Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

by Michael A Smerconish

  That takes nothing away from Mikey. He could have run that whole thing by himself, but like I said, he was a great officer and he used all the information he had.

  Finally, I believe, my confusion has cleared: America lost 19 heroes that day in Afghanistan, and Marcus Luttrell had the good fortune to survive. But good fortune can exact a price—even though he knows he did not make the fateful decision alone, he cannot escape his sense of responsibility to the ones who died. The fog of war can obscure the truth even when the combatants come back home.

  AFTERWORD

  The Lone Survivor story has long captivated me, and I have made it the subject of numerous columns and radio and television commentaries. I’ll also never forget hosting Marcus Luttrell for one of my book club events, on May 21, 2008, at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood, New Jersey. When tickets for the event went on sale, the 1,050-seat venue was sold out within 48 hours. You could have heard a pin drop for the entire 90 minutes Luttrell spent recounting to the audience and me what had happened in the Hindu Kush. Over the years I have hosted many live events with authors in front of large audiences under the guise of my “book club” but none with the emotional punch of that night.

  I was pleased when President George W. Bush posthumously awarded Lieutenant Michael Murphy the Medal of Honor and presented the medal to his parents, Daniel and Maureen Murphy, on October 22, 2007. Daniel is himself a wounded veteran, of the Vietnam War. In May 2010 my friend Mark O’Connor and I hosted Daniel and Maureen at the Irish Pub in Philadelphia, where we met to celebrate Gary Williams’s tribute to Lieutenant Murphy, a book called Seal of Honor.

  “ANTI-SEMITIC” LABEL

  CURBS TALK ABOUT ISRAEL

  Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, September 9, 2007

  ONE YEAR AFTER 9/11, I visited Israel as a guest of the Jerusalem Post. In the midst of the intifadah, the hard-line newspaper arranged for me to broadcast my daily radio show from Jerusalem. At the time, I was also filing one-minute commentaries for KYW-AM (1060). One of them caused some consternation at home. Here is what I said:

  Yesterday, an Israeli guide was anxious to show me the community called Gilo.

  “Look,” he said, “at the sandbags that these people have to place in their windows to shield them from sniper fire from a neighboring village called Beit Jala.”

  Sure enough, there were sandbags in windows and bullet holes in walls. Thinking of my kids, I said, “That’s no place to raise a family.”

  Today, I had a different guide with a different perspective. He wanted me to tour an Arab neighborhood in the West Bank.

  “Look at where Israeli tank fire has destroyed these homes,” he said to me. I looked. The devastation was terrible. “This is no place to live,” I said to myself.

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  “This is the village called Beit Jala,” he told me, “and the tank fired from over there, in Gilo”—where I had been the day before.

  I ended the commentary by saying: “And so it goes.”

  My intention was only to present a form of geopolitical glass half empty/ half full, not to assert any moral equivalency. But that didn’t spare me an onslaught of e-mail from Jewish listeners disappointed in what I had said, or what they thought I was implying. Some told me my “comparison” was anti-Semitic, which stunned me, given that my entire trip had a palpable, pro-Israeli tone.

  I was reminded of that experience this week while considering the backlash against the release of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. Mearsheimer is a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt is a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

  Their book is an outgrowth of their lengthy online article on the same subject, and of a 40-page essay published last spring in the London Review of Books. Their premise is that the United States has set aside its own security to advance the interests of Israel, owing to the existence of a “lobby,” which they define as a loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction.

  Among their observations is that anyone who criticizes Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have a significant influence over U.S. policy stands a good chance of being labeled anti-Semitic.

  Labeling has become all too common in today’s political debate, overlooking that few of us can neatly be compartmentalized under words such as liberal or conservative. Speak against same-sex marriage? You must be a “homophobe.” Oppose affirmative action? That sounds “racist.”

  Similarly, to question U.S. support for Israel runs the risk of being branded “anti-Semitic.” Perhaps it’s only a small minority who assign the labels. Still, each debasing generalization stifles conversation about issues of the day. The shame is that some people, who already have a seat at the table, resort to such language as a way to prevent those of different views from even getting to the table at all.

  Here’s hoping that, six years removed from 9/11, Mearsheimer and Walt can initiate a reasonable conversation about Israel. No subject with implications for U.S. security should be off-limits. Among their words worthy of debate are these:

  Saying that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.

  Of course, others conclude that the origins of America’s terror problem are much wider in scope than Israel alone; they argue that disdain for America’s relationship with Israel long preceded the modern terrorist threat. I say let’s air it out.

  Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments sound similar to words spoken to me by Michael Scheuer, author of the book Imperial Hubris and a man who spent 22 years with the CIA. From 1996 to 1999, he ran “Alec Station,” the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. He told me he agreed with Mearsheimer and Walt that the Israeli lobby had “distorted and burdened” U.S. foreign policy and added:

  The most dangerous aspect of the Israel lobby is that it threatens free speech in America. Very few Americans will exercise their right to free speech if criticizing Israel earns them identification as an anti-Semite.

  Which reminds me that after I recently interviewed Scheuer, a blog posting said:

  He won’t out-and-out claim he hates Jews, but everything he criticizes centers around Israel and the “dual loyalty” of neo-cons. You would be smart to avoid using this man as a reference. Soon he will reveal himself to be the true anti-Semite he is.

  Scheuer argues that he was hired by the CIA not to be guardian of the world but to be a guardian of the American people and that our foreign policy should be designed to protect Americans first. This is exactly what Mearsheimer and Walt say we have abdicated.

  Hardly an anti-Semitic view, and these well-credentialed academics have gone to great lengths to defuse any accusations of personal animus toward Israel. As they write in the London Review of Books:

  In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy; the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

  Their words are falling on deaf ears in certain quarters. A number of potential forums for discussion with the authors have turned down or canceled events. According to the New York Times, these include the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a Jewish cultural center in Washington, and three organizations in Chicago.

  This would seem only to strengthen their argument.

  AFTERWORD

  I have a vague recollection of my editor telling me I had “guts” to write this column at the time I filed it. That caused me t
o reread it before publication, but because I saw no problem in describing the book and the issues it raised, I made no changes. Well, he was prescient about the reaction. The blowback I received only underscored the observation that many have made that there is more robust debate about Israel within Israel than is tolerated in the United States. For some, support for Israel 99 percent of the time isn’t enough. Two particular reactions among many stand out in my mind. The first was an angry phone call I received from a close family member who is Jewish; he really let me have it. Someone in his Florida synagogue had shown my column to him, and while he could point to nothing specific that I had said, he was nevertheless insulted that I’d even written about the book. The second was even more upsetting. I was livid when I learned that coverage of the release of the book in the Jewish Exponent, a Philadelphia-area newspaper, targeted me because I wrote this column. The article was complete with my photograph and a defamatory headline. The fact that I was so inconsequential to the story that my name didn’t appear until the 11th paragraph didn’t stop them from running my name in the headline next to the word “Lies,” along with accusations of anti-Semitism within the story. I wrote to the executive editor who authored the story to express my dissatisfaction, and he replied by doubling down on his baseless accusations. I ended my participation in the e-mail exchange by writing, “You, sir, are an ass . . . and I intend to continue to support Israel despite you.”

  THE FACE OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

  Philadelphia Daily News, Tuesday, September 11, 2007

  THERE ARE EVENTS in our lives that will forever be entwined with the person who broke the news.

  I doubt you can recall the passing of a loved one without remembering who first told you. Any mention of JFK’s assassination reminds me of an emotional Walter Cronkite informing the nation of the passing of our 35th president. And few Philadelphians can think of the Broad Street Bullies without hearing Gene Hart repeating, “The Flyers win the Stanley Cup!”

  Today, as I have for each of the last five anniversaries, I carry a mental image of Aaron Brown on 9/11. I see him standing on a New York rooftop in brilliant sunshine against a smoldering backdrop while providing an extemporaneous human dimension to the death and destruction whose extent was then unknown.

  I just rewatched much of his work at YouTube. I wish all Americans would do likewise. It’s the perfect, unifying antidote to the partisan division that fighting the “war on terror” has become.

  Sobering. That’s how I regard his reports. Brown was always an intelligent journalist. But that day he spoke with an added somber clarity. Typical was this observation after the collapse of the World Trade Center’s South Tower:

  There has just been a huge explosion. . . . [W]e can see a billowing smoke rising. . . . I’ll tell you that I can’t see that second tower . . . but there was a cascade of sparks and fire and now it looks almost like a mushroom cloud . . . about as frightening a scene as you will ever see.

  I’ve often wondered how Brown himself regards his work that day, and what thoughts he might have now that he is unbridled by the limitations of being a reporter. So I called him to ask.

  He’d just started at CNN at the time of the attack, having been hired to create and manage a national newscast and breaking news. Brown was driving to work when he heard radio reports of an airplane hitting the North Tower. He said he assumed it was an accident, but knew he’d be reporting what happened, regardless of the cause.

  I dropped the car [off] . . . and was racing . . . to where the CNN building was and just thought, “Calm down. Whatever is about to unfold here, you need to be calm.”

  When I said I thought his work that day stood apart from that of his “competitors,” he was quick to point out that on 9/11 no one was motivated by any thought of competing. On another day, sure, but on 9/11, Brown said, there was an unprecedented level of cooperation among those all trying to do the same thing.

  But he recognized that his broadcast had the advantage of being live from a rooftop in sight of Ground Zero, instead of inside an antiseptic studio.

  When I asked what he remembered about that perch, he repeated what he’d once said to Peter Jennings:

  The thing that stays with me . . . is how I could smell it. . . . We were outside and could rarely see the monitor because of the sunlight. We could smell the tragedy. I can still smell it in many ways.

  I suspect Brown will never fully shake 9/11. When I replayed audio of his words that day and asked for a comment, his voice quaked as he told me that it was only the second time he’d re-listened to his reporting. The first came in a class at Arizona State University, where his students in a TV course asked to analyze his work. Brown spent three classes reviewing an hour of his 9/11 coverage.

  And I thought I was over the emotional power of it, but I’m clearly not. I suspect that 20 years from now, if God is kind enough to keep me alive that long, I will hear that tape and still have trouble putting together a complete sentence.

  Brown recalls the events of 9/11 in three parts: the morning “all-hell-breaking-loose” phase, the middle when “all of us, reporters and citizens,” tried to figure out exactly what had transpired that morning, and the end of the day, when the president finally addressed the nation.

  That night, Brown stayed in a hotel. The following morning, he recalls the deathly silence that consumed New York City, “as if saying something would have been disrespectful to the 2,500 people or so who died.”

  Today, just like the rest of us, Aaron Brown tries to make sense of what he reported, and we watched unfold. He thinks we continue to lack a “civil national conversation” about how to deal with this tragedy. He says:

  We have been angry, and we should have been, and there were things that needed to be done. But we can’t kill all of these people; we can’t even come close. And so we need other strategies, smarter strategies, more thoughtful strategies, or my kid is going to have this conversation with your kid.

  Which makes sense to me. And if we don’t follow that script, then no doubt a future Aaron Brown will be standing on another rooftop offering somber descriptions of another smoldering building.

  AFTERWORD

  On the 15th anniversary of 9/11 in 2016, Brown, then living in New Mexico, was interviewed by my CNN colleague Brian Stelter and said he still hears from viewers who thank him for his coverage that day. I’m not surprised. Aaron Brown’s work was stellar on 9/11, but even more so considering that it was his first day on the job at CNN. It was also the first day on the job for Ben Sliney as Federal Aviation Administration national operations manager. It was Sliney who made the decision to ground all planes in United States airspace that day.

  Like Brown, Sliney is a very impressive guy. I met him when we were both participants in a 9/11 remembrance at the Garden of Reflection on September 11, 2013. And I interviewed him close to that anniversary on my SiriusXM POTUS program. “Looking at weather on TV that morning,” he told me, “there were no issues from Maine to Florida. . . . I thought, ‘This is going to be a very easy day for me.’” Soon, he would be ordering a complete “ground stop” of all airplanes in the nation, so that none could take off. As he contemplated the chaos that might ensue if he forced those in the air to land, the situation worsened and he ordered that all airplanes in the United States be grounded, and that the borders be closed. The process took about two hours to land all 5,300 airplanes then in U.S. airspace, and all the while, Sliney and his team in Herndon, Virginia, watched a large screen showing the plane movements with a counter ticking down the number still airborne. Sliney was asked by the director and producers of the movie United 93 to help ensure the accuracy of that depiction and ended up playing himself in the movie. He was as steady and competent in the film as he was on 9/11.

  HOW RUSH BECAME

  THE KING OF TALK

  Philadelphia Daily News, Thursday, October 18, 2007

  THE MAESTRO ONSTAGE at the Academy of Music one week ago wielded a microphone instead of a baton.
And while the Philadelphia Orchestra was nowhere in sight, you could say the evening’s selection was a version of “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

  The conductor? Rush Limbaugh. He was in town at the behest of the station that airs his program locally (and mine), the Big Talker 1210/AM. This was Rush unplugged, working without commercials, and letting it rip for 90 minutes in front of a sold-out crowd of “dittoheads.”

  The packed house was a fraction of the millions he reaches every week via 600-plus stations as America’s most-listened-to radio personality.

  Of course, Rush brought with him a lesson plan from the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, but after watching his tutorial on Broad Street, it became apparent the strength of his appeal lies in more than his message.

  Rush Limbaugh is radio’s Riccardo Muti. He is an entertainer par excellence, and it is his gift of communication that sets him apart. The message, his politics, is his encore.

  To be sure, Limbaugh is an unapologetic conservative. He has singlehandedly made that ideology fashionable in a medium where it previously had no home. His worst critic would have to concede that his legacy is one of having reshaped the media landscape, starting with talk radio.

  I recognize that by now Limbaugh antagonists either have relegated this Daily News to the birdcage or are thinking of it.

  I get it. You like him or you don’t in the same way you condone or condemn the senior U.S. senator from New York. But give the big man his just due.

  Two decades ago, “the media” consisted of the big three networks and CNN, conventional radio, and traditional print. There was no Fox News, and Al Gore had yet to invent the Internet. Conservative media voices were the odd few. And there certainly was no dominant voice on the right. Rush Limbaugh filled that void when he was syndicated in 1988.

  He’d been honing his craft since 1967, when he began as a high school student with the moniker of Rusty Sharpe on KGMO in his hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri. After college, he worked his first radio gig in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, as a Top 40 DJ at WIXZ. By 1972 (as Jeff Christie), he was on Pittsburgh’s KQV. After a stint with the Kansas City Royals, he returned to radio at KFBK in Sacramento—and changed the broadcast business.