Autism Blog: President Bush and His Opposition to a Thimerosal Ban

My wife (Julie Lorenzen) has started work on a new blog. It is the Autism Blog. She has a good start and I think this will be a successful blog.

A few days ago, she ventured into presidential politics with her post, President Bush and His Opposition to a Thimerosal Ban. I am reproducing it here with permission:

Yesterday I wrote that the reason why President Bush is vetoing the FY 2008 Bill is because he wants the ban on thimerosal removed from the bill. This concerns the ASA, some scientists, parents and many others because the mercury in thimerosal is believed to be a trigger of autism. Near the end of my post I asked what the safer alternatives to thimerosal were in regards to preserving vaccines. My thanks goes out to the two readers who addressed my question. Please see their comments to my previous post if you would like to know what they wrote.

I once read somewhere that a possible reason as to why President Bush is against the ban is because his father, Past U.S. President H.W. Bush, may have a business connection to the company that manufactures thimerosal . However, I was unsuccessful in my search to find a website to back this claim up. I'm not about spreading false rumors about our U.S. President nor am I into bashing President Bush. But, if anyone can find a credible website discussing this claim, I might write about it in a future post. Thank you for your interest in this topic.

A Presidential Doughface

As a writing exercise I often place pictures of important or famous people up on the screen in my room and ask students to provide a caption or write something about the picture. After a few minutes students share their ideas and then I share one of mine which leads into a quick lesson in history. Sometimes this type of activity can be used to review a topic, introduce something new, or simply move a unit along with additional content.

The last time I presented students with this image they came up with some interesting responses:

*My belly hurts. I should have left that last taco in the bag and thrown it away.

*When are they going to invent a real tie that doesn’t look like a bow?

*This man is important. He looks really smart. Maybe he’s a writer or a great thinker. I wish the picture was in color.

*The picture looks like it is from a long time ago. I didn’t know they had hair gel back then. Interesting!

These are the better ones, of course. I left out the silly, off the mark, or inappropriate ones that can be the result of this type of exercise, but you can see that some students can really get into the moment when analyzing photographs.

Next we discussed names and labels…words we use to identify individuals or groups of people. We talked about how those names aren’t always meant to be nice. We also talked about how some names stick simply because it’s easier to remember a group of people by a certain name in order to remember what they stood for….groups like tree huggers, Bible thumpers, and even educrats.

These types of monikers are not simply for the 20th and 21st century. Certain groups throughout history have claimed remembrance through their name such as the Know- Nothings, muckrakers, and don’t forget the hawks and doves.

Do you know who the gentleman is in my image?

It is President Franklin Pierce, our fourteenth president and the tidbit of knowledge I share with students is Franklin Pierce was a doughface.

What’s a doughface?

During the 1850s a doughface was a Northern politician who had Southern sympathies.
President Pierce hailed from New Hampshire, one of our northern most states, so I’m sure it could be a little surprising that he might have southern sympathies, but he did. It wasn’t that he held slaves or thought slavery was a correct action, however, he did believe it was up to each state to decide its own course especially as new states entered the Union. He was against sectionalism and was not a fan of the abolitionist movement. President Pierce felt that compromise was an integral part of the Federal System.

The United States was experiencing growth and expansion, but a negative impact was growing tension between states who held slaves and those that did not. Legislators from the South wanted an equal number of slave and free states in order to balance power. They feared a higher number of free states because slavery could then be abolished through a Congressional vote.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act brought the question of slavery in the West to the forefront of national debate. In 1854 Congressman Stephen A. Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraka Act which would reverse the Missiouri Compromise of 1820 and allow settlers in Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide on their own if they would allow slavery or not. Reluctantly President Pierce gave his approval of the bill because many of his appointments were still pending in Congress and he wanted the Gadsden Purchase Treaty
to be approved as well.

Many Northerners disliked the way Pierce compromised with Southern viewpoints. Many of the discussions and debates on the floor of Congress were so emotionally charged that fistfights broke out and Charles Sumner, a U.S. Senator was so severely beaten it took him three years to recover.

The Kansas Nebraska Act eventually led to a mini civil war in those territories, and Kansas became “bleeding Kansas”. The Democratic party split, the Republican party was created, and the Whig party became nonexistent.

President Pierce is not the only president to be called a doughface during the time leading up the Civil War. President Buchanan and President Fillmore have also enjoyed the label.

Reagan Presidential Library

I read a shocking article today - the Reagan Presidential Library was unable to properly account for 80,000 of their 100,000 items! The article outlines some major issues at the library and definitely something we need to watch, not just at this library, but at all our presidential libraries.

A New Election Method?

As the 2008 Presidential election heats up, we have been seeing all kinds of proposals – from the previously mentioned change to allow foreign-born citizens to run to changes to the electoral college system. The 2000 election especially brought the workings of the electoral college to our collective attention. A question I ask my modern history students is should this system be changed? I usually get a mixed response – some for it and others who think it should stay. I think those opinions could be generalized to the entire US population (for those who actually know how it works!).

A recent HNN article by Alexander Keyssar talks not about tossing the system, but of modifying it (although at the end, he makes it clear he wouldn’t mind completely tossing it either). Keyssar starts with the recent efforts of California Republicans to modify their system from the current “winner-take-all” system to a by district apportionment. Currently, whichever candidate wins the overall popular vote in California gets all their electoral votes. Democrats, who expect to win California in 2008, are violently opposing the movement. This is the way almost all states work their votes. The new method would distribute votes by which districts the candidate won (the number of districts is equal to the number of votes, if you weren’t aware – it goes with how many Congressmen you get). So if Candidate A won 10 districts, Candidate B won 40 districts and Candidate C won 5 districts (and yes, California really has 55 electoral votes), they’d each get that many electoral votes rather than Candidate B getting all 55. As a note, there are only two states currently using this method (Nebraska and Maine) while the rest use the “winner-take-all” system most of us are familiar with. You’ll note that I included three parties in my hypothetical situation. A major hurdle for any third-party candidate has always been the “winner-take-all” system, which makes it very difficult for a third-party candidate to get enough votes to get any electoral votes, if they manage to garner a portion of the popular vote.

Where did the “winner-take-all” method come from? Because it isn’t in the Constitution (you can check if you don’t believe me or Keyssar). It was actually a partisan decision according to Keyssar. At first, all the states used different methods:
In some, the legislatures appointed electors by themselves (without holding any popular election); others developed a winner-take-all system in which they held "general ticket" elections, granting the winning candidate all of the state's electoral votes; still others allocated the electors by district. Numerous states changed systems from one election to the next.

Keyssar reports that the most progressive thinkers favored the district plan (so pretty much that same one now being discussed in California), including Thomas Jefferson. But alas enter partisan politics:
Jefferson proved more than willing to let partisan advantage trump what "would be best." As the 1800 election approached, his Republican supporters in Virginia, mindful that their opponents in the Federalist Party had won five of the state's electoral votes in 1796, replaced the district system with "winner take all" -- thereby guaranteeing Jefferson all of Virginia's electoral votes. (Massachusetts, the home of Jefferson's rival, John Adams, retaliated by entrusting the selection of electors to the Federalist-dominated legislature.) A few years later, Jefferson, as president, backed away from supporting a constitutional amendment mandating a district system throughout the nation -- a strategy that would have eliminated the potential unfairness of having a district approach in some states and the winner-take-all system in others -- because "winner take all" appeared to be benefiting his party.

Indeed, "winner take all" became, and endured as, the primary method of choosing electors precisely because of partisan dynamics. Regardless of the broader democratic principles at stake, dominant parties in nearly all individual states had embraced the short-run advantages of "winner take all" by 1830; since then, few states have had an appetite for dividing up their electoral votes while everyone else was using "winner take all" -- in part because doing so would appear to lessen the state's clout in national politics.

There have been national movements to go to a district plan, but opponents of the plan have managed to keep it from getting the necessary 2/3 majority in both houses to make amendment status.

So what does this mean for us – the electorate? According to Keyssar, it means we have a system we never voted on and as we’ve seen recently (we all remember 2000) has some serious flaws. Since there is no constitutional framework, any state can change their election method and, of course, the largest states (like California) are tempting targets. The issue, he says, shouldn’t be what one party wants in one state, but a national commitment to make a change to fix the system:
If the Republicans truly believe that it would be fairer and more democratic to choose electors by district, then instead of introducing such plans piecemeal in states where they would benefit, they should introduce a constitutional amendment to create a national district system -- one that would apply to Texas and South Carolina as well as California. And if the Democrats truly want to prevent procedural "power grabs," they should sign on to such a proposal -- or offer a "proportional plan" or (better yet) actively back a national popular election that would eliminate the electoral college altogether.

He ends with the thought that if the parties committed to “fixing” the system, “they might even succeed in dissipating a bit of the cynicism that the electorate so frequently expresses about political parties that seem far more interested in their own welfare than the fate of the nation.”

Poll: Which actor was the best at portraying JFK in a movie?

The poll has closed for the question, "Which actor was the best at portraying JFK in a movie?" There was a tie at the top between Cliff Robertson (PT 109) and Bruce Greenwood (Thirteen Days) with 35% of the vote. There was a tie for third place between James Franciscus (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy) and William Petersen (The Rat Pack) at 15% each.

Thanks to all who participated.

LBJ and the CMC

I find it interesting that often “state secrets” are kept even from high ranking officials of state – like the Vice President. We’ve all heard the story of Truman and the atomic bomb. An HNN article from this week explores how little Lyndon Johnson (LBJ), Kennedy’s Vice President, knew about the actual happenings of the Cuban Missile Crisis (CMC).
The article starts with the criticism that has been levied against LBJ – that he should have been better able to cope with Vietnam because of the lessons of the CMC, but the authors (Holland and Egan) bring up this question:
But what if Johnson was not permitted to learn the right lessons, which would have had to begin with an accurate understanding of what had happened? What if Johnson was purposely denied important knowledge? What if Johnson thought he had drawn the right lessons, but actually was trying to replicate a manufactured illusion?

The authors tell us that four members of ExComm were excluded from the final secret deal that ended the CMC – namely the US pulling missiles out of Turkey in return of the USSR pulling missiles out of Cuba. One of these members was LBJ. The other three (Taylor, Dillion, and McCone) were for political reasons. By why LBJ – JFK’s own Vice President?
…John Kennedy also decided to shut out Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat and the second-highest officeholder in the land. There was a tinge of irony in LBJ’s exclusion. Like any consummate politician, Johnson valued one quality—loyalty—above all else, and since he expected it, he gave it in return. Still, not even LBJ’s repeated demonstrations of fealty had been sufficient to overcome the Kennedys’ distrust, and in Robert Kennedy’s case, intense and ineradicable dislike.

So what happened?
In the days following the discovery of the Soviet missiles on October 15, Johnson had played an ambiguous, even contradictory, role at the ExComm meetings—that is, when he chose to speak at all. During the first day of deliberations, the vice president expressed the view that the offensive elements of the Soviet buildup were intolerable for domestic political reasons. As the ExComm’s discussions turned to the crucial question of whether to impose a blockade or take more violent action, however, LBJ went missing in action. Because the administration did not want to signal Moscow that its missiles had been sighted in Cuba, it was decided to keep LBJ on the political hustings as if nothing were untoward.

When Johnson finally made it back to Washington on October 21, the president directed DCI McCone to bring the vice president up to speed on the controversial decision to impose a blockade. Johnson initially expressed disagreement with the policy that had been developed. But McCone had also briefed Dwight Eisenhower that morning, and when the DCI informed Johnson that the former president opposed a surprise attack, and accepted the military handicap that came with imposition of a blockade, Johnson reluctantly changed his position.

Johnson attended every ExComm session thereafter, though his return hardly seemed to matter. Johnson only began to assert himself during the critical meeting on Saturday afternoon, October 27. Overall, LBJ seemed to favor a negotiated solution to the crisis, though he also came down on both sides of the key issue of linkage. At one point he criticized Robert McNamara’s stiff opposition to a missile swap, arguing that the Jupiter missiles were “not worth a damn” anyway. Minutes later, LBJ likened an outright trade to appeasement, asserting that it would be tantamount to dismantling the containment edifice Washington had painstakingly built.

There was every reason to believe, from the totality of what Johnson said, that he would have genuinely supported Kennedy’s gambit: to make the trade, so long as the Soviets agreed to keep it secret. But when the president convened a rump ExComm session on October 27, after the regular one broke up and just before RFK’s evening meeting with the Soviet ambassador, Johnson was purposefully excluded from the trusted inner circle. Thus, LBJ was left unaware of the genuine settlement terms that were hastily accepted by Nikita Khrushchev the next day.

Since the actual agreement was never known at the time, the CMC became a fabled stand-off and Kennedy a hero and after his assassination, no one was willing to contest the story. Stanford Professor Barton Bernstein pointed out in 1992 that this myth made it impossible for Johnson to live up to JFK’s image. While LBJ knew some of the story was false, there were parts that he did not even know, making it difficult for him to work with.

Holland and Egan state that even a better knowledge of the CMC probably wouldn’t have changed LBJ’s Vietnam policy:
Being privy to the truth about the missile crisis settlement might not have altered materially Johnson’s decisions about Vietnam. Had Johnson had a more accurate understanding of the missile crisis’ true history, he still would have had to contend with the false analogies and “lessons” that were rife in public. But more knowledge would have indisputably served him better than what he was allowed to know.

The Boy Biographer

I found a fun article in Prologue about Herbert Hoover's boy biographer. William Marsh, Jr., a 11 year old boy from Connecticut, decided to start his own printing business and wrote a short biography of Herbert Hoover. Billy Marsh found an old printing press his father had bought for 50 cents and managed to get it running. Already quite the businessman, Billy decided to write a book on the President! He wasn't thinking small, that was for sure! His Our President, Herbert Hoover can be summed up as:
Billy condensed the President's life into 44 pages of fifth-grade language and injected sermons about clean living and moral advice. He tended to digress but always returned to Hoover. Billy found Hoover fascinating and did not blame him for the Great Depression. To him the President was the greatest man in the world, belonging in the company of his favorites Washington, Lincoln, and Coolidge.

Marsh wrote the biography in six months, making rapid progress during a four-week period when he had time off from school. His research included newspapers, Hoover's radio addresses, and information from his parents. The book was illustrated with old woodcuts scrounged from the local print shop, most of them demonstrating a moral lesson.

The chronology of Marsh's book is loose. He rambles, writes colloquially, and skips over many aspects of Hoover's career. Considering the diatribes being written about Hoover by adult journalists in 1930, however, the boy's intellectual honesty is refreshing.

Billy Marsh, unlike most Americans at the time, liked Herbert Hoover and that caused interesting issues when the book became public:
The chief executive was pleased to learn about the 11-year-old's flattering biography from a front-page article in the New York Herald Tribune. He told the Tribune he was eager to obtain a copy. Once the Tribune hit the newsstands, the jaded literary community in New York and Washington sizzled. The biography seemed to strike a chord because it differed dramatically from the debunking of Hoover that dominated the press.

The author of this article writes that, "If the youth did not have a future in biography, he certainly had one in advertising. " Billy Marsh mailed out his book and arranged meetings and offered to do publicity for the book. The book hit the publishing world as something new and something they definitely wanted:
Learning of the book, the manager of the Doubleday, Doran Company tracked the head of the editorial department to his golf club and planned to beat the competition by signing a contract. At this point the manager had not even read the book, only newspaper excerpts. He stopped at the Herald Tribune office to borrow a copy, which he scanned as he sped toward New Milford. When he reached New Milford it was late, and Billy had gone to bed. His parents awakened him, and he signed the contract while still in his pajamas. The publisher's version was an exact facsimile, with the addition of a title page and a postscript to the original preface. Four other publishers arrived too late. Later it was learned Marsh himself had tipped off Doubleday. This opportunistic boy did not need a literary agent. Doubleday revved up its presses and rushed out a mass edition on July 11, 1930, the same day the Marsh boys met the President.

What did Billy think of the President?
Asked his impressions of the President, Billy replied, "He is just as nice as I said he was in my book."

The boys described Lou Henry Hoover in glowing terms. "She is very pretty and she wears the new style dresses, quite long," Billy said.

Billy Marsh went on to publish a second book in 1932, urging voters to reelect Hoover. This book didn't get the same attention as the first, though.

Jimmy Carter talks about his UFO Sighting

He saw a UFO but he does not think it was space aliens. "It was unidentified as far as we were concerned, but I think it's impossible in my opinion, some people disagree, to have space people from other planets or other stars to come to us," said Carter. "I don't think that's possible."

The video below has more details. The quality is low but it is viewable.