Tag: new york times

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He Didn’t Inhale Enough

I noticed yesterday that one of the New York Times blogs, The Caucus, had an item on how a gaggle of right-wingers is promising to do a “documentary” that will expose the dark side of Barack Obama. ‘Bout time! Here’s a guy who for years has been leaving a trail of unpleasant secrets. He has even written books full of assertions that people can fact check to find out what a self-aggrandizer he is.

The Times itself begins the process of exposing the mendacity with a 1,751-word story this morning–“Old Friends Say Drugs Played Bit Part in Obama’s Young Life“– that investigates his claims that he used drugs as a youth. That’s right: Obama says he used drugs and has suggested both in writing and on the campaign trail that his occasional pot smoking, drinking and cocaine sniffing was troubling and unwise.

But the Times is blowing the lid off those claims. The story says that “more than three dozen interviews” with “friends, classmates and mentors” from his high school and college years find that Obama is remembered as “grounded, motivated, and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.”

What could account for the discrepancy the Times seems intent on manufacturing? Ready? Here it is:

“[It] [could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

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Court of Special Sessions

In connection with my ongoing Irish-American research project, I’ve had occasion to peruse The New York Times archives at length. Looking for information on one case in an 1860s version of a police blotter column, I started reading accounts of cases brought on September 7, 1867, to the city’s Court of Special Sessions. The tribunal apparently tried petty crimes. But it didn’t regard them lightly. If someone made a credible enough accusation to get a police officer take you in, you’d have your hands full at the very least and stood a good chance of being sent to prison. On the other hand, looking respectable counted for something if you were a shoplifter. From the Times:

Court of Special Sessions.

Before Justice Dowling.

There were sixty-one cases tried yesterday at the Court of Special Sessions. The charges, in but very few of the cases, were of more than ordinary gravity. These we give:

A VICTIM TO SCIENCE.

John Shay was charged by Mr. Geo. W. Shaw with attempting to steal his watch on Broadway Bridge. The prisoner was leaning over the balustrade of the bridge, looking down the street. He turned when complainant was passing and made the effort with which he is charged. Counsel for the prisoner denied the direct statement of the complainant, saying that his client was on an errand connected with his employment, and that he merely stopped upon the bridge to see the operations of a photographer, shortly after which he was arrested and charged as complained. The complainant was so positive in his evidence, and as there was no rebutting testimony, the prisoner was found guilty and sentenced to three months in the Penitentiary.

A TALE OF A TUB.

Ellen Gallagher was found guilty of stealing a wash-tub from Thomas Mulholland. After gathering the tub from the door of the complainant while his back was turned, she endeavored to effect a sale to the daughter of Mulholland, whom she met on the next floor. Mrs. Mulholland recognized the tub, and the prisoner was arrested. Officer Cornelius Read was called, but stated that he knew very little of the case, only that the prisoner had confessed to him that she stole the tub. This “only” of the officer’s was sufficient to send the prisoner one month to the Penitentiary.

Under “Miscellaneous,” we find among other reports, this:

Mary Burke, a respectable looking lady, was charged with entering the store of Bertha Rosenberg, and stealing therefrom a roll of muslin containing five yards. Mrs. Burke entered the store and examined different articles but bought nothing. Mrs. Rosenberg suspected that something was wrong and stopped her on the way out, discovering the parcel. In consideration that it was her first offence, and that her connections were otherwise respectable, the prisoner was permitted to pay a fine of $50 and go.

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Fabuladora, or Tapeworm?

If you had never heard of Tania Head before last week, and I hadn’t, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve happened across her name now. She’s the disgraced former head of a group of World Trade Center survivors; disgraced because it turns out that her story of peril, heroism and escape was just that: an elaborately spun yarn.

The New York Times broke the story last week and put it on the front page (“In a 9/11 Survival Tale, the Pieces Just Don’t Fit“). The Times looked into each unique aspect of the drama Head has been relating for the past few years — among other things, that she was on the 78th floor of the south tower when it was hit, that she was badly burned and helped to safety by a documented hero of the disaster, that she took a wedding ring from a mortally injured man in the tower and gave it to his wife — and found that not a single point of the story can be verified. Head repeatedly postponed interviews with the Times before hiring a lawyer to deal with the media; neither Head nor the lawyer have responded to the story beyond saying she did nothing illegal.

Meantime, a newspaper in Barcelona, La Vanguardia, hasd gotten into the act. The paper has published a couple stories saying that Alicia Esteve (a.k.a. Tania) Head is from Barcelona; that acquaintances felt she was given to telling tall tales (at one point, she is termed a fabuladora — fabulist, or liar, in English — which is just about the best word I’ve come across this week); and that among her suspected fantasies was an account of a 125 mph crash in a Ferrari that severed her arm, which was found and reattached (only to be charred during her World Trade Center Adventure). La Vanguardia followed up that report with one based on interviews with what it describes as Head’s former colleagues and fellow students in Barcelona. One witness says that eight days after 9/11 — a period in which she says she spent five days unconscious in a New York hospital — Head showed up in a Barcelona classroom for an MBA program she was taking. She never mentioned any adventures at the World Trade Center; and apparently the only thing she said about New York is that she’d like to go there and work someday.

(The second La Vanguardia article, “Alicia Esteve comenzó curso en Barcelona días después del 11-S,” is in Spanish; the highly entertaining Google translation is here. Entertaining? Well, machine translation is still an inexact science; although it’s impressive that you can get this kind of instantaneous conversion from one language to another merely by pressing a button on your Web browser. But it is a conversion, not a translation, and the results are often comical. For instance, whatever algorithm Google uses apparently can’t make heads or tails of the pronouns in the Head story; so the story is filled with hes, hims and its that refer to Head. And then there’s the case of the ambiguous word that is meant one way and rendered another.

Here’s one sentence that got my attention in the “English” version: “Nevertheless, its personality, very surrounding and demanding, according to those who knew it, turned it a tapeworm.” A tapeworm? Here’s the Spanish: “Sin embargo, su personalidad, muy envolvente y exigente, según quienes la conocieron, la convertía en una solitaria.” Well, solitaria does mean tapeworm. Sometimes. But in this context, the story was talking about Head’s reported habit of trying to ingratiate herself with others. But apparently her “surrounding and demanding personality” turned people off and thus she became a “solitaria” — which can also mean (I think) a solitary one. The next sentence, in machine English, gives some context that would back up that reading: “No matter how much one made an effort in being likeable, it had few friends.”)

Returning to the subject of the tapeworm talk: One needs to read some of Head’s account of her imaginary 9/11 experience to get a feeling for how involved and vivid the fantasy was. For a piece the New York Daily News ran for the fifth anniversary of the attacks, a reporter joined one of Head’s tours of Ground Zero. She didn’t hold anything back describing the scene:

“Burned, bleeding, nearly blinded by dust, she struggled toward the stairway. ‘Blood. Body parts. I crawled through all that,’ she recalled. ‘I realized everybody around me was dying.’ She then encountered the first figure in FDNY bunker gear. ‘I always like to say for me it was like seeing God,’ she recalled. ‘It was like, “Okay, we’re gong to make it.” ‘ … Head had managed to reach the street when the south tower came down and a firefighter pulled her under a rig. ‘That was it for me. I woke up in a hospital five days later.’ ”

I suppose it’s not too hard to figure out how someone could come up with details like that: lots has been written about what happened that day, and imagination is a powerful thing. But the next step — presenting yourself as someone who was there, who touched many of those who perished — is breathtaking, as is the effort to maintain such a complex, attention-getting fiction (here’s one example of an admirer watching Tania in action).

That’s the story here: trying to peel back how this person made the journey from ingratiating, irritating misfit to heroine in a sweeping, historic tragedy. Of course, putting it that way almost makes it sound inevitable; the misfit, if such a being actually exists, always wants to be the hero, right? But still, that conversion — the day-to-day details, not the psychological generalizing — is what’s really interesting to me.

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Wednesday Notebook

The Dad File: As reported elsewhere, my dad had surgery Monday after falling and breaking a hip over the weekend. The operation took a couple hours all told; a surgeon inserted three pins into the fractured bone to help it mend. Afterward, he told my brother Chris and sister Ann, “If you break your hip, I guess this is the way you want to do it.” Yesterday, I talked to Dad in the hospital in Evanston. He sounded great, and the nurses or physical therapists had already had him up briefly, parading around with a walker. I’m relieved, though I know there’s some rehab ahead and that Dad won’t be able to immediately resume his routine of scouting out local Dairy Queens.

Guest observation: Courtesy of The Smiths: “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job/And heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

Auschwitzalbum-1

Auschwitz — the frolicsome side: The New York Times has a remarkable story today — you can tell, because I’m remarking on it — about a newly disclosed photo album depicting life at Auschwitz during the last six or seven months before Soviet troops liberated it in January 1945. You know, even S.S. troops assigned to the slaughter of innocents had a way of maintaining a day-to-day existence that probably helped reassure them they were good people doing a distasteful job. The pictures show social gatherings, a Christmas-tree lighting (the Soviets were just a few weeks from the camp’s gates), and hearty singalongs. As the Times article explains, a U.S. soldier discovered the pictures in an album in Germany after the war; he donated them to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum last year. The museum, in turn, has created a Web exhibit that went online this week. The Times piece online also includes a multimedia presentation with some good background from the exhibit’s curator.

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Today’s Reading

Kate pointed this story out in today’s New York Times, and read it aloud:

“He Confirmed It, Yes He Did: The Wicked Witch Was Dead”

“Like any coroner, he has seen some things. But one case stays with him nearly 70 years after the fact, like some old song he can’t get out of his head.

“He couldn’t shake this case even if he wanted to, what with all the videotapes, the DVDs, the television broadcasts replaying the gruesome aftermath over and over, in vivid Technicolor. Those striped socks, curling back like a pair of deflating noisemakers. …

“The coroner’s name is Meinhardt Raabe, and he lives in a retirement community tucked between here and there. He can’t see or hear too well, and his short legs need the assistance of a three-wheeled walker with hand brakes. But none of this means that at 91 he has forgotten much, because he hasn’t — especially about that case.”

It might be hard to believe a profile on one of the bit players in “The Wizard of Oz” might make compelling fare, but the story’s worth reading just for the writer’s touch; the story he tells is touching, too. There’s a catch, though: For a reason that escapes me–probably because this is the work of a highlighted national columnist, Dan Barry–the story is only available online as part of the Times Select service (we get Times select because we shell out for a daily subscription to the paper). It’s hard to see how this really helps the Times much. It’s one thing to put op-ed columnists and older-than-two-week archives under wraps and make people pay to see them, though I wonder if even that’s a winning proposition in the long term. This is just a lovely slice of life, and it comes as something of a rude surprise that it can’t be shared (unless, I suppose, people want to make do with email copies).

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Monday Dribblings

Text vs. image: The New York Times has a sort of character essay this morning on father and son farmers in Lebanon, Kansas (the geographic center of the lower 48 states). It’s a good enough piece, though it tries to do too much–relate the end of a way of life and a son’s break with his father–with too little–maybe 500 words. As it happens, the text is accompanied by a video version of the piece. The story follows much the same outline, but it’s different: For one thing, you get to hear and see the reporter play his role, gently prompting a couple of the the answers the son gives in the story. You also get to see the way the dad plays to the camera when he’s talking to the son. At the same time, the father and son come off as more compelling characters; the kid especially seems a little guilty and torn about leaving the farm for school. The video version comes off as the better piece of storytelling; if nothing else, the beautiful visuals make it worth watching.

The other Foley scandal: Let me add my voice to those decrying the emails of former Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.). I don’t need to rehash the story. But I think something has gone unmentioned in the furor over his come-ons to young congressional pages: His disgraceful prose style. For example, one email read:

“glad your home safe and sound…we dont go back into session until Sept 5,,,,si its a nice long break….I am back in Florida now…its nice here…been raining today…it sounds like you will have some fun over the next five weeks…how old are you now?…”

Maybe the congressman was just trying to adopt the breezy style of instant messaging (“cul8r!”) to demonstrate he was an electronic communications hepcat. His IMs with another page show he was a master of the form (“Maf54 (7:37:27 PM): how my favorite young stud doing”) despite his advanced age and high station. If so, he was going too far. Email accommodates a certain degree of informality–“Hey, guy” can substitute for the stuffy “Dear Hunk,” for example–but it is not an invitation to abandon form altogether, as Foley did. He seems incapable of maintaining a thought long enough to type it.

Foley would have done well to follow the example of one of his young correspondents, who shows an admirable respect for standard orthography and makes a game if less than perfect attempt to employ proper capitalization and punctuation:

“What happened was I gave certain people Thank-you cards, you know? I gave Foley one because he was a really nice guy to me and all. Then, he asked me to write my e-mail on the back of his. So I was like, ‘sure!’ because of course I had no suspicions.”

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Defining Moment

The Times worked up a bogus take on our president’s image and poll tribulations a year after Hurricane Katrina caught his administration, and just about everybody else who might have known better, flat-footed. In The Times’s telling, our president’s famous post-Katrina flight over New Orleans, gazing down on the blur of floodwaters and the invisible drama of people losing their grip on life, was a defining and damning moment. In the words of Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican:

“Unfortunately, it may be hard to erase the regrettable photo of him on Air Force One looking down at the destruction and devastation below. That’s a searing and very unfortunate image that doesn’t reflect the president’s compassion.”

Maybe the image is as bad as all that. But you have to ask yourself, what had Bush done before that picture was taken to mark him as such a dynamic, effective leader. What did he have in the asset column that was so thoroughly erased by the decision to view the catastrophe from afar? The Times finds the answer in the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center, where Bush made a personal appearance three days after the 9/11 attacks to inspire the Ground Zero workers.

I’m more inclined to think of another, more sprawling disaster scene: Iraq. After watching Bush’s handiwork there, his Hurricane Katrina performance seems like it’s par for the course. If that seems too harsh, consider my favorite Katrina Week utterance. No, not “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Not New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin going off on his profane radio tirade. Those were great, but I like this more: Bush’s remarks at a Southern California event while Katrina was still pounding the coast:

“The storm is moving through, and we’re now able to assess damage, or beginning to assess damage. And I want the people to know in the affected areas that the federal government and the state government and the local governments will work side-by-side to do all we can to help get your lives back in order.

“This was a terrible storm. It’s a storm that hit with a lot of ferocity. It’s a storm now that is moving through, and now it’s the time for governments to help people get their feet on the ground.

“For those of you who prayed for the folks in that area, I want to thank you for your prayers. For those of you who are concerned about whether or not we’re prepared to help, don’t be. We are. We’re in place. We’ve got equipment in place, supplies in place. And once the — once we’re able to assess the damage, we’ll be able to move in and help those good folks in the affected areas.”

Don’t worry, everyone — he’s got us covered.

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July Fourth (II)

A New York Times tradition: Publishing an image of the original printed version of Declaration of Independence, complete with John Hancock and others’ signatures. Always inspiring to read when you need to have your civic idealism refreshed, though yesterday I didn’t read the declaration but found myself thinking about the non-PCness of one phrase: “merciless Indian savages” (from this passage: The king “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”).

Later, or earlier — I can’t remember which — Kate pointed out the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead editorial for the day: “Patriots, awaken.” I don’t expect much these days from the mostly tired and uninspired Chron, but its little Fourth of July essay was very good. In part:

“…Perhaps it is the lingering shock effects of Sept. 11, 2001, or maybe it is the complacency of a half-century of growing affluence, but too many Americans seem all too willing to ignore Benjamin Franklin’s admonition about the danger of sacrificing essential liberties for temporary security. The Bush administration has been adroit at invoking the war on terrorism to justify policies that should be setting off alarms in this democracy.

“At what point will Americans draw the line at these intrusions on civil liberties and usurpations of power by the White House? Revelations that the National Security Agency eavesdropped on phone calls and e-mails without getting the required warrants didn’t do it. The disclosure that the government has compiled a vast database of Americans’ phone records didn’t do it. The hundreds of examples of President Bush’s unprecedented expansion of the number and scope of “signing statements” in which he gave himself the option to ignore parts of laws he objected to — such as torture — didn’t do it.

“Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration’s system for military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay that openly defied congressional law and international rules on the treatment of prisoners of war. So, what was the reaction in Congress? Regrettably, but not surprisingly in this era, there were immediate moves to give the president such authorization. ”

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What Are They Fighting For?

One of the most unsatisfying aspects of the ongoing coverage of the Iraq war: The failure of the media to make more than a token stab at explaining and exploring the insurgency. Generally, you get one of two types of approach in most stories: a simple gloss over — we can’t tell you who these people are or why they’re doing what they’re doing, but we can tell you they set off six more car bombs today; or a gloss over that follows the “coalition” line on explaining the insurgents — they’re thugs, murderers, enemies of democracy.

They may be all of these things. But it’s hardly acceptable to leave it at that. Our leaders have given us the gift of Iraq, and it’s one of those gifts that keeps on giving. Unless we think we can kill everyone who’s disinclined to go along with us over there, we better start figuring out the more complex reality driving the violence.

The New York Times had a story Saturday — “The Mystery of the Insurgency” — that’s the first attempt I’ve seen in the mainstream press to directly raise the question of what lies behind the insurgents’ tactics:

The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in winning hearts and minds among the majority of Iraqis, in building international legitimacy, or in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing, displayed no intention of amassing territory to govern now.

Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, they are cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21 people.

This surge in the killing of civilians reflects how mysterious the long-term strategy remains – and how the rebels’ seeming indifference to the past patterns of insurgency is not necessarily good news for anyone.

There are no answers in the story, really. But beginning to explore the questions the insurgency raises is a start.

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‘Viva il Papa’

The New York Times’s coverage of the pope’s death features an obituary by Robert D. McFadden. To call it an obituary is somewhat misleading. It’s a mini-biography that takes up most of an eight-page special section in the paper and 21 pages online. McFadden is what I would call a rewrite man extraordinaire. He works nearly exclusively in the newsroom and writes stories based on his own reporting and research, almost always on deadline, sometimes wrapping in contributions from others. His command of the rewrite craft — his ability to assemble and marshal the important facts in a story, his ability to convey a sense of scenes and personalities he’s never witnessed or encountered directly, the lucidity of his prose, his speed and encyclopedic general knowledge — means he gets to write some of the biggest stories. He’s so good with them that he won the Pulitzer Prize one year — not for any particular story, but for what he did day in and day out to create sound, well-reported, and readable stories. Although I’ve never met McFadden and don’t know exactly how the Times newsroom works, I’m confident of all of the above because we had our own extraordinary rewrite guy at The Examiner when I was there, Larry D. Hatfield, who would bail the desk out on deadline nearly every day. But that’s another story.

Back to the John Paul II piece in today’s paper. Here’s how it starts:

“On the night of Oct. 16, 1978, a vast, impatient throng in floodlit St. Peter’s Square cheered wildly as white smoke curled from a chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, signaling the election of a new pope. A long wait had ended, but the enthusiasm was somewhat premature.

“Cardinal Pericle Felici emerged minutes later to introduce Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, the first non-Italian pope since 1523. But even he had trouble pronouncing the name – voy-TEE-wah. Hardly anyone, it seemed, knew who he was. Murmurs and questions rippled through the predominantly Roman crowd.

“Then a powerfully built man with slightly stooped shoulders and a small smile on his angular face stepped onto the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. Cheers faded into silence. The crowd waited.

“He stood at the balcony rail, looking out, a Polish stranger in the fresh white robes of the pope. And there were tears in his eyes as he began to speak.

” ‘I have come,’ he said in lightly accented Italian, ‘from a faraway country – far away, but always so close in the communion of faith.’

“There were scattered cheers, and they grew louder as he went on.

” ‘I do not know whether I can express myself in your – in our – Italian language,’ he said, pausing.

“The crowd roared appreciatively, and the laughter swelled into resounding cheers.

” ‘If I make mistakes,’ he added, beaming suddenly, ‘you will correct me.’

“Tumult erupted.

“The cheers went on and on, and then grew into rhythmic waves that broke on the basilica facade and echoed across the square in a thundering crescendo:

” ‘Viva il Papa!’ Viva il Papa! Viva il Papa!’ ”

That’s enough to make me want to read the whole thing.