It is just about 30 years since the wall around Iran went up. And it is a few days away from fully 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down.
The Berliner Mauer had been up for more than a quarter century, and its surface facing east, grim gray, was a metaphor for life in the German Democratic Republic. On its western face graffiti evoked the freer spirit of the half-city whose heart had nonetheless been broken by the Soviet goose step that divided it. And the Cold War was won on the very day the authorities of the D.D.R. were simply coerced by the power of human will to let its subjects scramble over the deeply ugly barrier into a Berlin with life and life-blood.
There are three broad reasons that the Wall came down. The first is that the communist system itself was a Potemkin Village, and even the village facade spread from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics--always distrust political projects pompously named!--all the way through eastern Europe was not pretty. Neither was it efficient. It's human relations were, well, inhumane. No, they were cruel, although the Bolshoi Ballet danced serenely. My friend Dr. Jerry Groopman, the great chronicler of contemporary medicine, returned from a trip to Moscow a few years before the fall. And his report after visiting a few hospitals: "There is an ongoing epidemic of tuberculosis. The Soviet Union is a failure." This was not an oversimplification.
The second reason for the collapse of both the Warsaw Pact and the U.S.S.R. was the problem of nations and nationalities. The Pact put the Soviets as sovereign over great historic peoples. This simply could not last. There is just so much humiliation that Poles and Hungarians, Czechs and Rumanians could take. Moreover, the Soviet Union was also a union of coerced ethnic groups with pasts of which they were both conscious and proud. The regime began to aggress against these already shortly after the revolution, and these aggressive strategies soon included starvation, exile, population transfer and the importation of Russian nationals into the lands of others. Not many observers or, for that matter, scholars noticed--let alone, saw deeply--these issues abuilding. I was lucky. The greatest historian of communism, at least in the languages I read, Adam Ulam (now deceased), who was the supervisor of my doctoral dissertation at Harvard, saw these phenomena plenty clear and thus was always optimistic about the Soviet collapse. Look at some of his books and a few of his TNR pieces to get a sense of his depth and breadth. Also on the national question, see Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's masterful The End of the Soviet Empire: The Triumph of the Nations, a volume the publication of which in English by New Republic Books (in collaboration with Basic Books) I had much to do.
When I took over The New Republic in 1974 one of the first people I recruited--on a trip to Rome, as I recall--was Michael Ledeen, a scholar of Italian fascism. I think it was his doctoral supervisor and my friend, the great German Jewish historian, George Mosse, who suggested that we meet. But it actually was Claire Sterling, the brave journalist of uncomfortable truths, who introduced us. Michael was then working on a book about Gabriele d'Annunzio, the futurist poet, artist, fighter pilot, political theorist and neo-fascist adventurer who led a march on Fiume to keep it in Italian hands. The book was called D'Annunzio at Fiume. (D'Annunzio was also legendary romantic and lover, having had among his affairs a especially tempestuous one with Eleanora Duse, perhaps the most renowned actress of the turn-of-the-century and Jewish besides. She was the model for Rodin's mournful bronze Teté de la doleur. Oh, how I wander.)
Michael is now widely thought of as a reactionary. This is the fate of many people who turn out to be uncannily correct early on about the cruel deceits of left-wing and anti-American movements. When we met for our first coffee at the Piazza Navona the good and the over-happy were beyond themselves with satisfaction that euro-communism was about to triumph all over western Europe. Ledeen dourly and correctly said "no."
I'm coming a little late to Sheila Bair's intriguing Times op-ed from last week, but I think Tim Fernholz basically got it right over at The Prospect: Bair wasn't kvetching about the administration's regulatory proposals--the kind of thing that got her in Tim Geithner's crosshairs a few weeks back. She was taking aim at even more radical proposals for regulatory consolidation, like what Sen. Mark Warner lays out here.
Basically, the administration wants to fold the underwhelming Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) into the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency--the two agencies that regulate federal-charted banks--and rename it the National Bank Supervisor. (Under the status quo, big banks and other institutions can essentially pick their regulator. In the run-up to the financial crisis this tended to bring them to the doorstep of the OTS, which was perceived as weak and did its best to live up to those expectations. It "regulated" AIG Financial Products, for example.) Sen. Warner proposes consolidating not just those two agencies, but also the bank-regulatory functions of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, both of which currently oversee state-chartered banks.
Last week, the White House released a list of recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor that the United States government can afford a civilian. Among the 16 awardees are truly great figures: breast cancer philanthropist Nancy Goodman Brinker, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, and Sidney Poitier, the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Gus Van Sant's Milk is not a bad movie. Star Sean Penn eschews his characteristic bluster, offering a powerful yet modest performance as Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco supervisor who was assassinated in 1978. The supporting roles are also sharp, in particular Josh Brolin as Dan White, the disturbed former supervisor who killed Milk and Mayor George Moscone. And Van Sant's direction is generally smooth, if extremely conventional.
When renowned conservative radio talk-show host Armstrong Williams offered Stephen Gregory a job as his personal trainer in 1994, Gregory assumed his new boss was simply interested in shaping up. But when Gregory later became a producer for the radio program, occasionally traveling to speaking engagements with Williams, Williams allegedly began showing an interest that Gregory took as more than merely professional. In a complaint filed on April 10 in D.C.
