Harvard Magazine
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Alumni WritersAugust 28, 2008Politicking as Crimson-Hued Blood SportAs a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s government department, Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. ’72, was a nuanced writer. His dissertation, “Prior Restraint, Prior Punishment, and Political Dissent: A Moral and Legal Evaluation,” carefully explored the issues associated with “the question of the extent to which we can legitimately demand that the liberal state tolerate internal political activism.” His argument—with special thanks to his advisers, professors Michael Walzer and Arthur Sutherland, and further thanks to legal scholars Paul Freund and Laurence Tribe—came at a fraught time in the nation’s history, just after the confrontations of the civil-rights era, the street demonstrations and violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, and the turmoil associated with protest against the Vietnam War. Having examined court opinions in a variety of situations, Corsi found little support for limits on association (mandating disclosure of group membership, for example), for investigations of political activists, or for any but the most careful uses of injunctions and temporary restraining orders—and no usage consistent with political freedom for preventive detention as “either the exception or the rule.” Corsi could imagine extreme circumstances where state intervention would be possible, but he stressed the responsibilities of public officials to keep avenues of dissent open, and of dissidents to avoid abusing rights, lest on either side those rights be fatally compromised at moments of crisis. “Rights of dissent have always been incredibly fragile,” Corsi concluded. “We can write words numbering in the hundreds of thousands defining these rights and establishing rules for their maintenance. However, their continuance will always ultimately rest upon the restraint and respect of political activists and government authorities alike.” Somehow, in the years since, Corsi has segued from political science to a different kind of political art, and has found different purposes for his prolific writings—and a much different tone for them. As author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, he led the 2004 attempt to destroy the character and reputation of the Democratic presidential candidate. His current bestseller, the slyly titled The Obama Nation, aiming at Barack Obama, J.D. ’91, the 2008 Democratic nominee, furthers Corsi’s reputation of aiming for the jugular with an axe. Though much of the effect of such publications is as grist for the most partisan radio talk shows, they prompt debate more broadly as well, given their political significance. And so it was that Hendrik Hertzberg ’65 took on Corsi in “Attack-Dog Days,” his lead “Comment” in the September 1 issue of The New Yorker. Hertzberg, profiled in the January-February 2003 issue of this magazine, commands a sharp pen himself. “The Obama Nation,” he writes, “erects a superstructure of innuendo, guilt by (often nonexistent) association, baseless speculation, and sinister-sounding but irrelevant digression. The result is an example of what used to be known, in the glory days of ideologically driven totalitarianism, as the Big Lie—in this case, a fabricated, alternate-universe Barack Obama, who, we are told or invited to infer, is a corrupt, enraged, anti-American, drug-dealing, anti-Israel, pseudo-Christian radical leftist, black militant, plagiarist, and liar, trained as a Muslim and mentored by a menagerie of Marxists, Communists, crypto-Communists, and terrorists.” Putting Corsi’s recent work in context, Hertzberg writes:
At all levels of debate, high and low, the campaign ahead appears headed for rough talk and tactics, with Harvard participants across the spectrum. August 19, 2008Campaigning by Text MessageThe cell phone—and, more specifically, the text message—is the next frontier for political campaigning and communication, Garrett M. Graff ’03, a former Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at Harvard Magazine, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last week. The Obama campaign’s promise to announce a vice-presidential choice first via text message means those who submit their mobile numbers will be the first to know. It also means the campaign will have their mobile numbers for other purposes, such as sending a reminder to vote on election day. Graff, an editor at Washingtonian magazine and former Webmaster for Howard Dean, is the author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. He goes beyond the simple observation that as landlines fall out of favor, text messages are the way of the future, to offer some modern technological history: the medium has already been used to galvanize support for political movements in the Philippines, Spain, and Myanmar. After reading the op-ed, you can hear Graff discuss the same topic in a podcast. July 25, 2008All Eyes on ChinaT minus two weeks to the Olympics Games’ opening ceremonies in China. Amid the media throng, several Crimson correspondents offer insightful reports. James Fallows ’70 is blogging for the Atlantic about traffic, air quality, and everything else. Today, he reports, this notice, at once humorous and unsettling, was posted in his Beijing apartment building: “PSB [Public Security Bureau] personnel may conduct surprised [sic] inspection of our property without notification to examine your passport documents including checking your luggage and personal belongings, etc.” More >> July 25, 2008A Familiar Tale, Told With StyleThose in search of summer beach reading might pick up The Romantics, a new novel by Galt Niederhoffer ’97. According to Janet Maslin of the New York Times, Niederhoffer succeeds at breathing new life into an all-too-familiar scenario: the story unfolds at a wedding in which the maid of honor, the bride’s college roommate, has a “history” with the groom. In the novel, Maslin finds overtones of “well-wrought cynicism.” She appreciates the heroine’s “sharp eye” for the “tribal habits” of the bride’s WASPy family, and particularly likes the depiction of the mother of the bride:
This week’s New Yorker discusses the novel in a downright catty tone, though the account dwells more on the proceedings at a book party for Niederhoffer in New York than on the book itself. Author Rebecca Mead notes the similarities between the heroine, “clever, ill-at-ease, Brooklyn-dwelling Laura Rosen,” and Niederhoffer herself, “the clever, ill-at-ease daughter of the eccentric investor Victor Niederhoffer [’64].” Harvard Magazine mentioned Ms. Niederhoffer’s first novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles, in the May-June 2006 Off the Shelf. May 28, 2008In China, Slowly Reassembling LivesAmong those dispatching from China in the wake of this month’s devastating earthquake is Geoffrey Fowler ’00, formerly a Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at this magazine, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. His latest story chronicles a family’s return to their hometown, where little is left standing, after living in a refugee center for two weeks. This May 21 article is also worth reading; it tells the stories of people who survived up to a week after the earthquake before being rescued. One is Shen Peiyun, a 52-year-old toll collector who spent more than six days buried in rubble and drank his own urine to survive. Shen told Fowler he went to stand under a doorframe when the earthquake began, having picked up this survival tip from the disaster-themed television shows he was fond of watching. Read Fowler’s “Undergraduate” columns from the Harvard Magazine archives here: May 14, 2008The Harvard Hedge Fund?A blog post by Matthew Yglesias ’03 has sparked quite a lively debate about whether Harvard deserves its tax-exempt status. This is all a response to a bill being debated in the Massachusetts legislature to tax college endowments exceeding $1 billion. Yglesias, a blogger for TheAtlantic.com, starts by quoting another blogger’s comparison of Harvard’s endowment to “a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University.” Comments from site visitors draw in a cornucopia of related issues: tuition, financial aid, admissions policies, the general role of elite universities in society. You can even add your two cents if you scroll down to the bottom of the page. April 15, 2008Are Immigration Authorities’ Efforts to Curb Gangs Backfiring?In this month’s Atlantic, Matthew Quirk ’03, a staff writer at the magazine, explains how deportation of Latino gang members by U.S. immigration authorities may actually make the gangs stronger. Read the story here. April 4, 2008Lessons from an Old Man in a Black Bathing SuitThis week’s New Yorker has a meditation on longevity by Michael Kinsley ’72, J.D. ’78. Kinsley wonders why society confers respect, and even bragging rights, on those who live to be very old, “as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and never getting run over by a truck.” Read the piece—teasingly titled “Mine Is Longer Than Yours”—here. March 19, 2008As Supreme Court Takes Up Gun Ban, Greenhouse Is WatchingDid the framers of the Bill of Rights intend the “right to bear arms” to apply only for the purpose of forming a militia, or more widely, for purposes such as self-defense? Is the possibility that American citizens will need to rise up against a tyrannical government so remote that the right to form a militia has become obsolete? These are the questions the Supreme Court is weighing as it takes up a Second Amendment case for the first time in 70 years. These questions are also captivating the nation, and the reporter covering the case for the New York Times is a Radcliffe alumna. Linda Greenhouse ’68 has covered the Supreme Court for the Times for nearly 30 years, but recently announced that she is taking a buyout and retiring. Read her story about the Second Amendment case in today’s Times here; read a New York Observer interview with Greenhouse, including her remembrances of covering the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000, here. Read a review of her book, Becoming Justice Blackmun, from this magazine’s archives here and a snippet (”Hello Darkness”) from her speech as the 2006 Radcliffe Institute Medalist here. March 12, 2008Now That’s What You Call the “Reader’s Digest” VersionIn a recent New Yorker piece, Lizzie Widdicombe ’06 chronicles her attendance at a book party for Not Quite What I Was Planning, a compilation of six-word memoirs. That’s right—these are people’s attempts to condense their life stories into six words. Some examples: “Fix a toilet, get paid crap,” from a plumber; “Yes, you can edit this biography,” from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.) Widdicombe, a former Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at Harvard Magazine, offers her own hilarious suggestions for those the book didn’t include. For Hillary Clinton: “From Ill.; met Bill; iron will.” And Widdicombe has the courage to craft her own piece entirely from six-word sentences: “The book party: Housing Works, downtown. Cookies and beer on a table.” She doesn’t even cheat—she counts hyphenated words as two, not one. (”The magazine was flooded with entries. Five hundred-plus submissions per day.”) Read the piece here: Say It All in Six Words. |
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