What Was Behind Bush's "Harsh" Criticism of Yalta?
 

     In Monday's White House Letter, "60 Years After the Fact, Debating Yalta All Over Again," reporter Elisabeth Bumiller manages to characterize Bush's speech in Latvia (lamenting the 1945 Yalta agreement that surrendered Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union) as a political gaffe.

     For the record, here's what Bush said in Latvia May 7: "The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."

     Bumiller's "letter" opens with a snide reference to the McCarthy era (perhaps an echo of the same kind of guilt-by-association the Wisconsin senator was accused of): "When President Bush declared on May 7 in Latvia that the 1945 Yalta agreement led to 'one of the greatest wrongs of history,' he reignited an ideological debate from the era of Joseph McCarthy. For more than a week now, the left and the right have been arguing over the president's words and rearguing the deal made by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill in an old czarist resort near the Crimean city of Yalta in the closing days of World War II."

     Bumiller strives to paint Bush's "harsh" criticism of Yalta as a political gaffe: "Mr. Bush has criticized Yalta at least six other times publicly, usually in Eastern Europe, but never so harshly. In the dust kicked up by the quarreling, the central questions for White House watchers are these: How did the unexpected attack on Yalta get in the president's speech? What drove his thinking? Did the White House expect the fallout?"

     Later she says: "Mr. Bush not only sided with the conservatives in his speech in the Latvian capital, Riga, but he also took a harder-line view against Yalta than any other American president, including Ronald Reagan. By far Mr. Bush's most hotly contested formulation was his assertion that Yalta followed in the 'unjust tradition' of the secret nonaggression deal between the Nazis and the Soviets known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the British appeasement of Hitler in the Munich pact."

     Yet Latvian president Vaira Vike-Freiberga appears to agree with that formulation, writing in a Washington Post op-ed: "But unlike in France, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands or Austria, the collapse of the Nazi empire did not lead to my country's liberation. Instead, with the full acquiescence of the western Allied powers, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were reoccupied and annexed by the Soviet Union, while a dozen other countries in Central and Eastern Europe experienced renewed repression and decades of totalitarian rule as powerless satellite states of the Soviet empire."
And Mikheil Saakashvili, president of the Georgian republic (also visited by Bush) notes: "For 60 years the word 'Yalta' has meant betrayal and abandonment. The diplomatic accord reached between Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States in that sleepy Black Sea resort relegated millions of people to a ruthless tyranny."

     Would Bumiller really want the purportedly undiplomatic Bush offending fellow heads of state?

     Bumiller then quotes three (unlabeled) liberal historians slamming Bush to various degrees: John Lewis Gaddis of Yale, who has referred to himself as a "disillusioned  Democrat," Robert Dallek, a liberal  Boston University historian, and David Kennedy of Stanford, described by a fellow college professor as a "New Deal liberal."

     Bumiller contrasts those apparently nonpartisan professors with "adamant" "conservatives" like the anti-war populist Pat Buchanan and Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum (who isn't exactly a consistent  right-winger either).

     Bumiller concludes with another "McCarthy" jab: "The administration official, who requested anonymity because he said he wanted to let the president's words speak for themselves, said the White House had not anticipated last week's fallout, nor had anyone there discussed what he called the 'nasty and stupid' Yalta politics of the McCarthy era. 'The point was, it was a lousy agreement," the official said."

For the rest of Bumiller on Yalta, click here:

Another Series of Liberal Assumptions
 

     Sunday's front page brings the opening salvo of another huge and potentially  ponderous series from the Times: Janny Scott and David Leonhardt's "Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide."

     Here's how the Times describes the impending series: "This is the first in a series of articles examining the role of social class in America today. A team of reporters spent more than a year exploring ways that class -- defined as a combination of income, education, wealth and occupation -- influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of unbounded opportunity."

     Within the article the paper self-consciously promises: "Over the next three weeks, The Times will publish a series of articles on class in America, a dimension of the national experience that tends to go unexamined, if acknowledged at all. With class now seeming more elusive than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of individuals: a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Wash., regretting his decision to skip college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Mass., musing over the cachet of his 200-foot yacht."

     But  reliable facts are sparse on the ground, judging by Sunday's epic first entry, which begins: "There was a time when Americans thought they understood class. The upper crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God. The middle class drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as company men. The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean. Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old markers. It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared."

     The Times keeps the fires burning for potential class tension, however: "But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways. At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and lifespan are wide and appear to be widening."

     For the Times, it's not enough that life is getting better for everyone -- it's troubled that some may be benefiting at a relatively faster rate than others. Yet most new technologies, from health care to cell phones, start out as luxury items that only the very rich can afford. That gives economic breathing space for the technology to improve and come down in price, until such things are cheap and ubiquitous.

     The Times states: "In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say. Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. It is supposed to take the sting out of the widening gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots. There are poor and rich in the United States, of course, the argument goes; but as long as one can become the other, as long as there is something close to equality of opportunity, the differences between them do not add up to class barriers….So it appears that while it is easier for a few high achievers to scale the summits of wealth, for many others it has become harder to move up from one economic class to another. Americans are arguably more likely than they were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born."

     Later lines echo with economic determinism: "A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy. Merit has replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned."

     So their children's success actually isn't earned, but merely granted?

     Elsewhere the Times admits the findings are cloudy: "Some economists consider the findings of the new studies murky; it cannot be definitely shown that mobility has fallen during the last generation, they say, only that it has not risen. The data will probably not be conclusive for years." But the Times takes the un-cited research as unvarnished fact.

     The reporters also take as fact the purported rise in income inequality (without acknowledging any  counterarguments):

     "In a 1987 speech, Gary S. Becker, a University of Chicago economist who would later win a Nobel Prize, summed up the research by saying that mobility in the United States was so high that very little advantage was passed down from one generation to the next. In fact, researchers seemed to agree that the grandchildren of privilege and of poverty would be on nearly equal footing. If that had been the case, the rise in income inequality beginning in the mid-1970's should not have been all that worrisome. The wealthy might have looked as if they were pulling way ahead, but if families were moving in and out of poverty and prosperity all the time, how much did the gap between the top and bottom matter?

     "But the initial mobility studies were flawed, economists now say. Some studies relied on children's fuzzy recollections of their parents' income. Others compared single years of income, which fluctuate considerably. Still others misread the normal progress people make as they advance in their careers, like from young lawyer to senior partner, as social mobility."

     The Times betrays a passive attitude toward success, as if it is something granted, not earned through individual initiative: "One way to think of a person's position in society is to imagine a hand of cards. Everyone is dealt four cards, one from each suit: education, income, occupation and wealth, the four commonly used criteria for gauging class. Face cards in a few categories may land a player in the upper middle class. At first, a person's class is his parents' class. Later, he may pick up a new hand of his own; it is likely to resemble that of his parents, but not always. Bill Clinton traded in a hand of low cards with the help of a college education and a Rhodes scholarship and emerged decades later with four face cards. Bill Gates, who started off squarely in the upper middle class, made a fortune without finishing college, drawing three aces."

     Gates was hardly "dealt" his occupation and wealth, but through hard work became successful, while Clinton's immense presidential ambitions were hardly a secret. Yet the Times reduces the accomplishments of Gates and Clinton to literally the luck of the draw, glossing over their hard work.

     The Times wonders, with an almost regretful tone, why class war does not resonate in America (while giving the free market two cheers): "Why does it appear that class is fading as a force in American life? For one thing, it is harder to read position in possessions. Factories in China and elsewhere churn out picture-taking cellphones and other luxuries that are now affordable to almost everyone. Federal deregulation has done the same for plane tickets and long-distance phone calls. Banks, more confident about measuring risk, now extend credit to low-income families, so that owning a home or driving a new car is no longer evidence that someone is middle class."

     It takes a populist liberal line on economics: "The after-tax income of the top 1 percent of American households jumped 139 percent, to more than $700,000, from 1979 to 2001, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which adjusted its numbers to account for inflation. The income of the middle fifth rose by just 17 percent, to $43,700, and the income of the poorest fifth rose only 9 percent."

     Near the end, the Times recapitulates its argument: "Will the trends that have reinforced class lines while papering over the distinctions persist? The economic forces that caused jobs to migrate to low-wage countries are still active. The gaps in pay, education and health have not become a major political issue. The slicing of society's pie is more unequal than it used to be, but most Americans have a bigger piece than they or their parents once did. They appear to accept the tradeoffs."

-- Clay Waters, back from England

For the full article from Scott and Leonhardt, click here: