By Shelley Smithson
Mitchell Capitan points to a flock of sheep grazing in the shadow of a sandstone mesa. The sheep belong to Capitan's family, along with a few head of cattle and twelve quarter horses standing in a corral near his mother-in-law's house in Crownpoint, New Mexico.
"All of this area," Capitan says, gesturing to the valley of sage and shrub brush below, "there's a lot of uranium underneath there. That's what they're after."
Capitan and his Navajo neighbors are battling a license granted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to Hydro Resources Inc. (HRI)--a subsidiary of a Texas company, Uranium Resources--one of several firms that have laid claim to the minerals beneath thousands of acres on and around the lands of the Navajo Nation and three American Indian pueblos in northwestern New Mexico. A group called the Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining is suing the NRC to block mining in Crownpoint and another Navajo community. A panel of federal judges in Denver heard the case in May 2008 but has yet to issue a ruling.
A resurgence of interest in building nuclear power plants, touted as a nonpolluting alternative to carbon-fueled plants, has sparked a uranium rush. Since 2007 the NRC has received seventeen license applications for twenty-six new reactors, causing a flurry of applications for uranium mining permits across the Four Corners region, where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado meet. In February Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Energy Department would expedite the approval process for $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees for utilities that are building nuclear plants. The guarantees, along with other Bush-era incentives, are meant to spur construction of new plants.
The anticipated rise in demand for uranium has led the industry back to the very places it deserted three decades ago when it abandoned hundreds of mines, seven polluted uranium mills, billions of gallons of contaminated groundwater and mountains of radioactive waste. Congress is only now beginning to press agencies to clean up the mess, an undertaking that could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Plenty of people in this economically distressed corner of New Mexico are thrilled about the 8,000 new jobs and $1 billion in economic benefits the uranium industry promises. They point to claims made by industry lobbyists in a concerted PR campaign that new technology will make mining safer and that cast doubt on the connection between uranium mining and the illnesses that plague people who worked in mines and mills or lived near them.
Many others, especially American Indians like Capitan, remain unconvinced. They are afraid the companies will leave behind another trail of environmental destruction, illness and death like that of thirty years ago.
Sitting in his wood-paneled office in Window Rock, Arizona, Navajo Nation president Joe Shirley Jr., a tall, thin man with silver hair and a fierce opposition to uranium mining, declares, "I don't believe there is any safe technology that can be used to mine uranium. Many of my people died because of mining of uranium ore here on Navajo land. Back at that time, the US government did not apprise my people of the dangers that are inherent with the mining of uranium ore. And as a result, a lot of people came down with cancer." Shirley has watched several family members suffer from uranium-related illnesses. "It is devastating. It has wrecked the lives of our families," he says.
He rejects the idea that mining is needed because it will bring jobs to the Navajo Nation, where the unemployment rate is around 50 percent. "How much is a life worth?" he says.
"If you can show me the cure for the cancer that is caused by the uranium ore, I might have second thoughts about it," he says. Until then, the tribe will continue to fight the state and federal agencies that grant permits to uranium companies despite the opposition of American Indian communities.
Starting in 1942, much of the uranium used for atomic bombs being built in Los Alamos was mined in northwestern New Mexico. Between 1950 and 1979, the region yielded more yellowcake than any other place in the United States. Hundreds of uranium mines and seven mills--many of them on or near Indian land--stocked the government's cold war atomic arsenal and, eventually, the nation's nuclear power plants.
Though the region has always been poor, locals remember the uranium era as a prosperous time. People ate lunch at the Uranium Cafe in Grants, listened to country music on KMIN (pronounced K-mine) and built houses with scrap materials from the mines. On weekends Indian uranium workers and their families drove from the reservations to the border towns of Grants, Gallup and Farmington to shop.
But in 1979, everything changed. Public outcry over the near-meltdown at Three Mile Island plus construction cost overruns dealt the uranium industry a deathblow in a few short years. For thirty years no new nuclear plants were ordered in the United States. The nation's 104 nuclear reactors bought cheap surplus uranium from government stockpiles and later from dismantled Soviet-era nuclear warheads.
The first uranium boom left a toxic legacy to the people of the area. Uranium workers, inadequately protected from the dangers of mining and milling, developed a range of maladies. Although the government knew of the health risks of radioactive dust--European studies from the 1920s and '30s had linked uranium mining with lung cancer--officials did not require mine companies to ventilate shafts or to limit worker exposure to radon, the radioactive gas released during mining. Duncan Holaday, an industrial engineer at the Public Health Service, discovered that radon levels in US mines in the 1940s were as high as those found in European mines in the 1920s. "He tried to convince the mine operators and the Atomic Energy Commission that they were going to have a big epidemic here if they didn't start ventilating the mines. But nobody paid much attention to him," says Dr. Victor Archer, now in his 80s and living in Salt Lake City. Archer worked with Holaday for nearly two decades on an epidemiological study for PHS on the relationship between radon and lung cancer. Though he knew the miners were at risk of developing lung cancer, Archer says he was not allowed to warn the 2,500 men in the study about their unsafe work environments. "It was understood if we upset the miners...then the mine operators would not let us examine the miners," he says.
The researchers repeatedly warned mine operators and state and federal mining officials of the dangers of working in unventilated mines. "We'd tell them about the European experience, and they'd say, 'Those foreigners are different from our miners,'" Archer recalls. "Mostly they would object because to ventilate would cost them money."
Just as the researchers warned, uranium workers developed lung cancers, as well as a long list of other ailments. In 1990, after fifteen years of litigation and lobbying by the families of deceased miners, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provides payments of $100,000 to miners, millers and ore haulers who contracted specific lung diseases, as well as some millers and ore haulers diagnosed with certain renal diseases. Congress recognized the government's failure to protect those who worked in "mines that were providing uranium for the primary use and benefit of the nuclear weapons program of the United States." But the act covers just a fraction of those afflicted only before 1971, when the government stopped buying uranium for its weapons program and passed standards to limit worker radiation exposure. Post-1971 workers who suffer from the same illnesses say they too should be compensated. They claim that the government's radiation limits were insufficient and that regulators did not force companies to follow rules intended to protect workers' health.
The new uranium rush has resurrected antagonisms among Indians, Anglos and Hispanics and sparked a bitter war over the future of uranium mining in New Mexico. Many Indians say they were, and still are, treated as second-class citizens in stores, restaurants and businesses in border towns, where their sales taxes support city coffers. Non-Indians complain that Indians living on reservations do not pay property taxes yet are able to vote in school bond referendums, which often benefit reservation communities. There's anger, too, about the prevalence of drunk driving on the roads between the reservations, where alcohol is illegal, and the border towns, where bars are plentiful. But few issues evoke more emotion than the prospect of uranium mining.
On a Saturday afternoon in June 2008, racial tensions simmered when 700 people packed into the high school gymnasium in Grants. The Route 66 town is home to 8,800 people, two prisons, a handful of 1950s-era motels and twice as many fast food restaurants. On one side of the gym sat a crowd of mostly American Indian residents, who had come from nearby communities to voice their opposition to proposed uranium mining near Mount Taylor. The 11,000-foot snowcapped peak rises above the stark badlands between Grants and Albuquerque and is sacred to five tribes in the Southwest--the Navajos, Acomas, Lagunas, Zunis and Hopis. Last year the Navajo Nation joined twenty other Southwestern tribes in opposing mining on Mount Taylor. Indians claim that protection of the mountain is crucial to their religions and cultures.
Many Indians fear that pollution from uranium mines and mills could contaminate the mountain springs, rivers and aquifers that supply water for crop irrigation, homes and businesses on their land. The Navajo Nation Council banned new uranium mining on Navajo land in 2005.
"If you contaminate our groundwater, where do we go for water after that?" Shirley demands.
In the bleachers on the other side of the gym sat mostly Anglo and Hispanic residents from Grants and neighboring towns. They were there to speak in support of mining and against a state plan to set aside the top of Mount Taylor as a culturally protected landmark.
In June state officials voted to make the cultural listing of the mountain permanent, a decision that could hinder uranium mining on private and public land within and adjacent to the cultural-property boundaries. That possibility led to a fierce campaign by the uranium industry that pitted Anglo and Hispanic landowners against the state and the tribes. Commenting on the move to designate Mount Taylor a traditional cultural property, industry lobbyist Marita Noon called it "a sneak attack, sadly perpetrated largely by Native Americans against white men."
James Martinez of Albuquerque says state officials are placing Indian culture above all others. Martinez's great-great-grandfather was born in a cave at the base of Mount Taylor on land given to Spanish settlers 300 years ago by the king of Spain. Twenty thousand acres were granted to several families, including the Martinez clan. But over the years, three-quarters of the Juan Tafoya Land Grant, as it was called, was lost to back taxes and sloppy paperwork or unscrupulously taken by Anglo lawyers and ranchers.
"Thirty-five years ago, my father made [the land grant] into a corporation," Martinez explains. "He brought a lot of people back who lost their rights there."
The land grant now totals 4,500 acres, including the village of Marquez--population zero. The Martinez family lived in Marquez until after World War II, when they moved to Albuquerque. Now all that remains of the village are a few empty houses, a vacant church, a closed post office and an abandoned school. Just beyond the village, beneath the icy mountain streams and ponderosa pines, is a uranium ore body estimated at 15 million pounds.
When Martinez was a teenager, a uranium company sank a shaft and built a mill near Marquez, but before any ore was pulled out of the ground the price of uranium collapsed. So too did the family's dream of becoming wealthy. Then, four years ago, after two decades of uranium prices that averaged around $10 a pound, the price of uranium started to climb, reaching an all-time high in 2007 of $138 a pound. (It has since fallen with the price of other energy commodities to $49 a pound.) The 500 shareholders of the Juan Tafoya Land Grant voted to lease the land to Neutron Energy, a private uranium company based in Phoenix. The company, which plans to operate a shaft mine and a mill in the area, promises that technology and safer operating procedures will make mining and milling environmentally benign.
Martinez's son Amadeo is already benefiting. Neutron gave him a scholarship to attend the University of New Mexico, where he is studying geology in hopes of working for the mine company. He plans to move back to the village of his ancestors someday. "I know the Natives. We've been accused [by them] up front of only looking for the fast dollar," says James Martinez's wife, Patricia. "We see it as a way to help the economy, to help our future, the next generation."
From Linda Evers's front yard she can see the snow-covered cap of Mount Taylor to the east. To the north her view is blocked by a ten-foot red fence that separates her property from the boundaries of the Homestake Mill Superfund site. Today all that remains of the closed uranium mill eight miles northwest of Grants are a few metal buildings and two earthen impoundments. Covering 240 acres, the Homestake impoundments, holding piles of tailings, are filled with 20 million tons of radioactive sludge generated by thirty years of milling uranium.
Evers, a former miner, miller and ore hauler, says she became a member of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment because she wanted the community to remember that uranium has sickened Anglos, Hispanics and Indians. Evers, who is Anglo, believes her degenerative bone disease and persistent skin rashes are linked to uranium exposure. "My daughter was born with no hips at all," says Evers, whose son was also born with birth defects.
The multicultural alliance is composed of Indian, Anglo and Hispanic members of five grassroots organizations opposed to new mining. The group has given tours of contaminated areas to state officials, worked with lawmakers to craft legislation and testified before the state legislature about widespread groundwater pollution at Homestake Mill. Despite a three-decade remediation effort that has been overseen by the NRC and the Environmental Protection Agency, contamination from Homestake's tailings has migrated to five regional aquifers. A 2008 report by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry declares the site a public health hazard and states, "even upon completion of the remediation, the levels of uranium and selenium will be above drinking water standards."
This year, state environmental officials ordered people in Evers's neighborhood to stop drinking well water. In addition to contamination from mill tailings, state officials are investigating whether radioactive pollution from abandoned uranium mines north of Homestake might be contributing to toxic underground plumes.
Fifty miles west of Grants, in the Navajo community of Church Rock, soil testing in 2007 revealed radiation levels so high that EPA crews wearing hazardous materials suits brought in backhoes to remove dirt from the yards of five families. The homes are located between two abandoned mines and a former mill that was the site of the largest radioactive spill in US history.
The residential dirt removal cost the government $1 million and was part of an EPA plan to clean up one of the two mines. Despite opposition from the community and the Navajo Nation, the NRC issued a permit allowing HRI of Dallas to begin new mining at the other abandoned mine.
Larry King, who lives nearby, testified in 2007 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is pressing the EPA to clean up more than 500 abandoned mines on the Navajo Nation. King said, "The NRC ruled that the radiation from the [old mine] site doesn't have to be included in [the permit's] public dose calculations, that the wastes there are now part of 'background,' as if the Great Spirits had placed them there from the beginning of time.... I guess [NRC's] mandate to protect the public health and safety just doesn't apply to we Navajos."
King's neighbor Edith Hood, who was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2006, also implored Congress to halt the NRC's approval of new mines in Navajo communities. "My father has pulmonary fibrosis. My mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. My grandmother and grandfather died of lung cancer. Many of my family members and neighbors are sick, but we don't know what from," Hood said. "How can they open new mines when we haven't even addressed the health impacts and environmental damage of the old ones?"
According to the EPA, long-term exposure to uranium and its radioactive byproducts has been linked to chronic lung and renal diseases and cancers. Uranium exposure may also cause tumors in the tissues where new blood cells are formed and in the lymphatic system. Long-term exposure to high levels of radium--a byproduct of uranium mining--may cause anemia, cataracts, fractured teeth, head and nasal passage tumors and bone cancer.
A 2000 study reported that two Navajo children exposed to uranium while in the womb suffered deadly central nervous system disorders. Their mother had unknowingly led the family's sheep to water at uranium-contaminated springs and had drunk the water herself. Hood said she fears that traditional Navajo families, who raise and butcher sheep, may be eating meat that is poisoned with uranium and other heavy metals.
A federally funded project at the University of New Mexico is trying to determine if there is a connection between drinking uranium-tainted water and kidney disease. Many Navajos in northwestern New Mexico do not have running water, so they haul water in fifty-gallon barrels from public wells. Nearly one-quarter of these unregulated water sources likely contains unsafe levels of uranium, according to the US Indian Health Service.
It's 10:02 on a crisp fall morning in Grants. Radio KMIN is on the air, playing "goo-ooo-ood country music."
"Thanks for tuning in to KMIN," says the effervescent announcer and station president, Derek Underhill. "It's time for our public-service program on energy. Our experts are brought to you by CARE." The mining-industry-backed CARE, the Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy, is sponsoring an eight-week "educational series" on the community's AM radio station, featuring one-hour interviews with uranium executives and mining-friendly lawyers, economists, academics and scientists.
The guest this morning is Steven Brown, a health physicist who has worked in the uranium industry for forty years. Brown is discussing a 1999 report by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. "[The report] states, and I quote, 'No human cancer of any type has ever been seen as a result of exposure to natural or depleted uranium.'" Brown does not provide the next sentence in the report, which states, "Uranium can decay into other radionuclides, which can cause cancer if you are exposed to enough of them for a long enough period."
Downplaying uranium-related illnesses and environmental pollution on the radio is only one move in the industry's public-relations playbook. In public hearings and industry-sponsored "educational meetings," the executive director of CARE, Marita Noon, claims environmentalists are using Indians as pawns to block mining and to keep the state's residents poor. Noon, who was a Christian motivational speaker before becoming a self-proclaimed "advocate for energy," says God put uranium in New Mexico so that Americans can wean themselves from Middle Eastern oil and Russian uranium.
Industry lobbyists also make their case to regulators and legislators. In March a New Mexico House committee tabled a bill that would have empowered state regulators to force companies to clean up their messes from decades ago. "The industry came out hard against it," says Nadine Padilla, a lobbyist for several grassroots groups, including the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment. Another failed bill would have created a permanent fund to clean up abandoned mines that are contributing to groundwater pollution.
At an NRC hearing in Albuquerque last fall, uranium lobbyist Adella Duran demonstrated the cozy relationship between the industry and some lawmakers. Duran stood at the podium and told an NRC panel that she had been asked by representative to the New Mexico Legislature John Heaton to speak on his behalf.
"He wasn't able to be here tonight," she explained. "He knew that I was going to be here in a different capacity, and so he has asked me on his behalf, for the record, to read a letter that he has written to [NRC] Chairman Klein."
After reading the statement by Heaton, who is chair of the State House Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee, she moved to the other side of the podium and spoke on behalf of her clients, the uranium industry, urging the NRC to expedite its permit process for new mines.
The industry is peddling influence at the local level, too. Both Homestake and HRI have hired the Albuquerque public relations firm D.W. Turner to bolster their images as good corporate citizens. Homestake established a "Little Miners" program to fund classroom projects at the Grants elementary school; both firms support numerous nonprofit organizations, from literacy programs to domestic violence shelters to crisis pregnancy centers.
"They're going around handing out checks to people, to businesses, nongovernmental organizations, a lot of social programs that have been starved," says Chris Shuey, a community organizer with the Southwest Research and Information Center, an Albuquerque-based advocacy group. Shuey, who is often referred to by CARE's executive director as an "environmental zealot," says he has watched the debate devolve into an atmosphere of racial divisiveness and hate. "There's been demonizing and just meanness and ruthlessness against people who have been upstanding citizens," he says. "They say there are rabid environmentalists. There is nobody as rabid as these pro-uranium people."
Mitchell Capitan stands at the end of a washboard road and points to a large water tank perched atop a mesa in his hometown of Crownpoint. There are no major rivers in this part of the state, and since most people do not have a well, every day residents from the surrounding area come to the community well and haul water to their homes. An estimated 15,000 residents draw water from the Crownpoint well.
Mining "is going to be a big risk because our main aquifer is the sole drinking water for this community," says Capitan. "We have good clean water."
Instead of sinking a shaft or digging a pit, HRI plans to extract uranium by injecting bicarbonate solution into the sandstone aquifer--just one-quarter mile from the municipal well. The injection will release uranium from the rocks, where it has been encased for eons.
The company claims the process, called in situ recovery (ISR), is as safe as pumping baking soda underground. But the solution also mobilizes heavy metals, including arsenic, selenium and molybdenum, all of which are pumped to the surface then back into the ground after the uranium is extracted. Opponents worry that water contaminated with uranium and heavy metals will travel through underground channels to the village well 1,500 feet away, just as radioactive plumes from mines and mills have sullied aquifers to the south in the Grants and Church Rock areas.
HRI's parent company, Uranium Resources, has used the technology for thirty years at mines in South Texas. Richard Abitz, a geochemist who advises opponents of ISR mining in Texas, Colorado and on the Sioux Indian Reservation in Nebraska, says no ISR operation has ever restored the underground water at a mine site to its original condition. State and federal regulators routinely amend allowable levels of uranium and heavy metals after restoration efforts fall short, he said. In Texas, Goliad and Kleberg counties are trying to force uranium companies, including Uranium Resources, to clean up aquifer contamination from previous ISR operations.
Meanwhile, the NRC is considering a plan that would expedite the environmental review process for ISR operations nationwide, a move opposed by the New Mexico Environment Department. At a hearing on the issue last year, Capitan stood up and implored Navajos to unite against uranium mining. "Let's be banded together in one and protect our land and our water, because water is sacred," he said.
"How about if there was no water?" Capitan continued. "We can't live. We might have a million dollars right here, and I'm thirsty--which one am I going to take? I'm going to drink that water."
About Shelley Smithson
Shelley Smithson, a freelance writer in Urbana, Illionis, teaches journalism at the University of Illinois
Jul 3, 2009
A World Apart? : The White House and the Middle East
By Bernard Avishai
A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East--From the Cold War to the War on Terror. By Patrick Tyler.
A writer can't tackle a subject as immense as the United States and the Middle East without a kind of working conundrum. Patrick Tyler, a former New York Times and Washington Post correspondent, does not tell us what prompted him to write A World of Trouble, other than the declassification of some documents; but his conundrum is fairly easy to infer from the book's first chapter, which chronicles President Eisenhower's strong response to Israel during the aftermath of the 1956 Sinai War. Roughly, it is this:
The United States had reasons for becoming Israel's patron after the Six-Day War in 1967, but the continuing conflict has seriously damaged America's relations in the Middle East and across the Muslim world. And there is plenty of evidence--ever since Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser accepted UN Resolution 242 in July 1970--that at least Egypt and Jordan were prepared for a peace deal if the United States could have forced Israel back into its pre-1967 boundaries (allaying Israeli security fears with, say, a defense pact). During all this time, Israel has been almost entirely dependent on the United States for diplomatic cover, guns and money. During most of this time, US policy has been that Israel's colonization of the West Bank is "an obstacle to peace." Yet successive presidents allowed Israel a free hand while successive prime ministers expanded settlements to more than half a million people, a great many of them neo-Zionist fanatics--people who are inarguably an (arguably the) obstacle to peace. Why did these American presidents not dictate peace terms to Israel--by 1974 a client state--the way Eisenhower did in 1957? Was this incapacity or reluctance really, as some have famously charged, the work of the Israel lobby?
The good news you derive from Tyler's book--if good is the word for it--is that you cannot explain US foreign policy as the product of any permanent force, or quirk, of domestic politics. There are complex stories behind presidential responses. Yes, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been influential; but you also need to consider factors like presidential ideology, real international rivals, varying levels of political vulnerability, narcissism and sheer stupidity. Tyler's book exposes so many presidents, in so many diplomatic fixes, that we derive something like a comparative taxonomy just from reading through it. And when you project Barack Obama into the obvious categories--worldly versus naive, vulnerable versus popular, and so forth--it seems clear that no president since Eisenhower is better positioned to bring Israel into line with an American version of, and interest in, regional peace. Obama has now delivered his Cairo speech. Will he--can he--follow through?
By the end of 1956, Tyler reminds us, Israel occupied most of the Sinai Peninsula, after attacking Nasser's forces in late October. The Israeli government was made up of virtually the same people who would be in power during the Six-Day War; their justifications for making the occupation of the Sinai permanent were ones that would become familiar after 1967: control of Palestinian terrorism, strategic depth through territorial expansion, "deterrence." The black joke at the time was that Hitler had swum to Egypt and become nasser ("wet" in Yiddish). Actually, though the Egyptian president spoke of rallying the "Arab nation" against colonialism, he shifted away from American patronage only after Eisenhower's powerful secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, failed to deliver on a promise to build a high dam at Aswan. Nasser then acquired an enormous quantity of tanks and MIGs from the Soviets. He also nationalized the Suez Canal.
Israeli Prime Minster David Ben-Gurion, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and France's Guy Mollet had plotted the whole "crisis" in advance. Israel would say that its invasion was to pre-empt insurgents operating from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, where about 1 million Palestinian refugees languished in camps. But this would serve as a pretext for England and France to intervene and reoccupy the canal zone. Ben-Gurion had brushed aside his foreign minister Moshe Sharett's secret contacts with Nasser and wanted urgently to pre-empt Egypt's assimilation of Soviet arms. He also wanted to open the port of Eilat, blockaded by Egypt at Sharm el-Sheikh since the 1949 cease-fire, and turn his newly minted Israel Defense Forces into a shaper of both diplomatic facts and the immigrant Hebrew nation. He was already developing a nuclear bomb.
And Ben-Gurion was not without a grand design that might well have appealed to cold warriors like Dulles. He had presented to his co-conspirators a plan that entailed Israel's annexing not only a large swath of the Sinai but also the West Bank of the young King Hussein's Kingdom of Jordan and southern Lebanon up to the Litani--while France installed a sympathetic regime in Damascus. Meanwhile, Britain's client, the Hashemite regime in Baghdad, would annex what was left of cousin Hussein's East Bank. Eden and Mollet, to their credit, refused to play Sykes and Picot to Ben-Gurion's Jabotinsky. But British and American intelligence agents (the head of the CIA was Dulles's brother Allen) were indeed plotting a coup in Syria. The Dulles brothers had, after all, already engineered the toppling of Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953, reinstalling the shah.
Nevertheless, Eisenhower and his secretary of state were furious--and not only because the plot was hatched without telling them. For America had other interests, too--most obviously, in Persian Gulf oil fields and desert kingdoms. Eisenhower and Dulles were founders of the United Nations and wished to establish a stable order in the Middle East where international corporations could operate and that was not a necessary theater of cold war confrontation, as Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia had become. Besides, how could Dulles discredit the Soviet Union for its suppression of the Hungarian revolution while two of NATO's leading members crushed Nasser and re-entered the Canal Zone? How could America sponsor the Saudi regime when the region, inflamed by Israel's triumphs and imperial associations, was turned toward Nasserism and against the West?
Stymied in the UN Security Council, where England and France had a veto, Dulles pressed the General Assembly to call on them to withdraw their forces. A resolution was approved, and they were out within a week. What was left to contend with was Israel's occupation of the Sinai. Ben-Gurion talked tough. Dulles and Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson answered with the creation of a UN international peacekeeping force, and Pearson warned, "You run the risk of losing all your friends." Tiny Israel was almost entirely reliant on the good graces of Western powers that were, in turn, beholden to the United States. Israel, it is true, enjoyed Congressional support, especially from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, who was surrounded, like most Democratic leaders, by party bosses and influential Jewish friends--Abe Fortas, Arthur Krim--whose liberalism seemed of a piece with the saga of Zionism. Yet Dulles would not be moved. Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai was an American interest.
In what Tyler calls the administration's "finest hour," Eisenhower went on television in February 1957 and acknowledged that Israel should have free shipping to Eilat. He spoke of the UN charter and of UN forces ensuring free navigation. But of Israel seeking "something more," Eisenhower added: "Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal?" Dulles told Israelis that they "were on the verge of a catastrophe." (Tyler's narration, here and in the rest of the book, is convincing if slightly overdramatized: "Dulles could see that he was up against a lioness.... [As he] walked [Foreign Minister Golda] Meir to the door, he could not let her have the last word.")
That was that, and Ben-Gurion knew it. By the end of March 1957, Ben-Gurion had withdrawn Israeli forces from the Sinai, though with gains Israelis did not think trivial at the time. The port of Eilat was opened to Israeli shipping, which meant oil from the shah's Iran. It also meant flourishing relations between decolonized sub-Saharan African countries like Nkrumah's Ghana and "socialist" Israel, which dispatched military and agricultural advisers (often the former in the guise of the latter).
On the whole, this turned out to be Israel's golden age of state building, Hebrew cultural innovation and immigrant absorption. In a bittersweet twist of fate, a good many of the immigrants from North Africa were stampeded to Israel by the reaction of Arab governments to the 1956 invasion. The UN placed buffering troops in the Sinai, "the umbrella," as Abba Eban complained to UN Secretary General U Thant in the aftermath of the 1967 war, that would be taken away "as soon as it begins to rain"; it would indeed take another war for Israel to prove it could not be destroyed. Still, occupation of the Sinai would hardly have made new wars less likely. As Israelis learned bitterly in 1973, occupation made war inevitable.
Tyler's account of Eisenhower and Ben-Gurion is clearly meant to trigger a thought: why has no subsequent president approached matters quite this way? Should we assume that Israel will always be a third rail--that the Israel lobby has made American pressure incredible? Tyler takes for granted that such questions fuel growing skepticism, in and out of Israel and the Palestinian territories, about the prospects for any new peace negotiations. (Disclosure: Tyler interviewed me in 2005 when he was getting started on his book.) Whether or not the Palestinian Authority creates a unity government--or Israel reaches a deal with Syria over the Golan--skeptics assume that Israel's government will continue to come up shy of an acceptable offer to the Palestinians, especially regarding the settlements and Jerusalem. The only hope, though Tyler is tactful about spelling it out, is for a US president willing to make Israeli elites fear diplomatic isolation more than they fear the collapse of national solidarity. Diplomacy, to use the phrase of CBS's veteran correspondent Bob Simon, means putting Israelis "into a panic."
Tyler does not get into this, but we must be clear about the dynamic here, since new generations of correspondents have a way of writing about Israeli politics without his, or Simon's, sense of history. The problem is not some spontaneous drift "to the right" in Israel owing to, say, Hamas's missiles or Ahmadinejad's threats. Israel, after all, has been integrating these territories for forty years; Hamas did not even exist during the first twenty. Of course Israelis distrust Arab intentions, and vice versa. But although Tyler doesn't get into this, polls have shown for many years that a slight majority of Israelis would want to do a deal anyway--actually, a large majority of globalist professional and entrepreneurial elites in greater Tel-Aviv. Assume peace with Palestine, and the lives of Israelis on the coastal plain will change, if at all, for the better. The problem is that the Israeli population of greater Tel-Aviv is a decreasing majority relative to Jewish settlers and Orthodox residents of Jerusalem--call them "Judeans"--and the less well-educated Mizrahi and ultranationalist Russian immigrants who tend to support them. The Israeli right does not oppose a deal the way residents of New Hampshire oppose an income tax. For them, Greater Israel and a policy of deterrence is a way of life, inextricably bound up with sustaining a "Jewish" state--not only against Palestine but in spite of Israel's Arab minority, a fifth of its citizens.
"Judeans," in other words, have developed a world apart--theocratic, militant, tribalist--though many of them, in fact, are wards of the state, supported by state-supplied settlement infrastructure, family allowances and religious schools. (Just after Obama's speech, I watched one strapping settler tell Israeli television that the American president had been very professional and good on human rights but that he'd quoted the Talmud, and if he'd really read it he'd know that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.) Judeans may half believe that one fine morning Iran's mullahs will accept the incineration of Tehran and Qom for the pleasure of incinerating Tel-Aviv. Yet when they speak of existential threats, what they actually fear is the return of a couple of million Palestinian refugees to East Jerusalem and West Bank towns, transforming the city into an Arabic-speaking megalopolis, much as Tel-Aviv is a Hebrew-speaking one. They fear Arab rights in the state of Israel--and the very concept of an inclusive Israeliness. They regard Palestinian nationalism, in fact, much the way Arabs on the coastal plain in 1948 regarded Zionism, as bound to bring a flood of immigrants that will overwhelm their way of life.
So no Israeli leader, Tyler knows, will confront Judeans, many of them armed with automatic weapons, for the sake of Palestinians--who, Benjamin Netanyahu warns, just might fire missiles at Ben-Gurion Airport. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Fatah's Mahmud Abbas reportedly got stuck in talks over such matters as the town of Ariel, smack-dab between Ramallah and Jenin; the status of Jerusalem; and Palestinian refugees--always the five-foot leap over a seven-foot pit. Why should Olmert have conceded things that would tear Israel apart?
On the other hand--so Tyler's story of Dulles instructs--how long can any Israeli leader dare to defy an America administration that would lead the Western powers with a plan of its own, rooted in what Obama called "interests" of its own? Tyler might have added that Israeli moderates need the specter of American abandonment--of diplomatic isolation leading to economic isolation, a grave threat to Israel's high-tech economy--to confront Judeans and win back at least the Russian Israelis, who did not leave the Soviet Union to live in a little Jewish Pakistan.
But what, then, of the Israel lobby? Dulles, shmulles? Actually, the idea that presidents have been trapped by American Jewish pressure--and that Obama is bound to be--does not stand up to Tyler's history. It is better to rely on the taxonomy he implies, even if the intersecting categories are not airtight and every administration is not just one thing or another.
First, we might categorize presidents according to their knowledge of the region--if not their subtlety about the Arab world, their sophistication about the developing world more generally--as compared with, say, a Manichaean ideology in which preemption of dark forces takes precedence over any peace, which could anyway never be trusted. The latter view was hammered into a platform by neoconservatives during the late 1970s--one that cast America in a perpetual fight against evil (serially, "evil empire," "radical evil," "axis of evil") and cast Israel as America's biggest aircraft carrier. Second, we might categorize presidents as relatively strong or weak. Do they have broad popularity and reliable Congressional support for their agenda, however modest, or does presidential popularity fluctuate with media-hyped judgments of their efficacy or ineffectuality, or their virtues or peccadilloes, while each Congressional action hinges on tough votes? Finally, do presidents have a peculiarly soft spot for Israel, a penchant for seeing the Jewish state as a tribute to freedom or the answer to an ingenuous religious impulse--as natural to the Middle East as the Holocaust museum is to the Mall or "Jerusalem" is to Baptist hymns? Or do presidents see Zionism admiringly enough but mainly through the prism of the practical security problems Israeli leaders say they have?
Eisenhower--Tyler's hero, in a way--might be classified as sophisticated, popular and focused sincerely on Israel's security. (Eisenhower's army liberated the death camps, after all.) Kennedy can be classified pretty much the same way. Both administrations wanted to keep the region calm and were mainly set against Israel's acquiring nuclear weapons. They were certainly unwilling to indulge Zionism's irredentist claims.
The first shift came with President Johnson, especially after the Six-Day War, when his power was still great. But Johnson's ignorance of the Middle East, made worse by Vietnam-induced paranoia, was twinned with peculiar affections for liberal and Jewish allies--not just Fortas and Krim but Arthur Goldberg and the New York bankers Abe Feinberg and David Ginsburg--who prompted him to throw his considerable political strength directly behind Israel's cause. At first, as reciprocal escalations in May 1967 seduced Nasser into reimposing a blockade on the Strait of Tiran, Johnson tried to restrain Israeli forces and deal with the matter by international action. Then, after Israel's mobilization was followed by a shocking victory, Johnson tried to bask in its reflected glory. He delivered Israel its first Phantom jets, opening decades of codependent relations between the IDF and the Pentagon. He backed Israel's interpretation of UN Resolution 242, which nurtured its hope of keeping much of the conquered land and all of Jerusalem. "Johnson and Rusk," Tyler writes, "faced a choice: support Israel's occupation strategy or demand a full withdrawal. There was very little debate, at least in the White House. Johnson believed that Nasser had provoked the war, and though Israel had ignored his pleas to avoid a rush to combat, Johnson acceded to Israel's desire on how to play the postwar diplomacy."
The second shift came with President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who leveraged Johnson's position to the hilt. Tyler quotes Kissinger, the closest thing his story has to a villain: "Our objective is always, when the Soviet Union appears, to demonstrate that whoever gets help from the Soviet Union cannot achieve its objective, whatever it is." Earlier Tyler writes:
Was there a distinction between defending Israel and defending her 1967 conquests? It was a question that Nixon, too, regarded as important. But Kissinger, the diplomatic practitioner who admired subtlety in foreign policy, dismissed this as irrelevant "fine-tuning."
It was Kissinger, Tyler argues, who initiated a pattern of standing up to the Soviets, ignoring the Arab states, neutralizing State and Pentagon skeptics and (by contrast) befriending Israel's diplomats and appeasing Israel's Congressional advocates--people like, most notably, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington. Kissinger provided the open door for the lobby to push on.
The turning point, Tyler stesses, was not the 1973 war but a meeting that might well have prevented it. The summer before, Brezhnev was visiting San Clemente on a kind of detente victory tour. Sleepless, he called Nixon and Kissinger to a late-night meeting and pleaded for a US-Soviet approach to resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict, arguing that another regional war would throw the superpowers into a potentially nuclear confrontation. He suggested broad principles: guarantees for Israeli security and an end to attacks on Israel from Arab territories, safeguards for Israeli shipping and Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. "If we can get agreement on these principles, we can then discuss how to use any influence on the contending parties," Brezhnev said.
But by then the United States was Israel's major arms supplier. Nixon, who fancied himself Eisenhower's protege, allowed that the United States did not "owe anything to the Israelis." Yet Kissinger prodded Nixon to reject the overture. Both were convinced that Israel had an overwhelming military advantage to preserve the status quo; Nixon was embattled in Watergate, and Kissinger argued that the last thing the administration needed was a fight with Senate Democrats over Israeli security. His enthusiasm for Israeli power was natural for a Jewish refugee who had been part of the US Army's occupation of Germany. (He was a German interpreter in the counterintelligence corps.) What Kissinger did not know was that Brezhnev had intimate knowledge of Anwar Sadat's preparations for retaking the Suez Canal by force of arms.
Kissinger had been so certain of Israel's superiority that when an Arab attack was imminent, he warned Prime Minister Golda Meir not to take pre-emptive action. But after a week of horribly bloody battles, it became clear that the IDF would only slowly gain the upper hand. The IDF had lost fifty planes, 500 tanks and 3,000 soldiers, and Meir felt the need to put Israel's nuclear forces on alert. At that moment, the United States faced the choice of working with the Soviets to impose a cease-fire and lay down the "principles" of a regional settlement, or of resupplying the IDF in a massive airlift and putting off a cease-fire until Israel could fight its way back to a military advantage. Kissinger chose the latter course, even daring to put US nuclear forces on alert when Brezhnev threatened to intervene in defense of Egypt's entrapped Third Army. After this, Tyler implies, the US-Israeli alliance was forged in blood.
Tyler's Kissinger seems true, on the whole. Kissinger did strike the Manichaean template that spread among politicians and reporters in the 1970s, representing Israel as the US ally and "strategic asset" in the region. (The State Department's traditional client Saudi Arabia made things easy by unleashing an oil embargo against the West.) After Kissinger, pressuring Israel seemed something like a basketball coach foolishly demoralizing his slightly brazen power forward. Still, there are some episodes left out of Tyler's narrative that would mitigate any one-sided portrait. Israeli air power, responding to Kissinger's request, actually did help save King Hussein's neck in 1970, when Jordan was invaded by Syria during Black September. Jimmy Carter's eventual Camp David initiative would have been unimaginable without Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, which produced disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria.
Indeed, the second interim agreement with Egypt, which saw Israeli cargoes pass through the Suez Canal for the first time, never would have been consummated had Kissinger not gotten tough with Israel. (I covered this period, contributing reports from Jerusalem to The New York Review of Books.) Yitzhak Rabin's government had refused to withdraw the IDF behind the Sinai's Mitla Pass. Kissinger, now running foreign policy for Gerald Ford, announced a "reassessment," during which time new arms agreements with Israel were suspended. Thousands of Israeli rightists, led by the settlers' group Gush Emunim, took to the streets, shouting "Jew boy! Jew boy!" at Kissinger: the organizer of the airlift was now a traitor to their dream of Greater Israel. (All of this is missing from Tyler's account.)
It was precisely during the period of the reassessment that seventy-six senators, led by Scoop Jackson (and his protege Richard Perle), delivered a letter to the White House supporting Israeli claims. AIPAC had been formed in 1953, but it came into its own with this letter, which, hoisting Kissinger with his own anti-Soviet petard, made detente its foil. (Perle had been the moving force behind the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which, in effect, made detente hinge on Soviet Jewish emigration--a kind of dry run for hounding Kissinger on Israel, too.) It all seems so quaint now, Kissinger's fight with the neocons over who was overreacting enough to Soviet power.
Under the radar of the American media, however, Israeli political parties were having a fight of their own over who would overreach more in supporting West Bank settlement activities. From 1972 to 1983, mostly under Labor governments, the number of Jewish settlers in Jerusalem climbed from about 8,500 to more than 75,000. In 1977 Begin's Likud won power, and Gush Emunim went to work for real: 2,000 West Bank settlers became 6,000 by the time the Camp David accords were signed. President Carter--relatively sophisticated, with no particular softness for Israelis but politically weak and desperate for Jewish support in his primary campaign against Ted Kennedy--insisted that he had secured a freeze on settlements from Begin for as long as Camp David negotiations continued. He won an Israeli concession that Palestinian autonomy would lead to their acquiring "legitimate rights." But Begin double-crossed Carter and virtually dared him to fight with Israel's Congressional supporters as the 1979 Democratic primaries approached. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, there were something like 10,000 settlers.
President Reagan, for his part, called the settlements an obstacle to peace, urged on, by turns, by Alexander Haig and George Schultz. But nobody believed they meant it. Reagan left Sadat out on a limb, which may well have guaranteed Sadat's assassination. Reagan's team, meanwhile, was prepared to unleash Saddam's Iraq against Iran. There was talk of reviving a Jordan option, with King Hussein managing a federation with Palestine; but there was no heart to oppose Israeli retaliations against PLO guerrillas in southern Lebanon or, ultimately, Israel's catastrophic invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Reagan was a dream come true for the settlers: wildly popular, simple-minded, vaguely messianic and surrounded by Jewish neocons and Hollywood friends. By the time he left office, there were around 100,000 settlers outside Jerusalem and about 200,000 inside.
Curiously, Tyler gives rather short shrift to perhaps the biggest fight over settlements. After the Gulf War in 1991, Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, and his secretary of state, James Baker ("Fuck the Jews; they don't vote for us anyway"), threatened to withhold loan guarantees if Israel did not promise not to use the funds to settle Russian Jews in the West Bank. This occasioned AIPAC's most chilling show of force: a thousand volunteers stormed the Capitol in advance of the 1992 election. As it happens, the town of Ariel, which would become one of the biggest bones of contention between Olmert and Abbas, was largely populated by immigrant Russian Jews during this time. Ariel Sharon, then housing minister, picked up about 4,000 from the airport and plunked them down in the Samarian hills.
Clearly, I cannot do justice here to all the sordid details Tyler patiently recounts--much less to the ones he glosses over. I will say that the closer we get to the present, his book reads less like history and more like old news. Bill Clinton advanced the Oslo agreements, even cajoling Netanyahu into an interim deal on Hebron. His "bridging parameters" from December 2000 still form the spine of any American plan. But Clinton lacked "discipline" and needed Congress too much during the Lewinsky scandal. George W. Bush was, in our matrix, a replay of Reagan. You won't learn more about Clinton's fumbles than you learned from Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's essays in The New York Review of Books, or more on Bush than from, say, the pages of this magazine.
Where does A World of Trouble leave us? Tyler could not have anticipated Obama when he started writing, but something about his review of Middle East "trouble" seems vaguely "back to the future." Not since Eisenhower has there been a president with the necessary combination of attributes to reintroduce the idea of a regional settlement along lines determined by the great powers. America may be diminished in its own eyes, given the Iraq disaster, the financial crisis and the spreading insurgency in Afghanistan. But to Israelis--whose city-state earns less, and is somewhat smaller in habitable area and population, than greater Los Angeles--America and Europe are the world: markets, universities, culture, friendship, arms. Israel is a local military power, well entrenched in what Eisenhower called America's military-industrial complex. But Israel's actions in the territories have never been popular at the Pentagon, and the recent Gaza operation might be said to have violated every principle in Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency handbook. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.
Obama has worldly sophistication and a supportive European Union, an unprecedented mandate and even something Ike did not have, the affections of a majority of American Jews. Indeed, a recent J Street poll reveals that more than 70 percent of American Jews support Obama and a two-state deal pretty much like the one negotiated at Taba eight years ago. (J Street, a peace lobby backed largely by the progressive American Jews AIPAC has alienated, grew in parallel with the Obama campaign.) Against this trifecta, it will be hard to flog Israel's role in a clash of civilizations--a view of the world Obama all but denounced in Cairo.
None of this guarantees Obama will make the most of his opportunity. He is doing his best, clearly, to honor and attract the Islamic world. He has solidly endorsed a Palestinian state and an end to settlements. But if he's digested Tyler's implicit instruction, he'll quickly get beyond framing the peace process as a facilitated negotiation between Israel and Palestine, much as he got beyond the appeal for "bipartisanship" with Congressional Republicans. America in the Middle East is not some Dr. Phil, lively, well intentioned and--how did former Secretary Powell foolishly put it?--not wanting peace "more than the parties themselves." America has skin in the game. So do Europe and the neighboring Arab states. They must all want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians, who are chronically distrustful of each other, trapped by their fanatics, and whose leaders cannot resist the demagogy of the vendetta.
The time has come, in other words, for Obama to stipulate and conduct a public worldwide campaign for an American plan, not just an American vision. The broad terms of the plan will surprise nobody: we are not talking about the price of a rug in the bazaar; Israel is not just Palestine's cross, and Palestine is not Israel's internal affair. And there can be no peace without outside commitments: NATO committing to include Israel; Egypt and Jordan committing Palestine peacekeepers, investment capital and a sympathetic press. The United States can have no leverage with Iran, therefore no orderly exit from Iraq, without a working partnership with the Arab League.
"America will not turn our backs," Obama said in Cairo, "on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own." The whole Middle East, with the span of a continent, is roiled by this conflict. In the background of Tyler's foreground, Obama knows, are the world's largest proven reserves of oil and dollars, teens and violence. There is a burgeoning Arab middle class opening to the West, in Fez, Tripoli and Amman. But they are surrounded by restless undereducated people governed only by mosques and fathers where state security services leave off. Obama's is the face of a more progressive globalization, but world economic stresses could make the mosques, the fathers and their acolytes only more volatile. The status quo, in any case, means the triumph of the settlers and Hamas. And it is all too easy to imagine the sad follow-on chapters to Tyler's sad chronicle.
About Bernard Avishai
Bernard Avishai is the author, most recently, of The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last (Harcourt). He blogs at www.bernardavishai.com
A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East--From the Cold War to the War on Terror. By Patrick Tyler.
A writer can't tackle a subject as immense as the United States and the Middle East without a kind of working conundrum. Patrick Tyler, a former New York Times and Washington Post correspondent, does not tell us what prompted him to write A World of Trouble, other than the declassification of some documents; but his conundrum is fairly easy to infer from the book's first chapter, which chronicles President Eisenhower's strong response to Israel during the aftermath of the 1956 Sinai War. Roughly, it is this:
The United States had reasons for becoming Israel's patron after the Six-Day War in 1967, but the continuing conflict has seriously damaged America's relations in the Middle East and across the Muslim world. And there is plenty of evidence--ever since Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser accepted UN Resolution 242 in July 1970--that at least Egypt and Jordan were prepared for a peace deal if the United States could have forced Israel back into its pre-1967 boundaries (allaying Israeli security fears with, say, a defense pact). During all this time, Israel has been almost entirely dependent on the United States for diplomatic cover, guns and money. During most of this time, US policy has been that Israel's colonization of the West Bank is "an obstacle to peace." Yet successive presidents allowed Israel a free hand while successive prime ministers expanded settlements to more than half a million people, a great many of them neo-Zionist fanatics--people who are inarguably an (arguably the) obstacle to peace. Why did these American presidents not dictate peace terms to Israel--by 1974 a client state--the way Eisenhower did in 1957? Was this incapacity or reluctance really, as some have famously charged, the work of the Israel lobby?
The good news you derive from Tyler's book--if good is the word for it--is that you cannot explain US foreign policy as the product of any permanent force, or quirk, of domestic politics. There are complex stories behind presidential responses. Yes, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been influential; but you also need to consider factors like presidential ideology, real international rivals, varying levels of political vulnerability, narcissism and sheer stupidity. Tyler's book exposes so many presidents, in so many diplomatic fixes, that we derive something like a comparative taxonomy just from reading through it. And when you project Barack Obama into the obvious categories--worldly versus naive, vulnerable versus popular, and so forth--it seems clear that no president since Eisenhower is better positioned to bring Israel into line with an American version of, and interest in, regional peace. Obama has now delivered his Cairo speech. Will he--can he--follow through?
By the end of 1956, Tyler reminds us, Israel occupied most of the Sinai Peninsula, after attacking Nasser's forces in late October. The Israeli government was made up of virtually the same people who would be in power during the Six-Day War; their justifications for making the occupation of the Sinai permanent were ones that would become familiar after 1967: control of Palestinian terrorism, strategic depth through territorial expansion, "deterrence." The black joke at the time was that Hitler had swum to Egypt and become nasser ("wet" in Yiddish). Actually, though the Egyptian president spoke of rallying the "Arab nation" against colonialism, he shifted away from American patronage only after Eisenhower's powerful secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, failed to deliver on a promise to build a high dam at Aswan. Nasser then acquired an enormous quantity of tanks and MIGs from the Soviets. He also nationalized the Suez Canal.
Israeli Prime Minster David Ben-Gurion, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and France's Guy Mollet had plotted the whole "crisis" in advance. Israel would say that its invasion was to pre-empt insurgents operating from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, where about 1 million Palestinian refugees languished in camps. But this would serve as a pretext for England and France to intervene and reoccupy the canal zone. Ben-Gurion had brushed aside his foreign minister Moshe Sharett's secret contacts with Nasser and wanted urgently to pre-empt Egypt's assimilation of Soviet arms. He also wanted to open the port of Eilat, blockaded by Egypt at Sharm el-Sheikh since the 1949 cease-fire, and turn his newly minted Israel Defense Forces into a shaper of both diplomatic facts and the immigrant Hebrew nation. He was already developing a nuclear bomb.
And Ben-Gurion was not without a grand design that might well have appealed to cold warriors like Dulles. He had presented to his co-conspirators a plan that entailed Israel's annexing not only a large swath of the Sinai but also the West Bank of the young King Hussein's Kingdom of Jordan and southern Lebanon up to the Litani--while France installed a sympathetic regime in Damascus. Meanwhile, Britain's client, the Hashemite regime in Baghdad, would annex what was left of cousin Hussein's East Bank. Eden and Mollet, to their credit, refused to play Sykes and Picot to Ben-Gurion's Jabotinsky. But British and American intelligence agents (the head of the CIA was Dulles's brother Allen) were indeed plotting a coup in Syria. The Dulles brothers had, after all, already engineered the toppling of Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran in 1953, reinstalling the shah.
Nevertheless, Eisenhower and his secretary of state were furious--and not only because the plot was hatched without telling them. For America had other interests, too--most obviously, in Persian Gulf oil fields and desert kingdoms. Eisenhower and Dulles were founders of the United Nations and wished to establish a stable order in the Middle East where international corporations could operate and that was not a necessary theater of cold war confrontation, as Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia had become. Besides, how could Dulles discredit the Soviet Union for its suppression of the Hungarian revolution while two of NATO's leading members crushed Nasser and re-entered the Canal Zone? How could America sponsor the Saudi regime when the region, inflamed by Israel's triumphs and imperial associations, was turned toward Nasserism and against the West?
Stymied in the UN Security Council, where England and France had a veto, Dulles pressed the General Assembly to call on them to withdraw their forces. A resolution was approved, and they were out within a week. What was left to contend with was Israel's occupation of the Sinai. Ben-Gurion talked tough. Dulles and Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson answered with the creation of a UN international peacekeeping force, and Pearson warned, "You run the risk of losing all your friends." Tiny Israel was almost entirely reliant on the good graces of Western powers that were, in turn, beholden to the United States. Israel, it is true, enjoyed Congressional support, especially from the Senate majority leader, Lyndon Johnson, who was surrounded, like most Democratic leaders, by party bosses and influential Jewish friends--Abe Fortas, Arthur Krim--whose liberalism seemed of a piece with the saga of Zionism. Yet Dulles would not be moved. Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai was an American interest.
In what Tyler calls the administration's "finest hour," Eisenhower went on television in February 1957 and acknowledged that Israel should have free shipping to Eilat. He spoke of the UN charter and of UN forces ensuring free navigation. But of Israel seeking "something more," Eisenhower added: "Should a nation which attacks and occupies foreign territory in the face of United Nations disapproval be allowed to impose conditions on its own withdrawal?" Dulles told Israelis that they "were on the verge of a catastrophe." (Tyler's narration, here and in the rest of the book, is convincing if slightly overdramatized: "Dulles could see that he was up against a lioness.... [As he] walked [Foreign Minister Golda] Meir to the door, he could not let her have the last word.")
That was that, and Ben-Gurion knew it. By the end of March 1957, Ben-Gurion had withdrawn Israeli forces from the Sinai, though with gains Israelis did not think trivial at the time. The port of Eilat was opened to Israeli shipping, which meant oil from the shah's Iran. It also meant flourishing relations between decolonized sub-Saharan African countries like Nkrumah's Ghana and "socialist" Israel, which dispatched military and agricultural advisers (often the former in the guise of the latter).
On the whole, this turned out to be Israel's golden age of state building, Hebrew cultural innovation and immigrant absorption. In a bittersweet twist of fate, a good many of the immigrants from North Africa were stampeded to Israel by the reaction of Arab governments to the 1956 invasion. The UN placed buffering troops in the Sinai, "the umbrella," as Abba Eban complained to UN Secretary General U Thant in the aftermath of the 1967 war, that would be taken away "as soon as it begins to rain"; it would indeed take another war for Israel to prove it could not be destroyed. Still, occupation of the Sinai would hardly have made new wars less likely. As Israelis learned bitterly in 1973, occupation made war inevitable.
Tyler's account of Eisenhower and Ben-Gurion is clearly meant to trigger a thought: why has no subsequent president approached matters quite this way? Should we assume that Israel will always be a third rail--that the Israel lobby has made American pressure incredible? Tyler takes for granted that such questions fuel growing skepticism, in and out of Israel and the Palestinian territories, about the prospects for any new peace negotiations. (Disclosure: Tyler interviewed me in 2005 when he was getting started on his book.) Whether or not the Palestinian Authority creates a unity government--or Israel reaches a deal with Syria over the Golan--skeptics assume that Israel's government will continue to come up shy of an acceptable offer to the Palestinians, especially regarding the settlements and Jerusalem. The only hope, though Tyler is tactful about spelling it out, is for a US president willing to make Israeli elites fear diplomatic isolation more than they fear the collapse of national solidarity. Diplomacy, to use the phrase of CBS's veteran correspondent Bob Simon, means putting Israelis "into a panic."
Tyler does not get into this, but we must be clear about the dynamic here, since new generations of correspondents have a way of writing about Israeli politics without his, or Simon's, sense of history. The problem is not some spontaneous drift "to the right" in Israel owing to, say, Hamas's missiles or Ahmadinejad's threats. Israel, after all, has been integrating these territories for forty years; Hamas did not even exist during the first twenty. Of course Israelis distrust Arab intentions, and vice versa. But although Tyler doesn't get into this, polls have shown for many years that a slight majority of Israelis would want to do a deal anyway--actually, a large majority of globalist professional and entrepreneurial elites in greater Tel-Aviv. Assume peace with Palestine, and the lives of Israelis on the coastal plain will change, if at all, for the better. The problem is that the Israeli population of greater Tel-Aviv is a decreasing majority relative to Jewish settlers and Orthodox residents of Jerusalem--call them "Judeans"--and the less well-educated Mizrahi and ultranationalist Russian immigrants who tend to support them. The Israeli right does not oppose a deal the way residents of New Hampshire oppose an income tax. For them, Greater Israel and a policy of deterrence is a way of life, inextricably bound up with sustaining a "Jewish" state--not only against Palestine but in spite of Israel's Arab minority, a fifth of its citizens.
"Judeans," in other words, have developed a world apart--theocratic, militant, tribalist--though many of them, in fact, are wards of the state, supported by state-supplied settlement infrastructure, family allowances and religious schools. (Just after Obama's speech, I watched one strapping settler tell Israeli television that the American president had been very professional and good on human rights but that he'd quoted the Talmud, and if he'd really read it he'd know that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.) Judeans may half believe that one fine morning Iran's mullahs will accept the incineration of Tehran and Qom for the pleasure of incinerating Tel-Aviv. Yet when they speak of existential threats, what they actually fear is the return of a couple of million Palestinian refugees to East Jerusalem and West Bank towns, transforming the city into an Arabic-speaking megalopolis, much as Tel-Aviv is a Hebrew-speaking one. They fear Arab rights in the state of Israel--and the very concept of an inclusive Israeliness. They regard Palestinian nationalism, in fact, much the way Arabs on the coastal plain in 1948 regarded Zionism, as bound to bring a flood of immigrants that will overwhelm their way of life.
So no Israeli leader, Tyler knows, will confront Judeans, many of them armed with automatic weapons, for the sake of Palestinians--who, Benjamin Netanyahu warns, just might fire missiles at Ben-Gurion Airport. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Fatah's Mahmud Abbas reportedly got stuck in talks over such matters as the town of Ariel, smack-dab between Ramallah and Jenin; the status of Jerusalem; and Palestinian refugees--always the five-foot leap over a seven-foot pit. Why should Olmert have conceded things that would tear Israel apart?
On the other hand--so Tyler's story of Dulles instructs--how long can any Israeli leader dare to defy an America administration that would lead the Western powers with a plan of its own, rooted in what Obama called "interests" of its own? Tyler might have added that Israeli moderates need the specter of American abandonment--of diplomatic isolation leading to economic isolation, a grave threat to Israel's high-tech economy--to confront Judeans and win back at least the Russian Israelis, who did not leave the Soviet Union to live in a little Jewish Pakistan.
But what, then, of the Israel lobby? Dulles, shmulles? Actually, the idea that presidents have been trapped by American Jewish pressure--and that Obama is bound to be--does not stand up to Tyler's history. It is better to rely on the taxonomy he implies, even if the intersecting categories are not airtight and every administration is not just one thing or another.
First, we might categorize presidents according to their knowledge of the region--if not their subtlety about the Arab world, their sophistication about the developing world more generally--as compared with, say, a Manichaean ideology in which preemption of dark forces takes precedence over any peace, which could anyway never be trusted. The latter view was hammered into a platform by neoconservatives during the late 1970s--one that cast America in a perpetual fight against evil (serially, "evil empire," "radical evil," "axis of evil") and cast Israel as America's biggest aircraft carrier. Second, we might categorize presidents as relatively strong or weak. Do they have broad popularity and reliable Congressional support for their agenda, however modest, or does presidential popularity fluctuate with media-hyped judgments of their efficacy or ineffectuality, or their virtues or peccadilloes, while each Congressional action hinges on tough votes? Finally, do presidents have a peculiarly soft spot for Israel, a penchant for seeing the Jewish state as a tribute to freedom or the answer to an ingenuous religious impulse--as natural to the Middle East as the Holocaust museum is to the Mall or "Jerusalem" is to Baptist hymns? Or do presidents see Zionism admiringly enough but mainly through the prism of the practical security problems Israeli leaders say they have?
Eisenhower--Tyler's hero, in a way--might be classified as sophisticated, popular and focused sincerely on Israel's security. (Eisenhower's army liberated the death camps, after all.) Kennedy can be classified pretty much the same way. Both administrations wanted to keep the region calm and were mainly set against Israel's acquiring nuclear weapons. They were certainly unwilling to indulge Zionism's irredentist claims.
The first shift came with President Johnson, especially after the Six-Day War, when his power was still great. But Johnson's ignorance of the Middle East, made worse by Vietnam-induced paranoia, was twinned with peculiar affections for liberal and Jewish allies--not just Fortas and Krim but Arthur Goldberg and the New York bankers Abe Feinberg and David Ginsburg--who prompted him to throw his considerable political strength directly behind Israel's cause. At first, as reciprocal escalations in May 1967 seduced Nasser into reimposing a blockade on the Strait of Tiran, Johnson tried to restrain Israeli forces and deal with the matter by international action. Then, after Israel's mobilization was followed by a shocking victory, Johnson tried to bask in its reflected glory. He delivered Israel its first Phantom jets, opening decades of codependent relations between the IDF and the Pentagon. He backed Israel's interpretation of UN Resolution 242, which nurtured its hope of keeping much of the conquered land and all of Jerusalem. "Johnson and Rusk," Tyler writes, "faced a choice: support Israel's occupation strategy or demand a full withdrawal. There was very little debate, at least in the White House. Johnson believed that Nasser had provoked the war, and though Israel had ignored his pleas to avoid a rush to combat, Johnson acceded to Israel's desire on how to play the postwar diplomacy."
The second shift came with President Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who leveraged Johnson's position to the hilt. Tyler quotes Kissinger, the closest thing his story has to a villain: "Our objective is always, when the Soviet Union appears, to demonstrate that whoever gets help from the Soviet Union cannot achieve its objective, whatever it is." Earlier Tyler writes:
Was there a distinction between defending Israel and defending her 1967 conquests? It was a question that Nixon, too, regarded as important. But Kissinger, the diplomatic practitioner who admired subtlety in foreign policy, dismissed this as irrelevant "fine-tuning."
It was Kissinger, Tyler argues, who initiated a pattern of standing up to the Soviets, ignoring the Arab states, neutralizing State and Pentagon skeptics and (by contrast) befriending Israel's diplomats and appeasing Israel's Congressional advocates--people like, most notably, Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Democratic senator from Washington. Kissinger provided the open door for the lobby to push on.
The turning point, Tyler stesses, was not the 1973 war but a meeting that might well have prevented it. The summer before, Brezhnev was visiting San Clemente on a kind of detente victory tour. Sleepless, he called Nixon and Kissinger to a late-night meeting and pleaded for a US-Soviet approach to resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict, arguing that another regional war would throw the superpowers into a potentially nuclear confrontation. He suggested broad principles: guarantees for Israeli security and an end to attacks on Israel from Arab territories, safeguards for Israeli shipping and Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. "If we can get agreement on these principles, we can then discuss how to use any influence on the contending parties," Brezhnev said.
But by then the United States was Israel's major arms supplier. Nixon, who fancied himself Eisenhower's protege, allowed that the United States did not "owe anything to the Israelis." Yet Kissinger prodded Nixon to reject the overture. Both were convinced that Israel had an overwhelming military advantage to preserve the status quo; Nixon was embattled in Watergate, and Kissinger argued that the last thing the administration needed was a fight with Senate Democrats over Israeli security. His enthusiasm for Israeli power was natural for a Jewish refugee who had been part of the US Army's occupation of Germany. (He was a German interpreter in the counterintelligence corps.) What Kissinger did not know was that Brezhnev had intimate knowledge of Anwar Sadat's preparations for retaking the Suez Canal by force of arms.
Kissinger had been so certain of Israel's superiority that when an Arab attack was imminent, he warned Prime Minister Golda Meir not to take pre-emptive action. But after a week of horribly bloody battles, it became clear that the IDF would only slowly gain the upper hand. The IDF had lost fifty planes, 500 tanks and 3,000 soldiers, and Meir felt the need to put Israel's nuclear forces on alert. At that moment, the United States faced the choice of working with the Soviets to impose a cease-fire and lay down the "principles" of a regional settlement, or of resupplying the IDF in a massive airlift and putting off a cease-fire until Israel could fight its way back to a military advantage. Kissinger chose the latter course, even daring to put US nuclear forces on alert when Brezhnev threatened to intervene in defense of Egypt's entrapped Third Army. After this, Tyler implies, the US-Israeli alliance was forged in blood.
Tyler's Kissinger seems true, on the whole. Kissinger did strike the Manichaean template that spread among politicians and reporters in the 1970s, representing Israel as the US ally and "strategic asset" in the region. (The State Department's traditional client Saudi Arabia made things easy by unleashing an oil embargo against the West.) After Kissinger, pressuring Israel seemed something like a basketball coach foolishly demoralizing his slightly brazen power forward. Still, there are some episodes left out of Tyler's narrative that would mitigate any one-sided portrait. Israeli air power, responding to Kissinger's request, actually did help save King Hussein's neck in 1970, when Jordan was invaded by Syria during Black September. Jimmy Carter's eventual Camp David initiative would have been unimaginable without Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy, which produced disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria.
Indeed, the second interim agreement with Egypt, which saw Israeli cargoes pass through the Suez Canal for the first time, never would have been consummated had Kissinger not gotten tough with Israel. (I covered this period, contributing reports from Jerusalem to The New York Review of Books.) Yitzhak Rabin's government had refused to withdraw the IDF behind the Sinai's Mitla Pass. Kissinger, now running foreign policy for Gerald Ford, announced a "reassessment," during which time new arms agreements with Israel were suspended. Thousands of Israeli rightists, led by the settlers' group Gush Emunim, took to the streets, shouting "Jew boy! Jew boy!" at Kissinger: the organizer of the airlift was now a traitor to their dream of Greater Israel. (All of this is missing from Tyler's account.)
It was precisely during the period of the reassessment that seventy-six senators, led by Scoop Jackson (and his protege Richard Perle), delivered a letter to the White House supporting Israeli claims. AIPAC had been formed in 1953, but it came into its own with this letter, which, hoisting Kissinger with his own anti-Soviet petard, made detente its foil. (Perle had been the moving force behind the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which, in effect, made detente hinge on Soviet Jewish emigration--a kind of dry run for hounding Kissinger on Israel, too.) It all seems so quaint now, Kissinger's fight with the neocons over who was overreacting enough to Soviet power.
Under the radar of the American media, however, Israeli political parties were having a fight of their own over who would overreach more in supporting West Bank settlement activities. From 1972 to 1983, mostly under Labor governments, the number of Jewish settlers in Jerusalem climbed from about 8,500 to more than 75,000. In 1977 Begin's Likud won power, and Gush Emunim went to work for real: 2,000 West Bank settlers became 6,000 by the time the Camp David accords were signed. President Carter--relatively sophisticated, with no particular softness for Israelis but politically weak and desperate for Jewish support in his primary campaign against Ted Kennedy--insisted that he had secured a freeze on settlements from Begin for as long as Camp David negotiations continued. He won an Israeli concession that Palestinian autonomy would lead to their acquiring "legitimate rights." But Begin double-crossed Carter and virtually dared him to fight with Israel's Congressional supporters as the 1979 Democratic primaries approached. By the time Ronald Reagan took office, there were something like 10,000 settlers.
President Reagan, for his part, called the settlements an obstacle to peace, urged on, by turns, by Alexander Haig and George Schultz. But nobody believed they meant it. Reagan left Sadat out on a limb, which may well have guaranteed Sadat's assassination. Reagan's team, meanwhile, was prepared to unleash Saddam's Iraq against Iran. There was talk of reviving a Jordan option, with King Hussein managing a federation with Palestine; but there was no heart to oppose Israeli retaliations against PLO guerrillas in southern Lebanon or, ultimately, Israel's catastrophic invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Reagan was a dream come true for the settlers: wildly popular, simple-minded, vaguely messianic and surrounded by Jewish neocons and Hollywood friends. By the time he left office, there were around 100,000 settlers outside Jerusalem and about 200,000 inside.
Curiously, Tyler gives rather short shrift to perhaps the biggest fight over settlements. After the Gulf War in 1991, Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, and his secretary of state, James Baker ("Fuck the Jews; they don't vote for us anyway"), threatened to withhold loan guarantees if Israel did not promise not to use the funds to settle Russian Jews in the West Bank. This occasioned AIPAC's most chilling show of force: a thousand volunteers stormed the Capitol in advance of the 1992 election. As it happens, the town of Ariel, which would become one of the biggest bones of contention between Olmert and Abbas, was largely populated by immigrant Russian Jews during this time. Ariel Sharon, then housing minister, picked up about 4,000 from the airport and plunked them down in the Samarian hills.
Clearly, I cannot do justice here to all the sordid details Tyler patiently recounts--much less to the ones he glosses over. I will say that the closer we get to the present, his book reads less like history and more like old news. Bill Clinton advanced the Oslo agreements, even cajoling Netanyahu into an interim deal on Hebron. His "bridging parameters" from December 2000 still form the spine of any American plan. But Clinton lacked "discipline" and needed Congress too much during the Lewinsky scandal. George W. Bush was, in our matrix, a replay of Reagan. You won't learn more about Clinton's fumbles than you learned from Robert Malley and Hussein Agha's essays in The New York Review of Books, or more on Bush than from, say, the pages of this magazine.
Where does A World of Trouble leave us? Tyler could not have anticipated Obama when he started writing, but something about his review of Middle East "trouble" seems vaguely "back to the future." Not since Eisenhower has there been a president with the necessary combination of attributes to reintroduce the idea of a regional settlement along lines determined by the great powers. America may be diminished in its own eyes, given the Iraq disaster, the financial crisis and the spreading insurgency in Afghanistan. But to Israelis--whose city-state earns less, and is somewhat smaller in habitable area and population, than greater Los Angeles--America and Europe are the world: markets, universities, culture, friendship, arms. Israel is a local military power, well entrenched in what Eisenhower called America's military-industrial complex. But Israel's actions in the territories have never been popular at the Pentagon, and the recent Gaza operation might be said to have violated every principle in Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency handbook. Friends don't let friends drive drunk.
Obama has worldly sophistication and a supportive European Union, an unprecedented mandate and even something Ike did not have, the affections of a majority of American Jews. Indeed, a recent J Street poll reveals that more than 70 percent of American Jews support Obama and a two-state deal pretty much like the one negotiated at Taba eight years ago. (J Street, a peace lobby backed largely by the progressive American Jews AIPAC has alienated, grew in parallel with the Obama campaign.) Against this trifecta, it will be hard to flog Israel's role in a clash of civilizations--a view of the world Obama all but denounced in Cairo.
None of this guarantees Obama will make the most of his opportunity. He is doing his best, clearly, to honor and attract the Islamic world. He has solidly endorsed a Palestinian state and an end to settlements. But if he's digested Tyler's implicit instruction, he'll quickly get beyond framing the peace process as a facilitated negotiation between Israel and Palestine, much as he got beyond the appeal for "bipartisanship" with Congressional Republicans. America in the Middle East is not some Dr. Phil, lively, well intentioned and--how did former Secretary Powell foolishly put it?--not wanting peace "more than the parties themselves." America has skin in the game. So do Europe and the neighboring Arab states. They must all want peace more than the Israelis and Palestinians, who are chronically distrustful of each other, trapped by their fanatics, and whose leaders cannot resist the demagogy of the vendetta.
The time has come, in other words, for Obama to stipulate and conduct a public worldwide campaign for an American plan, not just an American vision. The broad terms of the plan will surprise nobody: we are not talking about the price of a rug in the bazaar; Israel is not just Palestine's cross, and Palestine is not Israel's internal affair. And there can be no peace without outside commitments: NATO committing to include Israel; Egypt and Jordan committing Palestine peacekeepers, investment capital and a sympathetic press. The United States can have no leverage with Iran, therefore no orderly exit from Iraq, without a working partnership with the Arab League.
"America will not turn our backs," Obama said in Cairo, "on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own." The whole Middle East, with the span of a continent, is roiled by this conflict. In the background of Tyler's foreground, Obama knows, are the world's largest proven reserves of oil and dollars, teens and violence. There is a burgeoning Arab middle class opening to the West, in Fez, Tripoli and Amman. But they are surrounded by restless undereducated people governed only by mosques and fathers where state security services leave off. Obama's is the face of a more progressive globalization, but world economic stresses could make the mosques, the fathers and their acolytes only more volatile. The status quo, in any case, means the triumph of the settlers and Hamas. And it is all too easy to imagine the sad follow-on chapters to Tyler's sad chronicle.
About Bernard Avishai
Bernard Avishai is the author, most recently, of The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last (Harcourt). He blogs at www.bernardavishai.com
The War Against the 'War on Drugs'
By Sasha Abramsky
As California goes, so goes the nation.
If that old adage still holds true, then the nation may soon see a gradual backpedaling from the criminal justice policies that have led to wholesale incarceration in recent decades. For the most populous state in the union is on the verge of insolvency--partly because it didn't set aside a rainy-day fund during the boom years; partly because its voters recently rejected a series of initiatives that would have allowed a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing to help stabilize the state's finances during the downturn; partly because it has spent the past quarter-century funneling tens of billions of dollars into an out-of-control correctional system. Now, as California's politicians contemplate emergency cuts to deal with a $24 billion hole in the state budget, old certainties are crumbling.
The state with the toughest three-strikes law in the land and a prison population of more than 150,000 is facing the real possibility of having to release tens of thousands of inmates early in order to pare its $10 billion annual correctional budget. At the same time, an increasing number of the state's political figures are challenging the basic tenets of the "war on drugs," the culprit most responsible for the spike in prison populations over the past thirty years; they argue that the country's harsh drug policies are not financially viable and no longer command majority support among the voting public.
Similar stories are unfolding around the country; in Washington, federal officials are talking about drug-policy reform and, more generally, sentencing reform in a way that has not been heard in the halls of power for more than a generation.
For old-time politicians, who have spent the past three-plus decades navigating the country's roiling tough-on-crime waters, the changes are almost unfathomable. Onetime California governor and current gubernatorial hopeful Jerry Brown, for example, has spent decades trying to erase the public's memory of his liberal tenure in the 1970s, when California's prison population shrank to well below 30,000. As a part of that remodeling, he has assiduously courted the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association, the trade union representing the state's prison guards. Now, with his war chest flush with CCPOA funds, Brown won't do anything to challenge tough-on-crime orthodoxies.
Yet many newer political faces view the current moment as something of an opportunity. For Betty Yee, chair of California's Board of Equalization--the office responsible for collecting sales tax in the Golden State--the changes, especially around drug-law enforcement, can't come soon enough.
Sitting at her conference table high up in one of downtown Sacramento's few sky-rises, Yee has marijuana on her mind. Specifically, she has become an outspoken advocate for legalizing pot for residents older than 21. Her friend Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a former San Francisco city councilman, is pushing just such a bill in the State Legislature. Yee wants to levy fees on business owners applying for marijuana licenses, impose an excise tax on sellers and charge buyers a sales tax. Do it properly, and the state could reap about $1.3 billion a year, she has estimated. "Marijuana is so easily available. Why not regulate it like alcohol and tobacco?" she says, and gain additional tax revenue into the bargain?
Not so many years back, any public figure who dared to advocate such reforms would have been shunned by much of the establishment. It's a measure of how much things have changed that Yee and Ammiano's proposal is being taken seriously across the board. In fact, shortly after I met with Yee, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger--whose office declined my request for an interview for this article--announced that the state should at least consider the merits of pot legalization. He wasn't advocating it, he was careful to stress, but he did think the time was ripe to debate the issue.
"The budget is so bad now, the populism of the issue is beginning to work here in the Legislature," Ammiano says as he paces back and forth in his office, toward the bookshelves with the four martini glasses and Golden Gate Bridge bookends and then away again. On the wall near the receptionist's desk hangs a huge poster from the movie Milk. "Everyone thinks it's Cheech and Chong," he says with a laugh, describing the marijuana legalization bill. "But there's a lot of policy wonks" supporting it. "There's very conservative support from the oddest sources and locations." The GOP chair in the state, as well as Tom Campbell, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful, have indicated their support for his bill, Ammiano declares. "When it starts to cost more money than it's worth even in the eyes of the pooh-bahs, then you can accomplish something."
Over the past three decades, California has tripled the number of prisons it operates, has more than quintupled its prison population and has gone from spending $5 on higher education for every dollar it spent on corrections to a virtual dead-heat in spending. That puts it in the same boat as Michigan, Vermont, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware--all of which, according to estimates by the Pew Charitable Trust, spend as much or more on prisons than on colleges. California is also under federal court order to implement costly improvements in the delivery of medical and mental healthcare services in prisons and to release close to a third of the prison population--about 55,000 inmates--to improve conditions for those remaining behind bars.
Schwarzenegger adamantly opposed that ruling by a three-judge panel. Now, though, in the face of fiscal calamity, he is proposing cutting the prison population by tens of thousands. Of course, he is doing that not out of concern for inmates' well-being, or out of a sense that many sentences are disproportionate to the crime, but simply because the state can no longer pay its bills. Schwarzenegger believes he can save several hundred million dollars by releasing some categories of inmates, in particular nonviolent offenders who are in the country illegally and stand to be deported upon early release.
To save money, he's also talking about firing hard-working guards (a far better, but costlier, option would be to scale back the prison system and to retrain surplus guards to work in other venues), and he's asking for close to $1 billion in cuts to vital prison drug-treatment, education and job-training services. At the same time, since this is all about shaving dollars off budgets rather than intelligent criminal justice system reform, there's no talk of investing in crucial re-entry infrastructure.
In short, it looks like California will go about a necessary scaling back of the correctional system exactly the wrong way. But however grudgingly state officials are approaching the issue, at least they recognize that the magnitude of prison spending is a problem. Down the road, when Californians start thinking beyond the crisis moment, that new understanding will shape policy responses for years to come. It will both feed off and help create a new national sentiment that being "tough on crime" isn't necessarily being smart on crime.
Tough-on-crime rhetoric, and the policies and institutions that grow from it, emerged from Nixon's Silent Majority tactics, from his recasting of politics as a series of debates around "values" rather than bread-and-butter issues. And in the same way the 2008 presidential election ended that peculiar chapter in American history, so too did it end the monotone cry that we could incarcerate our way out of deep-rooted social and economic problems. Despite a few halfhearted GOP attempts to accuse Democrats of being weak on drugs and public safety--Obama had, after all, written about his drug use during his teenage and early adult years, which, according to the old calculus, should have made him an easy target for scaremongers--neither presidential candidate played the tough-on-crime card. It was a nonissue for most voters and thus for the candidates. In fact, recent Zogby polling commissioned by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency suggests that close to eight in ten Americans favor alternatives to incarceration for low-level nonviolent offenders. Another Zogby poll, from last fall, found that just more than three-quarters of Americans felt the "war on drugs" was a failure. The sea change in public opinion holds in California too. In late March the Los Angeles Times ran a column asking readers their opinion on marijuana legalization. So far 4,927 people have replied, and 94 percent of them favor legalization. A Field Poll in April found that 56 percent of Californians favor legalizing and taxing pot.
The new atmosphere is most apparent vis-à-vis the Obama administration's move away from "war on drugs" rhetoric and toward a harm-reduction strategy. Gil Kerlikowske, the new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has made it clear that he prefers treatment over punishment for drug users, a preference he brings from his time as a reform-oriented police chief in Seattle. Putting money where its mouth is, the new team has increased funding for the Bush-era Second Chance Act, intended to connect released inmates with community services such as housing, family counseling and addiction treatment. Support is also growing for the creation of more drug and mental health courts across the country. Finally, there are the promises being made by drug policy leaders in Washington that state medical marijuana laws will be respected rather than trampled, as they have been for more than a decade.
A related issue involves the infamous discrepancy in sentences for crack- versus powder-cocaine crimes. Vice President Biden was one of the architects of these laws--which is why his repudiation of them in recent years has been so significant. The day after Obama's inauguration, the president's website mentioned the importance of eliminating these discrepancies--as well as of promoting needle-exchange programs and expanding the nation's embryonic network of drug courts. The House recently held hearings on the sentencing discrepancy issue.
For Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy state director of the Drug Policy Alliance in Southern California, sacrosanct legislative underpinnings of the "war on drugs" are starting to look like the Berlin Wall, "up one day and down the next"--seemingly impregnable; in reality, utterly fragile. Over the past few years, an increasing number of localities have dabbled in ways to simply walk away from the "war on drugs." Initiatives in several states and cities, including Denver; Missoula, Montana; Albany County, Oregon; and Seattle have mandated that law enforcement agencies deprioritize marijuana arrests. Several cities have begun needle-exchange programs. And states like California have passed citizens' initiatives mandating that first-time drug offenders be channeled into treatment programs in lieu of prisons.
Then there's Virginia Senator Jim Webb's legislation creating a blue-ribbon commission on criminal justice reform, with a mandate to put all questions on the table during its eighteen-month tenure--from drug law reform to the restoration of judicial discretion in sentencing, from parole reforms to different approaches to gangs, border patrol, prison architecture and the like. Webb has been pushing for systemic criminal justice reform for years; in 2009, he believes, it will acquire legs. During a telephone interview for this article, Webb said that President Obama "has personally called me on this, and he's very supportive of the idea of moving forward." Across the aisle many Republican senators, including senior figures like Lindsey Graham, have also expressed support for the idea.
The bipartisan backing for Webb's commission is partly a response to the escalating drug-and-gang crisis south of the border. There's a growing recognition in US policy and law enforcement circles that government dysfunction, phenomenal levels of street violence and the rising power of drug cartels are threatening to move from being a Latin American problem to one that destroys the integrity of the Mexican state and risks spilling over more heavily into the American Southwest. Nobody, no matter their political stripe, wants the Tijuana-ization or Juárez-ization of Phoenix or Los Angeles, of San Diego or El Paso.
"It really is a serious problem in this country," Webb argues. "The transnational gangs or syndicates are bringing a tremendous amount of drugs into this country."
To get a handle on that problem involves thinking of ways to neutralize these gangs, which inevitably leads to a discussion of partial drug decriminalization or legalization. Why? Because once the drug market is no longer confined to the shadows--once it is regulated and taxed, as alcohol was after Prohibition ended in 1933--the violence that accompanies struggles for control of that illicit market will disappear. After years of denying this truth and assuming that the country could incarcerate its way out of the drug-abuse epidemic, a number of American politicians, Webb included, are touting that seemingly paradoxical fact. Want to get really tough on crime? Well, do the smart thing: start working out ways to neutralize the drug cartels, start talking about at least limited forms of decriminalization or legalization.
It is, Webb argues, "a fair issue for this commission. Every piece of it should be fair game."
For an administration like Obama's that prides itself on thinking outside the box, systemic drug policy reform is an intriguing prospect. An increasing number of law enforcement people and judges have also decided that this is an idea worth running with.
"I've never seen so much interest," says retired Orange County superior court judge James Gray, who has been advocating marijuana legalization since the early 1990s. "My phone is ringing much more than it ever has before."
"We need to ask, Is there a more sensible approach?" argues Norm Stamper, who, like Kerlikowske, is a former chief of police of Seattle who believes the criminal justice system is broken. "And the answer is prevention and education and treatment."
After decades of being on the defensive, progressive criminal justice reformers suddenly have a receptive audience. New York, which has closed some of its prisons in the past decade, has spent the last few years unraveling the tangled web created by the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws. Michigan, Louisiana and several other states have also scaled back their harshest mandatory drug sentences. The State of Washington is looking at how to redefine low-end drug and property crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies. And in Michigan, which allows a $100 theft to trigger a four-year prison sentence, legislators are pushing to make the threshold $1,000 instead, so as to reduce the number of low-end offenders pushed into long-term incarceration and hobbled for life by felony convictions.
Meanwhile, correctional system administrators in Georgia, Illinois and Arkansas have started the long, hard task of reforming their systems from within even without a new consensus emerging on the issue.
Howard Wooldridge, a retired police detective from Bath, Michigan, who advocates in DC for criminal justice system reform, says the moment is ripe for change. "I've been doing this for twelve years, and this is by far the most perfect storm."
America isn't about to abandon all of its "tough on crime" tenets. Nor should it in all instances. The three-strikes law will likely remain in place for violent offenders, as will the growing body of laws limiting where sex offenders may live. Violent crimes will probably continue to trigger longer sentences than they did before the get-tough movement. And while some inmates will qualify for early release, many sentenced to long terms at the height of the tough-on-crime years will stay in prison. But out of economic necessity and because of shifting mores, the country will likely get more selective, and smarter, about how it uses incarceration and whom it targets for long spells behind bars.
This will be especially true for drug policy--the multi-tentacled beast that's sucking most people into jails and prisons. There, profound changes are likely to develop over the next few years. And when it comes to the mentally ill, momentum continues to build around mental health courts designed to get people medical and counseling help rather than simply to shunt them off to prison. States like Pennsylvania are starting to develop parallel institutions to deal with mentally ill people who run afoul of the law. Many other states will likely follow suit in the near future. Forty years after deinstitutionalization, a new consensus is emerging that prisons became an accidental, de facto alternative to mental hospitals, and that very little good has come from that development.
"I believe that we have a compelling national interest," explains Senator Webb, referring to systemic criminal justice reform. "That's a term that is carefully chosen. This is a national commission, but it should not be limited to looking at the federal prison system. You have to look at the whole picture and then boil it down into resolvable issues."
About Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky, a freelance journalist and senior fellow at Demos, is the author, most recently, of Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It (PoliPoint).
As California goes, so goes the nation.
If that old adage still holds true, then the nation may soon see a gradual backpedaling from the criminal justice policies that have led to wholesale incarceration in recent decades. For the most populous state in the union is on the verge of insolvency--partly because it didn't set aside a rainy-day fund during the boom years; partly because its voters recently rejected a series of initiatives that would have allowed a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing to help stabilize the state's finances during the downturn; partly because it has spent the past quarter-century funneling tens of billions of dollars into an out-of-control correctional system. Now, as California's politicians contemplate emergency cuts to deal with a $24 billion hole in the state budget, old certainties are crumbling.
The state with the toughest three-strikes law in the land and a prison population of more than 150,000 is facing the real possibility of having to release tens of thousands of inmates early in order to pare its $10 billion annual correctional budget. At the same time, an increasing number of the state's political figures are challenging the basic tenets of the "war on drugs," the culprit most responsible for the spike in prison populations over the past thirty years; they argue that the country's harsh drug policies are not financially viable and no longer command majority support among the voting public.
Similar stories are unfolding around the country; in Washington, federal officials are talking about drug-policy reform and, more generally, sentencing reform in a way that has not been heard in the halls of power for more than a generation.
For old-time politicians, who have spent the past three-plus decades navigating the country's roiling tough-on-crime waters, the changes are almost unfathomable. Onetime California governor and current gubernatorial hopeful Jerry Brown, for example, has spent decades trying to erase the public's memory of his liberal tenure in the 1970s, when California's prison population shrank to well below 30,000. As a part of that remodeling, he has assiduously courted the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association, the trade union representing the state's prison guards. Now, with his war chest flush with CCPOA funds, Brown won't do anything to challenge tough-on-crime orthodoxies.
Yet many newer political faces view the current moment as something of an opportunity. For Betty Yee, chair of California's Board of Equalization--the office responsible for collecting sales tax in the Golden State--the changes, especially around drug-law enforcement, can't come soon enough.
Sitting at her conference table high up in one of downtown Sacramento's few sky-rises, Yee has marijuana on her mind. Specifically, she has become an outspoken advocate for legalizing pot for residents older than 21. Her friend Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a former San Francisco city councilman, is pushing just such a bill in the State Legislature. Yee wants to levy fees on business owners applying for marijuana licenses, impose an excise tax on sellers and charge buyers a sales tax. Do it properly, and the state could reap about $1.3 billion a year, she has estimated. "Marijuana is so easily available. Why not regulate it like alcohol and tobacco?" she says, and gain additional tax revenue into the bargain?
Not so many years back, any public figure who dared to advocate such reforms would have been shunned by much of the establishment. It's a measure of how much things have changed that Yee and Ammiano's proposal is being taken seriously across the board. In fact, shortly after I met with Yee, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger--whose office declined my request for an interview for this article--announced that the state should at least consider the merits of pot legalization. He wasn't advocating it, he was careful to stress, but he did think the time was ripe to debate the issue.
"The budget is so bad now, the populism of the issue is beginning to work here in the Legislature," Ammiano says as he paces back and forth in his office, toward the bookshelves with the four martini glasses and Golden Gate Bridge bookends and then away again. On the wall near the receptionist's desk hangs a huge poster from the movie Milk. "Everyone thinks it's Cheech and Chong," he says with a laugh, describing the marijuana legalization bill. "But there's a lot of policy wonks" supporting it. "There's very conservative support from the oddest sources and locations." The GOP chair in the state, as well as Tom Campbell, a Republican gubernatorial hopeful, have indicated their support for his bill, Ammiano declares. "When it starts to cost more money than it's worth even in the eyes of the pooh-bahs, then you can accomplish something."
Over the past three decades, California has tripled the number of prisons it operates, has more than quintupled its prison population and has gone from spending $5 on higher education for every dollar it spent on corrections to a virtual dead-heat in spending. That puts it in the same boat as Michigan, Vermont, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware--all of which, according to estimates by the Pew Charitable Trust, spend as much or more on prisons than on colleges. California is also under federal court order to implement costly improvements in the delivery of medical and mental healthcare services in prisons and to release close to a third of the prison population--about 55,000 inmates--to improve conditions for those remaining behind bars.
Schwarzenegger adamantly opposed that ruling by a three-judge panel. Now, though, in the face of fiscal calamity, he is proposing cutting the prison population by tens of thousands. Of course, he is doing that not out of concern for inmates' well-being, or out of a sense that many sentences are disproportionate to the crime, but simply because the state can no longer pay its bills. Schwarzenegger believes he can save several hundred million dollars by releasing some categories of inmates, in particular nonviolent offenders who are in the country illegally and stand to be deported upon early release.
To save money, he's also talking about firing hard-working guards (a far better, but costlier, option would be to scale back the prison system and to retrain surplus guards to work in other venues), and he's asking for close to $1 billion in cuts to vital prison drug-treatment, education and job-training services. At the same time, since this is all about shaving dollars off budgets rather than intelligent criminal justice system reform, there's no talk of investing in crucial re-entry infrastructure.
In short, it looks like California will go about a necessary scaling back of the correctional system exactly the wrong way. But however grudgingly state officials are approaching the issue, at least they recognize that the magnitude of prison spending is a problem. Down the road, when Californians start thinking beyond the crisis moment, that new understanding will shape policy responses for years to come. It will both feed off and help create a new national sentiment that being "tough on crime" isn't necessarily being smart on crime.
Tough-on-crime rhetoric, and the policies and institutions that grow from it, emerged from Nixon's Silent Majority tactics, from his recasting of politics as a series of debates around "values" rather than bread-and-butter issues. And in the same way the 2008 presidential election ended that peculiar chapter in American history, so too did it end the monotone cry that we could incarcerate our way out of deep-rooted social and economic problems. Despite a few halfhearted GOP attempts to accuse Democrats of being weak on drugs and public safety--Obama had, after all, written about his drug use during his teenage and early adult years, which, according to the old calculus, should have made him an easy target for scaremongers--neither presidential candidate played the tough-on-crime card. It was a nonissue for most voters and thus for the candidates. In fact, recent Zogby polling commissioned by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency suggests that close to eight in ten Americans favor alternatives to incarceration for low-level nonviolent offenders. Another Zogby poll, from last fall, found that just more than three-quarters of Americans felt the "war on drugs" was a failure. The sea change in public opinion holds in California too. In late March the Los Angeles Times ran a column asking readers their opinion on marijuana legalization. So far 4,927 people have replied, and 94 percent of them favor legalization. A Field Poll in April found that 56 percent of Californians favor legalizing and taxing pot.
The new atmosphere is most apparent vis-à-vis the Obama administration's move away from "war on drugs" rhetoric and toward a harm-reduction strategy. Gil Kerlikowske, the new head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has made it clear that he prefers treatment over punishment for drug users, a preference he brings from his time as a reform-oriented police chief in Seattle. Putting money where its mouth is, the new team has increased funding for the Bush-era Second Chance Act, intended to connect released inmates with community services such as housing, family counseling and addiction treatment. Support is also growing for the creation of more drug and mental health courts across the country. Finally, there are the promises being made by drug policy leaders in Washington that state medical marijuana laws will be respected rather than trampled, as they have been for more than a decade.
A related issue involves the infamous discrepancy in sentences for crack- versus powder-cocaine crimes. Vice President Biden was one of the architects of these laws--which is why his repudiation of them in recent years has been so significant. The day after Obama's inauguration, the president's website mentioned the importance of eliminating these discrepancies--as well as of promoting needle-exchange programs and expanding the nation's embryonic network of drug courts. The House recently held hearings on the sentencing discrepancy issue.
For Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, deputy state director of the Drug Policy Alliance in Southern California, sacrosanct legislative underpinnings of the "war on drugs" are starting to look like the Berlin Wall, "up one day and down the next"--seemingly impregnable; in reality, utterly fragile. Over the past few years, an increasing number of localities have dabbled in ways to simply walk away from the "war on drugs." Initiatives in several states and cities, including Denver; Missoula, Montana; Albany County, Oregon; and Seattle have mandated that law enforcement agencies deprioritize marijuana arrests. Several cities have begun needle-exchange programs. And states like California have passed citizens' initiatives mandating that first-time drug offenders be channeled into treatment programs in lieu of prisons.
Then there's Virginia Senator Jim Webb's legislation creating a blue-ribbon commission on criminal justice reform, with a mandate to put all questions on the table during its eighteen-month tenure--from drug law reform to the restoration of judicial discretion in sentencing, from parole reforms to different approaches to gangs, border patrol, prison architecture and the like. Webb has been pushing for systemic criminal justice reform for years; in 2009, he believes, it will acquire legs. During a telephone interview for this article, Webb said that President Obama "has personally called me on this, and he's very supportive of the idea of moving forward." Across the aisle many Republican senators, including senior figures like Lindsey Graham, have also expressed support for the idea.
The bipartisan backing for Webb's commission is partly a response to the escalating drug-and-gang crisis south of the border. There's a growing recognition in US policy and law enforcement circles that government dysfunction, phenomenal levels of street violence and the rising power of drug cartels are threatening to move from being a Latin American problem to one that destroys the integrity of the Mexican state and risks spilling over more heavily into the American Southwest. Nobody, no matter their political stripe, wants the Tijuana-ization or Juárez-ization of Phoenix or Los Angeles, of San Diego or El Paso.
"It really is a serious problem in this country," Webb argues. "The transnational gangs or syndicates are bringing a tremendous amount of drugs into this country."
To get a handle on that problem involves thinking of ways to neutralize these gangs, which inevitably leads to a discussion of partial drug decriminalization or legalization. Why? Because once the drug market is no longer confined to the shadows--once it is regulated and taxed, as alcohol was after Prohibition ended in 1933--the violence that accompanies struggles for control of that illicit market will disappear. After years of denying this truth and assuming that the country could incarcerate its way out of the drug-abuse epidemic, a number of American politicians, Webb included, are touting that seemingly paradoxical fact. Want to get really tough on crime? Well, do the smart thing: start working out ways to neutralize the drug cartels, start talking about at least limited forms of decriminalization or legalization.
It is, Webb argues, "a fair issue for this commission. Every piece of it should be fair game."
For an administration like Obama's that prides itself on thinking outside the box, systemic drug policy reform is an intriguing prospect. An increasing number of law enforcement people and judges have also decided that this is an idea worth running with.
"I've never seen so much interest," says retired Orange County superior court judge James Gray, who has been advocating marijuana legalization since the early 1990s. "My phone is ringing much more than it ever has before."
"We need to ask, Is there a more sensible approach?" argues Norm Stamper, who, like Kerlikowske, is a former chief of police of Seattle who believes the criminal justice system is broken. "And the answer is prevention and education and treatment."
After decades of being on the defensive, progressive criminal justice reformers suddenly have a receptive audience. New York, which has closed some of its prisons in the past decade, has spent the last few years unraveling the tangled web created by the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws. Michigan, Louisiana and several other states have also scaled back their harshest mandatory drug sentences. The State of Washington is looking at how to redefine low-end drug and property crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies. And in Michigan, which allows a $100 theft to trigger a four-year prison sentence, legislators are pushing to make the threshold $1,000 instead, so as to reduce the number of low-end offenders pushed into long-term incarceration and hobbled for life by felony convictions.
Meanwhile, correctional system administrators in Georgia, Illinois and Arkansas have started the long, hard task of reforming their systems from within even without a new consensus emerging on the issue.
Howard Wooldridge, a retired police detective from Bath, Michigan, who advocates in DC for criminal justice system reform, says the moment is ripe for change. "I've been doing this for twelve years, and this is by far the most perfect storm."
America isn't about to abandon all of its "tough on crime" tenets. Nor should it in all instances. The three-strikes law will likely remain in place for violent offenders, as will the growing body of laws limiting where sex offenders may live. Violent crimes will probably continue to trigger longer sentences than they did before the get-tough movement. And while some inmates will qualify for early release, many sentenced to long terms at the height of the tough-on-crime years will stay in prison. But out of economic necessity and because of shifting mores, the country will likely get more selective, and smarter, about how it uses incarceration and whom it targets for long spells behind bars.
This will be especially true for drug policy--the multi-tentacled beast that's sucking most people into jails and prisons. There, profound changes are likely to develop over the next few years. And when it comes to the mentally ill, momentum continues to build around mental health courts designed to get people medical and counseling help rather than simply to shunt them off to prison. States like Pennsylvania are starting to develop parallel institutions to deal with mentally ill people who run afoul of the law. Many other states will likely follow suit in the near future. Forty years after deinstitutionalization, a new consensus is emerging that prisons became an accidental, de facto alternative to mental hospitals, and that very little good has come from that development.
"I believe that we have a compelling national interest," explains Senator Webb, referring to systemic criminal justice reform. "That's a term that is carefully chosen. This is a national commission, but it should not be limited to looking at the federal prison system. You have to look at the whole picture and then boil it down into resolvable issues."
About Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky, a freelance journalist and senior fellow at Demos, is the author, most recently, of Breadline USA: The Hidden Scandal of American Hunger and How to Fix It (PoliPoint).
The Most Important Financial Journalist of Her Generation
By Dean Starkman
On April 27, Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, sat down for a meeting at Goldman headquarters with Gretchen Morgenson, reporter, columnist and senior editor of the New York Times. The Wall Street titan and the Pulitzer Prize winner had never met, but this wasn't the usual polite getting-to-know-you session between reporter and source.
Long before most in the business press rose to the challenge, Gretchen Morgenson was reporting that the financial sector had gone rogue.
"I feel like I've been waterboarded," Blankfein told her, according to people familiar with the discussion. Blankfein was being dramatic, but he had reason to feel that way. It was Morgenson, after all, who had written the story this past fall that stripped the veil of secrecy from the most momentous closed-door deal in the annals of US finance: the government rescue of fallen insurance colossus American International Group. The September 28 story, "Behind Insurer's Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk," was the first article published by a major news organization to reveal that the true beneficiaries of the bailout were the institutions to which AIG owed money, known as counterparties (mainly Wall Street investment banks). The 2,700-word piece said, among other things, that an AIG collapse "threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman's side" and that Blankfein attended a meeting at the Federal Reserve on September 15, the same day decisions were made to let Lehman Brothers fall and to save AIG.
Today this is common knowledge; until this story ran, though, it wasn't. The article was about as bold and valuable as business stories come and involved no small journalistic risks for the Times. Goldman, for instance, was able to wring a correction on the story and still feels wronged today. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, called Morgenson and her editor to question the article's premise, The Nation has learned. The piece has been the subject of endless parsing on financial blogs and, privately, sniping by Morgenson's peers. Was Goldman really exposed to AIG? And if so, how? Was it fair to mention Blankfein's presence at the Fed?
It would be too much to say that the story was all in a day's work for Morgenson. It was extraordinary. But it does open a window onto what makes Morgenson the most important financial journalist of her generation.
At 53, Morgenson is at the height of her career, read and feared in the corridors of power running from Wall Street to Washington. As a reporter and columnist (a controversial dual role), she is enormously productive. During the period following Lehman's bankruptcy, her byline appeared on major stories on Henry Cisneros and good housing goals gone bad, Merrill Lynch's collapse, corrupted rating agencies and Washington Mutual's boiler-room culture, in addition to the September 28 blockbuster on AIG--not to mention weekly 1,200-word columns on everything from rating-agency hypocrisy ("They're Shocked, Shocked, About the Mess," October 26) to a convoluted tax deal that imperiled an Indiana electrical cooperative ("Just Call This Deal Hoosier Baroque," December 21).
She breaks business-press taboos constantly. Her prose is blunt; some even say crude. ("Everybody knows that executive compensation at many companies has been obscene. What everybody does not know is how obscene obscene is now," she wrote in February 2006 in a not untypical column.) Morgenson doesn't just cover subjects but sometimes hammers them into submission, as when she banged out more than three dozen stories on Countrywide in 2007 and 2008 and almost single-handedly made CEO Angelo Mozilo the face of a rogue industry. Not coincidentally, on June 4 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mozilo with securities fraud, alleging that he misled investors about the increasing risks Countrywide was taking with loans that Mozilo privately called "toxic."
At this point, it is almost impossible for business reporters and editors not to have an opinion about Morgenson. Supporters cheer her tell-it-like-it-is style; detractors call her simplistic and agenda-driven. In certain Wall Street and business circles, she is flatly detested.
"She rules," says Aaron Elstein, a senior writer who covers Wall Street for Crain's New York. "She grasped that the game was rigged way before it was fashionable to do so." (He was talking about bogus accounting practices, but the remark holds more generally.)
"Unreadable," snaps a business journalism peer. "She writes like an Escalade running into a concrete barrier. And her relentless and repetitious pounding of simplistic issues is maddening."
"The consensus view of her among actual business people I know is pure contempt," says Jim McCarthy of CounterPoint Strategies, a public relations firm that has represented high-profile business-press targets. "Her work has a sort of drive-by, potshot quality to it that leads to habitual mistakes and ideological laziness. She is reflexively opposed to free markets and assumes bad faith in almost every subject or person she examines."
What both sides miss, and what sets Morgenson apart, is that she combines the blunt writing style with a prodigious fact-gathering ability and an accountability mindset all too rare in the business-press culture. This allows her to go beyond merely reporting and commenting on the public agenda. She helps to set it.
For the public, the financial crisis has demonstrated the degree to which Morgenson matters. We've just experienced a long period of radical deregulation that touched off a sea change in the business culture and at the same time created an information vacuum. How was the public to know about Wall Street-backed predatory lending and the scale it had reached? Most of the business press ducked the challenge, sticking largely to tried-and-true formulas: personality profiles, scoops handed out by insiders and after-the-fact explanations of the latest corporate scandal. And while the press did publish some investor- and consumer-oriented stories about the housing bubble, defective mortgage products and the like, it was culturally incapable of grasping the big picture--that, for instance, the financial sector had gone rogue.
Morgenson got it then and gets it now. Ignoring the eye rolls of her peers, pushing back against the lawyers and the flacks, she aims her reporting straight at the heart of the matter--and in doing so points the way for a more credible business press. Many groaned, for instance, at her repeated pounding in recent years on excesses in executive compensation. But we now know that compensation lies at the center of today's crisis, since everyone from mortgage brokers to Wall Street executives was given incentives to sell financial products without regard for their quality. Similarly, what Morgenson saw as a fairness problem became a systemic one, since income distortions left a borrower class too strapped to repay consumer loans. More broadly, her tone of urgency and accountability gave the public the message it needed to hear: something in the system had gone deeply awry.
Morgenson made fairly strenuous efforts to talk me out of this profile, arguing variously that she wasn't the story, that others in the mortgage mess were far more significant, that attention might impair her effectiveness, etc. (As a thoughtful journalist, I of course blew all this off.) Waiting for her in a restaurant around the corner from her office at the Times, I'm more nervous than I expected to be. Not helping my sang-froid was the one-word description a friend at the Times offered of Morgenson's grimly focused demeanor in the newsroom: scary. She sweeps in--tall, blond hair well coiffed at shoulder length, blue eyes, carrying stuff, chattering apologies about being (two minutes) late--and I'm relieved and surprised to find how quickly it feels like I'm talking with an old friend. Over eggs and granola, she is chatty, even dishy and disarmingly open. At a certain point, though, I touch a nerve--something to do with her prerogatives at the Times, I think--and the chitchat ceases. Her eyes narrow and now seem icy as she stares across the table. I start to understand what it is like to face off against her.
But that's part of the formula. She has a lot of power for a business reporter, and she acts like it. When I ask, for instance, what she thinks of her former employer, Forbes--a question that would seem to call for some diplomacy--she says simply, "Awful. Terrible." Breaking a few more industry taboos, she then unfavorably compares current Forbes editor William Baldwin with his predecessor, the late Jim Michaels, one of her mentors.
"Jim Michaels had a knack for taking a small story and making it big," she says slyly. "Bill Baldwin has a knack for making a big story small."
(Baldwin, reached later, brushes off the slam. "Forbes has always been brusque in judgment and tough on people, and if you dish it out you have to learn to take it," he says.)
Still, plutocrats and liberals expecting or hoping to find a stern ideologue in Morgenson--or, really, sweeping views from her of any kind--will be disappointed. For one thing, many will be surprised to learn she's a moderate Republican. "I believe in capitalism," she says. "To me it's natural that I would go after the people who are wrecking it."
What becomes apparent over several conversations is that Morgenson is a business reporter--no more, no less. She's more likely to mention investors as her main concern than readers or "the public." Her views are pragmatic, sometimes small-bore to the point that her detail-laden writing can turn off casual readers. Her fixes are meliorative and not particularly original--better regulation, more competition. Her radical idea is, basically, that regulators should regulate, rating agencies should rate according to the merits of the credit, corporate compensation committees should set executive pay at arm's length, directors should look to the interests of shareholders first, large shareholders should act like the owners they are and mortgage lending should be something other than a game of three-card monte. That these views are seen as "antibusiness" in some circles tells us less about Morgenson than about the ethical breakdown among this generation's corporate elites.
"If you're going to believe this is an ownership society where you're going to take part in the upside, if you're going to participate in a sort of populist form of capitalism...you have to be confident that the agents have your best interests at heart," she says.
Morgenson was born in State College, Pennsylvania, the daughter of liberal parents. Her father was an academic psychologist who later taught at Wilfrid Laurier University (in Waterloo, Ontario), and her mother was a librarian. Her parents split when she was 10, and she moved with her mom to Oxford, Ohio.
Her ambition as a girl was to be a reporter for the New York Times. After graduating from her parents' alma mater (St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota), lacking contacts, training or much in the way of money, she nonetheless boarded a plane for New York City and eventually landed a job in journalism--as a secretary at Vogue reporting to, of course, a tyrannical editor. ("It was 'devil wears Prada,' totally," she says.) She later moved up to a low-level editorial job ("assistant slave," as she puts it), then began to write personal-finance columns. But at a salary of $10,000 a year, she found she couldn't afford her new profession and left for a better-paying job on Wall Street.
Her three years at Dean Witter (now part of Morgan Stanley) taught her a few things about the financial-services industry, none of them particularly edifying. For example, if the office squawk box in the morning announced an "overnight special" on some stock laden with incentives for the brokers, "you knew it would open lower," she says. Another lesson: "You can't trust your research department; that you learn pretty quickly." Her career, such as it was, lasted until mid-1983, when an early version of the tech bubble burst, costing some of her clients a lot of money. "I felt so terrible," she says. "I had this terrible guilt."
Retreating to the relative moral high ground of journalism, she cadged a six-month trial at Money magazine and eventually a job at Forbes, then known for its hard-hitting business investigations. She rose quickly, learning at the feet of Michaels, the magazine's defining personality and editor from 1961 to 1999. A taskmaster (he could be "nasty, frightening," she recalls), Michaels stressed the importance of assembling an armada of facts in reporting and cutting to the chase in writing. Don't leave it to the reader to sort it out, he preached.
It was under Michaels that Morgenson became Morgenson, rattling off a series of investigative coups. A 1993 bombshell that found the entire Nasdaq trading system was tilted to favor stockbrokers over investors led to a historic $1 billion antitrust settlement with Wall Street firms. Another Forbes story took aim at the mid-1990s euphoria surrounding "boiler rooms"--registered and licensed small brokerages that were in fact criminal enterprises. The firms cold-called and bamboozled thousands of people into investing in plausible-sounding tiny public companies the brokerages secretly controlled. And while all business publications covered the resulting criminal cases, only Morgenson traced the frauds of one particularly malignant firm, A.R. Baron & Company, to its financial backer and back-office services provider: Bear Stearns.
The story detailed an intimate relationship between a criminal enterprise and a Wall Street bank, including unheeded letters from frantic investors pleading with Bear to cancel trades they had never authorized. The piece, incredibly, also traced the relationship between Baron principal Andrew Bressman and Richard Harriton, a top Bear official. Bear later agreed to pay $38 million (and got off incredibly easy) to settle charges brought by the SEC and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau. Harriton agreed to pay $1 million and was barred from the business.
The business press generally goes to great lengths to avoid this kind of straightforward investigative reporting, which is why Morgenson's approach has been so badly needed in recent years. After all, the mortgage crisis was nothing if not the Bear/Baron model writ large. It is generally conceded today that Ameriquest, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Citigroup--all the brand names, in fact--were running boiler rooms underwritten and incentivized by Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch and the Wall Street securitization machine. The business press did not cover it then and still hasn't gotten its arms around this phenomenon. If readers are wondering why they were surprised by the mortgage crisis, this is the reason.
Morgenson arrived at the Times in 1998, an ascension that brought an investigative, accountability-oriented sensibility to a highly visible outpost. Reading through years of her work in one sitting isn't an entirely pleasurable experience--it can feel like you're being pummeled by a sock filled with wet sand. But even so, a reader is struck by her mastery of technical details, the force of her prose and, mostly, the underlying insistence that capitalism be made to work for everyone, not just the big shots. Her work in the run-up to the tech bubble was characteristically skeptical and investor oriented. Common causes of columns and stories include, besides compensation reform: shareholder rights; effective corporate governance; nonrigged arbitrations; anti-gouging; full disclosure in consumer lending; and fairness in bankruptcy, foreclosure and other legal proceedings. Her 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting was officially awarded for stories that plumbed bogus Wall Street stock research and the dangers of off-balance-sheet financing. But in an era of spectacular business corruption (Enron, WorldCom, etc.), I suspect the Pulitzer judges, who were not business news specialists, also appreciated her confrontational approach.
Not everyone does, of course. A handful of bloggers, including the late Doris Dungey (known as Tanta) of Calculated Risk and University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein, have created large bodies of work debunking and mocking her and picking her apart. Ribstein, who calls her Morgenscreed, particularly objects to the Times allowing her to write both an opinion column ("Fair Game") and straight news, sometimes on the same subjects. In a column last November, the Times's public editor, Clark Hoyt, tut-tutted the paper for the practice (Andrew Ross Sorkin, among others, is also allowed the dual platform) but not very convincingly. The critiques, most centering on Morgenson's alleged oversimplications, come across as arguments about wallpaper design in a burning house. Bloggers, for instance, hit the roof over a Morgenson column last September arguing that the newly nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be made to disclose details about the individual mortgages they'd bought or guaranteed in the past decade. Ribstein found the idea an example of her "extreme idiocy." Others would wonder what's wrong with it.
In the Times's famously baroque culture, some people are known to have power, and others aren't. Morgenson has it. She's not known as a shmoozer but as one of the most efficient staffers at the paper: in at 9:30; out, incredibly, around 6. And while she's a cheerful and cooperative colleague by all accounts--helping out younger staffers, waiting her turn at the salad bar, etc.--she doesn't hesitate to assert her undefined but very real prerogatives. Editors ask her questions and make suggestions. They don't give orders.
The downside, according to a midlevel editor, is that Morgenson is not particularly open to nuance or different points of view. This person says the system can lead to a kind of orthodoxy and groupthink that deadens reporting. Morgenson's views on executive compensation, for instance, are hardly out of step with the "way people think" around the Times, the person notes.
That said, her clout has its limits. In 2003 the Times business section was getting an overhaul. Its editor, Glenn Kramon, was moving up and out. Jockeying began for a successor, with internal candidates including Jim Schachter, now editor of digital initiatives at the paper, and Winnie O'Kelley, a business editor with whom Morgenson has been particularly close.
Instead, executive editor Bill Keller chose Lawrence Ingrassia, who had run the Wall Street Journal's "Money & Investing" section. While many believed Ingrassia had breathed life into a stale operation, some at the Times viewed him (unfairly, in my view) as a cheerleader for the tech bubble, mainly because of his frequent appearances on CNBC during the late '90s. Some also believed he didn't "get" the investigative, accountability-oriented journalism Morgenson practices, favoring instead the kind that depends on access to power.
When Keller asked Morgenson about hiring Ingrassia, according to people with knowledge of the conversation, she told him flatly that it was a bad idea. But she also promised to make it work. (Keller, through a Times spokeswoman, declined to comment.) For his part, Ingrassia, now 57, has nothing but praise for Morgenson. "She knows Wall Street and how it works better than any reporter I've seen," he says. "She has great sources, and she's passionate. She cares deeply about making sure that individual investors are treated fairly. Basically, she believes people in positions of responsibility should act responsibly." Ingrassia said he and Morgenson have "quite a good working relationship, now."
Says Morgenson, turning cautious and speaking slowly: "Larry Ingrassia has been extremely supportive of my work this year."
However one parses all that, few would argue that the business section has not dramatically improved in recent years. Despite a relatively small staff (the Times has about 110 business journalists; the Journal, about 700), it is reasonably competitive on major stories and has assembled a cadre of reporters capable of strong investigative work, including Diana Henriques, Charles Duhigg, Vikas Bajaj, Louis Uchitelle, Stephen Labaton, Louise Story and Peter Goodman, supplemented by Jo Becker of the investigative staff.
Morgenson, Ingrassia and the Times business staff have produced some of the best coverage of the crisis, particularly the "Reckoning" series at the end of last year, which included exposés on major themes: the predatory practices at Countrywide, Washington Mutual and other brand names; compromised regulation; skewed compensation incentives; even the role played by the person in charge of the regulatory system, George W. Bush. The paper's news coverage has been complemented by strong editorials, many written by Teresa Tritch, a former staffer at Money.
Morgenson's approach has obviously been vindicated by the crisis, and she continues to help steer the public agenda. A story in April (with Becker as the lead byline) deftly revealed Timothy Geithner's longstanding social and professional ties to some of the leading culprits in the financial mess, including Robert Rubin (a longtime mentor), Sanford Weill (who, the story revealed, pushed Geithner to head Citigroup) and executives at money manager BlackRock (which got a no-bid bailout contract from Geithner's New York Fed). A June 1 story peeled back Wall Street lobbying efforts to dilute the regulation of derivatives, and unearthed a key lobbyist's memo that has helped shape the Obama administration's policy-making.
Like newspaper crusaders of old, Morgenson has sided with the little guy over the big guy, revealing, for instance, that Countrywide's predations continued even after its borrowers had filed for bankruptcy. A series in 2007 and last year reported that the lender had destroyed or "lost" $500,000 in homeowners' mortgage payments, then imposed additional penalties and fees, and presented to the court "re-created" letters that had never been mailed to homeowners.
"It's really about fairness," Morgenson says. "It just seems that the playing field is so skewed in some cases that it's worthwhile to educate people to level the playing field a little bit."
A little-understood aspect of Morgenson's approach is that she avoids a business-press tendency toward over-sophistication and goes after the big, honking story, the kind that rings alarm bells in executive suites.
Take the AIG/Goldman story. It came a mere two weeks after the bailout was announced, with the public still baffled as to why an insurance company would suddenly require scores of billions from the government. It also involved clashing with Wall Street's most powerful firm on the crux of a vital matter of public policy. (Disclosure: Goldman is a funder of Columbia Journalism Review's business section, "The Audit," which I run.)
Today, Lucas van Praag, a Goldman spokesman, says the story was "really very unfair" and that the now-corrected error, which mistakenly placed Blankfein in the same meeting with his predecessor, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, set off damaging conspiracy theories. (Tim O'Brien, one of Morgenson's editors, who got the original tip for the story, takes the blame for the error.)
Goldman, which adamantly contested Morgenson's premise that it had been exposed to AIG's failure, received support from a surprising quarter: Geithner, who called Morgenson on her cellphone the day the story ran, a Sunday.
"I think they were fully hedged," he told her, according to people familiar with the call. Translation: Goldman had no exposure because it had bought insurance from third parties.
"Do you know who the counterparties were?" she snapped back. Translation: are you sure, and have you checked? He conceded he hadn't, the people said. Geithner made a similar call to Ingrassia, people familiar with that call said. (A spokesman for Geithner declined to comment.)
The dispute continues. Goldman officials have repeated that Goldman's exposure to AIG was "not material," in effect disputing Morgenson's premise. The meeting between Blankfein and Morgenson in April did not resolve the question.
But even conceding Goldman's main point--that $10 billion was covered at the time of the bailout--the bank still had another $10 billion exposed, the value of which easily could have, and probably would have, plummeted absent a bailout. One could argue that with Goldman's immediate exposure covered, the AIG bailout didn't benefit Goldman directly and that Goldman benefited no more than other banks. But the AIG bailout clearly mattered to Goldman--and would come to matter more as additional bailout funds flowed to the bank, totaling $12.9 billion. The Times stands by the story, and the story stands.
In one of our later interviews, Morgenson remarks that such chronicling has shaken her belief in capitalism "to the core." But one comes away unconvinced. She was a skeptic in the first place, after all, and doesn't put much faith in government either. "It's scarier than what Wall Street was doing," she says. "The secrecy, doing an end run around Congress, tripling the size of the Fed's balance sheet."
So capitalism is the world's worst system except for all the others? "You need it," she says firmly. "But it must have a counterbalance, and that counterbalance must be tough regulation--and a very forthright media."
About Dean Starkman
Dean Starkman is an assistant managing editor and the Kingsford Capital Fellow at Columbia Journalism Review; he runs "The Audit," CJR's online business-press section.
On April 27, Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, sat down for a meeting at Goldman headquarters with Gretchen Morgenson, reporter, columnist and senior editor of the New York Times. The Wall Street titan and the Pulitzer Prize winner had never met, but this wasn't the usual polite getting-to-know-you session between reporter and source.
Long before most in the business press rose to the challenge, Gretchen Morgenson was reporting that the financial sector had gone rogue.
"I feel like I've been waterboarded," Blankfein told her, according to people familiar with the discussion. Blankfein was being dramatic, but he had reason to feel that way. It was Morgenson, after all, who had written the story this past fall that stripped the veil of secrecy from the most momentous closed-door deal in the annals of US finance: the government rescue of fallen insurance colossus American International Group. The September 28 story, "Behind Insurer's Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk," was the first article published by a major news organization to reveal that the true beneficiaries of the bailout were the institutions to which AIG owed money, known as counterparties (mainly Wall Street investment banks). The 2,700-word piece said, among other things, that an AIG collapse "threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman's side" and that Blankfein attended a meeting at the Federal Reserve on September 15, the same day decisions were made to let Lehman Brothers fall and to save AIG.
Today this is common knowledge; until this story ran, though, it wasn't. The article was about as bold and valuable as business stories come and involved no small journalistic risks for the Times. Goldman, for instance, was able to wring a correction on the story and still feels wronged today. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who was then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, called Morgenson and her editor to question the article's premise, The Nation has learned. The piece has been the subject of endless parsing on financial blogs and, privately, sniping by Morgenson's peers. Was Goldman really exposed to AIG? And if so, how? Was it fair to mention Blankfein's presence at the Fed?
It would be too much to say that the story was all in a day's work for Morgenson. It was extraordinary. But it does open a window onto what makes Morgenson the most important financial journalist of her generation.
At 53, Morgenson is at the height of her career, read and feared in the corridors of power running from Wall Street to Washington. As a reporter and columnist (a controversial dual role), she is enormously productive. During the period following Lehman's bankruptcy, her byline appeared on major stories on Henry Cisneros and good housing goals gone bad, Merrill Lynch's collapse, corrupted rating agencies and Washington Mutual's boiler-room culture, in addition to the September 28 blockbuster on AIG--not to mention weekly 1,200-word columns on everything from rating-agency hypocrisy ("They're Shocked, Shocked, About the Mess," October 26) to a convoluted tax deal that imperiled an Indiana electrical cooperative ("Just Call This Deal Hoosier Baroque," December 21).
She breaks business-press taboos constantly. Her prose is blunt; some even say crude. ("Everybody knows that executive compensation at many companies has been obscene. What everybody does not know is how obscene obscene is now," she wrote in February 2006 in a not untypical column.) Morgenson doesn't just cover subjects but sometimes hammers them into submission, as when she banged out more than three dozen stories on Countrywide in 2007 and 2008 and almost single-handedly made CEO Angelo Mozilo the face of a rogue industry. Not coincidentally, on June 4 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mozilo with securities fraud, alleging that he misled investors about the increasing risks Countrywide was taking with loans that Mozilo privately called "toxic."
At this point, it is almost impossible for business reporters and editors not to have an opinion about Morgenson. Supporters cheer her tell-it-like-it-is style; detractors call her simplistic and agenda-driven. In certain Wall Street and business circles, she is flatly detested.
"She rules," says Aaron Elstein, a senior writer who covers Wall Street for Crain's New York. "She grasped that the game was rigged way before it was fashionable to do so." (He was talking about bogus accounting practices, but the remark holds more generally.)
"Unreadable," snaps a business journalism peer. "She writes like an Escalade running into a concrete barrier. And her relentless and repetitious pounding of simplistic issues is maddening."
"The consensus view of her among actual business people I know is pure contempt," says Jim McCarthy of CounterPoint Strategies, a public relations firm that has represented high-profile business-press targets. "Her work has a sort of drive-by, potshot quality to it that leads to habitual mistakes and ideological laziness. She is reflexively opposed to free markets and assumes bad faith in almost every subject or person she examines."
What both sides miss, and what sets Morgenson apart, is that she combines the blunt writing style with a prodigious fact-gathering ability and an accountability mindset all too rare in the business-press culture. This allows her to go beyond merely reporting and commenting on the public agenda. She helps to set it.
For the public, the financial crisis has demonstrated the degree to which Morgenson matters. We've just experienced a long period of radical deregulation that touched off a sea change in the business culture and at the same time created an information vacuum. How was the public to know about Wall Street-backed predatory lending and the scale it had reached? Most of the business press ducked the challenge, sticking largely to tried-and-true formulas: personality profiles, scoops handed out by insiders and after-the-fact explanations of the latest corporate scandal. And while the press did publish some investor- and consumer-oriented stories about the housing bubble, defective mortgage products and the like, it was culturally incapable of grasping the big picture--that, for instance, the financial sector had gone rogue.
Morgenson got it then and gets it now. Ignoring the eye rolls of her peers, pushing back against the lawyers and the flacks, she aims her reporting straight at the heart of the matter--and in doing so points the way for a more credible business press. Many groaned, for instance, at her repeated pounding in recent years on excesses in executive compensation. But we now know that compensation lies at the center of today's crisis, since everyone from mortgage brokers to Wall Street executives was given incentives to sell financial products without regard for their quality. Similarly, what Morgenson saw as a fairness problem became a systemic one, since income distortions left a borrower class too strapped to repay consumer loans. More broadly, her tone of urgency and accountability gave the public the message it needed to hear: something in the system had gone deeply awry.
Morgenson made fairly strenuous efforts to talk me out of this profile, arguing variously that she wasn't the story, that others in the mortgage mess were far more significant, that attention might impair her effectiveness, etc. (As a thoughtful journalist, I of course blew all this off.) Waiting for her in a restaurant around the corner from her office at the Times, I'm more nervous than I expected to be. Not helping my sang-froid was the one-word description a friend at the Times offered of Morgenson's grimly focused demeanor in the newsroom: scary. She sweeps in--tall, blond hair well coiffed at shoulder length, blue eyes, carrying stuff, chattering apologies about being (two minutes) late--and I'm relieved and surprised to find how quickly it feels like I'm talking with an old friend. Over eggs and granola, she is chatty, even dishy and disarmingly open. At a certain point, though, I touch a nerve--something to do with her prerogatives at the Times, I think--and the chitchat ceases. Her eyes narrow and now seem icy as she stares across the table. I start to understand what it is like to face off against her.
But that's part of the formula. She has a lot of power for a business reporter, and she acts like it. When I ask, for instance, what she thinks of her former employer, Forbes--a question that would seem to call for some diplomacy--she says simply, "Awful. Terrible." Breaking a few more industry taboos, she then unfavorably compares current Forbes editor William Baldwin with his predecessor, the late Jim Michaels, one of her mentors.
"Jim Michaels had a knack for taking a small story and making it big," she says slyly. "Bill Baldwin has a knack for making a big story small."
(Baldwin, reached later, brushes off the slam. "Forbes has always been brusque in judgment and tough on people, and if you dish it out you have to learn to take it," he says.)
Still, plutocrats and liberals expecting or hoping to find a stern ideologue in Morgenson--or, really, sweeping views from her of any kind--will be disappointed. For one thing, many will be surprised to learn she's a moderate Republican. "I believe in capitalism," she says. "To me it's natural that I would go after the people who are wrecking it."
What becomes apparent over several conversations is that Morgenson is a business reporter--no more, no less. She's more likely to mention investors as her main concern than readers or "the public." Her views are pragmatic, sometimes small-bore to the point that her detail-laden writing can turn off casual readers. Her fixes are meliorative and not particularly original--better regulation, more competition. Her radical idea is, basically, that regulators should regulate, rating agencies should rate according to the merits of the credit, corporate compensation committees should set executive pay at arm's length, directors should look to the interests of shareholders first, large shareholders should act like the owners they are and mortgage lending should be something other than a game of three-card monte. That these views are seen as "antibusiness" in some circles tells us less about Morgenson than about the ethical breakdown among this generation's corporate elites.
"If you're going to believe this is an ownership society where you're going to take part in the upside, if you're going to participate in a sort of populist form of capitalism...you have to be confident that the agents have your best interests at heart," she says.
Morgenson was born in State College, Pennsylvania, the daughter of liberal parents. Her father was an academic psychologist who later taught at Wilfrid Laurier University (in Waterloo, Ontario), and her mother was a librarian. Her parents split when she was 10, and she moved with her mom to Oxford, Ohio.
Her ambition as a girl was to be a reporter for the New York Times. After graduating from her parents' alma mater (St. Olaf College, in Northfield, Minnesota), lacking contacts, training or much in the way of money, she nonetheless boarded a plane for New York City and eventually landed a job in journalism--as a secretary at Vogue reporting to, of course, a tyrannical editor. ("It was 'devil wears Prada,' totally," she says.) She later moved up to a low-level editorial job ("assistant slave," as she puts it), then began to write personal-finance columns. But at a salary of $10,000 a year, she found she couldn't afford her new profession and left for a better-paying job on Wall Street.
Her three years at Dean Witter (now part of Morgan Stanley) taught her a few things about the financial-services industry, none of them particularly edifying. For example, if the office squawk box in the morning announced an "overnight special" on some stock laden with incentives for the brokers, "you knew it would open lower," she says. Another lesson: "You can't trust your research department; that you learn pretty quickly." Her career, such as it was, lasted until mid-1983, when an early version of the tech bubble burst, costing some of her clients a lot of money. "I felt so terrible," she says. "I had this terrible guilt."
Retreating to the relative moral high ground of journalism, she cadged a six-month trial at Money magazine and eventually a job at Forbes, then known for its hard-hitting business investigations. She rose quickly, learning at the feet of Michaels, the magazine's defining personality and editor from 1961 to 1999. A taskmaster (he could be "nasty, frightening," she recalls), Michaels stressed the importance of assembling an armada of facts in reporting and cutting to the chase in writing. Don't leave it to the reader to sort it out, he preached.
It was under Michaels that Morgenson became Morgenson, rattling off a series of investigative coups. A 1993 bombshell that found the entire Nasdaq trading system was tilted to favor stockbrokers over investors led to a historic $1 billion antitrust settlement with Wall Street firms. Another Forbes story took aim at the mid-1990s euphoria surrounding "boiler rooms"--registered and licensed small brokerages that were in fact criminal enterprises. The firms cold-called and bamboozled thousands of people into investing in plausible-sounding tiny public companies the brokerages secretly controlled. And while all business publications covered the resulting criminal cases, only Morgenson traced the frauds of one particularly malignant firm, A.R. Baron & Company, to its financial backer and back-office services provider: Bear Stearns.
The story detailed an intimate relationship between a criminal enterprise and a Wall Street bank, including unheeded letters from frantic investors pleading with Bear to cancel trades they had never authorized. The piece, incredibly, also traced the relationship between Baron principal Andrew Bressman and Richard Harriton, a top Bear official. Bear later agreed to pay $38 million (and got off incredibly easy) to settle charges brought by the SEC and the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau. Harriton agreed to pay $1 million and was barred from the business.
The business press generally goes to great lengths to avoid this kind of straightforward investigative reporting, which is why Morgenson's approach has been so badly needed in recent years. After all, the mortgage crisis was nothing if not the Bear/Baron model writ large. It is generally conceded today that Ameriquest, Countrywide, Washington Mutual, Citigroup--all the brand names, in fact--were running boiler rooms underwritten and incentivized by Bear, Lehman, Merrill Lynch and the Wall Street securitization machine. The business press did not cover it then and still hasn't gotten its arms around this phenomenon. If readers are wondering why they were surprised by the mortgage crisis, this is the reason.
Morgenson arrived at the Times in 1998, an ascension that brought an investigative, accountability-oriented sensibility to a highly visible outpost. Reading through years of her work in one sitting isn't an entirely pleasurable experience--it can feel like you're being pummeled by a sock filled with wet sand. But even so, a reader is struck by her mastery of technical details, the force of her prose and, mostly, the underlying insistence that capitalism be made to work for everyone, not just the big shots. Her work in the run-up to the tech bubble was characteristically skeptical and investor oriented. Common causes of columns and stories include, besides compensation reform: shareholder rights; effective corporate governance; nonrigged arbitrations; anti-gouging; full disclosure in consumer lending; and fairness in bankruptcy, foreclosure and other legal proceedings. Her 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting was officially awarded for stories that plumbed bogus Wall Street stock research and the dangers of off-balance-sheet financing. But in an era of spectacular business corruption (Enron, WorldCom, etc.), I suspect the Pulitzer judges, who were not business news specialists, also appreciated her confrontational approach.
Not everyone does, of course. A handful of bloggers, including the late Doris Dungey (known as Tanta) of Calculated Risk and University of Illinois law professor Larry Ribstein, have created large bodies of work debunking and mocking her and picking her apart. Ribstein, who calls her Morgenscreed, particularly objects to the Times allowing her to write both an opinion column ("Fair Game") and straight news, sometimes on the same subjects. In a column last November, the Times's public editor, Clark Hoyt, tut-tutted the paper for the practice (Andrew Ross Sorkin, among others, is also allowed the dual platform) but not very convincingly. The critiques, most centering on Morgenson's alleged oversimplications, come across as arguments about wallpaper design in a burning house. Bloggers, for instance, hit the roof over a Morgenson column last September arguing that the newly nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be made to disclose details about the individual mortgages they'd bought or guaranteed in the past decade. Ribstein found the idea an example of her "extreme idiocy." Others would wonder what's wrong with it.
In the Times's famously baroque culture, some people are known to have power, and others aren't. Morgenson has it. She's not known as a shmoozer but as one of the most efficient staffers at the paper: in at 9:30; out, incredibly, around 6. And while she's a cheerful and cooperative colleague by all accounts--helping out younger staffers, waiting her turn at the salad bar, etc.--she doesn't hesitate to assert her undefined but very real prerogatives. Editors ask her questions and make suggestions. They don't give orders.
The downside, according to a midlevel editor, is that Morgenson is not particularly open to nuance or different points of view. This person says the system can lead to a kind of orthodoxy and groupthink that deadens reporting. Morgenson's views on executive compensation, for instance, are hardly out of step with the "way people think" around the Times, the person notes.
That said, her clout has its limits. In 2003 the Times business section was getting an overhaul. Its editor, Glenn Kramon, was moving up and out. Jockeying began for a successor, with internal candidates including Jim Schachter, now editor of digital initiatives at the paper, and Winnie O'Kelley, a business editor with whom Morgenson has been particularly close.
Instead, executive editor Bill Keller chose Lawrence Ingrassia, who had run the Wall Street Journal's "Money & Investing" section. While many believed Ingrassia had breathed life into a stale operation, some at the Times viewed him (unfairly, in my view) as a cheerleader for the tech bubble, mainly because of his frequent appearances on CNBC during the late '90s. Some also believed he didn't "get" the investigative, accountability-oriented journalism Morgenson practices, favoring instead the kind that depends on access to power.
When Keller asked Morgenson about hiring Ingrassia, according to people with knowledge of the conversation, she told him flatly that it was a bad idea. But she also promised to make it work. (Keller, through a Times spokeswoman, declined to comment.) For his part, Ingrassia, now 57, has nothing but praise for Morgenson. "She knows Wall Street and how it works better than any reporter I've seen," he says. "She has great sources, and she's passionate. She cares deeply about making sure that individual investors are treated fairly. Basically, she believes people in positions of responsibility should act responsibly." Ingrassia said he and Morgenson have "quite a good working relationship, now."
Says Morgenson, turning cautious and speaking slowly: "Larry Ingrassia has been extremely supportive of my work this year."
However one parses all that, few would argue that the business section has not dramatically improved in recent years. Despite a relatively small staff (the Times has about 110 business journalists; the Journal, about 700), it is reasonably competitive on major stories and has assembled a cadre of reporters capable of strong investigative work, including Diana Henriques, Charles Duhigg, Vikas Bajaj, Louis Uchitelle, Stephen Labaton, Louise Story and Peter Goodman, supplemented by Jo Becker of the investigative staff.
Morgenson, Ingrassia and the Times business staff have produced some of the best coverage of the crisis, particularly the "Reckoning" series at the end of last year, which included exposés on major themes: the predatory practices at Countrywide, Washington Mutual and other brand names; compromised regulation; skewed compensation incentives; even the role played by the person in charge of the regulatory system, George W. Bush. The paper's news coverage has been complemented by strong editorials, many written by Teresa Tritch, a former staffer at Money.
Morgenson's approach has obviously been vindicated by the crisis, and she continues to help steer the public agenda. A story in April (with Becker as the lead byline) deftly revealed Timothy Geithner's longstanding social and professional ties to some of the leading culprits in the financial mess, including Robert Rubin (a longtime mentor), Sanford Weill (who, the story revealed, pushed Geithner to head Citigroup) and executives at money manager BlackRock (which got a no-bid bailout contract from Geithner's New York Fed). A June 1 story peeled back Wall Street lobbying efforts to dilute the regulation of derivatives, and unearthed a key lobbyist's memo that has helped shape the Obama administration's policy-making.
Like newspaper crusaders of old, Morgenson has sided with the little guy over the big guy, revealing, for instance, that Countrywide's predations continued even after its borrowers had filed for bankruptcy. A series in 2007 and last year reported that the lender had destroyed or "lost" $500,000 in homeowners' mortgage payments, then imposed additional penalties and fees, and presented to the court "re-created" letters that had never been mailed to homeowners.
"It's really about fairness," Morgenson says. "It just seems that the playing field is so skewed in some cases that it's worthwhile to educate people to level the playing field a little bit."
A little-understood aspect of Morgenson's approach is that she avoids a business-press tendency toward over-sophistication and goes after the big, honking story, the kind that rings alarm bells in executive suites.
Take the AIG/Goldman story. It came a mere two weeks after the bailout was announced, with the public still baffled as to why an insurance company would suddenly require scores of billions from the government. It also involved clashing with Wall Street's most powerful firm on the crux of a vital matter of public policy. (Disclosure: Goldman is a funder of Columbia Journalism Review's business section, "The Audit," which I run.)
Today, Lucas van Praag, a Goldman spokesman, says the story was "really very unfair" and that the now-corrected error, which mistakenly placed Blankfein in the same meeting with his predecessor, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, set off damaging conspiracy theories. (Tim O'Brien, one of Morgenson's editors, who got the original tip for the story, takes the blame for the error.)
Goldman, which adamantly contested Morgenson's premise that it had been exposed to AIG's failure, received support from a surprising quarter: Geithner, who called Morgenson on her cellphone the day the story ran, a Sunday.
"I think they were fully hedged," he told her, according to people familiar with the call. Translation: Goldman had no exposure because it had bought insurance from third parties.
"Do you know who the counterparties were?" she snapped back. Translation: are you sure, and have you checked? He conceded he hadn't, the people said. Geithner made a similar call to Ingrassia, people familiar with that call said. (A spokesman for Geithner declined to comment.)
The dispute continues. Goldman officials have repeated that Goldman's exposure to AIG was "not material," in effect disputing Morgenson's premise. The meeting between Blankfein and Morgenson in April did not resolve the question.
But even conceding Goldman's main point--that $10 billion was covered at the time of the bailout--the bank still had another $10 billion exposed, the value of which easily could have, and probably would have, plummeted absent a bailout. One could argue that with Goldman's immediate exposure covered, the AIG bailout didn't benefit Goldman directly and that Goldman benefited no more than other banks. But the AIG bailout clearly mattered to Goldman--and would come to matter more as additional bailout funds flowed to the bank, totaling $12.9 billion. The Times stands by the story, and the story stands.
In one of our later interviews, Morgenson remarks that such chronicling has shaken her belief in capitalism "to the core." But one comes away unconvinced. She was a skeptic in the first place, after all, and doesn't put much faith in government either. "It's scarier than what Wall Street was doing," she says. "The secrecy, doing an end run around Congress, tripling the size of the Fed's balance sheet."
So capitalism is the world's worst system except for all the others? "You need it," she says firmly. "But it must have a counterbalance, and that counterbalance must be tough regulation--and a very forthright media."
About Dean Starkman
Dean Starkman is an assistant managing editor and the Kingsford Capital Fellow at Columbia Journalism Review; he runs "The Audit," CJR's online business-press section.
U.S. Troops Move Deeper Into Afghanistan's Helmand Province; One Marine Killed
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 3, 2009
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan, July 2 -- Columns of U.S. Marines in eight-wheeled armored vehicles pushed deep into southern Afghanistan on Thursday in an attempt to cut off Taliban supply lines from Pakistan and restore order in areas long neglected by short-handed NATO forces.
The movement of the Marines to the town of Khan Neshin in the lower Helmand River valley is the most significant deployment of U.S. forces in areas near the Pakistani border with southern Afghanistan, and it reflects a growing concern among U.S. military and intelligence officials that much of the violence that has plagued the south is linked to a flow of fighters and munitions from Pakistan's Baluchistan region.
The troops encountered roadside bombs and small-arms attacks, which resulted in the death of one Marine, but commanders opted to mute their return fire. In the first 24 hours of the operation, the Marines did not lob artillery or call for fighter planes to drop bombs.
The drive to Khan Neshin is part of a Marine campaign to root out Taliban insurgents by restoring the authority of local officials and police departments in the Helmand River valley. The 4,000-strong operation -- one of the largest conducted by the U.S. military in Afghanistan -- is intended to demonstrate new strategies advocated by the Obama administration to turn around a struggling, seven-year-old war effort.
As units from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade fanned out on foot in other parts of the valley Thursday, their principal focus was to meet local leaders -- and to set about winning their confidence -- not to hunt down Taliban fighters. Marine officers distributed handbills explaining their presence and talked to residents with the help of interpreters. Some Marine companies, which had arrived by helicopter early Thursday, bedded down for the night in empty homes instead of constructing bases with razor wire and sand-filled barriers.
The brigade's operations officer, Col. Eric Mellenger, said the absence of opposition in Khan Neshin represented a "major political and security success" and would allow the Marines to meet with town elders over the next few days. In other areas, he said, "people have been coming up to us with information about the Taliban."
U.S. military and diplomatic officials say the vast majority of Afghans, even those in violence-racked places such as Helmand province, do not want to be ruled by the Taliban and its extremist ideology. The officials contend that if Afghans are provided security and basic services, they will switch allegiances and support the local government.
Reactions to the Marine operation varied across the valley. In Khan Neshin, residents largely stayed off the streets, wary of being caught in the crossfire of possible Taliban attacks on the troops. In the northern areas, around the Nawa district, several residents approached Marines with information about where roadside bombs had been planted. Farther south, in Garmser district, a Marine company was attacked by a group of insurgents, who eventually retreated to a housing compound.
A gun battle at the house was the day's most significant combat engagement, resulting in the Marine fatality and the deaths of at least three insurgents. As the sun set, it appeared that the standoff would continue through the night.
Another challenge for the Marines was the 110-degree weather. Loaded down with backpacks and ammunition, and insulated by flak vests and Kevlar helmets, several fell ill from heatstroke, and five had to be evacuated for further medical attention. Helicopters had to be summoned to replenish units with extra water.
"All in all, it's been a pretty good day, considering we have 4,000 Marines involved in this operation," said Maj. Tom Clinton, the senior watch officer in the brigade's combat operations center here.
Commanders expressed surprise that the Marine battalion that moved south to Khan Neshin -- an imposing collection of 70 armored vehicles, each weighing 17 tons -- did not encounter more resistance. The battalion reported an incident of gunfire directed at one of the vehicles, but little else.
The experience in Khan Neshin, a hardscrabble riverfront town that sits north of a vast desert stretching into Pakistan, suggests that Taliban fighters there, and elsewhere in the Helmand River valley, may be lying low to observe the Marines before trying to retaliate with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. But the Marine presence may also lead some of the fighters to move to other parts of the country or seek other infiltration paths from Pakistan.
Either way, U.S. military and civilian officials say they have an opportunity to impede the Taliban's ability to operate with impunity by building local government institutions and reconstituting police units. In Khan Neshin, there is no district governor, and although the Afghan government has 59 police officers on the payroll for the area, none show up for work.
Marine officers and representatives from a British-U.S. reconstruction team in Helmand have held meetings in the provincial capital with elders from Khan Neshin in recent weeks. The elders have urged the Marines to move into the area, which has become a key transit point for Taliban fighters coming from Pakistan, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Although most fighters have crossed into Afghanistan through the eastern provinces that abut Pakistan, increasing patrols in that area and the relative strength of the Taliban in the south have led increasing numbers of Pakistani fighters to infiltrate into Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province, according to U.S. officials.
"There's no doubt that the community doesn't want the Taliban there," said Rory Donohoe, a U.S. Agency for International Development officer who will serve on a reconstruction team for Khan Neshin. It will be the first U.S. district-level stabilization program in the south.
But getting residents to engage with the Americans could prove challenging at first. Marine commanders had hoped the officers with the Light Armored Reconnaissance battalion that moved into the town would convene a meeting with community leaders Thursday. But no such gathering occurred.
It was not immediately clear why. Although Marines walked through the town soon after they arrived, most residents stayed indoors. "We first have to figure out what they want," Donohoe said. "Our goal is to work in partnership with them."
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 3, 2009
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan, July 2 -- Columns of U.S. Marines in eight-wheeled armored vehicles pushed deep into southern Afghanistan on Thursday in an attempt to cut off Taliban supply lines from Pakistan and restore order in areas long neglected by short-handed NATO forces.
The movement of the Marines to the town of Khan Neshin in the lower Helmand River valley is the most significant deployment of U.S. forces in areas near the Pakistani border with southern Afghanistan, and it reflects a growing concern among U.S. military and intelligence officials that much of the violence that has plagued the south is linked to a flow of fighters and munitions from Pakistan's Baluchistan region.
The troops encountered roadside bombs and small-arms attacks, which resulted in the death of one Marine, but commanders opted to mute their return fire. In the first 24 hours of the operation, the Marines did not lob artillery or call for fighter planes to drop bombs.
The drive to Khan Neshin is part of a Marine campaign to root out Taliban insurgents by restoring the authority of local officials and police departments in the Helmand River valley. The 4,000-strong operation -- one of the largest conducted by the U.S. military in Afghanistan -- is intended to demonstrate new strategies advocated by the Obama administration to turn around a struggling, seven-year-old war effort.
As units from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade fanned out on foot in other parts of the valley Thursday, their principal focus was to meet local leaders -- and to set about winning their confidence -- not to hunt down Taliban fighters. Marine officers distributed handbills explaining their presence and talked to residents with the help of interpreters. Some Marine companies, which had arrived by helicopter early Thursday, bedded down for the night in empty homes instead of constructing bases with razor wire and sand-filled barriers.
The brigade's operations officer, Col. Eric Mellenger, said the absence of opposition in Khan Neshin represented a "major political and security success" and would allow the Marines to meet with town elders over the next few days. In other areas, he said, "people have been coming up to us with information about the Taliban."
U.S. military and diplomatic officials say the vast majority of Afghans, even those in violence-racked places such as Helmand province, do not want to be ruled by the Taliban and its extremist ideology. The officials contend that if Afghans are provided security and basic services, they will switch allegiances and support the local government.
Reactions to the Marine operation varied across the valley. In Khan Neshin, residents largely stayed off the streets, wary of being caught in the crossfire of possible Taliban attacks on the troops. In the northern areas, around the Nawa district, several residents approached Marines with information about where roadside bombs had been planted. Farther south, in Garmser district, a Marine company was attacked by a group of insurgents, who eventually retreated to a housing compound.
A gun battle at the house was the day's most significant combat engagement, resulting in the Marine fatality and the deaths of at least three insurgents. As the sun set, it appeared that the standoff would continue through the night.
Another challenge for the Marines was the 110-degree weather. Loaded down with backpacks and ammunition, and insulated by flak vests and Kevlar helmets, several fell ill from heatstroke, and five had to be evacuated for further medical attention. Helicopters had to be summoned to replenish units with extra water.
"All in all, it's been a pretty good day, considering we have 4,000 Marines involved in this operation," said Maj. Tom Clinton, the senior watch officer in the brigade's combat operations center here.
Commanders expressed surprise that the Marine battalion that moved south to Khan Neshin -- an imposing collection of 70 armored vehicles, each weighing 17 tons -- did not encounter more resistance. The battalion reported an incident of gunfire directed at one of the vehicles, but little else.
The experience in Khan Neshin, a hardscrabble riverfront town that sits north of a vast desert stretching into Pakistan, suggests that Taliban fighters there, and elsewhere in the Helmand River valley, may be lying low to observe the Marines before trying to retaliate with roadside bombs and suicide attacks. But the Marine presence may also lead some of the fighters to move to other parts of the country or seek other infiltration paths from Pakistan.
Either way, U.S. military and civilian officials say they have an opportunity to impede the Taliban's ability to operate with impunity by building local government institutions and reconstituting police units. In Khan Neshin, there is no district governor, and although the Afghan government has 59 police officers on the payroll for the area, none show up for work.
Marine officers and representatives from a British-U.S. reconstruction team in Helmand have held meetings in the provincial capital with elders from Khan Neshin in recent weeks. The elders have urged the Marines to move into the area, which has become a key transit point for Taliban fighters coming from Pakistan, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Although most fighters have crossed into Afghanistan through the eastern provinces that abut Pakistan, increasing patrols in that area and the relative strength of the Taliban in the south have led increasing numbers of Pakistani fighters to infiltrate into Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province, according to U.S. officials.
"There's no doubt that the community doesn't want the Taliban there," said Rory Donohoe, a U.S. Agency for International Development officer who will serve on a reconstruction team for Khan Neshin. It will be the first U.S. district-level stabilization program in the south.
But getting residents to engage with the Americans could prove challenging at first. Marine commanders had hoped the officers with the Light Armored Reconnaissance battalion that moved into the town would convene a meeting with community leaders Thursday. But no such gathering occurred.
It was not immediately clear why. Although Marines walked through the town soon after they arrived, most residents stayed indoors. "We first have to figure out what they want," Donohoe said. "Our goal is to work in partnership with them."
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