The speech we would have heard if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin couldn't return from the moon

50 years ago today, July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin embarked on the first-ever trip to the moon, where they would land days later, on July 20, before returning to earth on July 24.

Because they were risking their lives, a speech had to be prepared for President Nixon to read in the event they got stuck on the moon with no way back.

Here's the full speech, written by future New York Times columnist William Safire. The last sentence ... oh man! 😢

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by the nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

(Photo credit: Universal History Archive/UIG/SH. Photo via Variety.)

What did Hillary Clinton hide?

Ann Althouse (my mom) observes:

The evidence is limited because she limited it, and I'm forced to infer that she is hiding some very important things — important enough that it was worth destroying the evidence. You know, President Nixon did not destroy the Watergate Tapes. He considered it though . . .

Can Jon Huntsman save the Republican Party?

Jon Huntsman, the former Governor of Utah and U.S. Ambassador to China, never seemed to have a chance at the 2012 Republican nomination. But I hope that Republican pols are considering whether this was unfortunate in retrospect. Huntsman is only 52 years old, and if he ran again, he could benefit from the Republican Party's preference for nominating someone who has already run. (The lone recent exception was Bush in 2000; the rule has held up with every other non-incumbent Republican nominee going back to Nixon in 1968.)

Maybe the 2012 election will force Republicans to realize what Democrats have understood for a while: primaries are less about choosing the ideal candidate for the party's base, than about choosing a candidate who's going to appeal to swing voters in swing states. Huntsman, like President Obama, seems like the kind of person you'd expect to be the president of the United States in the year 2012 and beyond. Mitt Romney seems less like a modern-day president — or anyone the average American would expect to meet in their day-to-day lives — and more like someone who could have played the dad on the Donna Reed Show. (See the update at 8:58 in this live-blog from 2008.)

Is there more entitlement spending under Democratic or Republican presidents?

Republicans, according to this editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

This is in keeping with the basic facts of the time: Notwithstanding the criticisms of "big government" that emanated from their Oval Offices from time to time, the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush presided over especially lavish expansions of the American entitlement state. Irrespective of the reputations and the rhetoric of the Democratic and Republican parties today, the empirical correspondence between Republican presidencies and turbocharged entitlement expenditures should underscore the unsettling truth that both political parties have, on the whole, been working together in an often unspoken consensus to fuel the explosion of entitlement spending.

Do addicts have self-control?

This book review about "addiction and freedom" is worth reading, and it's a good companion to the book review about medicating children that I blogged recently. The book is Addiction: A Disorder of Choice by Gene M. Heyman, a Harvard psychologist. The reviewer is a psychiatrist, Sally Satel.

Both this review and the one about children illuminate the same fallacy, which I'd paraphrase like this:

1. A certain behavioral/mental problem -- call it "X" -- is associated with brain activity in ways that can be observed and predicted.  

2. Therefore, the solution to "X" must take the form of psychiatric/medical assistance; the solution cannot be individual free choice. (Indeed, even invoking that concept may be detrimental.)

There's a lot that could be said about why this is a fallacy and why it's so common. The question of free will lurks under the surface of the discussion, though Satel understandably sticks to talking about science, policy, and history, and hardly touches the philosophical problem. Here's what she says about the fallacy:

[M]uch of the public, and a dismaying number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists, mistakenly believe that if a behavior is influenced by genes or mediated by the brain then the actor cannot choose his actions. While every behavior has a biological correlate (and a genetic contribution) and every experience that changes behavior does so by changing the brain, the critical question, Heyman wisely says, is not whether brain changes occur (they do) but whether these changes block the influence of the factors that support self-control. . . .

Heyman uses the phenomenon of addiction to make a profound point about neuroscientific progress in general. "The implication is that as we learn more about a disorder," he writes, "the more likely it is to be thought of as a disease" -- and, consequently, as a condition whose course cannot be modified by its foreseeable consequences. Indeed, reconciling advances in brain science with their meaning for personal, legal, and civic notions of agency and responsibility will be one of our next major cultural projects.

Progress in brain science will also force a confrontation with the fact that the common interpretation of pathological behavior is often informed by a primitive form of dualism. If biological roots can be found, then we reflexively think “disease”—as in the obliteration of choice-making ability. The mechanical “brain disease” rhetoric is a symptom of the growing tendency to privilege neuroscientific explanations as the most authentic way of understanding human behavior.

In addition to logically explaining why that's a fallacy, Satel also says that the people who came up with the idea that addiction is a disease and is incompatible with self-control were motivated by political and financial concerns (and probably emotional impulses):

In fairness, the scientists who forged the brain disease concept had good intentions. By placing addiction on equal footing with more conventional medical disorders, they sought to create an image of the addict as a hapless victim of his own wayward neurochemistry. They hoped this would inspire companies and politicians to allocate more funding for treatment. Also, by emphasizing dramatic scientific advances, such as brain imaging techniques, and applying them to addiction, they hoped researchers might reap more financial support for their work. Finally, promoting the idea of addiction as a brain disease would rehabilitate the addict’s public image from that of a criminal who deserves punishment into a sympathetic figure who deserves treatment.

Those concerns may be admirable. But having good intentions behind your account of reality hardly ensures that your account will be accurate.

Finally, I had never heard of this incident (which begins the review), and I'm surprised it isn't better-known:

In 1970, high-grade heroin and opium flooded Southeast Asia. Military physicians in Vietnam estimated that between 10 percent and 25 percent of enlisted Army men were addicted to narcotics. Deaths from overdosing soared. In May 1971, the crisis exploded on the front page of The New York Times: “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” Spurred by fears that newly discharged veterans would ignite an outbreak of heroin use in American cities, President Richard Nixon commanded the military to begin drug testing. In June, the White House announced that no soldier would be allowed to board the plane home unless he passed a urine test. Those who failed could go to an Army-sponsored detoxification program before they were re-tested.

The plan worked. Most GIs stopped using narcotics as word of the new directive spread and the vast minority who were detained produced clean samples when given a second chance. More startlingly, only 12 percent of soldiers who were dependent on opiate narcotics in Vietnam became re-addicted to heroin at some point in the three years after their return to the states. “This surprising rate of recovery even when re-exposed to narcotic drugs,” said the epidemiologist who collected the data, “ran counter to the conventional wisdom that heroin is a drug which causes addicts to suffer intolerable craving that rapidly leads to re-addiction if re-exposed to the drug.”

Satel says our ignorance of this real-life experiment represents a case of "generational amnesia." It's easy to keep believing in a dogma if you don't look at any of the evidence that goes against it.

(Photo by Daniel Modell, a.k.a. dM.nyc.)

Robert Strange McNamara dies at 93.

Robert McNamara died yesterday. Just a few weeks ago, we watched The Fog of War, the Errol Morris documentary -- easily one of the three best documentaries I've ever seen — about McNamara's involvement in World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War.

Unsurprisingly, the movie is an indictment of the United States' conduct in the Vietnam War. What is surprising is that this is accomplished almost entirely through McNamara's own voice — occasionally supplemented with historical recordings of U.S. officials, but without a single sentence from an anti-war or even neutral commentator. One of the most memorable moments is when McNamara — staring directly into the camera, as he does throughout the movie — strongly suggests that he would appropriately be called a "war criminal."

On the other hand, one of the most frustrating moments is his response at the very end of the film to questions about why he didn't speak out against the war. He cryptically says that he had good reasons and that his decision would make sense to people who know everything he knows. In contrast with the rest of the movie, we hear him talking while seeing him in profile, somberly driving his car, rather than making eye contact with us.

Mickey Kaus wrote, in this 1995 review of McNamara's memoir:

I met McNamara once, at a conference. He was self-effacing, and breathtakingly concise. I understand the charm. But there is something wrong with a culture in which a McNamara is feted for his "guts" while George McGovern and Gene McCarthy, who opposed McNamara's mistakes, are regarded as nobodies. In one of the uglier passages of In Retrospect, McNamara sneers at the antiwar protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967. If they had been more "disciplined" and "Gandhi-like," he says, "they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down." Instead they were "troublemakers" who "threw mud balls" and "even unzipped [soldiers'] flies." This is contrition? Shouldn't McNamara be admitting that the mudball-throwers, after all, had been right?

McNamara's book confirms what he had often hinted: that he came to believe the war was unwinnable as early as 1965. At that point, as Paul Hendrickson of The Washington Post has noted, 1,335 Americans had been killed. Why didn't McNamara quit and speak out? He claims that would have been "a violation of my oath to uphold the Constitution." Cabinet officials who quit must do it "silently," he says, citing as a model Dean Acheson, who resigned from FDR's administration when he "found himself unable to accept the president's monetary policy."

Monetary policy! By the time McNamara left the Pentagon for the World Bank, another 14,000 Americans were dead. [If I remember correctly from the movie, McNamara states that the figure is around 25,000. — JAC] And of course the war didn't stop then. President Nixon continued it for five more years, although McNamara now says Nixon should have withdrawn. Surely whatever strictures prevented McNamara from criticizing Johnson wouldn't have prevented him from speaking out against Nixon. Even if he hadn't yet decided on withdrawal, simply giving voice to his doubts would have had an impact. Yet he didn't do it, while another 42,000 died. As McNamara puts it, defending his infamous quantitative approach to military success, "things you can count, you ought to count. Loss of life is one...."

And why, suddenly, having maintained his costly silence for so long, does McNamara break it now? Because, he says, he has "grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders." Please. Wouldn't the cynicism have been less if he'd spoken up earlier, maybe even at the risk of losing his prestigious World Bank job? Let me offer an alternative--more cynical--explanation for McNamara's strange sense of timing, one that fairly leaps off the pages of his book: he is acting now to protect his posthumous reputation.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., in a gushing back-cover blurb for In Retrospect, asks: "Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong?" An answer to this question does come readily to mind, or should have come readily to Schlesinger's mind: Robert Kennedy, who admitted his own culpability when breaking with Johnson over Vietnam in 1968. But Kennedy showed his courage when it made a difference in the lives of others. McNamara only found his when the one left to save was himself.

ADDED: Joel Achenbach points out this passage from Paul Hendrickson's book on McNamara:

At the time Robert McNamara seems most likely to have lost his faith in the military aspect of the war, in the late fall of 1965, after the battle of the Ia Drang Valley, the official U.S. casualty figures stood at 1,335 dead and 6,131 wounded. That is a total of 7,466. Almost two years later, in early October 1967 -- which was approximately the time when LBJ began actively setting out to remove McNamara from the Pentagon, now convinced his once-awesome defense secretary had gone "dovish" on him -- the casualty figures had hit 100,269. Which is to say that nearly 93,000 people were wounded or met their death or were reported missing in the period of the defense secretary's disbelief.

There it was, the essential contradiction of a public man's life, cold and glinting on the legal page, acknowledged now by the man himself: that he had ceased believing in the military efficacy of a war that he had stayed on to prosecute anyway.

History for Hillary Clinton supporters

As I said in my previous post on the idea that the media was sexist against Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, I still haven't gotten to what bothers me the most about that charge. So here it is.

A lot of the criticisms are based on the fact that some of the comments made about her have been superficial and trivial: her speaking voice, her display of cleavage.

I admit that when I see references to her legs or the fact that she wears pant suits, my reaction is: hey, that's sexist and unfair. So I'm not saying I approve of all this. (As I said before, though, it doesn't bother me for people to talk about her voice or cleavage.)

But it doesn't make sense to go from saying that the media's criticisms of her have been superficial ... to saying that Hillary in particular was hurt by sexism.

A presidential race is a zero-sum game. That means that anything that hurts one candidate has to help the other candidate. Therefore, if something "hurts" all the candidates, it really hurts none of them. If you're saying she was hurt by sexism, that's implying not just that there were unfair criticisms of her, but that they were criticisms of a sort that male candidates don't have to withstand.

Well, I agree that there have been some unfair criticisms of her. But to imply that male candidates aren't treated just as unfairly, or that the discussion of them isn't just as superficial? I mean, maybe you could believe that ... if you had never observed how any other presidential candidate has ever been treated.

I have some news for Clinton supporters who think that superficial criticisms of her are evidence of sexism:

PRESIDENTIAL RACES ARE UNFAIR

Media Focus on Candidates' Personal Quirks

Trivialities, Superficialities Discussed More Than Policy Issues

Barack Obama is criticized for not wearing an American flag pin on his lapel. His exotic name is a major topic of discussion among serious commentators.

John Edwards is ridiculed for seeming to spend too much time and money on his appearance.

Mitt Romney is criticized for being too polished and robotic, and his own staffers worry that his hair is "too perfect."

Bill Richardson receives little media attention despite having a more impressive resume than Clinton, Edwards, or Obama, and you have to wonder if the fact that he's not as conventionally attractive as those three candidates has something to do with it.

Before he officially enters the race, the media focuses on Fred Thompson more than any of his Republican rivals even though he doesn't have especially interesting ideas or accomplishments. The discussion in the media largely focuses on his perceived "sex appeal" and masculinity.

Dennis Kucinich is mocked as an elf-like creature whose wife is too attractive for him. While he might be too far left to have a real chance at becoming president, you have to wonder if he'd receive more favorable coverage if he had equally liberal positions but were a suave 6'4" man with a baritone voice.

John Kerry is criticized more for his stodgy demeanor than his policy stances — which the media don't report on because they're too busy mocking his rhetorically clumsy but substantively defensible statement that "I voted for it [one particular Iraq appropriations bill] before I voted against it [a related but significantly different bill]." It becomes common to talk about his horse face.

After Howard Dean loses the Iowa caucus in 2004, the media never report on him without mentioning that he let out an ill-considered yelp (which is always referred to as "the Dean scream") in an understandable effort to rally his supporters after a shocking defeat.

Dick Gephardt is routinely derided for lacking a "rock star" quality even though he's actually one of the most passionate speakers among the 2004 candidates.

Al Gore is criticized for seeming "stiff" and "wooden," for sighing heavily in a debate, for wearing "earth tones," and for walking over toward Bush in an awkward manner. He receives an enormous amount of attention for aggressively kissing his wife Tipper at the Democratic Convention -- a stunt clearly intended to broadcast his male sexuality.

George W. Bush is regularly mocked for stumbling over his words.

Bill Clinton is regularly mocked as fat.

George H.W. Bush is famously called a "wimp" on the cover of Newsweek magazine and is criticized for asking for a "splash" of coffee.

John F. Kennedy has a better tan and shave than Richard Nixon in a debate. This is widely seen as being a major factor in Kennedy's victory.

Presidential races are superficial and unfair. That's true whether the candidate is a Democratic or a Republican. It's true whether the candidate is a man or a woman. And it's unlikely to change in the near future.

(Photo of Edwards from the Edwards campaign.)

Secret surface

Everyone's talking about this shot of Obama with Fareed Zakaria's new book, The Post-American World, in hand.

I was glad to see this, since I read this distillation of the book the other day, and it's the kind of thing I want my president to be reading.

I hope to do a post about Zakaria's geopolitical thesis soon, but first I have to point out that Obama looks so cool! He looks like his own Secret Service agent.

"Ah, yes, Obama's appeal is superficial. McCain might have less charisma, but he's the more serious candidate."

I wonder what percentage of the people who have that response supported Ronald Reagan, who would not have ended up being President if he hadn't started out as a dashing Hollywood actor.

I actually think McCain is decidedly less serious than Obama when it comes to domestic and foreign policy. But that's a whole other blog post.

There's a tendency to assume that if a candidate gets high marks in some superficial area, then surely this must be offset by deficiencies in more substantive areas. As Matthew Yglesias has observed, people seem to subconsciously adhere to the "Law of Conservation of Virtues." The supermodel must be dumb. The smartest kid in the class must wear dorky glasses and have no social skills. The candidate who gives inspiring speeches must be weak on policy.

Once you put it like that, it becomes transparently irrational: of course Obama's charisma is independent of his strengths and weaknesses on the merits.

But I would go further. The coolness factor matters. Coolness, likability, charisma, and even sex appeal are legitimate reasons to vote for someone for president.

A candidate who's more personally appealing will be more likely to hold onto popularity as president, which will tend to make them more effective at enacting their agenda. If the president is more appealing for admittedly superficial reasons, that should apply abroad too, and we should want the world to have a positive attitude toward us (all other things being equal). [UPDATE: Here's some statistical and anecdotal evidence that Obamamania is sweeping Europe. And he's "becoming an international phenomenon."] Whether the president is liked by a lot of people matters, and someone who's suave and attractive has an advantage when it comes to being well-liked.

We're not supposed to admit that this does matter. We're supposed to believe that "what the voters really care about are the issues." And so while the pundits are willing to analyze relatively clear-cut demographic factors (race, gender, age), you rarely hear them talk about the more nebulous quality of attractiveness, even when it's obviously important.

When Tommy Thompson (my former governor) ran for the Republican nomination, the few commentators who bothered to even talk about him would struggle to articulate what exactly was the problem with his foundering campaign. Based on sheer substance and experience, he could have been a very strong candidate. But all you had to do is watch him for 10 seconds in one of the debates, and you'd see -- and hear -- why he couldn't make it.

My mom has taken a lot of criticism for breaking this taboo and talking about the candidates' more superficial qualities. People can be surprisingly willing to vehemently insist that something doesn't matter at all, when it clearly does matter.

Here was her reaction while watching one of the Democratic debates (she hasn't endorsed any candidate):

You know, Obama can be a rather cool character. Midway through the debate, I found myself practicing an impersonation of him. Not his speech, but his clasped hands on the table, his head turned sideways, chin up, lips pursed in a grin, his eyes looking down onto the hapless soul who imagines she could unsettle him in the slightest degree.

It's become a cliche to lament that the media is obsessed with trivialities in the presidential race and should focus on the issues instead. But if they would talk more about the actual importance of appearance, this would have the twofold advantage of being more honest and more enticing to readers/viewers. If you can get more people to pay attention to a presidential election, that's a good thing for democracy.

I know there's a huge gender angle to this -- I plan to do a whole other post about Hillary Clinton in this context. [UPDATE: Here it is.] But, of course, most candidates are men, and most commentators are men, and men tend to be hesitant to talk about the attractiveness of other men. And female commentators have obvious reasons for not publicly gushing over attractive men.

But face it: the results of the democratic process over the years are clear. JFK, Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush -- each had his own distinctive sex appeal. Can anyone say with a straight face that these men were chosen for the job purely based on their resumes and policy positions?

Nixon, Carter, and George H.W. Bush were, of course, weaker in this regard. I wasn't in existence during the Nixon or Carter administrations, and I had pretty minimal political consciousness for the Bush administration, but I have to imagine that these presidents' relative unattractiveness -- not just in the physical sense, but also demeanor, particularly in Bush Sr.'s case -- played to their weaknesses. Notice that Carter and Bush were both defeated by more charismatic challengers.

As I write this, I almost feel embarrassed to be making an argument about something that should be so uncontroversial. But since even references to Hillary Clinton's voice and attire are routinely presented as evidence of sexism, I think it's worth pointing out that the candidates' looks, voice, style, and charisma always matter.

Everyone talks about Obama's skin color, but what about McCain's ghostly, albino-like skin?

My theory of this general election is that if you have one candidate who's 47, 6'1", and has a full head of dark hair, and another candidate who's 72, 5'7", and bald with thin white hair, it's predictable who will win. I wish this didn't matter at all and everyone just made perfectly rational decisions based on substantive issues. And we won't know if this factor ends up being decisive. But I think we'll know that it mattered.

UPDATE: My mom links to this post and looks at other presidential candidates who, like Obama holding The Post-American World, have worn sunglasses.

UPDATE: At least McCain is doing what he can in the sex appeal department.