It seems like years ago, rather than months ago, that the Granite State Observer (GSO) launched amid the home stretch of a presidential impeachment and competitive New Hampshire Presidential Primary. In short order, the Primary results became irrelevant and Granite Staters, along with the rest of the world, coped with a stealthy, dangerous and historic global pandemic. This has put commerce, civic culture, and most other human interaction on hold. We picked an interesting time to launch this enterprise and we relish the challenge. We had to adjust but we remain standing, are re-tooling, and will be stepping up our activities in coming weeks. We cancelled our spring and summer hard-copy editions but will resume that in September. We have re-tooled, weighed the needs and capabilities of our writers, researchers and vendors, and are now back on the job. We deeply appreciate the energy, interest, support and good wishes that accompanied our winter launch. There is no more interesting time than now to establish a journal of news, opinion, analysis and culture. There is no more interesting place to base it than New Hampshire. We are moving forward.
The Publishers
Since we’ve been gone:
Ronald Wilson Sanders became Henry Agard Sanders?
BY TOM BRENNAN
As was widely predicted, Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary, edging out Mayor Pete, as he did in the popular vote for the convoluted Iowa Caucuses a week earlier. Sanders took clear command of the progressive “lane” in the race to the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, and a landslide victory in the Nevada caucuses later in February left much of the pundit class convinced Sanders was unstoppable. More than that, despite the fretting of the establishment Democrats who had botched the job in 2016, Sanders had been leading Donald Trump in almost every poll, throughout Trump’s presidency. Only Biden showed comparable strength, and his campaign looked snake bit.
There was an arc to the Sanders story, up to that point, that evoked memories of another true believer, his hour come round late in life. For the past five years Sanders looked to be a Liberal Democratic version of Ronald Reagan. Instead, he wound up being taken down like Henry A. Wallace.
Few now recall how marginal a figure Reagan was in 1975. Twice elected Governor by California’s quirky and fickle electorate, by 1974 Reagan appeared unable to even win in California again. His cultural and economic conservatism and hawkish view of the world were out of fashion, recalling the conservative Goldwater’s landslide 1964 loss. The Watergate era left Nixon and Agnew in disgrace. President Ford had selected liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, and possible heir. Influential Republican conservative leaders were so discouraged they actually explored the idea of a third party.
As late as 1980, establishment Republicans deeply resented Reagan’s unexpectedly strong challenge to President Ford’s nomination in 1976, and Reagan’s appeal to demoralized right wing true believers was not unlike Sanders’ left wing move against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Like Reagan in 1980, Sanders had to contend with the “age issue” and younger challengers taking up his cause in 2020. Like Reagan in 1980, party insiders blamed Sanders for the loss of the presidency in the prior election. Also like Reagan in 1980, Sanders hoped to ride ideologically driven grass roots energy to nomination, and to oust a president his supporters viewed as an aberration. Reagan’s supporters resented moderate dominance of the GOP, but were haunted by Goldwater’s loss. Progressive Democrats had been marginalized in their own party ever since McGovern was crushed in 1972. Supporters of both Reagan and Sanders were angered by what they saw as the incrementalism of presidents of their own party. Reagan proved to be no Goldwater in 1980, and Sanders had been leading Trump in most polls for four years (McGovern was never even close to Nixon in polls).
Then everything changed. Bernie’s fate mirrored that of Henry Agard Wallace in 1944, not Reagan in 1980. It is a cautionary tale of how power behaves, how power defends itself, and how people can be convinced to abandon their beliefs in search of a perceived safe harbor.
Had the 1944 Democratic convention not taken the unusual step of removing Vice President Wallace from the national ticket, he would have become president in 1945. Who was Wallace? In 2008 Robert Morris wrote a novel about how a Henry Wallace presidency might have played out. No dropping of the atom bomb? No Cold War? No “military industrial complex?” Whether it would have played out that way is an open question. What is clear is that Wallace was a popular progressive Vice President, poised to resume the New Deal after World War ll. FDR’s illness was better understood by insiders than by the public in 1944. Conservative party establishment players, alarmed at the prospect of a post war Wallace presidency, kneecapped him at the last minute. Sound familiar?
Nation magazine’s John Nichols invoked Wallace in a recent book about how progressives might win the “Fight for the Soul of the Democratic party.”
Wallace was a substantial figure in 1940s American politics. His family had long published a popular farm journal in Iowa. His father had been Secretary of Agriculture under Harding, and Wallace was a Republican until he signed on with the New Deal as FDR’s Ag Sec. Brilliant and quirky, Wallace cut an interesting figure in Washington. He was a big shambling fellow, with a shock of brown/gray hair, and a distracted manner. One journalist wrote that Wallace “looked like a hayseed, talked like a prophet, and acted like an embarrassed schoolboy.” Fascinated by plant science all his life, especially as it related to feeding the masses, Wallace was mentored by George Washington Carver, and became wealthy after patenting a more disease resistant corn. A fitness buff, he walked everywhere, was fond of playing with boomerangs, and famously knocked out Sen. Allen Ellender in a friendly boxing match. He often experimented on himself with odd diets, living on milk and popcorn for a time, and his curiosity about religions — Judaism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam– led to innocent but easily ridiculed correspondence with a Russian guru named Nicholas Roerich.
Wallace’s Depression era Agriculture Department was a hotbed of reform, and his success was enough to convince FDR to make Wallace his running mate in 1940. Wallace’s “guru letters” were only suppressed after word reached the GOP that their candidate’s mistress would be fair game if the letters were raised. Roosevelt had to threaten to not run himself, in order to get the Democratic convention to accept Wallace as VP in 1940. The FDR coalition was always a fragile thing, including liberal academics , rural populists, urban machines, economic conservatives, and southern racists. The city bosses and southern congressional barons detested Wallace, who was well to their left, and dismissive of their concerns and folkways. FDR admired Wallace, thought him a worthy successor, but came to worry about his lack of political skills.
The war dominated FDR’s third term. Wallace was an able team player, but he made a point to chart an unmistakably progressive course for the Democratic party’s post war future. He was militantly in favor of unions, civil rights, social programs, accommodation with the Soviets, and was against colonialism. In a counterpoint to TIME magazine publisher Henry Luce’s “American Century” Wallace promoted “the century of the common man.” He was broadly popular, heading into the 1944 convention with over 60% support in public polls. He seconded his own renomination with a speech that almost took the convention by storm. He was armed with letter from the president stating that, if he were a delegate, he would vote for Wallace. FDR’s posture was subtlety itself. This tepid letter was a far cry from the level of support FDR gave in 1940. The president was ailing, distracted by the war, and not a delegate to the convention. He had also passed a note to Wallace’s foes in the party mentioning that a couple of other VP prospects were fine with him too, and he was steered into actually helping recruit a reluctant Harry Truman to challenge Wallace, warning Truman that if he wanted to “break the party up in the middle of a war” by not coming on the ticket, it was on him. That was all the convention bosses needed. They adjourned the convention that Wallace almost stampeded, unpacked the galleries, and swung necessary delegations to Truman. The sound and centrist “mediocrity,” Harry Truman, not the liberal idealist Henry Wallace, became the 33rd president after FDR was reelected and died a short time later.
History mostly records that America dodged a bullet in 1944. Wallace was said to be far too naive to navigate the early years of the Cold War. Truman is mostly judged to have risen to the challenge very well. Wallace’s third party run for president in 1948, while brave on the question of civil rights, was indeed manipulated by communists. He drew less than 2% of the vote, most of it from New York City. He would later admit that he underestimated Stalin’s mendacity, and retired to a farm in Salem NY, tending to his plants until he died of ALS in 1965.
Truman consolidated New Deal gains with his 1948 win, and even inched forward on civil rights. His navigation of the early Cold War drew fire from the right and left, but has proven to have been sound over the long haul. However, none of that was knowable by the conservative party barons of 1944. The interesting question, the won that calls to mind what has occurred recently, has little to do with the relative merits of Wallace or Truman, and much to do with the motivation racists, city bosses, and what we now call “corporate Democrats” had in taking the unusual step of dumping a sitting VP? There is little doubt but that this was an effort to put the breaks on reform and progressive causes, post FDR.
We have just witnessed one of the most abrupt changes of direction by a political party since 1944. The accomplishment was all the more impressive in that it was accomplished in a primary process, not a smoke filled room at a convention.
For a year, all through 2019, a sprawling field of Democratic candidates fought for the nomination for president. Sanders eventually took command of the left lane in that race, despite suffering a heart attack, and despite the hunger for a black or woman candidate. He won Iowa and New Hampshire narrowly, roared through Nevada, and was expected to sprint to an insurmountable delegate lead after the March 2nd Super Tuesday voting. It was expected that Biden would win southern states, including South Carolina, and on Super Tuesday, but Biden appeared to be the lamest of horses. Republican Lite Democrats feigned concern that Sanders was “another McGovern,” but polls made hash of this.
Suddenly, Biden’s two leading centrist challengers, Klobuchar and Buttigieg, withdrew and endorsed Biden (as did Beto O’Rourke and others). Over a 72 hour period, at the same time, millions of primary voters abruptly abandoned plans to vote for Sanders, and rallied to a warmly regarded party elder of modest distinction. Fear of another Trump victory was part of this. This unprecedented national case of cold feet was nudged along by the drama of the eleventh hour withdrawals and endorsements. In contrast with Hillary, Biden’s collaborative nature has papered over divisions in the party. Corporate Democrats who were calling for a brokered convention days earlier began demanding the nomination contest shut down. Covid did the rest.
Biden may well rise to this challenge. America has been fortunate that way. It has been said that “God takes care of fools, drunks, and the United States.” A pol in Gore Vidal’s play, The Best Man, observed that “Men without faces tend to be elected president. Responsibility or personal honor fill in the features, usually pretty well.” Setting that aside, a reckoning in the Democratic party is long overdue. The party establishment has kicked the can down the road again. A great many working class Democrats feel abandoned by the party that once stood and spoke for them. This is inconvenient for the donor class, for the operatives and careerists, but it delivered Trump one victory, and we can only pray it does not deliver another. Whether Biden wins or loses, the differences can be papered over no longer. The dirty little secret is that Sanders was not ganged up on because the party establishment feared he could not win, but because they feared he could. This was the case with Henry Wallace in 1944. It remains unfinished Democratic party business, postponed in the fight against American fascism, as it was postponed in the fight against fascism in Europe 76 years ago.
Hoist on their own PC petard?
BY LYNN LEVESQUE and TOM BRENNAN
The Trump sex scandals are too numerous to track, and like everything else about him, cease to shock. Now lurid allegations are hurled at former VP Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and they seem to confirm every bad thing the un-woke have suspected about the bankruptcy of political correctness, the hypocrisy of the Me Too movement, and the inevitable and unsustainable contradictions of identity politics. The disturbing controversy is riddled with likely unresolvable questions about sex, power, class, and moral relativism.
Tara Reade, 56, charges that then Senator Biden sexually assaulted her 27 years ago, during her brief tenure as a minor member of his staff. Biden survived media hazing last year for excessively tactile habits with women which were mostly written off as innocent insensitivity by an old fashioned guy. Nothing approaching sexual assault. This was all presented as part of the Me Too awakening. Reade was among those offering this mild account of her own experience with Biden. Reade’s changed story puts that interpretation in a different light, and if true, strikes right at the heart of what many think is Biden’s strongest asset in his contest with President Trump, a reputation for decency.
In Reade’s account, Biden pinned her to a wall, in a basement corridor of a Capitol Hill office building, and concluded a clumsy pass by penetrating her with his finger. When she rejected his advance, Reade says, Biden responded with a familiar verbal tic of his — “come on, man, I heard you liked me.” She says he then said “you’re nothing to me” and walked away.
A definitive resolution is unlikely. There were no witnesses. It was 27 years ago. The best anyone can do is assess the credibility of the parties to the dispute, the plausibility of the charge, and any evidence or corroboration offered. Even after that is done, people will see what they want in this tribal time.
GOP partisans will harbor all of the un-woke attitudes listed in the first paragraph of this piece, with fresh memories of Brett Kavenaugh. It is well to remember how feminists excused Bill Clinton’s confirmed private transgressions, and dismissed more lurid charges leveled at him (at least at the time) because of the “greater good” of his public policy positions. Trumpers would resort to similar defenses.
Biden partisans will argue that Kavenaugh’s accuser had far more personal and professional “crediblity,” did not change her story, passed a lie detector test, offered four affidavits and analysts’ notes supporting her consistent accounts over the years, of her encounter with Kavenaugh. There is an established Republican tactic, boasted about by GOP consultants and operatives, of attacking opponents’ strengths. Recall the bogus attacks on John Kerry’s war record. Is the Tara Reade flap just more Swiftboating? Evidence abounded of Kavenaugh’s rowdy jock exploits, lending at least some plausibility to the charges leveled at him. Friend and foe find what Reade describes to be out of character for Biden. Perhaps that is exactly the point.
The story is still unfolding. At this writing, there are important unanswered questions to be directed at Biden and Reade.
This much is clear. It is time to junk the shiboleth that “all women must be believed,” or that any allegation against somebody else carries more weight simply because of gender, race, age, party or any other such characteristic of the accuser or the accused. This is wrong. It was always wrong. It is the ethos of the lynch mob, and anything but enlightened. The poorly thought out nature of this lazy approach to coalition politics can be demonstrated by a simple observation. It was common for black men to be lynched in the south based on a mere accusation of sexual impropriety. Me Too movement, meet Karen. In 2017, Senator Gillibrand could say of Al Franken, essentially, sure he’s entitled to due process, but I am entitled to my opinion, and my opinion is lynch him now. Biden was not the only politician, eager to signal enlightenment, who bought into this excess. It is pretty awkward for him now. Hopefully, decent people will have no more of this. All victims must be heard. Whether they are believed depends on evidence, and in the absence of hard evidence, credibility and plausibility matter. This is especially true of allegations about events in the distant past.
Once this is established, we can stipulate that there is no right to be president, or a Supreme Court justice. When one’s life or liberty are at stake, guilt must be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil matter, the preponderance of evidence decides. In selecting a president or a judge, which is not a legal proceeding, it is reasonable to resolve doubt in favor of the public. By that standard, so far, Biden and his supporters are not inspiring confidence.
Reade’s right to be heard was at first only respected by more marginal media on the Trump Right and Bernie Left. Then there was a cynical argument made by Biden supporters, some of them still clinging to the “believe all women” standard, that Trump was so much more awful, Reade’s charges should be ignored! This argument was not only prominent on social media, but it has been advanced on editorial pages of the great established media outlets. Not only is this morally obtuse, it is impractical. In today’s media environment, efforts to hide something like this only feed the story, and diminish the credibility of the journalistic institutions doing the hiding.
If the Reade charges are true, Biden should not be nominated to face Trump, not because Trump is not worse, but precisely because he represents a unique emergency. To empower Trump with a crippled challenger would be political malpractice. This needs to be cleared up now. Better now than October. Biden needs to be transparent. Class based attacks on Reade need to stop. Self defeating pressure for silence on the topic needs to end.
Absent this, delegates to the Democratic convention may, for the first time since 1952, have to actually decide something. There is the additional challenge of a mostly virtual convention looming, due to the pandemic. Biden’s Democratic competitors have suspended their efforts and endorsed him, but delegates remain to be elected, and many of the primaries have been moved to June. Efforts to cancel these primaries, such as in New York, are particularly egregious. There was no shortage of establishment Dems calling for an “open convention” when Sanders was ahead.
There is still time. Time for Biden to respond with full transparency and the empathy and decency he is known for. There is still time for Tara Reade to be fully heard, and her charges credibility and fairly vetted. We can do this. Avoidance is not an option.
Can a man write a woman’s diary?
BY LYNN LEVESQUE
THE LOST DIARY OF M by Paul Wolfe, Harper/Collins Publishers
JFK & MARY MEYER A LOVE STORY by Jesse Kornbluth, Skyhorse Publishing
Mary Meyer would be turning 100 on October 14th 0f this year. She is an irresistible topic. Her story involves the Cold War, the CIA, LSD, JFK, affairs of the heart, affairs of state, and multiple murder mysteries. The known historical facts are plenty compelling. The mystery still swirls around the murder of a dashing president, and the unsolved murder of his mistress less than a year later. Add to this the fact that the mistress kept a diary, which was burned, and holy smokes!
At the height of the Clinton/Lewinsky furor, a biography of Meyer was published. The author of A
Very Private Woman, Nina Burleigh, was brought up in Haight Ashbury, Baghdad, and an Amish community in Michigan. Her father was an author. Her focus has been on the tension between belief and science, with a secular and feminist outlook. She raised eyebrows, just as her Meyer book was coming out, by saying in an interview with the Washington Post, “I’d be happy to give Clinton a blowjob to thank him for keeping abortion legal.” She married the following year, but stood by her statement a decade later, excoriating middle aged white men who knew and cared nothing about sexual harassment, but manufactured indignation about it to try and destroy a president for his pro female policies. Somebody like this was bound to have an interesting take on Mary Meyer.
Now a more curious challenge has been tackled by two authors, two male authors, who have written novels that imagine the contents of the destroyed Mary Meyer diary.
The non fictional Meyer was born a century ago, the niece of the legendary environmentalist and reform governor of Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot. Educated at Vassar, strikingly attractive, socially prominent, acquainted with JFK when they were teenagers, Miss Pinchot worked as a journalist and editor. She married Cord Meyer in 1945. Meyer lost an eye in the war, and cut a dashing figure himself. He was a wheel in the CIA and World Federalists. Jack and Jackie Kennedy were Cord and Mary’s next door neighbors in Georgetown. Journalist Ben Bradlee, married to Mary’s Sister, also lived in the neighborhood. Cord and Mary divorced in 1958. Mary began applying herself seriously to painting.
Meyer and JFK commenced an affair that lasted until JFK was killed in Dallas in 1963. The public never accepted the official story about that, and various theories has been advanced, fingering everybody from the Mob, the CIA, Cubans on both sides of the Castro conflict, LBJ, big oil, and the Fort Worth Rotary Club.
A year after Dallas, Meyer was shot execution style, while hiking a towpath near Georgetown, at mid-day. A poor, black man found crouching nearby was charged, and acquitted.
Meyer’s brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee, was editor of Newsweek magazine at the time, and a close (and protective) social friend of President Kennedy. This not unusual in 1960s Washington. Bradlee was the Watergate era editor of the Washington Post. Ideas about protecting the personal privacy of political figures would evolve. He would write a tell all book about his private conversations with JFK. Jackie never spoke to him again. He left The sister of Mary Meyer to wed Sally Quinn, a Post reporter specializing in personality journalism (gossip). By the late 1980s Bradlee would essentially blackmail Gary Hart out of the race for president with information about assignations beyond Donna Rice. By the late 1990s Quinn would be clucking Georgetown’s disapproval of Bill and Monica.
Shortly after the Meyer murder, Bradlee learned his dead sister-in-law kept a diary. He located and destroyed it. Exact account of this differ. Benjy tells of bumping into CIA people just as got to Mary’s door with bolt cutters.
In addition to the diarists CIA and JFK ties, Meyer befriended LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary.
It would not take much imagination to come up with a novel based on the lost diary of this woman. The two men who separately tackled this project brought different perspectives to the challenge.
This is Wolfe’s first novel. He was a song writer and advertising man, but not exactly the man in they grey flannel suit. Bob Dylan became a fan of Wolfe’s after finding a song Wolfe wrote featured in the folk magazine Broadside.
Wolfe has has Meyer perused by Orson Welles and Allen Ginsberg. She jumps naked into a swimming pool at Hickory Hill, and dishes on Pamela Harriman and the First Lady. Meyer comes across cryptogram spilling the beans about plans to kill Castro. She is soon interacting with a CIA mole, asking herself “can a blonde go up against the whole world?”
Are we to be spared nothing?
Both books make use of the reputed plans of Leary and Meyer to “turn on” world leaders and thus prevent nuclear war. Better living through chemicals.
Kornbluth is a screen writer, and a seasoned magazine reporter. He knows the Georgetown set, and his thinner volume is has it’s sensational passages, but presents a more nuanced and plausible portrait. JFK was a sex addict. Meyer was a more serious and discreet person than going Mean Girls on Jackie, and jumping naked into RFK’s pool at a party. This relationship lasted longer than JFK’s usual passing dalliances with starlets, secretaries, or interns. Meyer seems to know it leads no place good, and Kornbluth has Meyer observing that “giving a man what he wants when he wants it is a bad idea.”
Meyer emerges as a consequential mistress, perhaps one who encouraged JFK’s skepticism about the Cold War, and the national security state. Perhaps that got them both killed. We’ll never know. Meyer was more than a bimbo eruption. She likely joins the ranks of Mistresses who moved history. Would Wendell Willkie have become who he became without his affair with Irita Van Doren? There are other examples. Now there is an idea for a book. Influential Mistresses. A woman should write it.