Islam’s flight was diverted when it was determined that he was on a “no-fly” list, presumably due to his alleged financial connection to Hamas and support of Omar Abdel-Rahman, convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing. (The ex-conductor of the “Peace Train” also supported the death fatwah on Salman Rushdie.)
I added that I hoped the handling of this flight represented a change in airline-safety protocol under transportation secretary Norman Mineta, which at the time included levying fines against airlines that engaged in actions similar to those taken toward Yusuf Islam. I was referring to specific instances in which American, United, Continental, and Delta Airlines were forced to pay millions of dollars for using their lawful discretion to boot passengers who the pilot believed were “inimical to safety.” That was a subject I dealt with extensively in my book Flying Blind.
While I could not have known in 2004 that the Department of Homeland Security was operating on bad information about Stevens/Islam, I nevertheless regret my role in the repeating of incorrect data. I have a vague recollection of making similar comments on radio at the time but no tapes I can listen to for recollecting. A series of successful Google searches, however, reminded me of what I said on television. On September 22, 2004, I appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360. After the lead-in music—Cat Stevens, of course—faded out, Cooper tossed to a Justice Department correspondent, Kelli Arena, who provided background and then said:
His supporters say he’s known for advocating peace. But U.S. officials say recent information suggests Yusuf Islam has knowingly financed terrorists through Muslim charities and has knowingly associated with potential terrorists. But officials would provide no specifics.
And then, after I was introduced by Cooper, I said:
I think it was the right call. I mean, imagine if you were on that plane, and all of a sudden they have knowledge of the fact that somebody who is Muslim and on a terrorism watch list is on board as well. Do you want that plane to enter the airspace over New York City and Washington, D.C., where it was headed? The answer to that is no.
Cooper then described my book as “pretty controversial” and said that what I was calling “terrorist profiling” would sound to some like “racial profiling.” Here, from the transcript, is my final word:
SMERCONISH: Anderson, you know, “profiling” is not a dirty word to me. The bottom line is that on September 11, 19 individuals who had a lot of common denominators, race, religion, gender, ethnicity, and, yes, appearance, they are the ones who perpetrated that attack. And my view is that we ought to be taking those characteristics into account. I mean, look at the mug shots.
I don’t regret my 2004 words to Anderson Cooper, especially when viewed in the context of their being said three years after 9/11. Still, I am sorry that Cat/Yusuf was the subject of government misinformation that I played a role in spreading. I’m convinced he’s a man of peace and that I jumped the gun in 2004 in defending the decision to deny him entry to the United States. While I regret the opinion I expressed years ago, I am pleased I was able to correct the record by writing this column. I still love his music, and when Yusuf returned to the States in 2016 with his Cat’s Attic tour, his second date (of just 12) was in Philadelphia, and I was again there when the legendary songwriter, now 68 years old, walked on stage solo at the Kimmel Center and opened with “Where Do the Children Play?” I took my friend Mike Baldini as my date. Thankfully we were not seated near anyone who wanted to compete with the headliner.
GO OLD SCHOOL ON DRINKING?
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, February 15, 2015
I PULLED FROM A SCRAPBOOK a Weekender column I wrote for the Lehigh University Brown and White in 1982:
Friday Happy Hours are at Lambda Chi Alpha, Pi Lambda Phi, and Zeta Psi. Later, there’s Delta Chi, FIJI, and Alo-TLC, all at 10. Saturday offers Alpha Sig, and Psi U at 9:30, Lambda Chi Valentine Grain Dance at 9:59, Delta Phi, Crow at 10, ATO at 11.
Pressure from the feds that made 21 the drinking age nationwide and liability concerns have limited that kind of lineup, and schools are still struggling to strike a proper balance. Dartmouth College just announced a prohibition of hard alcohol on campus, following the lead of Stanford, Colgate, and Swarthmore. But maybe the solution lies in the past.
Like Dartmouth, Lehigh has a rich Greek tradition. When I attended in the early ’80s, Lehigh had as many fraternities (36) for an undergraduate population of 4,000 as Penn State had for a community of 20,000. For Lehigh freshman men, the question used to be which house you’d be pledging, not whether. There were fraternities to suit every interest and personality: a football house (Delta Upsilon), a basketball house (Theta Delt), a Lax house (Theta Xi), a WASP house (Kappa Sigma), a Jewish house (Sigma Alpha Mu), a white-privilege house (Chi Psi), and even a nerd house (Psi Upsilon), although it did own its own fire truck. My fraternity, Zeta Psi, was more of a blend.
We were on tap 24/7. Thursday was pub night. On Fridays, the Interfraternity Council would sponsor cocktails for students and faculty at one or more houses. About once a month, we’d have a Saturday party, often themed. Except for the rare event that featured grain alcohol, I remember very little hard liquor. And given the constancy of the social life, there was no such thing as pregaming. Guys didn’t drink in their rooms; we drank among one another, in our own bar while playing beer pong, or in the lounge watching TV. Nobody drove. Everything was contained on campus.
Students with whom I have spoken tell me that the social life is still strong at Lehigh, but no longer revolves around on-campus fraternities, the number of which has decreased by one-third since I was there. One freshman told me that social life is now “90 percent off campus.” And when the fraternities do have parties, they need to be registered with the university so that wristbands can be distributed to the attendees who are 21 to ensure that only they drink the beer. A recent graduate, John Archibald, questioned the efficacy of the registration system, and confirmed the migration off campus:
With the registered fraternity parties, kids start to consume more alcohol quicker, trying to get drunk before the party starts at 10:30, so they consume a lot in shorter time, and it’s more dangerous than it needs to be.
Archibald graduated in ’13 and then received a master’s degree in ’14. (His father was a fraternity brother of mine.) He told me that in his senior year, 25 of the 27 members of his fraternity pledge class lived in five different off-campus houses within a block of one another. He said the social restrictions drove them off campus, denying the young men the camaraderie that used to come from living in a fraternity in senior year. Such is the demand for off-campus housing that Archibald and his roommates placed a security deposit for their senior year at the end of the first semester in their sophomore year. He told me:
It would be safer if they allowed more drinking on campus because it’s going to happen anyway, and now they go to off-campus houses, in an area for which students constantly get e-mails from campus police raising security concerns.
I don’t envy Sharon Basso’s job. As Lehigh’s dean of students, it falls to her to fashion an environment that is both socially fulfilling and safe. Where only 20 percent of the undergraduates are 21, she said, the resulting gap sets up a cat-and-mouse game on campuses for which no one has yet found a highly effective solution.
We take a harm-reduction approach that focuses on teaching students about healthy norms, dialogue about responsible consumption of alcohol and teach bystander intervention skills to step in and intervene when they see peers consuming alcohol dangerously, as opposed to a “crackdown, zero-tolerance approach.”
By e-mail, I could not persuade her with my Old School solution. “I think the issue is much more complicated than this,” she wrote, citing research concluding that more than half of students who experience hazing are forced to participate in drinking games; almost half of students had a high-risk drinking event in the last two weeks; and 43 percent of the sexual-victimization incidents involved alcohol consum
ption by victims and 69 percent involved alcohol consumption by the perpetrator. She also said the way in which students were partying had changed.
Delta Upsilon (DU) Beach Party, Lehigh University, spring 1986. The DU brother on fire is George Keefe (’86). Keith Curtis (’88) is on the left looking up. Lou Sofianakos (’87) is behind Keefe, and Dan Ezring (’88) is on the right, with a towel over his head. According to DU brother Brad McGowan (and Greek lore), then–Lehigh president Peter Likins had objected to the presence of the above-ground pool behind DU house and was reportedly en route to check that it had been removed, which prompted the brothers to plan this special welcome. Photo courtesy of Brad McGowan (’87).
On many campuses in 2015, students describe their parties as gatherings that last only two hours, and the entire focus is on getting intoxicated as efficiently as possible. That is why hard alcohol comes into the picture.
At Dartmouth, Nick Desatnick has concerns about whether the crackdown on hard liquor is the solution. Desatnick is a senior majoring in history and Asian studies. I caught up with him recently just after he finished his midterm in The Making of the Modern World Economy. He’s also a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon and the editor of the Dartmouth Review, the conservative newspaper on campus. He said:
I know from experience that Dartmouth in the last two years has tried out a prohibition on Greek life for all freshman students during their first six weeks on campus, and what we’ve seen during the period is a great deal in the way of furtive drinking behavior with hard alcohol in dorms, which is in my opinion far more dangerous than anything you would see in a Greek basement. . . . [There] you at least have some control over liability as a brother who’s looking after the well-being of guests, to avoid issues with the administration. But, also, just having a bunch of inexperienced drinkers around a bottle of vodka in a dorm room strikes me as a terrible idea.
On that, at least, we all agree.
AFTERWORD
My brother graduated from Lehigh four years before I did. He was president of the Class of 1980, and he, too, wrote the Weekender column for the Brown and White but did a much better job. For him, it was like covering a beat. We were both brothers at Zeta Psi—I was the house academic chairman; he was the house social chairman. My job was to file all the tests and quizzes in the house library for future reference by the brothers; his was to plan parties and come up with themes, like the one where the guys all wore X-ray-vision goggles. Anyway, he doesn’t think my Sunday Inquirer column’s opening paragraph listing a weekend’s worth of Lehigh parties in the early ’80s does justice to the social scene that he remembers from the late ’70s. Some of what he recalls is mind-boggling when viewed through the lens of 2017.
For example, today, Greek Week means volleyball and dodgeball competition or a lip-sync dance contest or both, but in my brother’s era, it meant the “Campus Crawl,” an incredible test of endurance where contestants would walk up and down Lehigh’s steep hillside and stop at each of 24 fraternities to chug a beer. Recalls my brother: “The perennial winner was a wrestler who could run and puke in stride. It was a thing of beauty!”
There was also “Nude Hoops” at the Beta house; an annual chugging contest; a beach party at Delta Upsilon facilitated by three or four dump trucks of sand around an above-ground pool into which a volunteer would dive after being doused with lighter fuel and ignited; a wet-T-shirt contest at Delta Tau Delta; and “Fiji Island,” where the brothers would flood their basement and toss in goldfish for effect.
I recently read an archived 1985 story in the Allentown Morning Call about changes in the Lehigh social scene in which Lehigh’s then dean of students, William Quay, is quoted. Quay suggests that the permissive era at Lehigh in the 1970s was a reaction to students’ getting interested in the Vietnam War and other world affairs and successfully arguing to the faculty that they were mature and could take responsibility for their own actions. As Quay explains it, the administration bought that line of reasoning.
“It is like a seesaw,” Quay says, noting that an incident will occur that causes the administration to become more restrictive, and then, four years later, a new generation of students will ask why they should be punished for something they did not do, and the restrictions will be lifted.
If he was right, maybe the pendulum will again swing. I’m not holding my breath.
MY DINNER WITH ROGER STONE
Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, August 23, 2015
“OH, I WENT to an orgy there once.”
That was Roger Stone’s response after I answered his question on my New York City hotel of choice. He’s standing shirtless and wearing khakis inside his pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side, where we meet before going for a drink and dinner. The two-bedroom with hardwood floors is decorated with vintage martini shakers and political memorabilia, including a poster of Richard Nixon sporting an Afro.
Stone had just awoken from a well-earned nap. He’s had a busy week. After three decades of advising Donald Trump, the two have just parted company and Stone has been busy fielding media inquiries. Whether he quit or was fired depends on which of the two men you ask.
Stone pulls a polo shirt (skull and crossbones, no alligator or man on a horse for him) over his bare back, which famously sports a tattoo of Nixon. But before we leave, he asks if I want to see the closet. Mine’s an easy call given his appreciation for sartorial splendor.
After the death of Mr. Blackwell in 2008, Stone began publishing his own best-and-worst dressed list on an annual basis at his website Stonezone.com (full disclosure, I made the former in 2014).
A full wall of his bedroom is filled with neckties and his closet is packed with seersucker and bespoke suits, although he professes to not having purchased one in years. He tells me the New York Times has a profile of his fashion sensibilities scheduled for its men’s style section in September.
“My tailor was a Chinese guy on 44th Street named Chen who was trained on Savile Row,” he says. “He was skilled and knew to leave enough fabric in the seams for weight fluctuations.”
Spending time with this practitioner of political dark arts is a steady diet of stories featuring household names. We begin with a drink at a neighborhood corner spot that Stone says caters to Manhattan Republicans, “including Rudy.”
When the owner greets him by name, Stone advises to look for a mention of his place in an upcoming tabloid column as the scene of a clandestine political meeting. (My hunch is that when it is published, he will be named as one of the attendees.) The owner offers a round. Stone demurs.
Walking to dinner, Stone tells me we are headed to an Italian restaurant favored by another GOP strategist, Ed Rollins. “I might stick a fork in his neck if we see him,” he tells me, not laughing. I still think he’s kidding until he reveals that he’s been dealing with a painful detached retina brought on by a boxing match with “some young guy.”
Rollins is not his only nemesis. He has famously tangled with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, making certain that Spitzer’s penchant for black socks made the tabloids. (I make a mental note to pick up the tab.)
Stone tells me about his current workload. He’s enjoying success as an author. His book The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case against LBJ is a Times best seller, and he will soon publish The Clintons’ War on Women.
“She didn’t kill Vince Foster but she helped move the body,” he tells me, before commencing a dissertation on carpet fibers and an explanation of how Foster’s body was found on a muddy trail with no dirt on his shoes.
He says all the recent notoriety with Trump has been good for his business. “I get calls from potential clients who need a ballbuster,” he says.
Hearing this, I immediately think of a scene in the 2008 HBO documentary Recount, directed by Jay Roach (Meet the Fockers and the Austin Powers movies), which tells the story of the Florida vote in the 2000 election.
When the Republican tally is in trouble, Bush family confidant James Baker barks, “Get me Roger
Stone.” Stone then orchestrates what was described as “the Brooks Brothers riot,” in which congressional staffers protested the counting of ballots in Miami-Dade.
“That’s not a dirty trick,” he tells me over pasta, at the finish of another story, this one concerning his success, at the request of a client, in having a candidate removed from a ballot due to phony signatures.
To hear him tell it, politicians at all levels have sought his counsel over the years, including some who have kept their distance. “I never met the man,” Stone says about a big city mayor who he claims engaged his services to research the contributions of an elected political critic, in the process uncovering widespread fraud in the form of straw donors. Stone is a real life Ray Donovan—only his clients toil in state capitals and Washington, D.C., not Hollywood.
My glass of Montepulciano is long empty, so when a busboy approaches to offer water, I ask for another round of wine.
“Stone’s rules: Never ask a busboy for wine,” Stone snaps. “They barely speak English.”
There’s that, too. Stone has rules for politics and rules for life that he promises to assemble in book form someday, including:
White shirt only after six.
Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.
If you’re explaining, you’re losing.
Until recently, Trump seemed to be following Stone’s rules. An internal Trump campaign memo leaked to the media last week was presumably written by Stone (he won’t publicly say) and includes a blueprint the candidate has been following. The memo reminds Trump of what Roger Ailes once told Ronald Reagan: “You didn’t get elected on details, you got elected on themes.”
Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right Page 33