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EDITQRIAL

THE FLIGHT

THAT

FAILED

That flash you saw on the television screen last

Tuesday was a metaphor with many meanings:

loss of innocence, heroic sacrifice, national

tragedy. The fire and smoke and trailing debris

composed a searing electronic icon hat will stay^

in the mind's eye of everyone now old enough

to focus on the picture. For it is iconics, not

economics or patriotism or sentiment, that must

explain theextraordinary global lurch in reaction

to theChallengerexplosion: the condolences

from Queen, Pope and premiers, the compulsive

media coverage, the sense of collective grief. In

the great scheme of things, one small tragedy or

As

the trauma diminishes in the weeks ahead,

another meaning will emerge from the dooms-

day events. The explosion that consumed

Challenger should also reignite the controversy

overhe Star Warsnucleardefense ystem.

President Reagan and the hi-tech freaks and

hacks who are pushing the program

have

almost

convinced the opinion leaders'' inAmerica

that it is logicallypossible and mechanically

feasible to laser and pulse our way into nuclear

primacy and national security. Bu t any school-

kid in New Hampshire can now see that with a

misfire rate no worse than the shuttle's, the

Strategic Defense Initlative would be a dud or,

worse, an engine of national suicide.

S.D.I.

is

no more a miracle shield-than the

shuttle

is

a vehicle for space exploration. Sensors

explore; astronauts tinker. One launch of the

unmanned Voyager as produced more ex-

ence than twenty-four shuttles. Both

Star Wars and the manned shuttle program

are major military projects, lucrative corpo-

rate boondoggles and serious efforts i n public

relations and self-promotion for NASA. The

tragedy is that i t cost even ives to reveal

man became one big symbol for mankind.

the scam.

TRUMAN AND CORCORAN

THE

TAPPING

OF TOMIMY

TH-EXJORK'

i t

KAI

BIRD

AND

MAX

HOLLAND

In April 1976 the Senate Select Committee o

Intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church

made its valedictory report on domestic spyin

and other intelligencegency abuses. Th

2,000-page Church committee report identifie

victims of wiretapping abuses by name, in

cluding Martin Luther King Jr., several news

men, and aides to Henry Kissinger,

The report also included a cryptic referenc

to the wiretapping of an unnamed forme

Roosevelt White House aide between Jun

1945

and May

1948

The

Washington

Po

spechated chat'the person involved was Thoma

(Tommy the Cork) Corcoran, an influenti

Washington lawyer and power broker. But th

story went largely untold because the documen

tation linking it to Corcoran was acking an

because other revelations, especially the wireta

on King, dominated the media post-mortem

Now, however, a considerable body of vi-

dence,ncluding Corcoran's own substantia

Federal Bureau

of

Investigation file, crucial in

ternal Bureau memorandums and the wireta

transcripts themselves,hasbeen made public

much of it under the Freedom of Informatio

Act. The story of he most extensive partisa

political wiretap instigated by any postwar Pres

dent can at lasteullyevealed.

The evidence shows -that just six weeks afte

assuming hePresidency, HarryTrumanhad

Edward-McKim, his top aide and close friend

ask the

F B I

o place a wiretap

on

Corcoran

Although the order for a tap on he flamboyan

lawyercame from the White House, the ide

that Truman might eavesdrop on his politica

Continued

on

Page 142

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CONTENTS.

Volume 242,

Number

LETTERS

130

EDITORIALS

129 The Flight That Failed

131 UncleButtinsky

132

Broken Reartland

133 At Home Abroad

COLUMNS

134

Minority Report

ARTICLES

129 Truman and Corcoran:

The Tapping of

Tommy the Cork

,- 135 Create Work, Not Jobs: f

The Myth of Full Employment

Stanley Aronoyi

138 Marching With Pretoria:

Reagan's Real Aims

in Sauth Africa ThomasJ. Down

140 Famine Update:

Bob McBride

In Ethiopia, Food

Is

a Weapon

JonathanB . Tuck

Hans Koning

BOOKS

THE ARTS

147 Ewen: Immigrant Women in the

1

. .

,

ChristopherHitchens

Land of Dollars: Life andulture

On the Lower East Side, 1890-1925

Susan Strass

149 Weigl: The Monkey Wars

Michaeltephens

150 Art

Arthur C. Dan

152 The Blindeding-tailpoem)

Sherod

Sanf

Kai Birdnd

Max

Holland

154 Music -

Evan Eisenbe

-

Drawings by Randall Enos .

Edifor, Vlctor Navasky

ExecutrveEdrtor, RichardLingeman; AssocrateEdrtors, Elsa Dlxler,

Edifor,Eiizabeth Pochoda; Assrsfgnt LlferaryEdrtor, Marla Margaroms;

Andrew Kopkind; Assrstant Editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel; Lrterary

Poetry Edrtor, Grace Schulman; Copy Chref,JoAnn WypIJewskl;Asstst-

ant Copy Edrlors, Vanla Del Borgo, Judith Long; Edrtorral Secrefary,

Marpessa Dawn Outlaw; Interns Gwen Bondi Washington), David Ap-

pell. Julia Bur+, Paul W Cohen, Dave Goldmer, Davld L L. Laskin,

Todd Lewan; n leave, Kai Blrd, Katha Pollitt.

Publrsher, Hamdton Fish 3rd

Assocrate Publrsher,Davld Parker; Advertrsrng Drrecfor.Chrls Calhou

BusrnessManager, Ann B. Epstein; Bookkeeper, Ivor A. Richardso

Arf/ProducfronManager, Jane Sharples; CIrculatron Drrecfor, Steph

W. Soule; Drrecfor

of

Development and Pubhcrty, Mlcah

L.

Sif

Subscrlptron Manager, Cookee V. Kleln; AssrsfanfAdverlrsrng Manag

Neil Black; Receptronrst, Greta Loell; Mai Clerk JohnHoltz;

Adminrstratrveecretary, Shlrley Sulat; Productlon, Terry Mill

Typography,Davld Aeker, Randall Cherry; Nalron AssocratesDrrecf

Nancy Bacher;

Natron

News Servrce, Jeff Sorensen.

EDITORIALS.

Uncle

Buttinsky

elect a Christian Democratic chancellor.

But

whether the i

terventionists buy off labor unions, prqmote insurrectio

or distribute disinformation, the effect is to interrupt the i

he menu for American intervention in the affairs

dependent effort of people to make their 6wi 1history.

of smaller states contains a sumptuous array of

A superpower has

so

many means of intervention at wo

choices, from full-scale invasion to polite persua- at one time that it is often difficult to see the system in i

sion. The President makes his selection, and the

taxpayers pay the check. The courses may be hot or mild:

troops are sent for permanent war games

in

Honduras, or

money is given to elect convenient andidates in El Salvador.

Big guns from the battleship New Jersey pummel Moslem

villages in Lebanon to shore up the Christian government,

or a propaganda arrage is loosed

in

West Germany to help

full complexity, or to imagine what the world would be li

without it. In South Africa, the United States :has esta

lished such a significant business and financial presence-

bolstered by political, military and cultural' rdationships-

that the withdrawal of the merest amount ?f moral ~or o

etary support is in itself an act of, ntervention, Israel is

such a stateof clientage with the United StateS tliat.debat

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32

The

k t

on. ebruary

8 19

in the Knesset or editorials in Haaretz are seen as suitable

stuff for American comment, criticism and action. In Nic-

aragua, which has so far evaded clientagebut notscrutiny, a

censor has only o sneeze and half the Congress threatens to

destroy the country.

The full force of the interventionist impulse is nowhere

felt more strongly this winter than in the Philippines. The

election cam pagn has become almost as much an event of

American politics as it is

a

part of domestic affairs. In the

first place, President Ferdinand Marcoss unexpected deci-

sion to hold elections came in esponse to demands from the

Reagan Administration, which feared that an infusion of

democratic legitimacywasneeded to offset the growing

popularity of the New Peoples Army. Then the American

media rushed into the fray picking its favorites on the basis

of who would be best or U.S. interests, and determining the

issues according to what would be most easily understood

by the American mind.

he

New

York Times supplied the oppositions biggest

break

so f a r

by questioning Marcoss record in the World

War Resistance.Several groups of not-so-neutral ob-

servers are already packing to go to Manila for

a

day of

close poll watching on February 7 . And one can only guess

about the activities of the U.S. Embassy, the bankers, the

corporate centurions, the freelance consultants and the hun-

dreds of interested parties who are shaping the campaign to

their own concerns.

All the reportage, the intelligence gathering and the ex-

pressions

of

concern from official and private American

sources, on the spot and safely

at

home, amount to nothing

less than a massive effort to intervene in Philippine politics.

Hardly anyone has questioned the intervention this time

because liberals and conservatives agree on the objective,

the removal of Marcos. It was a bit different two years ago

in El Salvador, when the American right wing whs irked

by the Administrations support for

JosC

Napole6n Duarte

over an old ally, Roberto D-Aubuisson, the butcher

who fell from favor. And some lonely leftists made

a

small

fusslast year when the State Dipartment ried to wreck the

Nicaraguan elections by pressuring anti-Sandinista can-

didates to withdraw from the race.

But even the best of intentions-and seeking the disap-

pearance of Marcos is hard to beat-should not justify the

wbrst of policies. Historically, the American role in the

Philippines has been a paradigm of imperial arrogance. The

McKinley Administration grabbed the islands from Spain,

and Teddy Roosevelt fought a bloody war of repression

against an authentic native insurgency. Until World War II

the Philippines was a colony pure and simple, and even after

gaining formal independence itemains an economic,

political and military outpost. Marcos could never have sur-

vived for two decades of tyranny without the approval and

support of successive American governments.

So

intricate is

the web of relationships that a break in any strand disrupts

the whole structure. Trade, aid, cultural contacts, military

compacts, all serve o keep the Philippines in a state of per-

manent dependence.

Elections seem to legitimize authority and stabilize the

P

-

system so well in America hat it is natural for policy-mak

to export the process to markets under

U.S.

influen

Its like sending jeans and Coke and rock-and-roll

benighted nations whose nder_development as enied

themsuchpleasures. The problem is not with the pro

uct-who doesnt want an honest ballot or a cold drink o

Springsteen album?-but with the trappings that come w

it: the press, the pollsters, the polhvatchers, the political f

ers and finaglers, the consultants, the arrogant advice a

the.,unshakable assumption that Americans have a droit

seigneur to go anywhere in the world and arran

everybodys life.

Broken

Heartland

has beena harsh, bitter winter in the Corn Belt a

the High Plains. Snows began early in October, a

wind-chill factors of 50 degrees below zero have

common. A brief thaw may help, ut everyone kno

more crunching cold is ahead. More unsettling than h

winter, whichpeople on the prairies are used to, is t

uneasiness related to the farm crisis.

Last month, in Union County, which has the richest la

in South Dakota, a young Farmers Home Administrati

supervisor killed his wife,daughter, son and dog while th

slept, then went down to his office and shot himself dea

He left a note: The job has got pressure

on

my mind, pa

on left side. The wlfe had been fired from twosecre

tarial jobs in two years. The family was from- New Yo

State and had lived in three South Dakota towns in the pa

nine years. The 12-year-old daughter had written a poem

school expressing her pain at having to move

s o

often a

Ieave new friends behind. Because the father

was

an out-o

stater, the Fm.H.A. moved him about the state, apparen

figuring he would be more willing to get tough with loc

farmers who werebehind

on

their loan payments th

would a native South Dakotan.

South Dakota farmers are accustomed to hard times. T

old-timersemember thehirties, whenhe droug

came, the dust blew and they put up tumbleweed hay to t

to keep their few remaining cattle alive. The price

of

co

was

so

low that the farmers burned the ears

m

their co

stoves. Now nightmares of those years haunt tbe people.

Over in Worthington, Minnesota, some 250 farmers ga

ered recently to hear an activist tell them that they ha

no

moral obligation to repay an unjust debt and that th

would be right to use a gun to defend heir farms fro

foreclosure. Enough of the lawless spirit of the Old West

mains in rural America for people to reach for guns when

else fails.

Community spirit in the hinterland

of

America is n

dead,but it is eroding. People still contribute rather sm

amounts to food pantries to help the most needy. But

they see theirneighbors go bankrupt and move away, ma

take the community-destroying attitude that people g

what they have coming to them. Farmers who have

made (that is, happened to be around during the go

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February 8,

986 The Nation. 13

years), or those who have not yet realized that they too are

in danger, say, He went in too deep, or He should have

Small owns are hard hit. Highschools are closingas

young families move o the city; those who remain are reluc-

tant to have children in these uncertain times. Rural and

small-town churches are rapidly losingmembers and are

largely supported by the elderly.

On Saturday evenings some people tune in to

A

Prairie

Home Companion, broadcast out of St. Paul over Ameri-

can Public Radio, and enjoy Garrison Keillors apt

descriptions of life in Lake Wobegon, which seems

so

much

like their hometowns. They know that there issomething

good about life in small-town America, but they wonder

what is happening to that life in a high-tech, computerized,

urbanized, war-threatening world. The only area of South

Dakota that is booming is Ellsworth Air Force Base, near the

Black Hills; to yhich cruise missiles andpreparations for

B-1 bombers have brought a fleeting prosperity.

The people are patriotic and for years have given their

sons, and now heir daughters, to the armed forces. Now

they sense hat the high-tech military binge is costing the na-

tion a sound agriculture, and they ask, Is this military

overspend necessary?

Congressional elections will be held this fall, and good

candidates are surfacing in both parties. The incumbents,

loaded with PAC money, claim that theyhavebeen the

farmers best friends in Washington, but they are in trouble

as the distress in the Farm Belt grows more serious.

Meanwhile, the people of rural South Dakota, the Corn

Belt and the High Plains,

go

valiantly ahead with life as

usual as best hey can. The high-school basketball games

and tournaments are the main action in the towns fortunate

enoughtill to have igh schools. People still go to

church, pray for the sick and troubled, try to helprheir

neighbors when they can, and hope for a turnaround.

Unlike Garrison Keillors Lake Wobegon, where all the

women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the

children are above average, the peopleof mall-town

America feel they are going down the tube, and that neither

the government noranyone else in high-tech Americaives a

damn.

BOB

MCBRIDE

Bob McBride has beena United Methodist minister in South

Dakota f o r nearly thirty years.

known better than-to take out all those loans.

At Home Abroad

London

toted

a

copy of the Sunday

New York

imes home

this morning, purchased from the one newsdealer

here who still carries it. Its not a thing youd do

everyweek, for itcosts f8.25, about $12; but on

an irregular basis it makes a worthwhile investment, if only

for the healthy shock it provides. It

is

not news to Nation

readers that,our newspaper of record has veered from its

once mildly liberal course t o a solidly right-wing one. What

shocked me (in my relative isolation from the Americ

media) were not the right-wing editorials, right-wipg essa

in the magazine, right-wing semantics in the news storie

which I fully expected, but the pervasiveness of this point

view in a wide range of articles on so many subjects.

every section, away from the newsof the moment, th

reader is given data with a dose of conservativephi-

losophy or, to be less euphemistic, a dose of propaganda

A maverick playwright who had written a drama abou

the Bay of Pigs is quoted by reporter Samuel Freedman

saying that there had been no anti-Castro undergroun

waiting for the invasion because Castro already had locke

them up and the Americans werent going to give the i

vaders the back-up support they promised. But, Free

man continues, the play does not offer conventional lef

wing wisdom. . [It] directly lampoons one of liberalism

heroes, John F. Kennedy. With that little but, Free

man in one fell swoop ascribes the right-wing version of th

fiasco to the left (the real left-wing version is presumabl

outside is en). He implies that theefthares lib-

eralisms hero worship of Kennedy, and with his seman

twist, left-wing wisdom, insinuates that the lefts dea

are little more than redundant folklore.

A

story about a news sheet in Nicaragua banned for a

.tacking the governmentgets a four-column headline.

sounds like the kind of publication whose editors would b

shot in

a

number of nations allied with

us,

but that s not m

point. What bothers me is that unless you are a caref

peruser of the story you might think that the publicatio

banned was a newspaper with the power of The Twnes itse

rather than a sheet with,a circulation of about 300.

Elsewhere, in what used to be called a think-piece, Jame

Markham describeshow the youth ofWest Germany

becoming more conservative. A number

of

students a

quoted by iiame. They all make disillusioned or born-aga

statements about their antinuclear, antipollution or ant

establishment pasts. They have returned to conservati

values, in Markhams words. There are ive or six of them

whichmakeshis ample equivalent to roughly one-si

thousandth of 1 percent of the West German student po

ulation. He also mentions unnamed teachers and profe

sors and ends up with two heads of polling organizatio

who actually call young West Germans relatively pro

gressive and who add hat lower-classWest Germans

are not necessarily affected by Markhams trend.

Public housing- n Britain, under Labor, used to be

good shape and, more important, relatively available. The

is a debate in my Times about the privatization of gover

ment services, and its proponent informs

us

that ever sin

Prime Minister Thatcher started selling off public housin

its residents have found an incentive to improve the

dwellings. Nothing about the outcry causedhere by th

policy, which doomed the very concept of subsidized hou

ing and which-, but why go on? Im grateful it on

spoiled my Wednesday morning, not my Sunday.

HANS

QNIN

Hans Koning is the author

of

De Witts War (Pafitheon)

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