From the Archives: Arlington schools need history bridge (1996)

This article appeared in The Washington Times on December 4, 1996, under the headline "Arlington schools need history bridge." At the time, I was serving on the Social Studies Advisory Committee for the Arlington County Public Schools. The committee monitored and made recommendations about the teaching of history, government, economics, sociology, and other social sciences in elementary, middle, and high schools.

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In his 1978 essay, "Teaching History Backwards," Ernest Lefever noted that "most high school seniors probably know more about ancient Greece and Rome and the voyages of Columbus than about the recent events that have shaped the outlook of their parents."

Mr. Lefever went on to say that learning history "is vital for any people. It is especially so for the United States, which is a democracy, a superpower, and the leader of the free world. The exercise of U.S. power and influence or the failure to exercise it has global reverberations. A responsible American citizen must understand this and must also be aware of the external dangers that threaten our freedom or that of our allies."

Rick Sincere and Ernest Lefever

The global scene has changed tremendously in the past 20 years - symbolized vividly by the fall of the Berlin Wall - but this perspective is still valid today.

To address the problem of how the recent past affects our present more saliently than the distant past, even while schools often fail to teach about recent events, Mr. Lefever suggested "teaching history backwards," starting with the past 30 years, then moving on to more distant developments that have affected the United States and world affairs.

For the past several years, the Social Studies Advisory Committee has recommended that the Arlington Public Schools add a fourth year of social studies to the required high school curriculum.

Specifically, we have recommended that a second year of world history be offered in grade 10, largely to compensate for the phenomenon that many of us have experienced - one year of world history is simply too short to cover all of the developments in the 20th century. We commonly experience this as "not getting past World War II" in a typical history course.

Arlington schools now face an additional problem: The new state Standards of Learning require an assessment at grade 11, which may become a barrier to graduation, just like the "literacy passport." We felt that something should be done to prepare our students for that test in a way that also would fulfill our long-held desire for a fourth required course in social studies.

In response, the curriculum development staff has recommended a new 10th-grade course called "The World Since `The War to End All Wars.'" This staff proposal, which has been forwarded to the School Board for final approval by Superintendent Arthur Gosling, meets the criteria set by the Social Studies Advisory Committee. The course is precisely what our committee members had in mind when we made our repeated recommendations for a fourth year of social studies. As envisioned, it combines history, geography and political science and brings students up to date in regard to the important events and trends of our own era.

A course like this builds a conceptual bridge to the 21st century and helps students find a common language to communicate with their parents and grandparents, who lived through these events and trends.

Some parents and students object to this change in the curriculum - which would begin in the 1998-1999 school year - because it reduces elective opportunities for students, particularly art or music courses. True, the number of electives available during 10th grade would fall from three to two, but the negative impact - if there is any at all - would fall on students taking social studies electives, primarily psychology (359 students), sociology (173), advanced placement European history (143) and economics (25). Out of 1,100 10th-grade students, only a few dozen - if any at all - would have to forgo art or music classes.

One reason the School Board is considering this curriculum change now is precisely to give fair warning to parents and middle school students that in two years they will have to meet this new requirement, and that they should plot out their course of electives with this in mind. Those desiring to take art, music or advanced placement European history can plan on taking them in later grades, or can use one of the other two 10th-grade elective slots for these courses.

If the Virginia Board of Education makes the 11th-grade social studies assessment a barrier to graduation, but the School Board fails to make this curriculum change, we could face major problems down the road. Should any Arlington students fail the test because no preparation was available in 10th grade, our whole school system will be poorer for it.

In designing this new course and considering all other options, the staff aimed for minimal disruption to the current curriculum, as well as the lowest cost to taxpayers.

The new 20th century history course is being added to the high school program of studies with almost surgical precision, designed to meet both state-mandated requirements and the desire of Arlingtonians to prepare our students from the classes of 2001 and beyond to be better, more informed citizens.

* The writer is co-chairman of the Social Studies Advisory Committee for Arlington Public Schools.

My Brush with Greatness: Edward Teller (1908-2003)

Today would have been the 106th birthday of nuclear physicist Edward Teller, who has often been called the "father of the hydrogen bomb."  Teller was also an advocate against government secrecy who probably would have relished the opportunity to engage in the debate about the NSA that has resulted from the revelations of Edward Snowden.  He was also a principal advocate for the development of what came to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars."

When Teller died in 2003, I wrote an article for a local Charlottesville newspaper, The Hook, which at the time had been running a series called "My Brush with Greatness."  My piece appeared as a back-of-the-book commentary piece.

For some reason, I have not previously rescued this piece for re-publication in this space, although it has been available on The Hook's archives.  (Sadly, The Hook ceased publication late last year, so how long and how available its archives will be remains an open question. The photo of Teller and me, reproduced below, that accompanied the article is already missing from the paper's web site.)

This article appeared in the print edition of The Hook on September 18, 2003.

Edward Teller: My brush with greatness

While the entertainment world reels from the loss of Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash, and John Ritter, the world stage will long remember the controversial cold warrior bomb-builder Edward Teller, whose September 9 death got lost in the shuffle. One local remembers the man who built the horrifying "super." –editor

RICHARD SINCERE

It would be a lie for me to say that Edward Teller and I were friends. It would even be a stretch to call us acquaintances, although we were colleagues on one side of a vital public debate at the height of the Cold War.

Edward Teller and Rick Sincere, c. 1983

The best I can say is that Edward Teller and I crossed paths on about a dozen occasions in the 1980s, participating in conferences together, and engaging in short but substantive conversations on nuclear weapons policy, U.S.-Soviet relations, and international politics.

Teller, who died on September 9 at his home in California at the age of 95, was known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb." He participated in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, and for many years was head of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which pursued fundamental research in nuclear physics and applied sciences.

My most memorable encounter with Teller was not the first one, in 1981. Rather, it was one of the last meetings we had, on November 16, 1988, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in the nation's capital.

On that occasion, Edward Teller, the American "father of the hydrogen bomb," met for the first time Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet "father of the hydrogen bomb." Sakharov, who as a dissident and human rights activist was forced by the Soviet regime to live in internal exile for many years, was in Washington on his first trip to the United States. (This was in the era of glasnost and perestroika-­ openness and reform-­ ushered in by former Communist Party leader Mikhail Gorbachev.)

The meeting between the two famous physicists was arranged by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think-tank for which I worked at the time. On that night, Teller was to receive the Shelby Cullom Davis Award for "integrity and courage in public life" at a dinner attended by some 750 people in government, business, the academy, and journalism. A few days before the dinner, we learned that Sakharov would be in town and that he had a desire to meet Teller.

As the crowd mingled at the cocktail reception several floors below, the president of the Center, Ernest Lefever, and I waited anxiously for Teller and Sakharov to arrive. Teller came first, accompanied by the massive walking stick he always carried with him. The three of us made some small talk when there was a knock at the door: Sakharov, accompanied by a Russian-English interpreter.

Andrei Sakharov and Edward Teller

They greeted each other like old friends, although the two had never met before. They sat together on a sofa and chatted amiably about the issues that motivated them: international stability, human rights, and, above all, nuclear physics. They spoke in soft tones, and we left them alone. What passed between them that night, in private, was known only to Teller and Sakharov.

Teller's career was a storied one, and he earned both scorn and accolades in his long life. Never one to mince words, he criticized government officials regardless of political party or ideology when he thought they were on the wrong path. He led a lonely but articulate crusade against U.S. government secrecy, arguing that it was pointless to classify, for example, reports on nuclear weapons research, because the Soviets were able to obtain these reports by stealth and espionage anyway.

The only people left in the dark were American voters, who were then unable to make sensible, fully informed decisions about public policy.

This approach was consonant with Teller's lifelong trust in democracy. In 1950 he wrote: "It is not the scientist's job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives."

Teller earned the enmity of "peaceniks," appeasers, nuclear freezers, left-wing ideologues, and Communist fellow travelers. In the 1980s, he was hounded by operatives of Lyndon LaRouche's political cult, who heckled him at public speaking events and tried to embarrass him for his support of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the anti-missile project known derisively as "Star Wars."

It was said that the only human casualty of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 was Edward Teller: So exhausted by traveling around the country, speaking out calmly against the Chicken Littles who declared Three Mile Island a disaster, Teller suffered a heart attack and was incapacitated for several weeks.

Teller, of course, had his admirers, too-­ not least among them those who felt that a strong defense posture was necessary in the face of Soviet expansionism, and especially those who felt that true defensive strategies (including civil defense programs and anti-missile programs like SDI) were morally, strategically, and politically imperative.

On that November night in 1988, President Ronald Reagan said that Teller was "a sterling example of what scientific knowledge, enlightened by moral sense and a dedication to the principles of freedom and justice, can do to help all mankind." The President added that Teller was "one of the giants of American science, and one of the bulwarks of American freedom."

Richard Sincere is co-editor of Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative, and author of Civil Defense: A Moral, Political, and Strategic Approach, both published in 1986 by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as of other books.

It wasn't until I decided to write this blog post that I discovered how Edward Teller shared a birthday with my own father and also with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Same day, different years in all three cases, however.)

Preparing for the Coming Viral Apocalypse (Please Retweet!)

More than 30 years ago, I was involved in the preparation of an anthology called The Apocalyptic Premise, which was edited by Ernest W. Lefever and E. Stephen Hunt and published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center.  The book gathered 31 essays about the then-current nuclear arms debate.

In an introduction, Lefever and Hunt define what they mean by the anthology's intriguing title, noting that, in public policy debates, "some ideas obscure desirable ends and confuse the means for reaching them."  They go on to say that

One such influential idea is "the apocalyptic premise," which has always flourished in times of trouble and uncertainty.  Both the Old Testament and the New Testament have vivid apocalyptic passages portraying how the world will end for both the righteous and the unrighteous....

But in current secular usage, an apocalyptic event is one that spells doom for a nation,  a civilization, or the human race itself...  In the nuclear era some secular apocalyptic prophets proclaim that the world will be destroyed by fire and brimstone unless their particular prescriptions for avoiding catastrophe are adopted.

In the context of the early 1980s, apocalypticism -- if I might coin a word (or not) -- dealt almost exclusively with fears of an imminently (immanently?) impending nuclear holocaust.  (See, for instance, my commentary on the ABC-TV movie, The Day After, which was broadcast the same year as The Apocalyptic Premise was published.)

End-times hysteria is nothing new.  It spread across Europe like hellfire in the years before the turn of the first millennium (around 1000 A.D.).

More recent years have seen a slew of end-times prophecies that have come and gone.  In 2011, for instance, radio preacher Harold Camping predicted the Rapture would take place on May 21 and then, when it didn't happen, said his calculations were off and the end of the world as we know it would instead take place in October.  Disappointed that the world did not end as he prophesied, Camping withdrew from public life and died a few weeks ago.

On January 9, Gon Ben Ari wrote about some recent apocalyptic predictions for The Jewish Daily Forward:

This may seem odd, but a surprisingly large chunk of the Western World believed we wouldn’t get to see 2013, purely because that’s what the Mayans thought. Most of these people never did anything else that Mayans did — never ate human flesh, for example, or at least never offered to pay for it. So why did they rush to embrace that specific bit of Mayan faith? Eschatology proves to be a human urge, just like hunger, sleep or love. We need to know that there’s at least a hint of a chance that the world is in danger, perhaps because it is too hard to care for anything that isn’t, or because it is easier to believe in a disaster that is inflicted on the planet from above than to admit to the one we cause daily. Secular media is fueled by eschatology — the Y2K bug, meteor scares, terrorist threats — with Hollywood blockbusters competing for the chance to feed it each summer. Who by fire? By water? By zombies?

If there is one thing in common among all the conflicting beliefs in the world, it is the belief that the world will come to an end. Hindus count down to the completion of Kali Yuga; Muslims await the arrival of Mahdi; Christians fear the Day of Wrath. Jewish participation in “hisuvei kitzim” — “end calculations” — is as harshly forbidden as it is widely practiced. Every great rabbi has an end date: The Vilna Gaon, Rashi, Maimonides. In 1927, Rabbi Avraham Yalin published a book in which he claimed that Zionism would be the end of the world and that it would reach its goal in 1948. He died in 1934 and never got to see which part came true. The Gemara itself claims that the world will get to be only 6,000 (Jewish) years old. In Gregorian Calendar time, this means 2,240.

Ben Ari went on to note that a prominent 18th-19th century rabbi prophesied that the end of the world would come in the Hebrew calendar's year 5775, which begins in September 2014.

In other dire warnings, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church last year said that permitting gay people to marry will either (depending on your interpretation of his remarks) be a sign of the apocalypse or will hasten the world's end.

Patriarch Kirill stated in a cathedral sermon:

This is a very dangerous apocalyptic symptom, and we must do everything in our powers to ensure that sin is never sanctioned in Russia by state law, because that would mean that the nation has embarked on a path of self-destruction.”

To take a current example that expresses our contemporary apocalyptic premise in a single word, Lou Dobbs, a popular and sometimes controversial TV host on Fox News, has written a new book published this week and called Upheaval, in which he argues that

the chief threats to the stability of our social order and economic well-being, indeed the very essence of our American way of life, go well beyond leagues of nation-states and ideologues who mean us harm.  The greatest threat of upheaval is a combination of those nation-states, ideological extremists, religious zealots, and the confluence of internal forces that are weakening our notion of who we are, diminishing our confidence in the American dream itself, and leaving many of our citizens and many of our leaders questioning American exceptionalism, our way of life, and our relationship to one another and to the world itself. The very idea of America is under great stress, from within and without.  The prospect of a great upheaval rises with each passing day that we decline to examine the consequences of the choices  we are making as a people and as a nation.  And these forces are allied, not in conspiracy, but in their contemporaneous array against us, our ideals, our values, and our nation's future.

Amidst this climate of dread and apprehension, even a possible shortage of Velveeta processed cheese within weeks of Super Bowl Sunday is being called a "cheesepocalypse," either mocking or reflecting the eschatological mood of the country.

The obsession with the apocalypse and the foreboding end of the world as we know it came to the attention of a Charlottesville financial advisor, David John Marotta, who described in last Sunday's Daily Progress how an off-hand remark on one of his blog posts ended up being distorted in a game of Internet telephone and, because of this distortion, ended up with a link to his post on the Drudge Report, bringing him a cascade of traffic and new visitors to his web site.

Marotta's December 11 blog post about preparing for possible emergencies is what stirred this apocalyptic pot. As he explains it,

Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner picked up the story first in his Dec. 26 Washington Secrets column titled, "Be prepared: Wall Street advisor recommends guns, ammo for protection in collapse."

Three parts of the headline are misleading.

I am not a Wall Street advisor; I am in Charlottesville. My only connection to Wall Street is having my photo taken at the Bull and eating at the Deli. The article does mildly clarify, describing me as a "Wall Street expert" — true if that means investment advisor. However, future articles referencing Bedard's article were misled by this description.

Furthermore, I did not exactly recommend guns and ammo. I suggested that two-dozen items on the list are more important. This is mentioned in the article when Bedard quotes me as saying, "Firearms are the last item on the list, but they are on the list."

I did not suggest there would be a collapse. I had written in the first of the series, "There is the possibility of a precipitous decline, although a long and drawn out malaise is much more likely."

Bedard was accurate in stating, "Marotta said that many clients fear an end-of-the-world scenario. He doesn't agree with that outcome, but does with much of what has people worried."

The very popular Drudge Report picked up the story next and featured it above its banner: "Wall Street advisor recommend guns, ammo for protection in collapse." The original Washington Examiner article was also copied on multiple sites without comment. Over three days, we had a record 30,946 unique visitors to our two sites.

After suggesting that the viral nature of his otherwise non-descript blog post may reveal something about the changing mood of the country and a reversal of traditional left/right political roles, Marotta said the solution to this apocalyptic thinking may simply be to reduce the size and scope of government. This, he asserts, will have a calming effect on political tempers:

Moving in a more libertarian direction blends the concerns of the right and the left on the abuses of governmental involvement in everything from marriage to spying. A smaller government could focus on what we all agree is its rightful purpose.

Journal of Civil Defense - April 1981

The lesson I take from Marotta's experience isn't that I should emphasize libertarian ideas more. After all, I've been doing that for years, especially since the launch of this blog in December 2004.

Instead, I think I should draw more on my years in the civil defense movement -- years in which I rubbed shoulders with fallout shelter-builders, survivalists, nuclear physicists, and even TV's Ben Cartwright himself, actor Lorne Greene -- and write more about how to prepare for the coming apocalypse.  If I could do it in the 1980s, why not do it today?

Scary headlines that say "Grab your guns and gold and run for the hills!" may stimulate the kind of blog traffic that Marotta experienced, and -- one would hope -- a corresponding increase in advertising revenue (and maybe a few cray-cray comments to enhance our entertainment value).

The end of the world as we know it is more than just a song title. It's a way of life.

So -- grab your gas masks, stock up on Bitcoin, and bunker down in the nearest mountain. Rediscover your inner Boy Scout ("Be prepared!"). The eschaton is imminent and it begs for your enthusiastic participation.

And please don't forget to leave a tip for your blogger and share this article on social media.

Remembering Ernest W. Lefever

My habit of waiting until the late hours of the evening to read the early morning newspaper sometimes serves me poorly.

One such occasion was last night (about 3:00 a.m., actually), when I turned to the obituary pages of Thursday's Washington Post to discover that my mentor and first professional employer, Ernest W. Lefever, had passed away.

According to the Post's Adam Bernstein:

Ernest W. Lefever, 89, who founded a conservative public policy organization in Washington and was an embattled nominee for a State Department human rights job under President Ronald Reagan, died July 29 at a Church of the Brethren nursing home in New Oxford, Pa. He had Lewy Body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

Dr. Lefever, a Chevy Chase resident, was an international affairs specialist with the National Council of Churches, a staff consultant on foreign affairs to then-Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.) and a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution before starting the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1976. The center studies the link between Judeo-Christian morality and national and foreign policy.

Bernstein's review of the life of Ernest Lefever focuses, as one might have expected, on one of those episodes that could be categorized as either a high or a low in one's life, depending on your perspective.

That would be Dr. Lefever's nomination by President Ronald Reagan to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Dr. Lefever eventually asked the President to withdraw his nomination after it had been entwined in controversy (much of it, in my opinion, manufactured) and political opposition. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Charles Percy (R-Ill.) was unhelpful in pressing the confirmation forward, to say the least.

Although Dr. Lefever's views on foreign policy (and particularly how human rights issues should be treated) were virtually identical to those of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been easily confirmed as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, he met a roadblock thrown up by those who differed with those views.

To summarize those views, at the risk of oversimplifying: The United States should treat authoritarian and totalitarian states differently, because authoritarian states -- such as, in those days, Chile and Argentina -- are more likely to be reformed from within and become liberal democracies than totalitarian states (such as the Soviet Union).

Indeed, in the years that followed, Chile and Argentina, as well as South Korea and Taiwan, did reform themselves and became model democracies. Greece, Spain, and Portugal are also examples of reform from within, which were fresh in the minds of Lefever and Kirkpatrick as they were making their arguments in the late 1970s.

It was much more difficult to dislodge totalitarian dictatorships because they controlled civil society (or an ersatz civil society) as well as politics and the economy. In authoritarian states, there were usually autonomous sources of moral and civil authority -- such as the Catholic Church -- that were lacking in totalitarian countries.

In any case, Lefever's views were shaped by decades of experience, not of the ivory tower, but of on-the-ground research around the world.

As the Washington Post article notes, Lefever served in Europe after World War II repatriating prisoners of war and other refugees, working under the auspices of the YMCA. It does not note that he worked in the concentration camps set up by the Roosevelt administration for Japanese-Americans during the war, helping to comfort them in their time of distress.

Lefever often told the story of how his pacifist views changed to more realist views when, somewhere in what later became East Germany, he saw a graffito that showed a swastika and a hammer-and-sickle with an equals sign between them. He realized through his work in Europe that Nazism and Communism were equally oppressive.

Beyond his humanitarian work in war-torn Europe, Dr. Lefever was widely traveled throughout his life. I would guess that he visited nearly every country in sub-Saharan Africa, the major countries of South and Southeast Asia (including Vietnam), and much of East Asia, as well. The results of his travels and research can be seen in the 20+ books and countless articles he wrote for policy journals and academic publications.

The Post notes Lefever's association with Hubert Humphrey. It doesn't specify that Lefever was the principal drafter of the Democratic Party's platform plank on Vietnam during the 1968 Chicago Convention.

During the 1970s, Lefever became associated with a group of disaffected liberal Democrats -- he was one of them -- who became known as "neo-conservatives." Sometimes known as "Scoop Jackson Democrats," many of them came out of a New York-based social democratic tradition that insisted on opposing Stalinism and, later, Soviet expansionism and adventurism. They generally maintained, at least for a while, that the welfare state was generally a good thing, and they supported the Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

Among the prominent neo-conservatives of those days -- a time, as George F. Will recently put it, "when that designation was more relevant to domestic than foreign policy" -- were Irving Kristol (father of Bill), Midge Decter (mother of John Podhoretz), Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Max Kampelman, and others who ended up either serving in the Reagan administration or supporting its policies in the pages of Commentary, The Public Interest, and similar publications. Ernest W. Lefever was one of these intellectuals.

As an outgrowth of his policy activism, Lefever in 1976 founded the Ethics and Public Policy Center, initially as a part of Georgetown University and later an independent think tank.

It was shortly after the EPPC's founding that I met Dr. Lefever and joined the Center's staff. I was a junior at Georgetown, needing a work-study job and late in finding one.

On a bulletin board in the financial aid office was an index card advertising a part-time position for a research assistant at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which was completely unknown to me. Needing the job and with few other alternatives listed on that bulletin board, I called the number and set up an appointment. (In those days, "bulletin boards" were made of cork and hung on walls.)

Dr. Lefever interviewed me. I was unshaped politically at that time, as likely to follow Richard McSorley and the Berrigan brothers as anyone else. He asked me for writing samples; all I had to offer were press releases I had drafted for my community theatre earlier that summer (1979; the year of Fiddler on the Roof).

He took a chance with me, put me under his wing, and taught me more than I can estimate.

Through his example, he showed me how to write clearly and effectively. He would say, of course, that such teaching would have no impact on someone who did not already think clearly and write plainly, but I must demur. Whether he knew it or not, he drilled me on composition, from word choice to sentence shape to paragraph size. (His influence affected me quickly. Within a few months of my beginning my part-time tenure at EPPC, one of my professors gave me a lower grade on a paper than he otherwise would have, telling me "You write too clearly" -- like a journalist rather than like an academic. I took his criticism as a badge of honor, and shared a chuckle with Dr. Lefever over it.) The Lefever standard for good writing on public policy? "If an interested and motivated person who reads at an eighth-grade level can understand it, you've done your job well."

Two years after I was hired, when my first op-ed was published in the Washington Star, Dr. Lefever congratulated me and said that he could tell from the way I formulated my arguments that I had been a high school debater. Then he chided me -- as he should have -- for identifying myself with the Center when I submitted the article, without clearing it with him first.

Over the seven or eight years that I was employed by EPPC (I took one year off to pursue my master's degree), Dr. Lefever and I worked closely together. My desk was immediately outside his office. He had a secretary, too, but I was his "special assistant to the president for research." I watched closely as he drafted articles; I often typed them for him through numerous iterations.

When, in 1984, a manuscript on investment in South Africa had gone through three different authors and at least four different versions (all rejected), he turned to me and asked me to write a publishable book. I did, and it became my first -- The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment in South Africa. Much of the shape of the book is actually his. It would have been fair for him to list me as co-author with him, but he generously gave me sole author credit.

Two years later, after we had hosted a conference about the Strategic Defense Initiative, he asked our colleague, Pete Wehner, and me to compile the papers and other articles into an anthology. He suggested that we seek out Zbigniew Brzezinski as a co-editor, so we could have "name" on the cover.

I bet him $5 that Brzezinski would turn down the invitation. I lost. My second book, Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative, has four co-editors: myself, Wehner, Brzezinski, and Marin Strmecki (at that time Zbig's research assistant).

After I left the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1988, I temporarily lost touch with Dr. Lefever. He called me about 10 years ago or so, however, and asked me to help him learn how to use a computer for writing. He had a Macintosh and I spent several hours with him, showing him how to create document files, how to edit them, how to save them. (Throughout his highly productive life, Dr. Lefever typed rapidly with just two fingers, and until the 1990s he used a manual typewriter -- not even an electric one -- for drafting his articles and book manuscripts.)

EWL also liked working with his hands. He was an accomplished cabinet maker. (He learned that trade as a teenager.) I remember spending weekends at the office with him, reinforcing the massive table in our conference room. It was hard work, especially for someone like me who is generally all-thumbs when it comes to carpentry or home maintenance.

Dr. Lefever was not afraid of technology or technological progress. His first published piece of writing, at the age of 13, was a story about a boy who makes a trip to the moon. (This was in about 1931, of course.) He was an early media critic in the sense of finding ways to analyze the way the broadcast networks reported the news so that their bias (if it was there) could be measured. As late as five days before his death, Dr. Lefever's 1974 book about CBS News was cited in an article by Cliff Kincaid.

Forgotten in the Post's coverage is the singular achievement in which Dr. Lefever brought together Edward Teller, the father of the (American) hydrogen bomb and Andrei Sakharov, the father of the (Soviet) hydrogen bomb. The two scientists had never met (largely because Sakharov was forced into internal exile in the Soviet Union as a consequence of his human-rights activism) but, at Dr. Lefever's invitation, Sakharov was an honored guest at the dinner at which Teller received the Shelby Cullom Davis Award for Integrity and Courage in Public Life. (I have to admit that, as one of only three or four people in the room when Teller and Sakharov first shook hands privately, this is an occasion that I shall never forget.)

The Post's obituary also leaves out Dr. Lefever's impish side. His last book, published in 2006, was called Liberating the Limerick: 230 Irresistible Classics. For most of his life, EWL was an inveterate collector -- and composer -- of limericks and other light verse. Here's an example, from the book:

Without being oratorical,
Consider Kant's categorical
Should one treat one's friends
As means or as ends?
Or is the query rhetorical?

Maybe that's not the best. Here's a second, about another noteworthy who recently passed away:

The CBS newsman Cronkite
Claimed ten million viewers each night.
He slanted the news
To fit his own views.
He knew in "his heart he was right."

I last saw Dr. Lefever about two and a half years ago. He asked me to visit him at his Chevy Chase home so that we could discuss possible collaboration on a book that he had in mind. He took me to lunch at a local Chinese restaurant and we had a pleasant conversation. The project never developed, but I was flattered that he would think of me as a collaborator and impressed that, at 87 years of age, that he was still so active and ready to stay in the arena. (Had the book been written, it would have been hotly controversial.)

Since then, we exchanged a few emails, but my last one to him (sent in May) received no reply. Now I know why.

I have quite a few photographs of Ernest W. Lefever from over the years. Here are some of the memorable ones.

Here are the two of us, after one of the Ethics and Public Policy Center's formal dinners.

Ernest W. Lefever, Jack Kemp, and Shelby Cullom Davis

New York Mayor Edward I. Koch and Ernest W. Lefever

EWL leads Jeane J. Kirkpatrick to the podium
(This photo was taken at the same event featured in the video, below.)

EWL opens the luncheon that launched my first book, The Politics of Sentiment

The staff of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the summer of 1981:
Back row, left to right: Steve (now Stephanie) Mayerhofer, Marion Frayman, Raymond English, Ernest W. Lefever, (unidentified), Rick Sincere, (unidentified), Mary Ellen Pohl (now Bork), Carol Griffith
Front row, left to right: Betty Marshall, Tom Tunney

EWL striking a goofy pose at an office picnic

EWL being playful during an EPPC staff meeting

EWL hosting the annual EPPC staff Christmas party at the Lefever home, early 1980s

Ambassador Margaret Heckler (former HHS Secretary) with Dr. Lefever at a June 2006 book signing for Liberating the Limerick

Margaret and Ernest Lefever in Arlington, Virginia, June 2006

One of the last photographs I took of Dr. Lefever, in June 2006, at a book party for Liberating the Limerick

Finally, you can see Ernest W. Lefever in action, in this promotional video for the Ethics and Public Policy Center that was released in 1985. (Apologies for the fuzzy and staticky conditions in parts of it; it was a copy of a copy before I digitized it.)

In addition to Dr. Lefever, speakers in this video include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Yonas Deressa, Senator Orrin Hatch, Linda Chavez, William Bennett, Ronald Reagan, Chester Finn, Robert Royal, Caspar Weinberger, and myself.

Ernest W. Lefever, rest in peace.

Besides the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times has published an obituary. The current president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Edward Whelan, has a remembrance on NRO's The Corner. EPPC has posted an official obituary here, accompanied by the most familiar formal portrait of EWL. (I have not yet seen a notice about a funeral or memorial service.)

Updates, August 5: The New York Times has an obituary, by Douglas Martin, in yesterday's editions. The EPPC web site announces there will be a memorial service for Dr. Lefever on August 22 in Washington. It also features a remembrance by George Weigel, who was the second president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Presidents at Notre Dame - Now, and Then

In reaction to President Barack Obama's address to the graduates at the University of Notre Dame this past Sunday, I have an opinion article in the commentary section of the Washington Examiner today. (It's on page 19 of the print edition, for those of you in the D.C. metro area who would like to pick it up and see it in full color, with accompanying photographs.)

The article, headlined "Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama at Notre Dame," notes that when President Carter spoke at the Indiana university more than three decades ago, his speech (about a "new" approach to U.S. foreign policy) was given analytical treatment in a full-length book just a few months later.

The article begins:

When President Barack Obama addressed the graduates of the University of Notre Dame Sunday, it was the first time in 32 years that a Democratic president had done so.

On May 22, 1977, President Jimmy Carter delivered an address on foreign policy at Notre Dame. Carter’s appearance was not marked by the sort of controversy that accompanied President Obama this year, nor was it the subject of the 24-hour news cycle.

Carter’s speech, however, was seen as sufficiently significant that a whole book of responses was published a few months later by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The book, Morality and Foreign Policy: A Symposium on President Carter's Stance, included such contributors as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, Irving Kristol, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Limited space in the pages of the Examiner caused me to exclude some of the erudite, perspicacious, and even juicy comments made by the authors collected in Morality and Foreign Policy. Let me offer a few samples.

It has become something of a commonplace, and a jocular one at that, to make facile comparisons between the Carter and Obama administrations, especially with regard to foreign policy. (The comparisons were raised even before the 2008 election as a warning to voters about Candidate Obama.)

Thus it was somewhat jarring to read this paragraph in the essay by Charles Burton Marshall, author of The Limits of Foreign Policy and The Exercise of Sovereignty, in his essay entitled "The Valor of Ignorance." Substitute the word “Obama” for “Carter” and this reference to political messianism could have been written yesterday – or next week – rather than in 1977:

“Sooner or later events will demonstrate even to the tight inner circle that the Carter administration no more knows the secret for walking on water around the world than it has a formula for cleansing the public service or any other manifestation of the Old Adam The self-enthrallment then will cease.”

Another comment whose echoes we here today came from the legendary editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley, whose essay was called "Reflecting the Eastern Establishment":

“Almost certainly it is a mistake to look to President Carter’s professed morality to explain our concerns about his foreign policy. His version of morality is not that sharp a departure, and on experience so far not that powerful a force in shaping his policies. We would do better to worry about sheer inexperience.”

John P. Roche, then dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, tried to set Carter’s speech in a wider context in his contribution, "A Lack of Ideological Roots":

“As a thirty-year veteran who long since reached the conviction that commencement addresses were drafted by computers, I am certain I have heard this one four times. Indeed, had I absorbed it without advance information on the source, I might have attributed it to Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Goldberg, Harold Stassen, or George McGovern. (At half an hour it was a bit brief for Hubert Humphrey, God bless him.) In short, it was standard commencement pap by an American ‘statesman’: ‘Speech 5c—American Policy, Morality, and the World (for use at a liberal religious school).’”

Roche went on to say:

“Part of Mr. Carter’s problem in world politics is the lack of any ideological roots, a weakness which has been buttressed by a McGovernite ‘issues staff’ which sincerely believes that the world began in January 1977, when they took office. In this state of historical amnesia it is hard to deal with the degrees on the scale between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’”

While generally content with the themes underlying President Carter’s remarks, Jeane Kirkpatrick -- at the time on leave from the Department of Government at Georgetown University and later to become Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations -- raised six questions demanding clarification or explication in her essay, "Selective Invocation of Universal Values." One was this:

“Why does the President think that ‘a peaceful world cannot exist one third rich and two thirds hungry’? The implication is that the frustration of poor nations causes war. In fact that the notion that poverty causes war doesn’t wash. Poverty causes hardship, suffering, and death … but there is little evidence to support the notion that it causes war… Poverty is abominable, not because it leads to war, but because it perpetuates human misery. We can approach problems of war and poverty more effectively if we are clear about the relationships between them.”

The two contributors most sharply critical of Carter’s speech were Michael Novak and Eugene V. Rostow. (One of Rostow's key points is featured in my Examiner piece.)

Novak, then a religion professor at Syracuse University and later author of the insightful book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, said in his response ("The March of Defeat") that Carter's Notre Dame address

“is a profoundly embarrassing and disturbing speech…. [The] President’s vision is deficient. It is deficient both in realism and fact. It is deficient in its moral vision. The President uses the word moral and its cognates – values, principles, social justice, and the like – very heavily indeed. But he does not use them well.”

Later in his essay, he added:

“One of the best ways to create an immoral foreign policy is to try too hard for a moral one.”

Rostow, who served in the Johnson Administration’s State Department and, by the beginning of the Carter administration was chairman of the executive committee of the Committee on the Present Danger, wrote in "Ignoring Soviet Realities" that

“President Carter’s Notre Dame speech is his most ambitious attempt thus far to define the American national interest in its course. The speech is deeply flawed: inconsistent; incomplete; and excessive in its claims of novelty…. The speech lacks any conception of the relationship between power and morality in international affairs.”

Ronald Berman, once chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, parsed the language of Carter’s speech. In "Confusing Domestic and Foreign Policy," he wrote:

“Where the language of this speech is moralistic,” he said, “it tends to have an effect just about the opposite to that intended: By devaluing our past motives it makes our present ones suspicious. How reliable can policy be which is based upon the acceptance of our moral fallibility?”

In a paragraph that timelessly retains its relevance, Burt Marshall, pondering whether disappointment might follow the non-fulfillment of the president’s high-flying rhetoric, noted that the

“distinction [between cynicism and skepticism] is important. A cynic shrugs off differences between right and wrong as merely conventional – a sham, as it were. A skeptic acknowledges such differences as real, but regards them to be often complex and subtle, and refuses to arrive at judgments on the basis of declaratory evidence only. Cynicism goes hand in hand with ennui. Skepticism kindles the critical spirit. Every one of us should be skeptical about foreign policy, because that attitude is what helps exact proper performance from those conducting it.”

Re-reading this book after some 30 years -- I began working at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in September 1979, and the Center's publications were readily available to read and absorb -- what struck me was how, despite their later affiliations and identifications, so many of the authors were (at least in 1977) firmly identified as Democrats, even if they later became more associated with the neo-conservative movement of the 1980s and, directly or indirectly, with the Reagan administration.

The book's editor, Ernest W. Lefever, had been a foreign policy advisor to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Rostow, as was noted, worked in the State Department under Dean Rusk. John P. Roche had been an advisor to President Lyndon Johnson. Although he served Republican presidents, Daniel Patrick Moynihan served in the U.S Senate as a Democrat from New York. Michael Novak had been a speechwriter for George McGovern. Jeane Kirkpatrick held on to her affiliation with the Democratic Party even through her tenure as UN Ambassador, up till (and perhaps including) when she icily invoked the "San Francisco Democrats" at the 1984 Republican National Convention. Irving Kristol, of course, is famous for coining the definition of a neo-conservative as "a liberal who was mugged by reality."

Except for Bartley, Berman, and Kissinger, I could not put my finger on another contributor to Morality and Foreign Policy who might be Republican. (I am not aware of any partisan affiliation of Roger L. Shinn, the last of the contributors, who at the time was Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary.)

It is hard to imagine a collection of Democratic scholars or activists today, coming together in an edited volume of essays criticizing Barack Obama for the policies he outlined in his speech at Notre Dame on May 17. Partisans of both Republican and Democratic stripes treat their top leaders with kid gloves. Just as Republicans -- with a few exceptions, such as Ron Paul -- were loathe to criticize George W. Bush even as he was abandoning conservative principles on issues like the economy, education, and foreign interventionism, so too are Democrats today unlikely to say an unkind word about President Obama's initiatives. (Disgruntled borborygmi in the blogosphere don't really count, do they?) It may not just be nostalgia that suggests that "in the olden days" policy debates were conducted more civilly and with less of a bipolar division than we see today. We may be remembering the past accurately when we say that.

Despite its being nearly 32 years old, Morality and Foreign Policy's essays are remarkably fresh. (The fact that President Carter in his address and several of the respondants speak at length about U.S. policy toward Iran and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes it eerily relevant, too.) While some references might be dated -- South Korea is now a thriving democracy, not an authoritarian dictatorship, for instance -- the foundational analysis of the contributors remains strong and applicable to the 21st century's international environment.

Morality and Foreign Policy is a slim volume (just 76 pages) but it is densely packed with insight. Look for it in a used book store or order it through Amazon.com. It will be worth the effort.

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Blast from the Past

While going through some old VHS videotapes in my collection -- many of them with no identifying marks -- I came across this promotional video made for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1985, shortly after the Center published my first book.

This is a fascinating look back at the political climate of the mid-1980s. While many of the domestic issues discussed in the video are still current (especially with regard to education policy), images of the menacing Soviet threat seem like a relic from another century -- which, of course, they are -- but no less frightening for that.

Besides myself, this video includes cameo appearances by Ronald Reagan, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Casper Weinberger, Chester Finn, Linda Chavez, Orrin Hatch, Yonas Deressa, Ethiopian bishop Abba Mathias, and others. EPPC staff members who appear and in the video include founding president Ernest W. Lefever and Robert Royal, now with the Faith and Reason Institute. Alert viewers might catch a passing glance of other staffers, such as Raymond English, Carol Griffith, and Margaret Webb. Really alert viewers will see the faces of Elaine Rendler, David Rothbard, John Chettle, John Montgomery, and various journalists, think-tank scholars, and academics in the scenes of seminars and conferences.

What is refreshing about this video, which was, as I said, made for promotional purposes, is that there is no direct appeal for financial contributions to the Center. This was no doubt what the Center's directors had in mind when they authorized the video's production, but their reticence to ask for money in so many words is admirable.

What is striking, too, about the video is that it is more than just a brochure-made-for-television. It has a narrative arc, as a good documentary film should have, and it ties together its disparate elements in a thematic fashion. It does so effectively. I don't know -- or, rather, don't remember -- who wrote the script, but whoever it was should be proud of the accomplishment. It wouldn't win an Oscar for Best Documentary-Short Subject, but it is well-crafted and much better than similar videos of this genre from that era.

A small portion of this video could be used as a commercial for my book, The Politics of Sentiment. It also includes a snippet of my first appearance on CNN, in an early incarnation of Crossfire with Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden (the inspiration for the character played by Dick Van Patten on Eight Is Enough). My opponent in the crossfire that evening was Dr. Helen Caldicott of Physicians for Social Responsibility and we were discussing civil defense policy. Somewhere I have a Betamax recording of that entire program, and I am flummoxed as far as figuring out how to convert it to DVD and then to AVI or Windows Media.

(At nearly 13 minutes, this clip is too long to post on YouTube in one piece, but fortunately Blogger now includes video upload capability. This is my first attempt to post a video directly through Blogger, rather than posting it on YouTube first and then embedding the code in my blogpost. You bloggers will understand the difference.)

Across Five Marches

Monday marked the fourth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

I remember clearly where I was when I heard the news that the actual war had begun: The evening of March 19, 2003, was the occasion of the last Washington-Lincoln-Reagan Dinner to raise funds for the Albemarle County and Charlottesville Republican parties. The after-dinner speaker was former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh. The buzz about the war news spread through the banquet room at the Boar's Head Inn even as the keynote address was still being delivered. As soon as Mr. Thornburgh finished his remarks, nearly everyone skedaddled back to their homes so they could watch CNN or (more likely) Fox News. A post-dinner reception with coffee and liqueur for high-dollar donors with Dick Thornburgh was abandoned.

It was still a very successful evening and much remembered in local GOP circles.

By lasting four years and counting, the Iraq war has already leaped over the time the United States was involved in World War I, World War II, and the Korean Conflict. (Technically, of course, the war in Korea has not yet ended; there is a ceasefire that has been remarkably solid for more than 50 years, and the shooting war has not recommenced.) The Iraq war has spanned nearly the same period as the U.S. War Between the States.

Somehow, I do not think the Bush administration expected to still be embroiled in a conflict in Iraq forty-eight months after the invasion and the relatively easy toppling of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. It has often been commented that the administration knew how to win the battles, but was befuddled as to how to handle the peace that followed. "Peace," of course, is used here in a relative sense.

During the run-up to the Iraq war, I wrote a piece that appeared in several religious and secular publications that outlined how to approach the impending war through the lens of Western just-war tradition. It may be useful to pull that article up today to see how it stands in retrospect. I ask my readers: Have the criteria I discuss in the article been met? If not, why not? If you believe they have, feel free to elaborate as to why you think that to be the case. (Your answers will not be graded but similar questions may appear on the semester final.)

The "Just War" and Iraq
(from The Metro Herald, September 20, 2002)

(Charlottesville, VA) --- Each day, the United States edges closer to war with Iraq, with an aim of deposing Saddam Hussein and finishing the task begun in the Gulf War of 1991. The Bush administration seeks cooperation from U.S. allies in this endeavor, even as doubts about a new U.S. invasion of Iraq are being raised in many quarters, including among Republicans on Capitol Hill, most notably House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX).

Especially within the context of the broader War on Terrorism, we must assess the morality of this prospective situation in light of the "just war" theory. Although a minority pacifist tradition teaches that war can never be justified, the larger religious heritage of the West teaches that in certain circumstances the use of military force may be just, obligatory, or both.

Just war theory is the common ethical heritage of all the mainline Christian churches -- Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist -- embraced in international law as the right of national self-defense. While most of the criteria for the just war were refined in the Middle Ages by Catholic scholars, basic documents of the Protestant Reformation reaffirm the applicability of the just war doctrine. For instance, the Augsburg Confession says: "Our churches teach that lawful civil ordinances are good works of God and that it is right for Christians to engage in just wars," and the Westminster Confession speaks about wars that are "just and necessary."

Augustine of Hippo asserted that war must be fought only as a last resort, after other political or diplomatic efforts have failed. Thomas Aquinas added that war must be authorized by a sovereign (in our case, through the democratic process defined by the U.S. Constitution), it must be for a rightful cause, and it must be fought to stop evil or advance good. Three questions require answers:

* Is the objective of the action just? According to Western norms, military action taken solely to conquer or subjugate other peoples is unjust, while military action designed to defend one's own or an ally's territory against external aggression is justified. Neither is revenge alone a just cause.

* Are the means employed both just and appropriate? The force used must be proportionate to the objective: just ends can be betrayed by unjust and inappropriate means.

* Will the chance for justice be enhanced if the action succeeds? However noble the end and just the means, military action is not justified if it has little or no prospect of achieving its objective. Assessing the chances of success or failure is a moral as well as a political imperative.

Policymakers must translate abstract goals -- peace, security, freedom -- into more specific objectives so they can choose appropriate means to achieve them. Moral judgment must be tempered with a sense of political realism.

Given the not-so-secret aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein's regime, it may be instructive to frame the "just war" question in another way.

Ernest W. Lefever, founding president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, turned to Abraham Lincoln for instruction on what to do when faced with a tyrannical regime. Lincoln offered philosophical and common-sense principles that Lefever summarized in this way:

People have a right to overthrow a tyrannical or utterly corrupt ruler or government when three conditions are met. First, they must have suffered the tyrant for some time; second, they must have exhausted all legal and peaceful means of getting rid of him; and third, the prospect for the tyrant's disappearing without their intervention must be bleak. Under these conditions, said Lincoln, the people have not only a right but an obligation to remove the tyrant, by violent means if necessary.

If a U.S. invasion of Iraq is considered as aid to the long-suffering Iraqi people, Lincoln's tripartite formula might inform the decision-making process.

But let's not fool ourselves. This is not a rescue mission. Whatever the political or humanitarian condition of the Iraqi people, no invasion will take place unless vital U.S. interests are at stake. And no invasion should take place unless all the conditions for a just war are met.

However we arrive at the decision, the default position must always be not to intervene, not to go to war. This is not a decision to be made capriciously nor -- as Thomas Jefferson wrote -- "for light and transient causes." Such a decision requires tough thought peppered with moral reasoning.

The job of the Bush administration is not merely to persuade our allies that the cause is just. It has to persuade the American people, as well. The administration must assure us that even if the cause is just, the war will be carried out with appropriate means and right intention, with the aim of promoting justice, peace, and security.

Readers, it's up to you: Did the Bush administration do the job I suggested in the last paragraph?