"There's no question that he wanted to sotto-voce the whole thing"

Jack Valenti (far left), Lyndon Johnson,
Jacqueline Kennedy

One of the small joys of H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam was that two of the most vacuous utterances McMaster quotes come from the mouth of a man who would later head the Motion Picture Association of America.

The man is Jack Valenti, an aide to Lyndon Johnson when Johnson was ushering in the modern era of presidential lying, misleading Congress, and evading the Constitution.

McMaster quotes Valenti several times in the book's final chapters, once in the stilted declaration that LBJ was "in the middle of the biggest legislative fight of Johnson's history" and another time admitting that "There's no question that he wanted to sotto-voce the whole thing."

Sotto-voce the whole thing, presumably said with a straight face? The man was born to be a macher in movies.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Military and civilian language / Goodbye, Lou Reed

H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam is full of military acronyms and zippy abbreviations, but the language that sets my teeth on edge (and, sadly, has most deeply penetrated everyday speech and writing) comes from the civilian leaders and their lickspittles who are McMaster's real villains.

McMaster's own prose is lucid and easy to read, but he's writing history based on extensive archival research about the planning of a war, so his prose is naturally dotted with the jargon of its subject: ECXOM, SEACOORD, CINCPAC, OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense), and so on.

To my surprise, I adjusted easily to the alphabet soup. Not so to obfuscation such as:

"Taylor had to contrive an assessment of the South Vietnamese government that was more optimistic than the one contained in his report two days earlier. The delay ostensibly permitted `thickening the fabric of the Khanh government in the next two months,' a task that Taylor had described as virtually impossible." 

*

"Bundy ... expressed hope that the `pretty high noise level' might threaten North Vietnam with the possibility of `systematic military action' in the future."

Thickening the fabric? What the hell does that mean? What does it say that shoring up or strengthening does not?  Why noise level rather than noise? And is it mere coincidence that such wordiness and pomposity crops up when leaders are deliberately deceiving the public. (The civilian leaders and Taylor were seeking to postpone action on Vietnam until after Lyndon Johnson could be reelected president in 1964.)

The answer doesn't matter, of course, because obfuscation and wordiness have won. Noise has lost out to noise level, just as no news or sports reporter or jabbering lawyer or business person will write skill when skill level sounds so much more impressive.

*

I found out while writing this post that Lou Reed had died. My favorite tribute to Reed came a few years ago from the excellent guitarist/songwriter/singer Alejandro Escovedo, who said that when he was growing up and someone would ask, "Beatles or Stones?" he would reply, "Velvet Underground."

Here's the first Lou Reed song I became aware of in the version I heard first.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A post about McGilloway, McMaster, and me

I have nothing to say today, so I'm going to write a newspaper column. You know the kind I mean: the ones the columnist calls "Not that it really matters but..." or "Sudden thoughts and second thoughts," unless he abandons all pretense and simply reproduces great chunks of previous columns. Here's my version of what I'd do if I were a columnist rather than merely what a reporter of pedestrian literary talent once termed "editorial support":

1) The first three words of Brian McGilloway's The Nameless Dead, available in paperback from the folks at Pan (the entire novel, not just the first three words), are a pretty damn good first three words that would make a fine title: "The cadaver dog ... " That makes me want to keep reading.

2) As a follow-up to Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals, I'm reading H.R. McMaster's Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. McMaster, a career military man and a scholar, shows a nice reporter's eye for detail in this vignette of the rivalry between Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Curtis LeMay, in 1963:

"LeMay’s bushy eyebrows, sagging jowls, and jutting jaw advertised an irascible personality. Aware of Taylor’s aversion to tobacco smoke, he hung his ever-present long dark cigar out of the left side of his mouth and intentionally puffed the thick smoke in Taylor’s direction."

3) Dana King has posted the second in his series of Bouchercon interviews, this one with me in my capacity as a moderator of panels. I've been moderating for five years now, and Dana's questions gave me the chance to think about interesting aspects of this most enjoyable pastime. I am especially pleased at his declaration that I am "among the Bouchercon moderators whose panels are worth attending even if you don’t think you have an interest in the topic." That's the highest compliment a moderator can receive. Thanks!

Dana's interview with those superb panel organizers Judy Bobalik and Jon Jordan appeared last week, and further interviews with authors, organizers, and readers, all talking about what goes into a successful crime-fiction convention, will appear weekly through December.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Two little pieces of prose: Cohen and McKinty

1) His picture of Abraham Lincoln's wartime military leadership is brisk and exciting, but I am sorry to say that Eliot A. Cohen is not the prose stylist that Thomas E. Ricks is. One Maj. John J. Key, Cohen tells us in Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen And Leadership In Wartime, "made the greatest sacrifice a man could to the Union cause" and, on the same page, "had just made the greatest sacrifice imaginable to the Union cause."

A good writer might have avoided the overdone "greatest sacrifice" trope. A careful editor allowed to do his or her job would surely not have let Cohen use it twice on the same page. Even if the expression were not a cliché (or even if it bothers you less than it bothers me), repeating the phrasing so closely creates a monotonous effect, not to mention the unfortunate impression that author, editor, or both did not pay careful attention to what they were doing.

2) Then there's Adrian McKinty, the first page of whose upcoming novel In The Morning I'll Be Gone contains as neat a parenthesis as you'll ever see. Now, the em-dashes with which McKinty sets off the remark may become commas or even parentheses by the time the book is published, so I can't reveal details here. But the remark's commentary on what went immediately before suggests a wry, disillusioned humor that I think I will like.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Military history, sharp thinking, and good writing

I expect I'll like Eliot A. Cohen's Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen And Leadership In Wartime almost as much as I liked Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals, and not just because I came to Cohen through Ricks' approving citations.

The two share a talent for incisive analysis and clear, elegant writing. That each writes about a subject of continuing vital and contemporary interest is a bonus. (In Ricks' case, the subject is the rise and precipitous decline in American military leadership from World War II to Iraq and Afghanistan. In Cohen's case, the subject is the military leadership of the civilian heads of state Lincoln, Clemenceau, Churchill, and Ben-Gurion during wartime.)

I'm going to like Cohen because he attacks the commonplace that a civilian leader's job during wartime is to get out of the military's way, and I'm predisposed to like attacks on commonplaces. Cohen's introductory chapters range well beyond his specialty (He's a professor of strategic studies). His discussion of the pervasiveness with which the idea of military supremacy in wartime has penetrated popular culture, for example, includes a slyly funny putdown of the movie Independence Day.

I'd recommend these books for readers interested in current affairs, military history, and world politics. More to the point, I recommend them to that tiny minority to whom good writing and clear argument matter.

(If recent discussion here at Detectives Beyond Borders has got away from crime fiction, know that it was a short story by Martin Limón, crime fiction all the way, that first got me thinking about military leadership and the consequences of leadership policies whose goals are to protect the leaders.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Thomas Ricks knows "transition" is not verb

"Petraeus and Odierno reversed some of Casey’s directives. ... formally demoted `transitioning' to Iraqi security forces from the top American priority to number seven on their mission list. Replacing it as the number-one task was the mission of protecting the Iraqi people."

 As I take my leave of the most thrilling, important, trenchant book that I've read since The Man Without Qualities, I highlight a small but significant additional reason to treasure it: The author, Thomas E. Ricks, clearly thinks good writing important, and he is unafraid to say that others should do so as well.

The sneer in those inverted commas around the odious transitioning above made me cheer, and it's worth noting that Ricks sneered in the context of commending two generals who de-emphasized "transitioning" in their effort to salvage a sloppy, directionless U.S. military effort in Iraq.

Ricks concludes his analysis of U.S. military leadership since World War II with an  epilogue of suggestions for undoing the damage wrought by incompetent generals and the diseased culture that the Army had become. Among these is better education (as opposed to training) for generals.

"As an added benefit," Ricks suggests, "many would learn to write clearly, a skill notably lacking in many American generals in this era of PowerPoint bullet-point briefings that lack verbs and causal thinking and all too often confuse a statement of goals with a strategy for actually achieving them."

Thomas E. Ricks, you are the man.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Thomas E. Ricks on the Vietnam War

I'm back to my pre-Bouchercon reading, and my respect only grows for Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals. I read Ricks' sections on World War II and the Korean war for my Bouchercon panel on wartime crime fiction. Here are some excerpts from his section on the Vietnam War, the first from another author whom Ricks cites:

"From corporals to colonels, the men whose main job it is to train fighting soldiers and forge them into fighting units find themselves instead mere cogs in the vast machinery of the `system'; martyrs to the American devotion to the idea that the American businessman is the most efficient individual in the world and therefore all American institutions should be `run on business lines.'"

— George Fielding Eliot on the Korean War-era U.S. Army 

* 

"'We were beautifully managed and inadequately led,' O'Meara wrote." 

*  

"A popular myth, persisting even in today's military, is that senior civilians were too involved in the handling of the war. In fact, the problem was not that civilians participated too much in the decision making but that the senior military leaders participated too little. President Johnson, Maxwell Taylor, and Robert McNamara treated the Joint Chiefs of Staff not as military advisers but as a political impediment, a hurdle to be overcome, through deception if necessary." 

* 

"Unlike what happened in Hue City, the My Lai massacre has lived in in American memory — but only as an instance of a rogue platoon led by a dimwitted lieutenant. What has been forgotten is that the Army's subsequent investigations found that the chain of command up to the division commander was involved either in the atrocity or in the cover-up that followed." 

* 

"They were led by Lt. Calley, a short, pudgy 1963 dropout from Palm Beach Junior College who had drifted into the Army while down on his luck in Albuquerque and has somehow been sleeked to be an officer." 

That last bit exemplifies one of Ricks' main strengths as a writer. Ricks is a reporter, but his touches of color are light years beyond the typical hyperventilating to which most journalists resort when they follow the dreary rule that says they must humanize their stories by giving the reader more than just process. Ricks' description of Calley could be the sketch of a character in a neo-noir novel.

(Here are my previous posts about The Generals. Click on the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

What Thomas E. Ricks taught me about war

I'm done reading the parts of Thomas E. Ricks' The Generals most relevant to my Bouchercon panel on wartime crime fiction.  Here's what I take from those sections, on World War II and the Korean War:

1) High respect for the skill, tact, wisdom, foresight, and calculation of the good generals: George C. Marshall, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Matthew Ridgway. 

2) Hatred of the sloppy invocation of military metaphors in areas of civilian life whose laughable triviality is matched only by the self-seriousness of the morons who invoke them. Every football coach who likens his game to war.  Every corporate executive who issues a mission statement. Every middle manager who expects his or her underlings to take that crap seriously. Every business person who invokes The Art of War. At best you're a clown. At worst you're a destroyer of lives for no noble cause. I knew that already, but Ricks taught me that in appropriating military lexicon without any of the risk or the high purpose that attends some military action, you're not just debasing the English language, you're disrespecting an institution you'd probably pretend to admire. 

3) Ricks writes about war without resorting to the condescending, ethically dubious you-were-there in which reporters transport themselves into the bodies of the people who really were there. (You know the sort of stuff: "Harry Grabowski shivered in the early-morning chill on that fateful day in June 1944." How does the reporter know this?)  Ricks does a perfectly fine job relating the rigors and horrors of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir without resorting to such trickery.

4) Another reason to hate the Dallas Cowboys, if football fans need one. Clint Murchison, Ricks writes, father of the Cowboys' first owner, was among the arch-conservative Texas oil billionaires who bankrolled a nationwide tour by the frothing, insubordinate Douglas MacArthur with a view toward getting MacArthur elected president. Lest this offend any Republicans, conservatives, oil men, or Texans, they should know that Ricks also notes the role of Sid Richardson, another rich Texas oilman, in the political career of the much saner Eisenhower. And is MacArthur to blame for such scary creatures as Alexander Haig and Oliver North? (I wonder, too, if Murchison or Richardson inspired any of the characters in James Ellroy's Underworld USA novels.)

I thought of including boots on the ground, much overused these days, in 2) above, but Ricks sheds some incidental light on why that particular phrase, rather than some other, is the self-serious instant cliché in the current debate about Syria. In the 1950s, Ricks writes, the future of the U.S. Army was in doubt. Many in the army and out believed that sea and air war would render ground troops and the army itself obsolete. So boots on the ground may reflect bitter relearning of a lesson Donald Rumsfeld did not know or pretended not to know: that warfare still requires troops, sometimes in massive numbers.

=========

Thomas E. Ricks' presence will loom over my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m., which will include authors Susan Elia MacNeal, Martin Limón, John Lawton, J. Robert Janes, and James R. Benn.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

The general line: American military leadership and crime fiction

"As Lt. Col Paul Yingling noted(sic) during some of the darkest days of the Iraq war, a private who lost his rifle was now punished more than a general who lost his part of a war."

That's from The Generals, Thomas E. Ricks' study of the rise and decline of American military leadership from World War II to 2012. But substitute Korea for the Iraq war, and the passage could come straight from Martin Limón's fiction.

One passage in particular, from Nightmare Range, Limón's new collection of short stories, has co-protagonist George Sueño musing with some bitterness that he and his colleague, Sgt. Ernie Bascom, spend their days tracking down small-scale dealing in black-market groceries while generals and their spouses who evade customs law by illegally exporting and trafficking in Korean art treasures are not so much as investigated, much less punished.

That's a terrific moral setting for crime fiction, a world I suspect is unfamiliar to most crime fiction readers but at the same time akin to the civic corruption so central to early hard-boiled writing. And it's a big reason I'm pleased Limón will be part of a wartime crime-fiction panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon in a week and a half.

The Generals is also relevant to fellow panelist James R. Benn's Billy Boyle novels. The hero of Ricks' study is Gen. George C. Marshall, one of whose first great accomplishments was to recognize the talents of a regimental officer named Dwight D. Eisenhower and groom him for the role he would fill as supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II.

One of Marshall's and Eisenhower's great skills, according to Ricks, was their ability to recognize talent and choose the right man for the big job. Billy Boyle's task is not as big as that of a real-life Eisenhower appointee, Gen. George S. Patton. But Billy is Eisenhower's relative by marriage, handpicked by the general to serve on his staff so he can have an investigator he trusts close at hand. Since personality is important, according to Marshall, expect me to ask Benn what Ike saw in Billy.

==================

Martin Limón and James R. Benn will be part of my "World War II and Sons" panel at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, N.Y., on Thursday, Sept. 19, at 4:00 p.m.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013