An Age of Anxiety
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook By Daniel Schorr An Age of Anxiety In 1996, near the end of the 20th century, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan cautioned us against “irrational exuberance.”...
...Interviewed by Charles Gibson of ABC, the President said his greatest regret was the intelligence failure that led to the war...
...In other words, that it had been aimed at Bush, not his successor...
...Medvedev’s Message On November 5, the day after Barack Obama’s election, Russian President Dmitry A. Medvedev delivered a bristling state of the federation speech...
...The CCC concentrated on protecting the land...
...Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland wrote that a State Department team has been investigating the possibility of upgrading the U.S...
...The New Deal left many monuments, ranging from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to the Federal Theater Project (FTP...
...The New Deal followed a Keynesian principle of deficit spending to prime the fiscal pump...
...It reminded me of the moon landing, when families wanted somehow to be together at a historic moment...
...Efforts were also made to establish some link between Iraq and the 9/11 terrorists...
...The automakers plead for salvation...
...That is, reconsider the wisdom of invading Iraq...
...Privileged interests, Medvedev said, applies to all the states which were formerly Soviet republics or satellites...
...During the campaign, it was commonplace to say that race was not a factor, that Obama was transcending race, that this was a post-racial era...
...North Korea has been removed from the State Department’s terrorist list, reversing a previous position that this would only happen after an outside inspection of samples from North Korea’s nuclear sites...
...And I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life...
...Had Bush not yielded, Obama might have been left with a crisis regarding authority to keep troops in Iraq...
...Whether intended or not, the relaxation of long held hard-line positions is bound to have the effect of lightening the foreign policy load facing the White House newcomers...
...But he has put the new Administration on notice that the price of Russian cooperation with the United States is acknowledgment of Russia’s privileged interests...
...As he leaves office, Bush might want to look at the Frost-Nixon interviews and consider doing a do-over...
...President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock to enforce integration at Central High School...
...Dickens was only half right...
...That’s a do-over I can’t do,” Bush responded...
...As a result, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki embraced the pact after rejecting it for months...
...The icon of the era is Bernard Madoff, who treated friends as suckers...
...Unemployment began to fall...
...interests section in Havana, in expectation of restoring full relations once Fidel Castro is gone...
...Easing the Wa y Abroad On a variety of foreign policy fronts the departing Bush Administration gave signs of seeking stability, almost as though clearing the decks for the Obama Administration...
...Now We Are All Equal As the voting returns climbed on election night, a strange thing happened...
...for the G-20 economic summit, told a Council on Foreign Relations meeting I attended that the timing was coincidental...
...I was struck all over again by the way Nixon, having insisted that what a President does cannot be illegal, finally broke down in a mistyeyed mea culpa...
...He accused the United States of being responsible for the war in Georgia, and threatened to retaliate for a missile defense system in Eastern Europe by deploying short-range missiles...
...In the words of a British official, the intelligence and the facts were fixed to support that decision...
...Then as now, the preceding years were marked by a regulatory laxity that contributed to a Wall Street crash followed by an economic downturn, worse than at present, with unemployment near 25 per cent...
...The United States, in the grip of a recession it has exported to a large part of the world, has lost much of its influence abroad...
...It is not the best of times but only the worst of times...
...Efforts are now being made to reinstate the sputtering diplomatic process aimed at scrapping North Korea’s nuclear weapons program...
...Black people displayed a new pride, and white managers greeted black employees with a new deference...
...But the Great Depression did not finally end until the 1939 military buildup...
...If this was meant to set the stage for a new era in Russian-American relations, it was not very promising...
...Unsuccessfully, but never mind...
...The task seems superhuman, but it is the only answer we have in the Age of Anxiety...
...People called faraway family members wanting to bond with them...
...Now, in the 21st century, we live in an Age of Anxiety...
...Medvedev added that Moscow was not happy about NATO extending its reach toward Russia’s borders...
...It means no elements of an antimissile system could be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic, as the Bush Administration was planning...
...The WPA built the bridges and the post offices...
...Is there any light at the end of the darkening tunnel...
...The decision was made to topple Saddam Hussein...
...Would he would have gone to war if the intelligence had been right...
...As I listened to Nixon on film, I thought of President George W. Bush...
...President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished...
...The White House yielded on setting a timetable for the troops’ eventual withdrawal and compromised on making Americans subject to Iraqi law...
...But once again a Keynesian dip into deficit spending...
...A new phenomenon was technological unemployment attributed to automation...
...That could be President Barack Obama, the new kid on the block who summons America to a common effort at rebuilding infrastructure and trust...
...Most galling of all is that this was done to us by people and institutions we trusted...
...But on Saturday November 15 Medvedev, who was in the U.S...
...The National Youth Administration (NYA) helped needy students...
...Suddenly, though, there was a new reality...
...I have impeached myself,” he said...
...Noteworthy was a shift in long-held positions to break a deadlock over a security pact governing American troops in Iraq...
...But he laid down a marker: The United States must respect Russia’s privileged interests (apparently the new code for sphere of influence...
...No alphabetical agencies this time as President-elect Barack Obama works to create 3 million jobs in two years...
...Where is what the Greeks called the deus ex machina, the god who descends at the critical moment to sweep all our troubles away...
...This was the America that made the Reverend Jesse Jackson cry, almost in disbelief, as this milestone was reached...
...I let down my friends...
...I got 50 cents an hour for sorting library slips in college...
...One can trace the road it traveled: President Harry S. Truman integrated the Armed Forces...
...Yet in tr uth, it was all about race—not in the “God damn America” of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but in the “God bless America” of Barack Obama...
...In two years the economy started to turn around...
...Medvedev stressed that Russia was ready for a dialogue with the Obama Administration...
...We all knew that someday there would be an African American in the Oval Office, but we didn’t know when...
...I let down the country...
...Shopping is down, shoplifting is up...
...That sounds like an updated version of the 1968 Brezhnev Doctrine justifying the invasion of Czechoslovakia to keep it within the Soviet bloc...
...They exploited our faith in them...
...Doing a Do-Over Recently I had occasion to see both the play and the movie about the famous David Frost interviews of ex-President Richard M. Nixon in 1977...
...President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and then the Voting Rights Act...
...That apparently has met some resistance...
...Superpower” is an antiquated word...
...It is now generally accepted that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks President Bush, urged on by Vice President Dick Cheney, was deter mined to find a target for American anger...
...A variety of new agencies, including the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), focused on the renewal of America...
...It has taken a long time, but “all men are created equal” has reached its ultimate reality in the highest office in the land...
...Once it happened, suddenly America was a changed place...
...Here in the Washington area, employment is down and cases of child abuse and neglect are up...
...There has also been discussion in the Bush Administration about a proposal by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to establish some form of diplomatic representation in Tehran as a first step toward accommodation...
...President Ronald Reagan named General Colin L. Powell as his national security adviser...
...A Fortune magazine cover proclaims: “GM: Death of an American Dream...
...The polls had said Obama was going to win, but who believes the polls...
...and President Bush appointed first Powell, then Condoleezza Rice to the office of secretary of state...
...He said his speech, originally scheduled to be delivered October 23, was delayed because of drafting problems...
...He will be seeing President Obama at the resuming economic summit in April, if not before then...
...I let the American people down...
...A Keynesian Deficit Dip To one old enough to have been around at that time, there is a certain feeling of 1932 in the air today as an activist new President mounts an attack on a crushing economic crisis...
...While still in office, he had to respond to questions of critics, but not only critics, as to whether he let the American people down, primarily by launching an invasion of Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction...
...One of its undertakings involved an area in the Catoctin Mountains that FDR called Shangri-la, later to become Camp David...
...And it means the American-backed regime in Georgia would have to go...
...FDR came on the scene pledging a New Deal for the American people...
...But his expressed inability to look back avoids the issue...
...Even with Cuba, the oldest American confrontation of them all, there are reported signs of movement...
Vol. 91 • November 2008 • No. 6
