Awakening

Gasp!!! It’s been five months now since I last posted anything on this Blog. Is that pathetic, or what? Well, if you thought I was gone, you were wrong. I have not dropped off the face of the earth. You are not rid of me. I have decided to come back.

The truth be know, I have largely shelved my writing-historian life the past five months and happily returned to my first profession, practicing law. Yes, by day, I am a registered, card-carrying Washington lawyer-lobbyist. You can look it up. Here’s a link to my latest public report at OpenSecrets.Org: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobbyists/lobbyist.asp?txtname=Ackerman%2C+Kenneth&year=a&txttype=l ) The work has been interesting and productive and — no apologies here — it’s been lucrative too. Writers have to eat and pay bills, and I like to eat well. And a few months of hourly billings certainly helps.

But so much water has run under the bridge these past few months: Hillary, Obama, McCain, easily the most exciting Presidential sweepstakes in memory, not to mention the ongoing drama between George Bush’s last gasp White House and Nancy Pelosi’s stumbling Congress, and now the economy bumbling over, of all things, subprime mortgages. And that’s not even counting the New York Giants. What woeful, thrilling times we live in. How can a historian be silent?

Yet here I am, sitting silently all these months, a mere spectator. No, I haven’t given up being a fervid political junkie. I continue to read my three newspapers each day (the Washington Post, NY Times, and Roll Call). I listen to POTUS 08 on XM radio, check the DrudgeReport and other internet sites, and tune in pundits for hours on end. No excuses. I like it, and wouldn’t have it any other way. But every time I sit down to try and write a Blog post or an article, about politics, history, or anything else, I get distracted. Words dry up. I find other things needing attention. Writer’s block? Perhaps. But these blocks don’t come out of thin air.

Since my last book was published in May 2007 (Young J. Edgar: Hoover the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties, 1919-1920), I admit that I’ve researched at least half a dozen good ideas for next topics, including possible narratives about figures as diverse as Emma Goldman, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, American socialist founder Eugene V. Debs, long-time autocratic House Speaker Joe Cannon, feminist pioneer Victoria Woodhull, John Adams and the Boston Tea Party, and even the adventures of a once-famous British ocean deep-sea diver from the 1880s named Alexander Lambert. All these ideas have great promise, real keepers. But here too, the writers block sets in. I find problem at every turn, and no path out of the forest.

So I’ve made a decision. To start writing again, I need to write. And be published. That’s the only way to beat writers block. And in this modern world of cyberspace, the way you do it is through a Blog. So here I am Blogging — and in this initial effort, I am Blogging in the worst stereotypical way: with a self-absorbed, nascissistic, whiney, inconclusive essay about nothing but myself. But I guess that’s how you start. It doesn’t become literature overnight.

So expect to see me posting more often on this space. What I’ll write about, what shape it will take, ony time will tell. But plan to spent time having Coffee with Ken. I am going into writer’s training. Any encouragement would be appreciated.

So that’s it from the home front. Hope you’ll put up with me in the meantime.

Thanks, and all the best. –KenA

What does history say about George Bush, Alberto Gonzalez, and the eight fired Prosecutors? Just ask Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding.

So, armed with my cup of Starbucks (shade-grown Mexican), let me start off this new Blog by jumping straight into the middle of the today’s big hullabaloo: the storm over Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and his firing of eight federal prosecutors under circumstances that suggest political coercion. Yes, federal prosecutors serve at the much-cited “pleasure” of the President, but tampering with the wheels of justice for political ends can be unethical at best and criminal at worst. And Gonzalez has already been caught making several public misstatements on the affair. Hence the big controversy.

Does history give us any useful guide for judging this episode? News commentators have been pointing all week to the numbers of federal prosecutors fired by various prior presidents over the years, the fact that Clinton and Reagan both fired the whole bunch of them at the beginnings of their respective terms, so on. But this misses the point. Nobody has ever argued that an administration does not have the right to make room for new political appointees by dropping some of the old ones. The concern, rather, is that someone in the Justice Department or White House might have been trying deliberately to influence the outcome of specific pending cases – to put people in jail, have them indicted, or protect lawbreakers from prosecution – based on politics. That’s where things get sticky.

Perhaps the starkest example comes from President Richard M. Nixon and the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. Nixon’s case of tampering with a federal prosecutor was a blockbuster – known ever since as the Saturday Night Massacre. His target was Archibald Cox, the bowtie-wearing Harvard law professor and former Solicitor General who had been appointed by Nixon’s own Justice Department as a Special Prosecutor for the Watergate case in May 1973. When Cox decided to ignore the president’s objections and insisted on trying to get his hands on important evidence in the case, specifically recordings of relevant Oval Office conversations that Nixon had secretly taped, Nixon decided to give him the boot. On October 20, 1973, Nixon ordered Attorney General Eliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson refused, as did his deputy Attorney General William Ruckleshaus, both of whom resigned rather than carry out the order. That left Solicitor General Robert Bork, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, to do the deed.

Cox, too, technically served at the “pleasure” of the president; his independence was based solely on assurances given by Richardson. Still, when Nixon acted to break those asurances, the conflict was so apparent and the public’s reaction so hostile that Congress in 1978 passed a permanent law authorizing Independent Counsels on an ongoing basis in politically charged cases – a step intended to block future presidents from firing federal prosecutors in these situations. Neither side liked the result; Republicans complained about independent counsel aimed against them, such as Lawrence Walsh and his eight-year pursuit of the Iran-Contra scandal, just as Democrats complained about Kenneth Starr and his pursuit of the Whitewater-Monica-gate affair. Nobody shed any years when the permanent law expired in 1999.

Another case of political manipulation in Federal prosecutions goes back to the Teapot Dome scandals of the 1920s. Warren G. Harding was president then and Harry Daugherty, his Attorney General, presided over a Justice Department riddled with corruption unmatched either before or since – bribes, kickbacks, extortion, blackmail, you name it. When two United States Senators, Montana Democrats Thomas Walsh and Burton Wheeler, got wind of the scandals and threatened to investigate, Daugherty sent agents from the Department’s Bureau of Investigation (led by its then 27 year-old Deputy Director J. Edgar Hoover) to investigate the Senators, shadowing them and their families, wiretapping their phones, pilfering their offices, and tampering with their mail. They convinced a Grand Jury in Montana to indict Senator Wheeler for influence peddling, a charge later found to be baseless both by a Montana jury and a Senate investigating panel. When the truth finally came out, Daugherty and his circle were history, and Daugherty himself avoided prison only by the grace of hung juries in two separate criminal trials.

All of which brings us back to George W. Bush and his Attorney General, Alberto Gonzalez.

Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre and Harry Daugherty’s harrassment of Senators Walsh and Wheeler were extreme cases. Nobody suggests, based on the facts revealed so far, that the firings of the eight federal prosecutors rise to the eggregious levels of these benchmarks. Still, they make a point. If evidence ultimately shows that the firings were part of a system designed to pressure federal prosecutors into twisting the outcome of particular cases, to shield friends from prosecution, use grand juries to settle political scores, or to create phony issues in hotly-contested political elections, then all bets are off. The history gives us some clear lessons to keep in mind: First, federal prosecutors might serve at the “pleasure” of the president, but, pleasure or not, there are lines of ethics, propriety, and law that a president may not cross. Second, in the end, the truth always comes out. You can count on it. And finally, the Washington classic: it’s not the crime, but the coverup that gets you in trouble.

Welcome to my Blog

Well, I’ve finally taken the plunge and started a blog. Friends have been telling me for months to try it, and I’ve always refused, thinking I was too old, too technologically backward, too boring, too disorganized, or too pressed for time to do it right. And I wouldn’t want to embarrass myself all over the Internet by doing it badly.

But here I am, armed with a cup of coffee to give it a try.

First, an introduction. My name is Ken Ackerman (that’s me looking back at you from the snapshot), I live just outside Washington, D.C. and you can learn almost anything else about me on my websight (also a new item of the past few days) at www.kennethackerman.com. Why all these new things suddenly in my life at this moment? The answer is largely self-serving. Among other things, I write books, non-fiction histories, complex epics about forgetten times in America like the Gilded Age or World War I, and I happen to have a new one coming out in May. It’s called YOUNG J. EDGAR: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil Liberties, and (to be very mercinary about it) here’s a link to the Amazon.com page where you can pre-order up a copy if you’d like http://http://www.amazon.com/Young-J-Edgar-Assault-Liberties/dp/0786717750/ref=sr_1_4/105-7924771-2805203?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174065283&sr=1-4.

The book tells the story of the notorious 1919-1920 Palmer raids, a civil liberties travesty in which some 10,000 Americans, mostly recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, were rounded up by the Justice Department, crammed into overcrowded makeshift prisons for weeks or months, cut off from lawyers and families, often roughed up and rushed through sham hearings, and then almost every one of them released with no charges ever brought. The reason — much like today — was a war on terror. The Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, like most other Americans at the time, feared that the country stood on the brink of a commmunist-led uprising, sparked by a wave of anarchist bombings in April and May 1919. One bomb in particular on June 2, 1919, exploded in Palmer’s own home near Dupont Ciircle in Washington, D.C., almost killing Palmer, his wife, and his daughter who were in their bedrooms.

To lead the crackdown, Palmer choose the brightest young man in his office, a 24 year-old upstart named J. Edgar Hoover who would later rise to fame as director of the FBI for five decades. For Hoover, leading the Palmer raids was a coming-of-age adventure that shaped his life. I tell the story as much as possible through his eyes, but I also feature the handful of admirable people who had the backbone to oppose Hoover and Palmer at the height of the crisis, including lawyers like Clarence Darrow (of Scopes monkey trial fame) and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and radicals like Emma Goldman.

How do the Palmer raids of 1919 compare with George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” today? Which was worse, then or now? That’s one of the things I’ll talk about on this Blog, and I hope you’ll chime in as well. I’ll give you a hint: There’s no simple answer. Real life doesn’t work that way.

So that’s who I am and that’s what I’m doing. When you have a chance, please come by and have a cup of coffee with me and tell me what you think. I’ll do the same.

Meanwhile, all the best. –KenA