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Castles in the Air

President Bush’s “Lunge for Legacy Tour” of the Middle East continues. Not content with attempted burnishing of his own record, Bush is reaching back into the past tear down one of the greats, Franklin Roosevelt.

At issue is the age old Auschwitz question, what did Roosevelt do? Or as Secretary Rice summed it up, “the often-discussed ‘Could the United States have done more by bombing the train tracks?.”

Bush says yes. Others aren’t so sure. The Associated Press quotes a raft of people affirming the would have been usefulness of bombing Auschwitz, most of them not historians.

The literature on this is vast. One place to start is The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis by W. D. Rubinstein. He summarizes the claims made about logistics, prospects and politics of bombing the camps, and concludes that they are myths, myths being used to slander the Allied war leadership.

” In searching for a rational explanation of modern history’s greatest crime, it is important that we not assign guilt to those who were innocent.”

Bush grew up at a time when “Twelve O’Clock High” was on television, with terse talking bombardiers constantly off to hit ball-bearing plants, returning with barely a scratch. And the madcap antics of Hogan’s Heroes gave further proof of America’s endless pluck.

In reality the Allies had limited resources, which they used with limited results.

The efficacy and morality of the wartime bombing are discussed in Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan by A.J. Grayling

The post war Strategic Bombing Survey found that even the most energetic and successful bombing had limited effects.

To pull an example from the air, ball bearings:

“The German anti-friction bearing industry was heavily concentrated… approximately half the output came from plants in the vicinity of Schweinfurt….In a series of raids beginning on August 17, 1943, about 12,000 tons of bombs were dropped on this target — about one-half of one per cent of the total tonnage delivered in the air war…[after massive loss of aircraft] Repeated losses of this magnitude could not be sustained …Although there were further attacks, production by the autumn of 1944 was back to pre-raid levels…. there is no evidence that the attacks on the ball-bearing industry had any measurable effect on essential war production.”

And this was in Western Germany, not hundreds of miles East in Poland.

As long as we are playing make believe, why not imagine a world in which American aid to the Soviets was even vaster that it was. In this happy play-war, the millions of Soviet soldiers who died in the campaigns leading to the Soviets liberating the camps never died, but rolled up to the gates in sturdy Ford trucks a year or so earlier.

The Source of Our Troubles

The campaign t-shirt is not one of the higher art forms. For that matter it’s not one of the higher forms of campaigning. But they get made and worn nevertheless.

Not always, though. Past Presidential candidates may have been restrained by lack of ready access to the mills of Asia, or the knowledge that few of their supporters would look attractive in the items. But by harnessing the power of the web, some visionaries have dared to dream the dream of a William Howard Taft t-shirt.

The Des Moines Register calls our attention to retropresident.com, source of this salute to an earlier, less visibly sweaty era.

Neil Swanson launched the notion.

“What if someone could have a Truman or FDR or Nixon T-shirt, just like the vintage sports shirts and hats? They didn’t have T-shirts back in the day, obviously, so why not create some?”

Lesser lights get their moment as well, although reviving Dick Gephardt’s Chrysler star logo isn’t likely to make anyone misty for what might have been. The best graphics are Republican –

Alf Landon

…and Richard Nixon.

The overall lesson is relief that most of these sorry graphics did not get wider exposure “back in the day.” And the certain knowledge that Obama’s small-town-electric-co-op looking logo has company in blandness.

Vanity Fair‘s “White House Civil War” account of Gore-Clinton spats and slights recalls those heady days when nothing seemed impossible, the President spoke in coherent sentences, and the White House was mired in minutia. When school uniforms walked like men, and V-chips promised to end filth as we knew it.

The piece excerpts from Salley Bedell Smith’s “For Love of Politics—Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years,” following the resource competition between Gore and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 campaigns for President and Senator.

Apparently the fate of the Republic turned on the teen marketing of “Resident Evil,” and whether Al Gore or Hillary Clinton would be credited with denouncing this scourge.

“One of the most dramatic examples occurred in September as the Federal Trade Commission prepared to release a report on violence in the media. The agency’s million-dollar study showed that entertainment companies were marketing violent movies, video games, and music to children under 18. Under ordinary circumstances, a vice president running for the presidency would have first call on publicizing the report. But Hillary insisted she should handle the rollout because she had already called for a universal ratings system. “It was a key point of her Senate campaign,” said Bruce Reed. “The president had singled her out for that in the 2000 State of the Union, so the finding of the F.T.C. was directly relevant to her campaign. The vice president’s campaign had concluded that cultural issues were hurting him, and they were dying to announce the report as well.”

An alternative reading of events might be that the September 11, 2000 [did the Mossad do this one too?] FTC release was a side show. Gore appeared on Oprah to lament kids today, while Bush kept his eye on the ball campaigning. In Florida.

In other news, the article confirms the status of former Clinton and Gore staffer Bob Boorstin as a national resource. His “I find her to be among the most self-righteous people I’ve ever known in my life” quote on Hillary to Carl Bernstein got a lot of play, and in the Vanity Fair piece he tops himself:

“Did we make mistakes? Yes. Would I say that Clinton was the only reason we lost? No. Would I say with absolute zero doubt in my mind that we would have won the election if Clinton hadn’t put his penis in [Lewinsky’s] mouth? Yes. I guarantee it.”