"Have You No Sense of Decency?"

By David K. Shipler

            On June 9, 1954, in a highly charged Washington hearing room, the elderly attorney Joseph Welch, a man partial to homespun clarity, put to Senator Joseph McCarthy the stiletto question that has entered American lore. Responding to the Wisconsin Republican’s smear of a young colleague of Welch’s, the lawyer demanded McCarthy’s full attention and began with this:

            “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to persist, Welch cut him down: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

            In the old black-and-white film, McCarthy has a mean squint, a twisted look something like Donald Trump’s when attacked. Trump’s method is different, but he plays on the same ground of fear and demonization. So Welch’s question is relevant today, and it ought to be directed not only to Trump but also to the American people: Have you no sense of decency?

Or, to make a gesture toward hope: After many months of waiting, when will America’s slumbering decency awake?

            For that is what eventually happened to end McCarthy’s slimy innuendos that ruined so many lives with false implications of communist affiliations, based on scanty rumors, guilt by association, and fabricated evidence. Preceded by Edward R. Murrow’s devastating televised assault on McCarthy three months earlier, Welch’s rhetorical question hit home. Huge numbers of Americans, watching live on national television, knew the answer. Decency stirred.

            This episode remains as my first political memory. I was 11 years old. Coming home from school day after day, I saw my grandmother, a Southern-born, Eisenhower Republican who detested communists, sitting bolt upright in a straight-back chair in front of the TV, appalled by McCarthy’s vile slanders. She loved Joseph Welch. His gentle decency struck a chord with the decency she carried inside herself.

            So it was during the Civil Rights movement as well, as Americans saw in their living rooms the contorted, hateful faces of Southern white girls screaming racist epithets outside integrating schools, the burly white cops swinging truncheons at non-resisting black protesters, the dogs and fire hoses unleashed against peaceful citizens demonstrating for their basic rights. Segregationists played their role in a pageant of brutal injustice vividly enough to stir the decency that resides in most Americans.

            Where is decency now? Is it gone or just marginalized, merely dormant? For a long time, McCarthy got away with his witch-hunt as a sly weasel in an era of exaggerated fears about communist designs on America. Trump gets away with his bullying as a vicious Rottweiler in a time of real and fake fears about insecurity in all its forms. Many of his supporters are legitimately scared of their economic peril, unduly afraid of terrorism, and eager to accept the scapegoats he offers, which include the varieties of people who represent a diversifying America.

Even if Trump does not win the Republican nomination, or even if he wins that but not the White House, his supporters will remain a restive, fulminating force of anger. So he has offered the country a lesson in its failure to remember that tolerance, logic, and the acceptance of difference is not genetic but must be learned anew by each generation.

The society has failed those who accept him as he vilifies and ridicules vast groups of people, a whole religion, all who try to govern, all who disagree. It has failed those who give a Nazi salute outside his rally and shout, “Go to Auschwitz,” as one man did. It has failed those who shout, “Nigger,” and “Go back to Africa.” It has failed those who cheer his invitation to beat up protesters, the empty promises he cannot possibly fulfill, the coarse insults he levels at fellow candidates. It has failed those whose schools have not taught them to check facts, research reality, know history, follow public issues, and make decisions that are carefully informed.

            On his 1954 program, “See It Now,” Ed Murrow read from the script that he and Fred Friendly had written about McCarthy. It is worth listening to today:

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine—and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. … We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.

“We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn’t create this situation of fear. He merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.’”

Murrow concluded with his traditional sign-off: “Good night and good luck.”

Good luck, indeed.

The Great Manipulator and the Velcro Candidate

By David K. Shipler

            If Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, as his admirers enjoyed saying, then Donald Trump is the Great Manipulator, with an uncanny eye for the voters’ nerves of fear and yearning. If criticisms slid off Reagan as if he were coated with Teflon, every one sticks to Hillary Clinton as if she were covered in Velcro. If Trump gets better at what he does, and if Clinton doesn’t unglue the labels of dishonesty and opportunism, the election could be close.

            Trump is dangerously clever at reading the electorate, at least the part of it whose anti-government anger and economic despair have been energized by Republican radicals who now wail as Trump rides the wave that they produced. Talk-show personality Glenn Beck, who incites furious extremism, compared Trump to Hitler in 1929 and warned Americans against voting in anger. “When you’re really angry, you don’t make good decisions,” Beck told a rally for Ted Cruz. “Don’t drive drunk, don’t vote angry.” That’s sage advice from a model of calm reason.

            But if Trump grabs the nomination, it would not be amazing to see him temper his insults, smooth his sharp edges somewhat, and stress the virtue of “flexibility,” a word he used a few times in the last debate. His bare-knuckled bullying appeals to some but repels others, even those who want a tough-guy act in the White House. If he managed to time his evolution deftly, he might just appeal to the wishful thinking of Republicans who want to beat Clinton at all costs. And costs there would be.

The Privacy Problem: Security vs. Security

By David K. Shipler

            We might be approaching a tipping point about privacy, as dramatized by the Apple-FBI dispute over decrypting a terrorist’s iPhone. After years of seeing privacy and safety as opposites in the war on terrorism, important segments of American society seem to be recognizing personal security and national security as parts of the same whole, not as a dichotomy in a zero-sum game. If this evolution continues, it could eventually produce a significant correction to the surveillance state that developed after the trauma of Sept. 11, 2001.

In the meantime, however, the two versions of security are colliding: the government’s rising concern about security from crime and terrorism in an age of digital encryption on the one hand, and, on the other, the public’s heightened interest in security from hackers, identity thieves, cyber-ransom demands, and—yes—government surveillance. Both sets of anxiety are justified. How to resolve the clash intelligently is far from clear.

The FBI’s effort to force Apple to create new software to disable an iPhone’s security features is propelling the courts forward in time at a faster speed than they typically travel. They usually lag well behind technology. But now they and Congress need to catch up quickly. That phone and hundreds of others sit in evidence lockers waiting to be cracked by law enforcement, requiring a creative effort by judges, legislators, prosecutors, and high-tech companies to make it possible—legally and technically—to execute a legitimate search warrant on a particular device without the risk of compromising security on all such devices.

The Temporary Death of Political Cynicism

By David K. Shipler

            Cynicism about politics appears not to be genetic. It has to be relearned generation after generation, election after election. So it is that voters who are fed up with ineffective or unjust government, and by politicians who promise what they don’t deliver, are flocking to two candidates who cannot possibly deliver what they are promising: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

            The attraction, at each end of the spectrum, seems to run beyond protest or anger. Not only do Trump and Sanders supporters know what they dislike, they also know what they want to believe is doable: “Make America great again,” says Trump. “Make this political revolution a reality,” says Sanders.

            Polling shows that only six percent of voters “would consider voting for both men,” Thomas Edsall reports in The New York Times, based on recent NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys. But a few of their policy proposals actually overlap: hitting corporations for taxes on overseas profits; eliminating tax loopholes for the very rich, opposing trade agreements that have facilitated the American job drain; raising the wages required for foreigners who get H-1B work visas; and increasing spending on mental health treatment for veterans, for example.

Trump also favors letting vets use their Veterans Administration cards for private physicians, outside the system, who accept Medicare. Sanders takes credit for a law that “makes it easier for some veterans to see private doctors or go to community health centers,” his website declares.

If you take time to drill down into the positions detailed by both candidates, you’ll find that while both offer some concrete specifics about how they would accomplish their goals, Sanders’s are more solidly documented. Some liberal economists have questioned his math, but there is no doubt that his proposed tax increases would generate hundreds of billions in additional revenue. All he’d need is a Congress that looks nothing like the one we’re fated to have.

The Nihilist Republicans and Political Bigotry

By David K. Shipler

            Senate Republicans’ pledge to reject President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee who hasn’t been named contains as much intellectual integrity as trying to ban a book you haven’t read. It further politicizes an institution that works properly only above politics, when justices examine the law and the Constitution without regard to their personal preferences. And it could paralyze the Court on key cases, producing 4-4 ties that would let stand lower appeals court rulings but would set no nationwide precedents on matters that cry out for clear resolution.

The ironic fact that this would promote government’s dysfunction and further reduce its stature does not help so-called “establishment” Republicans who are worried about the protest vote being mobilized by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Those voters have been energized by the disdain for government, encouraged by the Tea Party movement and other radicals who could be called the Nihilist Republicans, as distinguished from the Responsible Republicans who used to try to govern when they won elections.

Justice Antonin Scalia’s body wasn’t even cold before Nihilist Republicans voiced their political prejudice by stereotyping as leftwing any conceivable candidate who could be proposed by Obama. This is the classic dynamic of bigotry: reject an individual—even an unidentified individual—because of his or her membership in a group. Reject because of the origin. Reject because of who supports the person. It is the same deviant logic that Trump uses to oppose letting Muslims into the country.

In a society that supposedly values individualism over collectivism, judging people by their collective associations rather than by their individual traits violates a basic American ethic—at least one we wish to see practiced.

Foreign Policy: Jazz or Football?

By David K. Shipler

            American football is a convenient metaphor, and it’s sure to be overused on this Super Bowl weekend. But what if we turn it around and recognize that our foreign policy is actually the metaphor—a metaphor for football, and that our trick tactics and testosterone-driven plays internationally are often modeled on what works in the National Football League?

             The decision this week to ramp up US military deployment in Europe, like putting more muscle on the line, is designed to cow Vladimir Putin’s “aggression,” to use the word that is kicked around casually by the Pentagon. It seems logical if you think you’re in a game to win by defeating the opponent rather than finding victory on common ground. The real world of foreign affairs is rarely a zero-sum game, however, and there’s never a final whistle.

 The American-Russian face-off is full of football-style moves that look tough but have had the perverse effect of strengthening the hand of the other side. Expanding NATO, which commits the United States to go to war to defend any of its members, has alarmed Moscow as the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have joined the alliance, along with Eastern European countries once in the Soviet sphere of influence. Russia’s reaction has been the opposite of what’s good for the West.

The American Myth of "Who We Are"

By David K. Shipler

            All countries need myths, especially if they’re at least a little bit true. They inspire imagination, set high standards, and foster hope. The American Dream is such a myth, for it challenges the society to make real the principle that anyone who works hard can prosper. American democracy is partly mythological in an age of voter suppression and billionaire campaign funding.

President Obama has summoned up another myth—one about American character—by often declaring that this or that bigoted, inhumane, self-destructive policy is “not who we are.” That’s partly correct, but only partly. The notion of a people inherently devoted to inclusive, rational decency is a beautiful myth being sullied daily by the leading Republican presidential candidates and now, as seen in the Iowa results, by their supporters. If they are “who we are,” then we have some work to do on truth-telling, cooperative problem-solving, and respect for the country’s religious and ethnic diversity.

Obama and Race

By David K. Shipler

             On Monday’s holiday, Barack and Michelle Obama visited an elementary school in Washington, DC, filled backpacks with books for kids, helped make planters for the school’s vegetable garden, and celebrated the service of AmeriCorps mentors. But Martin Luther King Jr. Day passed with no speech by the first African-American president about race in America. Nor, in his final State of the Union address last week, did Obama include a discussion of the state of race relations, despite the strains and fault lines that have grown more visible in recent years.

            On matters of race, he has not used his bully pulpit very well. Not that he’s ignored the topic: Very occasionally over his two terms, he’s offered some of the most eloquent and insightful commentary heard from any president, usually at a ceremonial or tragic moment. He has initiated a series of concrete policies aimed at improving the lot of minorities, including a task force on policing that might help counter bias in uniform.

But what he has not done, for whatever reasons, is spark and guide the kind of ongoing, searching introspection that the country needs. This is a loss for all of us.

            Bill Clinton, a president whose acute sensibilities were shaped by his upbringing as a white kid in Arkansas during the Civil Rights Movement, organized a national conversation on race during his second term.

Labor: A Free Market or a Rigged Market?

By David K. Shipler

Imagine working hard for a big company, say, Walmart, and feeling that your paycheck should be higher. Imagine going to the store manager and asking for a raise. Imagine him saying no—well, you don’t have to imagine that, because that’s the way it will surely be if you’re all alone. But now imagine that all your colleagues, all the cashiers and stockroom workers and salespeople go together to the manager and ask for a raise. Will he take notice? You bet. And if he doesn’t, watch what happens if you and your co-workers threaten to strike.

That’s the simplified sketch of what collective bargaining is about. It is what labor unions do—unions that have become an endangered species in the private American economy, where only 6.6 percent of workers are members, according to the Labor Department’s latest figures, from 2014.

That means that the vast majority of employees, with the exception of highly skilled professionals who are valued enough to negotiate their terms, cannot influence their wages, vacations, pensions, health insurance, or job security. A larger minority of government employees are unionized—35.7 percent at last count, mostly police officers, firefighters, and teachers—but that figure is dropping too, and will probably get another downward kick by the Supreme Court, if the conservative justices rule as they indicated during a hearing this week.

The United States, then, is likely to become an economy with virtually no labor unions if the trends of recent decades persist. About one-third of American workers were union members fifty years ago, and just over one-tenth are today. What are the implications?

Books, Parents, Schools, and Hidden Defeats

By David K. Shipler

            About a year ago, a mother in a wealthy suburb of Dallas filed a formal complaint against the use of my book The Working Poor: Invisible in America in advanced placement English classes at Highland Park High School. A review committee was formed, but she thought its membership was stacked against her and so withdrew her challenge. That was the end of the story.

            Or was it? Not quite. Six of Highland Park’s eighteen English teachers resigned at the end of the year, mostly because of the controversy, which involved seven books altogether and had brought “panic attacks, meltdowns, or outbursts of volcanic anger,” one told me. Going forward, teachers were required to write long rationales justifying the readings they wished to assign, which were then submitted to panels of community residents. Only the principled, daring, and resolute could resist the temptation of “soft censorship” as a way of avoiding controversial works by not choosing them in the first place. This must happen invisibly all across the country.

So even victories over those who try to have books removed have unseen costs. The classroom can be invaded by stress, bureaucracy, politicization, and a sense of danger. Education has “become very unsafe,” said Brian Read, an English teacher in Plymouth-Canton, Michigan, whose selections for AP English—Beloved by Toni Morrison and Waterland by Graham Swift—had survived an angry challenge by a small group of conservative parents who hadn’t read them.

At Year's End, Bits of Good News

By David K. Shipler

            Don’t blame the mainstream press, whose job is to focus on conflicts and problems, for the grim picture of a grim world. You can’t cure an issue until you turn it out into the sunlight. But in this season of holidays and reflections and resolutions, a little light on the brighter spots in our better nature might be part of that remedy, not so much to comfort us as to provide models of what could be. So I offer a few here.

             *The Dallas Dinner Table, which organizes dinner conversations at homes and churches about race, has had so many requests by local residents to participate on Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 18, that it quickly reached its maximum of 500 and had to close registration early.

            *The fear and bigotry toward Muslims inflamed by Donald Trump, and effectively endorsed by the silence of most other Republican candidates, has provoked rebuttals and statements of support for Muslims from some (though not all) Christian pulpits across the country.

*The bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton, wrote of “our love for you, our Muslim neighbors,” and pledged “our commitment to find even more effective ways to protect and defend you from words and actions that assault your safety and well-being. We believe God calls us to resist what is divisive, discriminatory, xenophobic, racist, or violent, and we want you to look to us as allies and friends.”

Sequel: A Theatrical Idea Reborn

By David K. Shipler

            One year ago, the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C.—an otherwise estimable institution—summarily fired Ari Roth, its internationally respected artistic director, who over 18 years had built the center’s Theater J into an inventive forum of dramatic ideas. Roth was compelled by his family history and his creative sensibilities to reach across difficult lines of difference. He did not shrink from putting hard issues before Washington audiences, but always with a strain of hopefulness. He did not like leaving people in despair.

            He did not like leaving himself in despair, either, and in less than a year began a new theater company, appropriately named Mosaic, which is now assembling the polished pieces of diverse experiences into a thematic first season of ambitious plays. In a country and a world that is dangerously polarized, he is searching for paths to healing by looking clear-eyed at momentous conflicts and personal sorrows. Fine art does that. Art filtered by politics does not, and that’s where Roth’s expansiveness collided with the JCC’s timidity.

Essentially, Roth infuriated shallow-minded conservatives by staging plays that portrayed Israel as an actual country with real blemishes and impurities, not the cardboard artifice that right-wing, pro-Israel Americans have constructed in their imaginations. He produced playwrights who put history on display and allowed Arab voices to be heard. He did not censor one narrative in favor of another. He did not simplify reality but invited theatergoers to consider its contradictions and ambiguities, in the Middle East and elsewhere. And now, exiled from the Jewish theater, he is making a promising start doing the same thing on a broader landscape.

The Next Affirmative Action

By David K. Shipler

            College admissions officers who want racial diversity on campus have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with a conservative Supreme Court that dislikes racial preferences. The next probable step, once the Court decides the case it heard today (Dec. 9), is to shift from race to socioeconomic class as a means to assemble a creative variety of students. This would have pluses and minuses as a substitute for race-based affirmative action, which the Court seems poised to restrict severely or to strike down entirely in the current case, Fisher v. University of Texas.

            Class could be used as a proxy for race and ethnicity, given the overrepresentation of African-American and Latino households at lower income levels in the population as a whole. But the blacks and Latinos admitted to the most selective universities would be very different from those who get in under current racial preferences, large majorities of whom are middle- or upper-class, with only tiny fractions from poor backgrounds.

            “At the top twenty law schools, 89 percent of African Americans and 63 percent of Latinos (and even higher proportions of whites and Asians) come from the top socioeconomic half of the population,” writes Richard D. Kahlenberg, citing a 2011 study, while only 2 percent of all law students in those schools come from the bottom quarter. “Another study finds that the proportion of black students at elite colleges coming from the top quartile of the socioeconomic distribution increased from 29 percent in 1972 to 67 percent in 1992.”

Mixing Opinion into News

By David K. Shipler

            The New York Times violated a worthy tradition today by publishing an editorial on its front page, above the fold, in a space previously reserved for facts and analysis, not opinion. It was a mistake, and I’ll bet I’m not the only former or current reporter for the paper who hopes it doesn’t happen again.

            The Times has been one of the last American news organizations to maintain a high wall between news and editorial. This is a peculiarly American practice, unusual even among other democracies. But it has been badly eroded by Fox News especially, which taints much of its reporting with politics. MSNBC, some radio broadcasters, and smaller newspapers have also allowed news coverage to be corrupted by partisan perspectives, while The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and some others still cling to what we denizens of the newsroom used to call, in decades past, “the separation of church and state.”

            Reporters were so zealous about this firewall that the newsroom would rumble with murmurs of discontent when a certain editorial writer, who opined on urban affairs, descended periodically from his exalted perch on the tenth floor of the old Times building to the third-floor newsroom to find out from me and other writers what was actually going on in the street. We talked to him but were careful not to listen to him and to pay no attention to whatever he wrote on the topics we covered.

Next Thanksgiving

By David K. Shipler

            Thanksgiving is the best of American holidays. It is either religious or secular, depending on your preference. It is unburdened by materialism and free from jingoistic patriotism. It celebrates neither war nor triumph. It is not a day of mourning or grievance. It does not merely turn a page on the calendar but prompts a turning inward in reflection. The only true indulgence is the elixir of good food, best observed in our closest circles of family and friends.

            Only there, for those of us who have that safe place of intimacy, does giving thanks come easily this year. If we have good health, good love, good friendships—if we have enough money to sustain us comfortably, work that we enjoy, lives that educate us constantly—gratitude flows clearly. Our act of thanksgiving is about the present, and the past that has led to our bounty.

            We cannot give thanks for the larger world. Let us hope that next Thanksgiving we can, at least in some measure. I would wish then to be grateful--

            *for the decency of my fellow Americans, who snuffed out the hateful bigotry and bluster of Donald Trump and his mob of followers, overcoming them at the polls to retain our nation’s purpose and ideals.

Textbooks for Peace in Israel and the West Bank

                As published at The New Yorker online

By David K. Shipler

A small, sad record was set on Thursday, for the largest number of deaths in a single day in the two-month rash of scattered attacks by Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank. Five people died, two by stabbing in Tel Aviv and three by automatic gunfire near Alon Shvut, a Jewish settlement. In the shadow of the attacks in Paris, however, this everyday violence has slipped nearly out of sight. It has become so routine that it remains in our peripheral vision.

No peace talks are scheduled, and even if they were they would need to reach more deeply into ordinary beliefs than negotiators can usually manage. Those beliefs are shaped in schools, which fail to teach children to think sympathetically about the other’s past and recent history. As touchy-feely as this might seem, education has grown into an unavoidable obstacle to co-existence, for it misinforms perceptions across the lines of conflict.    Continue reading at The New Yorker.

Surveillance: A Cautionary Note

By David K. Shipler

            In the rush after the Paris attacks to step up surveillance, the usual arguments are being heard on one side about violations of civil liberties, and, on the other, about obstacles to monitoring because of what CIA director John Brennan derides as “hand-wringing” over government intrusion. But there is a less visible problem, often mentioned by former intelligence officials: Excessive, unfocused surveillance has produced floods of information beyond what the professionals can digest and analyze.

            At an illuminating panel in Washington two months ago, three former officials of the National Security Agency—Thomas Drake, William Binney, and J. Kirk Wiebe—made precisely that point, and if you talk to others who have been in the business, many of them will tell you the same thing. The petabytes of data that have been vacuumed up almost indiscriminately since 9/11 are stored untranslated, unread, and unsifted in digital files, well off the radar of the agents who are charged with spotting radicals before they commit the next atrocity.

            The American Civil Liberties Union, whose overriding goal is to protect constitutional rights, came up with the perfect metaphor after the Patriot Act diluted the Fourth Amendment’s protections in 2001: You don’t find a needle in a haystack by increasing the size of the haystack. Yet expanding the haystack is what was done, and is what is now being proposed.

Ban Before Reading

Author's Note in The New York Times Book Review

By DAVID K. SHIPLER

Friends and family congratulated me, book sales bounced a little and a 10-year-old title was suddenly under discussion by people who had never read it. I had been awarded literary recognition of a peculiar kind, one that brought me no euphoria. Along with six other books opposed by conservative parents in a wealthy school district near Dallas, my book “The Working Poor: Invisible in America,” a nonideological portrayal of lives near the bottom, was suspended from the English curriculum at Highland Park High School, where it had been used in advanced placement classes.

Continue Reading

The Rabin Assassination and the Judgment of History

Killing a King:The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel Dan Ephron W.W. Norton & Company
2015, pp. 304, $27.95

Review in Moment Magazine by David K. Shipler

The assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin 20 years ago produced instant analysis of unusual accuracy. Typically, it takes decades for the air to clear enough for history to make a sound judgment, especially in the Middle East. But when Rabin was shot in the back in November 1995 after a huge peace rally in Tel Aviv, the Israelis of various camps who either mourned or celebrated what they thought the murder meant for their country turned out to be exactly right.

   They were right that Rabin’s death would result in a loss of momentum toward the concessions necessary to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. And they were right that the assassin, a religious extremist named Yigal Amir, did not act alone, in a sense: He drew ideological sustenance from a significant segment of Israeli society where Rabin was detested and denounced as traitor, Nazi, Arab-lover and defiler of God’s plan for the Jews.

   Amir was an activist and organizer, and within circles of like-minded friends, he made little secret of his lust to kill Rabin. He staked out positions at Rabin’s apartment and elsewhere several times, and finally pulled the trigger in complete harmony with the hatred purveyed by a radical absolutism that has gained in political power ever since.

   This turning point is meticulously documented by the journalist Dan Ephron in his compelling account, Killing a King: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the Remaking of Israel. A former Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek who covered the rally and the murder trial, Ephron interviewed both Rabin’s and Amir’s families and associates, sifted through court and investigative records, and pieced together an authoritative narrative that will serve as a valuable record of history.

   It is also a page-turner. You don’t want to put it down, because even though you know the outcome, Ephron does such diligent reporting in getting inside the mind of the assassin, the thinking of Rabin, and the miscalculations of the Shin Bet units charged with providing security that practically every page carries the tense energy of fresh insight.

   Along with fellow right-wingers, Amir was deeply alarmed when the Oslo accords signed in 1993 by Rabin and the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, laid the groundwork for an Israeli military withdrawal from Palestinian population centers in the West Bank and Gaza. A Palestinian Authority governed by Arafat would get limited control over a patchwork of zones, a prospect that sent Amir and others “scouring the Talmud for laws that Rabin might be violating,” Ephron reports. Although Arafat would have no authority over Jewish settlers, who would remain under Israeli law and security protection, Amir concluded that the prime minister had become a moser, “a person who handed over Jews to a hostile power.” The idea had been discussed in the haredi press, which had raised the question of whether Rabin might be subject to the Talmudic concept of din rodef, defined as “the law of the pursuer,” which “permitted a bystander to kill the aggressor in order to save the innocent victim,” Ephron notes. This argument came to constitute Amir’s religious rationale for the assassination.

   “Amir clearly stood on the margins of the right-wing camp,” Ephron concludes. “But its mainstream leaders had goaded the extremists with their ugly rhetoric and its rabbis had furnished the religious justification for violence.”

Intelligence officials worried about an assassination attempt, but Rabin gruffly rebuffed their pleas that he wear a bulletproof vest. And Amir was not on the radar of the Shin Bet, whose monitoring concentrated on Palestinians; the agency underestimated the threat from Jews. Those Jews who did come under surveillance were mostly “national religious” settlers on the West Bank, and Amir did not fit the obvious profile. He was ultra-Orthodox, lived not in a settlement but in the coastal town of Herzliya and studied law at Bar-Ilan University.

   The Shin Bet’s entire file on Amir, Ephron found, consisted of a single page with a few sentences noting that he tried to organize a militia to attack Palestinians and that he took students for weekend visits to settlements. But, according to Ephron, his boasts about plans to kill Rabin went unreported by a Shin Bet informant, who thought him “nothing but a blowhard.”

   Amir was especially inspired by Baruch Goldstein, a settler who stormed into Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994, spraying gunfire across the sea of kneeling Muslim worshipers and killing 29 before survivors beat him to death. “The Goldstein massacre captivated Amir and also taunted him,” Ephron writes. “Amir regarded himself as a doer and others as talkers and compromisers… If Amir thought sacrificing himself might be a courageous way to derail the peace train, Goldstein had beat him to it.”

   Indeed, Amir’s sense of urgency to kill Rabin rose and fell as the prospects for a peace agreement advanced and faltered. The more hopeful the diplomatic progress, the more driven Amir became to end it. With a 9mm Beretta stuck in his belt and a clip containing armor-piercing bullets made by his brother Hagai, he traveled to demonstrations and showed up at Rabin events, trolling for an opportunity. Once, riding on a bus full of protesters to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, he thought his chance had come. But at the last minute, Rabin canceled his appearance to rush to the scene of a bombing elsewhere, part of a series of attacks by Palestinian radicals who were as eager as the Israeli right to torpedo the peace process. 

   Hagai spent 16-and-a-half years in prison as an accomplice and was then mined by Ephron on points of Yigal’s thinking. Rabin’s daughter, Dalia, provided the author with intimate details and even with her father’s blood-stained clothing, which Ephron carried in hand luggage to a forensic expert in the United States to answer a key question: whether a hole in the front of Rabin’s shirt had been made by a bullet. Since Amir had shot him in the back, a frontal wound would have suggested a second shooter, perhaps a conspiracy. The expert’s verdict: not a bullet hole, but probably a surgeon’s rapid work to get a tube into the dying prime minister’s chest.

   The great sorrow in this story is the fragility of the middle ground. Neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli side could hold the posture of accommodation and compromise against the fierce winds of violence. Those forces of moderation deserve more attention than they usually receive, and in these pages, too, Ephron might have explored them more thoroughly.

   Yet his solid reporting leaves the reader space to reflect on what might have been. Could Rabin have survived politically amid the suicide bombings? Would Arafat have been more conciliatory with Rabin than he was with subsequent prime ministers? Could more astute politicians have used the country’s surge of raw grief to sustain the peace process?

   “The opponents of compromise in both camps had nowhere near the power and influence they hold now,” Ephron notes. “The process itself had yet to be contaminated by sustained waves of violence and settlement expansion. And the rapport between Rabin and Arafat—the deciders of their generation—had evolved into something workable. For all those reasons, Rabin probably stood a better chance of forging a durable reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians than any leader before or since.”

Cheapening the Holocaust

By David K. Shipler

            As if the Palestinians hadn’t done enough to Israelis, Prime Minister Netanyahu now blames them for the Holocaust by fabricating a tale that Hitler had not planned to exterminate the Jews of Europe until the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, suggested it in 1941. Netanyahu thus lends his office to the sordid practice of manipulating and distorting the Holocaust, a timeworn occupation in the Middle East.

            When Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, posters appeared in Jerusalem depicting the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, wearing a tie covered with swastikas, doctored from the backwards swastika pattern on the tie he inexplicably wore when he addressed Israel’s parliament in 1977. Begin was shown as the obsequious Jew with a yellow Star of David on his lapel, the label the Nazis had required. Pedestrians walked past the posters unfazed, accustomed as they were to such smears.

            If Begin ever saw those caricatures, he must have been stung. He himself had survived the Holocaust by fleeing Warsaw for Lithuania, where he was arrested by the Russians, spent a year in Soviet prisons, and was released to join the Polish army. In 1982, I happened to interview him in his office soon after he had been called by President Ronald Reagan, who had likened the carnage during Israeli’s bombardment of West Beirut during the war in Lebanon to “a holocaust.”

            “He hurt me very deeply,” Begin told me, “and I said to him, ‘Mr. President, I know what is a holocaust.’”

The Cold War Quagmire

By David K. Shipler

                You’d think with all the hand-wringing in Washington over Russia’s foray into the quagmire of Syria that some Middle Eastern plum was about to fall into Russia’s lap—at American expense. And so it would be if the Cold War rivalry were still operating, when every gain by one superpower was considered an equivalent loss by the other. But that’s not the case now, and it’s time for both Russia and the United States to abandon the zero-sum game in favor of a more carefully calibrated set of calculations.

                The two countries’ interests are not identical, their strategies differ, and their motives diverge. They are headed for a proxy war, each arming different factions. But their fundamental national security concerns overlap significantly, and both would surely find solace in a stable Syria—even a secular dictatorship—where ISIS, the Islamic State movement, had been crushed. American ideals notwithstanding, a Jeffersonian democracy in Damascus is not in the cards. So there is room for inventive Russian-American cooperation.

                Vladimir Putin doesn’t do democracy—not at home, not abroad. He doesn’t accept the American faith that a pluralistic political system will naturally arise from the ashes of a destroyed dictatorship. It is painful to recognize that he has a point, at least as witnessed in Egypt, Libya, and Iraq. The next country on that list would be Syria, should President Bashar al-Assad be overthrown. One form of autocracy would surely be exchanged for another.

Putin comes out of a deep Russian culture that abhors a power vacuum and fears anarchy—especially when they occur in his own back yard.

The Hunger for Heroes

By David K. Shipler

            Washington’s adoring reception of Pope Francis has been cleansing. Scrubbed of the toxic rhetoric that passes for debate in this town, his simple truths have been elevating. His calls for human decency have been inspiring. His embrace of dialogue as he faced Congress this morning was not merely a pleading but a moral teaching. And despite the tiresome babble of CNN commentators trying to squeeze his various messages into familiar political boxes, Francis summoned the best in America with a challenge to lift our gaze beyond those boundaries and see again, with exhilarating clarity, the reasons for our great ideals.

            You do not have to be Catholic, or even religious, as I am not. You do not have to agree with every view that Francis holds, as I do not, to see him as a hero, a secular hero badly needed in the tumultuous vacuum of righteousness that afflicts our time.

The modern era has precious few: Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, Mikhail Gorbachev (if you’re not a Russian who detests him), Malala Yousafzai (have you forgotten her already?).

We need heroes. We need figures to admire. We need our lives driven by something larger than ourselves. We need to play a part in a higher purpose. Occasionally, someone of goodness, or a mission of virtue, comes along to satisfy this yearning. As often, probably more often, it is someone of malice—or a corrupted idea. Religion can be either. As Francis said today, “Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion. We know that no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism.”

The Iran Deal: Israel Wins Twice

By David K. Shipler

The Senate’s failure to block the agreement with Iran may look like a defeat for Israel, whose government lobbied so intensely against it, but in reality Israel is likely to benefit in two ways if the deal is implemented. First, Iran will be impeded in pursuing nuclear weapons. Second, Israel will get more security aid from the United States.

The first point has been ferociously debated, of course. The second, however, is indisputable. The Obama administration was reportedly eager to start talks with Israel about enhanced assistance as the Iran deal was completed. Democratic supporters of the agreement, pressed by AIPAC, the pro-Israel organization, are ready to improve their political standing by by compensating Israel with new weaponry.

An example is Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, who declared when he endorsed the Iran deal, “The U.S. should provide Israel with access to the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) to help deter Iranian cheating.” That’s the bunker-busting bomb, which might be able to reach buried, fortified nuclear facilities. It would presumably enable Israel to start a war that the United States would have to finish.

The Common Ground Between the United States and Russia

By David K. Shipler

            Washington may regard Vladimir Putin as the world’s Number One Nuisance, but he came through in the Iran agreement, just as he did in 2013 by negotiating the removal of chemical weapons from Syria (minus chlorine, unfortunately, which has industrial uses but has been weaponized). Before its thinly disguised invasion of Ukraine, Russia also shared intelligence on terrorism and other security matters. Unpublicized contacts among Russian and American military and civilian intelligence officials were reportedly frequent and productive; perhaps they still are.

So, a new overlay of common ground should be drawn onto the map of conflict between Washington and Moscow. President Obama, answering a well-placed question by Thomas Friedman Tuesday after the deal restricting Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons, said this:

            “Russia was a help on this. I’ll be honest with you. I was not sure given the strong differences we are having with Russia right now around Ukraine, whether this would sustain itself. Putin and the Russian government compartmentalized on this in a way that surprised me, and we would have not achieved this agreement had it not been for Russia’s willingness to stick with us and the other P5-Plus members in insisting on a strong deal.”

            Quite an endorsement. But he shouldn’t have been surprised. Preventing Iran from going nuclear is as much in the Russian interest as it is in ours. Look at a map. Iran is in Russia’s back yard. If there is any constant in Russian history (and there are several), it’s the importance of the back yard. Ukraine is also in Russia’s back yard. You mess with the back yard, you mess with house and home. And while Putin can certainly be faulted for his aggression against Ukraine, for exaggerating Western designs on Russia’s security, and for fostering jingoism among the Russian public, his country and the United States share important overlapping interests.

            Let’s make a short list:

A Constitution Informed by Social Change

By David K. Shipler

            If you spend time reading the Supreme Court’s majority and dissenting opinions in the landmark same-sex marriage case, a transcendent principle jumps out at you. It has little to do with the definition of marriage or the widening acceptance of homosexuality. Rather, it is the notion that society should be alive to its own injustices, even those unseen in the age when solemn constitutional texts were written. Later—nearly 150 years later in this instance—practices that were once acceptable emerge as violations of the rights set down at a very different time.

This is the crux of the ideological dispute between conservatives and liberals on the Court, and it is articulated in this case with unusual clarity. The conservative dissenters define liberty in the narrowest terms—to Clarence Thomas it means freedom from physical restraint and imprisonment, nothing more.

To Antonin Scalia, the clock simply has to be turned back to the date of the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment, whose clauses banned the states from denying any person “the equal protection of the laws” or depriving anyone “of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Those were the provisions that the Supreme Court found were being violated by denying same-sex couples the right to marry.

Scalia scoffed. “When the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868,” he wrote, “every state limited marriage to one man and one woman, and no one doubted the constitutionality of doing so.” Case closed.

Compare that with Anthony Kennedy’s fluid view of liberty in his opinion for the slim 5-4 majority. Kennedy is not easily categorized as liberal or conservative; he is often a swing vote. Here, however, he effectively endorses the liberal concept of a living Constitution by emphasizing its place in a shifting world.

The Mainstream Roots of Bigotry

   By David K. Shipler

        The alleged murderer Dylann Roof may have entered the bible study group in Charleston from that fringe of white supremacists that have always plagued America, but the stereotypes they hold of African-Americans are also woven into much mainstream conservative commentary by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and others. One telling overlap is their assertion that whites are in peril; Beck has called Obama a racist who hates whites, Roof is said to have expressed fears that blacks were taking over, threatening whites.

Ironically, the election of a black president has enabled old racial assumptions to be embedded and camouflaged within legitimate political criticism. The images are cleverly encrypted, but they may be blatant as well. Google “Obama ape” and you will see dozens of Photoshopped pictures of Michelle and Barack Obama as primates, playing off that traditional American calumny of blacks as subhuman. You can buy them on T-shirts and babies’ onesies. When they are circulated online, sometimes by Republican office-holders, the caricatures create an odd counterpoint of racial prejudice alongside the non-bigotry that most voters demonstrated by twice electing the first African-American in the White House.

Surveillance: Edward Snowden's Wishful Thinking

By David K. Shipler

            To risk all by being a whistleblower, you have to believe deeply in your society’s capacity for self-correction, and Edward Snowden—after periods of doubt—is a believer, it seems. Last week he hailed “the power of an informed public” in driving Congress to make modest trims in the National Security Agency’s authority to collect data on Americans’ electronic communications. This is the way an open democracy is supposed to work: expose the wrongdoing and provoke reform.

But before we celebrate with embarrassing rhapsodies, let’s remember how far the United States has to go. The 9/11 trauma has not yet healed, and the post-traumatic security measures—some sensible, others excessive—have compromised the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee of the people’s right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.” Many of the extreme methods of intrusion remain intact. Some have proved worse than useless, overloading intelligence professionals with terabytes of distracting information that’s hard to search and sift for the ominous patterns of incipient terrorism.

So there are both practical and ideological reasons to abandon the excesses, yet they seem likely to stay largely in place until several conditions develop.

If earlier spasms of anxiety in American history are any guide, violations of constitutional rights in the interest of national security come to an end when, a) they are so egregious that their disclosure inflames the public; b) the perceived threat diminishes; and/or c) courts find the measures illegal or unconstitutional. Early signs of each of these can be seen, but only as slight beginnings of what may become significant trends.

The First Amendment and the Freedom to Hate

By David K. Shipler

Metro said Thursday that it will not allow new issue-oriented advertising in the transit system after a controversial pro-Israel group sought to place ads featuring a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad, a drawing that was linked to deadly violence in Texas this month.

--The Washington Post

            Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that the White Aryan Resistance wanted to put ads on Washington Metro trains and buses featuring a cartoon from the gallery it labels “Kikes.” For example, take the one that portrays a long-nosed, thick-lipped, cigar-chomping giant leering maliciously as he applies a drill bit to the stomach of a smaller, terrified blond fellow he’s holding down with a meaty hand. “Never forget, white man,” says the caption, “the Zionist Jew is working around the clock to DESTROY YOU.”

            Or, let’s imagine that some purveyor of one of those Photoshopped images of Barack and Michelle Obama as subhuman primates (you can see dozens by Googling “Obama Ape”) decided to display it throughout the capital’s transportation system. Picture buses circulating through the streets of Washington adorned with posters of an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jewish monster or President Obama morphed into a chimpanzee.

            There might not be a risk of violent reaction. But it’s a safe bet that very few Americans would defend the parade of such ugly bigotry against Jews and blacks. Consider, then, the application to Metro by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative to buy space for the winner of its cartoon contest in Texas—a drawing featuring the traditional stereotype of a fierce, raging Arab, glaring and waving a curved scimitar as he declares, “You can’t draw me!” The artist, out of the frame, replies, “That’s why I draw you.”

Pamela Geller and the Anti-Islam Movement

(published on The New Yorker Web site)

By David K. Shipler

     The winning cartoon in the contest to draw the Prophet Muhammad, early this month in Garland, Texas, which two gunmen attacked, depicts a fierce Prophet waving a scimitar and saying, “You can’t draw me!” The artist, whose hand and pencil are visible, replies from outside the frame, “That’s why I draw you.”

     And so the principle of free speech confronted American society’s unwritten code of restraint on contemptuous stereotyping. .  . Freedom of expression suddenly looked like two overlays on a map, the legal landscape and the cultural landscape, each with its own boundaries. . . . 

     Virtually all the alarm over the coming Islamic takeover and the spread of Sharia law can be traced back to an old document of questionable authority and relevance, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.” Dated May 22, 1991, it was found in 2004 by the F.B.I., buried in one of a large number of boxes uncovered during a search of a house in northern Virginia.

     Continue Reading.

Another View of Vietnam Veterans

By David K. Shipler

(Published on The New Yorker website)

      From time to time during the American war in Iraq which began in 2003, aging Vietnam veterans wearing baseball caps and khaki jackets emblazoned with pins, patches, and the names of their units gathered at the small commercial airport in Bangor, Maine. A few older vets of more noble wars were sometimes among them, frail men from the Second World War and Korea, as they assembled in the passenger lounge to greet returning troops when their planes touched down for refuelling. Bangor would be the arrivals’ first contact with American soil since they left for the zone of combat.

     At the gate, the Vietnam vets usually formed two lines—as an avenue of welcome, of course, not a gauntlet. They were giving something that many of them felt they had not received decades earlier. . .

     Through the years, our varied ways of thinking about the Americans who fought that war, which ended ignominiously forty years ago this week, have been characterized by tension between a sense of virtue and a sense of shame. Americans cannot agree amongst themselves on what happened there, on what might have happened had we done one thing or another differently, or on what would have happened if justice and morality had prevailed.

     Read full piece at The New Yorker