"¡Yo Estuve en la Rastra de la Muerte!" por el Brigadista Emilio Valdés Calderón
PM
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9 de Abril , 2,001 Publicación Semanal Vol. I , No. VIII
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"¡Yo Estuve en la Rastra de la Muerte!"
por el Brigadista Emilio Valdés Calderón
Parece que fue ayer, pero no: hace 40 años que invadimos a Cuba con el
propósito de liberar a la patria del comunismo. Por tres días, del 17 al
19 de abril de 1961, estuvimos peleando hasta que se nos acabaron las balas.
tropas castristas. Nos llevaron a Girón, donde nos maltrataron, escupiéndonos,
insultándonos, amenazándonos con el paredón. El grupo nuestro fue llevado
a una casa donde habían muchos más prisioneros. Tres de éllos fueron
fusilados después. Uno fue Pérez Cruzata, quien había estado antes con
Cuando ya habían 110 brigadistas dentro de la rastra, los que eran
vejados por el Comandante Cienfuegos, Fernández Vila le advirtió que nos
vamos a fusilar. Traigan 50 cochinos más". Nuestro jefe, Ernedio Oliva, también
estaba en la rastra. Cienfuegos le preguntó que qué tenía que decir, a lo
que Oliva respondió con su nombre, rango, y número de serie. Esto puso
furioso a Cienfuegos, y ordenó que Oliva saliera del vehículo. Esto
posiblemente le salvó la vida. Estimo que ya habíamos 161 brigadistas en
esas circunstancias. Más de 40 heridos fueron tirados adentro. Cerrada la
puerta lateral, la rastra fue puesta en marcha. Tratamos desesperadamente
de volcarla, lanzándonos contra los lados, pero inutilmente. Las paredes
interiores estaban cubiertas con madera "playwood" y zinc. Un paracaidista
que sabía karate rompió algunas tablas. Estábamos muy apiñados, y el aire
comenzaba a faltarnos. Fue horrible. La oscuridad era total. Se produjo
un caos. Muy difícil de describir aquellas escenas. En la parte de atrás de
la rastra logramos hacer algunas hendiduras utilizando los metales de
nuestros cinturones y un pedazo de hierro que apareció no se cómo.
Logramos hacer unos cuatro huequitos de más o menos una pulgada y media
cada uno, y claro, éramos muchos para todos poder usarlos. Esas ranuras fueron
hechas como a unos tres pies del piso. En la parte del frente se produjo
una gran agitación, ya que allí no había respiración alguna. Algunos de esos
hombres, ya casi desmayados, logramos cargarlos, pasarlos para atrás y
ponerlos junto a los huecos. Uno de éllos fue Arteaga, vecino mío en
Cuba, quien prácticamente muerto, pudimos revivirlo. Mi hermano, el viejo
Guerra y su hijo estaban al lado opuesto. Guerra nos arengó para que estuviésemos
tranquilos, diciéndonos que nos íbamos a salvar. Pusimos nuestras camisas
en las paredes para absober la humedad y el frío de la noche, y pasándolas
por nuestros cuerpos nos ayudaba a mantenernos vivos y alertas, pues si uno
caía al piso, no se levantaba más.Ya habían algunos muertos. Y he aquí lo que
más me impresionó en aquel trágico viaje de ocho horas. Jose Millán saltó
del piso y me dio en la cara sin querer. Me dijo que tenía esposa e hijas
en Miami. Entonces me confesó que se iba a morir en ese momento, que tenía a
Jesucristo delante de él, que nosotros seríamos salvados. A los dos
minutos cayó muerto. A mi lado.
Supimos que la rastra había llegado al Castillo del Príncipe, en La Habana,
vez fue abierta la puerta lateral. Casi no podíamos levantarnos. Mi hermano y
el viejo Guerra me ayudaron a salir. Cuando miré hacia atrás, vi a muchos
cuerpos en el suelo. Después supimos que habían muerto nueve, y otro que
falleció poco después. Entre éllos, un joven campesino de 20 años que no
era brigadista, y así y todo lo metieron en la rastra. Fue un espectáculo de
horror. La culpabilidad directa fue de Osmani Cienfuegos. Muchos
militares castristas en el Palacio de los Deportes hicieron gesto de desaprobación
acerca de aquella masacre e ignominia. Fue un verdadero acto de cobardía,
del que también fue responsable Fidel Castro por respaldar a Cienfuegos.
Cuando se escriba completa la historia de Bahía de Cochinos, se van a
saber muchas cosas más.
CUBA HOY, LA REALIDAD SIN PALABRAS:
http://www.netforcuba.org/InfoCuba-EN/CubainPictures/CubainPictures.htm
HOSPITALES EN CUBA:
http://www.netforcubaenespanol.org/Enfoque/0035-SaludPublica-Cuba.htm
Try living in a country controlled by a mad old man that is stuck in the
cold war:
www.cubaverdad.net
Check this out
Super User For Ever
> 04-17-2006
> EL PERIODICO DEL AIRE
> Por la Libertad de Cuba y la Democracia Mundial
Rolling Stone :
URL:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_president_in_history
Rollingstone.com
The Worst President in History?
One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush
-----------------------------------------------------------
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical
disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist
attacks
of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White
House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do
to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that
may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering
whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in
all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at
Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of
them
all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same
handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from
across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the
bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who,
confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that,
as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to
disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation
already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew
Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined
Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G.
Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has
his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but
remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and
collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the
Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for
Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from
office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of
worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians
conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one
percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among
those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only
for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go
along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of
disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called
Bush
a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president
since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary
to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch.
We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply
concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues.
When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even
pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good,
bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as
conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who
the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the
citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on
to dismiss
the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said
the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors"
than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians
were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be
expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald
Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly
three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back
before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush.
The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew
Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled
-- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called
Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were
gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the
Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in
Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be
higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush
the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be
coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure,
the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in
and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief
and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the
columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and
suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies
that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's
words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet
the
ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of
voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his
job.
Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one
twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in
his
second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation
in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen
from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of
ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks)
to
such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry
Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has
experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his
high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the
commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a
recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election,
the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
* * * *
How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best
understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness.
In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three
presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided
the nation through what historians consider its greatest
crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the
Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War.
Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances,
they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more
secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan,
Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation,
governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case,
different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic
policies,
foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct,
crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the
rarities
in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of
these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the
greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a
simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus
preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly,
Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of
presidential performance.
* * * *
THE CREDIBILITY GAP
No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more
than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a
reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war
with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham
Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar
when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered,
confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from
beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift
American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to
serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office
spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the
1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no
swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such
reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's,
suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and
credibility.
In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase
"credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's
professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than
two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach
fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but
that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election.
Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared
"mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been
running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More
than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and
untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy
than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by
conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton,
managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by
shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by
overhauling the White House's inner circles. But Bush's publicly
expressed
view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the
conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his
"high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems to foreclose
the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing
Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the
White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political
capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term
might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially
among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent
attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major
personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew
Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a move announced by
the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than
contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and
personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was
widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the
president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of
Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were
Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally
a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably
certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health
problems.
* * * *
BUSH AT WAR
Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars
well -- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars.
James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset
of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting
military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching,
combined with a reversal of America's military fortunes and the
negotiation
of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and
ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his
Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The
Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick
and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk's favor -- much as the rapid
American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William
McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning
re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War,"
Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet
while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's
idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into
the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition
Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that
lasted until Pearl Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and
Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military
conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become
bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001,
he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point
in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his
pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day
transformed Bush's presidency, giving him an extraordinary
opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were
encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling
of
the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then,
Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over
leadership.
No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II,
John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with
such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to
embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national
struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top
military advisers and even members of the president's own Cabinet who
expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies -- including
retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary
Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the
president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of
national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including
James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely
ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder
Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal
to."
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration,
Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting
the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their
pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision,
the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized
citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been
demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an
imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House
suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any
political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an
appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered
-- the administration built a "Bush Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive
warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles
previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign
policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so
with
premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so
while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world
safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of
international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that
emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence
that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war
among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since
proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military
officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would
require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate
estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as
"wildly off the mark."
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the
modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did
in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq
has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash
young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White
House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted
circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a
messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and
Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
* * * *
BUSH AT HOME
Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate
conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant
right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked
immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties
have
suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon
Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared
in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that "we
are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles
away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."
But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly
from his original campaign persona.
The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more
than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a
vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's
father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph
in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more
money in their pocket." The claim is bogus for the majority of
Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new
private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid
Clinton-era
federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record
levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees,
state and
local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who
rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small
businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services.
The lion's share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very
richest
Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically
sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago.
Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the
Bush administration's original forecasts and is chiefly attributable
not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on
defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping
since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only
2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average
inflation rate of 3.4 percent.
The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with
the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also
placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect
to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the
forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a
combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and
financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White
House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous
presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in
American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever
-- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year
2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting
that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut
federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee
this
would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit
in the first place!
The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either
failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert
Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so
unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states --
including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political strongholds --
have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for
immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in
dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage
immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of
Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The
paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive
spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924
that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has
in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican
Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes of using them to build a
permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant
demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how
costly the Republican divide may prove.
The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently
deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal
bench
and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist,
prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly
invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees,
seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the
Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no
president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close
friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the
country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over stem-cell
research,
the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population
control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to
conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what
former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first
religious party in U.S. history."
Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and
beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's
pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental
issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from
their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the
effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while
peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug
Administration on making emergency contraception available over the
counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings
they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish
and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being
the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new
path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile
to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of
educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has
declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan
political
ends."
The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science
alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane
Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying
hurricanes, but Bush ignored them -- much as he and his
administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National
Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the
Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency
Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a
nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after
the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise
massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th,
however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it
could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense
President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those
he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the acts of government
to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained eternal renown by
saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds.
Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous victory. In 1959,
Johnny
Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won the Grammy for best
country & western performance. If anyone sings about George
W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.
* * * *
PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT
Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George
Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of
impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged
offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and
corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials
who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges
have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and
serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and
the rule of law -- most notoriously, the charges that led to the
impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's
resignation.
Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these
allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and
corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan,
including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's
secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals
produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a
White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most
scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon's, was
Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a
paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials,
including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and
deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges
stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting
scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Three Cabinet officers -- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General
Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left
their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official
in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White
House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a
successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration.
Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan
and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared
scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of
Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby,
on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the
Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable
standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant's personal
secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal
involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official,
who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign
power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national
security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top
federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing
investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the disgraced Republican
lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in
prison -- investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including
former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and
current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already
been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional
corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud
of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest
advisers.
History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding
the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the
U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the
constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government.
The
Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances
they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took
drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the Whig Senate
censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the people."
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to suspend
habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862
has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard
Nixon's conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert
domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes
regulating executive power.
By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what
Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate
authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers'
healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal
findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales,
the Bush White House has declared that the president's powers as
commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime
president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More
specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is
perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic
surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed
legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing
constitutionally dubious "signing statements," which declare, by fiat,
how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that
interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier
presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view
of the
Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush
doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk
that
Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases -- using
the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those
instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as
over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel
solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a
compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.
Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need
go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent
Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal
infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have no
part in the
creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president,"
Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit
sexual liaison. "No man is above the law, and no man is below the law --
that's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country," Rep.
Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you and it protects me
from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door,"
warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of
Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these
quarters is deafening.
The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully
justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War,
there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it
imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even
unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise
unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by
becoming
indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the
preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he
has
been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln
faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil
against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did
not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular
and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received
Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in
1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror"
-- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity,
which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to
national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to
survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could
be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently
endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the
citizenry.
* * * *
Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no
wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do
no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having
supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an
alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this
will benefit Bush's reputation in history.
The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider"
and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has
had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the
noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more,
after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him
as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under
both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen
to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided,
less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan,
Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those
three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology
that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities.
Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the
face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great
Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both
domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived
responses to
radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what
Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little
statesmen," Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making,
compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.
No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty.
There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half
years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in
2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was
one -- who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the
estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up
propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it.
Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions,
the
present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in
history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob
Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."
Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be
defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we
cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and
this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No
personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of
us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor
or dishonor, to the latest generation."
SEAN WILENTZ
Posted Apr 21, 2006 12:34 PM