guerrilla history

Best statues in NYC’s Central Park: Poland’s King Jagiello, hero of 1410

Six hundred years ago, this man atop his bronze horse in full battle regalia, pointing his dual sabers to the sky, was the single most powerful on earth. He was Poland’s King Wladyslaw Jagiello, and on July 15, 1410, he led an army of 50,000 Polish and Lithuanian knights, cavalry, and foot soldiers against a marauding horde of 32,000 invading Teutons — primarily Germans — near the small town of Grunwald.

By sundown, Jagiello’s soldiers had slaughtered over 26,000 of the invaders, utterly demolishing their army. The Battle of Grunwald, as it came to be called, would reshape Central Europe for the next 300 years, placing King Jagiello in command of a vast, united Polish-Lithuanian empire that included large swaths of modern Germany and Russia. It was also one of the most civilized places in Medieval Europe, complete with bicameral legislature, checks on royal power, religious tolerance (this is when Jewish people came to escape persecution further west), and a home to Renaissance art. Jagiello’s vistory was one of two game-changing military events of the Fifteenth Century, the other being England’s 1419 triumph over France at Agincourt, immortalized by William Shakespeare in his play Henry V. (Click here to see Kenneth Branagh delivering Henry’s terrific speech to his troops.)

Personally, I had never heard of King Jagiella (damn American education system!!) until last week when I happened to come across this fantastic statue of him in New York City’s Central Park. The work of Polish sculpter Stanislaw Ostrowski, it served originally as centerpiece for Poland’s exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. But the outbreak of World War II, in which Poland was quickly devoured by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, left it stranded in America. New York Mayor Fiorello Laguardia fell in love it and lobbied to keep it in New York City. In 1945, the Polish government-in-exile agreed, and it was moved to its current spot in Central Park. 

Next time you’re in the neighborhood, don’t miss it. It’s at the east end of Turtle Pond, near the Great Lawn, not far from Cleopatra’s Needle, and an easy walk from the Upper East Side.

$1,420 Gold: Headed for a Crash?

This month, November 2010, saw the nominal price of gold blast itself into the record books with a historic new high of $1,420 per ounce, almost triple the price a decade ago. It’s been a remarkable run. Too good to be true?

Before gold bugs get too giddy, it’s worth remembering that this year also marks another anniversary, the 141st, of the darkest day ever in American gold trading: Black Friday (September 24) 1869, when the notorious corner by Jay Gould and Jim Fisk climaxed in a spectacular crash that crippled Wall Street for months, bankrupting thousands, freezing the national economy, and spewing scandal to the very door of the White House. It caused an estimated $100 million in financial value to vanish in a wink, worth multiple billions in modern money.

Still, 1869’s Black Friday was the ugliest, partly because both the price run-up and crash that year stemmed from the unabashed, garish actions two greedy speculators trying to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else: James Fisk Jr. (below, left, in his ersatz “Admiral” uniform) and Jay Gould (below, right). 

Fisk and Gould pulled off their famous gold corner decades before the battery of modern US financial regulators came on the scene: the SEC, CFTC, Federal Reserve, bank overseers, and even industry self-policing groups like FINRA or NFA. Fisk and Gould lost fortunes when the corner collapsed: Even back in 1869, the market was bigger than any two players, though it took the combined weight of the US Treasury announcing emergency gold sales and a pool of big banks dumping gold on the market to break their stranglehold.

Regulators can help, but commodities are notorious for volatility. Just two years ago, for instance, in 2008, we saw the price of a barrel of crude oil drop from nearly $150 in July to less than $34 in December, a whopping 75% loss, part of a sector-wide reversal.

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Al Franken makes it 60. But do Senate Super-Majorities Matter?

Sort of.

Democrats today are celebrating Al Franken’s long-awaited victory as Minnesota’s newest United States Senator. The cheers are not just for him. With Franken, Democrats will now number 58 in the Senate. This, along with two friendly Independents, will give them enough seats and potential votes – 60 – to block Republican filibusters and really control the Chamber.

That’s real power. And it sounds great.

But don’t believe it.

Over the years, we’ve had plenty of Congresses with large, lopsided partisan majorities. Some did great things. Others failed miserably. What mattered wasn’t the size of the Majority, but whether it reflected a true national consensus, and whether it did its job.

The Scorecard on Cloture
First, the raw numbers.

The US Senate has always loved filibusters. Up until 1919, there was no way to stop a single Senator from talking his heart out and endlessly delaying a bill, thus killing it. Cloture, as adopted in 1919, allowed a majority of Senators to end debate, but only if they could muster a two-thirds vote. This was rare. From 1919 until 1970, Senators invoked Cloture only 8 times. Filibuster reigned supreme.

Then, in 1975, the Senate lowered its Cloture target to three-fifths, or 60 votes. Since then, cloture has been invokes literally hundreds of times, including 61 successful clotures during the 110th Congress (2006-7) alone.

During this post-1975 period, the only time either Democrats or Republicans had “filibuster-proof” majorities (60 or mote) was the four years 1975-1979: the Gerald Fold and Jimmy Carter era. During those four years, Senate leaders filed 62 cloture motions, voted on cloture 40 times, won on 20, and lost on 20. Not much to brag about. [Click here to see year-by-year votes for the enitre priod 1919-2009.]

The Biggest Majorities

This isn’t to say that big Senate majorities can’t produce terrific progress, clearing logjams for needed change. Three times in American history, we have seen large, sustained Super-Majorities in the U.S. Senate that made a difference:

• Civil War and Reconstruciton Era (1861-1875), when Republicans held overwhelming majorities, peaking in 1869 at 61-11 (equivalent to an 85-15 margin today);
• The FDR “New Deal” era and World War II (1933-1947), when Democrats held the whip hand by as much as 75-17 in 1937; and
• From 1959 through 1969, when Democrats consistently held margins above 60 seats, reaching 68 in 1966, the New Frontier and Great Society years. [Click here for the full list of party breakdowns, 1855-2009.]

These were creative periods with capable presidents (Licoln, FDR, Kennedy, Johnson) and national direction. They produced groundbreaking innovations. Arguably, the lower standard allowed some sloppy legislation and bad policy choices, but at least they managed to make decisions in times of crisis. Where they made bad ones, they were accountable.

And today?

Al Franken’s 60th vote will matter only if Democrats — Obama included — use it wisely and skillfully. Their majority is fragile. But on any Senate vote, there are moderate Republicans to woo for every conservative Democrat lost. Is the country united behind fundamental change? What say you, Obama?

That’s politics at the highest level. Now we’ll see if they are up to it.

LA Times Book Fair

Yes, in case you thought you saw me in the crowd, yes I was out in California last weekend for the LA Times book festival, and it was a treat. I sposke on a panel titled “Biography: Infamous Lives,” where I delivered one of my typical spell-binding, clever, and insightful orations about young J. Edgar Hoover for a packed room of 300+ people. Joining me on the panel were Nancy Isenberg (Aaron Burr) and Michael Neufeld (Werner Von Braun), and moderator Scott Berg. Any of you lucky enough to be happening to watch C-SPAN BookTV that day saw it live. I imagine they’ll repeat the broadcast sometime soon, and I’ll make a point to post something on this Blog when I find out the time. (Of course, if any of you still believe me when I promise to post things on this Blog, it says more about your own gullible nature than it does about my own trustworthy character, or lack thereof).

In any event, it was a fun trip. The LA Times festival draws a huge crowd to the UCLA campus, with plenty of atmosphere, dozens of interesting esoteric booths, and a taste of Hollywood. While there, I also did an interview with Blogger Paul Huebl (“Crime, Guns, and Videotape”) which he posted on Google Video at http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=ackerman+kenneth&sitesearch= , so please check at out and enjoy.

I’ll post something more later. I feel like ranting today.

Dinner on Capitol Hill

So tonight I had a wonderful wiener schnitzel for dinner at the Cafe Berlin, a terrific German restaurant on Capitol Hill in Washinton, D.C., while trading gossip with a friend about the latest back-room maneuverings over the Farm Bill while sipping a very dry riesling from Alsace. Talk has it that the Farm Bill, a fascinatingly-complex legislative behemoth spending billions of dollars over ten years that has been stuck for months in House-Senate negotiations, is now likely to pass some time in March.

I just thought you might like to know. All the best. –KenA

What does history say about George Bush, Alberto Gonzalez, and the eight fired Prosecutors? Just ask Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding.

So, armed with my cup of Starbucks (shade-grown Mexican), let me start off this new Blog by jumping straight into the middle of the today’s big hullabaloo: the storm over Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and his firing of eight federal prosecutors under circumstances that suggest political coercion. Yes, federal prosecutors serve at the much-cited “pleasure” of the President, but tampering with the wheels of justice for political ends can be unethical at best and criminal at worst. And Gonzalez has already been caught making several public misstatements on the affair. Hence the big controversy.

Does history give us any useful guide for judging this episode? News commentators have been pointing all week to the numbers of federal prosecutors fired by various prior presidents over the years, the fact that Clinton and Reagan both fired the whole bunch of them at the beginnings of their respective terms, so on. But this misses the point. Nobody has ever argued that an administration does not have the right to make room for new political appointees by dropping some of the old ones. The concern, rather, is that someone in the Justice Department or White House might have been trying deliberately to influence the outcome of specific pending cases – to put people in jail, have them indicted, or protect lawbreakers from prosecution – based on politics. That’s where things get sticky.

Perhaps the starkest example comes from President Richard M. Nixon and the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. Nixon’s case of tampering with a federal prosecutor was a blockbuster – known ever since as the Saturday Night Massacre. His target was Archibald Cox, the bowtie-wearing Harvard law professor and former Solicitor General who had been appointed by Nixon’s own Justice Department as a Special Prosecutor for the Watergate case in May 1973. When Cox decided to ignore the president’s objections and insisted on trying to get his hands on important evidence in the case, specifically recordings of relevant Oval Office conversations that Nixon had secretly taped, Nixon decided to give him the boot. On October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Eliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused, as did his deputy Attorney General William Ruckleshaus, both of whom resigned rather than carry out the order. That left Solicitor General Robert Bork, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, to do the deed.

Cox, too, technically served at the “pleasure” of the president; his independence was based solely on assurances given by Richardson. Still, when Nixon acted to break those asurances, the conflict was so apparent and the public’s reaction so hostile that Congress in 1978 passed a permanent law authorizing Independent Counsels on an ongoing basis in politically charged cases – a step intended to block future presidents from firing federal prosecutors in these situations. Neither side liked the result; Republicans complained about independent counsel aimed against them, such as Lawrence Walsh and his eight-year pursuit of the Iran-Contra scandal, just as Democrats complained about Kenneth Starr and his pursuit of the Whitewater-Monica-gate affair. Nobody shed any years when the permanent law expired in 1999.

Another case of political manipulation in Federal prosecutions goes back to the Teapot Dome scandals of the 1920s. Warren G. Harding was president then and Harry Daugherty, his Attorney General, presided over a Justice Department riddled with corruption unmatched either before or since – bribes, kickbacks, extortion, blackmail, you name it. When two United States Senators, Montana Democrats Thomas Walsh and Burton Wheeler, got wind of the scandals and threatened to investigate, Daugherty sent agents from the Department’s Bureau of Investigation (led by its then 27 year-old Deputy Director J. Edgar Hoover) to investigate the Senators, shadowing them and their families, wiretapping their phones, pilfering their offices, and tampering with their mail. They convinced a Grand Jury in Montana to indict Senator Wheeler for influence peddling, a charge later found to be baseless both by a Montana jury and a Senate investigating panel. When the truth finally came out, Daugherty and his circle were history, and Daugherty himself avoided prison only by the grace of hung juries in two separate criminal trials.

All of which brings us back to George W. Bush and his Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez.

Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre and Harry Daugherty’s harrassment of Senators Walsh and Wheeler were extreme cases. Nobody suggests, based on the facts revealed so far, that the firings of the eight federal prosecutors rise to the eggregious levels of these benchmarks. Still, they make a point. If evidence ultimately shows that the firings were part of a system designed to pressure federal prosecutors into twisting the outcome of particular cases, to shield friends from prosecution, use grand juries to settle political scores, or to create phony issues in hotly-contested political elections, then all bets are off. The history gives us some clear lessons to keep in mind: First, federal prosecutors might serve at the “pleasure” of the president, but, pleasure or not, there are lines of ethics, propriety, and law that a president may not cross. Second, in the end, the truth always comes out. You can count on it. And finally, the Washington classic: it’s not the crime, but the coverup that gets you in trouble.

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