Took the airplane down to my hometown of Washington, DC for a bit of exercise this weekend. The city was built to awe the citizens with an inhuman scale. Plazas are vast and the Mall itself is a forbidding barrier if you’re trying to walk from place to place on a hot or cold day (the architects who wrote A Pattern Language concluded that no public square would be effective unless it was small enough that people could recognize each other from opposite ends). The government buildings are huge and discourage casual entry by being set back from the street and not having any retail shops on the ground floor as a commercial office building might.
The D.C. of my childhood is vastly different from the D.C. of today. Those imposing buildings that symbolize the government’s power are now wrapped in concrete highway barriers that broadcast the government’s fear of a lone terrorist driving a truck filled with a fertilizer bomb. Around the Federal Reserve building, for example, the barriers cover part of the sidewalk so as a pedestrian you’re separated from the street by a wall of concrete. The effect is certainly ugly and it will be interesting to see what happens if a beautiful Old World city such as Paris needs to be secured against lone terrorists in trucks. But in a way the cowering of the government marks the triumph of the individual in American society. “God created men; Colonel Colt made them equal” wasn’t quite right after all. It was the terrorists who blew up the Marine compound in Beirut and those who blew up the World Trade garage in 1993 who actually made individual men the equals of government.
There is one new building in Washington, D.C. that harks back to an era when governments were all-powerful and individual men and women subordinate: the World War II Memorial. This is at the east end of the Reflecting Pool and adjacent to the Washington Monument (now wrapped in an ugly high security fence). The new monument looks as though it was built by Soviet architects and indeed looks a lot like the WWII memorial in East Berlin. The thing is huge and it makes one pause and reflect… “We’d better not start any more wars or we’re going to run out of space on the Mall.”
[My visit to the Memorial coincided with protests in Europe against American power in the form of George W. Bush, visiting to celebrate the American victory over the Germans in Italy. Picking up on the theme of an earlier entry, I suppose it would not have been very politic of him to respond by saying “We’re sincerely sorry for being so bellicose and we’re going to show it by giving Italy back to the Germans…”]
Overall I still love Washington, D.C. Where else can you drive on a riverside parkway, 100-percent paid for with Federal tax dollars, and pass adjacent signs reading “The George Bush Center for Intelligence” and “Turkey Run”?
I too grew up in DC suburbs & as much as I enjoy the Imperial City (thanks to French designers, thank you), I dread returning to see how this beautiful city is cowering behind Jersey barriers. Bummer.
[I apologize in advance to the potential appearance of politically incorrect thoughts here… it is NOT my intent to diminish those who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our country.]
Several items have caught my attention what with the confluence of the WWII Memorial dedication, 60th anniversary of D-Day, and President Reagan’s passing.
I’ve known (well, believed & never had anyone contradict it) for 35+ years that the US had some 600,000 casualties (killed, missing, & wounded) in WWII, but never heard a number for the killed portion. Thanks to the WWII Memorial I now know the US admits 400,000 dead.
The Soviets admit some 20,000,000+ dead. Do the math.
As heroic as D-Day was, please to remember the Russians were throwing Kulaks under Tiger tanks by the summer of 1941, 3 full years before Americans hit French beaches.
Somewhere amongst the D-Day events I heard that for the first time Germans were invited to ceremonies. It sounds as though the Russians are still not official guests.
re: President Reagan getting credit for “ending the Cold War”… this feels something like Al “Woody” Gore being given credit for “inventing” the Internet. Great PR line, but way off the mark.
The man who set the foundation for “the new world order” is on the left in this picture… Harry Dexter White.
http://www.imf.org/external/np/adm/pictures/images/hwmkm.jpg
[Extra credit to identify the man on the right.]
For serious history buffs, there’s a wonderful new book about White…
http://www.treasonabledoubt.com
– David
The Russians were official guests this year. Putin was there. Of the 20 000 000 dead Russians a large proportion were civilians starved, either by Stalin or Hitler, it’s much the same.
I would have thought ‘The man who set the foundation for “the new world order” ‘ was George Kennan. Still alive btw.
The guy on the right in the photo looks like J M Keynes. There were giants in those days.
Oh Phil, “a beautiful Old World city such as Paris ” had its old streets mercilessly destroyed 1854-5 by Haussmann, and wide avenues with good lines of sight built in order to avoid mobs assembling and dispersing likee they did in 1848.
You are correct USSR had “only” about 9,000,000 military deaths during WWII (and 19,000,000 civilian). China – over a million (9,000,000 civilian). Then were the UK, Yugoslavia and the US – each lost between 300 and 400 thousand.
I lived for several years a few blocks from place in Washington described in the second paragraph. The barriers near the buildings of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the US Department of State are temporary and there are plans for surroundings that have better aesthetics. Philip didn’t mention the building reconstruction at State. Delivery trucks going inside State must park near the public tennis court located on Fed grounds right next to the buildings.
Certainly Philip has a valid point. If I were Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, I might be as concerned about Arab terrorists as Philip apparently is.
Tennis, anyone?
Of course, Whittaker Chambers said that harry Dexter White was a Soviet agent.
Brad DeLong saysof this :-
“If Harry Dexter White was indeed a spy for J.V. Stalin, never did a tyrant receive worse service than Stalin did from White. The post-WWII North Atlantic alliance was so strong and such a barrier to the Soviet Union primarily because post-WWII economic growth was so strong, and Harry Dexter White’s work at institution-building played as large a role in laying the foundations for those Thirty Glorious Years of economic growth as anyone’s. ”
So 3 points to David Eddy.
Gennady Gerasimov : “Reagan’s SDI was a very successful blackmail,” Gerasimov told The Associated Press. “The Soviet Union tried to keep up pace with the U.S. military buildup, but the Soviet economy couldn’t endure such competition.”
SDI changed the assumptions about the use of nuclear weapons in multiple ways: 1) missile couldn’t reach USA but USA missiles could reach them 2) giving the technology to another country like Britain would cripple intimidation tactics 3) would force the Soviets to spend money on new weapons while the USA would not have to.
Concerning Harrry Dexter White, there is no doubt in a reasonable person’s mind he was a spy. The 2 Daves and Bruce are being unreasonable.
Google for “harry dexter white venona” and all will be clear.
HDW also died under mysterious circumstances which have never been cleared up.
Phil, your equating of terrorists with the Founding Fathers seems a little odd. If terrorists were able to equalize their power vis-a-vis the govt, would not taxes go down, or other freedom-inhibiting barriers be removed? Instead the screws are clamped tighter; I think this refutes your argument.
“Concerning Harrry Dexter White, there is no doubt in a reasonable person’s mind he was a spy”
From Brad DeLong again :-
But the public release of the VENONA decryption effort told us of the following message to Moscow in August of 1944. If true, the message is absolutely devastating:
However..
Boughton and Sandilands (2003), “Politics and the Attack on FDR’s Economists: From the Grand Alliance to the Cold War,” Intelligence and National Security 18:3 (Autumn), pp. 73-99, make the following points:
The cable was not written by the person who met with White.
The person who met with White–who had the codename ‘Koltsov’–has not been identified, but it is known that he was not an intelligence agent (although he was acting under instructions from the NKVD in seeking his meeting with White).
Bruce Craig believes that Koltsov was an accredited member of the Soviet Bretton Woods delegation.
Silvermaster–a genuine Russian spy–was annoyed and dismayed at Koltsov’s contact with White.
The future meetings to which Koltsov refers never took place.
He concludes : –
“Were I on a jury, I certainly would not convict White of espionage on the basis of the evidence we have, even including VENONA. I’m not sure the evidence passes the “clear and convincing standard.” Nevertheless I think that even though Boughton and Sandilands have pleaded their case well, there is enough evidence to classify White as a genuine “security risk.” “