IT’S ABOUT TIME

Robert Morgenthau. is finally giving up his job as Manhattan District Attorney and it has cast a pall over the whole city, if you believe the indigenous media. It’s end-of-an-era time at the Times and CBS and the rest of the mainstreamers, with a touch of we-shall-not-look-upon-his-like-again thrown in. Can we count on that? is my reaction.

For justification of my refusal to join in the chorus of regret over the loss of the great man, I point to a Times article of 1997, twenty-two years after he took over as D.A. It reported that he had refused the requests of New York Governor Pataki and New York City Mayor Giuliani that he seek the death penalty in the case of N.Y. police officer Sanchez, who had been shot to death by a burglar he’d intercepted fleeing from an attempted murder of his own father. The governor and mayor had previously removed a similar case from the jurisdiction of the Bronx County district attorney on the grounds that his refusal was based on nothing but personal prejudice, in violation of the death penalty statute.

Morgenthau got away with his usual story, already invoked in six other cases, that his refusal was based solely on the merits of the case as studied by a committee of his prosecutors, who somehow always seemed to agree with their boss in these matters. The cop’s parents, a Hispanic couple, got notified of the decision by one of Morgenthau’s aides, not by him. The mayor and the governor accepted the bad news with regret, but took no further action.

Morgenthau had always lived a privileged life as might be expected of the grandson of a Wall Street millionaire, our World War I ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), and son of Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury. As such, Robert was used to having his pronouncements accepted without reserve by the faceless masses whom he honored with his imperial presence. The Sanchezes violated this rule by questioning his decision against their son and were never heard from again.

They had plenty of company in their neglected state as literally thousands of other New Yorkers were deprived of their right of reprisal against murderers by Morgenthau’s refusal to enforce the death penalty against a single murderer during his whole thirty-four years in office. Nobody believed his repeated claim that he just never got a case that fitted the requirements of the law because he was on record repeatedly denouncing the death penalty and promising he’d never enforce it under any circumstances.

Granted that the state legislature had only agreed to restore the penalty if it was surrounded with an obstacle course of restrictions and qualifications calculated to discourage its use, still how possible was it that in a total of about 50,000 murders in New York during Morgenthau’s incumbency, of which at least one-fifth or 10,000 happened in his jurisdiction, no cases worthy of maximum prosecution could be found? Yes, many of them were cases between criminals, but there were still thousands involving innocent citizens who had thought the law was to be obeyed and by which they were now betrayed

What about the fact that the other four New York City District Attorneys also failed to demand the death penalty in their cases? Obviously they were taking shelter behind Morgenthau. If he could get away with ducking his responsibilities why shouldn’t they? If the best-known D. A. in America, whose office was featured on “Law and Order”, didn’t choose to do his duty, it wasn’t up to them to fill in the gaps left by him. Why should they have to take on the wealthy idealists at the New York Times, who had no fear of crime in their own neighborhoods and no sympathy with people who did fear it and supported barbaric punishments like execution? And wasn’t the Court of Appeals loaded with similar fat cats who had the same attitude?

So much for the will of the people. It had been exerted in 1994 to eject Mario Cuomo from the Governorship after three terms because he had continually frustrated all efforts to reinstate the death penalty. He had gone the limit with his speeches against it, even maintaining that life in prison was a worse punishment, which no convict would choose if death was the alternative. Mario came close to telling the world that people actually liked to die and sending them to the electric chair was the same as realizing their life’s ambition. This was to much for the public to swallow and he was returned to private life.

Some of the cases Morgenthau copped out on were bad enough to bring his humanity into question. There was the Nicole DuFresne case in January 2005 where a young actress was shot down on the street by a 19-year-old mugger who objected to her asking if he was going to shoot her. Nobody dissed him like that. Morgenthau prevented him from getting the sentence he deserved.

Before that there were the three killings above the Carnegie Delicatessen in 2001 where a woman selling marijuana out of her apartment was mowed down with two customers by a pair of gunmen. Morgenthau mercy was again on tap and the murderers are comfortably lodged in jail instead of an unmarked grave.

If I write about this subject again I may go into the background of this distinguished public servant who clearly looks on the public as his servants subject to his unusual notions of law and legislation. A few years ago I wrote a little about Frank Hague, the 30’s mayor of Jersey City, who summed up his theory of government very neatly when he told a crowd “I am the law!” The reporters thought it was all a joke. They hadn’t met Robert Morgenthau.

IT’S MAGIC

Oh give me a home with a government loan

And a mortgage I ain’t paying no more

With stimulus dough I can call my own

And the wolf slinks away from my door.

Stim, stim, stimulus

Dot’s wot I learned in my school.

Dough, dough, it’s fabulous,

That Obama he ain’t no fool.

He’ll find us the gelt to pay off our debt

Tho’ the clouds we see are cumulus

Payin’ a debt just ain’t no sweat

If you can just score some…stimulus.

Stim, stim, stimulus

It’s all comin’ out of a pool

In the land of Oz so famous

Ooh, that man is so cool!

Mythology seems to get into any consideration of the current breakdown of the economic machine. That’s not too unusual in times of stress. People look for a savior to come to their rescue from out of nowhere. As you see, he did, and he got into my head, triggering a poetic reaction which also extended to his land of origin. Not that he’s actually Ozian, it’s just that if one took seriously the mystic qualities with which he’s been invested, he would have to be. Luckily all this has been exaggerated and it’s been ascertained that he is a member of the human race.

That settles that. But mythology still intrudes, the most popular variety right now being the golden legend about the New Deal of the Thirties, also featuring a superhuman character who used a magic wand to bring prosperity out of disaster and a new day to dawn on an America raised to glory through his inspired leadership. All this has made for a hard act for Obama to follow, like a singer following Pavarotti.

Well, it’s not that bad. Roosevelt, the man I’ve been alluding to, did not actually perform miracles. His New Deal just didn’t live up to its advertisements when it came to lifting the country out of the Great Depression. Let that be a consolation for his successor. If he flops, he just has to remember that FDR did too. That’ll make him feel better. For a few minutes anyhow.

What happened in the Thirties? As I’ve written before, it was saved by the Forties, that is, by World War II. Unemployment, the curse, disappeared. As one writer has said “Roosevelt hadn’t known what to do with the extra people in 1938, but now he did; he could make them soldiers.” All those folks who are convinced that Obama will get us out of the Middle East and make peace with all our enemies should take heed of this. Roosevelt was a peacemaker too until 1939. By then he’d been fighting unemployment since 1933 and hadn’t gotten anywhere after some early success. Things had actually gotten worse in 1937. Overnight, from a supporter of the Neutrality Act FDR became a warrior thirsting for battle and summoning his armies to follow him to victory or death. He found it thrilling. His cousin Theodore had been the same way.

Could Obama turn out the same? Politicians, as I’ve just shown, often go to war when domestic troubles get them down and a diversion is needed. Being still the richest country in the world we have no shortage of enemies who’d enjoy taking a crack at us. I worry about Hillary Clinton being the Secretary of State. She tends to rub people the wrong way. So does Biden when you come to think about it. With a couple of troublemakers like that on the loose, anything could happen.

Going back to Roosevelt, he took the 1937 increase in unemployment very hard. He concluded that it had been cooked up by the “interests” to make him look bad. They wanted revenge for his forty-six state sweep in the 1936 election and his attacks on businessmen in his speeches. Calling them “economic royalists” and “princes of privilege” didn’t endear FDR to them. Although it hardly seems likely that they would reduce hiring of help just to spite Roosevelt, it could also have been possible that attacks like these served to weaken confidence in his attitude toward business and thereby indirectly reduced activity, including hiring.

Roosevelt tried to have it both ways -- beat up on business and at the same time beg it to bring back prosperity by extending credit to customers, investing in new equipment, exporting to new markets and generally whipping itself into a lather of activity which in the opinion of businessman and in his would not just strengthen the country but also his regime. A lot of the businessmen thought the two outcomes were incompatible.

Obama, with his soak-the-rich ideas seems to be on the same track as the Roosevelt of 1938. He should remember that the successful Roosevelt was the FDR of 1939. With war raging in Europe and threatening to spread here, FDR allied himself with the businessmen of the country, who became his favorite people. The first was William Knudsen of General Motors, who took charge of war production. After him came men like Charles Wilson, also of GM, and Charles Wilson II of GE, then William Jeffers of Union Pacific, Henry Kaiser, Andrew Higgins, Donald Nelson of Sears and literally thousands of others, including Wall Streeters. Roosevelt told the world he was giving Dr. New Deal a rest and substituting Dr. Win-the-War. It worked: he won the war, stayed in power and died at his peak. Obama, take notice.

ABOVE AND BEYOND

In my last disquisition in this space I misstated facts about the microfilm files I’d been consulting at the N.Y. Public Library. I said each micro box contained one reel of film. Not so. It was six reels. Sorry about that. I caught my mistake through trying to figure out why the library achieved its objective of printing two weeks’ editions of a newspaper on every reel of film by printing the same editions over and over until all the film had been used because if they only printed each edition once, two weeks total pages wouldn’t have filled a half a reel. So why didn’t they print four weeks or six weeks or something and fill the reels that way? I don’t know but I’m going back to find out. I’ve already learned that the capacity of a regular .35mm reel is 80 newspaper pages. But how can there be 778 boxes for a paper that never printed more than thirty pages or so a day? What about that? What about…oh, a lot of things. Well, I’ll never know what makes the rain to fall or makes the grass so tall, but I will know why I have to cope with microfilm that goes on repeating itself and wasting the best years of my life when I try to read it. Watch out, library.

The above is a diversion from my subject of today, which is another return to my police days as a relief from trying to penetrate the mysteries of the “plans” and “solutions” and “measures” being proposed for the alleviation of the mortgage miseries besetting us all, including those of us who have always kept our payments current and now wonder where we went wrong. Where are our bailouts?

Well, on to something more encouraging. Leafing through my dogeared collection of reports from my departmental days I’ve been struck by the number of them that are about off-duty incidents involving cops who were…off duty, but still went to bat against crime when they encountered it with no help available and no witnesses to vindicate their actions. I find it impressive. Here are some examples.

There we have it. Five off-duty cases in a limited time period coming to the attention of one captain out of twenty or more in Queens, all well or adequately justified, all voluntary and pretty well forced on the cop and all resolved without serious damage even to the perpetrators. They’re just a small sampling taken at random, which indicates to me that the total for the borough could have reached three figures for the year. If they all came out as well as these, the police department could take pride in the initiative of its members. The people of the city could take comfort from the fact that they were getting more service than they had paid for. For myself I now realize that I should have seen this earlier instead of taking this “above and beyond” activity for granted, as I did for years. I’ve always believed in looking for the patterns to be found in any sequence of events, but I should have found this one sooner. I was too close to the action to see it, I fear.

RECEIVING BY GIVING

“Tax cuts won’t end the recession.” They won’t? There goes my whole economic plan for restoring prosperity. Somebody else is taking my place, somebody else shares your embrace. Somebody who doesn’t believe in tax cuts, but believes in government payouts to the right people, which will eventually be paid for by tax increases, not cuts.

The problem here is that government money is often…wasted. I know this firsthand. I worked for a government for twenty-eight years, as a cop. In that situation there was no such thing as a bottom line. We were exempt in two ways. One was in the area of our results. They were never good, but they were never questioned. Our excuses were always accepted. Murders went up because they were unplanned and spontaneous and unpredictable and what could we do about that? Other crime? -- same story. Nothing was our fault and nothing could be done about anything.

The other area where no questions were asked was that of our costs. The city held them down in the compensation area by tough negotiating with our unions, but our other expenses were not investigated. We once installed an elaborate city-wide telephone system whereby precinct switchboards could be bypassed and every extension could be reached directly, saving everybody’s time and temper. The list of numbers that was distributed, however, came in a cheap booklet format instead of on laminated sheets as they should have, and the booklets were worn out and useless in a month or less, putting an end to the project, which was written off as a loss.

Things like this were typical, but they didn’t affect our appropriations for the next fiscal year. We had no bottom line, as I’ve said, and losses meant nothing. We got our funds routinely, with no questions asked. I’ve offered an example here of mismanagement on a relatively small scale, but if I had been the commissioner I’m sure I could have provided much more impressive ones. Not that commissioners ever did.

Since that time I’ve worked in private industry and found out about documenting expenses and justifying them and other things unknown to civil service and in fact to the not-for-profit world, I fear. But yesterday I found myself carried back to those days when I spent a few hours in the New York Public Library, doing research for this blog.

The Library’s a great place and I feel lucky to have the use of it. One thing bothered me though. I was going through the files of a departed New York newspaper, looking for material I believed I could use here, based on my recollection of it from other days. There were 778 boxes of microfilm covering the whole lifetime of the paper. Each box contained one roll of microfilm recording two weeks of publication. It didn’t take me long to find out that this ratio might have been right for the New York Times, which can run up to 100 pages in one issue, but had nothing to do with a tabloid like the Mirror, my subject, which probably printed fewer pages in a week than the Times did often in one day.

The obvious way to handle this was to forget the two-week quota for each film roll and go to a two-month quota if that was what it took for publication to fill up the roll. But apparently the two-week quota was sacred. How was it met? Easily. Just keep printing the same two weeks over and over again until the roll was filled. So fourteen editions of the paper were copied repeatedly until this was done. The unlucky researcher, such as myself, who should have been able to go through one roll and find something new on every page displayed instead found himself looking at the same pages repeating themselves and repeating themselves until the film ended.

The discouraging part of this was that it looked like this pattern would repeat itself through every one of the 778 boxes of film available for examination. There was no way I could ever go through all these. The actual number of boxes required for the tapes should not have exceeded one or two hundred. These would have been be relatively easy to examine since there would have been be no wading through page after page of print which only repeated what the tape had already displayed. New York Public Library, what did you think you were doing?

This is, I suppose, a minor flaw in the work of a great public utility. All right, but it still says something about non-profits. Projecting, it says something about government grants of money to them as opposed to tax cuts to the public at large. The difference between the two is that the public can be trusted to waste less than the institutions will. It’s simply a question of responsibility, as armies of people before me have insisted. Executives who are responsible to stockholders, to owners, to lenders, to cash customers, to the bottom line in other words, will do a better job than those who don’t have these obligations.

Following this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, the most sensible thing the government could do would be to refund Bill Gates all the tax money he’s ever paid so that he could use it to do what the politicians claim they can, but he has proved he can -- create jobs. He has created millions of them. How many has Ted Kennedy ever created?

When I say Gates I’m using his name as a surrogate for the thousands of entrepreneurs like him who have created the industries that have transformed the world economy and raised the standard of living of people who grew up driving oxcarts and living in mud huts and now live in real houses and ride in real cars. Taxing the creative people who have brought this about is not the highest and best use of money which textbooks tell us should be the objective of government policy.

I looked for a quotation from somebody to finish this sermon. No luck. Until I found what T.S. Eliot said. You know “April is the cruelest month…” He knew, he knew.

ONE WASHINGTON STATE IS ENOUGH

The columnist George Will has uncovered a secret Democratic plot to undermine the Constitution and “pack” the U.S. Senate with two new senators from a new state which the Demos are nursing along to birth in the sure knowledge that it will be forever Democratic and its senators will be a permanent addition to the their present majority in the Senate, guaranteeing their control of the government far into the future.

The Convention had before it the horrible example of what had happened in London in 1780. Under the instigation of an eccentric young nobleman, Lord George Gordon, a huge mob gathered to protest the relaxation of the English penal laws against Catholics. Rioting soon started, to become known as the Gordon “No Popery” riots. The Houses of Parliament were heavily attacked, but refused to give in to the rioters. The drunken chaos continued for a week with attacks on M.P’s., citizens, pubs, jails, foreign legations and unfriendly houses. At last the King himself had to use his troops to put down the mob.

This wasn’t the first or the only time local mobs in a capital city had overborne a national government and tried to impose their will on it without regard to the sentiment of the bulk of the country concerned. It was minority rule with a vengeance. London was notorious, but Paris was equally so. In Rome the reigning pope was regularly evicted from the city by the mob when it went on a tear.

The Parisians really got into their stride two years after the Constitutional Convention when they stormed the Bastille, hanging its governor and starting the French Revolution, of which Paris continued to be the center until things began to quiet down in 1794 and the guillotine was given a little rest. This helped to convince our country’s leadership that they had made the right decision in passing up America’s only sizeable cities, Boston, New York and Philadelphia and making a yet unbuilt city, Washington, the national capital, far removed from the danger of overthrow by any group of citizens even if they succeeded in reaching it in the first place. Oh yes, it was designed by a French engineer who provided it with long broad boulevards suitable for firing cannon down to break up an advancing mob.

The high priest of the anti-city philosophy was Thomas Jefferson, who never stopped denouncing cities for their promotion of vice and greed as opposed to the virtues of farmers living the good life in their own fields and orchards. In an agricultural country such as America was, he had no shortage of followers who shared his views, but he also had to face the fact that the country was not meant for peasants only and needed roads and highways and in fact a lot more territory, which he obtained through the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson knew how to rise above principle when it was necessary.

The national suspicion of cities has never gone away, though, and they still aren’t as much admired as they feel they should be, because for all the fun and the money and distraction they provide, they still have the drawback of attracting undesirables of all types who see the possibilities of getting a living without work either by crime or panhandling or welfare fraud or whatever. Centuries ago things were the same. The underclass, as we call it today, existed and nothing could be done about it. Americans, though, took one precaution. They were starting a country from scratch and they wanted to be sure neither the nation or its states should be ruled from a Paris or London infested with all the worst elements of the country. So they created Washington. They also created Albany, Harrisburg, Tallahassee, Sacramento, Austin, and other communities not known to fame.

In case you don’t recognize them, these are the state capitals of some of the largest states in the Union, all of which contain cities that are much larger and to many, more suitable for a state capital than the comparative hamlets shown. But it was done deliberately by the state founders for the reasons I’ve been citing in this article. They wanted to nullify the power of local majorities to control central governments. If they could have disenfranchised the inhabitants they would have done so. In Washington it was done. As I’ve shown, color prejudice had nothing to do with it. No reason then remains to violate the Constitution to rectify an injustice where one has never existed. OK, Mr. O?

WE HAVE LIFTOFF!

No, I didn’t watch the Inauguration. I like political arguments, but I don’t like political speeches. A prize fight is usually interesting, but an exhibition of bag-punching by a fighter is less so. There have to be two sides.

You don’t expect to hear two sides from somebody who’s just been sworn in as President. Instead you will get a recitation of all the good things he’s going to do for the peepul of this great country, God bless ‘em. Sometimes this gets out of hand, the way the annual State of the Union address has. This has resolved itself into a laundry list of goodies spread all over the map wherever voters are to be found. There’s a new traffic light for Chillicote, Ohio, for instance, and they’re gonna fix that railroad crossing in Des Moines, Iowa as well. It goes on and on. Inauguration speeches are like that or getting like that.

I’m not the first to check them off. Back in 1880 James Garfield, the twentieth president, later assassinated, wrote that he’d been reading the speeches of his predecessors and they were all so bad, except Lincoln’s, that he though he might not bother with one at all. You couldn’t do that today. Television and all that, you know.

A lot will have been said about the New Deal, I’m sure. It fits. The New Deal originated at the 1933 inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat like Obama. Times were disastrous then as now. Banks were closing, businesses collapsing, layoffs taking place.

The New Deal was suggested but not spelt out in the inauguration speech. It got flesh on its bones as the year went on. Regulation was in, laissez-faire was out. Deficit financing, that is, borrowing money for Uncle Sam to spend creating jobs for the unemployed, was the way out of the Depression.

As I’ve said before along with many others, it didn’t work. In 1938 unemployment nationwide was 19%. It had been 16.9% in 1936. This leaves no doubt that Roosevelt could never have been re-elected -- especially to an unprecedented third term -- in 1940 if it hadn’t been for World War II. The European demand for armaments created a boom in America, sending the unemployment rate down to 14.6% in 1940, and after we hyped things even more by joining the fight, the rate bottomed out near zero. People who claim the New Deal ended the Depression often forget to mention all this. Especially in inauguration speeches. It would spoil the mood.

So the New Deal will get a lot of favorable mention from the new President, which will include endorsement of the idea of much more intensive regulation of financial concerns, who are in hot water over their misguided investments in mortgages on properties that (a) were over-appraised in the first place and (b) were bought by people who didn’t have the kind of incomes necessary to make the mortgage payments. These mortgages are now called “toxic”, a word that seems to have caught on like “high-yield” or “locked in (profit)”. What has happened to them, I wonder?

The toxic or subprime mortgages were a consequence of New Deal thinking which rejected the idea that poor peoples’ money deposited in banks was best utilized by the banks lending it out on mortgages and other sound investments that would yield a return that would cover interest payments to the depositors for their money and also enable the bank concerned to cover its expenses and continue in business. Profitable investments of this kind were most often to be found in prosperous areas and not necessarily in the neighborhoods where the depositors lived. This was unfortunate maybe, but it did mean that the depositors got a return on their money

This seems to have stimulated demand for increased regulation of banks to prevent such fiascoes in the future. But do we really want more political interference in business in view of the results therefrom that I’ve noted above? Do we trust politicians that much? Do we really believe that all we have to do is increase their power and their discretion about using it and it will never be abused?

I’ll drag up a story from the past that refutes that idea. There was a priest named Father Coughlin who was almost a Rush Limbaugh of his day. He supported Franklin Roosevelt, then split with him. Roosevelt wanted him off the air and sent word to the Catholic Church that if he wasn’t removed, the IRS would commence an investigation of the income of every Catholic bishop in America. He got his man.

So in order to violate one man’s First Amendment right to free speech, the President of the United States proposed an illegal inquiry into the private lives of people who had given no grounds for such investigation by an agency which legally existed for the purpose of collecting the revenues of the United States and not for carrying out personal vendettas of the president or anyone else. We need to think of things like that before we go delegating “oversight” over our affairs to presidents, vice-presidents, senators, dog wardens or any other such ambitious overreachers.

QUE SERA’ SERA’

As I keep saying in this space , Long Island never lets you down. No matter how smooth everything appears on the surface of its daily life, in a corner somewhere some hugger-mugger is going on that would make the angels weep if only they knew about it. The latest secret scandal involves none other than New York’s senior Senator, the honorable Charles Schumer.

The case is now over with the nurses being fully vindicated civilly and criminally by the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court. The court ordered the sitting judge and the district attorney to terminate their connection with the case and close it down. The court found that no patients were endangered by the walk-off, since other care providers were on the spot and also that prosecution of their lawyer for his part in it was a violation of the First Amendment and the whole system of American justice.

The abuse of the nurses is not exactly a surprise on Long Island, where there have been a number of incidents of workers imported from Asia and in some cases used literally as slaves for the people who arranged their immigration. The nurses weren’t that badly off, but they were still victimized and probably would have continued to be if it were left to Senator Schumer, the alleged friend of the working man. He wrote no less than four letters to the president of the Philippines to get him to lift his government’s suspension of Ventosa’s license to recruit nurses there. Eventually it was lifted. What part Schumer played in getting D.A. Spota of Suffolk County to pile on with criminal charges against the nurses is not known.

What is known is that Schumer, the chairman of the Democrats’ Senatorial election committee, collected $75,000 in campaign contributions from people associated with Sentosa. The newspaper reports don’t mention anything about anyone suing Sentosa, Spota or Schumer for their actions in the case, but no one would be surprised if it happened. Especially President-elect Obama wouldn’t be surprised. He’s getting used to his party comrades getting themselves into trouble. His choice for Treasury secretary is a chap who admits he underpaid his taxes for several years, but it was all just an “honest mistake.” It’s certainly a relief to hear that. I mean, suppose he had said it was a “dishonest mistake.” Maybe the nominee for Health and Human Services Secretary will astonish the world by saying this. He’s got tax troubles too. Unlike Mr. Geithner, the Treasury hopeful, he doesn’t appear to have nanny-tax problems as well.

After them we come to the name of Gov. Richardson of New Mexico who was to be nominated for Commerce Secretary but has now disqualified himself because of an investigation into his relations with financial companies doing business with his state. The only remaining controversy is over the nominee for Attorney General, Mr. Eric Holder, who was key in the last-minute pardon given to Marc Rich, the international swindler, and Democratic contributor, by the Clinton White House when leaving office in 2001.

That’s four Cabinet jobs out of a possible fourteen where the nominees are jammed up for one reason or another.

A MAN OF FAMILY

Having earned a bad reputation as a history buff I found myself at Christmas engulfed in what else -- history books. One of them was, of course, John Adams by David McCullough. I say “of course” because John Adams has made a big comeback lately after being left in obscurity for two hundred years or so. Even when I was a schoolboy all we knew about him was that for some mysterious reason he had been the first vice-president of the United States, after which he became President for one term and disappeared from history.

John got this kind of neglect at a time when history was actually taught in schools and we kids couldn’t help but absorb some of it, no matter how we resisted. Years later when I questioned my own children to find out if they knew any Presidents, they were able to come up with George Washington but struck out completely on his successor. I took them out of that school, but it probably was no worse than the generality. And I’m afraid John Adams was the kind of man who just wasn’t meant to be memorable. Being sandwiched in between Washington and Jefferson as President didn’t add very much to his renown either. They’re both on Mount Rushmore but he isn’t.

There was one odd thing about him that did get my notice when young and now has surfaced again in the present John Adams enthusiasm. This was his action in the year 1787 in sending a mission to France to talk peace instead of war with the Directory, the revolutionary junta then running the country. These bandits had been snatching American ships on specious grounds, greatly agitating the conservative anti-revolutionary Federalist party, to which Adams belonged, who were demanding war with our old friends the French, and were joined by a fair number of the liberal Republicans, but not their leader, Jefferson.

Adams’s mission got a rough reception from the French, but eventually turned the tables by revealing that they had refused to pay them a bribe of $250,000 to secure their goodwill. This put the French on the spot, alienating their American friends and bringing war in sight. They immediately changed their tune and proposed a peaceful solution to the affair. Adams ignored the war hawks in America and concluded a treaty with the French, thereby saving the country from a war it did not need or really want. From the beginning Adams had believed that the French would eventually pull in their horns and this judgment had been vindicated.

In spite of this success, many of the Federalists had been disappointed when their war plans were thwarted and in particular Alexander Hamilton, who was out of office but not out of politics, had turned against Adams because he had been prevented from carrying out his plan to raise an army to annex Mexico and all the territory north and south of it, replacing the Spanish Empire with an American one. He had come to regard Adams as a small-minded hidebound little bourgeois who was unable to think big and appreciate the possibilities of expanding America to take in the whole Western Hemisphere. He himself did not have that problem.

So thanks to Hamilton and other former friends Adams lost in 1800, becoming the only president out of the first five not to get two terms. The next man to suffer this rebuff was his son John Quincy Adams. His son was Charles Francis Adams, who became Lincoln’s ambassador to England. One day he told the Prime Minister that if England built any more warships for the Confederacy like the Alabama “it would be superfluous in me to tell your Lordship that this is war.“ John Adams lived again. He had kept peace but he had always believed in a strong navy in order to keep it better. No more Alabamas were built.

Adams’ navy enthusiasm as well as many of his other characteristics had its roots in his Massachusetts upbringing where plain living and high thinking were the order of the day. He was a farmer’s boy and actually enjoyed working on the family farm. This testifies to his work habits as New England farms are very discouraging of such. One day his father took him out for a hard days’ harvesting in company with him and at the end of the day asked him how he liked it. He liked it fine, John said. “Well I didn’t” said his father, “and tomorrow you’re going back to school.”

John got to be a lawyer and then a delegate to the Continental Congress which in 1776 issued the Declaration of Independence, which he signed. This greatly irritated the British government, but all the same they decided to give the American upstarts another chance to get right with the King by accepting a peace offer he had sent. John and Benjamin Franklin and Edward Rutledge met with Lord Howe, the peace commissioner, on Staten Island and listened to the offer. One of its provisions was a promise of pardon to all the American rebels who accepted the settlement. No way, said John and company. That was it. The meeting was over. It was just as well. Howe had pardons in his pocket for immediate use, but none of them were for John Adams. He was to hang, says his biographer.

Adams is back, as I’ve said. He’s not alone either. Abigail, his wife, accompanies him. During his eclipse she has gotten more attention than him because she chronicled her time better than anyone else. She left more of a record of the 18th Century than most professional historians of that time. Most of her writing is in her constant letters to her husband, which he always matched with letters of his own. When it came to such writing both of them showed they were highly qualified to be the spokesmen for their time and place. David McCullough says that there is no memorial of Adams in Washington at all. I expect that when there is one it will be different from other Presidential monuments -- it will include his wife.

I was given this biography because the donor had learned about Adams from a TV documentary which covered his career. The book, I believe, is a tie-in with the program. This was a surprise hit, showing that there was more of a public appetite for American history than anyone knew of. In fact, a sequel is planned. (No, not really, it’s just that no mention of TV is complete without some such news. Just see the original and read the book and you’ll have J. Adams in full and you won’t need a sequel).

THERE’LL BE SOME CHANGES MADE?

As 2008 fades away into the twilight and everyone tries to remember what it was all about I feel myself sharing in the incredulity. Did we really have an election campaign that went on for two years? Did we really elect a guy who’s gone into hiding on a remote Pacific island? Will he and his predecessor continue to avoid each other until January 20th? Don’t they have anything at all to talk about? Not even about the best place for a hideaway office? Where you can snatch a smoke? Or maybe even a nip of some good old Kentucky cureall? Or have a little poker session with the boys? Other presidents have done it and passed the word along. But only after making personal contact with the new guy and testing his discretion about such things. It can’t be done a continent away.

Well, that’s one for Obama and Bush to work out between themselves when they get around to it. It won’t keep me awake nights. There are things closer to home to think about. One is the condition of New York, where I live. I try to keep this page of mine light and easy and free from agitation about the terrible state of things in general. I’ve used a lot of space writing about the outrageous frauds that keep surfacing all around me without getting outraged by them myself. But that doesn’t apply when one is writing about bloodshed. It just ain’t funny, that’s all. And it’s flowing again in NYC. 2008 is going out in a haze of blood. The New York Post reports eight murders in the city in the last three days. In several other cases victims are in “critical condition” and “clinging to life.” These phrases must be pre-set at the Post, they are used so often.

The courts aren’t helping with the problem. Two juries recently acquitted cop-killers of the most serious charge against them -- the killing, although they were found guilty on lesser charges. But there is no sign of a move in New York to do away with unanimous jury verdicts and substitute a finding of guilt by a 10-2 vote. The cranks and flakes who now constitute the “holdouts“ who prevent juries from exercising their common sense and returning intelligent verdicts would be stripped of their power to pervert justice.

In the meantime we’re obviously not transitioning from a glorious 2008 to an even more glorious ‘09. A new president, no matter how refreshing his fans find him to be, won’t change that. He has indicated this already by staffing his administration with a large number of retreads from previous governments. It reminds me of a book that was once popular, “A Treasury of the Familiar.” You can say that again.

At least they know where the bodies are buried. They’ll know the temptations to avoid as well. If some contractor offers to rebuild their house for free because he happens to have a lot of building material on hand that will just go to waste otherwise, they’ll send him on his way with a flea In his ear. If he offers to introduce them to a lonely lady who’s just dying to meet people like them who’re a part of the exciting Washington scene, they’ll reject the temptation out of hand and go home to their wives and kiddies instead. As for excursions hither and yon with all expenses paid, they will go begging in the Obama White House. A new day is dawning. Too bad the governor didn’t get the message.

I have dug up a poem which covers the subject. It’s called “The Reformer.”