My Review of Sonia Purnell's "Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman's Astonishing Life ...."

 Sex, Money, and Power

Pamela Harriman was born in 1920 into minor nobility as a Digby. She later, through her marriage to Randolph became a Churchill and through her marriage to Averell she became a Harriman. In the middle she married Hayward Leland a Broadway producer of “Sound of Music” fame. However, the real story as journalist/biographer Sonia Purnell tells it in her hagiographic biography is about how a once chubby girl uses are innate smarts and her sexual powers of seduction to have access to great wealth and be influential in the corridors of power in England, France, and the United States. 

Her marriage to the alcoholic and womanizing Randolph was destined to fail. Nevertheless, she so charmed his father Winston, that she was able to sit on many high-level meetings of state at his Chequers country estate. She also had his full permission to seduce Averell Harriman who was in charge of lend-lease aid to Britain. She was 21 and Harriman was 50. It was said that her high diplomacy took place between the sheets of the Dorchester Hotel, where Harriman put her up. After Harriman was reassigned to Moscow, she seduced Edward R. Murrow, the leading radio journalist in London at the time. Murrow almost divorced his wife for Pamela. Her affair with Murrow did not stop her from sleeping with Bill Paley, Murrow’s boss at CBS radio.

These affairs took place after Pamela gave birth to young Winston. She was far from the best of mothers and young Winston was shuttled between relatives and nannies. Her sexual liaisons and the affairs of state took precedence over her son.

The end of the war was a letdown for her, but soon she took up with Prince Aly Khan. Khan teaches her the Arabian arts of lovemaking which she will soon use with great affect. According to Purnell she became quite expert at oral sex.

After her affair with Khan, she started a long lasting on and off affair with Giorgio Agnelli of Italy’s Fiat automobile company. He along with Khan rained substantial gifts upon her including apartments and artwork. She later had an affair with Eli Rothschild of the Paris branch of the eponymous bank.

She moved to the United States upon her marriage to Hayward Leland. The marriage was not a happy one but it last until Leland’s death in 1971. After his death and the death of Harriman’s wife, the two are reunited after thirty years. Remember at this time Harriman was 80 and she was 50. Harriman, a scion of the Union Pacific fortune was a power broker in the Democratic Party. He introduced her to the Washington D.C. movers and shakers and their Georgetown mansion becomes the locus of high-level socio/political events.

By 1980 she was the doyenne of the Democratic Party. After Bill Clinton’s defeat in his reelection race for the Arkansas governorship, she took him under her wing and introduced him to the D.C. establishment. By the mid-1980’s she had a political action committee and was funding Democratic Senate races throughout the country. She became close to Sandy Berger and Richard Holbrooke who would become key figures in the Clinton Administration. She also went with Averell to Moscow to meet with the then Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and sensed that times were changing in Moscow.

As a reward for all of her efforts, Bill Clinton appointed her ambassador to France in 1993. There she became very close to French president Jacques Chirac. He spoke at her memorial. While in Paris she played a behind the scenes role in settling the Bosnian Wars.

All wasn’t sex and parties. She had an abortion, and her finances were totally mismanaged by Washington power broker Clark Clifford causing the Harriman family to sue her, as she was the executor of the Harriman estate. 

All I have to say is that her seductive powers jump right off the pages of this wonderful book. Purnell gives great credit to this remarkable woman.

My UCLA Anderson talk on Prospects for the Financial Markets 2025

The link below presents my talk at the UCLA Anderson Forecast discussing the outlook for the financial markets in 2025. The link opens with my talk, but you can scroll to the beginning to view the entire forecast program.

https://www.youtube.com/live/rbpRv5pt5OE?feature=shared&t=3075

My Review of Maria Konnikova's "The Biggest Bluff....."

 When to Hold’em, When to Fold’em*

Maria Konnikova arrived in the United States in 1988 at age four, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. She succeeds academically graduating from Harvard and earns a Ph.D. in social psychology from Columbia. However, academic life was not for her, and she worked as a TV producer and a writer.

Along the way she encountered John von Neumann’s and Oscar Morgenstern’s classic “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.” John McDonald’s later popularized that book with his “Strategy in Poker, Business & War.” Immediately she became hooked by poker where she can apply her background in social psychology at the game table. She enlisted poker star Erik Seidel to be her mentor in 2016 with the goal of becoming a professional poker player within a year. For a complete novice at the game, this is an act of extreme chutzpah.

Poker involves luck, strategy, probability theory, skill, and the ability to deceive and read other players while maintaining, as they say a “poker face.” It means having the ability to pick up psychological clues about the behavior of competing players.

Her game is No Limit, Texas Hold’em. She leaves her Brooklyn apartment most weekdays to play online in Hoboken, New Jersey where online gambling is legal. As the saying goes. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? The answer is “practice, practice, practice.” Instead of Carnegie Hall her goal is to get to the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. That she does and she goes on to Monte Carlo and Macau.

She succeeds and within two years she became a very successful poker player. It was not easy, especially for a woman, where 97% of the players are men. She puts up with all kinds of harassment on her way to reaching her goal. She also learned how applicable the skill set needed for playing poker has all kinds of applications in her daily life. For example, when and how to ask for a raise.

Maria Konnikova is a remarkable woman, and I highly recommend her book. Nevertheless, I would have liked to know who staked her for the necessary entry fees and antes, and the travel expenses associated with attending the events. It also would have been helpful to have illustrations of the poker hands she discusses in the book. These are mere quibbles.

*-Apologies to Kenny Rogers

My Review of H.W. Brands' "America First: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War"

 The First America First

With Donald Trump’s victory America First as foreign policy is yet again being thrust into the limelight. Thus, it is important to understand its origins making University of Texas historian H.W. Brands new history of the first America First movement is especially timely. Brands views America First through the lens of the shadow war between Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh with the latter being the most prominent proponent of America First.

There is not much new in the Roosevelt side of the equation, but Brands, at least for me plows new ground on Lindbergh by carefully researching his diaries and speeches from the late 1930’s to America’s entry into the war in December 1941. What I learned was that Lindbergh was a foreign policy realist in understanding the decadence of 1930’s Britain and the weakness of France. In his view Germany was the rising power in Europe, so much so that it would overwhelm both Britain and France. 

He believed that with adequate military preparedness the United States would be able to fend off any cross Atlantic attack from a Europe under the auspices of Nazi Germany. Roosevelt, on the other hand was far more clear-eyed in understanding what a Nazi dominated Europe would mean for the security of the United States. From 1939 his globalist vision pushed the United States for war with Germany. Indeed. within the space of a few weeks between late December 1940 and early January 1941 Roosevelt called on America to become the arsenal of democracy and then articulated his Four Freedoms.

Although losing the public relations battle Lindbergh plowed ahead in attacking Roosevelt and his interventionist policies. He reached a dead-end with his infamous Des Moines speech in September 1941 when he, echoing Nazi propaganda, called out the Roosevelt, the British and the Jews for leading America into war. There was near universal condemnation of his speech and for both Lindbergh and America First it was downhill from there.

Beneath his realpolitik there was his underlying racism against Jews and the non-white races. He viewed the war as dividing the white world, when instead it should have been focusing on the dangers coming from the non-white world, no matter that Germany was allied with Japan.

Unfortunately, there are too many similarities to the world of Trump and the world of Lindbergh. America can’t stand aside today in a very dangerous world, but as Brands noted in 1941 the U.S. was the dominant economic power in the world; this is no longer the case. This makes the case that the most important task before us is to strengthen our economy.

A Strong Holiday Shopping Season

 I have a theory that the coming holiday shopping season will be strong. The recent consumer confidence surveys highlighted the fact that Republicans, with Trump's victory, feel much better about the economy and conversely the Democrats have become more pessimistic. My sense is that the Republicans will shop till they drop out of joy and the Democrats will be engaged in the time tested cure of retail therapy. Net. Net. We have the makings for a strong shopping season.

MSNBC is in a World of Hurt

After lying to its viewers about inflation, the border and the mental acuity of President Biden and going gaga for Kamala Harris it now faces a collapse in viewership, and more importantly a significant change in its corporate structure.  Today MSNBC's parent Comcast announced that it will spin off most of its cable networks into a new entity. Significantly that new entity will exclude NBC and its news division which means that MSNBC will no longer have access to NBC's worldwide network of reporters.

Thus the new MSNBC will consist of commentators and news readers that won't have the imprimatur of NBC news. Thus it won't be able to cover breaking news about weather events, wars, campaign events and domestic disturbances. Simply put the network does not have the reportorial  staff, unlike its sister company CNBC which has reporters covering business verticals and an international presence.

Indeed, without NBC News, MSNBC, won't hold a candle to Fox News, CNN and Bloomberg News, all of whom are global news organizations. Thus in order to be competitive it will have to staff up at huge cost. Some of that cost will be borne by the overpaid on-the-air talent, something that is long overdue. 

For my previous commentary on MSNBC see: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2012/11/my-letter-to-comcast-ceo-brian-roberts.html and https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-comcast-whores-of-msnbc.html

My Review of Bob Woodward's "War"

Biden’s Wars

Washington Post writer Bob Woodward has chronicled every president since Bill Clinton. In this book he focuses on Biden’s three wars, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Gaza. Unfortunately, he fails to discuss the most electorally significant war that was a result of Biden’s open border policy. Although not characterized as a war, the invasion/arrival of 10 million illegal/undocumented immigrants at our southern border seemed like a war to those Americans living in the Southwest and later to those living in the cities where they were bussed to. 

Woodward glances over the debacle in Afghanistan where Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from that country permanently reduced his poll standing. I have yet to see who was fired for allowing this to happen.

Biden initially does much better with Ukraine. Here we witness the actions of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin seamlessly performing as a team. Of course, it is my guess that those three were Woodward’s sources for what happened. Benefitting from excellent intelligence the team warns Putin and notifies Ukrainian President Zelensky that Russia was about to invade. The public release of the intelligence was unprecedented, and it helped prepare Ukraine and the American people for what was to lie ahead.

Contrary to expectations in the West, Ukraine survived the initial Russian assault and then began a counter offensive aided by U.S. weaponry. It is here where the Biden team fails. Instead of going all-in with all kinds of offensive weapons, the team dilly-dallies preventing Ukraine from pressing its advantage. As a result, the stalemate we have now ensues. The Biden rationale for going slowly was the fear that Russia might introduce nuclear weapons into the conflict. Although plausible, we don’t have any Russian sources to back this conjecture up.

After the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, Biden goes all-in in support of Israel, and he visits the country a few weeks after. However, after the casualties start rising in Gaza the administration starts going soft. This is highlighted in the July 1924 meeting between Vice President Kamala Harris, now a presidential candidate, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While being supportive and diplomatic with Netanyahu in private, she stuns the Israelis with a very strong public statement critical about how Israel is fighting the war and the casualties in Gaza it is causing. That along with a slowdown in certain arms deliveries to Israel, highlighted the growing breach between the Biden White House and Netanyahu.

In all three cases it seems to me that Biden’s strategy was to “end wars” not to win them. (See:  https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2024/05/joe-no-win-biden.html) This strategy ended in disaster in Afghanistan, and it is certainly not helping in Ukraine and Gaza.

There were two widely reported scoops coming out of Woodward’s book. The first being that Trump supplied Putin with Covid testing kits when they were scarce in the U.S. and second Army Chief of Staff Milley calling Trump a fascist. There was third one, not so widely reported where Biden demonstrated significant mental decline at a Silicon Valley fundraiser in June 2023, a year before his disastrous debate performance. The country would have been saved a lot of anguish if this were reported earlier.

Woodward’s book is a helpful guide to understanding the Biden years, but it is far from definitive. We learn more as his staffers write their own memoirs in the years to come.