Today in Supreme Court History: August 4, 1961

8/4/1961: President Barack Obama's birthday. He would appoint two Justices to the Supreme Court: Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

President Obama's appointees to the Supreme Court

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

Truong Dinh Hung v. United States, 439 U.S. 1326 (decided August 4, 1978): Brennan, reversing Circuit Court, allows bail pending appeal of espionage conviction (passing along government secrets, theft of government property, acting as unregistered foreign agent) (this was in connection with Carter’s negotiations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam on normalization of relations, return of prisoners, etc.); defendant, Vietnamese citizen, did not have permanent residence in U.S. and was in contact with Vietnamese ambassador in Paris, but Brennan notes “opportunity” to flee does not equal “inclination” to flee; defendant had resided here for 13 years, was close to his sister, a permanent resident who owned a house here, and “numerous affidavits” attested to his character and “reliability as a bail risk”. (Convictions were affirmed on full appeal in 1981, and cert denied. Truong was paroled in 1986, married an American college professor, and moved to the Netherlands, working as an economist for the EU.)

[John F. Carr]

Did the Circuit Court overrule the District Court? A District Court order denying bail under such circumstances ought to stand up as an allowable exercise of discretion.

[Dan Schiavetta]

The District Court granted bail but revoked it after conviction. The Circuit Court sustained the revocation.

[Syd Henderson]

His co-conspirator, Ronald Humphrey with the USIA (who passed him the cables) was also convicted and sentenced to 15 years. No idea what happened to him but he's still alive. Truong died in 2014 (cancer, in Malaysia). I gather he was a model citizen after his parole. Wikipedia says "It is the only case of military espionage to come out of the Vietnam War" and it was after the war.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Thanks!

[Syd Henderson]

By coincidence, this headline today: “Sailors Charged with Spying for China.”

[Dan Schiavetta]

today's movie review: Darkest Hour, 2017

Someday we'll get a balanced depiction of Churchill. Recently we've seen him in his second term as Prime Minister in the 1950's where it's made clear that hanging on when he was "past it" was a disservice to his family (Churchill's Secret) and to his country (The Crown). But as for the World War II era, we're still in hagiography mode.

He was a multifaceted person (compulsively so, perhaps spurred by his dysfunctional upbringing), he lived a long time, held a lot of government posts, and was a good writer. (He also was, unusual for the time, not anti-Semitic.) But politically he was only useful for a few months in 1940, when (in the words of Beverley Nichols) he "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle". Before that, he had a long history of bad judgment and ego-driven decisionmaking. Even his anti-appeasement speeches would have been more effective if given by someone with a better track record. And after 1940 he was only a tolerable military and political leader; fortunately his crazier strategic ideas either got talked out of him or got overruled by circumstance. He was no good at assembling support in Parliament and was an extremely inefficient administrator, sucking up valuable meeting time with long speeches about irrelevant matters. And he really should have retired in 1945.

Why is he attractive to us? Possibly because his vaunted courage and eloquence was so comfortable. He was born in a palace, into the highest reaches of the aristocracy. (If his father had been the first-born instead of third-, Winston would have been a Duke; that's as high as you can get without actually being in the royal family.) Even as a young man he had servants to feed him, dress him, bathe him. He could stay in bed till noon, smoke the finest cigars, have oysters served for breakfast, swig the best brandy, then waddle over to Parliament and speechify. In his war memoirs we read of long, lush banquets with foreign leaders, sipping champagne while going over maps . . . there's scarcely a mention of anybody suffering in a war that claimed over 50 million lives. He was hardly a man of the people.

He certainly never took the subway, as depicted in this movie, set in May 1940 as Churchill's coalition cabinet weighs Mussolini's proposal to mediate with Hitler. At least Gary Oldham doesn't chew the scenery as much as Timothy Spall did in The King's Speech, and we don't see that film's unforgivable distortions of history, putting Churchill in scenes he was never near. Here we get a somewhat sympathetic portrait of Chamberlain, still the Tory leader but dying of cancer, admitting to the King that Churchill was right about Hitler (though in reality Chamberlain was never deluded either), and we see that due to past misjudgments Churchill was still distrusted by his Party. But once again the Labor Party is slighted, as well as its leader Clement Attlee, who is dispatched with a throwaway line about being "a sheep in sheep's clothing". In fact it was the two Labor ministers in the cabinet (Attlee and Greenwood) who were from the first against negotiating with Hitler, whereas Churchill was one of those who wavered.

Appeasement was the policy of conservatives, who thought the real enemy was Soviet Bolshevism. Labor had been against rearmament, but Attlee changed that and by 1938 was as opposed to the Munich agreement as Churchill was. But as long as dictatorships were anti-Communist, conservatives were willing to look the other way as to human rights abuses. This mindset is familiar to those of us who remember the Cold War. If George Will were writing in 1937, we'd see glowing columns about this "forceful and necessary man" Adolf. It was Labor (in particular the much-underrated Attlee) which had refused to join the cabinet if it was led by Chamberlain, put Churchill in power, and ably assisted him in the conduct of the war. Attlee was called "the dullest man in British politics" but behind the scenes knew how to organize and effectuate. After the war he became what many historians consider the greatest Prime Minister of the 20th century. He deserves a movie someday.

[Krayt]

Being “a man of the people” is a rhetorical trick most politicians use, to get elected, so their fortunes can oddly increase rapidly.

It is grossly cynical and has zero value outside that context.

[Dan Schiavetta]

To give one example, LBJ's great impetus to push through his "Great Society" program was surely due to his own experiences being desperately poor as a child.

[Bob from Ohio]

"unforgivable distortions of history"

Like your "review".

"what many historians consider the greatest Prime Minister of the 20th century"

Yes, modern historians are awfully left wing.

[grb]

Here’s a quote attributed to Churchill: “Success is all about going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

There’s no evidence he said this, mind you, but it’s easy to see why people might think he did (likewise with Lincoln, who’s also been tagged with the saying). Churchill had a terrible record in WWI, devising the catastrophic attack on Gallipoli. Even during WWII he made some costly errors of judgement but still saw the historical situation more clearly than those around him.

But despite that clarity of vision, he was completely blind on the subject of Britain’s worldwide colonialism. Churchill stubbornly refused to confront the evidence it was a doomed anachronism. Even within the straightjacket of his colonial worldview, Churchill’s conduct was frequently atrocious, as with his reaction to the Bengal Famine of 1943 (which killed millions of people).

So we celebrate his determined discipline and vision while recognizing those qualities triumphed over personal mistakes and flaws. However much some people try to make Churchill a cheap fetish object, you can’t lose track of his importance or brillance.

[Dan Schiavetta]

For a brief but crucial period in 1940, circumstances were met by the man needed to address them, and the man met the circumstances he was suited for. Most of the rest of his life, the two were out of kilter.

[Neugierige]

"Absolute insistence on perfection may be spelt shorter: paralysis."

[Noscitur a sociis]

Stick to porn.

[Syd Henderson]

One of the reasons Attlee won in 1945 was that he was so effective in the War Cabinet and the British could see it.

I liked Churchill's histories though it's been a long, long time since I've read them, except for his history of England. He wrote one on the Russian Civil War which is the only one I've read on that subject.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Churchill, typically magnanimous, invited Attlee to the Potsdam conference in July 1945 because the general election votes hadn’t yet been counted (though everyone, including Attlee, expected the Tories to stay in office by a wide margin). Only to find that when appearing before the troops Attlee got the bigger cheers. In his memoirs Churchill says their cheers for him were “sheepish, perhaps due to most of them having voted adversely”.

I highly recommend David Reynolds’s “In Command of History”, which tracks the writing of Churchill’s six volumes (for which he had a lot of help) alongside the events they recount, the fights over what to include and what not, getting permission to print certain documents, the calculation of the effect of publication when Churchill was trying to get back into office and, once in, trying to get in good with President Eisenhower and arrange another summit.

[Dilan Esper]

Churchill was a pretty terrible leader. He obviously is remembered in history for getting One Big Thing right (and even there, he was only half right- had Britain actually gone to war when he wanted them to they would have had no allies and lost badly to the Nazis), and he had an amazing command of the English language. But FFS he was an awful man- racist, selfish, a publicity hound, etc., and he was an impediment to the war effort, often fighting to get British generals credit rather than win the war. Plus, his conduct with respect to India is completely inexcusable.

The British public properly dumped him and his party in the 1945 election. They realized he was a turkey.

[Bob from Ohio]

"They realized he was a turkey."

What did they "realize" when they made him PM again later?

[Dan Schiavetta]

The Conservatives got back into power not because the nation particularly wanted Churchill again but because of exhaustion with the Attlee government which had run its course.

Like I say, Churchill should have retired in 1945. Staying on was an ego trip. The Party would have been served better if Butler had taken over in 1947 (or 1953 or 1955). (Not Eden; he didn’t have the temperament.)

In general the early 1950’s was not a particularly partisan period in Britain. Its economic policy has been called “Buttskellism” (Tory Butler and Labor Gaitskell had almost identical policies as Chancellors of the Exchequer). Churchill had little interest in domestic policy, though he was probably correct when he said in 1951 “what this country needs is several years of quiet, steady administration”.

[Dilan Esper]

All of this.

[Neugierige]

They didn't. PMs aren't elected.

And their relationship with the rest of the cabinet and party is much more conciliar, or at least was.

[SRG]

While technically PMs are not elected by the people, as a shorthand you say that someone is elected PM when the party wins the general election.

[Dan Schiavetta]

It's a better system than what we have. Party leaders are less likely to put someone in charge who is incompetent, lazy or ignorant. Can you imagine someone like George W. Bush or Donald Trump struggling through "Question Time"?

It is also better in that there is no "decider". The PM is simply part of the Cabinet. In fact Stalin's son-in-law, bugging the Allied quarters at Yalta, was surprised to hear Churchill on the phone to ministers back home not barking orders at them but asking permission as to whether to take certain positions at the plenary meetings. This unwritten custom seems to us Americans squishy and uncertain, but it's based on centuries of experience with what actually works in practice.

[SRG]

It is related that when Churchill was passing through a lobby at the House of Commons during his second term as PM, one MP said to another, "they say the old bugger is completely senile", whereupon Churchill replied "they say the old bugger is completely deaf, too".

[David Nieporent]

had Britain actually gone to war when he wanted them to they would have had no allies and lost badly to the Nazis),

False. Germany was in no way ready for war before the time they started it; I don't know why people always ignore that fact.

[Dan Schiavetta]

Hitler was eager to invade the Sudetenland to show his military strength and was surprised and actually disappointed when Chamberlain took the wind out of his sails by handing it over to him. Whether he really had that strength is I suppose another issue. But it’s fairly certain that Britain was not ready.

[Dan Schiavetta]

P.S. My information for this is John Toland’s biography of Hitler, which came out in 1970. It’s interesting to look at these early works, written before the mythology ossified, where the authors remembered the events personally and there were still plenty of eyewitnesses alive to interview. Another good book (from 1966) is Laurence Thompson’s “1940: Year of History, Year of Legend”, which talks about Churchill’s coalition cabinet. He points out that it survived despite widespread of distrust of Churchill because Chamberlain was so loyal to it.

[David Nieporent]

You are correct that Hitler was eager to invade the Sudetenland in September 1938. But the German army was not. They knew they were utterly underprepared for war.

[Dilan Esper]

Germany was a lot more ready for war than Britain was. Churchill was all testosterone and no brain or viable army.

[David Nieporent]

No, Germany was not. It really really wasn't. Read up on the state of the German army in September 1938.

The sad part was that not only was it woefully underequipped, but that handing Czechoslovakia to Germany was what allowed it to equip itself for September 1939.

[Dan Schiavetta]

That skit was great until the end when they start beating him up. I’d leave it with him just being chased out of the studio.

“Piffle or not?”

“What is that not unlike?”

Similarly, Imus did a funny bit about Dennis Miller's brief run as color commentator on Monday Night Football. Wisecracking about how that forward pass reminds one of Spinoza's theory of essence was . . . well . . . innovative?