A Colossal Wreck (39 page)

“Management,” McNamara declared in 1967, “is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society.” Substitute “party organization” for “management” and you have Lenin.

Of course the managerial ideal for McNamara was a managerial dictatorship. World Bank loans surged to Pinochet’s Chile after Allende’s overthrow, to Uruguay, to Argentina, to Brazil after the military coup, to the Philippines, to Suharto after the 1965 coup in Indonesia. And to the Romania of Ceauşescu. McNamara poured money—$2.36 billion between 1974 and 1982—into the tyrant’s hands. In 1980 Romania was the Bank’s eighth biggest borrower. McNamara crowed delightedly as Ceauşescu razed whole villages, turned hundreds of square miles of prime farm land into open-pit mines, polluted the air with
coal and lignite, turned Romania into one vast prison, applauded by the Bank in an amazing 1979 economic study cited by Rich as tokening the “Importance of Centralized Economic Control.”

So the McNamara of the World Bank evolved naturally, organically, from the McNamara of Vietnam. The one was prolegomenon to the other, the horrors perhaps on a narrower and more vivid scale, but ultimately lesser in dimension and consequence.

As displayed by Morris, McNamara never offers any reflection on the social system that produced and promoted him, a perfectly nice, well-spoken war criminal. As his inflation of his role in the foe-bombing of Japan shows, he can go so far as to falsely though complacently indict himself, while still shirking bigger, more terrifying and certainly more useful reflections on the system that blessed him and mercilessly killed millions upon millions under FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon.

I don’t think Morris laid a glove on McNamara, who should be feeling well pleased. Like Speer, he got away with it yet again. In the weeks after the film was launched he scurried to Washington to participate in forums on the menace of nuclear destruction with the same self-assurance that he went to Vietnam and Cuba to review the record. If Morris had done a decent job, McNamara would not have dared to appear in any public place.

March 4

“When all seems dark,” my father, Claud, used to say when I was a teenager, “try reading a little Marx. It puts things in perspective.” As I’d mope over the defection of some girlfriend he’d thrust a copy of the
Eighteenth Brumaire
into my hand and tell me to cheer up. I remembered Claud’s advice last weekend, when news that one of the world’s great Marxist economists, Paul Sweezy, had died at the age of ninety-three.

Sweezy wasn’t at all like Marx in personal demeanor. Karl was hairy, bohemian, cantankerous whereas Paul, godlike in his good looks, radiated an amiable and dignified calm, as least in my limited personal experience. Reading Marx, you feel you’re getting to the
truth of the matter and it was the same way with Sweezy. He wrote and taught with extraordinary clarity.

After Sweezy’s death, I asked Robert Pollin, once a student of Sweezy’s, for his thoughts on Sweezy. Bob remembered the excitement of Sweezy’s lectures at the New School back in the day, and he swiftly furnished many interesting paragraphs about Sweezy’s great contributions, in the big books and in
Monthly Review
, which he founded with Leo Huberman in 1949.

At Harvard in the 1930s Sweezy was the star grad student of Joseph Schumpeter. Pollin reckons that Schumpeter was thinking of Sweezy, whom he greatly admired, when he wrote in
Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy
that capitalism would not survive because capitalism breeds intellectual freedom, hence people with critical faculties, and it’s inevitable that this spirit breeds powerful minds who will turn their guns on the deficiencies of capitalism itself. Then Schumpeter, conservative himself, wrote that socialism would succeed, maybe unwieldy, but more egalitarian nonetheless, in part because the brilliant thinkers grown dissatisfied with the crassness and injustices of capitalism would also rise to the top in a socialist society, and make it function decently. “And again,” Bob writes, “who else could he have had in mind here but Paul, his student and protégé?”

Different times, brighter hopes. These days we’re looking at a lot of socialist rubble, but simultaneously at a capitalist architecture whose stresses and failures Sweezy, in accessible terms, decade after decade, in his books and in the
Monthly Review
, which he founded with Leo Huberman in 1949, trenchantly detected and explained: the reasons for the New Deal’s failure, until World War II bailed out the system; military Keynesianism and the Korean War as the prime factors in US recovery after that war; underdevelopment in the Third World, consequence of dependency that was created by imperialism; as well as the increasing role of finance in the operations of capitalism.

Way ahead of most, Sweezy was clear-eyed about the trends: the capture of more and more of society’s wealth by the rich, the threat this pyramid of purchasing power poses to the stability of the whole system, the need for the left to bolster what defenses working people can muster against the predators. Sweezy, Bob Pollin writes,

was the most powerful Marxist exponent of under-consumptionism since Rosa Luxemburg. Keynes himself later embraced this as his analysis of the 1930s depression. Under-consumptionism is the tendency in capitalist economies for the capitalists to produce more things than the people can afford to buy. Capitalism could solve this problem through more income equality, and more social control over investment spending. But capitalists don’t like that solution. Therefore, as Sweezy and Baran argued in
Monopoly Capital
, they come up with alternative means of getting buyers for the things monopolist firms decide to produce: they get the military to spend, they induce spending through advertising, and they ride the wave of epoch-making innovations like the automobile (which brought public highway construction and government subsidized construction of the suburbs).

Read Sweezy’s books and you can understand why we have US Marines presiding over the continuing enslavement of Haiti, why we have John Kerry proclaiming his doctrine of progressive interventionism, why we have Alan Greenspan calling for a renewed onslaught on Social Security. Sweezy taught generations how to understand these things, how not to be surprised. Like all great teachers he gave us the consolations as well as the burden of such knowledge. If you know what’s happening you’re in a position to figure out how to do something about it, and that’s always uplifting.

March 31

Michael Newdow, a California doctor with a law degree, has been arguing to the US Supreme Court that the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance uttered daily by millions of school children is unconstitutional. The Pledge was originally written by a former Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy, in 1892 to promote the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the Americas.

In 1954, amid the freezing gusts of the cold war, the Rev. George M. Docherty, pastor at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, preached to a distinguished congregation including President Dwight D. Eisenhower that the Pledge should contain a reference to God, thus distinguishing it from kindred pledges by “little Muscovites” similarly pledging their loyalty to the hammer and
sickle. Living “under God,” Docherty thundered, was “a definitive fact of the American way of life.” He conceded that “honest atheists” might disagree, but added that in his opinion the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression “is not, and was never meant to be, a separation of religion and life,” and that, honesty notwithstanding, “an atheistic American is a contradiction in terms.”

America was in the midst of a tumid uptick in religious pietism at the time, powered in part by the need to display America’s Biggest Ally in the fight against Communism. In fact the tremendously popular Eisenhower had had an unconventional spiritual upbringing, with his father’s faith stemming from the Mennonite Baptist River Brethren, who had moved from Pennsylvania to Kansas. His mother Ida was a Jehovah’s Witness. Eisenhower was the first President to join a church (Presbyterian) after being elected President. (Lincoln is the only American President to have steered clear of churches altogether.)

Eisenhower and Congress rushed to implement Docherty’s call. Congress was unanimous and the only religious group that objected was that of the Boston Unitarians. “One Nation Under God” was added to the Pledge, and when the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it unconstitutional last year and that school children didn’t have to recite it if they didn’t want to, Congress once again exhibited unanimity in reproving the uppity judges.

April 12

Today brings us the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Claud Cockburn, father of other Cockburns—the brothers Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick; Claudia Flanders, Sarah Caudwell; grandfather of Daisy Cockburn, Chloe Cockburn-Scheff, Olivia Wilde, Charlie Cockburn, Henry Cockburn, Alexander Cockburn, Laura Flanders, Stephanie Flanders.

Claud was the greatest radical journalist of his age, an inspiring influence not only on
CounterPunch
, but on many other seditious journalistic enterprises, such as the UK’s
Private Eye
, the fortnightly at whose helm he stood at a crucial moment in the early 1960s, or the
National Guardian
founded by Cedric Belfrage, James Aronson, and John McManus.

Claud was a child of empire, born in the British legation in Peking, son of Harry Cockburn, the British minister there during the Boxer rising, who had spent twenty years in Chungking and was on friendly terms with the Empress Dowager of the Middle Kingdom. Claud grew up mostly in Budapest, and went to Berkhamsted school, run by his friend Graham Greene’s father. Just young enough to escape slaughter in the Great War, he went to Oxford, lived in Paris, wrote for Ezra Pound’s
Dial
, worked for the London
Times
in Berlin, saw the rise of Hitler, and went to New York to describe the Crash.

He turned left, quit the
Times
, joined the
Daily Worker
, the newspaper of the British Communist Party, founded his famous anti-fascist newsletter
The Week
, and fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, joining the Republic militia before the International Brigades were formed. His superiors ordered him back from the front lines to assume the propaganda duties alluded to in the piece below. 1947 saw him quit
The Worker
and the CP, move to Ireland, and start a whole new life as a novelist and freelance commentator. His first book,
Beat the Devil
, written under the name James Helvick, was turned into Huston’s well-known film of the same name. He wrote other novels, including
Ballantyne’s Folly
and
Jericho Road
, and three volumes of masterly memoirs, collected in
I, Claud
.

He wrote fast, with a beautifully easy style. His prose could be light, ironic, also savage. He was learned but never overbearing, cultivated but never patronizing. He respected and enjoyed people at all social levels and ages. He loved dogs. Under the force of his example who could resist the lure of journalism? None of his sons did, to the initial gloom of our mother Patricia, who knew first-hand that freelance journalism doesn’t always bring home regular slabs of bacon.

His body simply wore out when he was seventy-seven though his mind stayed sharp till his last breath.

The day before he died in St. Finbarr’s hospital in Cork he dictated a column for the
Irish Times
to Patricia. He never soured on his ideals, never lost faith in humanity’s nobler instincts, never failed to see the humor in life.

Shortly before Claud died, amid one of the periodic uproars about upper-class British spies, my friend Ben Sonnenberg asked him to write a piece for Ben’s literary quarterly
Grand Street
. Claud turned in a masterly essay, full of astute observations about Guy Burgess and spy mania, but also with a wonderfully tragic-comic memoir about the strange death of Basil Murray in Valencia. I include it here because
Grand Street
is not easily available.

Spies and Two Deaths in Spain

by Claud Cockburn

Before he was revealed as a central figure—perhaps the mastermind—of the Burgess-Maclean-Philby spy scandal, the rapscallion Guy Burgess used sometimes to join me at a table in one of the bars of the House of Commons and, in the course of conversation, proclaim that he was an agent of the Soviet government. This would come out in a drink-slurred roar, clearly audible to, for example, Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, towering massively at the bar, as well as to any other politician or newspaperman in the place.

He would usually, somewhere in the talk, make another emphatic assertion. This was to the effect that he was the illegitimate son of the then Lady Rothschild. It was, he implied, a fact which accounted for his expert knowledge of international finance.

The claim about his illegitimacy was entirely false and quite a number of people who ought to have known better believed it. And his claim to be an agent of the KGB was true and no one believed it. It was a crude and entirely successful example of the double bluff. If anyone—and I suppose there were some such in British counter-intelligence—were to report a suspicion about Burgess’s role, his superior was likely to reply with weary contempt, “I know, I know, he keeps saying so himself.”

The ploy about Lady Rothschild appealed to people as a fairly titillating piece of gossip. It was useful to Burgess and he employed it for the same reason that his contemporary Brendan Bracken, Britain’s Information Minister throughout the war and an immensely successful political and financial pirate, used to claim that he was the
illegitimate son of Winston Churchill. Reading the excitingly simplistic accounts of successive spy scandals in British publications, I find it useful to recall these facts about Burgess, which indicate in their own simple way how complex the detection of spies in our midst can be. We have had spy scares every few years, and I have no doubt, are going to have more of them. In the same way, scares about terrorism—together with more or less fraudulent analyses of the supposed activities and motivations of terrorists—will certainly proliferate as the nervous system of the general public increasingly demands sedation in the face of horrifying phenomena.