After their ’60 Minutes’ appearance, I’m on Valerie Plame and Robert Wilson’s side. During the Iraq war horror, they were patriots, and they paid a price. Wilson stuck his neck out on a big lie. Period. I still don’t buy that she had some important job, or that her cover meant very much.
Plame came across under Katie Couric’s questioning as sincere but not that complicated. She doesn’t speak that well, can’t express a complex idea. She went to a second-rate school, as I recall. The fact that someone of Plame’s blonde intellectual powers had real responsibility at the CIA brings back memories of the CIA officer who was killed in Afghanistan a couple of years back, Johnny Micheal Spann. Spann was also not an intelligent coolie in the James Bond or Alden Pyle mode, though he had a rough and ready air.
This is a mark against the meritocracy. Prestige and status are greatly-valued in the meritocracy. Appearance is more important than ever in the media age. In the old days, Princeton blue bloods populated the CIA and accepted a life of anonymous service. These days service is out of fashion, and second-raters go for the spook jobs. The argument that we failed to anticipate 9/11 is a fair one, but the failure reflects the desertion of government service by the media critics themselves, the intelligent and privileged. They have better things to do. Plame left the CIA herself–for a lucrative book deal.
Plame didn't leave the CIA, she was outed, which left her only the option of staying as a glorified clerk. She was also in the CIA a very long time anyway. Doesn't she have the same right to tell her story as Tom DeLay? Or is it only the scoundrels who should get book deals?
There was a book on Vietnam called, "The Best and The Brightest," which tried to explain how the best minds could have been so blindsided by such a quagimire. Let's not forget the Bay of Pigs fiasco, either. It's entirely possible that Plame simply doesn't do well in interviews. Many of us suffer from the "Morning After Syndrome," where the morning after an event we think of the perfect thing we WISH we'd have said.
"She went to a second-rate school, as I recall."
From Wikipedia:
[Valerie Plame] graduated in 1981 from Lower Moreland High School, in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, and in 1985 from Pennsylvania State University with a B.A. in advertising.[10] While a student at Penn State, she worked for the business division of its student newspaper, The Daily Collegian.[10] By 1991, Plame earned two Master's degrees, from the London School of Economics and Political Science and the College of Europe (Collège d'Europe), in Bruges, Belgium, respectively.[2][10] In addition to English, she speaks French, German, and Greek.[10]
I am usually a supporter of yours, Phil, but in this case, you are wrong about her education. LSE is among the most selective universities in the UK, and the College of Europe is also "highly selective".
Your point about meritocrisy is unclear (maybe you are tired), but I'll take a stab at trying to make sense of it. On first blush, I would instinctively feel more comfortable with the CIA being run by blueblood, Waspy types from Yale (they originally came from Yale not Princeton, which was itself considered second-rate in the 40s), but when I think about it a little more deeply, those guys also got everything wrong as well (despite their elite education). They got Vietnam wrong, they got Central America wrong, they got the Soviet Union wrong. And they were Anglophiles to boot, which meant that they had that Anglophile romantic attachment to the British empire, that I find revolting. (Im not anti-English–Im just anti-empire, and the fact is that England produced all of its most sophisticated literature and philosophy before 1800, when it had yet to bring its empire to full fruition).
Thanks to James Bond we expect spies to be much more than they really are and to do more than they really do. The CIA has very good equipment, but they aren't really very good, they never have been, I doubt they ever will be. Secrets don't last long in the United States, Americans are compulsive talkers who tell their life stories to complete strangers at the drop of a hat. Not really good spy material.
As to Ms. Plame.
"Undercover" people are just that. Valerie Plame was expected to "pass" as a "non-spy", somebody you would talk to freely. Her job was not to "speak well and express complex ideas", her job was to put people at ease and draw information from them. She was apparently quite good at this. She was a valuable asset. Outing her was like willfully destroying any other valuable piece of government property. A crime, a federal crime.
Along with that, dozens (hundreds?) of people around the world are going to have their careers ruined because their employers will discover that they had had lunch with Ms. Plame. Some of them may find their lives in jeopardy too.
I really don't get the business about the schools. Very bright people who don't come from well to do families usually have to go to land grant schools. Penn State, for example. A lot of Jewish people who ended up doing great things had to be content with NYU. As to working for the CIA, government service is part of social mobility. "Officer and a Gentleman". America is supposed to be about social mobility, nu? Ms. Plame was probably recruited at Penn State and groomed by the agency because as "Madrid" says, LSE is top, top.
More on spies.
If you want to examine a really good spy who has been outed, have a look at Vladimir Putin.
Putin put on a little crucifix for his first meeting with our beloved leader and talked to him about Jesus and had Bush eating out of his hand. That is a spy.
I didn't see the interview but yr post comes across as a bit condescending.
Indeed, you must've been tired, Phil. It's "Joseph" Wilson. Robert Wilson is the playwright.
Philip, this post is a bit damaging to your credibility. Do you really think coming out of the "Ivy" schools is that much better from some of the great public universities in this country, though it's been proven the biggest difference is the contacts one gets while in those Ivy schools?
Would you express a complex thought with Katie Couric?
I'll fourth that–really a pathetic post.
A confession: I first started reading Phil's stuff in the Observer because he would–I thought, comically–always somehow work in the fact that he had gone to school off the red line, just shy of the Porter (or was it the Alewife?) stop. No matter the subject, always and without fail the H-bomb was dropped, conveying more about Phil's insecurity than his pedigree.
And here he is again, talking about "second-rate schools." And glossing over the fact that the CIA originally was merely an arm of Brown Brothers-Harriman, elitist because its beneficiaries were, in short, the elite. (Dave Seaton, the Dulles brothers both went to Princeton (as did George Kennan), but Bill Casey, like Allen Dulles's nephew, Avery, went to Fordham, which Phil would probably sniff at).
For real pedigree you have to turn to people like the Bundy brothers, McGeorge and William, both Brahmins through their mother, although dad, Harvey Hollister, was from Michigan. Groton, Yale, Skull & Bones (like Richard Bissell)–these bright boys engineered the immensely profitable war in Indochina, amongst others. 56,000 Americans died in those paddies, yes, but the war was a victory for Grumman and Bell helicopter and all the other merchants of death. The Bundy boys, along with Bob Strange McNamara (Berkeley), did their alchemical work well, transmogrifying blood into profits.
As for discounting Plame, rather difficult to do, doncha think, since much of her work in counter-proliferation remains classified. Your read on her is laughable at best–what do you think, she wants to come across as Hillary, that is, as highly unsympathetic (even with Hillary's newly-minted bizarro giggle, the smart-girl equivalent of Bush's rancher denims)?
Corn and Isikoff both wrote that Plame was working on the aluminum tube issue ("…no mere analyst or paper-pusher at the CIA. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration: searching out intelligence on Iraqi WMDs…") but both being, transparently, mockingbirds, nothing they say can be trusted. The full story remains classified, not to protect the U.S., but (as always) to avoid embarrassment to those same "elites" who are doing such a good job of leading America to its gotterdammerung (sorry, no umlauts on this blog).
I'll have to jump on this bandwagon. Very poor piece Phil. Since Plame is not a jew I'm surprised you treated her with such disdain.
She's a foot soldier, not an analyst. He skills are deception, coercion, assassination and overthrowing of countries. Ivy leaguers tend to not get their hand dirty, instead, they are the ones telling the "second rate schoolers" to take care of those jobs.
WM
Believe me over the years some Ivy Leaguers have gotten their hands very, very dirty. There are people that go to those schools who are just as bad and mean as they come.
Valery Plame is very good looking. Somebody that listens well, for sure. Somebody people like to talk to.
She is probably an excellent spy. Spying is not about stealing the formula for the a-bomb or Coca Cola or shooting Dr. No, it's often just about having lunch with certain people that don't even know that their little scrap of information is an important piece in a puzzle. Just sitting with those people and letting them talk, like you were doing them a favor to listen. The pieces of the puzzle begin to fit together.
It's a huge job of collection, assembling and analysis, every part is important. Plame is where the rubber meets the road.
And speaking of non-Ivy's, here's a list of Nobel laureates from CCNY:
Julius Axelrod 1933 – 1970 Nobel laureate in Medicine
Kenneth Arrow 1940 – 1972 Nobel laureate in Economics
Robert J. Aumann 1950 – 2005 Nobel laureate in Economics
Herbert Hauptman 1937 – 1985 Nobel laureate in Chemistry
Robert Hofstadter 1935 – 1961 Nobel laureate in Physics
Jerome Karle 1937 – 1985 Nobel laureate in Chemistry
Arthur Kornberg 1937 – 1959 Nobel laureate in Medicine
Leon M. Lederman 1943 – 1988 Nobel laureate in Physics
Arno Penzias 1954 – 1978 Nobel laureate in Physics
Other alumni include Daniel Bell, Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Colin Powell (?), STANLEY KUBRICK, Paddy Chayevsky, Gershwin, Beh Shahn, Jackie Mason, Mario Puzo, Bernard Malamud, Jonas Salk, MICHIO KAKU, Andrew Grove, and the great Red Holzman.
(Capitals mine, for veneration)
Not bad for a crummy, free, third-rate school.
But the Fogg does have the best Van Gogh self-portrait, I'll give it that.
¡Olé Oarwell!
Phil-
Keep in mind that white folk usually don't possess the pathological need to verbalize, as is so prevalent among your team.
Particularly when they feel challenged or possibly insecure.
Did you really go to Harvard? Wow.
Best regards
Class and rank are mostly fluctuating variables in American politics – They mean mostly zero – For example, Bush 43 is not "old money," but Bush 41 was – Even though 43's money is technically older.
In 1999 Bush bought a pig farm and called it ranch and the media fell for it. Even though it is not a ranch and he has no horses. Meanwhile Gore had his farm his whole life, but the media said he was raised in a hotel, which was half true – but misleading.
Dubya joined a chruch in 1999 and the started some wars and a good portion of American Christians think Bush is a Christian and Carter is not.
Yada yada yada
Also – Bush was well aware of the neocons and their agenda when he worked for his Dad in 1990 – He hired them with that in mind
But the whole world blames the neocons because they fell for the Bush construct.
"Also – Bush was well aware of the neocons and their agenda when he worked for his Dad in 1990 – He hired them with that in mind"
The Republican elders including George Schultz had to scour the field for a fresh face after the self destruct of Newt's revolution, taking the party with him in order for them to prop up as the presidential hopeful. W, having a blank slate (at least in the negative catagory), was the perfect candidate. Schultz and gang, being in the Reagan's "save from communism at any cost" war of Latin America, was not taking on any of the kindler gentler America rubbish spouted by W.
Great post here on how to think about organized diaspora lobbying within the United States:
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/armenians_cubans_and_aipac.php
I guess it doesn't realy matter much now what her credentials were because sociopathic Rethuglicans destroyed her career and as was pointed out, put in jeopardy most everyone who worked with her in any capacity.