Quickthink

Quote of the day

Provence is a country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on a train.Here in London it is an effort of will to believe in the existence of such a place at all.

From South Wind Through the Kitchen, Elizabeth David

I believe that we all  need such places. Not places to arrive at. But to long for. For Elizabeth David, suffering through the drab post war years in London, that place was Provence.

I was not a huge fan of Boris Berezovsky. The main reason was that from the accounts I heard, he was a manipulator. He loved gaining and using influence. And in these games, he was ruthless. Well, in the days of Boris Jeltsin, one could put these talents and passions to use. And Berezovsky did, amassing power and influence.

But then it all fell apart and the Berezovsky empire went into exile. One had the feeling that he was less happy as an exile, even though with his money he could afford a rather comfortable existence. One had the feeling that he missed being in power. And this, I felt, was both consistent with my earlier impression of the man and not particularly attractive, given how he had climbed that slippery pole in the first place. Did he pine for the days when he was the baddest beast in the jungle?

One of the more enduring mysteries about Berezovsky was how closely he was connected to violence. How dirty were his hands? Richard Behar, writing for Forbes, speculates that he was connected to the Klebnikov murder and more. Will we learn more? We may. In the meantime, we are left with the rather strange spectacle of a billionaire who decided it wasn’t worth living any more.

Hey! This is old news! Lehrer was already exposed, right? Well, he was. It came out a while ago that Jonah’s writing had serious problems. He “self-plagiarized” (sounds a bit kinky) and he made up quotes. Now it turns out in his second book “how we decide” he may have made up interviews as well. BI reports that the book is being pulled from circulation.

What happened? Lehrer didn’t need to do what he did. But he took shortcuts in his work to get the results he wanted. BI reports it as an example of the type of cognitive bias that we all suffer from - where it is easier to criticize others than assess our own decision making.

Interesting. Taking a cure from Dan Pink, I think the problem is a bit different. When we really, really, really want something we tend to detach ourselves a bit from reality. That thing gets so important, that everything else falls off the radar screen. Lehrer really, really wanted recognition for his work and he got it. How he got it lost significance.

This is the dark side of the “engagement” era we live in. We are told to promote engagement, which is right. But there is such a thing as being overly engaged. Too deeply into the moment. Not detached enough to see what is going on around you. Obsessed? Well sort of. But you don’t need to be obsessed to lose your balance.

And Lehrer lost his balance. That is for sure.

Former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, was a character. He became mayor at a moment of fiscal crisis for the city. He dealt with that crisis, but more importantly, while doing so Ed was just himself - an honest, open and rather brash figure. Almost carefree and openly loving the city that he ran. He stood out back then as a role model and it is sad to see him pass on.

Thanks Ed!

Sometimes you can lose your priorities. At these critical moments, a quote like this comes in handy, (Via Steve Cohen)

“I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol and wild women. The other half I wasted.” ―

W.C. Fields. — It was his birthday Tuesday.

And here he is, hard at work (via NNDB)

 Andrée Putman just passed on at the ripe old age of 87. She was an interior designer with a modernist and literary palate.

I liked this quote from her obit. Enjoy!

I’ve had so many occasions to start believing in myself, and I never will. Strange. I am protected by a lot of angels from any self-esteem, from the capacity to feel content with myself. Perhaps that also gives me a certain capacity for wonder at the world, like a child before a Christmas tree. This is very strong in my life, and maybe it’s what opens me to other people, and to new ventures and experiences. In French, we have a nice word for that: ‘partant,’ ‘ready to go.’ I’m always ready.”

I had forgotten about Robert Bork. It seems like a long, long time ago when he suddenly appeared on the US media radar screen as the Reagan nominee to replace Justice Lewis Powell on the US Supreme Court. Before discussing Bork, we should note that Powell had been known as a “swing vote” on the court - and a man who rarely took extreme positions. Bork was certainly different. He was treated roughly in Senate hearings because his views on judicial interpretation were considered to be too far from the mainstream. Then he was rejected. Some were offended. I was relieved.

The problem is that after Bork was rejected, we got Scalia, Thomas, Roberts and Alito. These four have (in my view) similar views about constitutional interpretation to Bork. So I forgot about Bork.

But Linda Greemhouse reminded me today of the man and his tragic sense of entitlement to lead. Bork not only had strong views, but he had a messianic vision of their centrality to the fate of western man. Bork fervently believed that only Bork could save us from ourselves. But he was not allowed the chance. Bork thought this was tragic for western man. I said thank the Lord.

This interests me today for several reasons. First, I am reminded that Bork’s inflated sense of his own importance was not so unique. To the contrary, modern US conservatism has at its core a strong evangelical quality. Reagan used this to great political advantage. But by now we see more clearly how this sense of “my way or the highway” is destroying the movement.

Second, I am reminded of the controversial nature of Bork’s leadership model. Bork believed in laying out a clear vision for the future. As John Kotter has said over and over again, this is what leaders are supposed to do. That way, we can see more clearly which visions to embrace and which to reject.

I would agree. But we are not so used to this. We are more used to management. Managers deal with complexity and functionality, less so with vision. This is nicht gut when we need to see where we are going. And I agree with Kotter that it is dangerous to confuse good management with good leadership. They are very different.

Applying this, Europe is “managing” the Euro crisis. But where is Europe going? Who knows. The US is “managing” the Afghan exit strategy, but where is this taking us in a strategic sense? I am not sure I want to think about that.

Get the point?

But back to Bork for one last point. Bork’s main argument was that US jurisprudence had veered too far away from primary textual sources. He argued therefore that “original intent” should guide interpretation of the US constitution and that any other method was illegitimate. It is a strong view, and oddly it tends to strip legal institutions of any leadership responsibility for the results of law. That responsibility is shoved back on the shoulders of political actors. Is this tenable? The debate still rages and perhaps will not be settled in our life times.

But we might take note of the practical danger of allocating power to institutions that have limited accountability for what they do. And we might be careful that in rejecting figures like Bork, we do not also denigrate the value of leadership in general.

From an article that is nominally about real estate

“I was sitting next to a very funny man (at a dinner party),” Ms. Rose said, “and he had me laughing and laughing. And Laurent, sitting at the other end of the table, loved my laugh. So we sat together after dinner and I said something like, ‘I hope you don’t mind if I tell you how much I love your work.’ And he said: ‘I don’t know your work. I hope you don’t mind if I tell you how much I love your eyes.’”

Well, some people know what it means to find a great life.

Joe Kennedy was a character and he knew it. As a character, he demanded to take and use center stage. He was not a team player. And as a man with dynamic vision without much constraint by group loyalties, old Joe was at times a bad boy. Dave Nasaw has written a new biography of the old man, reviewed today in NYT. There we find this statement

Mr. Nasaw writes that since his death “Joseph P. Kennedy has been vilified and dismissed as an appeaser, an isolationist, an anti-Semite, a Nazi sympathizer, an unprincipled womanizer, a treacherous and vengeful scoundrel who made millions as a bootlegger and Wall Street swindler, then used those millions to steal elections for his son.” There is “some truth to these allegations,” he adds, but “they tell only part of a larger, grander, more complicated history.”

ok. He was not a bootlegger. As for the rest … well, there are a slew of facts that are hard to ignore. And for my money, the word “scoundrel” cannot be easily set aside, despite the great successes that he enjoyed and the charms that he employed … when he chose to do so.

BTW, the review points out that both Joe Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt were charmers who crossed the border between truth telling and fabrication in situations. Both were charmers. And both used people in ways that we call manipulation. But for all of his faults, FDR still commands respect for the roles that he played and for what he achieved for the nation. And Kennedy? Well, less so. He was more a force of nature than a force for community.

Milt Campbell won the decathlon at the 1956 Helsinki Olympics (having come in 2d to Bob Mathias back in 1952).  He also set world records in the hurdles. And he played pro-football for the Cleveland Browns for a while. But …

Just before the opening game in 1958, he later recalled, he was called in to the office of Paul Brown, the team’s coach, who wanted to know why Campbell had just married a white woman. Campbell said he told Brown that was not the coach’s business.

The Browns cut Campbell the next day.

And off he went to Canada to play football there. Milt complained later that he did not get the media attention that he deserved. And he had a point. But things were different back then.

Milt just passed away at the age of 78.