Novak Wisdom

From an interview with Robert Novak (via Advance Indiana) comes a lot of interesting things. This is important to history.

The most interesting Republicans right now are a few young House members. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin is the best of them. Also Jeff Flake of Arizona and Jeb Hensarling of Texas. They are known in the House as right-wingers. I would describe them as reformers. They think there's been too much corruption and waste. They are supply-siders. They are very upset with earmarks and very, very upset with the passive leadership we have today....

Q: You've had some unparalleled sources. How does one go about cultivating them?

A: What I'm going to say may come as a shock, because I'm not a terribly likable person, but you gotta get a source to like you. There's very little that I or any other journalist can really do for a politician. A favorable column is not all that much, so there's not much payback. It's gotta be "I want to help Novak because I like him." That may sound naive, but it's true.

Senator Pat Moynihan was one of my great sources. I don't believe he said, "Boy, if Novak writes this column, I'm going to really be in much better shape." He thought I was an interesting guy and had interesting ideas, and he liked to talk about things with me. ...

I was just a Midwestern country boy when I came here. Rowly (Evans) was an elite Philadelphian. I didn't realize how much a lunch was part of the whole source/reporter equation. Rowly learned that from Joseph and Stewart Alsop. If Rowly didn't have a meal with a source, it was a bad day. Quite often he would have two sources for the same meal, usually breakfast....

Q: In your memoir, you describe an early meeting in the Oval Office with Reagan in which he quoted a couple of obscure 19th-century British free-trade advocates and some little-known modern Austrian economists. How underrated intellectually do you think Reagan was?

A: He was extremely underrated, particularly by the press. The press was very derisive. They were derisive of Eisenhower, too -- they thought he was just another Army officer -- but the attacks on Reagan were harsher. He was portrayed as stupid, uneducated, out of his element. I think he was very well educated and understood a lot of things. He was also very flexible in his policies -- too flexible for my taste.

Q: How do you feel about Dick Cheney?

A: I think he's the most forceful, effective vice president in history.

I like some of the things he's done. I think he was instrumental in getting the tax cuts through, which I approve of. I'm at odds with his aggressive military policy, but he's put a new dimension on the vice presidency that I don't think will be continued and maybe shouldn't be continued. ...

I think Dean Rusk, for example, was totally the president's man. Colin Powell leaned heavily the other way, maybe too much, trying to protect the Foreign Service....

Q: Who do you think were the best legislators?

A: Legislators are funny. One of the best-equipped legislators was Wilbur Mills, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. He really knew trade, taxes -- he really knew the field. He was very smart and came across as a shrewd bargainer. But he never got anything done.

A more recent chair of the Ways and Means committee was Bill Thomas, who was considered by his colleagues to be the smartest guy in town. I think Bill considered himself the smartest guy in the world. But he was very meager in terms of accomplishments. It's hard to get things passed.

If you go by accomplishments, the best was Lyndon Johnson. There's not even a close second in terms of getting bills passed. The reason: He was a trader, and he never took no for an answer. He could bargain into the night. ...

Q: What about Newt Gingrich?

A: I thought he was a failure as speaker and a great success as a political manager in getting a Republican majority in the House....

Q: What's the most helpful thing someone can say to a person who's gravely ill?

A: There's not much you can say. A lot of people say: "You're a tough guy and a fighter. You're gonna beat this." Well, I don't know if I will beat it. Being tough and a fighter have nothing to do with it. I guess the most helpful thing they can say, if they're a man or woman of faith, is to tell me they're praying for me.

Edmund Campion

Edmund Campion is an Oxford Roman Catholic who fled England to become a Jesuit in the 1500's and returned as an illegal priest. He was caught, debated by Protestant scholars in the Tower of London, and executed for treason.

He claimed that he was on a merely religious mission, not political, but he was executed not for heresy but for treason. Questions of religion and politics were mixed because the Pope had some years earlier deposed Queen Elizabeth and forbade any Englishmen to obey her on pain of excommunication. A good article on the topic is: Papists, and the "Public Sphere" in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair in Context, Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 72, No. 3, (Sep., 2000), pp. 587-627 . http://www.jstor.org/stable/3079477.

The Pope's 1570 bull Regnans in Excelsis said:

Therefore, resting upon the authority of Him whose pleasure it was to place us (though unequal to such a burden) upon this supreme justice- seat, we do out of the fullness of our apostolic power declare the foresaid Elizabeth to be a heretic and favourer of heretics, and her adherents in the matters aforesaid to have incurred the sentence of excommunication and to be cut off from the unity of the body of Christ.

IV. And moreover (we declare) her to be deprived of her pretended title to the aforesaid crown and of all lordship, dignity and privilege whatsoever...

V. And also (declare) the nobles, subjects and people of the said realm and all others who have in any way sworn oaths to her, to be forever absolved from such an oath and from any duty arising from lordshop. fealty and obedience; and we do, by authority of these presents , so absolve them and so deprive the same Elizabeth of her pretended title to the crown and all other the abovesaid matters. We charge and command all and singular the nobles, subjects, peoples and others afore said that they do not dare obey her orders, mandates and laws. Those who shall act to the contrary we include in the like sentence of excommunication.

Thus, anyone who was a Roman Catholic and who believed in the authority of the Pope had to, as a matter of religious belief, refuse to obey the English government. Edmund Campion, as a Jesuit, took a special vow of obedience to the Pope. Thus, insofar as he followed his religion, he was a traitor to England-- or, if you like, a traitor to Parliament and Queen Elizabeth, if loyal to Queen Mary Stuart. Further, the Bull implies that any Roman Catholic should use all efforts to obey the legitimate ruler-- Mary Stuart-- which meant to depose the pretended ruler, Elizabeth.

In such circumstances it does not seem unreasonable to me to make it illegal for priests to enter England, or that being a priest loyal to Rome would be prima facie evidence of treason.

See also "Campion's Brag,") his challenge to debate.

Wikipedia's "French Nobility" is a good article. I looked it up in an attempt to understand Proust (and other French novels) better. Here are some things I learned.

Other activities could cause dérogeance, or loss of one's nobility. So were most commercial and manual activities strictly prohibited, although nobles could profit from their lands through mines and forges.

Thus, being a noble had some severe disadvantages.

Other than in isolated cases, serfdom ceased to exist in France by the 15th century....

That sounds like England.

Figures differ on the actual number of nobles in France at the end of the 18th century. For the year 1789, the French historian François Bluche gives a figure of 140,000 nobles (9,000 noble families) and claims that around 5% of nobles claimed descent from feudal nobility before the 15th century.[1]

With a total population of 28 million, this would represent merely 0.5%. The historian Gordon Wright gives a figure of 300,000 nobles (of which 80,000 were from the traditional noblesse d'épée),[2] which agrees with the estimation of the historian Jean de Viguerie,[3] or a little over 1% (proportionally one of smallest noble classes in Europe)....

So little of the nobility actually were descended from the medieval nobility! This, too, doesn't sound so different from England. Maybe the War of the Roses didn't really destroy the ancient English nobility. It seems France was as open, or more open, than England to admitting non-nobles into the nobility. See the next excerpt:

From 1275

to 1578, non-nobles could acquire titles of nobility after three generations by buying lands or castles that had noble privileges attached to them, that is to say that these fiefs had formerly belonged to a noble lord or the king and had been given in feudal homage. Non-nobles could not possess noble fiefs without paying a special tax on them (the franc-fief) to their liege-holder.

In the 16th century, families could acquire nobility by possessing certain important official or military charges, generally after two generations.

Many titles of nobility were usurped by non-nobles in the Renaissance and early 17th century by purchasing fiefs and by living nobly, i.e. by avoiding commercial and manual activity and by finding some way to be exempted from the official taille lists. In this way, the family would slowly come to be seen as noble....

The noblesse de lettres became, starting in the reign of Francis I of France, a handy method for the court to raise revenues; non-nobles possessing noble fiefs would pay a year's worth of revenues from their fiefs to gain nobility. In 1598, Henry IV of France undid a number of these anoblissments, but eventually saw the necessity of the practice.

The last excerpt, below, is useful for interpreting names:

The use of de in noble names (Fr: la particule) was not officially controlled in France (unlike von in the German states), and is not reliable evidence of the bearer's nobility. A simple tailor could be named Marc de Lyon, as a sign of his birth place. In the 19th century, the de was mistakenly adopted by some non-nobles (like Honoré de Balzac) in an attempt to appear noble....

What if Britain Hadn't Fought in 1939?

It's interesting to think about the counterfactual of what would have happened in Europe if Britain had decided not to defend Poland. France would probably have followed Britain's lead, as she did after Munich in 1938. There would have been no need for a Hitler-Stalin Pact, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Germany would have conquered Poland easily in 1939. In 1940, Russia would not have dared to absorb the Baltic republics and Bessarabia, and would not have had the part of Poland it conquered in actual history. Germany could have attacked then instead of 1941, and without fiddling around in the Balkans first. The Russian army would have been one year less far away from Stalin's purge of most of its generals in the 30s. Presumably Germany would have done even better than it did in 1941. Britain, France, and the US would not have aided Russia-- it would be hard to defend helping Stalin when they weren't fighting a common war with him. Japan was engaged in tank battles with Russia in real history in 1940, and with the best Russian troops sent to fight Hitler in my alternative history, the Japanese would have attacked vigorously. This Northern strategy would clearly have dominated going South to Indochina, the Philippines, and the Dutch East Indies, so there'd be no reason for America to get involved. If Russia didn't lose in 1940, it would lose in 1941. What next? Hitler might have settled down to organizing the Slavs for a few years, or he might have gone straight to conquering France and the Balkans. He couldn't have beaten the Royal Navy and Air Force in 1940 or 1941, but he could have by, say, 1950. Whether he'd want to is not entirely clear, but I think he'd like the idea of world domination. He might have tolerated an independent Britain if it refrained from electing a Labor government.

King Offa's Border Policy

I was reading about the border policies of King Offa, the Anglo-Saxon king of Mercia. He made no attempt to conquer Wales. Instead, he built Offa's Dyke, a boundary-marking ridge, and every few years he raided Wales. (Click here to read more.)

That is a common imperial boundary policy. Mark the boundary, so the barbarians know how far they're permitted to loot to, and if the barbarians make trouble, launch a punitive expedition and burn down some of their houses. Don't attempt to conquer them, because it's not worth the expense of keeping a garrison in a wasteland that won't yield much taxes anyway.

That's what we should have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the addition of pre-emptive expeditions to stamp out any preparations for barbarian raids.