Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam has a fascinating story in Vanity Fair this month about President Bush’s attempt to depict himself as a leader whose unpopular decisions will ultimately be vindicated by history. The piece is made all the more poignant by the fact that Halberstam died in a car crash in April at the age of 73:

Ironically, it is the president himself, a man notoriously careless about, indeed almost indifferent to, the intellectual underpinnings of his actions, who has come to trumpet loudest his close scrutiny of the lessons of the past. Though, before, he tended to boast about making critical decisions based on instinct and religious faith, he now talks more and more about historical mandates. Usually he does this in the broadest—and vaguest—sense: History teaches us … We know from history … History shows us. In one of his speaking appearances in March 2006, in Cleveland, I counted four references to history, and what it meant for today, as if he had had dinner the night before with Arnold Toynbee, or at the very least Barbara Tuchman, and then gone home for a few hours to read his Gibbon.

I am deeply suspicious of these presidential seminars. We have, after all, come to know George Bush fairly well by now, and many of us have come to feel—not only because of what he says, but also because of the sheer cockiness in how he says it—that he has a tendency to decide what he wants to do first, and only then leaves it to his staff to look for intellectual justification. Many of us have always sensed a deep and visceral anti-intellectual streak in the president, that there was a great chip on his shoulder, and that the burden of the fancy schools he attended—Andover and Yale—and even simply being a member of the Bush family were too much for him. It was as if he needed not only to escape but also to put down those of his peers who had been more successful. From that mind-set, I think, came his rather unattractive habit of bestowing nicknames, most of them unflattering, on the people around him, to remind them that he was in charge, that despite their greater achievements they still worked for him.

[...]Despite his recent conversion to history, the president probably still believes, deep down, as do many of his admirers, that the righteous, religious vision he brings to geopolitics is a source of strength—almost as if the less he knows about the issues the better and the truer his decision-making will be. Around any president, all the time, are men and women with different agendas, who compete for his time and attention with messy, conflicting versions of events and complicated facts that seem all too often to contradict one another. With their hard-won experience the people from the State Department and the C.I.A. and even, on occasion, the armed forces tend to be cautious and short on certitude. They are the kind of people whose advice his father often took, but who in the son’s view use their knowledge and experience merely to limit a president’s ability to act. How much easier and cleaner to make decisions in consultation with a higher authority.

Therefore, when I hear the president cite history so casually, an alarm goes off. Those who know history best tend to be tempered by it. They rarely refer to it so sweepingly and with such complete confidence. They know that it is the most mischievous of mistresses and that it touts sure things about as regularly as the tip sheets at the local track. Its most important lessons sometimes come cloaked in bitter irony. By no means does it march in a straight line toward the desired result, and the good guys do not always win. Occasionally it is like a sport with upsets, in which the weak and small defeat the great and mighty—take, for instance, the American revolutionaries vanquishing the British Army, or the Vietnamese Communists, with their limited hardware, stalemating the mighty American Army.

The full story is here.

A moving story in yesterday’s New York Times about one of their reporters, Khalid Hassan, who was murdered in Baghdad last week:

At 8:45 a.m. on Friday, Khalid W. Hassan was navigating his car out of one of Baghdad’s most dangerous neighborhoods on his way to work as a reporter and interpreter at The New York Times bureau here. “My area is blocked,” he wrote in a cellphone text message to the paper’s newsroom manager. “I am trying to find a way out.”

Within 45 minutes, about two miles from his home, Mr. Hassan, whose Palestinian family migrated to Iraq in 1948, was forced to the side of the road by gunmen in a black Mercedes. The gunmen opened fire with automatic rifles, pitting Mr. Hassan’s rundown Kia car with bullets. At least one struck him in the upper body, but failed to kill him.

Mr. Hassan, a heavyset, pranksterish 23-year-old, loved the new world of cellphones, online computers and downloadable videos ushered in by the American occupation of Iraq, so much so that he spent a quarter of his monthly salary recently on another new phone. Slumped in his seat, he called his mother, then his father, at work as a school caretaker, telling them he had been shot. “I’m O.K., Mom,” he said.

An off-duty policeman in a gasoline station line told Mr. Hassan’s father what came next. A second car with gunmen, an Opel Vectra, seeing Mr. Hassan on his cellphone, pulled forward and fired two fatal shots into Mr. Hassan’s head and neck.

The rest of the story is extremely interesting, highlighting the plight of ordinary people trying to survive in Baghdad and the complexity of sectarian violence there. More here.

If there was one assignment I particularly hated as a trainee reporter it was vox pops. The problem was that you could never really convey a person’s personality with a tiny headshot and a tightly edited quote. But this video from Anorak goes to show that in the YouTube age, you can’t beat a bit of vox pops to show what people are really like. Welcome to Britain.

From this morning’s New York Sun:

British poet Rupert Brooke once designated a corner of a foreign field as “forever England,” but after a heated discussion last night, the traffic and transportation committee of Community Board 2 unanimously voted not to recommend co-naming a portion of Greenwich Avenue in the West Village “Little Britain.

The resolution will now go before the full board.

Sean Kavanagh-Dowsett, an owner of three British-themed businesses on Greenwich Avenue, including the restaurants Tea & Sympathy and A Salt & Battery, had made an impassioned case in favor of the naming. He said there is another British-style business on the block and still another likely coming. He also stressed the significant support from local businesses and residents. A stack of local letters, as well as an online petition of nearly 6,000 names in support (57% of which were from New York) was presented.

He also said naming the street Little Britain would draw business to the area, and help protect the charm of the neighborhood. “There’s a bit of an English feel to the neighborhood, Mr. Kavanagh-Dowsett, told The New York Sun.

But members of the committee expressed a few doubts. One committee member, Ian Dutton, pointed out that New York is already named for a part of Britain. Sean Sweeney, who is also on the committee, asked about the role of Virgin Atlantic Airways in the campaign to co-name the street. Mr. Kavanagh-Dowsett said he approached the airline, not vice versa, and that some of the plans for what has become the Virgin empire were first drawn up on a napkin at the White Horse Tavern on nearby Hudson Street.

More here.

The proposal to rename a part of Greenwich Village “Little Britain” goes before Community Board 2 tonight. I’ve said before that I hope the idea is rejected. And I still stand by that opinion. If the area was truly British, then maybe. But it’s not.

The marketing company behind the Campaign for Little Britain claims it “was conceived to help a small, quirky, local business survive the onslaught of homogeneous global brands who are causing three to four fold increases in rent in the area, that inevitably only they can afford.”

Isn’t it a little ironic then, that the main sponsor of the campaign is none other than Virgin Atlantic, a homogeneous global brand that recently pissed off a swathe of New Yorkers with a tacky citywide advertising campaign that pretended the company knew and cared about the nuances of New York’s various neighborhoods? As one Lower East Side resident told the New York Times ”Wow, that makes me feel dirty — what a way to whore out my neighborhood.”

The sentiment could just as easily be applied to the Campaign for Little Britain, which whores out a few square blocks of Greenwich Village for the sake of a faux British tea room.