"Original Sin", by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson

This is the famous bok by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and his co-author, documenting the decline and fall of Joe Biden during his term as president. The point of the book is summarized in this passage: "What the world saw at Joe Biden's one and only 2024 debate was not an anomaly. It was not a cold; it was not someone who was under- or over-prepared. It was not someone who was just a little tired. It was the natural result of an 81-year-old man whose capabilities had been diminishing for years. Biden, his family, and his team let their self-interest and fear of another Trump term justify an attempt to put an at times addled old man in the Oval Office for four more years."

Many Biden advisers talked with the authors and admitted that they had had serious concerns about Biden's ability to meet the challenges of a 2024 campaign. (This is similar to the many Republicans in Congress today who have serious problems with Trump that they are willing to talk about privately, but will not say publicly.) The excuse the Biden advisers use for not speaking out is that his decision-making ability was still intact. But this is only a part of being president; the other part is communicating the reasons for your decisions to the public. And Biden was a horrible communicator; he simply had no communication skills whatsoever as he neared the end of his term. It had gotten so bad that he often could not even complete a coherent thought, often getting lost in mid-sentence.

I've often wondered why Biden's advisers let him do that early debate with Trump. The book answers the question by saying that the polls showed the public had serious doubts about Biden's ablilty to serve a second term, and so the debate was planned to demonstrate that Biden was in fact up to the job.

After the debate Biden went on national TV to try to rehabilitate his image. Instead, he confirmed his incompetence when, in response to the simple question, "Did you watch the debate?", he answered "I don't think I did." Huh? You're not even sure whether or not you watched the debate? After this there was no question as to his lack of competence.

The Biden campaign had three highly respected pollsters on staff who were polling daily, and after the debate the polling news was even worse for Biden. The pollsters would report to the campaign leaders, but the word wasn't getting through to Biden, and the pollsters weren't permitted to meet directly with Biden. Finally, on Thursday, July 18th (three days before Biden left the race), the pollsters met with the top campaign aides. The message was that "A Large majority of voters do not believe that President Biden is mentally and physically capable of serving four more years, and the belief that he is too old to be president is a settled question in voters' minds." Biden, sick with Covid at the time, recognized that his staying in the race would have the effect of tearing the Democratic Party apart, and he withdrew.

What is so sad and pathetic is that both Joe and Jill Biden still believe to this day that Joe could have beaten Trump in the 2024 election. Talk about delusional! What is equally pathetic is the grudge held by the Bidens against Nancy Pelosi, for (implicitly) suggesting that Joe re-consider his run after the disastrous debate. Their resentment was so severe that when Pelosi broke her hip in Luxembourg in December of 2024 and underwent hip replacement surgery, neither Joe nor Jill called her to wish her well. So much for Biden as the great empathizer.

Biden's advisers knew he was going downhill and increasingly during his term they limited his press availability. His average of nine press conferences a year was fewer than every post-WW2 president except for Reagan and Nixon. By contrast, Truman had 41 a year and the first Bush had 36. (Had Biden done more press conferences he surely would have been better prepared at answering questions during the horrid debate.)

Biden's advisers even limited his availability to his biggest donors and supporters. At small gatherings of donors, Biden was using a teleprompter instead of the usual informal remarks. Imagine, a donor who had given as much as $500,000 for a meet-and-greet with the president had to settle for canned remarks read from a teleprompter!

What is tragic is that Biden's legacy will now be that through his hubris he gave us another disastrous four years of Trump as president. Had he kept his (implicit) promise to only serve one term, the Democrats might have settled on a worthy candidate who could have beaten Trump, and Biden would then have had a legacy of some accomplishments, putting him somewhere in the middle of all presidents in the rankings. As it is, he will be near the bottom, at least for the near future.

"Dwight D.Eisenhower", by Tom Wicker

This little book has much to recommend it. It is an easy read, both because of its short length (140 pages), and the readable prose of its author, a veteran working journalist. Its relatively recent publication date (2002) enables the author to write from the perspective of time, which allows for geater insight into how bad some of Ike's foreign policy blunders were.

Wicker writes primarily of five major blunders Ike made during his eight-year presidency.

1. 1953 Coup in Iran. Ike teamed with the British to engineer a coup ousting the democratically elected prime minister, and restoring the Shah for what turned out to be a 26-year reign of terror against his people. Is it any wonder that Iranians call the U.S. "The Great Satan"? I just recently learned that the reason Iranians were so upset about Jimmy Carter letting the Shah into the U.S. for medical treatment in 1979 was that they thought the U.S. was planning to re-install him as Iran's leader. (They didnt believe the story about the Shah needing medical treatment.) And now today we have a war with Iran, a continuation of the ongoing hostiities initiated by Ike in 1953.

A website summarizes the damage caused by Ike: "The coup of 1953 was more than the removal of a prime minister—it was the violent denial of the Iranian people’s right to self-determination. It entrenched dictatorship, facilitated foreign exploitation, and left scars that remain visible today."

2. 1954 Coup in Guatemala. Wicker writes that there was "even less excuse" to overthrow Guatemala's elected government in 1954. He concludes that "Arbenz's land reform was cancelled, unions were outlawed, hundreds of political and labor leaders were exiled, unknown numbers of campesinos were murdered, thousands were arrested, political parties were suspended, and thre-quarters of the people were disenfranchised because they were illiterate. For years to come, Guatemala was racked by guerrila warfare, coups and countercoups, murder and repression."

A webside sums it up this way: "What followed was one of the most tragic chapters in Latin American history. Guatemala’s brief democratic experiment gave way to decades of military dictatorship. When leftist guerrillas took up arms in the 1960s, the response was overwhelming state terror: death squads operating from unmarked vehicles, bodies dumped in public as warnings, systematic campaigns of torture and disappearance. The violence reached genocidal proportions in the 1980s, when the military waged scorched-earth warfare against indigenous Maya communities suspected of supporting rebels. Entire villages were wiped out; survivors spoke of helicopters dropping mutilated corpses to terrorise the population. By the time peace accords were signed in 1996, more than 200,000 Guatemalans had been killed or disappeared – over 90% at the hands of US-backed security forces. A UN truth commission would later conclude that the military had committed acts of genocide against the country’s indigenous population."

3. Failure to condemn McCarthy. Ike always maintained that he didn'ty speak out against McCarthy because he didn't want to give him any more publicity. This represents a huge failure, showing a complete lack of moral leadertship. I once heard some speculation that McCarthy had some dirt on Ike, namely, that he had used Nazis to help run post-war Germany, and this is why Ike kept quiet, but I've never seen any evidence that this was actually the case.

4. Failure to speak out in support of the Suprme Court decision in Brown v. Bosard of Education. Ike disagreed with this decision, though he did take steps to enforce it in LIttle Rock in 1957. Ike even attempted to lobby Chief Justice Earl Warren before the decision was announced, telling Warren at a dinner party that "These southerners are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big overgrown Negroes". For shame, Ike.

5. The U2 incident. Ike had a summit confertence scheduled with Khrushchev in May of 1960, at which nuclear disarmament was to be discussed. However, this fell apart on May 1st when an American U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. Ike's folly here was in authorizing this flight, knowing it could jeopardize a diarmament agreement, an issue which he felt very strongly about. Then he committed another blunder when he denied it was a spy plane, lamely claiming that it was a weather mission over Turkey that had strayed off course. As we have seen so often since then, the cover-up was not successful, and only made things worse. Ike could have saved the upcoming summit by admitting the error and apologizing, but he didn't have it in him to do this.

Wicker doesn't even mention Ike's role in the 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of what is today known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And only in passing does he mention the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a CIA operation that was planned during the Eisenhower administration and then carried out after Kennedy took over.

Wicker's conclusion is that Ike was a great man, but not a great president. But was he even a good president? Historians seem to think so. A 2021 C-SPAN survey ranked him 5th, behind only Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt. I am more inclined to place him in the middle of the pack.

"Anatomy of a Scandal"

This is a six-episode Netflix drama from 2022, which I binge-watched in one day recently. Prior to watching it I read many IMDB user reviews, most of which complained about the ending. I am writing mainly to examine the issue of whether the ending spoiled an otherwise good series, as the reviewers have claimed. Spoilers to come.

There are several questionable plot issues with the ending. The idea that the main characters aren't able to recognize their university classmates from 20 years before is ludicrous. There is no reason for the prosecutor of the rape charge, a really weak character, to have turned out to be the same woman raped by the defendant 20 years before at the end of a wild party. And now, after a name change, she is prosecuting him for a similar type of rape. On this I agree with the criticisms.

But the reviewers are really off-base in criticizing the MP's wife for leaving her husband after he is found not guilty. They miss the whole point of this fascinating story. The series starts with showing the wife at a cocktail party where she is enthusiastically greeted by all and is obviously a very popular figure in govenrment social circles. She is beautiful, charming, and seemingly has the world at her fingertips. She then finds out her husband has been having an affair with a young staffer but has recently broken it off. She and her husband work through this OK, but then the staffer accuses him of raping her in an elevator (lift) two weeks after he had ended the affair. He and his wife endure a trial, which is strictly a "he-said, she-said" case as there is no physical evidence, and no corroborating evidence other than the young woman's friend who testified that the woman had mentined the incident to he the day after it happened.

Naturally the MP is found "not guilty" by the jury, but in the process certain events of 20 years earlier come to light, and the wife realizes that her husband has been hiding the truth about this past event from her, and in essence hiding the truth about himself and what kind of person he is. The sense of entitlement of the upper class in Britain becomes more obvious and more odious to the wife, and she leaves him, taking their two kids with her to an idyllic place away from London and to a new life. This makes perfect sense in light of her new insights. It makes perfect sense that she does not want her children growing up in this type of toxic environment of entitlement.

Asa retired lawyer, I am dismayed at certain legal aspects of the case. No competent prosecutor would ever bring rape charges on this flimsy evidence. The trial itself is shown in in a believable manner, but the idea that there would even be any charges brought in the first place is totally bogus. The alleged victim didn't even say "no"; what she said was "not here", a statement the defendant emphatically denies hearing when he testifies, but which is ambiguous in any event.

The other legal problem with the plot is the idea that the MP and his friend, the Prime Minister, would be arrested for crimes committed 20 years before. Their resignations from Parliament are quite realistic, and mirrors actual scandals in Britain's past. But to also be accused of a crime on top of being disgraced seems out of bounds. In the U.S. the crmiinal statute of limitations would have ruled out such a charge 20 years after the fact. Apparently there is no statute of limiations in Britain for serious crimes, a real oddity to me.