Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You
Robert S. McNamara, former World Bank president, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ford executive, and Army Air Force officer died on Monday. Obituaries for him have appeared a wide variety of venues, and they've been varied in content and in tone. Motor Trend focused on McNamara's years as an executive at Ford and his effect on the domestic automobile industry, Alternet rather unconventionally compared him to Hunter S. Thompson, and the New York Times published the sort of long, careful obituary one expects from the Grey Lady.
Most remembrances of McNamara highlight his position as U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and his role in shaping the United States's prosecution of the Vietnam War. Perhaps the best and most thorough examination of this aspect of McNamara's career is in Errol Morris's documentary The Fog of War. The film revolves around interviews with Morris conducted with McNamara, but it's more than a biography or a history of the war in Vietnam. Morris also lays out, through McNamara's reminiscences, a chilling account of the American bombing of Japanese cities during World War II, a discussion of innovations at Ford during the 1950s, and an analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Since news of McNamara's death broke, the list of holds on The Fog of War has skyrocketed from zero to (at this writing) 32. The film is definitely worth the wait, but if you're eager to learn more about Robert McNamara right now, you might want to start elsewhere.
You could begin with The Whiz Kids, John A. Byrne's biography of a group of ten influential businessmen – among them Robert S. McNamara. All ten were veterans of the Army Air Force's Office of Statistical Control, created in 1942 to gather and analyze information about military operations, improve efficiency, and streamline internal operations monitoring. Statistical Control worked on the principle that everything could be reduced to numbers, then analyzed and improved; a method that was wildly successful. After the war, the ten men who were the stars of this group applied en masse to the faltering Ford Motor Co., and were hired as executives. The Whiz Kids examines the business lives of all ten men, and teases out their philosophies of statistical analysis and business management, how and why their ideas worked at Ford, why they were eventually surpassed by others, and the influence they've had on the business world. This might sound like a dry set of topics, but instead it's a revealing and compelling look into the heart of how American business operated during the middle of the last century.
In 1960, Robert McNamara accepted the post of U.S. Secretary of Defense for President Kennedy, a position he held through the Johnson administration. It is in this job that McNamara gained most of his fame, through his role as "architect of the Vietnam War." In 1967, he commissioned a classified report on the history of U.S. decision-making about and military involvement in Vietnam, which became known as the Pentagon Papers when it was leaked to the press by researcher Daniel Ellsberg. The whole collection is long, and admittedly a bit dry, but volume five of the original 1972 book edition (pictured at left) consists of a whole series of interesting essays about Vietnam and American foreign policy during the Vietnam era, written by a variety of influential intellectuals of the day. Many profound and still-controversial questions are discussed, for example: What do the Pentagon Papers say about the structure of power in the U.S. government? Did the authors of the Papers actually do a good job of assessing the true history of the administration of the war? Had the government ever really had the interests of the Vietnamese people in mind?
Posted by Emily-Jane
Last Monday, Alaska's senior senator Ted Stevens was convicted on seven counts of lying on Senate financial documents. Hearing this story, I started thinking about other political and social scandals during my lifetime—bribery and payoffs by lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the Enron financial scandal, the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, the affair between White House intern Monica Lewinsky and then-president Bill Clinton, Oregon senator Bob Packwood's resignation after 29 women accused him of sexual harassment, and of course the Iran Contra debacle of the 1980s.
And then I wondered, is history full of fascinating scandals I don't know about? Scandals that happened before I was born, or before I began paying attention to the news? There must be! So, after thinking on this for awhile, and doing a little reading/research (surely you knew this was coming next. . .), I'm excited to recommend some fascinating books about scandals of the past. And one feature film, to boot!
First up, how could I discuss books about political corruption, scandal, and shocking deeds of the past without mentioning local newspaper columnist Phil Stanford's Portland Confidential? Portland may seem like a wholesome place now, but back in the day everyone thought of the Rose City as a place where bribes were commonplace, corrupt union officials conspired with jaded government bureaucrats, and gangsters ran highly effective protection rackets. Among the tales Stanford relates is the story of the pinball wars of the 1950s. The pinball machines in question weren't the relatively kid-friendly games of today; they were more like slot machines—basically they were gambling devices that local crime organizations rented out to bars and other small businesses. Gangsters would convince a bar owner into hosting the pinball machine (sometimes with threats or other manipulation), and the owner would keep a small bit of the profit, giving most to the racket that provided the machines.
The drama of the pinball wars is laid out on the silver screen in the great B-movie Portland Exposé (the library's copy is packaged as a double bill with another B feature in a series called Forgotten Noir). Portland Exposé pits local tavern owner George Madison and his hastily gathered cohort of right-thinking brave men (an honest union official, an out-of-favor crime boss, a couple of newspapermen, and an unusually un-corrupt police captain) against evil mobsters and corrupt Teamsters. And, as a side benefit, if you manage to watch the whole film—it is somewhat mediocre, plot-wise—you'll get to see a lot of loving footage of Portland landmarks, circa 1957.
To our south in California, the glamour and political pull of the movie industry has inspired all kinds of human temptation and shady dealing—and where shame and power come together, someone will eventually expose hidden deeds to the light of day. California Babylon by Kristan Lawson is your guide to crime scenes, assassination sites, abandoned utopias, and other California spots linked with scandal, excess, and sin. This is an honest-to-goodness guidebook, so California-bound vacationers might want to take it along, but it's suitable for armchair travelers as well.
If this sampling of West Coast scandal doesn't satisfy, you might turn to a reference book that can get you started on any one of hundreds of stories of scandal from America's past: The Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals, and Dirty Politics, by Kim Long. It's better for casual browsing than it is for reading straight through, but you are sure to find many diverting stories of wrong-doing, dirty-dealing, and bad apples.
Posted by Emily-Jane
Nearly every day this election season I have considered it my duty to obsessively check the Presidential election polls on my current favorite polling website, Pollster.com, and to read all the politics articles I can get my hands (or mouse) on. In one of my recent descents into election madness, I stumbled across an article on the Wall Street Journal site that described my poll-watching as a national trend. This election cycle, Americans are delving into the minutiae of poll results: getting live updates on their Blackberries, critiquing interview methodologies, and rejoicing at even the teensiest shift in the polls in favor of their candidate.
In an effort to lighten up a little about the polls and remind myself that statistics can't tell me how happy I'm going to be over the next four years, I picked up Gary Rimmer's Number Freaking, How to Change the World With Delightfully Surreal Statistics. Ever wonder if your boyfriend really is worth his weight in gold? If he's 180lbs, he's worth about a million bucks. Is he worth his weight in chocolate? Mine is worth about $800 in grocery-store grade chocolate. How long would it take all the beer consumed in the world every year to flow over Niagara Falls? 6 hours and 29 minutes. Rimmer takes bits of info and widely held suppositions and turns them into strange and wonderful visions of the world. He firmly comes down on the side of fun rather than fact in the pursuit of great number freaking and arranges each mini-chapter as problems you can solve. Or you can just find the answer at the bottom of the page, like I did.
One thing that keeps me going back to the newspaper and polling websites is the use of beautiful and engaging interactive maps and graphics. The article that pointed out my trendy status also has a rich zig-zag graph that tracks the poll results over time from several different polling companies. Another site I've seen has a map infographic that lets you decide which states will be won by each candidate and tallies up electoral votes as you go. When I think about creative graphics for data, I think first of Edward Tufte. His books have become essentials in the worlds of design, statistics, business, and information. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is about more than just producing the right chart for the right data. He also is a proponent of beauty in graphical representation, both in terms of the specifics of type and lines, as well as in the efficient truth presented by a well-designed graphic.
Maps as a means of representation have always enthralled me. My first job in a library was in the map department at my university. My working hours passed quickly as I familiarized myself with the collection of maps available for students to use: topographic maps for the entire region and beyond, nautical charts for that boat trip to the San Juans, aeronautical charts from the Defense Mapping Agency in case I needed to fly over disputed territory. Katharine Harmon shares my fascination with maps, but her predilection leans towards maps that capture a personal vision over data. Her book You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination is a collection of maps that range from a 1943 Pictorial Map of Loveland populated by always-accurate cupids and lovesick couples to A Dog's Idea of the Ideal Country estate which includes two butcher shops and lots of mud. Maps from the intimately personal to the broadly universal are included and knit together with several essays that illuminate and deepen the images.
Posted by Kate
A presidential election always seems to create a lot of news, especially as Election Day approaches. I'm sure you've seen and/or read an awful lot about McCain, Obama, their speeches, their policy ideas, and their campaigns. So even if you're interested in politics, you might be getting a little tired of hearing about it all! I can tell you, I'm definitely feeling ready for a new set of headlines. But, all the news I've seen about the presidential campaign — including a recent episode of local radio call-in show Think Out Loud — has made me wonder a bit, lately, about the history of political advertising. How did campaign advertising get started? Is it a twentieth century phenomenon? Are there ads from the past that really changed the course of a campaign, and if so, what were they like?
The Living Room Candidate — a multimedia exhibit from New York City's Museum of the Moving Image — collects hundreds old television and internet commercials for presidential candidates from Eisenhower and Stevenson in 1956 to McCain and Obama in 2008. It's fascinating to see how much advertising has changed over this fifty year time span, and the exhibit also provides election return maps, a list of related websites, and more.
What about ads that focus on issues, rather than candidates? Revolutionary Tides: The Art of the Political Poster, 1914-1989, by Jeffrey T. Schnapp, is a gorgeous coffee-table sized book with page after page of posters from around the world, produced for mass audiences and featuring nearly every important political topic from posters encouraging people to buy war bonds and military recruitment posters to posters promoting public health and literacy.
And, a bit further afield, Arthur Asa Berger's Ads, Fads, and Consumer Culture analyzes advertising's affects on popular culture. Berger devotes an entire chapter to political advertising, but also discusses many other types of advertising, examines the culture of consumption, and considers how advertising works as a venue for communication.
Posted by Emily-Jane
