My Amazon Review of George Packer's "Our Man:Richard Holbrooke and The End of the American Century"

A Man in Full

George Packer knows how to write. His 600 page (in print edition) biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke kept my full attention throughout my reading, no mean feat. Packer fully benefited from Holbrooke’s papers given to him by Katie Marton, Holbrooke’s third wife and more than 200 interviews that put you into the room of a host of very important conversations that affected American foreign policy in every Democratic administration from Kennedy to Obama. Needless to say watching the sausage being made is very messy where personality too often dominates over policy.

Holbrooke was blessed by having met Dean Rusk as a college student through a friendship with his son and had the Harrimans, both Averell and Pamela Harriman as a patron early in his career and Hillary Clinton later on. His goal was to become secretary of state; he never achieved it, but you can find his foot prints on American policy from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

We see Holbrooke in the bush taking fire in 1960’s Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer, where he realizes early on that the war was unwinnable and again see him taking fire in the Balkans in the 1990s and Afghanistan in 2010. He certainly had raw physical courage. He also knew how to dominate a room. Through the force of his personality he basically brokers the end of the Bosnian civil war with what became known as the Dayton Accords.

Holbrooke’s problem was that many of the coalitions he built were against him. Simply put, all too many people couldn’t stand him. Too be sure they respected his intellect and insights, but he had a way of annoying his best of friends. President Obama made him our Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009, yet after appointing him he refused to meet with him or even be in the same room with him. Even Hillary Clinton, his principal sponsor, grew tired of him. In fact he suffers a fatal heart attack in Clinton’s office while he was arguing for a negotiated solution to with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Holbrooke’s life was focused on foreign policy to the exclusion of practically everything else. Packer makes it clear that it was no easy task to be one of his spouses, where he had numerous affairs including with his best friend’s wife. That best friend was Tony Lake, who became national security adviser to Bill Clinton and a lifelong bureaucratic adversary.

His personal faults aside Holbrooke cared about our country and wanted our foreign policy to reflect the best of our ideals. He became a full-throated supporter of humanitarian intervention in Bosnia and he understood coercive diplomacy had a role in formulating foreign policy. Holbrooke was tough on our enemies and too often he was tough on his friends. He was truly a man in full and Packer’s writing brings that out.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/RQG5BWHYE8NK3/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of John Oller's "White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century"

Super Lawyers of the Gilded Age

Retired Wall Street lawyer John Oller takes us back to the turn of the 20^th Century when the modern law firm was created to service the giant industrial corporations that were taking form. Among the IVY League WASP lawyers we see Paul Cravath fresh after his winning the “current wars” for his client George Westinghouse against Thomas Edison create the model of today’s law firm. He hires associates straight out of the best law schools, trains them and puts them on a partnership track. He also creates a profit sharing system among the partners. More than 100 years later this is how corporate law firms work.

We meet Frank Stetson, JP Morgan’s lawyer, future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Charles Evans Hughes, George Wickersham who would become William Howard Taft’s attorney general who brings a multitude of anti-trust lawsuits, and William Nelson Cromwell who pretty much is responsible for a coup in Panama that leads to the building of the Panama Canal.  We also meet a young John Foster Dulles, who would later run Sullivan & Cromwell and be Eisenhower’s secretary of state.

There is also one Jewish lawyer in this telling. He is Samuel Untermyer  who after making a fortune on Wall Street, he becomes a leading muckraker taking on the titans of Wall Street, including JP Morgan in very famous congressional hearing.

Out of their labors we see formulated the notions of the “rule of reason” in antitrust cases first enunciated by William Howard Taft when he was an appellate judge, the consent decree and the business judgement rule for corporate officers and directors. As the story evolves most of Oller’s protagonists make peace with the progressives they rub up against and as such they become part and parcel with the newly emerging administrative state. Of course the emergence of the administrative state would become a great boon to the super lawyers.

We also see the growing internationalist outlook among Oller’s Wall Street lawyers. They push for intervention on the Allies side in World War I and actively support the creation of the League of Nations. A generation later they would form the backbone of Wendell Willkie’s campaign for the presidency. Oller bemoans the fact that Wall Street lawyers are far less involved in Washington D.C. then they were 100 years ago. Instead we see Wall Street investment bankers taking their place.

Oller has written an interesting book highlighting the merger between law and capital. At time he gets bogged down in too many details, but on the whole his book makes for an interesting history. 

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R1DA0ATSMPIED3/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of William L. Silber's "The Story of Silver: How the White Metal Shaped America and the Modern World"

Silver Bull

N.Y.U.  Economic historian William Silber has a real fondness for silver as a monetary metal. He starts his story in ancient times but his history really begins with Alexander Hamilton establishing a bi-metal standard in 1793 valuing silver at 1/16^th of an ounce of gold, creating the 16-1 gold/silver ratio that would legally stand until 1873. That standard valued silver at $1.29/ounce.

He is not happy about the “Crime of 1873” where Senator John Sherman demonetizes silver and puts the United States on the road to the gold standard which occurs in 1879. By using the then populist slogan, he puts himself squarely on the of the pro-silver/pro-inflation forces extant in the country at the time. Unfortunately Silber fails to distinguish between a good deflation caused by rapid increases in productivity and a bad deflation distinguished by a collapse in aggregate demand. The 19^th Century silver wars culminate with William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic Convention. By then gold becomes more plentiful and the U.S. enjoys the full benefits of the gold standard.

One of Silber’s heroes is Nevada Senator Key Pitman who leads the silver bloc in the Senate which counted fourteen senators among the seven mining states. In the 1930s Pitman convinces Roosevelt to raise the price of silver through huge treasury purchases. That ripples across the Pacific breaking China, then on the silver standard, leading to a flood of illegal exports that cause a credit contraction thereby weakening the economy. That in turn will make it easier for first Japan and then Mao’s Communists to take over the country.

Silber’s most interesting character is Henry Jarecki, a Yale psychiatrist who become enamored of silver. Jarecki sees that silver is undervalued and buys up as much coin and silver certificate currency to redeem at the U.S. Mint at $1.29/ounce. Soon the mint runs out of silver and the price explodes. Jarecki would leave Yale and found Mocatta Metals, a leading precious metals trading company.

Silber spends most of the book in excruciating detail describing the Texas Hunt Brothers corner on the silver market in 1980. An operation that nearly bankrupts Wall Street and triggers Fed action. To me, he is way too sympathetic to the Hunt Brothers.

Simply put Silber describes silver as a dual functioning metal. It is both an industrial commodity and a store of value. He makes his case on the store of value proposition when the price of silver surges with gold amidst the short inflation scare that existed following the financial crisis of 2007-2010. In essence it seems Silber has more faith in metals than the fiat currency of the Central Banks.

Though not as good as his earlier books on Paul Volcker and the 1914 closure of the stock market, “The Story of Silver” is a good read for those interested in economic history.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R291D01TPCA1DW/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

A Green Moonshot, Not a Green New Deal

I just finished reading Douglas Brinkley’s “American Moonshot” and it came to me that what is needed to solve the problem of climate change is not an amorphous Green New Deal, but rather a focused Green Moonshot. (See https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2019/05/my-amazon-review-of-douglas-brinkleys.html) The American space program of the 1960s is a far better analogy than the New Deal of the 1930s. This is especially true because the space program, although spending big bucks, did not require a remaking of American society while the supporters of the Green New Deal want to use it as an excuse to remake society in their social democratic image. The latter is not desirable and is politically impossible.

What a Green Moonshot would do is that it would focus attention not so much on alternative energy, carbon taxes and conservation which as important as they are, will not solve the problem. What is needed is a crash program to REMOVE carbon from the atmosphere. An April 7^th New York Times article on the subject was entitled, “Blamed for Climate Change, Oil Companies Invest in Carbon Removal.”  The process involves direct air capture to generate a flow of air over calcium hydroxide that captures the carbon and converts it into fuel.

There are other techniques to remove carbon dioxide from the air through cryogenics, expensive, but it works. What we have here is less a problem of pure science than a problem of chemical engineering. It is very much similar to the creation of the modern aluminum industry when the Hall- Hercoult process refined aluminum from alumina and note the chemical formula for alumina is AL2O3, not too different from carbon dioxide CO2. One is an aluminum oxide and the other is a carbon oxide.

Further unlike the space program which had to create the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 we already have in place the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is though that agency a focused research effort in conjunction with private contractors that an economical solution to carbon capture problem could be solved within a decade.

Indeed such a program would be a far easier sell to those members of Congress who are skeptical of the Green New Deal. To be sure the climate deniers in the Republican Party probably won’t go along with this, but hopefully by 2021 cooler heads will prevail. To paraphrase President Kennedy we will do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

My Amazon Review of Douglas Brinkley's "American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race"

 Space: Kennedy’s New Frontier

Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley has written a terrific book about America’s race to the moon and John Kennedy’s crucial role in it. The book is part history of the American space program and its antecedents and part biography of President Kennedy. I lived much of that history while growing up. As a teenager I was one of the thousands who wrote letters to rocket scientist Wernher von Braun offering up my plan for combining liquid and solid fuel stages in missile development. Later I stood and cheered John Glenn in his 1962 ticker tape parade up Broadway after his successful Mercury mission. And I can never forget showing up I my orderly room at Fort Bragg after returning from leave to watch Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on grainy portable black and white TV set. Brinkley evocatively brought back all of those memories.

Brinkley starts his history by discussing the role of America’s first rocketeer Robert Goddard whose experiments in the 1920s inspired many into thinking that going to the moon was not a pipe dream. He spends much time on the German rocket program during World War II where von Braun was a leading scientist in developing the V-1 and V-2 rockets. It is also clear that he was a war criminal in using slave labor to build those rockets. Von Braun gets picked up by the U.S. Army in Operation paper clip and with Cold War tensions rising he is expunged of his past sins and becomes America’s leading rocketeer.

In the late 1950s Kennedy was a politician on the make. The Cold War was heating up and America was shocked by Russia’s 1957 launch of Sputnik. His leading issue was the missile gap, which later was proved to be non-existent, but it elects him president. In 1961 with Russian moves on Berlin, the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Russian success in manned orbital flight, Kennedy makes a decision for America to go to the moon by the end of the decade and thus was born the Apollo program. The space program became a critical asset in America’s fighting the Cold War.

Kennedy owns the space program and he befriends America’s new heroes, the astronauts where the names of Glen, Grissom, Shephard and others would become household words. The glamour of the astronauts and Kennedy’s personal magnetism gave form to the new frontier in space and supports his poll numbers. With his strong political support the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) formed by Eisenhower is flooded with money which by the mid-1960s accounts for 5% of all federal spending. However, at the outset, Kennedy didn’t fully realize what a herculean systems engineering task that would lie ahead and required a great deal of luck as well.

Brinkley recounts the role of NASA administrator James Webb in organizing the moon effort. Webb with both government and industry experience molds the agency to do his bidding in a very efficient manner. Because he previously worked for Kerr-McGee Oil, He knows Senator Robert Kerr well and as a consequence Kerr becomes a leading supporter of the space program. Kerr along with Vice President Lyndon Johnson (a big supporter from Day 1) and Houston Congressman Albert Thomas make the appropriations flow and they also bring the space program headquarters to Houston. Brinkley also highlights the role of private contractors in making the moon landing a success. North American Aviation built the rocket engines, Boeing the airframe, McDonnell Aircraft the space module and Grumman Aviation the lunar lander.

Of course the moon program was not without its critics. From the Right came howls that it was too costly and if the money were to be spent it should be spent on military applications and from the Left came criticism that the money should have been spent on poverty programs. Despite the criticism the moon program continued as tribute to the martyred president.

My one quibble with the book is that Brinkley only has one mention in passing on Theodore von Karman who founded Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and rocket engine maker Aerojet-General. Von Karman was a true pioneer in space flight. Nevertheless Brinkley shows that the America of the 1960s had the ability to come together to do great things. Would that be true today? I would humbly suggest that instead of an amorphous Green New Deal we have a focused Green Moonshot modeled after the space program.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/R363LCWKUWOTX1/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv