Editorials

On Saturday, one of those brilliant northern California sunlit February days, I went along on a downtown walking tour sponsored by the Planning Commission’s task force on UC’s hotel proposal. A couple of the participants gave a mini-lecture on the elegant moderne printing plant on Oxford (threatened with demolition), where the U.N. charter was printed and David Brower met his wife. The historic tidbits in their account whetted the appetite of one of my fellow walkers, a young man recently graduated from Boalt who has enthusiastically taken up the Berkeley activist tradition. “Why,” he said, “are there no walking tours of famous historic sites from the ‘60s and ‘70s, like the place where Patty Hearst was kidnapped?”  

Is that history? The Patty Hearst kidnapping? Well, it must be, though it seems like last week’s news to me. His question set me thinking about news from my lifetime as history, and wondering what I can tell younger people about recent history while I can still remember it.  

People the age of my young friend probably don’t even recognize the catch phrase from the Watergate scandal, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” That’s a good one to learn about, because it deserves permanent recycling, and is quite applicable to the current president in particular. The question of what our leaders know about what they’re doing is one of the central political questions in every era.  

Robert McNamara’s appearance here last week reminded me of how much people like me knew about what was going wrong in Vietnam, years before McNamara and his ilk claim they found out about it. How could that be true? When I started working against the Vietnam War in 1964, I was 24 years old, living in the Midwest, wife of a graduate student, raising babies and editing a medical newsletter. He was a corporate hotshot turned Washington politico. How could he have been so out of touch, when I, and people in the hinterlands like me, knew exactly what was going on? (Dorothy Bryant, in this issue, explores what his moral obligations might have been when he did find out.) 

Fast forward to 2004. How can George W. Bush have the nerve to go on television to say that he’s SHOCKED, SHOCKED to learn that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction? Wait a minute; didn’t a hundred thousand of us march down Market Street with big signs before he started the war to tell him that? In Ann Arbor in 1964 we were relatively few and far from the centers of power, but in 2002 the naysayers were many, ubiquitous and vocal.  

In the ‘60s, the politicians who claimed not to know what was going on were Democrats. Our Democratic congressman brought a junior State Department honcho to Ann Arbor, long about 1966, to meet with party faithful and explain why our Democratic president knew what he was doing in Vietnam. We hooted him down, and by 1968 both the congressman and President Johnson were gone.  

It could happen again. This time it’s the Republicans who are starting to question their guy. Kevin Phillips, once a Nixon aide, is the loudest defector from the current Republican folly, but others are warming up. Columnist George Will, in the past a reliable shill for the Republican party, said in his most recent column that “once begun, leakage of public confidence in a president’s pronouncements is difficult to staunch.” What did George W. Bush know about what was actually happening in Iraq, and when did he know it? Or even more alarming, maybe he STILL doesn’t know what’s going on there. His erstwhile friend Mr. Will reminds us that even last May, after the war, President Bush said, “We found the weapons of mass destruction. You know, we found biological laboratories.” No, we did not, says columnist Will. 

There used to be a deodorant commercial with the tag line “Even his best friends won’t tell him that he has Body Odor.” Even Dubya’s best friends seem to be telling him recently that something stinks about the Iraq war.  

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And now, back for a moment to the hotel proposal. My tour group included many thoughtful citizens, some of whom I know to be good writers. The Planning Commission’s task force is holding a public forum to discuss the plans on Feb. 18. Between now and then, I’d like to invite people who went on the tour to write short commentary pieces describing what they saw that the public should be thinking about before the forum. If we get enough submissions, we’ll devote an extra commentary page to them. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Daily Planet.