Grim Reader, Sept. 25, 2009: Irving Kristol, Juan Almedia Bosque and Willy Ronis
by Michael Schaffer
SEPTEMBER 25, 2009 TAGS:
If Irving Kristol had died 10 years ago, his obituaries would have been relatively straightforward pieces, tales of a remarkably successful intellectual entrepreneur who carried his brand of dissent against postwar liberalism from the margins of American politics to the corridors of power.
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But even though Kristol remained an aggressive conservative polemicist right up until his death, other things changed by the time the Obitosphere finally got to digest his life story this week. For one thing, the neoconservative politics he popularized spent eight contentious years at home in the White House, earning blame — rightly or wrongly — for the failures of a president who left office wildly unpopular. For another, the media itself has changed, meaning that the major-newspaper accounts of his life, with their muted assessments and CV recitations, now jostle for space with a new cast of online opinionators eager to mine Kristol’s story to find ammunition for today’s political wars.
Kristol’s story itself, that of a New York intellectual who “paved [the] way for Reagan,” according to the Wall Street Journal, is fascinating enough. Most major obits headline the famous description of Kristol as the “godfather” of neoconservatism, though the New York Times, perhaps aware that neocon is an ill-defined term, calls him the “godfather of modern conservatism,” which may not be much more useful.
Either way, it’s quite a jump from Kristol’s intellectual origins among the young leftists of City College of New York’s Alcove Number One. The bulk of the mainstream obits seek to explain this move. “They came to understand a core principle of neo-conservatism – the law of unintended consequences, whereby big projects often bring about the opposite of what their authors expected,” the United Kingdom’s Independent writes of Kristol and the colleagues who joined him, quoting his famous statement that a conservative is a liberal who’s been “mugged by reality.”
While the British papers in general focus more on the intellectual roots of the neocons, U.S. outlets look at how Kristol sold his views. Towards that end, the Washington Post’s obit includes predictably booster-ish quotes from former Bush strategist Karl Rove, who says Kristol made “immersion in ideas” a GOP “moral imperative.” Grim Reader fears Rove’s Kristolphilia may have spread beyond his quotations, as the Post’s piece guilelessly notes that Kristol “cautioned against running deficits,” leaving unmentioned the baleful budget records of recent Republican presidents, not to mention Kristol’s own statements that he had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit” since “political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”
The fact that links to such past statements were buzzing around the blogosphere within a day of Kristol’s death is a pretty good indication about how political journalism — including journalism about recently deceased political figures — has changed. Though most of the rent animus towards neocons has concerned foreign affairs rather than the domestic policy battles that attracted Kristol, the liberal end of the opinion universe quickly rose to implicate the deceased in unpopular policy or behavioral traits of the contemporary right. “When a major figure from the other ideological camp dies, I think the common thing to do is to praise the dead guy and disparage his modern-day co-ideologues by comparison,” writes Matthew Yglesias in one representative post. “But … Kristol’s own account of his role in popularizing nutjob anti-tax politics is sufficiently damning that I don’t think that strategy will really fly.”
Kristol’s acolytes, naturally, hit right back, often attesting to his influence in strikingly personal terms. “Aside from my father, no single person had a bigger impact on my political thinking than Kristol,” writes Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times, echoing statements by David Brooks, Robert Kagan, and a host of other commenters. But while the tributes, to Kristol’s skepticism about utopian solutions and to his abiding faith in American tradition, are no doubt genuine, Grim Reader is struck by a subject that rarely comes up in the conservative encomia: George W. Bush. For devotees of Irving Kristol, it really is as if he died 10 years ago.
--
Elsewhere, it was a slow week in death — evidenced, in part, by the fact that the Obitosphere is currently engaged in a roiling debate over whether the autumn equinox marked the end to a freakish Summer of Death, or whether it just felt that way. The latter argument is taken up by none other than the New York Times, whose Sarah Kershaw looked into the numbers. “No more celebrities had died than in past summers, according to Lou Ferrara, a managing editor in charge of entertainment and lifestyle coverage for The Associated Press,” she reports. “The perception of numerous celebrity deaths was not supported by the number of obituaries the news agency wrote.” Rather than a sign of celebrity carnage, Kershaw concludes, it was a matter of the Grim Reaper reaching a new generation: “This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.”
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Baby boomers can rest easy at least this week — the highest-profile cultural figure to die is 90-year-old composer Leon Kirchner, who’s remembered in the Washington Post for “expressive, rigorous, atonal yet romantic music,” whatever that means. Like a lot of obits penned by cultural critics rather than obituary writers, it’s a piece that will leave a many lay readers confused, perhaps wishing they were reading about a ’60s pop star instead. Far more readers will likely recognize the sound, if not the name, of Bobby Graham. A session drummer in 1960s London, he’s estimated by the Independent to have played on 15,000 records, backing up acts from Englebert Humperdink to Dusty Springfield. The piece does a good job on the music, but Grim Reader would have loved to learn a bit more about the life of a session man.
Journalism usually does a decent job remembering its own, and this week was no exception. There’s a small Washington Post obit for Christy Bulkely, who in the 1970s was one of the first female newspaper publishers in America when she ran the Saratoga Springs Saratogian. But though the story lauds her as a groundbreaker, it includes an odd and distinctly antediluvian quote from her old boss, USA Today founder Al Neuharth, “She had a remarkable ability to work with males and females,” he says. And that’s surprising … why? The Associated Press and the Wilmington Star-News also flag the passing of Horace Carter, who as a newspaperman in 1950s North Carolina crusaded against the Klu Klux Klan, earning death threats for his trouble.
--
Overseas, death claimed veterans from both sides of Latin America’s not-so-Cold War battlefields. In Cuba, Juan Almedia Bosque, the only black leader of Fidel Castro’s rebels, died at 82. U.S. papers use a wire service obit, but Britain’s dedicate more ink to a man who went on to be vice president and one of Castro’s most visible deputies. “Two qualities helped him to survive the vicissitudes of 50 years of revolutionary politics: his absolute, unquestioning loyalty to the supreme leader, Fidel Castro, and his black skin,” reports London’s Times, noting that his status as a member of a long-oppressed minority was symbolically important. Those assertions of loyalty might surprise readers of the Independent’s story, which reports recent rumors — denied by Bosque — that he was part of a CIA coup plot.
The Times also flags the death of Mohamed Ali Seineldin, an Argentinian colonel who led several coup attempts against democratic governments that, he feared, would prosecute veterans of the repressive country’s right-wing regimes of the 1970s and 1980s. Seineldin is painted as an ultraconservative fanatic, though the piece features the sort of mealy-mouthed opener that might make a less-grim reader put down the paper: “While some Argentinians regarded him as a hero of the conflict against Britain,” it says, “others associate him with the oppressive years of 1970s dictatorship.”
Also abroad, the Washington Post remembers 99-year-old French photojournalist Willy Ronis, running photos that make Grim Reader want to move straight to Paris. Ronis “illuminated the romance, gaiety and mystique of Parisian and Provençal life after World War II,” the obit explains, adding an anecdote about how an elderly Ronis was once so captivated by a female radio interviewer that he asked her, mid-interiew, to pose nude for him. She did. Romance, gaiety, and mystique indeed.
And the Guardian pens a sweet piece about Raj Singh Dungarpur, a 1950s cricketer who helped create the modern, globalized version of the game. He was also steeped in the sport’s lore, as the final paragraph, referencing an autographed photo of an Australian cricket legend, shows: “During his last weeks he was speechless, laid low by diabetes and Alzheimer's. His nephew Shivendra, in an attempt to get him to talk, took out an autographed photo and showed it to him, whispering in his ear ‘Don Bradman.’ Dungarpur looked at the photograph for a minute and without looking up said: ‘Donald George Bradman. The Don.’ Those were his last words.”
Finally, the award for the obit that most makes Grim Reader want to sit down and write a spy novel goes to the Agence-France Presse for its take on Elizaveta Mukasei, one half of the most famous husband-and-wife duo in KGB history. After undercover postings in California and Western Europe, she returned home to write espionage textbooks. Unfortunately, Russian secrecy rules mean the closest the piece comes to revealing her triumphs is with sentences like this: “In 1955 she set off on her biggest mission, described as ‘espionage work in special circumstances abroad’ in a still-unidentified Western European country.” Which means fiction is likely to be the best source, or at least the most interesting.
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
But even though Kristol remained an aggressive conservative polemicist right up until his death, other things changed by the time the Obitosphere finally got to digest his life story this week. For one thing, the neoconservative politics he popularized spent eight contentious years at home in the White House, earning blame — rightly or wrongly — for the failures of a president who left office wildly unpopular. For another, the media itself has changed, meaning that the major-newspaper accounts of his life, with their muted assessments and CV recitations, now jostle for space with a new cast of online opinionators eager to mine Kristol’s story to find ammunition for today’s political wars.Kristol’s story itself, that of a New York intellectual who “paved [the] way for Reagan,” according to the Wall Street Journal, is fascinating enough. Most major obits headline the famous description of Kristol as the “godfather” of neoconservatism, though the New York Times, perhaps aware that neocon is an ill-defined term, calls him the “godfather of modern conservatism,” which may not be much more useful.
Either way, it’s quite a jump from Kristol’s intellectual origins among the young leftists of City College of New York’s Alcove Number One. The bulk of the mainstream obits seek to explain this move. “They came to understand a core principle of neo-conservatism – the law of unintended consequences, whereby big projects often bring about the opposite of what their authors expected,” the United Kingdom’s Independent writes of Kristol and the colleagues who joined him, quoting his famous statement that a conservative is a liberal who’s been “mugged by reality.”
While the British papers in general focus more on the intellectual roots of the neocons, U.S. outlets look at how Kristol sold his views. Towards that end, the Washington Post’s obit includes predictably booster-ish quotes from former Bush strategist Karl Rove, who says Kristol made “immersion in ideas” a GOP “moral imperative.” Grim Reader fears Rove’s Kristolphilia may have spread beyond his quotations, as the Post’s piece guilelessly notes that Kristol “cautioned against running deficits,” leaving unmentioned the baleful budget records of recent Republican presidents, not to mention Kristol’s own statements that he had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit” since “political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”
The fact that links to such past statements were buzzing around the blogosphere within a day of Kristol’s death is a pretty good indication about how political journalism — including journalism about recently deceased political figures — has changed. Though most of the rent animus towards neocons has concerned foreign affairs rather than the domestic policy battles that attracted Kristol, the liberal end of the opinion universe quickly rose to implicate the deceased in unpopular policy or behavioral traits of the contemporary right. “When a major figure from the other ideological camp dies, I think the common thing to do is to praise the dead guy and disparage his modern-day co-ideologues by comparison,” writes Matthew Yglesias in one representative post. “But … Kristol’s own account of his role in popularizing nutjob anti-tax politics is sufficiently damning that I don’t think that strategy will really fly.”
Kristol’s acolytes, naturally, hit right back, often attesting to his influence in strikingly personal terms. “Aside from my father, no single person had a bigger impact on my political thinking than Kristol,” writes Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times, echoing statements by David Brooks, Robert Kagan, and a host of other commenters. But while the tributes, to Kristol’s skepticism about utopian solutions and to his abiding faith in American tradition, are no doubt genuine, Grim Reader is struck by a subject that rarely comes up in the conservative encomia: George W. Bush. For devotees of Irving Kristol, it really is as if he died 10 years ago.
--
Elsewhere, it was a slow week in death — evidenced, in part, by the fact that the Obitosphere is currently engaged in a roiling debate over whether the autumn equinox marked the end to a freakish Summer of Death, or whether it just felt that way. The latter argument is taken up by none other than the New York Times, whose Sarah Kershaw looked into the numbers. “No more celebrities had died than in past summers, according to Lou Ferrara, a managing editor in charge of entertainment and lifestyle coverage for The Associated Press,” she reports. “The perception of numerous celebrity deaths was not supported by the number of obituaries the news agency wrote.” Rather than a sign of celebrity carnage, Kershaw concludes, it was a matter of the Grim Reaper reaching a new generation: “This summer could come to be known as the summer when baby boomers began to turn to the obituary pages first, to face not merely their own mortality or ponder their legacies, but to witness the passing of legends who defined them as a tribe, bequeathing through music, culture, news and politics a kind of generational badge that has begun to fray.”
--
Baby boomers can rest easy at least this week — the highest-profile cultural figure to die is 90-year-old composer Leon Kirchner, who’s remembered in the Washington Post for “expressive, rigorous, atonal yet romantic music,” whatever that means. Like a lot of obits penned by cultural critics rather than obituary writers, it’s a piece that will leave a many lay readers confused, perhaps wishing they were reading about a ’60s pop star instead. Far more readers will likely recognize the sound, if not the name, of Bobby Graham. A session drummer in 1960s London, he’s estimated by the Independent to have played on 15,000 records, backing up acts from Englebert Humperdink to Dusty Springfield. The piece does a good job on the music, but Grim Reader would have loved to learn a bit more about the life of a session man.Journalism usually does a decent job remembering its own, and this week was no exception. There’s a small Washington Post obit for Christy Bulkely, who in the 1970s was one of the first female newspaper publishers in America when she ran the Saratoga Springs Saratogian. But though the story lauds her as a groundbreaker, it includes an odd and distinctly antediluvian quote from her old boss, USA Today founder Al Neuharth, “She had a remarkable ability to work with males and females,” he says. And that’s surprising … why? The Associated Press and the Wilmington Star-News also flag the passing of Horace Carter, who as a newspaperman in 1950s North Carolina crusaded against the Klu Klux Klan, earning death threats for his trouble.
--
Overseas, death claimed veterans from both sides of Latin America’s not-so-Cold War battlefields. In Cuba, Juan Almedia Bosque, the only black leader of Fidel Castro’s rebels, died at 82. U.S. papers use a wire service obit, but Britain’s dedicate more ink to a man who went on to be vice president and one of Castro’s most visible deputies. “Two qualities helped him to survive the vicissitudes of 50 years of revolutionary politics: his absolute, unquestioning loyalty to the supreme leader, Fidel Castro, and his black skin,” reports London’s Times, noting that his status as a member of a long-oppressed minority was symbolically important. Those assertions of loyalty might surprise readers of the Independent’s story, which reports recent rumors — denied by Bosque — that he was part of a CIA coup plot.
The Times also flags the death of Mohamed Ali Seineldin, an Argentinian colonel who led several coup attempts against democratic governments that, he feared, would prosecute veterans of the repressive country’s right-wing regimes of the 1970s and 1980s. Seineldin is painted as an ultraconservative fanatic, though the piece features the sort of mealy-mouthed opener that might make a less-grim reader put down the paper: “While some Argentinians regarded him as a hero of the conflict against Britain,” it says, “others associate him with the oppressive years of 1970s dictatorship.”
Also abroad, the Washington Post remembers 99-year-old French photojournalist Willy Ronis, running photos that make Grim Reader want to move straight to Paris. Ronis “illuminated the romance, gaiety and mystique of Parisian and Provençal life after World War II,” the obit explains, adding an anecdote about how an elderly Ronis was once so captivated by a female radio interviewer that he asked her, mid-interiew, to pose nude for him. She did. Romance, gaiety, and mystique indeed.And the Guardian pens a sweet piece about Raj Singh Dungarpur, a 1950s cricketer who helped create the modern, globalized version of the game. He was also steeped in the sport’s lore, as the final paragraph, referencing an autographed photo of an Australian cricket legend, shows: “During his last weeks he was speechless, laid low by diabetes and Alzheimer's. His nephew Shivendra, in an attempt to get him to talk, took out an autographed photo and showed it to him, whispering in his ear ‘Don Bradman.’ Dungarpur looked at the photograph for a minute and without looking up said: ‘Donald George Bradman. The Don.’ Those were his last words.”
Finally, the award for the obit that most makes Grim Reader want to sit down and write a spy novel goes to the Agence-France Presse for its take on Elizaveta Mukasei, one half of the most famous husband-and-wife duo in KGB history. After undercover postings in California and Western Europe, she returned home to write espionage textbooks. Unfortunately, Russian secrecy rules mean the closest the piece comes to revealing her triumphs is with sentences like this: “In 1955 she set off on her biggest mission, described as ‘espionage work in special circumstances abroad’ in a still-unidentified Western European country.” Which means fiction is likely to be the best source, or at least the most interesting.
Got a tip for the Grim Reader? Drop a line to obitreader@gmail.com.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader appears Friday in Obit. He is the author of One Nation Under Dog, about culture and the American pet industry.
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