American presidents (5): Ronald Reagan

August 6th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

This week, I was back at the City Lit to resume the course on post-war American presidents. Our lecturer this time was Mark Bedford and we looked at Ronald Reagan who was the 40th president and served from 1981-1989. He took us through Reagan’s ascent to the White House as well as his two terms as president – Reagan was the first person to serve two full terms  since Eisenhower – and he made good use of clips from television programmes.

Everyone knows that Reagan started his career as a movie star in Hollywood, but I had forgotten that he was a member of the Democratic Party for 25 years (he declared: “My party changed. I didn’t.”). Also I had not appreciated the importance of his ‘GE years’, the seven years he spent as the spokesman for the General Electric company, fronting their media advertisements and touring the factories to speak to the company’s workers (he was dropped because his remarks had become too political).

Reagan switched to the Republicans in 1964 and served as Governor of California from 1967-1975. After making unsuccessful bids for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and 1976, he obtained his party’s endorsement in 1980 when he beat Jimmy Carter in the worst electoral defeat of any incumnbet president in history and became the oldest person to win a presidential election at the age of 69.

He was dubbed ‘the great communicator’ with a folksy style and his calm response to the assassination attempt of 1981 endeared him to the American public. He was never noted for his intellect and famously had a relaxed management style with disengagement from the detail of policy. This was his ‘excuse’ for the scandal of the Iran Contra affair when amazingly America shipped arms to Iran via Israel and then used the profits to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. .

Reagan is remembered for his stalled Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed ‘Star Wars’, and increased arms spending in his first three years of office by 40% in real terms. However, he only used direct force on three occasions: the stationing of troops in Lebanon, the invasion of Grenada, and the bombing of Libya. He preferred to fund anti-communist forces in other countries, notably in Afghanistan (which led to the formation of Al-Queda) and Central America.

Many Americans credit Reagan with winning the Cold War and we had a short discussion about who was responsible. Was it Reagan because of his fierce anti-communist rhetoric (he called the Soviet Union “the evil empire”) and build up of America’s arms arsenal?; was it Gorbachev with his policies of ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’?; was it a combination of both with their summits?; or was it – as one television commentator asserted – the result of a succession of post-war US presidents – both Democrat and Republican – resisted Soviet expansionism and maintained a strong military force.

Domesrically Reagan was known as a low tax, small government politician. Certainly he cut social spending but, as we have seen, he boosted arms spending. In fact, the federal debt grew over his two terms from $9.8 billion to $2.6 trillion.

You can read more about Ronald Reagan here.

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Confused by all the conflicts in the Middle East?

August 5th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

The “Guardian” newspaper today helpfully provides a short guide to 15 of the nations in the Middle East explaining who they support and who they oppose. Check it out here.

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An election to the House of Lords? Surely not!

August 4th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

The House of Lords is a very strong contender to be the most bizarre legislative institution in the world. As I explain my “Short Guide To The British Political System”:

“Historically most members of the House of Lords have been what we called hereditary peers. This meant that years ago a king or queen nominated a member of the aristocracy to be a member of the House and, since then, the right to sit in the House has passed through the family from generation to generation. Clearly this is totally undemocratic and the last Labour Government abolished the right of all but 92 of these hereditary peers to sit in the House.

Almost all the other members of today’s House of Lords are what we call life peers. This means that they have been chosen by the Queen, on the advice of the Government, to sit in the House for as long as they live, but afterwards no member of their family has the right to sit in the House. Many are former senior politicians. Others are very distinguished figures in fields such as education, health and social policy.

A small number of other members – 26 – are Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of England. Iran is the only other country in the world that provides automatic seats for senior religious figures in its legislature.”

Thanks to my colleague and friend, Lord (Jim) Knight, I have become aware that there is currently an election in process to fill a vacancy in the Lords. How come? Jim explains here.

Later this week, more life peers will be appointed to the Lords bringing the total of peers to around 800 when the elected House of Commons is only 650 and the plan is to cut that number by 65. Crazy!

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A few fascinating facts and figures about Wikipedia

August 3rd, 2014 by Roger Darlington

  • Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales who is the subject of a profile in today’s “Observer” newspaper.
  • It is a not-for-profit organisation.
  • It is funded by some $50 million a year in donations.
  • The site went live on 15 January 2001.
  • Today it is the planet’s sixth most visited web site.
  • It has 110 million pages.
  • It has entries in 287 languages.
  • The largest number of entries are in English: 4.6 million
  • It has around 35,000 human contributors.
  • One Swede is responsible for 2.7 million articles on Wikipedia as explained here.
  • Almost half of all Wikipedia edits are made by bots as explained here.

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A review of “August: Osage County” – and why I love Meryl Streep

August 2nd, 2014 by Roger Darlington

This weekend, I saw the film “August: Osage County” based on the acclaimed play by Tracy Letts. You can read my review here.

My main reason for wanting to see the movie was that it stars Meryl Streep. I’ve been a massive fan of hers since “The Deerhunter” (1978) and “Kramer vs Kramer” (1979) and I reckon that I’ve now seen her in around 30 films. She is brilliant at accents and can play a whole variety of roles. She is undoubtedly the finest actress of her generation and it’s been wonderful to see her continue to secure brilliant roles even as she grows older. She has now been nominated 18 times for an Academy Award, winning three.

Meryl Streep is the kind of person I’d like round for dinner. I admire her not just as an actress but as a human being. She has been married to the same guy since 1978 (a sculptor rather than an actor) and has four children (two of whom have gone into acting) – the kind of family stability that is all too rare in the world of celebrities. She is bright (she went to Yale) and generous (she is a philantropist) and she has never done or said anything scandalous. She is a Democrat and non-religious.

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“Hard Choices” (4): “Gaza: Anatomy Of A Cease-fire”

August 1st, 2014 by Roger Darlington

The headline “Gaza: Anatomy Of A Cease-fire” could easily be from a news article on the cease-fire announced today between Israel and Hamas. In fact, coincidentally it is the title of a chapter I have read today in “Hard Choices”, the memoir of Hillary Clinton’s four years as US Secretary of State.

Clinton assumed her role just after the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza in January 2009 which resulted in a death toll of  1,400 and she was determined to prevent another invasion in November 2012. She successfully negotiated a cease-fire that time which prevented such an Israeli assault.

In her memoirs, she writes:

“As our motorcade raced through the streets of Cairo that night, I wondered how long – or even if – the cease-fire would hold. The region had seen so many cycles of violence and dashed hopes. It would take only a few extremists and a rocket launcher to reignite the conflict. Both sides would have to work hard to preserve the peace. And even if they succeeded, there would have to be difficult talks over the coming days about all the complex issues we had deferred in the agreement. I could easily be back here soon, trying to put the pieces back together again.”

In fact. it was not Clinton who was back – she stepped down as Secretary of State in February 2013 – but her successor John Kerry. The point is that Israeli’s action in January 2009 did not prevent the crisis in November 2012 and the cease-fire in 2012 did not prevent the current crisis. Once we have a cease-fire that holds, substantive issues will have to be negotiated and genuine concessions will have to be made by both sides, otherwise we will simply be back in another crisis in a few years time and all those Palestinian and Israeli lives will have been lost for nothing.

My good friend Eric Lee – with whom I travelled to Israel in April 2007 – has made some very constructive suggestions here.

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How, 300 years ago today, a German princeling became the British monarch

August 1st, 2014 by Roger Darlington

He was 52nd in line to the British throne. He was the Elector of Hanover. Although he was fluent in German. French, Dutch, Italian and Latin, he could barely understand English.

So how come, 300 years ago today, the British Parliament invited Georg Ludwig to become our King? It had everything to do with the fact that he was a Protestant and not a Catholic, but you can read more here.

This German princeling became the first of four successive King Georges of Britain who have been characterised as sad, bad, mad and fat respectively. Isn’t history fun?

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American presidents (4): Jimmy Carter

August 1st, 2014 by Roger Darlington

This week, I was back at the City Lit to resume the course on post-war American presidents. For Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, our lecturer was Paul Hadjipieris (his parents are Cypriot and his wife is American).

His approach was rather different from the lecturers on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He focused very much on their time as president rather than give a lot of biographical background and, more than the other lecturers, he made comparisons with other post-war presidents.

Jimmy Carter was the 39th president who served from 1977-1981.

He was a born-again Christian who took over his father’s peanut business and served in the Georgia Senate and as Georgia Governor before running for the White House. He presented himself as a Washington outsider at the post-Watergate time when the federal political system was in disrepute. His determination to be a kind of ‘people’s president’ led him to reject many of the trappings and traditions of the office and he famously declared: “I will never tell a lie”.

Although Carter was a Democratic president at a time that Congress was controlled by the Democrats, his outsider status played against him at a time of a newly resurgent Congress and he had a troubled relationship with the legislature. Also he ran against the tradition of building up America’s image by making a controversial ‘crisis of confidence’ television address.

Carter’s major focus was on America’s energy crisis and he created a new Department of Energy and passed the National Energy Act. However, US citizens were reluctant to trade down for more fuel-efficient vehicles. Meanwhile, having taken office during a period of international stagnation and inflation, this persisted throughout his term.

On the foreign relations front, Carter was the first president forced to confront the rise of militant anti-American, Islamic fundamentalism. The taking of 52 American hostages in Teheran in late 1979, the failure of an attempt to rescue them, and their eventual release only minutes after he left office all helped to define his tenure at the White House as a time of perceived weakness. However, he was responsible for the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt and he signed the SALT II agreement with the Soviet Union.

In the presidential election of 1980, Carter was roundly beaten by the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan, suffering the worst electoral defeat of amy incumbent president in American history. However, perhaps more so than any other president in modern times, Carter was been incredibly active on the international stage throughout his post-presidential period and has been called “The American Ghandhi” (he is now 89).

You can read more about Jimmy Carter here.

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A time-lapse map of every nuclear explosion since 1945

July 31st, 2014 by Roger Darlington

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing”the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.

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American presidents (3): Gerald Ford

July 30th, 2014 by Roger Darlington

This week, I was back at the City Lit to resume the course on post-war American presidents. For Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, our lecturer was Paul Hadjipieris (his parents are Cypriot and his wife is American).

His approach was rather different from the lecturers on Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He focused very much on their time as president rather than give a lot of biographical background and, more than the other lecturers, he made comparisons with other post-war presidents.

Gerald Ford was the 38th president who served from 1974-1977. In fact, he was in the White House for a mere 816 days – the shortest term in modern times.

In spite of media images of Ford as president stumbling or falling, in his younger days he was an all-star athlete before becoming a lawyer. Most of his political career was spent in the House of Representatives where he served a total of almost 25 years for a district in Michigan, finally becoming Minority Leader for the last eight of those years. He hoped that he would be chosen by Richard Nixon to be his Vice-Presidential partner but Nixon instead went for Spiro Agnew.

When Agnew had to resign as Vice-President over bribery charge unrelated to the Watergate scandal, Nixon finally had to turn to Ford and make him the new unelected Vice-President and someone who showed great loyalty during the Watergate affair. When Nixon became the first president in US history to resign the office, Ford became the first – and, so far, only – unelected president in the nation’s history,

Although he was an uncharismatic leader and a dull speaker, Ford entered the White House with a lot of good will which he immediately lost when he pardoned Nixon a month after taking the oath of office and then issued a clemency for Vietnam draft dodgers. Furthermore he had a strained relationship with Congress: he was a Republican president and Congress was Democrat-controlled, resulting in Ford exercising the presidential veto no less than 77 times. In turn, Congress blocked his efforts at legislation.

Domestically Ford faced the economic impact of the oil price increases of 1973 and the combination of inflation and unemployment on his watch resulted in a period of stagflation. He launched a WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign. On the international front, Ford’s request for more aid for South Vietnam was turned down by Congress and the North Vietnamese subsequently overran the south. However, he progressed the SALT II negotiations and signed the Helsinki Accords.

When Ford sought the Republican nomination for the presidential race of 1976, he was opposed by Ronald Reagan who ran him a close second. A weakened Ford was then narrowly beaten in the general election by Jimmy Carter.

You can read more about Gerald Ford here.

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