Coming to terms: six years on
(and seventeen months of Bush still to go)

Malcolm freely admits he is still trying to get a perspective on the madness of these last six years.

The event

He arrived home mid-late afternoon, that Tuesday. Before he was into the house, his wife called out that his daughter was safe. Why? What?

All television channels were rolling the news feed: the smoke and horror of Manhattan, three thousand miles away and five hours time difference.

His daughter should have been going into work in one of the buildings which subsequently collapsed. She should have arrived at the World Trade Center by the PATH link from Hoboken. (Until now, Malcolm had thought that meant "Passage under the Hudson". He now sees it means "Port Authority Trans-Hudson" Corporation.)

What saved the daughter was the baby, just a few months old, and needing to be delivered to the day-care facility. He had filled his nappy, twice, so she had missed two trains. As a result, and somewhat flustered, she pulled in very late at Hoboken to be told that the PATH was not operating, and that everyone should go home. Hoboken station is right on the waterside, and the plume of black smoke just across the river was only too obvious.

Cell-phones were not working, partly because of the consumer overload, partly because of deliberate official intervention, and partly because the aerials on top of the WTC had been taken out. Her husband was in Dallas, Texas, at a conference. She could not contact him. By some strange dispensation she was able to phone London. So a strange bouncing of messages took place. She phoned London. London phoned the husband's sister in Los Angeles. She phoned Dallas. And vice versa. And for some time.

The husband, and three New York colleagues, rented a car (the only transportation available, remember) and drove, non-stop, from Dallas to New York: thirty hours, 1550 miles. They were not the only ones.

The daughter assumed that the rest of her team, for whom she felt responsible, could be under the rubble: in fact all were safe, but she would not know that for two days. Other members of her company, with whom she had worked, were on American Airlines flight 77.

That evening, the 9th September, she eventually arrived back at her hometown, and collected the baby from day-care. Later she discovered that the nursery helpers, way past their usual hours, were still caring for two uncollected children. Learning that, she says, was the moment it all closed in on her.

The consequences

Perhaps those subjective recollections were what clouded Malcolm's objective judgments. Or perhaps he merely went with the flow.

The deposing of a fascist dictator is a good thing, yes? And Saddam Hussein and his Baathist régime were a blood-bespattered lot, who had consciously moulded their structures and methods on the Nazi example.

There was, and is, clear and incontrovertible evidence that Saddam's Iraq was a military threat, that it had invaded its neighbours, and deliberately and earnestly sought weapons of mass destruction. Nay-sayers should refer to the Supergun Affair, and recognise that Saddam did initiate both nuclear weapons and biological weapons programmes. What the US and UK did not know (because the Iraqi totalitarianism was so opaque) was that these had not been sustainable.

So far, so ...

Malcolm is still not sure whether he would not repeat his acceptance of the military option.

Organising the aftermath

When the American and British forces crossed the Rhine in 1945, and brought about the collapse of the Third Reich, what happened next (at least in the Western Zones of Occupation) was well rehearsed.

The US Army had some practical experience: they had administered Mexico in 1847-8, the former Confederacy after 1865, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba after the Spanish-American War, and the Rhineland after World War I. From this experience, a committee in the War College in 1939-40 had actually produced a manual on administering occupied territory.

Nor were the British, having run an empire, any further behind.

As early as the beginning of 1941 the Intelligence Training Centre of the War Office began courses at St John's College, Cambridge, "to train officers in postwar reconstruction and other missions incident to military operations in foreign countries".

Some fifty months later the investment paid off. And three years after that, a new, dynamic and democratic Federal Republic of Germany was up-and-running. And after that came the Wirtschaftswunder.

Anyone who wants to get into this period, in Malcolm's view, should start with the fiction and romance, and then work back to the history. Leon Uris creamed the popular market with the near-weepie Armageddon, published in 1963, but covering the period from the mid-1940s to the Berlin Airlift. Still available (if only on the second-hand market), still as good as any other historical thriller. For a less emotive, more satisfying read, then it's John le Carré, including his impression of Bonn as A Small Town in Germany. In passing, for Malcolm, Len Deighton (especially the historical reconstructions Bomber and Fighter, and the marvellous Bernard Samson series) trumps le Carré every time. Philip Kerr's revived Bernie Gunther (of whom, doubtless, more anon) also catches the mood.

Au suivant!

And then ...

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

... the memo "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action" notes that U.S. "military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace," but adds that "little thought" has been given to, among other things, "the aftermath and how to shape it."

Who is thereby seen to be derelict of their duty? Who should be held responsible?

Clearly the American authorities bulldozed their way through (and apparently without) any contingency planning. That implies we can no longer trust the Pentagon's forward planning (including that of General Petraeus, just this last week) until they prove themselves and their judgments to the contrary.

Equally, the UK systems, under the new Prime Minister, need to be more wary, more transparent, more credible and less credulous in their actions and interpretation of American initiatives.

And now...

A wholesale stream of "I told you so" confessions and self-exculpations are being loosed on the public. As token of that, by courtesy of the New York Times Book Update, Malcolm receives notice of The Terror Presidency (a nice, ambiguous title, that) by Jack Goldsmith. Malcolm regards the New York Times Sunday edition (which arrives in umpteen sections over two days), of which the book section is just one part, one of the journalistic delights of the world. It makes our domestic Sunday Times seem small beer.

Goldsmith was for just nine months, from the autumn of 2003, head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the US Justice Department. As such he was, effectively, the main scrutineer of legal opinion on the actions of the Presidency.

Goldsmith was a conservative republican loyalist, and got his job on that basis. Even so he found the White House's shenanigans unacceptable. Here's he lays out his stall:

I was briefed on some of the most sensitive counterterrorism operations in the government. Each of these operations was supported by OLC opinions written by my predecessors. As I absorbed the opinions, I concluded that some were deeply flawed: sloppily written, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the President. I was astonished, and immensely worried, to discover that some of our most important counterterrorism policies rested on severely damaged legal foundations.

Goldsmith puts that, and himself, in a very specific, significant and physical context: sitting under the framed photograph of a predecessor, Elliot Richardson. Richardson had been ordered by Nixon to sack the Special Prosecutor, Archibald Cox (and so frustrate further investigation into Watergate): Richardson had refused, and honourably resigned.

The New York Times reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, says:

The portrait of the Bush administration that Mr. Goldsmith — who resigned from the Office of Legal Counsel in June 2004, only nine months after assuming the post — draws in this book is a devastating one. It is a portrait of a highly insular White House obsessively focused on expanding presidential power and loathe to consult with Congress, a White House that frequently made up its mind about a course of action before consulting with experts, a White House that sidelined Congress in its policymaking and willfully pursued a “go-it-alone approach” based on “minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense.”

Malcolm sees a sad truth in that; it tells us nothing new. It reinforces all that we felt, and feared about the Bush/Cheney Administration.

For Malcolm, that leaves three areas of questions:

• How many more of these "revelations" are to come from other White House defectors and discards? Can this Prsidency be besmirched any further? Will this one emerge as the most discredited Presidency of modern times? Or of all time?
  
• How can the next Presidency clean the Augean stables, rebuild a relationship with the people (not just the American people, but those of the entire US sphere of influence) and live, like every previous President had to, eventually, within and under the Law? And when will the Supreme Court scent the wind, assert itself, and regain its pre-eminent position in the tripartite system?
  
• Can we wait that long?

Sphere: Related Content

Chiaroscuro
from Moltrasio

Here we have the Telegraph comment column regaling us with the deeply-considered thoughts of Iain Dale, Tory blogsmith and man-about-the-hamlet. A bit curious that: Dale's own blogsite is in the hands of a caretaker (Shane Greer) while he is on holiday on Lake Como (see left).

And very nice it must be there, too.

Dale's theme is:

Gordon Brown is out to destroy the Tories

Gordon Brown's political strategy has finally been exposed. Tories have spent the past 10 weeks wondering if they had misjudged the Prime Minister, but now he has unwittingly revealed that far from adopting a "new kind of politics", he's using classic old politics to try to skewer the Tories.

Well, that's as well to know. It would have distressed Malcolm greatly had Gordon Brown been in the business of promoting the Tories. And that "classic old politics" sounds very tasty indeed.

Yesterday's regal and be-fuschia'd visit of Thatcher to Downing Street was one of the neatest skewerings of recent history, and an object lesson (from both parties) in the trade-craft of the spadassin.

If he wasn't so obviously a clueless refugee from the 128th Upper-Class Twit of the Year Competition, Cameron might deserve sympathy for such an efficient dissection.

Well, not really.

Yesterday's outing was a classic. Consider our young fellow-me-lad, coping with foot-and-mouth, while self-evidently himself foot-in-mouth. There he was suggesting:

that pressure had been put on the Chief Veterinary Officer, Debby Reynolds, to declare Britain clear of the virus.

Calling on Gordon Brown to "get a grip" Mr Cameron said yesterday: "I think there is a real question about Government competence."

The Mail's Benedict Brogan had a different take on that:

David Cameron gave the BBC an interview on foot and mouth earlier, but for some reason it was not carried by the 6 o'clock news. In it he suggests Gordon Brown is losing his grip on the crisis and that the Government may have put pressure on the chief veterinary officer to declare Surrey was free of the disease. He's made similar comments to Sky News.

Now, I've just asked someone in Downing Street what they made of Mr Cameron's remarks, and learn that the Prime Minister actually telephoned Mr Cameron earlier to brief him on developments. In fact, Mr Cameron popped up on the telly in the corner of the PM's office while they were talking. I'm told Mr Brown was somewhat mystified to have Mr Cameron berating him on Sky while he was trying to explain to the Leader of the Opposition the dangers of the media jumping to conclusions. I'm not told how the conversation finished, but something tells me all this consensus malarky is about to get the heave-ho.

UPDATE: Sources say that when Mr Brown and Sir Menzies Campbell discussed foot and mouth later, they compared notes on what they believe is Mr Cameron's 'lack of seriousness'.

Malcolm makes a memo: "skewering" and "consensus malarky", both on the same day. Mixed messages there.

Now, the really interesting reaction is the National Farmers' Union, the heartland of the Conservative core vote, Malcolm would suggest.

Complaints that the previous restrictions were lifted too quickly? Not a hint. On the contrary, the NFU is pushing for the restrictions on livestock movements to be more localised. Here is the Surrey NFU Chairman on the NFU's own website:

"This is the time of year when livestock farmers are trading their stock and their income for the year depends on it.
"The Prime Minister was sincerely interested in the issues we raised but the reality is that we have to get on top of the disease first. We did agree that the first priority was to contain and eradicate this outbreak and I am grateful for Mr Brown’s continued commitment."

Support for David Cameron? None too obvious. In fact, the morning BBC News made noises that "farmers' leaders are expressing concern about Mr Cameron's intervention". That's another story that seems to have been quietly and quickly spiked.

Cameron's problem starts by not having a Denis.

Denis Thatcher was a rabid right-winger, and quite happy to play the gin-swilling golfer for the gallery. Behind that bluff exterior there lurked a shrewd business brain, and a discreet occasional nudge on the tiller.

Denis had some grasp of farming. During the 1979 Election Campaign, Margaret Thatcher (and one suspects the media savvy of Gordon Reece played a part) was photographed cuddling a two-day old calf. It was a superb photo-opportunity, and played well to the suburban crowd. Denis, however, and not quite sotto voce, expressed concern for the calf (and that played as well with the real wellie-brigade).

Iain Dale, with whom this entry started, seems to expect Andy Coulson, royal 'phone tapper extra-ordinaire, to be Cameron's Gordon Reece, Denis Thatcher and Angelo Dundee:

Coulson's message to David Cameron, and indeed the whole Conservative Party, must be this: Gordon Brown is out to destroy you. It's no good adopting a defensive strategy. You can't just defend your ground. The best form of defence is attack and you must go in all guns blazing.

Gordon Brown does not yet believe the next general election is in the bag, but among his foot soldiers you can smell the stench of complacency.

David Cameron must demonstrate that they are in for the fight of their lives. The next four weeks, I believe, will determine the course of politics for the foreseeable future.

So far, Cameron's recent form has been very lightweight: an issue a day, and on to the next drubbing. Joe Louis, back in 1940-41, had his "bum of the month club"; so perhaps Dale's metaphors and time-frame should be over-printed with a blue Absit omen.

Because, at the moment, the main sport is machine-gunning the barrel of stinking Tory fish.

Sphere: Related Content

This is Blog number 250, of Malcolm Redfellow revivus.

Malcolm was given the Doctor Frankenstein-treatment and renewed his mouthing off, just a year ago.

Has it changed the planet? Did all those little electrons whizz round the cybersphere to any effect, however small?

Is it, indeed, a Brave New World since he came back to be in it?

Let him review the hit-list:

• David Cameron brought to earth with a minuscule pharp! Check.
• Some kind of normal civility and much chumminess established in Northern Ireland. Check.
• The total moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the 43rd President of the United States, all his adherents and all his works, exposed. Check.
• Supplies of real ale maintained in all key watering holes across North London and the galaxy. Check.
• The sheer nonsense that is Formula One motor-racing derided and reduced to the irrelevance it should properly be. Check. (Curiously, this posting last March, one of Malcolm's briefest, seemed to attract as much attention and agreement as any).
• Democratic socialism established across the known globe. Errr ... not quite yet.

So much still to do! Onwards and upwards! Nil bastardi carborundum! Sphere: Related Content

Belfast Memorial to the International Brigaders.

Saturday 13th October, 11 a.m. Writers Square, Donegal Street, unveiling by Bob Doyle.

All other information about the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the exhibition at the Linen Hall Library (from the Friday evening), and the AGM from Lynda Walker or refer to the IBMT site.

That's the factual (and important) stuff out of the way. Sphere: Related Content

Long live the Fifteenth Brigade!

It's a great song, a rousing song, but Malcolm has severe doubts that many in fact marched off cheerfully to the Jarama Front singing:

Viva La Quince Brigade—
Rumbala, rumbala, rumbla
Viva La Quince Brigade—
Rumbala, rumbala, rumbala
Che se a cubuerto de gloria—
Ay Manuela, ay Manuela...

The third stanza implies a vague link with the actuality:

At Jarama we're still standing
Rumbala, rumbala, rumbala:
And we have no planes above us,
Not a tank, not any cannon
Ay Manuela! ay Manuela!

As will become clear in a moment, the XVth did not have no planes above us at this time.

The history

Antony Beever records that:

On 12 February [1937] Asensio's troops captured the commanding feature of Pingarrón, while to the north XI International and 17 Brigade just held on at Pajares. The newly formed XV International Brigade was thrown into the breach on the San Martín-Morata road to face Sáenz de Buruaga's troops. They consisted of a British battalion, commanded by Tom Wintringham, the Dimitrov battalion and a Franco-Belgian battalion. The American battalion was being hurried through induction at Albacete to be ready to reinforce them.

When Beevor's verson is set alongside Hugh Thomas's earlier history (and Malcolm's more favoured reading), it seems little more than a terse summary:

Asensio... the next day, the 12th, stormed and captured the heights of Pingarrón, on the other side of the river [Jarama]. Sáenz de Buruaga's brigade crossed also at San Martín and joined Asensio in a new offensive at the south of the front towards Morata de Tajuña.

The ensuing battle was marked by Republican control of the air for the first time. Nationalist Junkers were driven out of the sky by Russian fighters. It also marked the first fight of the XVth International Brigade, commanded by Colonel 'Gal', a naturalized Russian, of Hungarian birth like Kléber and Lukacz. Gal was incompetent, bad-tempered and hated. The central figure in the formation of the brigade was the Chief of Staff, the gallant English Captain Nathan—shortly promoted to the rank of Major. The Political Commissar was a French Communist, Jean Chaintron, who passed under the name of 'Bethel'. The brigade comprised volunteers from twenty-six nations. The first battalion of the brigade consisted of 600, chiefly Englishmen of the Saklatvala Battalion—so called after the Indian Communist of that name who had been briefly a Member of Parliament in the twenties, but was usually known as the British Battalion. In command was the 'English Captain', Tom Wintringham, once of Balliol College, Oxford, more recently editor of Left Review, a communist and military correspondent of the Daily Worker. The Political Commissar was a rugged Scottish communist, George Aitken.

The British Battalion included a large number of Scots and some Welshmen. There were also some Americans in the battalion at this stage, sixty Cypriots (from London), an Abyssinian, an Australian, a Jamaican, a South African and a Cuban. The other three battalions of the XVth Brigade were 800 mixed Balkans of the Dimitrov Battalion; 800 French and Belgians of the 6th of February (or Franc0-Belgian) Battalion; and 500 Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion including many Negroes. The Abraham Lincoln Battalion was still training at the village of Villa nueva de la Jara, near Albacete. The Irish were divided between the Abraham Lincoln and the British Battalions. Those who joined the former did so because they had objected to the British Daily Worker's omission to mention that many of the fallen on the Córdoba front at Christmas had been Irish. They had then been serving with the British No. 1 Company, and had rioted when their first request for a transfer had been refused. Frank Ryan, their leader, also had a public quarrel with Marty...

Malcolm quotes this at length not just because it is more detailed, but because it is delightfully cadenced. For example, the detail of Tom Wintringham, once of Balliol College, Oxford brings the man to life, as does the concealed-meaning in a rugged Scottish communist, George Aitken; while the recital of the national origins leads the reader to wonder Why? How?

Back to Viva la Quince Brigada

As far as Malcolm can determine, the song was wished on the folk-music scene by one Bart Van Der Schelling, a musician, activist and member of the Dutch segment of the International Brigade.

Time Magazine has this from 4th August 1941:

World War II has yet to produce a great song, but last week some of its saddest were heard in the U.S. The League of American Writers produced an album of records ($2.75) called Behind the Barbed Wire—six songs of the French, Spanish, Italian and German anti-Fascists who now rot in the French concentration camps of Gurs, Vernet d'Ariège, Argelès-sur-Mer.

The six songs were recorded in Manhattan by a Netherlands-born fighter in the Spanish Civil War, Bart van der Schelling. He wears his chin in a brace, is called "official singer" for the U.S. survivors of the International Brigades of the Loyalists. Singer van der Schelling is backed by an "Exiles Chorus" directed by Earl Robinson (Ballad for Americans). Some of the songs—the Spanish Joven Guardia, the Italian Guardia Rossa, the German Thaelmann-Bataillon, the French Au Devant de la Vie (music by Soviet Composer Dmitri Shostakovich)—were composed during the Spanish War. Most of them are in rough, plodding march time. The one which gives the album its name was composed by a German, Eberhard Schmitt, in the camp at Gurs. Its chorus, translated (not quite so lame in the original):
Behind the wire, our courage is unbroken;
We yield to no one! We're not broken reeds!
Jail or internment, we're masters of our lives,
Nothing counts with us but deeds!
For where Germany's and Austria's sons may be,
One goal they cling to: Liberty! . . .

Malcolm has never come across hair nor hide nor shellac of that 1941 recording, but we find Quinte Brigada [sic] is track 14 on "Fighting the Fascists, 1942-44", which is Disc 4 of Bear Family Records 10-CD compendium of Songs for Political Action. The credited musicians and singers are Pete Seeger, Tom Glazer, Baldwin Hawes and Bess Lomax.

It next turns up in The People's Songbook, originally published by Boni and Gaer in New York in 1948. And from there it became a:

Traditional Spanish Folksong from 'The People's Songbook', also known as 'Ah, Manuela!' it is possibly the war's signature song.

Thereafter, it turns up repeatedly in Pete Seeger's repertoire, notably in the Carnegie Hall Concert of June 8, 1963.

Though fond of the song, Malcolm has some doubts about the honesty of its parentage. It sure ain't "traditional", but van der Schelling or Seeger: does it really matter?

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Eisenhower for civil rights?

One of Malcolm's very earliest memories is from Wednesday, November 3rd, 1948.

He is able to be so precise because it involves asking his father what was so special about that morning's BBC radio news. Dad (not the most politically-focused of souls) explained it was the American election. To the astonishment of most, and to universal and lasting derision of the Chicago Daily Post (see right), Harry Truman saw off Thomas Dewey.

Perhaps, in that moment, the seed of a lifetime's commitment and interest was sown.

Truman's reputation has grown steadily (and "steadily" is one word that seems to go neatly with HST). That of his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, may be somewhat more mixed. He is regularly placed, commonly just behind Truman, in the top ten of Presidents by the traditional listing by academic historians. He is also identified in many minds with the materialism, conservatism and inhibitions of the "Eisenhower Fifties". Much, perhaps too much, of these lasting impressions derive from the contemporary judgments of a few journalists: Arthur Krock and James Reston at the New York Times, the Alsop brothers, Joseph and Stewart, in their "Matters of Fact" columns for the New York Herald-Tribune, the syndicated opinions of Marquis Childs, and, above all, Walter Lippman.

Malcolm ran through these thoughts as he read a piece in today's New York Times Op-Ed column, by David A. Nichols, and by-lined from Winfield, Kansas. Winfield is where the former professor and academic dean at Southwestern College in Kansas is usefully spending his retirement. Here Nichols is, of course, giving a short-hand version of the thesis he developed in A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution. (There are introductory reviews here, and here. There is useful historical material here.)

Eisenhower's link to Kansas is partly factual and partly faux-folksiness for his wartime troops. He is the first Texas-born US President (Malcolm uses that phrasing to exclude the period 1836-1846), but grew up in Abilene KS, and chose to place his Presidential Library there. That's the Abilene ("population 6,409") in northern Kansas, on modern I-70, but the one where Wild Bill Hickok was briefly Marshal and saw off John Wesley Hardin. Eisenhower's representation as a Kansas farm-boy comes from his early job as night-watchman in the Belle Springs Dairy, Abilene.

Nichols champions Eisenhower as the harbinger of Civil Rights legislation. This, of course, runs counter to the grain of some opinions, as in the wikipedia view:

Liberal critics complained Eisenhower was never enthusiastic about civil rights, but he did propose to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed those acts into law, although both Acts were very weak and added little to the total electorate. Nonetheless, they constituted the first significant civil rights acts since the 1870s.

Nichols notes the significance of the 1957 Civil Rights Act (which the article celebrates, and passed 50 years ago this week), the first federal legislation on black rights for 82 years. The main obstacle against even such modest moves was that:

a coalition of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans had consistently blocked progress.

In particular Nichols identifies one particular villain:

Eisenhower complained in 1967 that if his critics felt “there was anything good done” in his presidency, “they mostly want to prove that it was somebody else that did it and that I went along as a passenger.” That has been especially true of his championship of civil rights.

The “somebody else” in this instance was Lyndon B. Johnson, who in 1957 was the Senate’s Democratic majority leader. Historians have consistently credited Johnson for the bill’s passage. Yes, Johnson played a role, but hardly the one his advocates might imagine: Eisenhower and his attorney general, Herbert Brownell Jr., first proposed strong legislation, and it was Johnson and his Southern cronies who weakened it beyond recognition.

Johnson wanted a cosmetic bill that would enhance his presidential ambitions without alienating his white Southern base. It was a balancing act, as even a weak bill depended on Eisenhower’s new legislative coalition, which formed after he persuaded the Republicans to abandon their longtime opposition to civil rights legislation. (Republicans provided 37 of the 60 yes votes when the final bill passed the Senate.)

Eisenhower's main civil rights issue was the fall-out from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka judgment, which reversed the "separate but equal" provisions from 1896. His immediate response was to insist that the District of Columbia immediately applied those conditions. The crisis came, not from the Supreme Court decision, but from its subsequent order (31 May 1955) to lower courts to use "all deliberate speed" to integrate schooling. That led to the "Little Rock Nine" incident, when Eisenhower conscripted the Arkansas National Guard, and stiffened it by federal forces; and Governor Orval Faubus realised that going eyeball-to-eyeball with the wartime Supreme Allied Commander was not a good percentage play.

Where Nichols is helpful is identifying the extent of Eisenhower's 1957 proposals:

The Eisenhower proposal had four main parts. The first two — the creation of a civil rights commission to investigate voting irregularities and a civil rights division in the Justice Department — survive to this day. The other two pillars, unfortunately, became victims of politics. Part 3 proposed to grant the attorney general unprecedented authority to file suits to protect broad constitutional rights, including school desegregation. Part 4 provided for federal civil suits to prosecute voting rights violations.

Nicholls again fingers the chief suspects:

Senator Richard Russell of Georgia (see left) led the attack on Part 3, accusing the attorney general of conspiring “to destroy the system of separation of the races in the Southern states at the point of a bayonet.” Johnson eventually told Eisenhower he had the votes to kill the entire bill unless the president dropped Part 3. Eisenhower reluctantly capitulated.

Russell was four decades a Senator, with a record that was not wholly malign, and was LBJ's tutor in the black arts of the Senate: he had missed out on the Democratic nomination for 1952. His placement, by LBJ, on the Warren Commission is frequently mentioned by the conspiracy theorists as indicative of mischief or worse. He deserves to be more remembered, perhaps, for his evaluation (as Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, no less) of the thermo-nuclear stand-off:

If we have to start over again with another Adam and Eve, then I want them to be Americans and not Russians, and I want them on this continent and not in Europe.

It was Russell, too, who detected UFOs in the Soviet Union.

In passing, Malcolm finds a moment to wonder whether, today, we should be so squeamish in "destroy[ing] the system of separation of the races ... at the point of a bayonet".

However, Nicholls continues to note the fate of the final part of the Eisenhower proposals:

The reasoning behind the fourth part of the proposal, providing for civil suits, was that in 1957, civil rights prosecutions were carried out by the criminal division of the Justice Department, and offenses would be subject to jury trials. Given the all-white juries of the South, prosecutions were acts in futility.

Johnson's machinations to suppress this move, ironically founded on a civil right premise of "denying defendants their constitutional right to a trial by jury", angered Eisenhower, who forced a compromise:

to allow civil suits before a judge without a jury so long as the projected punishment did not exceed a $300 fine or 45 days in prison.

Nicholls concludes:

Eisenhower’s bravery on the act went largely unrecognized by the civil rights leadership. An exception was Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was New York’s only black member of Congress. “After 80 years of political slavery,” Powell declared, this was “the second emancipation.” More typical was the reaction of Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons, who called it “a small crumb from Congress.”

Perhaps, but it was the first crumb Congress had dropped in eight decades.

Eisenhower's long-term reputation will not need to depend substantially on episodes like the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960. It is proper, though, to recall they had significance.

Equally, Malcolm finds time to ponder on Truman's and Eisenhower's (both Kansans by adoption) approaches to the racial issue. Truman's Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 (of July 1948) ordered integration in, respectively, federal employment and the armed services.

In his article today, and in his more important book, Nichols has shown that Eisenhower's efforts also deserve some honour, even if Ike's rhetoric was, typically, and, as Nichols himself says, "disappointing".

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Malty musings

Malcolm, after his previous posting (about the Crown Liquor Saloon, in Belfast; with which he beat The Times by a full day), began musing about the congeniality of pubs. In particular, is there some necessary link between age and agreeableness?

This gentle, and genteel, consideration was begun in the very pleasant surrounds, with good company, at the Spaniards on the top of Hampstead Heath. Too many visitors take a casual look, and make totally-erroneous assumptions about the Spaniards. For a start, all the Dick Turpin guff is absolute garbage. Inside, the Spaniards is tatty, substantially furnished with the throw-outs of any jumble sale around (see right). It is, indeed, quaint; and desirably so. In scope and clientele it is not just one pub but several. On warm and balmy weekends it crawls with families and their kids coming in from the Heath across the pinch-point in the road. During the working week it is a haven of peace, quiet and pleasure: logoed tradesmen brushing past besuited types. So Malcolm, after two pints of London Pride and a substantial ploughman's, felt at ease with the world. It would have been even more idyllic had the Adnam's been on tap: it wasn't, but Pride is a worthy runner-up.

A week ago he had one of the finest pints of Adnams Broadside imaginable in the George in Stamford. Now, Malcolm has a very tender spot for Adnams. He had a maternal relative who ran the Lord Nelson in Southwold many years ago, still the nicest pub in one of England's most attractive small towns.

In his early married life, Malcolm drank Adnams in the Angel in Bury St Edmunds; but that was in the days before the Gough family up-dated a respectable and estimable local hostelry and made it into something just too squeaky and streamlined for a simple pint. No worry; Bury is well provided with other places of resort, most of them serving Greene King Abbot Ale: younger Malcolm spent too many hours in the Fox in Eastgate Street, then on the outskirts, now hemmed in by new development and the A14 ring-road.

For years, though, Malcolm fought shy of Adnams off its own Suffolk turf. It seemed not to travel too well. That was an impression helped by some dodgy beer keeping. More recently the brand has been turning up more widely; and seems to have gained seven-league boots. This implies either a change of the basic formula, or (more likely) better carriage and cellaring. Either way, it is a serious improvement to English drinking.

Back to Hampstead

The turn of the millennium has not been kind to the NW3 drinker. Both the Nag's Head (a.k.a. The Cruel Sea) and the Horse and Groom (a.k.a "The Remorse and Gloom") are lost and gone. Malcolm misses the latter (a decent Youngs house in the trappings of a small gin-palace), but not the former: he does wonder, however, how the literati and thespian communities survive without either. The Flask, just down the Walk, is still there (though there are severe qualms about the imminent "touching up" being promised).

Jack Straw's Castle, at the top of Heath Street, was never in recent memory a wholly successful experience, and has now been converted to apartments. In passing, Malcolm urges all to ignore any claim to it being the "highest pub in London": that is The Gatehouse across the Heath in Highgate (of which more, doubtless, in a subsequent posting).

The Olde White Bear is not to be totally by-passed: it has a good beer selection. For Malcolm, it lacks that X-factor ingredient of atmosphere, of "agreeableness", as the necessary concomitant to the fullest enjoyment of good ale, which is the main issue of this posting.

After the rush to gentrify and gastro-pub anything in sight (which takes the worthy Wells Hotel—and its now-missing bar stool, identified as "Elizabeth Taylor sat here"—out of consideration), the serious drinker in search of gritty authenticity is left with only the Holly Bush, up the hill.

Malcolm likes the Holly Bush. The steep hill, the secluded position off the tourist-beaten track help to divert the less knowing to other watering-places. The clean exterior disguises the artful clutter, the domestic proportions, within.

He cannot help reflecting on its history. It was originally the stables of the painter, George Romney. So, next door and later at the lady's house at 10, Edgware Road (now, perhaps appropriately, an Odeon Cinema), Romney repeatedly—perhaps as many as a hundred times between 1782-1786—painted "Mrs Emma Hart", the late teenaged mistress of the Hon. Charles Grenville (example, see left). Not so much a commission, more an obsession, one might fairly think. However, "Who she?" one may well ask. Well, she was formerly Amy Lyon, daughter of a Cheshire blacksmith, and later Lady Hamilton of Nelsonian fame.

Say no more ...

... except that the Holly Bush serves Adnams.

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The Crown of Life

Malcolm gave up the weed when fags went to 4/6 [22½p] a packet, and because, quite frankly, he couldn't see the point.

However, he is a beer bore. There are few British breweries of which he is totally ignorant. He regards the Belgians with considerable affection for their ability to turn basic ingredients into something splendiferous. An American micro-brewery is another delight to be tested, tasted and marked down for love or (rarely) loathing.

So he was distinctly chuffed when first Irish, then Northern Irish, then British pubs went smoke-free.

Now, in the spirit of Dave Bowman's advice to Heywood Floyd, for something wonderful.

There is, in Belfast, at 46 Great Victoria Street, the self-proclaimed Most Beautiful Bar in the World. That claim may be arguable, but not actionable. In any case, the Crown Liquor Saloon has one of the best pub-based websites in the world (albeit in need of a spell-check), and that is beyond peradventure.

The Crown has been owned by the National Trust for thirty years, and it has been well-loved. Malcolm's first visit there was long before that, and before it began to be tidied up and gentrified. Its survival (together with that other wonder, the Edwardian glass in Stroke City's Guildhall) is one of the great escapes of the years of the Troubles (and the decades of "redevelopment"): in its own small way as remarkable and deserved a survival as St Paul's and St Pancras in London, or the Kölner Dom.

Now, the Crown is a fixture and place of pilgrimage on every Belfast tourist trail. Rightly so. And it's about to get even better. Here's Linda McKee doing a puff piece for the Belfast Telegraph:

The nicotine layer has been scraped away - and restorers working at the Crown Bar in Belfast are discovering the beautiful colours beneath.

A small army of conservators has been working hard to restore the National Trust-owned Victorian pub to its former glory, and the work is expected to be complete by the end of October.

Project manager Claire McGill, a freelance conservator, says the £500,000 restoration scheme was long overdue.

The popular bar is the only National Trust-owned pub in Northern Ireland and has been described as the best preserved Victorian pub in the UK.

Not only was one of its snugs reproduced for the classic film Odd Man Out but its interior was described by John Betjeman as a "many coloured cavern".

But the gorgeous glass, ceramic and woodwork which lined that cavern has suffered a lethal combination of cigarette smoke, graffiti, wear and around 20 bomb attacks in the area.

Ah, yes. The ceiling was always a very dusky brown. The snugs bore the imprints of many a misplaced pen-knife. The floor and tiles were, at best, well-worn. The jakes were a disgrace.

All changed, changed utterly. And all, Malcolm hopes and expects, for the better.

Malcolm's only regret is that he has no visit planned before December. Just time for the Guinness properly to settle.

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Doctor Newton's third Lawe of the Body politick

As Malcolm has argued here before, the most immutable rule in politics is that for every action there is a necessary and predictable reaction. It may not be instant, but it is inevitable.

This is evidenced yet again by the commendable action of U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in the New York U.S. District Court, and reported this morning by Dan Eggen on the front page of the Washington Post.

Anyone with half a smigeon of a liberal principle will long have been uneasy about the "catch-all" (if only...) nature of the Patriot Act. Anything that requires such a convolved acronym (The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act), is instantly suspect in Malcolm's book. The Act was a major knee-shudder reaction to 9-11, but was intended to have a life-expectancy of four years. Naturally, like all extensions of state power, it has lingered on, not greatly modified from its original totalitarian conception. In the 2005 review, the usual suspects slugged it out on either side, with the mule-headed hard-liners of the House winning out over the Senatorial defenders of liberty.

This is how the particular provision which Judge Marrero has red-lined works:

the FBI's issu[es] of tens of thousands of national security letters (NSLs) each year to telephone companies, Internet providers and other communications firms. The FBI says it typically orders that such letters be kept confidential to make sure that suspects do not learn they are being investigated, as well as to protect "sources and methods" used in terrorism and counterintelligence probes.

Notice the Stasi-like symmetry of that: tens of thousands of intrusive trawls every year, but the carriers, the ISPs, the telecoms companies, the postal services are put to silence to protect hypothetical "sources and methods". It is difficult to come up with a more outrageous example of state power trampling on the individual.

Anyone trying to make sense of our present world is aided and hampered in equal measure by the ever-present Orwellian truism. Most of Malcolm's blogs, in fact the pensées of all shades of opinion in the blogosphere, come down to restatements of original truths mouthed by the alter ego of Eric Blair. There ought to be some randomiser which spits out these declarations of the bleeding obvious. Strung together, of themselves they would spell out the depths of our servitude. So here goes:

• Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
• During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
• In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
• Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
• If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

So, cheers all round for Judge Marrero. The reaction against ever-intrusive state machinery continues with him and his like, our last line of defence against boot-boy politics.

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Kicking against the pricks

On one hand it shouldn't matter a toss. On the other, Malcolm knows he will salivate all the way to the finishing post, and still be hanging on the Net for over-night up-dates.

That's the 2008 US Elections. Despite the to-and-fros of the last few days, Malcolm doesn't expect the UK electoral timetable much to precede that: so he will try to concentrate on the immediate issue.

Issue number one must be the need to give the Republicans the bloodiest nose possible. Again, why does Malcolm care? He has a lot of admiration for many (liberal) Republicans. Compared to the corrupt and cloacal end of the Democrats, they are a shining example.

It's mainly the arrogance that gets him.

On an similar track he caught a repeat of an interview with John Major on the BBC Parliament channel. Major is, wisely, reclusive; and rations his appearances on these occasions. As a consequence, he seems more relaxed, and more approachable than his days wrestling across the sand of the arena.

What particularly caught Malcolm's attention was Major reminiscing about the 1992 Election outcome. He described sitting with Chris Patten, who had run a brilliant campaign for the Tories, but had lost his own seat at Bath to the LibDem, Don Foster. Major and Patten agreed that the elastic had been stretched too far with four successive General Election wins; and a reaction was inevitable.

There's an element of commendable humility in that recognition. It is what has been singularly missing in the Republican Party.

And the saner elements of the GOP are waking up to the extent of the problems. Here are Jonathan Weisman and Chris Cillizza, the Washington Post's mavens and election junkies, today surveying the wreckage:

A Senate electoral playing field that was already wide open for 2008 has become considerably more perilous for Republicans with the retirement of Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and the resignation of scandal-scarred Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho).

Republicans need a net gain of just one seat to take back control of the Senate, but they have 22 seats to defend, and campaign cash is conspicuously lacking. Warner's retirement raised to two the number of open Republican seats, and both of them -- in Virginia and Colorado -- are prime targets for Democrats.

The piece points out that Chuck Hagel may retire from his Nebraska seat, and the Republicans have to defend two appointed, and unelected, Senators in Wyoming and Idaho.

Two telling quotaions spell out the mood:

"The state of the playing field looks very good, even in places where we didn't expect it to look good, even in deeply red states," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) , chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. "Things could change, but if you did a snapshot, we're going to have a good year."

"It's always darkest right before you get clobbered over the head with a pipe wrench. But then it actually does get darker," said a GOP pollster who insisted on anonymity in order to speak candidly.

The one to watch, though, is Virginia. One obvious Democratic candidate is Mark Warner (no relation), who split the Virginia vote for the Senate 52-47 in 1996 (with the Republican vote down by 28%) and then in 2001 snaffled the Governorship by a similar margin. Mark Warner is still in his early 50s, has been noised as a potential Veep candidate, and would be a sound Democrat runner next year, in any capacity. By contrast, as Weisman and Cillizza remark, the

Republican field could turn fratricidal if Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, a moderate whose political base is in the suburbs of Washington, goes up against former governor James S. Gilmore III, a confrontational conservative.

Since this is happening just over the Post's garden fence, we can take that on good authority.

Malcolm, about to head off for a few days in Yorkshire, closes with one more consoling thought. Healey's well-proven First Law of Holes states, "when in a hole, stop digging." This earthy wisdom has, perhaps fortunately, never reached the inner circles of the US Republican Party.

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NeoCon tricks

"Anarchy in Britain"! But who's to blame? Well, try this, it's straight from the same "shock jock" cesspool as Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and the benighted Ann Coulter. So, welcome Phillip Blond:

Blame the killer kids on the middle classes
Meddling liberals have destroyed working-class culture

_____________________________________________

After that headline, it takes Blond a while to really get the boot in. He even starts in the same ball-park as some sort of reality:

Mrs Thatcher created an economic underclass in the 1980s...
Despite the endless targets of social programmes, it is harder now to climb up from the bottom than it was in the Edwardian age. Far from securing the benefits of economic growth for the working class, Labour has abandoned its original constituency for the 100,000 middle-class voters that can turn a British election. The fact that the bottom 50 per cent of the British population own less than five per cent of the wealth has not troubled Gordon Brown one bit.

Where to start?

Well, let's work from the top.

Malcolm will not apologise for the Thatcher government's economic policy, except that its cardinal error was to start a class war at the very moment Britain was hit by economic recession, the concomitant of the oil-price surge. Result: three million unemployed. In effect, Thatcherite economics were a frenzied response to that first miscalculation. This was compounded by the neglect of education and training: an essential area where the private sector could not or would not make good the lack of direct government action, and essential to re-skilling and raising productivity.

None of that, however, is anywhere near relevant to Blond's hysterical headline.

The Edwardian myth

Next that nonsense about the social movement of Edwardian society. How can such a gross generalisation be proved or disproved? All Malcolm will note is that he had an aunt who went through life with the name "Minima", because she was born in the 1912 Yorkshire Miners' Strike. The issue of the strike and the basis for her name was the demand for a "minimum wage" of 12/6 a week (the younger element may need that explained: 62½p a week).

For comparison, the second Duke of Westminster inherited his title in 1899 and "a guinea a minute" from his London rents. He was a serial adulterer with fascist sympathies. Malcolm notes that the present Duke of Westminster is worth £6.6B, well sufficient to support his taste for call-girls, is still the country's biggest landowner, and a very close associate of the Prince of Wales. So no similarities there, then.

The second Duke's contemporary, the Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, worth the modern equivalent of £3.3B: his heir inherited a million a year from coal royalties alone (and still was not accounted in the same wealth league as Londonderry or Newcastle, those other noble coal-owners).

What price social mobility, then or now, in that lot?

Labour's "original constituency"

The barb in Blond's outburst starts about here.

We should start by recognising that the Labour Party was never the party of the most deprived tier of our society. The Party was the creation of, and for a long time the creature of the craft trades unions. Since crafts are less significant in modern business, Labour's present natural "constituency" is the aspiring technological classes as much as skilled labour. That is recognised by any analysis of voters' behaviour. NOP and ICM suggest that C2 voters (the traditional "blue-collar" workers) went Conservative by a significant margin in 2002 and 2005. Labour's strength, and present "constituency" has been among mortgaged house-owners. There has also been a greater acceptance of Labour among women, the so-called "school-gate mums", liking the social policy, childcare, health and education.

The underclass

Blond's Parthian shot is that bit about:

the bottom 50 per cent of the British population [who] own less than five per cent of the wealth [which] has not troubled Gordon Brown one bit.

Malcolm does not want to quibble, but the National Statistics table he is looking at says half the population share 7% of the wealth. That figure been pretty stable for at least 30 years. However, that share was worth just £19.6B in 1973, but is worth £265B now. There is a difference (for us ordinary folks) between wealth and income: we accumulate wealth in our working years, but inevitably expend it in our retirement. Our income is often at its highest when we have least disposable income (thanks to children, mortgages and our lifestyles).

An "underclass"?

Malcolm is aware that he has himself used this term loosely on occasion. He suspects it is another term that has been imported into the general (and therefore his own) consciousness without precision or context, and based on an inexact parallel between US and UK societies.

There was, some years back, an essay, applauded by Frank Field, by Alan Buckingham of the University of Sussex, which made this point. It went on to identify the characteristics of the British "underclass", which amounted to 5.5% of a cohort sample. Apart from

the characteristic of long term unemployment, the individuals who make up that 5.5% have very little else in common which could identify them as a distinct 'class'... The chronically workless are more likely to have been sacked, to have gone to prison and to be single parents. The qualitative part of the dataset, which is aimed at gauging people's attitudes, shows a common trend toward lack of motivation, lack of commitment to work and family, and general apathy.

And therein lies the proper answer to Blond. He identifies a particular and limited social malaise with the "working class". Blond uses "the poor" and the "working class" as synonyms:

the centralised and imposed system of the welfare state was a creation of the middle-class that ultimately destroyed the self-help culture of the British poor...

The working classes originally wanted a more mutual welfare state where entitlement was based on what they put in; instead the middle classes, irritated by the ability of the poor to organise themselves, determined their needs for them - creating a depressing dependency culture in our inner cities.

The poor might have survived this if middle-class culture had not invented progressive values. In the 1960s, the middle classes abdicated a wider social responsibility and decided that the culture of their parents was paternal and repressive. They bought the idea that notions of service and responsibility were an unjust imposition and embraced the pursuit of wealth, drugs and sexual liberation as self-evident positives, in the process repudiating any idea of a common national vision.

Annus mirabilis

Ah, it's that sex and drugs and rock'n'roll thing again. Perhaps nobody told Blond that Larkin
was prone to irony:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Or perhaps Blond is impervious to irony, even his own:

While toxic to civilised middle-class life, such values were lethal to the working class. In the absence of a culture that was genuinely their own, the children of the poor embraced this middle-class decadence. They gradually abandoned each other and instead embraced glamour, greed and sexual promiscuity as if they were a form of liberation.

(Oh, dear: you weren't trying to drink at that moment, were you? Don't worry, the stain will wash out!)

Blond's solution:

Blond is right (very, very right) alongside, if not even ahead of Dave Cameron here:

[Cameron] has to give power, money and organisation back to the working class so that they can once again develop their own high culture. And he should remind the middle-class liberals he courts that it was their values (or lack thereof) that caused these problems in the first place.

(Now, Malcolm just warned you about drinking and reading at the same time!)

Don't you just lurve that conceit about "high culture"? Where did that come from? Translated into real English, it means:

Phillip is an internationally recognised theologian and philosopher. Educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he edited Post-Secular Philosophy, one of the founding texts of a new radical theology.

He has appeared as a commentator on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. He writes regular comment and editorial pieces for the International Herald Tribune. His aim is to make theology and philosophy culturally relevant and intellectually exciting.

Or, in short-hand, he's paid by the line, needs an adjective, and "high" is about as neutral and lacking in overt condescension as he can get.

Where did he get this guff from?

Well, Aldous Huxley might be in the frame. Again, though, Blond seems to have missed the irony and social satire:

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able ..."

How can anyone be so wrong?

Blond has this misconception:

Before the Second World War, working-class communities, though far poorer than today, lived lives largely free of violence and crime.

On one level that is John Major treating the Tory faithful to a muddling of George Orwell:

Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist' and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.

[Orwell's 'old maids' hiked, not biked. At least in Malcolm's text they did.]

More seriously, anybody, like Blond, who believes that the 1930s were a crime-free paradise should go back to the statistics. Then he should remember that it's not comparing like for like. Two examples,

• the Metropolitan Police recorded "thefts" as "lost property" until the 1930s, and
• in the bad old days of capital punishment, with the unwillingness of Juries to convict, "murder" was a charge used in only the most extreme cases.

And some of the worst crimes, like the 1934 Gresford Pit disaster, went unrecognised, and unpunished. Of course, that was part of the working class's "high culture": one in seven miners seriously injured, maimed or killed in a working life-time.

Malcolm is still horrified that a serious academic (being generous to Blond) can get away with this tosh, this windy diatribe, this ignorant babble, this con-trick on the reader, or be paid for it.

And even do it sober.

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Not a lot of room at the top

Malcolm has only done it the once, about a dozen years ago: made it to the top of the Empire State Building, that is. But, on the flight into Newark, he chooses the port side, expecting to see its iconic shape as G-VHOT (or G-VBIG) comes in. During his visit, he commutes in on the Midtown Direct: it's the first and last view of Manhattan.

By comparison, he has done the London Eye three times, but excuses that on the basis of showing relatives the sights.

Neither is as scary as the CN Tower, with its glass floor and 1,122 feet of nothing, straight down (Malcolm is acrophobic ever since). Nor possessed of quite the view from Seattle's Space Needle: Mount Rainier across Downtown, the Cascades, and the sublimity of the Olympic range across Puget Sound. That has to be the prize winner. Whereas Mr Eiffel's erection always looks better from below.

Malcolm suggests there's no need to leave your seats: most of that is available by the wonders of webcam.

So what's your point, Malcolm?

Well, it's an article Malcolm almost missed, on the Cityroom blogs site of the New York Times. Jake Mooney did a nice little piece to note that:

As anybody with a weakness for weepy film romanticism knows, closing time at the Empire State Building’s observation deck was always the stroke of midnight — right? Cary Grant waited up there for Deborah Kerr until the clock struck 12 in An Affair to Remember (1957), and Meg Ryan had to talk her way past a security guard to meet Tom Hanks there at night in Sleepless in Seattle (1993).

But if Mr. Grant was searching the observation deck for true love today, he would have another two hours to cool his heels in the rain: The deck has been open until 2 a.m., seven nights a week, since March 1.

That's it, really. Except that:

Wil Greenstreet, a jazz saxophonist, has been providing high-altitude mood music Thursdays through Saturdays from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m., and Mr. Greenstreet’s gig, which began as a summer engagement, was recently extended through September.

Malcolm learned from the article that there are now 4m visitors a year, up from

about a million people to visit in that first year [1931] ... two million for the first time in 1987. They reached three million for the first time in 1995 and steadily increased, but dropped below that mark in 2001, after the World Trade Center attacks. By 2002, though, attendance was back to 3.3 million people, and then the rise started again.

He also learned that Scott Fitzgerald, who went up in that first year, was disappointed because of:

the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe.

Malcolm barely regrets never having managed the World Trade Center ("2000 — a record year for visitors at the time — it drew about 2.2 million people"). It didn't draw Malcolm in late August, 2001, though. He looked up; pondered; said "Next time"; and went in search of an afternoon beer.

The irony for Malcolm lies in something else: the best thing to see from the Empire State Building's observation deck is William Van Alen's Chrysler Building, especially as the stainless steel catches a golden sun-set.

One of his enduring disappointments is that he has never managed to photograph that moment. When MoMA was decanted out to Queen's, he took the trip and tried to get a decent image from the 7 Line (or wherever). Didn't quite work. An unfinished task, then.

And, as the sun slowly sinks in the West, Malcolm heads off, humming to himself Brooklyn-boy Billy Joel's epitaph on Manhattan:

I've seen the lights go out on Broadway.
I saw the Empire State lay low.
Life went on beyond the Palisades:
They all bought Cadillacs and left there long ago.

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