Politics and Fourth Turnings

As many readers know by now, William Strauss and Neil Howe, who wrote Generations and The Fourth Turning, divided American history into periods of approximately 80 years, called saeculums (Latin for a long human life.) In turn they divided each such period into four "turnings," a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling and a Crisis. After the civil war crisis, the High lasted approximately from 1867 to 1885, the Awakening from about 1885 to 1905, the Unraveling until 1929 or so, and the crisis through 1945. In our own time the High ran from 1945 to 1965, the Awakening from then until the mid-1980s, the Unraveling from about 1985 until. . .sometime in the last 8 years. (Future students will decide when the crisis began largely based upon what happens in the next ten years or so. I suspect that if there is a Democratic resurgence and a turn away from low taxes, income inequality, torture and imperialism in the Middle East, the Bush years will rank as the end of the Unraveling, but if present trends continue--which frankly seems more likely to me these days--we shall date the crisis to 9/11/2001.)

Each turning has a different style of politics. The High is the era of consensus, with cooperation between the major parties but intolerance of any extreme dissent. Because it follows the crisis it is also often an era of relatively high taxation in an effort to shrink the accumulated debt. The Awakening generally involves a loosening of social bounds, some reforms of obvious injustices, and the emergence of new concerns such as the environment (which was a very hot issue in each of the last two Awakenings.) It also has always been a time of greater interest in women's rights. The state weakens, politics become more partisan, and cultural issues become important during the Unraveling, while aging professional politicians struggle to find enough common ground to hold things together (as Bill Clinton did in the 1990s.) But the Crisis is an apocalyptic period. Rhetoric becomes controversial and absolutist, and opposing world views fight to shape the next five decades or so.

Karl Rove, I feel quite sure, has read Strauss and Howe. Although they have never been seriously treated at length in a major newspaper or magazine (and the only really good review either book got in the mainstream press was written by yours truly), they are known through the grapevine, and Rove is obsessed with history. But in any case, the Bush Administration and the Republican Party have generally held the initiative for the last seven years--and seem to have regained it since their 2006 defeat--precisely because their rhetoric has been far more appropriate to a crisis era than that of the Democrats. The past, they have proclaimed again and again, is irrelevant--we are in a new era calling for new principles. Holding their beliefs with religious fervor, they never admit a mistake. Most of all, they stay relentlessly "on message"--the tactic which one White House official predicted would enable them to prevail even against a Democratic Congress. And indeed, it has.

Triangulation remains the Democratic tactic of choice. The Congress has repeatedly caved in on civil liberties issues, and now, thanks to Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer, it will confirm the third consecutive Attorney General who has proclaimed that Presidential power is absolute. Charles Rangel is now introducing a bill to roll back some of the Administration's tax cuts, and the Democratic leadership is running for cover. The Congress does not want to close the loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay 15% taxes on most of their income, while upper middle class Americans pay a marginal rate of twice that. It continues appropriating money for the Iraq war while trying to make capital of scandals like Blackwater which are the inevitable consequences of fighting it in the first place. And on Iran, the pressing issue of the moment, most of the candidates are not disputing the idea that Iran must somehow be prevented from having nuclear weapons and that a US attack cannot be ruled out. None of the front-runners, for instance, suggested during last week's debate that we should not attack Iran without a Security Council resolution authorizing an attack (which, obviously, we would never get.) Barack Obama is emerging as an exception simply because he's willing to talk to the Iranian government.

And no one, clearly, is triangulating more enthusiastically than the most likely Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. The other night she tied herself in knots trying to support and oppose her own Governor's plan to give illegal immigrants drivers' licenses at the same time. She talks repeatedly about wanting to go back to the 1990s (I doubt even Alf Landon or Wendell Wilkie expressed nostalgia for the 1920s in 1936 or 1940.) And, of course, she voted to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization and claims only to oppose a "rush to war."

A few weeks ago I wondered here whether Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, who led us so brilliantly through the last two Fourth Turnings, had faced the issues before them squarely before they reached the White House. Now I am ready to answer that question.

In Lincoln's case the answer turns out to be an unequivocal yes--even though Lincoln, amazingly enough, did not make a single speech of any note between his nomination as President in May 1860 and his election in the fall. Campaigning as we know it was not yet an established part of Presidential campaigns, and agitation was left to the party faithful while the candidate maintained an Olympian reserve. But in New Haven on March 8, 1860, Lincoln defined slavery as the critical issue before the country and left no doubt where he stood.

Now these two ideas, the property idea that Slavery is right, and the idea that it is wrong, come into collision, and do actually produce that irrepressible conflict which Mr. Seward has been so roundly abused for mentioning. The two ideas conflict, and must conflict.

Again, in its political aspect, does anything in any way endanger the perpetuity of this Union but that single thing, Slavery? Many of our adversaries are anxious to claim that they are specially devoted to the Union, and take pains to charge upon us hostility to the Union. Now we claim that we are the only true Union men, and we put to them this one proposition: What ever endangered this Union, save and except Slavery? Did any other thing ever cause a moment's fear? All men must agree that this thing alone has ever endangered the perpetuity of the Union. But if it was threatened by any other influence, would not all men say that the best thing that could be done, if we could not or ought not to destroy it, would be at least to keep it from growing any larger? Can any man believe that the way to save the Union is to extend and increase the only thing that threatens the Union, and to suffer it to grow bigger and bigger? [Great applause.]

Whenever this question shall be settled, it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained. And hence, there are but two policies in regard to Slavery that can be at all maintained. The first, based on the property view that Slavery is right, conforms to that idea throughout, and demands that we shall do everything for it that we ought to do if it were right. We must sweep away all opposition, for opposition to the right is wrong; we must agree that Slavery is right, and we must adopt the idea that property has persuaded the owner to believe -- that Slavery is morally right and socially elevating. This gives a philosophical basis for a permanent policy of encouragement.

Continuing, Lincoln denied any desire to harm slavery while it existed but insisted that it must be kept out of new territories. He argued effectively that the language of the original Constitution showed that the Founders had regarded it as an evil (since they had avoided any use of the word "slave"), and that if restricted, it would eventually disappear. Lincoln, as I have shown here, had grasped the essentials of the Strauss-Howe paradigm as early as 1838, in his Springfield Lyceum speech, and he knew the country was at a turning point. Whether he knew it or not, he had laid the foundation for the civil war in the New Haven speech--and I would guess that he at least suspected it.

In his acceptance speech in 1932, Roosevelt touched more bases than Lincoln, and made some contradictory promises. He pledged both to alleviate terrible economic distress and to balance the budget, and he took the Republican leadership on with respect to two specific party issues, the tariff (which he argued was too high) and Prohibition, which the Democrats as a party had finally decided to oppose. But his conclusion was equally sweeping and even more forward-looking. It also referred quite explicitly to the shift from a third turning to a fourth.

One word more: Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose. Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations. Blame not Governments alone for this. Blame ourselves in equal share. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.

Never before in modern history have the essential differences between the two major American parties stood out in such striking contrast as they do today. Republican leaders not only have failed in material things, they have failed in national vision, because in disaster they have held out no hope, they have pointed out no path for the people below to climb back to places of security and of safety in our American life.

Throughout the Nation, men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the Government of the last years look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.

On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.

The New York Times notes today that President Bush's name comes up far more frequently in Democratic presidential debates than in Republican ones. So it does, but the leading Republican candidates have yet to express any significant difference of opinion with the incumbent on any issue. They are equally as militant abroad, equally as anti-government at home. It seems, in short, as if only one candidate next fall will be using the sweeping language of a Lincoln or FDR. His words will, to be sure, have far less relation to reality, and the policies they call for will probably bring continued disaster. But the Republican candidate could yet carry the day, simply because his rhetoric will more closely match the mood of the country. Democrats, take note.

Postcript--Democratic alternatives?

I have just been listening to last night's Democratic debate, much of which dealt with Iran. All the candidates insisted that they wanted to resolve the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons through diplomacy, and most of them criticized Hillary Clinton--rightly, in my opinion--for supporting the resolution that declared the Republican Guard a terrorist organization. But Tim Russert, moderating, seemed to accept the idea that we had to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and he asked all the candidates to pledge that Iran would not get a nuclear weapon while they were President. Most of them did the best that they could to make such a pledge, without promising to go to war. Meanwhile, as a friend of mine pointed out a few weeks ago, Clinton took almost exactly the position on Iraq that Nixon took on Vietnam in 1968--she wants to end the war, but only responsibly.

It occurred to me, first of all, that the whole controversy about Iran reflects how insane the United States has gone since the end of the Cold War. While many of us found Cold War rhetoric frightening at various points, I do not recall any President or candidate threatening preventive war to stop a Communist state from getting nuclear weapons--not even Barry Goldwater in 1964 (when China did explode a nuclear weapon late in the campaign.) We owe some thanks to our parents' generation, apparently, for recognizing that preventive war was not a way of stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons--even though that option was discussed in Washington both in 1949-51 and in 1964. The Boom generation, of course, wants absolutely to have its way, and has apparently concluded that we have the right to attack any nation we find threatening--even if some of our politicians would prefer not to do so.

In the midst of all this, however, I was flabbergasted to hear Dennis Kucinich say exactly what I have been saying here repeatedly for three years--that the only way to argue that certain states should not have nuclear weapons is to commit to fulfilling the provisions of the existing Non-Proliferation Treaty (to which he explicitly referred) and commit to a world in which no one will have nuclear weapons. Once again we must credit our parents, who recognized that when they negotiated that treaty in the 1960s and wrote the provision in. But Kucinich, is, of course, a fringe candidate. I have checked the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the LA Times, and none of them reported that statement. Yet it is absolutely true.

Have the neocons won?

When the Democrats regained control of Congress in 2006, many of us, I think, thought tha the Bush era was over and a change would begin. The voters in particular had clearly rejected the Iraq war--as had Washington's traditional establishment, embodied in the Baker-Hamilton commission--and we now expected de-escalation to begin. The resignation of Don Rumsfeld (who was actually fired, we can now see, because he opposed escalation in Iraq) encouraged this illusion. But that was not what happened. Nearly a year after the election we have more troops (but less casualties) in Iraq than ever. More importantly, it seems that the course that the Bush Administration set us on five or six years ago--a futile attempt to rule the Middle East, if not the whole world, by force--may be so firmly entrenched that even another election will not reverse it.

I am glad that I managed in 2002 to recognize how revolutionary the new foreign policy was, and to reject it on fundamental grounds. (Anyone who is interested can find what I had to say on the H-Diplo internet list archives for the fall of that year.) Our new National Security Strategy had proclaimed that we had the right and the duty to overthrow any unfriendly regime that was trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and that we would do so alone if necessary. Meanwhile, President Bush announced that Israel would (in effect) keep whatever land it had settled and wanted to keep in any peace with a new Palestinian state. Each of those stands, in different ways, repudiated critical provisions of international law and flung the door open to international anarchy. Both were far, far more important than the President's attempts to promote democracy. Indeed, it is partly because the President has proclaimed that both the United States and Israel will take, and keep, whatever they want, that elections in the Middle East have turned out so badly for us.

Now for the last two months in Iraq, the purely military news has been remarkably good. After averaging over 90 per month from last October through this August, American deaths were at 69 last month and should be about 40 this month. It is hard to believe that such a spectacular and precipitous decline can actually represent the destruction of enemy capability, and it is possible that some enemies are waiting it out, but what does this mean, both for the situation on the ground and for our foreign policy?

It appears to mean that by 1) temporarily increasing our troop presence and 2) making political deals with traditional authorities, we have been able substantially to quiet down Sunni areas. Those deals have involved giving Sunnis arms, standing up police forces, and isolating extremists. There are, however, two big problems with this. First of all, the new strategy is not finding favor with the elected Shi'ite government at all, as today's New York Times explains, because we are strengthening the Sunni side in the ongoing civil conflict. Secondly, any gains depend entirely on a continuing American presence. Essentially, we have discovered that the combination of a larger American presence and a large measure of assistance for Sunni leaders, including former insurgents, can create a fairly safe Sunni area while the Shi'ites, and in particular Moqtadar Al-Sadr, consolidate their position in the South. It is a disguised partition of the country--but one that depends upon a more or less permanent American occupation to work.

That is not, of course, the whole story. We have also detained thousands and thousands more Iraqis, some of whom we are trying to re-educate, and we are relying more and more on air power, which kills large numbers of civilians. All this may make the whole edifice rather shaky--at some point the Iraqis may in fact conclude they have had enough of us and force a crisis. But meanwhile, in northern Iraq, the chickens that our bold new National Security Strategy let loose in 2002 are coming home to roost. The liberation of Iraq Kurdistan was the most striking consequence of the Iraq war, and some Kurds apparently feel that this will lead to the liberation of Turkish and Iranian Kurdistan as well. Turkish soldiers have been dying at the hands of Iraqi Kurds, and the Turkish government is claiming the same right that we claimed in 2001-2 and the Israelis have claimed since the 1950s--to cross borders to strike at terrorists. Although the President, ever the world's wise parent, tells the Turks that crossing the border is not in their interests, they astonishingly do not seem to agree. They are already bombing across it and seem certain to send in troops. No one knows where all this will end.

And meanwhile, the Administration is beating the drums and escalating its rhetoric for war on Iran. President Bush, indeed, has ratcheted up his demands. We must act now, he said last week, not to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, but from having the knowledge to build a nuclear weapon. States that do not share our values, in short, must be denied even the possibility of building weapons that could actually hurt us. This is a yet more sweeping claim to rule the world, and we should not be surprised that Vladimir Putin, in particular, has refused to accept it. Our view, of course, was stated by then-National Security Adviser Condolezza Rice in 2003, when she rejected the idea of multipolarity because it led to the two world wars and the Cold War. American hegemony, she argued, was the world's only way out. She and her bosses still obviously believe this.

And now it is time to raise another issue on which I have rarely touched here--the power of the conservative American Jewish lobby, represented in Washington most powerfully by AIPAC. John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt, who created such a stir by writing about this a couple of years ago, have now published a book on the subject. It hasn't created much of a stir--the opposition seems to prefer to ignore it. When they published their initial article, Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books, as I pointed out here, did a fine job of pointing out, first, that AIPAC does not represent American Jewry--its leadership is far more conservative than most American Jews--and of showing how the organization has managed to frighten the entire Congress by equating any opposition to Israeli policies with support for terrorism. Now, AIPAC's main goal is to precipitate war with Iran.

Don't believe me? Think I'm being paranoid? Then simply click aipac.org. There you will find that AIPAC doesn't deny its importance, it brags out it, proudly citing a New York Times statement that it is "the most important organization affecting the America's [sic] relationship with Israel." Most of the site is devoted to progress towards war on Iran, including accounts of new sanctions, a report of a briefing AIPAC gave on Capitol Hill on the Iranian nuclear threat, and a headline noting Condolezza Rice's promise to maintain Israel's military edge in the region. Inside the site reports that a bill authorizing new sanctions against Iran has passed, 397-16, while a measure to allow state and local governments and fund managers to sell off holdings in any companies helping the Iranian petroleum industry passed 408-6. (Two co-sponsors of the latter measure are Barney Frank and Barak Obama.)

AIPAC, I suspect, is partly responsible for Hillary Clinton's vote to declare the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, with all that that implies. Her vote, in turn, implies that she shares the goal of bringing down the Iranian regime and is once again willing to give the Bush Administration a pretext for doing so. And while some other Democratic candidates are less enthusiastic for such a course than she is, none have been willing to endorse the idea of national sovereignty, or the actual goals of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (complete nuclear disarmament by everyone), or the idea that we might indeed have to live with some hostile nations that have nuclear weapons--though hardly on the scale of our adversaries during the second half of the last century.

A new war on behalf of non-proliferation, in my opinion, will further spread terrorism in the Middle East and beyond. It will also, I think, vastly increase the probability that a nuclear weapon will go off in an American city in the next ten years, because that will become our adversaries' only possible response to our insistence that we and our allies and we and they alone must dispose of this ultimate weapon. And such consequences will, I am afraid, eventually break down the solidarity of the advanced industrialized world, with consequences we can only imagine. Millions of Americans, in my opinion, understand this at some level, but as another Presidential election nears, they appear to be almost leaderless.

Nominating candidates

When the young Republican Party met in Chicago for its national convention in 1860, its leading candidates were William H. Seward of New York , Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio--men whose national reputation had made them many friends and enemies. The Democratic Party was already hopelessly split, and the right candidate had an excellent chance of winning the election. Seward was the early leader in the balloting, but the convention slowly turned to a lesser-known Illinois Republican, Abraham Lincoln, a veteran of one term in Congress in the mid-1840s who had lost a close Senate election to Stephen Douglass just two years before (although actually winning the popular vote.) Party bosses realized that a lesser known candidate could more easily be packaged for the American people, and Lincoln became the "Rail Splitter" during the next few months and won perhaps the most important election in American history. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Democrats in 1932 also had bright prospects, and a round of primaries (a longer round, actually, than Kennedy and his rivals had to face in 1960), produced three candidates: Governor Franklin Roosevelt of New York, his predecessor and defeated 1928 candidate Alfred E. Smith, and Texas Congressman John Namce Garner. To protect white supremacy the South still insisted upon a 2/3 majority for the nominee, and Roosevelt, the front-runner, could not intially achieve it. But newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst brokered a deal, and Garner became FDR's Vice President--perhaps the first time, actually, that a major contender for the nomination had accepted the second spot. The ticket swept the country.

This year Hillary Clinton (now also from New York!) is the Seward of the campaign, the heir presumptive. Because of her family connections, eight years in the White House, and strategic location in New York, she had already locked up any of the most important contributors, I was very reliably informed by two Democratic luminaries, eighteen months ago. Like the Republican James G. Blaine in 1884, she is the emotional favorite of important segments of her party, but she carries tremendous baggage. She is denying that, as a fine Washington Post story explains this morning, by pointing to her impressive re-election throughout New York State, including the upstate Republican area, last year.

The point of the story is that that victory is being massively overrated by Clinton and her supporters. She had only slightly more Republican opposition than Joe Lieberman did in Connecticut--she ran against the former Mayor of Yonkers. And yes, she carried upstate, but she ran behind Governor Eliot Spitzer statewide, and well behind Charles Schumer in 2004. The story also includes evidence that she might suffer the fate of another New Yorker, Al Smith, in 1928--Smith had been elected Governor at least four times, but many of his fellow New Yorkers did not regard him as Presidential timber, and he lost the state in the Presidential election. I would certainly expect Clinton to carry New York next year, but I think her margin would be much lower, and as the story suggests, carrying western New York state does not mean that she could carry Ohio.

One hundred years ago it is at least possible that at the Democratic Convention the major rivals of such a controversial candidate--including John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Bill Richardson--might have come together to make a deal. They would unite behind one of their number--and I would nominate Obama, a midwesterner with unique assets and, apparently, few vulnerabilities. In return Richardson would be promised the State Department (where he would be outstanding) and Edwards would get Health and Human Services with a mandate to design national health insurance. Ms. Clinton could be offered the Attorney Generalship, which she would probably decline.

The country and the Democratic Party would both be far better off, I think, if those three candidates struck such a deal now, before someone (probably Clinton) has won a few critical primaries, been annointed as the winner, and put an end to any drama. The country would also be better off if Democratic opponents and the press leaked stories about former President Clinton's love life now (I am told several such are circulating), rather than wait for the Republican nominee to use them to swing the general election. Yet even now, with the Republican Party more than half way to destroying the America in which we all grew up and risking disaster all over the world, there is no sign that such a deal could take place. Perhaps this is the real dynamic behind the decline of great parties and great nations: after several decades of success, they become too pre-occupied with internecine warfare to think about their enemies in the outside world. Our nominating system, too, has become too expensive and rigid to respond quickly to the party's or country's needs. But one must not yet despair; much can happen between now and November 2008.

Don't miss yesterday's post, below.

Where are we going?

If indeed the United States is headed for a course correction, the news does not yet show it. Last fall's election certainly seemed to show that the country had turned against the Bush Administration and most of its works, but the Republicans have bizarrely managed to remain on the offensive and the Democrats seem to cower more every week. The Mukasey confirmation hearings present the latest and perhaps most dramatic challenge to the Democracy (as it used to be called): the Senate is now called upon to confirm a new Attorney General who claims absolute executive power in time of war, and if they do so--as it seems they surely will--it will amount to an admission that Presidents may in fact establish a modified dictatorship if it suits them. The drumbeat for war against Iran continues, and the President's CHIP veto has been sustained. Even more alarming, however, is the tenor of the debates among the two sets of Presidential candidates.

How so? Well, our Constitution has in effect been suspended, we may face an impending economic catastrophe, and we have destroyed the postwar world order that our parents spent half a century building up, all under President Bush. Yet the Republican candidates are projecting more self-confidence and self-assuredness than the Democrats! One hears no more talk of them distancing themselves from the President--they are falling all over each other (and this includes Rudy Giuliani) promising that they will out-Bush Bush. They are ready to attack Iran and foresake the UN, to make Bush's tax cuts permanent, appoint yet more extreme right wing judges and make all the Bush tax cuts permanent. So vehement are they that I will be genuinely surprised if the eventual nominee makes a real move towards the center in the general election. Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, the Democrats are once again failing to articulate any broadly different foreign policy (even though Obama has made a few tentative steps in that direction), and the front runner, Senator Clinton, seems eager to pursue the confrontation with Iran, if her vote on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is any indication. Perhaps the electorate still wants the most muscular foreign policy possible and an abridgment of civil liberties to fight terror because it sense how detested we have become around the world--a sad commentary, if true, on the Republican capacity for turning policy failure into political success.

Meanwhile, my thoughts have turned elsewhere because of the death of Deborah Kerr, especially because of the role that the obits have given the most attention--that of Karen Holmes, the lonely, depressed young officer's wife in From Here to Eternity. Reading that extraordinary book at the age of fifteen was one of the formative experiences of my life, and the book and the film have remained a major source of interest ever since.

I doubt many of my readers have ever read From Here to Eternity, even though it was perhaps the greatest best seller of the early 1950s. James Jones, its author, never had a comparable success, and the book was too long, perhaps, to become a staple of college reading lists. Set in Hawaii in 1941, it is probably the best portrait of Army life any American has ever written, but it was more than that. It is really a portrait of the greatest generation, both male and female, as they struggle to emerge from the Depression and make something of their lives. The female characters, the frank use of language (Jones was the first author freely to use the word "fuck," and few, if any, have used it more poetically than he), and the book's sex scenes--really bed scenes--were ahead of their time, and they remain some of the more remarkable achievements in those areas. Over the years I have pressed many friends and lovers to read it, but I think that only one has ever done so, and I have never found a way to assign it in a class.

The book's real power, for me, comes from another over-arching theme: a man's relationship to an institution. The first protagonist, Prewitt, knows no other life than the Army, with which, as several other characters realize, he was hopelessly in love. (I was shocked when something similar happened to me during my brief military service, but when I returned to From Here to Eternity I understood.) Prewitt loves the camaraderie, the ritual, and the equality that the army offers, although he can't stand the petty politics that have consistently worked against him. Like me, he started out at the top. A bugler, he served at Fort Meyer and played a Taps on Memorial Day at Arlington in his first enlistment--just as I spent the first four years of my career teaching at Harvard. Neither one of us ever achieved anything quite like that again. Prewitt is "the best fuckin' soldier in the company," as his first sergeant puts it, and that is far from an advantage. But he also has scruples. He has quit boxing, at which he also excelled, because he accidentally blinded a man in the ring, and the institution will not forgive him. Institutions have never been more powerful in in the United States than they were from the 1930s through the early 1960s, and it is fitting that his rebellion eventually crushes him.

Warden, the First Sergeant--whom Burt Lancaster made the most memorable part of the movie--doesn't share Prewitt's idealism and has reached the top, at least within the enlisted ranks. (As those who have served in the military know, becoming a First Sergeant is probably statistically as hard as becoming a general, and it requires a very impressive person to make it.) He resents the incompetence of his superiors even more than Prewitt, but he is too smart to say so in public. He has a code of his own, but he plays the angles. On the other hand, he is enough of a rebel to break one of the strongest taboos, and to seduce his commanding officer's wife.

That seduction, in his Captain's bungalow on a rainy Honolulu afternoon, is the most extraordinary scene in the movie of From Here to Eternity, in my opinion, and probably the most dramatic scene that Kerr ever played--far more so than the one on the beach. (There's a memorable reference to that scene in the movie Hud.) Some of the more exciting dialogue from the book had to be cut in 1953, but Lancaster and Kerr more than made up for that by conveying so much with their expressions. "Why, if it isn't Sergeant Warden," she says. "My husband isn't here, if you're looking for him." "And if I'm not looking for him?" Lancaster asks, with the perfect hint of a grin. "Then he's still not here," she replies, suddenly measuring him---and on it goes from there. When I first saw the film in the late 1960s after reading the book I was disappointed because so much dialogue and so many plot lines had to be cut, but later viewings changed my mind. The audiences of the 1950s knew how to fill in many of the blanks, and the adaptation captured the essence of the story very well. Donna Reed was also outstanding (and won an Oscar) as Lorene, the hooker with whom Prewitt falls in love. She was a "dance-hall girl" in the film, but she still explained her career choice--she was accumulating enough money to establish herself as a middle-class woman back in her home town and secure a good husband--something her beauty alone had not been enough to do. Prew eventually asks her to marry him, but she refuses. "She has to marry a man who has so much position and respectability," her roommate (also a hooker) explains, "that his wife couldn't possibly ever have been a whore." A soldier, obviously--even an officer--is out of the question.

Love, in From Here to Eternity, is doomed, just as it was in Casablanca, another classic also set in late 1941. That only makes it more intense and more powerful, in both cases.
The characters are as tossed about by events as those of Dr. Zhivago, A Tale of Two Cities, or The First Circle. It was the real gift of our parents to have lived through that period for us, so that love, music and film could become the great themes of our own youth. Now, it seems, our children will have to put their noses to the grindstone to get society and government back on their feet. I still hope they will not suffer on the same scale of their grandparents, but it seems things may get a lot worse before they get better.