4. British Views of the Far East Situation
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Some of the dark shadows of approaching war were lifted by a report of the Japanese Ambassador to London that a recent conciliatory speech of Australian Premier Menzies had been given as a gesture of friendship from Great Britain to Japan. [327] Furthermore, Admiral Nomura in Washington conversed with the British Ambassador, who told him that neither
[321] I, 382, 383.
[322] I, 381.
[323] I, 384, 385.
[324] I, 386.
[325] I, 387.
[326] I, 388.
[327] I, 389.
Page 52
the United States or England desired war in the Pacific, but that in case of difficulty the United States would back up England. According to the British Ambassador's interpretation of recent newspaper stories, the situation in the Far East was somewhat better than it had been, although it was still dangerous. [328]
65. British Counter Intelligence Against the Japanese [329]
The British were exercising censorship of foreign messages at various points in their worldwide communication net. Code messages passing from Havana to Bombay were seized by the British censor in India; [330] a Japanese steamship was stopped by an armed British vessel in the Gulf of Persia, and all mail was removed for inspection; [331] all mail carried on vessels touching at Hongkong was examined by the British authorities, which caused the Japanese to route vessels carrying important mail away from this port. [332]
JAPANESE-DUTCH RELATIONS
66. Japanese Threats Against the Netherlands East Indies
Rumors of approaching war between America and Japan were affecting all Japanese relations in the South Pacific, especially in the Netherlands East Indies where strenuous efforts were being made to keep out Japanese fishermen. [333] A conversation between a Japanese diplomat and an official of the Netherlands East Indies demonstrated some interesting views on both sides regarding the relative strength of the Japanese and the United States navies.
HOFSTRAATEN: "No, you are badly mistaken there. I am satisfied from what I have heard from American naval officers that they could sink the Japanese navy within six weeks."
ISIZAWA: "On the contrary, I have been told by Japanese navy men that in the event of an attack our ships could sink the entire American fleet within two weeks." [334]
Japan seemed to be ready to take severe measures against the Netherlands East Indies, if the occasion arose. [335] Unfortunately, the Japanese had succeeded in getting access to secret documents and messages sent from the Netherlands Ministry in Bangkok to Dutch authorities. A request was sent to Tokyo for a Dutch language translator who could take advantage of this situation, [336] but very shortly thereafter, a secret investigation by the Netherlands government disclosed that a native employee, who possessed keys for all the safes, had been in contact with the Japanese Military Attaché. Since the Japanese had learned of this investigation from a telegram of the British Attaché in Bangkok, it may be presumed that Japan was able to decipher some of the British codes. [337]
Though documentary evidence is not available at the present writing, it is possible that the contents of the original message disclosing this leak in the Netherlands Indies government was revealed to proper authorities at Bangkok by United States officials so that proper measures could be taken to prevent damaging revelations.
[328] I, 390.
[329] I, 391.
[330] I, 392.
[331] I, 393.
[332] I, 394.
[333] I, 398.
[334] I, 395.
[335] Ibid.
[336] I, 396.
[337] I, 397.
Page 53
67. Dutch Counter Intelligence Against the Japanese
As early as January 10, 1941, the Japanese in the Netherlands East Indies were complaining to Tokyo that the Dutch authorities were intensifying their surveillance of Japanese nationals. For this reason, secret documents concerning Japanese plans for arousing the natives and Chinese residents against Dutch authorities were burned to avert their discovery. [338]
The Dutch authorities were exercising very close censorship over the mail of all foreign residents, and Tokyo was warned to send all secret correspondence by official couriers. [339] Since Japanese diplomats in the Netherlands East Indies were engaged in intelligence work, [340] they urged that only civilian couriers be used instead of military men, so as to avoid all misunderstandings with Dutch Authorities. This plea was occasioned by the fact that many Japanese entering Netherlands East Indies as diplomatic couriers were military men in disguise, who were easily spotted by Dutch counter espionage authorities. [341]
68. Japanese-Dutch East Indies Negotiations
Repercussions from Mr. Matsuoka's visit to Berlin and Rome were felt even in the Netherlands East Indies, where Japanese representatives claimed that the refusal of the Dutch to grant them trade advantages was influenced by the British and American governments. The Netherlands government insisted, however, that its decision was based on its own policy of not sending anything to Japan which could then be forwarded to Germany. All Japanese efforts to persuade the Dutch that their goods would not be reshipped to Europe seemed to be unavailing. This was especially true after the visit of Mr. Matsuoka to the Axis capitol. [342]
Japanese diplomatic dispatches from Batavia were quite frank in their appraisal of this situation. Not disguising the fact that all verbal arguments had been of little avail and that, therefore, a new approach would have to be made if their proposal was to be realized, Japanese agents reported that Mr. Matsuoka's trip to Berlin had blocked their negotiations to buy more essential products from the Netherlands East Indies. [343]
Agreeing that the Dutch had no intention of blockading Japan, but were determined to see to it that no supplies of military value would reach Germany from the Netherlands East Indies, Japanese negotiators informed Tokyo that the situation was approaching a crisis. There seemed to be little doubt that the Japanese were planning to seize the Indies eventually, but negotiations were being carried on to ensure a constant stream of supplies until a favorable opportunity arose for military conquest of this area. [344]
JAPANESE-THAI RELATIONS
The Japanese were exerting constant pressure on Thailand to assure themselves of closer economic relations with this country. According to the Japanese, the British were ready to invade Thailand at any time that Japanese-Thaiese cooperation became too great. [345] Japan was somewhat disturbed when Thailand resumed diplomatic relations with Russia, and
[338] I, 399.
[339] I, 400-402.
[340] I, 403, 404.
[341] I, 405, 406.
[342] I, 407-410.
[343] Ibid.
[344] I, 411, 412.
[345] I, 413.
Page 54
Tokyo did not hesitate to inform its diplomats that Japanese-Thailand relations should tend toward promoting Thailand's reliance on Japan. [346] Propaganda broadcasts were transmitted to this area from Tokyo, [347] and though Japan desired a radio beacon for military purposes, Japanese diplomats explained to the Thaiese that it was needed for the safety of the Thailand-Japan Air Service. [348]
In mid-April Japan's pressure on Thailand became intensified. The Thaiese were informed that Japan expected them to accept her offers of assistance; there could be no mistaking Japanese intentions for this area. [349]
The remaining chapters of this study, with their appendices, will appear in subsequent volumes which will be published in the near future for the information of higher authorities who need to know.
[346] I, 414.
[347] I, 415.
[348] I, 416.
[349] I, 417.
Page A-1
APPENDIX I
Preliminary Phase
(February 14, 1941- May 12, 1941)
PART A—THE HULL-NOMURA CONVERSATIONS
No. 1
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
February 15, 1941
# 85.
On the 14th at noon I presented President Roosevelt with my credentials and at the same time with Former Ambassador HORINOUCHI's release from office. In my separate numbers 86 [a] and 87 [b] I describe my own formal statements at the presentation ceremony together with the President's formal responses.
Secretary HULL sat with us during the ceremony and the President assumed a very attentive attitude. We talked of a number of things, in the course of which he referred to the situation in the United States, speaking as follows:
"At present Japanese-American relations are following a gradually worsening path. Incidents in China have mounted to over a hundred and troubles between Japan and the United States are inciting American public opinion. Furthermore, the newspapers of both countries are printing at random inciting articles. This is a matter to be worried about. Secretary HULL and I are endeavoring to quiet public opinion but you will remember the case of the sinking of the Maine long ago and only four years ago happened the Panay incident. I am awfully worried because I fear that through some untoward incident the worst may happen. Japan is gradually penetrating further and further south toward the Hainan Island, the Spratley Islands, French Indo-China and Thai. Now you know that in consideration of the 3-power pact Japan is not free to act independently. I fear that Germany and Italy are going to bring force to bear on you."
In response I said: "Well, it is my intention to do my utmost to prevent a rupture in Japanese-American relations. My personal opinion is that Japan and the United States ought not quarrel with each other but rather when the time comes let both countries have the grave mission of bringing about world peace."
The President replied: "I strongly agree with you and will do my best to improve relations between Japan and the United States, and whenever necessary at any time I will be glad to have interviews with you."
[a] Plain text.
[b] Not available.
Trans. 2-19-41
Page A-2
No. 2
FROM: Washington (Morishima)
TO: Tokyo
January 13, 1941
# 21. (Your special message # 2.) [a]
I see by the papers that WAKASUGI, formerly Consul General in New York, is to accompany Ambassador NOMURA as an adviser and is coming to Washington. No doubt you have been considering what official status he is to be given in his capacity as an adviser. I might say, however, that if he is to be called merely a special official, it would be impossible for him to ask for diplomatic privileges in the United States and, furthermore, he would experience inconvenience in his more important activity and in contacting members of the Congress and the press, to say nothing of the State Department officials. Consequently, he would not be able to accomplish the mission for which he is to be especially sent. I wonder how it would be if the precedent set by Minister NISHI, when he was made a Special Ambassador to Soviet Russia, is followed and WAKASUGI, by special consideration, could be given the combined status of Minister and Counselor. I might also mention, for your reference in this connection, that among the diplomats here, especially in the case of those from Italy, -----, Mexico, Brazil, and Great Britain, there are in each office two Commercial Attaches, in addition to the Ambassador, and one of these two Attaches is given the status of Minister.
[a] Not available.
Trans. 1-15-41
No. 3
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
17 February 1941
# 93.
(We are unable to decipher your message # 67a from the 18th letter on. Please retransmit.)
Regarding Wakasugi's rating, besides the situation explained in my message # 216, Great Britain has given one of her Counselors a Minister's ranking, and also shortly she will add one more Minister. (Minister to Canada is to be transferred to Canberra as High Commissioner.)
It has also been reported that U.S. will promote her Counselor at London to a Minister, and the Legal Adviser to the newly appointed Ambassador, KOHEN (Cohen?) will also be given the Minister's ranking.
In view of the above and in consideration of the performance of his duties in relation to the State Department and the diplomatic corps in general, please decide on Wakasugi's diplomatic rank and reply as soon as possible.
[a] Re appointment of Col. Iwakuro as Aide to Military Attaché at Washington.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
[b] Re status of Wakasugi.
Trans. 3-5-41
Page A-3
No. 4
FROM: Washington (Japanese Ambassador)
TO: London
February 14, 1941
# 6. Message from Tokyo # 68. (Part 1 of 3)
In my recent discussions in the Diet this Foreign Minister in order to persuade the United States to reflect have frankly expressed our attitude and determination and endeavor to make it clear that our national strength is not exhausted. Now when you take office, will you please begin with the President and inform both the officials and people of the United States of the following points. Please endeavor to impress them upon your listeners:
1. It is my mission to rescue our civilization from chaos and to bring peace and prosperity to the Pacific in which both Japan and America are interested. In the accomplishment of this task our two countries ought to cooperate and pull together. Since the new year, compromises between our two countries have been less in evidence. Unfortunately the American officials and people refuse to understand our real intention; or else they mistakenly deem that our aims are at odds with their own welfare. This is a very grave and dangerous hallucination. We have an uncheckable determination to oppose any country whose design it is to thwart us. Now, I hear that the Americans think that among our people there are those who secretly despise the Tri-Partite Treaty. (Of course, all countries have their dissenters.) The Americans hope that, through the prolongation of the China trouble, we will be shorn of our national strength and that if they take a strong attitude toward us they can break the solidarity of our people and bring us to our knees. At least, I hear there are such Americans, and if it is true, this sort of mistake may bring about most regrettable results.
2. It is true that our national strength is to be a certain extent exhausted; however, it is not as much so as American propaganda would indicate. Further, it is the character of our people to resent pressure from the outside and to combat it savagely. By adding to our troubles, losses and our setbacks in war, the Americans should know that they are only consolidating the morale of our folk. Now, I have seen many Americans who have traveled among us Japanese and, judging from them, if the United States was in the same predicament, the same thing would result. The Americans ought to know what result will come from following this sort of policy. On the other hand, our people must not forget that by departing from reason and acting emotionally, making compromises with people who meet them half way with sympathy and kindness, they often get further than in any other way. Now, perhaps those who are the leaders in the United States may be this sort of people.
Trans. 2-17-41
No. 4A
FROM: Washington (Japanese Ambassador)
TO: London
February 14, 1941
# 6. Message from Tokyo # 68. (Part 2 of 3) [a]
3. Do you know that in all Japan there is not one man who actually wants to fight the United States? Unfortunately, however, if trouble of any sort arises between Japan and the United States, the Soviet is sure to work directly upon the American people and try to instigate them to war. America has never started a war willfully on her own.
Page A-4
4. What does the United States have to gain by fighting Japan? In all the United States, I will wager there is not one who desires to defeat Japan and see the race of Yamato shattered but, on the other hand, if there be a man who thinks of that even in his wildest dreams, let him know once and for all that this cannot be done. Now let's suppose for a moment that they did defeat us and forced upon us another Versailles Treaty. It would not take us any thirty years to throw off that yoke. No, our deliverance would come swiftly. Behold the resurgence of the German Reich! Japan has a government such as no country on this earth possesses. By the eternal glory of our emperor, the King of Heaven, we have overcome every vicissitude through which we have passed in years gone by. If we were to go down now, swifter than that of Germany would be our restoration and like lightening would come our vengeance and in this there is no element of doubt. The imperial family is the fountainhead from whence issues the uniform stream of our national existence. We have a peerless nation, totally and completely incomprehensible to all outsiders. In sum, if Japan and the United States, who have always been friends, now break, it will be a tragedy for both and the civilization of the world will be cast into chaos. Under these circumstances I can tell you one thing; the United States ought to ------ absolutely must ----- think this matter through.
[a] DoD comment: Part 2, above, of Mr. Matsuoka's message was not available to the original historian. Through recent research, the message has been located. Such instances will occur throughout this history from time to time; suffix "A" will so indicate.
Trans. 2-17-41
No. 5
FROM: Washington (Japanese Ambassador)
TO: London
February 14, 1941
# 6. Message from Tokyo # 68. (Part 3 of 3).
5. If Japan and the United States fight, Soviet Russia is sure to move; and suppose that Japan is completely defeated as the United States hopes that she will be, then Soviet Russia will grab the whole of China and Bolshevize her, and on the wave of her success, she will Bolshevize the greater part of Asia. I wonder if the United States presages such an eventuality? If, in one chance out of a million, Japan should go under, a fearful situation would prevail in the Far East.
6. The foreign policy of Imperial Japan is based on a logic unique in the world. Its utmost concern is the security of world peace and prosperity. She had not, in the least, any intention of attacking the United States. Therefore, that the United States is intensely working towards the building up of her defenses is a phenomenon beyond our comprehension. Japan and the United States should never oppose each other, but cooperate. Recent words and actions of political leaders in the United States have been extremely provocative, and it would seem that their object is to build a defense sufficiently powerful to enable the United States to act as a police official for the whole world. Such a thing is indeed not only regrettable for the sake of peace in the Pacific, but also unbecoming of the United States. Instead of interfering often with the right to livelihood enjoyed by the other powers, the United States, I believe, should awaken to the responsibilities that are hers by right and that she has towards world peace, and in the spirit of mutual concession, should devote all her energy to the solution of the impending crisis and to the promotion of the well-being of humanity.
Relay to London.
Trans. 2-17-41
Page A-5
No. 6
The Ambassador in Japan (Grew) to the Secretary of State.
(Paraphrase)
3
TOKYO, Jan 27, 1941—6 p.m.
(Received January 27—6:38 a.m.)
(125)
A member of the Embassy was told by my ----- colleague that from many quarters, including a Japanese one, he had heard that a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor was planned by the Japanese military forces, in case of "trouble" between Japan and the United States; that the attack would involve the use of all the Japanese military facilities. My colleague said that he was prompted to pass this on because it had come to him from many sources, although the plan seemed fantastic.
Grew
711.94/1935: Telegram
(S.D. II, P. 133)
No. 7
FROM: Honolulu (Okuda)
TO: Tokyo (Gaimudaijin) [a]
February 15, 1941
# 027.
Chief of Office Routing.
To Chief of Fifth Branch, Section 3 of the General Staff and Captain Ogawa:
WOTUTO requested on the 14th that the information noted below be forwarded to you. I find it difficult to relay the information contained in paragraph 1, but I do so anyway.
1. Indications seem to be that the U.S. has decided to declare war on Japan within the next three weeks.
2. Definite advice will be available twenty-four hours in advance of such a declaration by the U.S.
3. The U.S. plans to cut Japanese trade lanes to South America.
[a] To foreign ministry.
Trans. 2-18-41
Page A-6
No. 8
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo (Gaimudaijin)
February 19, 1941
# 095
At the time of my assuming my post the newspapers of this country manifested a spirit of welcoming me personally as one who has a large number of friends in this country and as being well acquainted with conditions here, but they are all agreed in saying that as far as the future of Japanese-American relations is concerned there is nothing to do but wait for future developments. The newspapers have also reported the President's press conference of the 11th (see my special intelligence report) and activities of the Japanese Navy in the French Indo China area; taking the attitude that Japanese-American relations still permit of no optimism.
To cite some of the more noteworthy newspapers articles, the New York Herald Tribune of the 12th pointed out the great significance of the statement by President Roosevelt on the day of Ambassador Nomura's assumption of his post, to the effect that there will be no change in the established policy of assistance to Britain, even though the U.S. should become involved in war in the Far East; and asserted that even though Ambassador Nomura will likely begin conversations with the U.S. government officials looking to Japanese-American negotiations, unless the Japanese are prepared to make greater concessions than they are generally anticipated now, there is very little hope of any success. It also set forth that the Ambassador personally is friendly to the U.S., that during his office as Foreign Minister he had worked for the renewal of the trade treaty, and that he will likely renew his efforts for the conclusion of a treaty.
The Evening Star on the 12th related how the German and Italian diplomatic representatives in Washington turned out to welcome the Ambassador at the station on his arrival, suggesting that Germany and Italy expect the new Ambassador to bring about some joint diplomatic moves with the German-Italian Axis in Washington. It was asserted that local diplomatic circles will be watching with interest to see what conciliatory moves will be made by Ambassador Nomura in trying to enlist American good-will for the improvement of Japanese-American relations. It was further stated that when it comes to the actual problems, expressions of intentions and personal relationships, mean nothing, but that friendship of the U.S. for Japan will depend upon Japan's actions in the Far East and South Pacific, and that the new Ambassador knows well what the conditions are for bringing about closer relations between Japan and America.
Trans. 2-26-41
No. 9
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo (Gaimudaijin)
February 19, 1941
# 96.
Although it has been but a few days since I assumed my post, I wish to report my general observations.
(1) There are definite indications of American-British solidarity and identity of feelings Germany in the present war. Although no tangible proof can be given, the general sentiment in America against Germany appears to be as strong as, if not stronger, than it was during the world war.
Page A-7
(2) Since the Tripartite Treaty, there is a definite feeling among the people here that Japan is their real enemy, and also that, coinciding with the German spring offensive, Japan will embark on her southward advance and that Japan is using the Thailand-French Indo-China situation as an excuse to prepare herself for an attack on Singapore.
(3) There is much talk of America's backing England, Australia, New Zealand, and Dutch Indies against Japan's southward advance.
(4) In the event of American-British joint naval action, many capital ships will be needed in the Pacific and many smaller ships in the Atlantic. Therefore, if the situation demands it, British capital ships will take over the Pacific area and American destroyers will take over the Atlantic area. On the basis of this argument, there are some who believe that in exchange for the aid of latest type British capital ships, America will furnish destroyers to assist England. This is a very important question, deserving our utmost consideration.
(5) Some are bold enough to say that, in a year or two, the American fleet at Hawaii will make a westward advance, claiming that Japan's southward advance is part of her national plan and for that reason America cannot maintain a neutral attitude. Should Britain fall, the Americans will add whatever remains of the British fleet to her own fleet to attack Japan.
Please communicate the contents of this message to the War Minister and the Navy Minister.
Trans. 2-21-41
No. 10
February 20, 1941
Japan Must Expand Nomura Says
Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura, new Japanese Ambassador, said yesterday that his country must expand southward, that he hopes the expansion can be by peaceful economic means but that he cannot promise Japan will not use force to carry out the program.
Describing Japan as a nation bent only on preserving the peace, the Ambassador declared that war can be avoided between the United States and Japan unless the initiative comes from the American side.
"Japan will expand to the south peacefully and economically," he said in Japanese to an interpreter at his first press conference since arriving in Washington February 11.
Doesn't Expect War With U.S.
Under the present economic bloc system Japan can no longer get goods from far places. Naturally she has to get them nearby.
"I cannot say with absolute definiteness whether Japan will have to resort to force to secure these necessities," he added.
He did not expect war with the United States, he said, unless this country makes the first move.
Six feet in height and a veteran of more than three decades in his country's navy, the Ambassador took great delight in his rejoinders to questions fired by a group of forty reporters.
Though he has a good command of the English language, Nomura spoke through an interpreter, yesterday, apparently to give himself more time to prepare careful answers to all questions.
Page A-8
The picture he painted of Japan's activities and of her "new order" for Asia was one of a peaceful nation intent on removing trade barriers.
Atmosphere Not so Good
Persistently reporters attempted to get him to express some of Japan's objections to recent American and British military movements in the Far East, to admit a danger of war with the United States, to voice Japan's objections to fortification of the far Pacific Island of Guam and to disclose the degree of cooperation existing between Japan and Germany.
None of these attempts was successful.
Whenever a barbed question was asked the Ambassador and his interpreter would laugh uproariously, slap thighs and prepare an answer.
The closest that Nomura came to saying that Japanese-American relations were something less than rosy was a statement at the start, that he found the "atmosphere in Washington not quite so good as I expected when I was in Japan. I thought it would not be so bad".
"Do you believe there is danger of war between the United States and Japan," Nomura was asked.
"Personally I believe that there should not be war, and there will not be war," he replied. "But of course that is my personal opinion."
"Can there be any commercial equality in Asia in view of Japan's program?" was the next question.
"I believe that eventually, when peace and normal conditions are restored in China, it will be quite possible to restore normal policies and guarantees to United States commerce," Nomura said.
"Of course at present there are military controls. Without these controls it would be impossible to carry out our operations. It is inevitable that there will be certain cases of impairing third-power interests. But this is merely temporary."
Queried on Guam
Asked if Japan objected to strengthening by the United States of Guam and Samoa, voted yesterday by the house, Nomura replied:
"Of course from the Japanese side we don't like to see an air or naval base so near our territory, especially a base of a great power like the United States."
"But we cannot interfere."
Asking if he had any objection to British reinforcements arriving at Singapore, the Japanese envoy replied similarly: "Singapore doesn't concern us. It is a British base."
Asked whether he had brought with him any concrete suggestions for improving relations, Nomura replied that "I can not answer that."
"Do you think Japan will have to expand her territory some more in order to establish this new order?" the Ambassador was asked.
"No," he replied—in English.
Regarding current activities in Indo-China and Thailand he said,
"Indo-China and Thailand have special reference to the China war. The main object of Japan there is the economic, or exchange of goods." He explained that his country is interested chiefly in making sure that no war supplies get into China from Indo-China or Thailand."
Nomura was asked, "Will Japan extend her relations with the Axis?"
"There is a treaty and Japan will stick to it," he said.
If the United States goes to war against Germany would Japan declare war on the United States?" was the next stickler.
Page A-9 http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
"I don't think the United States will declare war against Germany, so the situation you refer to will not arise." Nomura answered.
"Does the treaty obligate Japan to go to war against the United States if the United States goes to war against Germany?" the envoy was asked.
"That is a question of treaty interpretation; I will refrain from going into it," he said cautiously.
Then he volunteered the following:
"When Japan entered upon the Axis treaty it was her intention to preserve the peace. Her motives were entirely peaceful. We wanted to avoid war with the United States."
Asked for a comment on a statement by Undersecretary of State Welles, Tuesday, that Japan should express her intention in deeds not words the Japanese Ambassador said:
"That remark by Mr. Welles may mean some criticism against Japanese or some other country. Japan sincerely tries to carry out her words."
The press conference broke up when a reporter asked whether he believed "the Roosevelt Administration is trying to get the United States into a war."
"I'll ask you," said Admiral Nomura, laughing heartily.
Nomura was characterized recently by President Roosevelt as an old friend.
(Washington Post)—(20 February 1941: Columns 1 & 2)
No. 11
FROM: Tokyo
TO: Washington
February 27, 1941
# 100.
On the 27th the German Ambassador called on me and said that according to a telegram from the German Ambassador in Washington, you said, in response to a question put to you at the press conference regarding Japan's stand in the event of German-American war, that "it involved the question of the application of the Tripartite Agreement."
As the German Ambassador wishes to verify the above phrase let me know the facts relative to it.
Trans. 3-3-41
No. 12
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
February 28, 1941
# 122. Re your # 100. [a]
At a press interview on February 19th, they cornered me with queries as to whether Japan would join the war in case the United States does. I explained, "That is a matter of the Tripartite Pact, and I do not wish to discuss it. Originally this Pact was concluded with peaceful intentions toward the United States."
Page A-10
For your information I am sending you the clipping (Washington Post) by separate wire (# 123). [b]
[a] The German Amb. in Tokyo desires verification of your statement in Washington re the question of application of the Tripartite Agreement being involved in the event of a U.S.-German war.)
[b] See No. 13.
Trans. 3-4-41
No. 13
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
March 2, 1941
# 123.
"If the United States goes to war against Germany, would Japan declare war on the United States," was the next stickler. "I don't think the United States will declare war against Germany, so the situation you refer to will not arise," NOMURA answered. "Does the treaty obligate Japan to go to war against the United States if the United States goes to war against Germany," the Envoy was asked. "That is a question—I will refrain from going into it," he said cautiously. Then he volunteered the following: "When Japan entered upon the Axis Treaty it was her intention to preserve the peace. Her motives were entirely peaceful. We wanted to avoid war with the United States."
Note: This is request message. It was referred to in No. 14 (Tokyo to Washington # 107) in which Matsuoka warns Nomura to be extremely careful in his replies to such questions and to keep pace with the Foreign Office.
Trans. 3-11-41
No. 14
FROM: Tokyo (Matsuoka)
TO: Washington
March 4, 1941
# 107.
Re your # 123 [a].
Though Your Excellency is sufficiently aware of the necessity of being extremely cautious in your replies to questions as to whether Japan will enter the conflict in the event the United States attacks Germany, I am gradually clarifying this in the affirmative at the Plenary Budget Sessions of the Lower House. As far as your manner of answering questions is concerned, henceforth, when questions are put to you on successive occasions, please keep pace with me. Please transmit your wire and this one to Germany.
[a] No. 13.
Trans. 3-8-41
Page A-11
No. 15
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
March 8, 1941
# 136.
(Part 1 of 2) Strictly Secret.
To be handled in Government Code.
Today, the 8th, at HULL's residence, we had a secret conversation all by ourselves lasting for more than two hours.
The Secretary explained to me his economic policy and said that the economics of extreme nationalism was bound to invite war and that he had at one time concluded a treaty especially with Canada even against preferentialism practiced within the British Empire. From this point on we entered into the main stream of our discussion. I said:
"The President had once pointed out that Japanese-American relations were in a state of deterioration. Suppose that the worse came to worst; this worst state of affairs would recur every ten or twenty years and nothing would be so unfortunate as that to both countries."
The Secretary agreed with me in this view, and so I proceeded, saying:
"We need, at this time, to maintain in a cool-headed manner our promises to each other and reduce to the minimum anything that is provocative." He again concurred in this.
I then warned him by emphatically pointing out how the embargo arouses antagonism. However, he did not make any satisfactory reply.
Then the Secretary stated:
"The great aspiration on the part of HITLER for military conquest is as insatiable as were those of NAPOLEON and ALEXANDER. It appears that Japan approves of such conquest and that what she professes as the New Order in the Far East is in fact merely the conquest of the Great Far East by force of arms."
Then our conversation shifted to the subject of China, French Indo-China and Thailand. I said, "What Japan is seeking in China are three things, namely; as may be clearly seen from Japan's treaty with that government, a good neighbor (of course if a third power attempts to establish military bases in China, Japan would object to it as a threat to her); economic cooperation (Japan places great importance on such products as iron and coal. She has no intention of interfering with any third power in the matter of ordinary commerce); and an anti-Communist agreement (the Communist Party is succeeding in the northwestern part of China), and Japan is trying to get these on the basis of equality. So long as the army is in China, it has for its object victory. War, as it is fought today, is an economic war as well; and so it is inevitable that the economic state in the occupied territories assumes the form of economic planning and control."
The Secretary did not very strongly object to this view, and merely stated "The question of the 250 protests could well be settled without touching upon this question."
Trans. 3-13-41
Page A-12
No. 16
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
March 8, 1941
# 136.
(Part 2 of 2)
Strictly secret. To be handled in Government code.
I said to him: "Heretofore French Indo-China has followed the policy of seclusion too closely. It is necessary for Japan to get her to open her doors in order that Japan may cope with the present tendency of dividing the world into economic spheres. As to Thailand, we would like to have her also become a good neighbor of ours. I suppose you already know that we have a treaty of friendship with her. I don't know personally whether naval forces were used or not in the recent mediation. They may have been used in demonstrating our power so as to hasten a successful conclusion of the mediation."
To this, he did not say a word in reply.
Then the Secretary said: "How about the advance towards Singapore and into the Dutch East Indies?", which he thought was the most important point of our conversation and, quoting the arguments presented by politicians, he seemed to express fear over the possibility of Japan's planning a more aggressive military conquest in the Greater Far East.
I explained, "There was no danger of Japan advancing towards Singapore and the Dutch East Indies by means of force unless circumstances make it unavoidable. What Japan wants from the Dutch East Indies is of an economic nature."
As regards 'unless circumstances make it unavoidable,' since it was previously stated that if the United States stiffens the embargo, those who advocate that we should acquire oil wells would get the upper hand regardless of the question of whether we must acquire oil from some other place, I asked him what he thought of this. The Secretary seemed to think that Japan would be forced rather by the Tripartite Alliance than by the embargo. (Regarding this point, the President also expressed a similar view at the time of our first meeting).
Furthermore, the Secretary appeared to be greatly concerned over the alleged visit which you are to make to the European countries.
At any rate, today's conversation was only a beginning. He said that he would discuss such questions only with an Ambassador and "off the record" whether the discussion is official or private; and added that although the President is in complete agreement with his views, he would be glad to arrange for my interview with the President. He went so far as to show me the back-door entrance to the White House so that I could avoid the newspaper men.
We agreed to consider today's conversation as having taken place with neither party taking the initiative. Since I expect to have similar conversations in the future, will you please be especially careful not to let this matter leak out to the officials on the outside.
Trans. 3-13-41
No. 17
FROM: Washington
TO: Tokyo
March 9, 1941
# 134.
On the 5th, Wakasugi met and talked with Roy Howard. The outline of what Howard had to say is given below, for whatever interest it may have:
1. Howard said that his travel schedule had made it impossible for him to have accepted the kind invitation of the Foreign Minister. He also said that he felt the necessity of rushing
Page A-13
home to the U.S. to aid his friend Wilkie in his campaign for the Presidency which at that time seemed to be going against him.
However, Howard said, he is considering making another visit to the Far East as soon as the British Aid Bill, which is at present being discussed in Congress, is decided upon.
2. Howard, on his last trip, flew from Rangoon to Chungking and thence to Hongkong. While in Chungking he called on Chiang Kai-Shek and other key men. Chiang's spirits were so high that he appeared even younger than he did when Howard saw him on the previous trip. His, as well as the others', spirit to fight on against Japan is as ever on the increase.
Howard said that he asked Chiang Kai-Shek if he had any intention of accepting Japanese demands of setting up a patrol area between North China and the Soviet Union to guard against Communism; to suppress anti-Japanese sentiment in China; to cooperate in the economic development of China, and through these acts to settle Sino-Japanese differences.
Chiang's reply, Howard said, could not be quoted here but the gist of it was that now that Japan had set up the Nanking government and installed Wang Ching-wei therein, there was no hope of any amicable settlement.
3. With regard to the query as to the possibility of settling the Sino-Japanese incident through the mediation of the President of the United States, Howard said that if Japan guaranteed non-aggression against China, there was, in his opinion, a possibility. (The same opinion was expressed by President Stewart of Yenching University in Peking when Wakasugi saw him there recently.)
4. Howard said that he knew the Foreign Minister well. "Matsuoka", he said, "has a realistic view of politics. He knows that win or lose the battle, an American-Japanese war would end in nothing but losses for both countries and absolutely no gains. This conviction on the part of Matsuoka is one guarantee of peace between the two countries."
He added confidentially that he has described the man Matsuoka as a realist to the President.
5. Howard said that the most difficult problem in the relations between the U.S. and Japan is America's ignorance of the truth behind Japan's avowed goal of establishing a New Order in East Asia.
Americans, as a rule, are under the impression that-----(garbled). Through this, Japan, disregarding all foreign interests and intentions in the Far East, will attempt to do what she pleases to suit herself through force of arms.
Since the signing of the Tripartite Pact, this impression is growing stronger all the time, for Germany has used this very same system in Europe.
It is true that the U.S. has used force against her neighbors in the past, Howard said, giving as instances Nicaragua, Mexico, and Cuba. However, since then, the U.S. has been trying to right these wrongs and to offer cooperative assistance.
At present, the U.S. policy is to settle all differences with foreign countries by treaty terms and through international law. In this way, she is hoping to bring about order throughout the world.
In view of this, the U.S. cannot tolerate the setting up of a new order program fashioned to suit Japan and Japan only, for, if allowed, it would break down the U.S.'s policy from its very foundation.
The country is unified in the belief that two policies cannot exist in this world.
To ease this fundamental difference between the two countries, Howard suggests that the fact that Japan's real intentions are peaceful and involve only economic factors, be explained by someone like the Foreign Minister. He adds that in his opinion, it would be well to repeat at every opportunity that Japan does not have any political or militaristic ambitions; that Japan is not embarked upon any domination program.
Page A-14
6. Japan is not grasping the most important points to publicize in her propaganda work. It is useless for Japan to spend so much time trying to explain the China Incident.
Americans are very ignorant of foreign affairs, he said. This can be seen by the fact that they are under the impression that a totalitarian state like China is a Democracy. Americans with Communistic leanings even claimed the Soviet Union to be a democracy until the German-Soviet Union anti-aggression pact was signed.
Japan should publicize the fact that in actuality, Japan is similar to a democracy and that there is no reason for the U.S. to look upon her as an enemy.
Mailed to all consuls general in U.S. and Canada, (plus Honolulu).
Trans. 3-11-41
No. 18
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
March 8, 1941
# 135.
To be handled in Government Code.
(Secret outside the Department).
I had an opportunity to talk with many well-known persons and newspaper men in New York. Viewing the developments taking place in the two countries, giving aid to Britain has virtually become a national policy with nationwide support. The influence of the Isolationists is steadily declining and although no one advocates the sending of troops to Europe, pending the passage of the bill to aid Great Britain, preparations are progressing for shipment of arms and materials to Britain in increasing numbers. Eventually, many say, that American warships will be used to convoy these shipments. Although at present there is no likelihood of Congress declaring war, it is certain that the President as a Commander-in-Chief has the power to dispatch warships to any part of the world.
The United States believes that if Great Britain succeeds in withstanding the German spring offensive, the war would become a drawn out affair in view of the fact that submarine warfare is not intended to be decisive but one of gradual exhaustion, and, therefore, the prospect of a victory would increase. Although the United States realizes that in comparison with the position Germany held during the first World War, it is at present much stronger, the people do not discuss this subject. As to Japanese-American relations, they believe they have reached a stalemate and since the United States does not wish inwardly to face crises on two fronts simultaneously, the China question has somewhat receded from the focus of interest. Due to the fact that peaceful settlement has been reached recently in French Indo-China, the people of the United States did not make a great ado over this question; however, as regards the question of French Indo-China versus Thai, they regard this question as a policy on the part of Japan to acquire bases for further southward advance, and so, if troops are moved further in the direction of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies, they will begin to consider the situation as very serious for both the United States and Great Britain. Consequently, in such an event the United States would launch a thorough-going embargo against Japan and then, although the United States would not move her principal naval forces westward, she might cut off our sea routes and thus institute what may be called a long distance blockade. They see that there is a chance of such a strategy developing into a long-drawn-out and extensive guerrilla war on the sea.
As to the Axis Powers, they regard Italy as having already fallen under German pressure and for this reason they do not consider her an important factor. In other words, Germany comes
Page A-15
first; Japan, second. For this reason, Japan should face the situation in a cool-headed manner and avoid, as far as possible, expressing views that may be provocative. Inasmuch as there is the possibility of the present war becoming a long-drawn-out affair, Japan should make ready for any unforeseen eventuality ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- I believe that there is little prospect of improvements being achieved by means of temporary makeshifts and that there is no other way but for Japan to adopt a bold counter-policy.
Please transmit this message to the Premier and to the Navy and War Ministers.
Trans. 3-11-41
No. 19
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo (Gaimudaijin)
February 25, 1941
# 112.
The following are the impressions I got as the result of meeting with various foreign representatives. I forward it to you for whatever value it may be.
1. With Japanese-U. S. relations in a critical condition, it is natural that the newspapers are full of speculations as to the possibility of war between the two countries. Inquiries of me on this point are frequent, as may be imagined. I have replied to all questions concerning the "southward expansion" program along the lines contained in your instructions.
2. I met the British Ambassador on this the 25th. He spoke very softly and his general attitude was very calm and collected.
He said that even though Japan had decided to sit at the same table as Germany and Italy, England had no actual differences with Japan. He brought up the subject of our so-called "southward expansion", but when I explained the matter to him, indicated satisfaction and comprehension. He continued by saying that England's war spirit was high and that with the aid of the United States, victory was a certainty. Today, Italy as a threat to Egypt is a thing of the past.
He added that he hoped that Japan would not misjudge the general outlook.
I said that it seemed inevitable that a war which involved both naval and continental warfare would be a long drawn out affair. "Was England making preparations for a long drawn out War?" I asked.
He replied that it may be said today that the air force holds the key to victory or defeat. England is gradually strengthening her air power. Great Britain once said that the war would last for three years. It is just at the half way mark at present, he said.
3. The representative of the Soviet Union told me that the U.S.S.R. would probably remain neutral for an indefinite period.
4. The Italian representative said that Germany and Italy would not welcome a long term war. The United States, on the other hand, has the ability to withstand a war lasting several years, if they are determined to do so. Moreover, the U.S. is gradually moving in the direction of entering the war, he said.
Trans. 2-26-41
Page A-16
http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
No. 20
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
14 March 1941
# 145.
As it had been reported that the President would soon be taking a vacation trip, I had arrangements made by the Secretary of State and had a secret interview with him for an hour and a half this afternoon. (The Secretary of State was present taking notes.) The conversation ranged over a number of topics, and I told him that if further positive assistance is given China, and the "embargo" against Japan is made more rigid, this would cause uneasiness among our people, and that there ought to be some way of doing something to improve relations between the two countries. To this the President replied that the most serious obstacle is the Tripartite Alliance, that this had been a surprise to the American people; who feel that likely there will be greater developments than are to be seen in the wording of the published text of the same, and that in view of Foreign Minister Matsuoka's visit to Europe it is feared that there might be a further drive southward in concerted action with Germany's offensive. I replied that this would not necessarily follow, that our foreign policy is determined not by the Foreign Minister alone, but by all the Cabinet members. Being a person who is reluctant to give assent ----- I did not expect that he would say anything ----- .
The Secretary was pleased over the day's interview and urged that Japan take the "initiative" in bringing about a better situation. (Just before this the President did say that there would likely be some way out.). Inasmuch as they had again inquired regarding the matter of a southward push, I replied that I thought there was no danger of this. The President also added that one great problem after the war will be the regulation armaments. He said that personally he is very fond of the Navy, (his private room is decorated with nothing but pictures of battleships), but that as we well know there are many difficulties involved in carrying on a war with the Pacific Ocean intervening, and that it would not be a wise thing to burden the people with the heavy costs of an armament race between Japan and the U.S.; also that the appearance of motion pictures of Matsuoka and Hitler would have a disquieting effect upon the people. I agreed that this is quite possible ----- (last 3 lines garbled).
(On request of Tokyo's # 122, the last three lines were retransmitted in # 149 (See I, 21) from Washington.)
Trans. 3-19-41
No. 21
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo (Gaimudaijin)
17 March 1941
# 149.
Regarding your # 122 [a], the portion of the message requested retransmission is as follows: "I agreed that the was quite possible and we finished our talk in good spirits. Details will be sent later. Please keep this matter secret for future occasion."
[a] "Send last part of your # 145," (Nomura's talk with Roosevelt, 14 March.)
Trans. 8-11-41
Page A-17
No. 22
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
15 March 1941
# 146.
(In 4 parts, complete).
The particulars of my interview with the President on the 14th were as follows:
I began by saying that I would address him with the frankness of a seaman, and that he would please pardon if I appeared impolite. He remarked laughingly that my English would do. Further prefacing my remarks with the statement that while Japan does not wish to fight America, if the present attitudes of the two countries are persisted in, a crisis in the Pacific must be reached, I came to the question of the difficulties involved in carrying on a frontal war with America, and told him that in the event of a Japan-American war, a war in the Pacific would not be an easy thing for the United States either, that even if the U.S. should win, the result of such a war would be the loss of peace and order in the Far East, that Soviet influence would become prevalent in the Far East, bringing about a recurrence of the difficulties of the monarchial days. Manchukuo would likely come under this influence, with the danger of China and even the entire Far East becoming Sovietized. The U.S. would have nothing to gain thereby. On the other hand in meeting Great Britain's continental blockade in the Atlantic, Germany's use of submarines and airplanes to attack Great Britain's shipping in a counter-blockade would become increasingly violent, with bombings even of non-military establishments, and also greater activity in the way of British counter-attacks. This war cannot be terminated by (such means) but will become a long drawn out war of exhaustion. The former great war affords proof that a long drawn out war brings serious reactions socially to both the victors and the vanquished alike, if not indeed social revolution. (The President gave assent to this point.) At such a time as this both the governments of Japan and the U.S. bear a grave responsibility for cooperating in maintaining the peace of the Pacific, and for preventing the spread of hostilities.
Coming next to the question of Japan's policy on the continent, I stated that it was Japan's policy to reach a local settlement of the dispute between Japan and China and to prevent its spread, but that one reason for its having become as extensive and long drawn out as it has, is the absolute anti-Japanese attitude of the Nationalist Government. Inasmuch as I had explained to the Secretary of State, the other day, what it is that Japan asks of China, I would omit a repetition of this, only to say that the treaty made with the Wang government gives evidence of the spirit of good neighborliness, friendship, and equality with which we are cooperating in economic matters and in an effort to resist Communism.
(Part 2)
There seem to be various misunderstandings in regard to the new order in East Asia, and I myself do not know of any clear definition as to what it is, however, it does mean that Japan is to be able to secure the commodities essential to her existence while preserving friendly relations with the adjacent neighbor nations, and the "bloc" economics and the economic pressure of the powers have given impetus to this program. To go more into detail, we desire to have the economic and trade doors open to our nearby neighboring nations, and we are planning for cooperative prosperity, but we are making no demands for territory. It is the same thing as the Pan Americanism or good neighbor policy of your country, but due to the fact that we are not as clever as your country in carrying it out we frequently invite misunderstandings.
The President and the Secretary looked at each other and laughed; I told them that I believed that even these matters were not such as could not be settled without recourse to
Page A-18
war, but that if at this time further positive assistance is given China and if the "embargo" is made more rigid, the relations between the two nations would be still further aggravated, however I still believed that some way can be found for an amicable solution.
To this the President replied as follows:
(1) My grandfather traveled and traded in all parts of China ----- entered a certain harbor of Haiti (?) on a Japanese merchant ship ----- sold a lot of goods at 10¢ and 15¢ apiece to the Negroes, also entered Santiago, Cuba, and sold all the stock that had accumulated. ----- saw that Japan was well able to compete with other countries on a basis of equality.
(Part 3)
----- in regard to Mexico, for example, we would be able to overcome her by force, but this would result in more harm than good. Some senators have advocated the acquisition of the islands in the Caribbean, (this, he said, is no national secret), but he said that Great Britain paid out $20,000,000 for two million Negroes, and that there is no need of taking these over. He said that he could not believe that Japan could continue long to govern China with her civilization of several millenniums, even though she might do so for a time.
Hitler's success -—--- (the Secretary ----- agreed ----- repeating "world conquest -----. Iraq ----- make Africa a colonial territory -----. After Germany's victory in the war, and the new order in East Asia, the U.S. will stand ----- and there she can never consent to this. Furthermore when Mussolini with Hitler's ----- Germany victory, a friend of which Japan must beware.
(2) China has an old civilization and by means of the radio her language is becoming unified, and she is about to emerge from the period of ruling military cliques into national unity. Until rather recently Russia was made up of nomadic peoples, a large part of them illiterate. Her civilization is behind the times and she is ruled by one man, Stalin, and is not in a position to profit -----. According to the report of an attaché who was with the 8th Route Army, the program of the 8th Route Army is not Communistic but "educational", but he may be somewhat mistaken.
I then told him something of the way the Communist influence has permeated the northwestern areas of China, and that the Japan-China emergency must not be allowed to continue on indefinitely. -----.
(Part 4)
(3) The Tripartite Alliance stirred up the American people tremendously. As long as such a treaty exists there is danger that ----- developments ----- result in southern advance in concert with Germany.
I therefore explained to him that this treaty has been forced upon us by the oppressive acts of the U.S. and that its object was "preventative" and not "offensive" and that it is therefore to be called a peaceful treaty, but he said it remains to be seen what the results of the Foreign Minister's visit to Europe will be. However, there may still be some way of bringing about a change for better in the situation.
(4) The policy of the government is to break Germany and to help Britain to win, and therefore exports even to the Soviet, of cotton, and machine tools, for instance, if they enter Germany from Russia will increase Germany's power to continue the war. This has given rise to embarrassing problems between us and Russia. Further explanation was then made regarding the "embargo" against Japan.
(5) Now and then persons calling themselves representatives of the Japanese government come over, but the U.S. government cannot deal with them. However, if it is necessary, it is always ready to talk freely with the Ambassador, as we have today, through the President, or the Secretary of State.
Page A-19
At any rate the conversation was pleasant throughout and they were concerned over the situation in the Far East. The Secretary finally thanked me, and made the statement reported in the latter part of my previous message.
Please be careful that this, as well as the former (previous) message [a] by no means be allowed to leak out.
[a] (See I, 20 & 21).
Trans. 3-18-41
No. 23
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
20 March 1941
# 157.
My observations concerning the present activities of the United States are as follows:
On the 19th the Lower House approved the $7,000,000,000 "Aid for Britain" Budget by a vote of 337 to 55 and without amendments. In addition to this they had previously approved a $3,500,000,000 Defense Budget. The President recently made a stirring address. Now the belligerent spirit of the people is being stirred up so that they are beginning more and more to support the dictatorial powers of the President. Well, when it comes to actually assisting Great Britain, ships are what is most needed and at present Great Britain's month losses, through sinking, amount to 500,000 tons. The argument has been put forward that in the United States' ship building program, it is better to construct more small craft than warships. In any case it is very difficult to speedily increase ship building capacity. Nevertheless, it is being said that by next year twice as many craft will be produced as this year. When it comes to delivering ships to Great Britain, there is a growing feeling here that, if necessary, they should be convoyed by American warships. By and large, it appears that the officials are making a great many military preparations. I do not think that the Congress will ever declare war, but for that matter the United States is actually already in the war. Influential American officials say that Germany may have a temporary success, and even though she succeeds in landing troops in Great Britain, long term occupation of those islands will be impossible. They hold that even though Great Britain is invaded, the war will not end but rather that, in that case, it will be a long, long struggle, ending no one knows when.
Relayed to London and Berlin.
Trans. 3-22-41
No. 24
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
20 March 1941
# 160.
The activities of the United States in connection with the convoy system exercised by the American Navy are as follows:
1. Now that the "Aid to Britain" Law has passed, America finds that she cannot immediately transfer the craft which constitute the most urgent need. The United States knows that she cannot exercise her aid to Britain unless the threat on the high seas is eliminated. Therefore, some sort of convoy system carried on by the Navy is deemed essential. It has been reported recently that German submarines are in the waters near this country and consequently popular opinion is gradually coming to recognize this necessity. The Committee to Defend
Page A-20
America by Aiding the Allies, which seems to reflect the opinions of the Government and which was formed last year before destroyers were transferred to Britain, recently passed a resolution to the effect that if convoys are needed, they shall be afforded. The Navy, too, recognized this necessity, and the President, himself, is said to have ordered the Navy to draw up a definite plan.
2. Since it is feared that through convoying ships the United States may precipitate its entry into the war, substitute proposals have been advanced; namely—
a. That American warships to transferred to England and that they do the convoying.
b. That the cruising limits under the Neutrality law be extended and that the convoy limits of British craft be curtailed.
3. Concerning convoys, there is a prohibition stipulation in the "Aid to Britain" Law. However, constitutionally speaking, this has no effect in limiting the President's powers as Commander-in-Chief. From a constitutional point of view, therefore, it is very doubtful if this clause has any meaning. Furthermore, the President is said to be considering abolishing from the Neutrality Law the provision (the cash and carry principle) prohibiting American merchantmen from stopping in belligerent zones.
Relayed to London, Berlin, and New York.
Trans. 3-22-41
No. 25
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
21 March 1941
# 162.
Relayed to London and Berlin.
It is estimated that not only the Democratic Representatives but also two thirds of the Republicans will vote approval of the policy of the administration, when the vote is taken in the House on the 7 billion dollar budget for carrying out the so-called Aid-to-Britain bill.
Some of the leaders of the Republican party who formerly were opposed to aiding Britain are now among those who will vote for the appropriation. Public opinion in the U.S. is rallying to the support of the President's aid for Britain.
Trans. 3-25-41
No. 26
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Berlin
24 March 1941
# 5.
Strictly Secret.
To be handled in Government code.
Please transmit the following message concerning the present state of affairs in the United States to Foreign Minister MATSUOKA:
By virtue of the expansion of her own national defense and her assistance to Great Britain, the United States had de facto already entered the war. It will take a considerable length of time before the United States' full power is behind her program of assistance to Britain and the big question of the moment is sea shipping. The number of ships recently sunk has mounted to a high figure and it is impossible to fully make up for them. Consequently, the officials of the United States are most anxious about this situation. The Congress is not likely,
Page A-21
at least at this stage, to declare war, but I would say that there is a possibility that American warships may presently begin to convoy. I am, however, following every detail of this situation because I know that convoying materials to England is going to have a tremendous effect upon the American people. The trend now is to concentrate the main strength of the American Navy in the Atlantic and, in coordination with Great Britain, to protect British territory in the Pacific Ocean. Furthermore, the minds of the officials of the United States appear also to be made up to protect the Netherlands Indies. The United States is in addition following the policy of assisting China as much as possible so long as she restrains Japan and of preventing Japan's advance to the south. Notwithstanding all this, at least while the Atlantic is the primary focus of interest, the United States certainly desires at least a temporary peace in the Pacific. There can be no mistake on this point. For all the cheering and crying that American assistance will bring victory to England, those responsible are beyond any question trembling within themselves. Apparently there are also officials, who might be said to have the power of life and death, who on the surface loudly proclaim that a land invasion of Great Britain is next to impossible, and that the chances of its success are remote, and that Great Britain is sure to win, but who underneath the surface are pessimistic. Now, things have come to the point where people who speak of peace are anathematized by the title of defeatist and they are dwindling in numbers. It will take two years for assistance to England to reach its peak; that is to say, in June, year after next, and thereafter the plans are to have it continue at that rate for three years.
Trans. 3-27-41
No. 27
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Berlin and London
25 March 1941
# 047.
(Circular).
Action Tokyo as # 171.
Re my # 170 [a] and # 168 [a].
Even though this appropriation is passed, it is recognized that it will take time for it to get into operation so that the U.S. will be able to do anything toward replenishing the shipping lost by Great Britain. Of the merchant ships (5,000,000 tons) to be built with the shipbuilding funds provided in this appropriation ($629,000,000) together with those to be completed that are now under construction (3,500,000 tons), at the most only about 1,000,000 tons could be completed during the current year, and this would not be easy for the U.S. -----. It is thought that this is the reason why it is not advisable for the U.S. Navy to engage in convoy duty.
[a] See I, 27A.
Trans. 3-27-41
Page A-22
No. 27A
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
March 22, 1941
# 168.
1. Because of the shortage of bottoms, the President, the Secretary of the Navy and Naval Affairs Committee of Congress have on successive occasions stated that American commercial ships will be transferred to England. I have news which seems to indicate that the Naval Affairs Committee of Congress on the 21st made a statement supporting the transfer of some ships (five is said to be the number). This matter is being held over until the arrival of the British Envoy SALTE and until the people see how critical the situation is. This is to forewarn you.
2. On the occasion of a discussion for an additional naval budget in Congress on the 21st, a proposal prohibiting the use of already existing funds in the conveying of goods sent in the Aid to British Program was overwhelmingly voted down. The above is for your information.
Relayed to London and Berlin. Have relayed information to New York.
Trans. 3-26-41
No. 28
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
22 March 1941
# 167.
At the present time there are two bills before the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House which call for strong economic restrictions against Japan. These two plans are as I give them below. This is but another example of the sort of bills they have been passing against us all along. Though I do not believe that they are of immediate concern, I give them for your information.
1. One bill (already presented in the House in Washington) calls for an embargo against the export of military goods to Japan, against transportation of such equipment on American ships, restrictions against American products being shipped on Japanese ships, and the prevention of activities by American people of companies that would aid Japan.
2. I am sending the details, by mail, of a resolution requesting the President to institute strong economic restrictions against Japan because of the occupation of Chinese territory by Japanese forces.
Have relayed information to New York.
Trans. 3-26-41
No. 29
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: London, Berlin and Rome
2 April 1941
# 66.
(Circular). Message to Tokyo # 207.
I. To the protests of Berlin and Rome over the confiscation of their ships, the American government will take a bristlingly hostile attitude, and returning them is the last thing that the United States would consider. I cannot consider otherwise than that. Washington's relations with those two governments will follow an ever-narrowing route.
II. The German and Italian ships will be handled in a manner more or less different from those of Denmark. (The charge of sabotage is a mere fabrication.) To the extent that general
Page A-23
principles and United States law will permit, these vessels will in all probability be somehow used to assist Great Britain, nor is there likely to be any objection.
III. It appears that the authorities of this country are conferring with the several American states on the question of the confiscation of vessels.
Relayed to London, Berlin and Rome. Have relayed information to New York.
Trans. 4-4-41
No. 30
FROM: Washington (Jap. Amb.)
TO: London, Berlin and Rome
2 April 1941
# 65.
(Circular). Message to Tokyo as # 206. Secret.
Aroused more and more by the course of the military situation, the Government of the United States is taking advantage of the National Defense legislation (and of course the Aid-to-Britain law) in order to strengthen her attitude of suppressing the Axis powers. An example of this can be found in the confiscation of ships, and in all probability Washington is going to take successive vigorous measures along the line of convoying, etc. But when it comes to the question of economics, although I regard it as inevitable that they will take the same course and extend the export quota system, nevertheless that is a matter they are considering very deeply. Gradually by degrees they are whipping up the spirit of the people upon whose approval they wish to base their actions. I do not think they can easily be deterred, and their talk of "short of war" is gradually turning to "economic warfare". We must be ever on the alert because of this trend.
Relayed to England, Germany, and Italy.
Trans. 4-4-41
No. 31
FROM: Rome
TO: Washington
10 April 1941
No number.
Message to Tokyo # 205.
In connection with the question of American seizures of Italian ships, Director PRUNAS [a] told ANDO [b] confidentially: "At the present time the Italian Government is protesting this act as being contrary to International Law but it seems that the American Government is again disregarding International Law and scheming to confiscate them. We are making a very profound study of retaliatory steps to be taken in such an event. Rest assured that should we put these into operation they will be blanket retaliatory measures. Furthermore, in the case that they do confiscate them, it will take at least six months of repair to put them in usable shape because the interiors of these Italian ships were severely damaged by their crews.
"Though Mexico, Venezuela and Costa Rica in Central and South America have already taken steps similar to the United States; Brazil, Argentina and Chile will not take such measures.
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On this last point he is understood to have been very optimistic.
Relayed to Washington, London and Berlin. Relay to London.
[a] Director General of the Transoceania Bureau of the Italian Foreign Office.
[b] Secretary in the Japanese Embassy in Rome.
Trans. 4-12-41
No. 32
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Rome
4 April 1941
# 2.
(Message to Tokyo as # 218, April 4th).
Re my # 207 [a].
On the 4th the Italian Commercial Attaché told IGUCHI [b] confidentially that in all probability the Italian Government would demand the recall of the American Naval Attaché in Rome because of the American demand for the recall of the Italian Naval Attaché in Washington. Furthermore, if the American authorities decide to confiscate Italian ships in the United States, (at the present time the American flag has been taken down and again they are flying the Italian flag), in revenge the Italian Government is considering the confiscation of a part of American owned property in Italy (this is said to be something more than $150,000,000).
Relayed to Rome. Have relayed information to New York.
[a] See I, 29 in which Washington reports on the confiscation of German and Italian ships.
[b] Japanese Embassy Counselor in Washington.
Trans. Not dated
No. 33
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo (Gaimudaijin)
11 April 1941
# 225.
(Abstract)
The passage of the lend-lease bill has made America optimistic about the war in Europe and Africa. However, the situation in the Balkans and the English failure in Africa, threatening as it does Alexandria and the Suez and Dakaar, have stirred up feeling in America. The sinking in one day of 400,000 tons of shipping as was done on March 23rd, has alarmed public opinion, for England and America together cannot turn out more than 2,000,000 tons a year.
Trans. 4-18-41
No. 34
FROM: New York (Morishima)
TO: Tokyo
12 April 1941
# 147.
President ROOSEVELT has been issuing orders one after another with special bearing on the sanctioning of the navigation of American ships on the high seas arranging preparations for the defense of Greenland; and generally everyone throughout the country has welcomed this
Page A-25
as an approved measure of assistance toward England, even such persons as Colonel Lindbergh himself. They are endorsing the leasing of Greenland as an appropriate step in America's National Defense program. On the other hand, in view of Germany's preeminent success in the Balkans, and the ever present threat to British maritime communications, further effective measures are being demanded, particularly in both the Christian Science Monitor and the Tribune editorials of the 12th.
1. Greenland will become a base for naval convoys.
2. It is a fact that munitions will be transported to the Suez in American ships.
3. The United States is considering going so far as to transfer to England the recently stolen German and Italian ships.
4. Colonel Donovan at a Foreign Policy discussion meeting held in Chicago on the 11th, in supporting the convoy question, proposed the occupation of Dakar [a], or the acquisition of usable harbors in Ireland as a result of British-American pressure and he went on to say that if necessary the United States should unhesitatingly enter the war. These comments are creating quite a stir.
This is for your information. Please transmit this to all competent ambassadors in Europe.
[a] French West Africa.
Trans. 4-18-41
No. 35
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
4 April 1941
# 214.
Re my # 212 [a] and # 213 [a].
In connection with the export quota system, as you know, in response to our numerous strong protests, for a year now the United States has taken the unwarranted attitude that it is unreasonable for foreign countries to keep prating about things which are necessary to the United States' defense program. (See my # 1679 [b] of last year.) Well, the United States does not attempt to conceal the fact that her objective is to bring pressure to bear and to restrain Japan. This is specifically why they are carrying out the measures which trouble us. So long as they take this attitude, it is futile for me to negotiate with the State Department on the question of obtaining the present licenses. No matter how much I negotiate on both of these matters, I will get nowhere. An official in charge at the Export Control Office very cynically remarked to Lawyer SIEBOLD; "Why, for us to use our good offices to get licenses for Japan would, after all, be giving a big boost to a technical enemy, wouldn't it?" From that, I think you can see how just about every one of the American officials feels.
[a] Available in code under study.
[b] MORISHIMA reports on the reasons for the limitations placed on exports.
Trans. 4-8-41
Page A-26
No. 36
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo (Gaimudaijin)
15 April 1941
# 228.
(In 2 parts, complete).
Received from New York as # 048 to me.
Relayed to Tokyo as New York # 148 of 15 April.
New York—Tokyo # 065 [a]
Re my Washington—Tokyo # 164 [b]
I. The president of the YU Company [c] is confined to his home by sickness. According to my telegram # 65 [a] Yamaoka and the lawyer for "YU" have been holding conversations. Inasmuch as he has not yet applied for a permit, in order to expedite matters, I went with Yamaoka, on the 12th to call on the vice president. (The chief engineer and the lawyer were also present at this interview.)
The "YU" Company's opinions relative to the four points presented to them by Yamaoka are as follows:
(a) Concerning the "non-selective polymerization process, including catalytic hydrogen and tri-potassium phosphate process," the "tri-potassium phosphate process" cannot yet be manufactured by them, since it does not belong to them. It is a patent of the Shell Development Corporation and therefore the "YU" Company cannot apply for a permit.
(b) As to the "catalytic cracking process, including hydrogen transfer as a part thereof", there is no objection to applying for a permit for it, however, the "hydrogen transfer" ----- there is danger that the State Department may consider that it comes within the export embargo on aviation gasoline.
(c) As to the "catalytic desulpharization process":
(1) The "YU" Company is still studying it in the laboratory and it is not yet a "commercial process" and hence the problem of an export permit belongs to the future and need not be considered at this time.
(2) Inasmuch as the scope is rather broad and there is danger that it might be dealt with as aviation gasoline and thus come under the embargo, it would be better to deal with "crude, or other charging stock". (The original draft was presented as it was. After the attitude of the State Department has been ascertained it is to be considered again).
(3) The transfer of the "Phillips Desulpharization Process" to a third party is also forbidden.
(d) Materials such as a catalyst, etc., as requested in the 1938 and 1928 contracts, including the foregoing process". Even if a request for a comprehensive permit for the "materials" mentioned in the above were made by the "YU" Company it would be impossible to have it granted. Therefore there is no objection to requesting a permit for the "catalysts" only mentioned above ----- in case of ----- it will become an actual problem.
II. The "YU" Company's opinion is as (1) and is a reasonable one I think. Now, then there is a possibility of obtaining an export permit, we should immediately put in a request for a permit for only those things for which there is a reasonable expectation of having a request granted. And therefore in harmony with their opinion we have made application for a permit -----. Please convey the "YU" Company's views to Saneyoshi [d] and if he has any opinions, the talk may continue ----- having informed Saneyoshi please have another conference.
III. Further in regard to "materials" the Ambassador's telegram # 214 (?) [e] to Your Excellency ----- is necessary to get in touch with the State Department ----- other than "catalysts" ----- to delay needlessly the negotiations regarding materials ----- there is no other way than to request negotiations through the Embassy..
Page A-27
IV. For any further negotiations with the "YU" Company it will be necessary to have Saneyoshi (of the Japan Gasoline Company) come to America.
[a] See I.
[b] See I, 199.
[c] Universal Oil Products Co. of Chicago (?).
[d] Masao Saneyoshi, an official of the Japanese Gasoline Co.
[e] See I, 35. Ambassador Nomura reports that it is useless for him to continue negotiations with the U.S. in matters pertaining to licenses and protests over the export quota system, as the U.S. is not attempting to conceal the fact that her objective is to bring pressure to bear and restrain Japan.
Trans. 4-22-41
No. 37
FROM: Shanghai
TO: Nanking
16 April 1941
# 111.
(Part 1 of 2).
Message to Tokyo as # 617.
Re my # 616 [a].
On the 15th I sent a member of my staff to the American Consulate General and he said to Chief Consul STANTON: "Our Army, through its espionage agencies, has procured an unimpeachable report that the gasoline in question was purchased by the Chungking Commercial Section. After loading, the responsibility for the shipment rests on Chungking. Furthermore, we know that Chungking has not even got any war insurance. For over a year now we have suspected such shipments as being destined for the enemy and have been on the lookout. Naturally we feel strongly impelled to seize them." STANTON retorted: "Well, I will not even pretend to deny that this gasoline was about to be shipped to Chungking. I will not quibble. The customs have produced the necessary documents and this is a bona fide export. Any interference on the part of you Japanese is illegal." My staff member pointed out: "The Military does not raise the point as to whether or not this is to be included in the embargo which has recently been brought into force. The whole thing is this: the gasoline is for the use of our enemy, the Chungking Government, and we are going to confiscate it." STANTON retorted: "As to whether or not this is enemy produce, the burden of proof is on the Japanese. Furthermore, suppose it is destined for Chungking. Until it is turned over to them, it belongs to Texas. You say it is 'tekisan' (enemy produce): I say it is 'Texan' (evidently having heard the Japanese use the word 'tekisan', STANTON makes a pun using the word 'tekisan' for 'Texan'.) Now, say that you Japanese set aside the regulations of the customs and seize this gasoline on the mere charge that it is bound for the Central Army, the American concerns have not heard of any regulations permitting such deeds being publicly announced. If you start to seize American goods on the basis of unannounced regulations, it will be just too bad for you. By what logic could you possibly call such an act proper and reasonable?" My staff member answered: "Well, we got it straight from our espionage agencies and they will furnish definite proof. Pretty soon you'll understand why this proof cannot be denied."
[a] See I, 39.
Trans. 4-18-41
No. 38
FROM: Shanghai
TO: Nanking
16 April 1941
# 111.
Message to Tokyo as # 617.
Part 2 of 2.
"Don't think that just by calling our plans to seize this gasoline improper and unreasonable you can move us in our determination to confiscate it." STANTON replied "Well, Texas, through this incident, is going to incur a great loss. I will immediately protest to Japan by note and will demand reparations. What is more, I will wire the facts to both Washington and Tokyo." My man countered by saying "The diplomatic officials know that there is a good basis for our argument. They also know that Texas will incur no loss. A mere protest from the United States won't do any good. If you simply report the details of this to Tokyo, all that will ensue is a big argument and you will wind up where you are right now. I mean the United States will have no recourse in settling this matter but to withdraw its complaint immediately." My man started to walk out, but STANTON sat down and said "You may say if you will that Texas will incur no damage, but until this gasoline is bought up, Texas will suffer a sizeable loss." He was rather nasty, and in conclusion my man stated "Well I wasn't thinking about it being bought up. You know I am not authorized to go deeply into these things. However, I may safely say that Japanese officials are of the unanimous opinion that the American concerns shall not undergo any losses. Since this gasoline is for the enemy, we can't compromise. But, if it is true that Texas actually will suffer, it might be possible to get in touch with Hongkong and have them consider this point. In any case, I will communicate this to the Consul General in Shanghai."
Trans. 4-18-41
No. 39
FROM: Shanghai
TO: Nanking
16 April 1941
# 110.
Message to Tokyo as # 616.
Re your # 294 [a].
1. In connection with our schemes to procure petroleum mentioned in 2 of your telegram, I sought the advice of the purchasing agents and the Chief of the Constabulary. They replied that this gasoline must, at any cost, be prevented from reaching the hands of the Chungking officials, and that the thing to do is to seize it immediately.
2. As to whether or not this gasoline seems under the export embargo regulation of the customs, upon investigation I find that the export permit was obtained before this regulation went into effect on April 7th, and that the transaction is foolproof.
3. After finding out these things, on the 14th I called the military and naval officials to my residence and announced the contents of your telegram. As a result of our conversation, we agreed as follows:
If we follow the plan suggested in 3 of your message in handling this matter, from the very beginning it will smell of corruption, and if we merely say that we suspect that it is for the aid of CHIANG KAI-SHEK, we would make ourselves vulnerable to a come-back on the part of the United States. No.! We must have an air-tight case. Therefore, as we all agreed, the besthttp://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
Page A-29
thing to do is to negotiate by insinuations, claiming that we have a witness (some imaginary person) whom we will not name.
Relayed to Nanking.
[a] Tokyo wires Nanking and Shanghai concerning a report that the U.S. is about to exercise a comprehensive Petroleum embargo against Japan.
Trans. (Not dated)
No. 40
FROM: Tokyo
TO: Nanking
12 April 1941
# 118.
Message to Shanghai as # 294.
Re your # 575 [a].
1. We have received a report that the United States is about to exercise a comprehensive petroleum embargo against Japan in the near future. Soon we are going to have Ambassador NOMURA inform the American Government that if they carry out this measure, our Empire cannot but act with determination. We are going to have Ambassador NOMURA advise them not to embargo petroleum. Therefore, although we do not like to hold up the gasoline in question, if you get any definite proof that the Chungking Commerce Section has purchased it, go ahead and seize it.
2. So far I have received no report from you on the schemes mentioned in my # 153 [b] for purchasing petroleum. (Please report on this immediately.) These negotiations are going on and if it is seen that success is imminent and that this seizure will damage the negotiations, you may release the gasoline. I will leave this up to your judgment, which should be guided by developments in your city.
3. If you cannot find the actual proof mentioned in the preceding paragraph 1, take suitable steps to prevent the exports mentioned in your # 539a. If we cannot get the results we desire, we will come forth with an out and out charge that the goods are suspected of being sent to assist CHIANG KAI-SHEK and summarily seize them.
[a] Not available.
[b] Available; Not translated.
Tans. 4-14-41
No. 41
Proposal Presented to the Department of State Through the Medium of Private American and Japanese Individuals on April 9, 1941. [a]
The Governments of the United States and of Japan accept joint responsibility for the initiation and conclusion of a general agreement disposing the resumption of our traditional friendly relations.
Without reference to specific causes of recent estrangement, it is the sincere desire of both Governments that the incidents which led to the deterioration of amicable sentiment among our peoples should be prevented from recurrence and corrected in their unforeseen and unfortunate consequences.
Page A-30
It is our present hope that, by a joint effort, our nations may establish a just peace in the Pacific; and by the rapid consummation of an entente cordiale, arrest, if not dispel, the tragic confusion that now threatens to engulf civilization.
For such decisive action, protracted negotiations would seem ill-suited and weakening. We, therefore, suggest that adequate instrumentalities should be developed for the realization of a general agreement which would bind, meanwhile, both governments in honor and in act.
It is our belief that such an understanding should comprise only the pivotal issues of urgency and not the accessory concerns which could be deliberated at a Conference and appropriately confirmed by our respective Governments.
We presume to anticipate that our Governments could achieve harmonious relations if certain situations and attitudes were clarified or improved; to wit:
1. The concepts of the United States and of Japan respecting international relations and the character of nations.
2. The attitudes of both Governments toward the European War.
3. The relations of both nations toward the China affair.
4. Naval, aerial and mercantile marine relations in the Pacific.
5. Commerce between both nations and their financial cooperation.
6. Economic activity of both nations in the Southwestern Pacific area.
7. The policies of both nations affecting political stabilization in the Pacific.
Accordingly, we have come to the following mutual understanding subject, of course, to modifications by the United States Government and subject to the official and final decision of the Government of Japan.
I. The concepts of the United States and of Japan respecting international relations and the character of nations.
The Governments of the United States and of Japan might jointly acknowledge each other as equally sovereign states and contiguous Pacific powers.
Both Governments assert the unanimity of their national policies as directed toward the foundation of a lasting peace and the inauguration of a new era of respectful confidence and cooperation among our peoples.
Both Governments might declare that it is their traditional, and present, concept and conviction that nations and races compose, as members of a family, one household; each equally enjoying rights and admitting responsibilities with a mutuality of interests regulated by peaceful processes and directed to the pursuit of their moral and physical welfare, which they are bound to defend for themselves as they are bound not to destroy for others.
Both Governments are firmly determined that their respective traditional concepts on the character of nations and the underlying moral principles of social order and national life will continue to be preserved and never transformed by foreign ideas or ideologies contrary to those moral principles and concepts.
II. The attitudes of both Governments toward the European War.
The Government of Japan maintains that the purpose of its Axis Alliance was, and is, defensive and designed to prevent the extension of military grouping among nations not directly affected by the European War.
The Government of the United States maintains that its attitude toward the European War is, and will continue to be, determined by no aggressive alliance aimed to assist any one nation against another. The United States maintains that it is pledged to the hate of war, and accordingly, its attitude toward the European War is, and will continue to be, determined solely and exclusively by considerations of the protective defense of its own national welfare and security.
Page A-31
III. China affairs.
The President of the United States, if the following terms are approved by His Excellency and guaranteed by the Government of Japan, might request the Chiang-Kai-Shek regime to negotiate peace with Japan.
a. Independence of China
b. Withdrawal of Japanese troops from Chinese territory, in accordance with an agreement to be reached between Japan and China
c. No acquisition of Chinese territory
d. No imposition of indemnities
e. Resumption of the "Open Door"; the interpretation and application of which shall be agreed upon at some future, convenient time between the United States and Japan
f. Coalescence of the Governments of Chiang-Kai-Chek [sic] and of Wang-Ching-Wei
g. No large-scale or concentrated immigration of Japanese into Chinese territory
h. Recognition of Manchukuo
With the acceptance by the Chiang-Kai-Chek regime of the aforementioned Presidential request, the Japanese Government shall commence direct peace negotiations with the newly coalesced Chinese Government, or constituent elements thereof.
The Government of Japan shall submit to the Chinese concrete terms of peace, within the limits of aforesaid general terms and along the line of neighborly friendship, joint defense against communistic activities and economic cooperation.
[Should the Chiang-Kai-Chek regime reject the request of President Roosevelt, the United States Government shall discontinue assistance to the Chinese] [b]
IV. Naval, aerial and mercantile marine relations in the Pacific.
a. As both the Americans and the Japanese are desirous of maintaining the peace in the Pacific, they shall not resort to such disposition of their naval forces and aerial forces as to menace each other. Detailed, concrete agreement thereof shall be left for determination at the Proposed joint Conference.
b. At the conclusion of the projected Conference, each nation might dispatch a courtesy naval squadron to visit the country of the other and signalize the new era of Peace in the Pacific.
c. With the first ray of hope for the settlement of China affairs, the Japanese Government will agree, if desired, to use their good offices to release for contract by Americans certain percentage of their total tonnage of merchant vessels, chiefly for the Pacific service, so soon as they can be released from their present commitments. The amount of such tonnage shall be determined at the Conference.
V. Commerce between both nations and their financial cooperation.
When official approbation to the present understanding has been given by both Governments, the United States and Japan shall assure each other to mutually supply such commodities are as respectively available or required by either of them. Both governments further consent to take necessary steps to the resumption of normal trade relations as formerly established under the Treaty of Navigation and Commerce between the United States and Japan. If a new commercial treaty is desired by both Governments, it could be elaborated at the proposed conference and concluded in accordance with usual procedure.
For the advancement of economic cooperation between both nations, it is suggested that the United States extend to Japan a gold credit in amounts sufficient to [foster trade and industrial] [c] development directed to the betterment of Far Eastern economic conditions and to the sustained economic cooperation of the Governments of the United States and of Japan.
Page A-32
VI. Economic activity of both nations in the Southwestern Pacific area.
On the pledged basis of guarantee that Japanese activities in the Southwestern Pacific area shall be carried on by peaceful means, without resorting to arms, American cooperation and support shall be given in the production and procurement of natural resources (such as oil, rubber, tin, nickel) which Japan needs.
VII. The policies of both nations affecting political stabilization in the Pacific.
a. The Governments of the United States and of Japan will not acquiesce in the future transfer of territories or the relegation of existing States within the Far East and in the Southwestern Pacific area to any European Power.
b. The governments of the United States and of Japan jointly guarantee the independence of the Philippine Islands and will consider means to come to their assistance in the event of unprovoked aggression by any third Power.
c. [The Government of Japan requests the friendly and diplomatic assistance of the Government of the United States for the removal of Hongkong and Singapore as doorways to further political encroachment by the British in the Far East.] [d]
d. Japanese Immigration to the United States and to the Southwestern Pacific area shall receive amicable consideration—on a basis of equality with other nationals and freedom from discrimination.
Conference.
a. It is suggested that a Conference between Delegates of the United States and of Japan be held at Honolulu and that this Conference be opened for the United States by President Roosevelt and for Japan by Prince Konoye. The delegates could number less than five each, exclusive of experts, clerks, etc.
b. There shall be no foreign observers at the Conference.
c. This Conference could be held soon as possible (May 1941) after the present understanding has been reached.
d. The agenda of the Conference would not include a reconsideration of the present understanding but would direct its efforts to the specification of the prearranged agenda and drafting of instruments to effectuate the understanding. The precise agenda could be determined upon by mutual agreement between both governments.
Addendum.
The present understanding shall be kept as a confidential memorandum between the Governments of the United States and of Japan.
The scope, character and timing of the announcement of this understanding will be agreed upon by both Governments.
[a] The English text with a few omissions was sent to Tokyo by Admiral Nomura on April 30, 1941, though the Japanese text of this same proposal had already been sent on April 17, 1941 (See I, 47). Clauses of the original text which were omitted in the dispatch of April 30th to Tokyo. (I, 41) have been marked by brackets.
[b] Omitted in dispatch to Tokyo.
[c] Omitted in dispatch to Tokyo.
[d] Omitted in dispatch to Tokyo.
Trans. 5-1-41/5-3-41
Page A-33
No. 42
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
14 April 1941
(Urgent)
# 227.
Strictly secret. To be handled in Government code.
This morning of the 14th I had an interview with Secretary of State Hull at his private residence. I said that not only should the Governments of our two nations agree to maintain peace in the Pacific Ocean, but the time has now come when both should take a larger view and without delay. The Secretary expressed accord, and I continued, "We being presumably viewed as an enemy, the American fleet is cruising in the Southern Pacific and naval instructors are being sent here and there, and in Manila a conference is being held between England, the United States and the Netherlands. Viewed from the standpoint of military experts, this is a most unfortunate trend and is certainly a step in the direction of war. The responsible military officials of Japan cannot overlook such things as this. The war fever of both countries is rising. In the United States the thirst for blood is gradually increasing. In the Atlantic convoying is about to be exercised. This, I tell you, is an inflammatory situation. It looks to me as though a declaration of war is imminent. Japan cannot but feel the gravest concern. Now, Sir, don't you think there might be a little change?" To my first statement he offered no particular comment. However, with the second he expressed accord. Next, Secretary HULL questioned me about the military policy of Japan and I explained that, "For example, a year or so ago Prince KONOYE made a statement to the effect that Japan is ready to make peace with China on the basis of equality with no indemnity and no annexation. There were some opponents at the time but the people agreed and they are still of this mind. The Japanese are united in one firm mind under the Emperor." Then I went on to explain to him something of our form of Government and international ideals. He seemed pleased and to understand, and said, "We are much alike." We went on to converse more or less about mutual economic problems, the stabilization of the Pacific, etc., and he promised me that at his very first opportunity he and I were going to have a conference. I think that before long he is going to inform me as to the date.
By the way, I explained the new treaty between Tokyo and Moscow and concluded by stating that the pacification of the Pacific would be the first step in the eventual winding up of hostilities in Europe, with which Secretary HULL expressed agreement.
Trans. 4-15-41
No. 43
FROM: Washington (Nomura)
TO: Tokyo
14 April 1941
(Very urgent)
# 229.
Secret. To be handled in Government Code.
The effect upon our country of the conclusion of the Japanese-Soviet neutrality agreement is something for which sufficient gratitude cannot be expressed to you and I know full well the extent to which our Government and people appreciate your efforts. Japanese-American relations being extremely delicate at this time, it would be well to carefully heed the handling this pact is accorded in newspaper articles and editorials. As I told you in my # 227 [a], I made my explanations to Secretary HULL early in the morning of the 14th. As a direct result of these
Page A-34
conversations, Secretary HULL's opinions and phraseology on the occasion of the newspaper correspondents' interview of that day were not only extremely moderate, (please refer to my special report) but it seemed to me that he was probably doing his utmost to calm public opinion all over the country. And in this connection we, too, must see to it that our own papers do not play up this agreement as though it were directed against the United States. I believe that it would be wise not to arouse American public opinion. Therefore, on this point please send me your comments. That is all for the present.
http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
[a] See I. 42.
Trans. 4-15-41 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
frank 5.fra.000 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Of the four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives, Barney Frank is the only one whose public remarks have been collected in a book of quotations (“Frank Talk: The Wit and Wisdom of Barney Frank,” published in 2006). He is also the only congressman whose fight against the impeachment of President Bill Clinton has been the subject of a documentary, which was shown to acclaim at film festivals around the country (“Let’s Get Frank,” directed by Bart Everly). Frank is not the only member of Congress to have been the subject of a full-scale biography, but the account of his life, written by a former aide named Stuart E. Weisberg, to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press later this year, will likely rank among the more exhaustive and admiring books ever printed about a sitting member of the House, who is described as “arguably the most unique and fascinating, certainly the most entertaining political figure in Washington.” http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
The title of the book suggests the basis for the widespread interest: “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman.” Now sixty-eight years old, Frank has represented Massachusetts’s Fourth Congressional District since 1981, and he remains best known for his decision, in 1987, to reveal that he is gay, becoming the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. At the time, the disclosure provoked more curiosity than controversy, but, two years later, Stephen Gobie, a prostitute whom Frank had patronized and then befriended, made a series of lurid allegations about him—claiming that they had had sex in the House gym and that Frank had permitted Gobie to run a prostitution ring out of his home. An investigation by the House Ethics Committee failed to substantiate those charges, though it determined that Frank had written a misleading letter of recommendation for Gobie and had Gobie’s parking tickets waived. Nevertheless, Frank was reëlected with ease, and he became a pointed critic of the Republicans who took control of the House in 1994 and a passionate opponent of Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998. A witty and effective presence on the House floor and in committee rooms, Frank in recent years has settled into the roles of wise guy and wise man of the Democratic Party. (Conservatives “believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth,” he once remarked. More recently, he noted that Barack Obama’s continued insistence that we have one President at a time “overstates the number of Presidents we have.”) In a 2006 poll of Capitol Hill staffers by Washingtonian, published shortly before the elections that gave Democrats control of the House for the first time in twelve years, Frank was voted the brainiest, funniest, and most eloquent congressman—a notable achievement, since he often speaks in a barely comprehensible mumble.
During the financial crisis this fall, Frank’s status as a gay trailblazer suddenly seemed remote and irrelevant. After the Democrats’ victory, he became chairman of the Committee on Financial Services, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, designated him the Democrats’ chief negotiator with the Bush Administration on legislation to address the crises in the banking and auto industries. “Through this all, the quarterback for us is Barney,” Pelosi told me. “He’s solution-oriented, respectful of different perspectives, and brilliant. And it’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”
For the first time in more than forty years of public life, Frank has real power, and he is wielding it in a characteristically idiosyncratic manner. He remains a national symbol of outré sexuality as well as a rare wit in generally humor-deficient Washington. But in Congress he is thought of no longer simply as a liberal of the old school (which he is) but also as a grind. His expertise is in one of the least glamorous subjects on the national agenda—housing, particularly rental housing for poor people—and he is using that knowledge to confront the nation’s economic crisis. “For Barney, the question has always been: What works? What can government do to see that people have the decent necessities of life?” his sister Ann Lewis, the longtime Democratic activist, says. “Now he’s right there. Barney’s been preparing for this moment for his entire life.”
The contours of Frank’s Massachusetts district have shifted over the years, but his political base has long been the liberal, heavily Jewish suburbs of Newton and Brookline. (Brookline was once part of the district represented by Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, but he surrendered it to Frank’s predecessor, Father Robert Drinan, saying, according to Frank, “I can’t take all the phone calls. Those nice Jewish ladies even call when they agree with you!”) Much of the campus of Boston College, a Jesuit institution, also lies within Frank’s district, and two days after the recent election he paid a visit to the B.C. Real Estate Council, an alumni group.
Boston College has become a major national university in recent years, but the hundred or so older graduates at the luncheon reflected the school’s Irish-Catholic roots. Frank ambled to the podium in his standard uniform: a monochromatic suit, a white shirt, and a rep tie. The look is an improvement on the dishevelled attire that was once his trademark. When Frank was running for state representative in Boston, in the early nineteen-seventies, a campaign poster featured his photograph and the words “Neatness Isn’t Everything.” In conversation, and even in his speeches, Frank often refers to his lifelong struggle to lose weight, but he is well into his seventh decade, and that battle seems to have been lost, a plight accentuated by his apparent tendency to buy shirts in his aspirational, rather than his actual, size.
Frank never speaks from a prepared text, and he talks so quickly that transcription is nearly impossible. His staff in Washington sometimes posts videos of his remarks on the Web instead. Frank has lived in Massachusetts since he was a freshman at Harvard, in the late nineteen-fifties, but his accent is still marked by a virulent strain of his native New Jersey—he is from Bayonne. (Early in Frank’s congressional career, Toby Moffett, a representative from Connecticut, jokingly asked for U.N.-style simultaneous translations of Frank’s remarks during committee hearings.)
Frank rarely smiles, even when he’s being funny. “There are three lies politicians tell,” he told the real-estate group. “The first is ‘We ran against each other but are still good friends.’ That’s never true. The second is ‘I like campaigning.’ Anyone who tells you they like campaigning is either a liar or a sociopath. Then, there’s ‘I hate to say I told you so.’ ” He went on, “Everybody likes to say ‘I told you so.’ I have found personally that it is one of the few pleasures that improves with age. I can say ‘I told you so’ without taking a pill before, during, or after I do it.” A priest and several older men at my table realized that Frank was talking about sex, and, embarrassed, they stared at their hands. But the moment passed quickly. In Frank’s district, at least, his homosexuality provokes little controversy, even at a Catholic school. (Elsewhere, Frank no longer censors his ribald sense of humor. Not long ago, Paul Begala, the political strategist, was speaking at a fund-raiser for a gay-rights group and said, “When I told my father, back in Texas, that I was speaking to an L.G.B.T. group, he said that sounded like a sandwich.” From the audience, Frank called out, “Sometimes it is!”)
Frank told the group at Boston College that he predicted, and might have prevented, the real-estate crisis that has engulfed the economy. By this time, many aspects of the crisis were well known. The end of the housing bubble had caused home values to plummet and mortgage defaults to rise, particularly among subprime borrowers. Many financial-services firms had assembled mortgages and bought and sold them as securities, and the value of those assets had also declined sharply—a development that devastated the firms. The investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had closed their doors, and the financial-services industry was on the brink of collapse, even after Congress authorized an emergency seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout, in October.
According to Frank, at the root of the real-estate crisis was a misguided notion that homeownership should be available to all people—what President Bush has called “the ownership society.” “The ‘I told you so’ here is that homeownership is a nice thing but it is not suitable for everybody,” Frank said at Boston College. “There are people in this society who don’t have enough money to be homeowners, and there are people whose lives are not sufficiently integrated for them to take on the responsibility to be a homeowner. And we did too much pushing of people into inappropriate mortgages and into homeownership.” He said that many people would always be renters, and that there was nothing wrong with this. “We need to get back in the business of building rental housing and preserving the housing we have,” he said.
In one respect, Frank went on, the current crisis has had a salutary effect: home prices have fallen, making homes more affordable for those who still have the money to buy them. “But we need to be bringing down the cost of housing in an orderly way, like by building new housing to increase the supply,” he said. “We’ve brought the cost down a little bit in a less orderly way. I tend to eat when I’m under stress. I want to lose twenty-five pounds—but not by Sunday. And that’s how home prices have come down.” (Frank speaks incessantly about food. In “Let’s Get Frank,” he complains about the low-fat provisions given to Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee during the impeachment debate. Referring to Dick Gephardt, who was the Minority Leader at the time, Frank says, “They got all this jelly-doughnut shit in there, and I gotta eat this stuff. . . . Gephardt’s a sheygets—whaddaya expect from Gephardt?” Sheygets is Yiddish for a male Gentile, and thus one who cannot be trusted to provide acceptable snacks.)
Frank arrived in Congress when the Reagan Administration was withdrawing the federal government from the business of building housing for the poor. At the time, it was clear that the private sector had little incentive to build low-income housing without government assistance in the form of tax breaks or subsidies. The Reagan Administration assisted low-income renters by offering them vouchers to help them pay rent and by providing tax credits to local developers who built low-income housing. In subsequent years, Frank has fought with intermittent success to preserve such programs from major budget cuts.
In 2001, Frank embraced a new approach. That year, Bernie Sanders, then a representative from Vermont, sponsored a bill to create a government trust fund that would be used for building and renovating low-income housing. Sanders’s legislation didn’t pass, but the idea was later reintroduced, and Frank backed a proposal for funding the trust with a portion of the annual revenue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, the two giant, government-backed mortgage companies. The funding for the trust would be automatic—not subject to annual congressional approval. “I realized, because housing has been a backwater, getting appropriations for housing is going to be tough,” Frank told me. “First of all, if you want to build housing, it can’t be year by year. You know, it’s construction. But, two, I’m finding money outside the appropriations process, money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So I can do a lot of units without directly competing for the appropriations.”
The idea was based on a variety of similar programs at the state and local levels. In the past few decades, governments across the country have set up nearly six hundred trust funds to build low-income housing, typically by collecting small taxes or fees from real-estate transactions. “There was positive buzz for what was happening with state and local trust funds, but the amounts were really a drop in the bucket,” Barbara Sard, the director of housing policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said. “But the dream for making a real difference in low-income rental housing has been to do it at the federal level, and that’s what Barney has been trying to do.”
In 2007, Frank used his influence as committee chairman to insure that the housing trust-fund bill finally passed the House. In 2008, a similar measure made it through the Senate as part of a larger bill, which President Bush signed. By that time, however, Fannie and Freddie were mired in debt, and the value of their shares was collapsing. And, because Frank’s committee was supposed to oversee the two mortgage giants, he faced questions about what he might have done to avoid the catastrophe.
The Committee on Financial Services, which has seventy members, is one of the biggest panels in Congress. (It was known as the Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs Committee until the Democrats lost control of the House in 1994, and Frank attributes the change to “Republican political correctness.”) Congressional hearings customarily begin with statements from members, a practice that can take hours. Frank and Michael Oxley, the Ohio Republican who was his predecessor as chairman, shared a distaste for the tradition, and together they were known as the “impatient caucus.” Still, Frank allows his colleagues to speak briefly before a hearing, and, on October 21st, Scott Garrett, a conservative Republican from New Jersey, used his time to attack Frank—in particular, his claim that he had anticipated the crisis.
“Before we are able to go forward with new and important changes to the over-all regulatory structure for our financial-services industry, I do believe that it is essential that we better understand just how we got into this problem,” Garrett said. “Now, one of the main parts of the problem was poor regulation in the past, specifically in the area of Fannie and Freddie.” According to Garrett, “our distinguished chairman” had no right “to claim the mantle of being a champion of reform with Fannie and Freddie.” On the contrary, Garrett argued, he and other Republicans had wanted to “raise the capital levels, to reduce the retained portfolios, to lower the conforming loan limits.”
Garrett’s accusations were genteel compared with those made by Bill O’Reilly, a few weeks earlier, when Frank appeared on his show on Fox News. “You blame everybody else! You’re a coward!” O’Reilly bellowed. “In any private concern, you’re out on your butt! But not here in the federal government!” Frank, in turn, berated O’Reilly for his “ranting” and “stupidity.” (The confrontation has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.)
At the hearing, Frank responded testily to Garrett. “The purpose of this hearing was to be forward-looking,” he began. “And I had hoped we could focus on that. But, after the gentleman from New Jersey’s comments in having decried partisanship, he then practiced it. It does seem to me to be important to set the record clearly before us.” Frank pointed out that when Garrett had attempted to tighten regulations on Fannie and Freddie, Republicans had controlled the House. “Had a Republican majority been in favor of passing that bill, they would have done it,” Frank said. “Now he has claimed that it was we Democrats—myself—who blocked things. The number of occasions on which either Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay consulted me about the specifics of legislation are far fewer than the gentleman from New Jersey seems to think.
“I will acknowledge that during the twelve years of Republican rule I was unable to stop them from impeaching Bill Clinton,” Frank went on. “I was unable to stop them from interfering in Terri Schiavo’s husband’s affairs. I was unable to stop their irresponsible tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and a Patriot Act that did not include civil liberties.” In other words, Frank insisted, if the Republicans had wanted to try to prevent the mortgage crisis, they would have had plenty of opportunities to do so.
Frank and I discussed his role in the housing crisis at his district headquarters, in a small office building in Newton. His boyfriend, Jim Ready, who runs an awning company in Maine, had just returned from Whole Foods with Frank’s lunch, a salad, which he was eating with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. Frank explained that he first became interested in housing during his service, in the late sixties, as the top aide to Kevin White, who was then the mayor of Boston. The city had a long history of building public housing, mostly high-rises, and White pledged to encourage the construction of small apartment complexes, in keeping with the scale of most Boston neighborhoods.
“At first, when you talk about affordable housing and subsidized housing, people immediately ask, ‘What sort of public housing?’ ” Frank said. “ ‘Is it run by the city, like Cabrini-Green?’ ”—a notorious, now demolished project in Chicago. “And we long ago learned how not to do that, but that still was in people’s heads. And if you can do a word-association test, where a picture floated out in people’s heads, there would be these sterile high-rises. And it struck me, before I conceptualized this, that the answer to that was public-private partnership, that that’s the way to do affordable housing. And then it struck me: You know what? This is the model for other things. Public-private-sector coöperation.”
When White was mayor, one of the most infamous public-housing projects in the city was Columbia Point, in Dorchester. The project was said to be so dangerous that ambulances refused to enter it without a police escort. In a process begun under White, and shepherded in its early days by Frank, Columbia Point was turned over to a private developer, who converted it to a mixed-income community, which included housing for the poor and market-rent apartments for the more affluent. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz “Barney is a real capitalist,” Joe Corcoran, the developer who took over Columbia Point, told me. “He understands that we have to make a profit. Barney is the smartest politician I’ve ever seen. I have no problem with him being gay, or being Jewish. I like Jews. I like doing business with Jews. They know how to make a deal.” http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
Frank’s experience in city hall in Boston led to an impatience with abstractions. He recalled a comment by Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, who will be the director of the National Economic Council in the Obama Administration: “Larry said, ‘Oh, well, in the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rented car.’ Well, people wash leased cars all the time. And, secondly, poor people don’t rent cars. It’s just one of those irrelevant things.” Frank went on, “In 2004, it was Bush who started to push Fannie and Freddie into subprime mortgages, because they were boasting about how they were expanding homeownership for low-income people. And I said at the time, ‘Hey—(a) this is going to jeopardize their profitability, but (b) it’s going to put people in homes they can’t afford, and they’re gonna lose them.’ ” (In a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence B. Lindsey, a former economic adviser to President Bush, wrote that Frank “is the only politician I know who has argued that we needed tighter rules that intentionally produce fewer homeowners and more renters.”) Frank recalled with disdain a Bush Administration proposal to allow time limits on rental vouchers for poor people. “They said, ‘Well, don’t you agree that we should limit the amount of time people have a voucher?’ I said, ‘Yes, if you limit the amount of time they can be poor—“I’m sorry, you can only be poor for four years.” ’ ”
In 2005, while the Democrats were still in the minority, Frank contributed to a bipartisan effort to put his objectives—tighter regulation of Fannie and Freddie and new funds for rental housing—into law. At the time, Fannie and Freddie were regulated by a small agency within the Department of Housing and Urban Development; the bill proposed to create an independent agency to monitor their operations. Frank and Michael Oxley, who was then chairman of the Financial Services Committee, achieved broad bipartisan support for the bill in the committee, and it passed the House. But the Senate never voted on the measure, in part because President Bush was likely to veto it. “If it had passed, that would have been one of the ways we could have reined in the bowling ball going downhill called housing,” Oxley told me. “Barney, to some extent, is misunderstood—with this image of him as a fierce partisan. He is an institutionalist. He believes in the House and in the process. He eschews the grandstanding style that so many members use and prefers to work behind the scenes and get something done.”
Frank’s prescience on the housing crisis should not be overstated, because Fannie and Freddie represented only one aspect of the problem. “Fannie and Freddie were contributors to the bubble, but they came late in the really bad loans, after the private issuers like Merrill and Citigroup,” Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, said. “The law probably would have curtailed their lending, but it’s hard to say it would have made any difference. The real problem was outside of Fannie and Freddie, with the banks, and nobody in Congress was talking about it.”
Frank hopes that the housing trust fund won’t have to rely entirely on Fannie and Freddie for money. He intends to secure additional funding from, among other sources, the Federal Housing Administration, a division of the Department of Housing and Urban Development which insures mortgages. Specifically, he wants to fund the trust with profits from an F.H.A. program that allows older homeowners to borrow money against the equity in their homes. “We’re going to expand that program, which makes money for the federal government, and start with part of the profits from it,” Frank told me. “If you know how the government works, you can find ways to do what you want.”
The number of housing units that will be built or renovated with funds from the trust is likely to be modest at first. (Frank declined to provide an estimate.) But the money will be available to both nonprofit and commercial developers, fulfilling Frank’s longtime goal of promoting public-private partnerships. “Barney has been our champion in the House, and he has been unbelievably effective,” Sheila Crowley, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which lobbied for the establishment of the trust, said. “If the bill hadn’t come out of Barney’s committee to the House with universal Democratic support and strong support from moderate Republicans, the Senate wouldn’t have paid any attention. But Barney got it done.”
The bill takes effect this year, but it’s unclear whether the housing trust will work as Frank expects. “I am skeptical that a national housing trust will address the real problems in our housing markets,” Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor who studies the housing market, said. “In many places, there is a lot of housing available at low prices. In Buffalo and throughout the industrial Midwest, there’s loads of low-cost rental housing available. The private sector in Houston does a great job of providing low-cost rental housing without help from the government. The question is whether this program will make a difference in places like New York and San Francisco, where there is a shortage. It’s not obvious that you want to think about new or renovated housing for poor Americans. Poor people buy used cars. There’s no reason to think that used housing isn’t often the right answer as well.” Moreover, it’s not clear that Frank’s determination to avoid the annual congressional appropriations process makes good public policy. “Once you have funding on automatic pilot, the money is spent regardless of what other priorities are there for the federal government and whether it’s properly targeted and properly administered,” David John, who studies housing as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said. “This is why we have an appropriations process.” Scott Garrett, Frank’s colleague and ideological adversary on the Financial Services Committee, told me, “Barney has a great deal of faith in government’s ability to solve people’s problems. The question is whether that faith is justified.”
When the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, the Democratic leadership in the House made Frank a kind of one-man immediate-response team to Newt Gingrich, the new House Speaker. Frank and Gingrich sparred almost daily, and Frank still professes surprise that Gingrich took their disagreements personally. “Barney Frank hates me,” Gingrich said at the time. (He would not discuss the matter for this article.) According to Frank, Gingrich is a “bleeder”—a derogatory term for a boxer who is prone to cuts. For Frank, the word has particular resonance: one of his high-school classmates was Chuck Wepner, a heavyweight boxer who was known as the Bayonne Bleeder.
“My first day of high school, I was sent to the vice-principal for discipline, because I got in trouble for talking too much,” Frank told me. “When I got to her office, Chuck was already there. He’d gotten into a fight with the toughest kid in the school.” (In 1975, Wepner went fifteen rounds in a heavyweight championship bout against Muhammad Ali and, in so doing, it has been said, inspired Sylvester Stallone to create the character Rocky.)
Frank’s parents, Sam and Elsie, raised their four children in a distinctly less rarefied setting than the ones in which they all eventually arrived. Sam Frank operated Tooley’s Truck Terminal, near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City. “My father ran a truck stop,” Frank told me. “He sort of lived on the fringes. We’re talking about Hudson County—Frank Hague was the boss—a totally corrupt place. In 1946, my father’s brother Harry got the contract to sell cars to the city, and of course he had to give a kickback to the guys who ran the city. My father was a middleman or something.” Sam was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about the matter. He refused and was found in criminal contempt. “For a while, he was hiding out from the cops in New York,” Frank recalled. “I was six years old, and once I went to see him in the city, and we saw ‘Robin Hood,’ with Errol Flynn. The next day, the cops came to my first-grade class to interview me, to see if I had been with my dad. My father’s sister, Aunt Minnie, taught at the school. She heard about the cops coming and went straight to my classroom to break it up, so I didn’t have to talk.”
Eventually, Sam returned to New Jersey, and was jailed for refusing to testify. “They treated him nice,” Frank said. “They let my mother bring him food. He served for about a year.” The incident notwithstanding, Frank’s parents instilled in their children a belief in the power of the government to do good. “We had this great good fortune of growing up with parents who took politics seriously,” Frank’s sister Ann Lewis told me. “The idea that people could choose their leaders was not a small thing in the aftermath of World War II.” Lewis, who is two years older than Frank, said that Frank was outspoken even as a boy. “Our uncle Rosie was a sportswriter, and Barney was a huge Yankees fan, and one day around 1950, when Barney was around ten, Rosie brought home a talent scout for the Yankees,” she said. “And I remember Barney asking the guy why the Yankees didn’t have any black ballplayers. I was very struck by that. I looked at the kid, and I thought, That’s a really tough thing to do. Good for you.”
“Barney was a famous person at sixteen,” Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor, who dated a classmate of Frank’s at Bayonne High School, said. “He talked exactly like he talks now, and he was always talking, always involved in every kind of politics. Because Bayonne was such a sleazy place, nobody knew whether Barney was going to wind up in Congress or in jail.” According to Frank, his father was involved with the Mafia. “Funzi Tieri, a big-time gangster with the Genovese family, came to my brother David’s bar mitzvah, when I was twenty-three,” he said. Sam Frank died at the age of fifty-three, while Barney was an undergraduate at Harvard, and Barney took a year off to help resolve the family’s tangled financial affairs. “The Mafia guys were very helpful to me at the time,” he said.
All four Frank children settled far from Bayonne. Ann Lewis, the eldest, was the director of communications in the Clinton White House and a top aide to Hillary Clinton during her Presidential campaign. David Frank works as a speechwriter for the A.A.R.P., and Doris Breay is an administrator at Brandeis University who frequently campaigns for her brother. In the nineteen-seventies, Elsie Frank moved to Boston and later became the president of the Massachusetts Association of Older Americans. During Barney’s first reëlection campaign, in 1982—a tough race, because redistricting forced him to run against another incumbent, Margaret Heckler—Elsie was featured in a series of television commercials for her son. She died in 2005.
Earlier this fall, the Democrats in the House had to take sides when Henry Waxman, of California, challenged John Dingell, of Michigan, for the chairmanship of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which Dingell had held for a year. (Dingell also chaired the committee from 1981 to 1995.) The contest represented a classic ideological confrontation between the left and the center of the Democratic Party. As chairman of the House oversight committee, Waxman, an outspoken, pro-environment liberal, led high-profile investigations of Republican wrongdoings, while Dingell, a pro-labor moderate, is known as a behind-the-scenes player, often on behalf of the automobile industry.
Frank voted for Dingell, who lost, 137–122. “I thought Henry was making a great mistake,” Frank told me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. “One of the advantages we have today is that we appear to be much less ideologically driven than the Republicans. I think there is a danger of what will look like liberal overreach. We need all the moderates to pass legislation, even at two hundred and fifty-seven”—the number of Democrats in the House after the 2008 election. “If Dingell and Waxman were running ab initio, I’d vote for Waxman. But I do think there should be some burden of proof before you throw out a chairman.”
To the public, Frank looks much like Waxman—a blunt partisan with a flair for sound bites—but, like Dingell, he has a record as a pragmatic legislator. He graduated from Harvard in 1962 and began a long, ultimately unsuccessful quest there for a Ph.D. in government. (I once asked him the subject of his planned dissertation. “The Massachusetts legislature,” he told me. What about the legislature? “I never got much farther than that,” he said. He later attended Harvard Law School, and graduated in 1977.) In the mid-sixties, as a teaching assistant at Harvard, Frank lived on campus and had time for non-academic pursuits. He spent five weeks registering black voters in Mississippi, and travelled around the country as an organizer for the activist Allard Lowenstein, an early leader of what would become the student movement of the late sixties. Frank also befriended a group of young, reform-oriented politicians, who hoped to wrest control of the commonwealth from the long-serving Democratic Party stalwarts who dominated state government. In time, his circle of politician friends coalesced into an entity known as the Democratic Study Group, for which Frank served as an unpaid executive director, and which quickly came to center on a young state representative from Brookline named Michael Dukakis.
“At the time, Massachusetts was one of the three or four most corrupt states in the country,” Dukakis told me. “About twenty or thirty of us young reform types decided to start a little organization that would give us some clout, on basic progressive legislation and conflict-of-interest and integrity stuff. We persuaded Barney to take the Red Line down from Harvard to be our staff guy—for free. He hasn’t changed. He was smart as hell and funny as hell and worked like hell.”
In 1967, Frank was invited to work on Kevin White’s first campaign for mayor of Boston. White, who was thirty-eight, belonged to a generation of charismatic young politicians—including John V. Lindsay, in New York—who ran on platforms dedicated to empowering neighborhoods and cooling inner-city tensions, and he narrowly defeated Louise Day Hicks, a former chairperson of the Boston School Committee, who opposed the desegregation of local public schools. “The White administration was an incredible burst of energy, and Barney was effectively Kevin’s chief of staff,” Fred Salvucci, who ran White’s “little city hall,” in East Boston, said. “We stopped the expansion of Logan Airport, traded highway funds for mass transit, did all this stuff, and Barney was the guy we went to for answers. Other than saying, ‘Talk faster, I’m busy,’ because his mind was working faster than mine, he was great to work with, even though I couldn’t understand his accent a lot of the time.”
In 1972, Frank ran for state representative in a district that included much of Boston’s Back Bay. He profited from student enthusiasm about the Presidential race that year. “I am one of the few people in the country who can say he benefitted from George McGovern’s coattails,” he has said. Once elected, Frank became known for witty banter and harsh partisanship. After Michael Dukakis won the governorship, in 1974, Frank became one of his most vociferous critics, repeatedly accusing him of betraying his liberal principles.
“I inherited a mess,” Dukakis told me. “The state was a shambles, with twelve and a half per cent unemployment. Time magazine was calling us the New Appalachia. It was depressing stuff. I had to do some hard cutting, and Barney was upset about it, and I can understand why.” Liberal outrage at Dukakis grew so intense that in the 1978 election he drew a primary challenger from the left, Barbara Ackerman, a former mayor of Cambridge, in addition to an opponent from the right, Edward J. King, a pro-business former football player. Frank endorsed Ackerman over Dukakis. “The real point of Ackerman’s campaign,” Barney told his biographer, Stuart Weisberg, “was to show Dukakis that there was a price to be paid for hurting poor people.”
King defeated Dukakis in the Democratic primary and went on to become a conservative governor. “Yeah, I didn’t see Ed King coming on as strongly as he did,” Frank told me. “I was very angry at Mike. And I thought he was doing permanent damage to liberalism.” Frank insists that Ackerman did not cost Dukakis the primary, but he remains troubled by his misjudgment in the race.
Two years later, in 1980, Pope John Paul II instructed priests to withdraw from electoral politics, and Father Robert Drinan, at that time the congressman representing Massachusetts’s Fourth District, complied by not running for reëlection. Frank, with Drinan’s endorsement, easily won the general election. (Afterward, Frank joked about papal infallibility.) In 1982, Dukakis defeated King in a rematch and served two more terms as governor. He said that he had no hard feelings for Frank. “He has always been a strong progressive force around here,” Dukakis said. “He’s a guy who still represents me in Congress and does so very well.”
Frank’s role in crafting the government’s response to the current economic crisis suggests both the promise and the limitations of his pragmatic liberalism. On the evening of Thursday, September 18th, during one of the most tumultuous weeks in American economic history, Frank was summoned to an emergency meeting in the office of Nancy Pelosi. That Monday, the federal government had declined to intercede as Lehman Brothers, the investment-banking firm, declared bankruptcy. But the following day the Federal Reserve provided American International Group, the insurance company, with a bailout worth eighty-five billion dollars, to prevent it from going out of business. Many in Congress viewed these developments with alarm.
“On that Thursday afternoon, I was meeting with my leadership, and I realized I had not heard from Hank Paulson”—the Treasury Secretary—“that day about the markets,” Pelosi told me. “So, because the situation was looking chaotic, I called Hank and said I wanted him to come in the following morning at 9 A.M. with Ben Bernanke”—the chairman of the Federal Reserve—“to brief me and the whole Democratic leadership. I reached him at about 3 P.M., and he said tomorrow morning might be too late. He had to come by that night.”
Pelosi asked Frank and a bipartisan group of senators and representatives to meet with the Administration officials in her office. “That evening, when we met with them, they painted a very dismal picture,” Pelosi continued. “They said if we don’t act now we may not have an economy on Monday night.” Paulson proposed that Congress authorize the Treasury Department to buy large amounts of the so-called toxic assets—mostly mortgage-backed securities—from financial-services companies that were on the brink of collapse. “We kept asking them, ‘Why do you want to buy these assets?’ ” Pelosi said. “ ‘Why not just buy their stock to recapitalize them?’ They just said this was their break-the-glass project—‘In case of emergency, break glass.’ It was waiting in the wings, and they wanted to use it. Harry Reid”—the Senate Majority Leader—“kept asking how much it would cost, and Paulson wouldn’t commit to a number.”
Frank laid out the provisions that the Democrats wanted in a bailout bill: equity for the taxpayers, like any other investors; a program to limit foreclosures for beleaguered homeowners; compensation reform for executives at companies receiving bailout funds; and strict congressional oversight of the whole process. Two days later, on Saturday, September 20th, the Treasury Department sent Congress a formal proposal of sorts. In a text just three pages long, the Treasury asked for seven hundred billion dollars from Congress but provided few details about how the Administration would spend the money. “It was just ridiculous,” Pelosi told me. “They wanted us to surrender all authority and give them seven hundred billion dollars.”
Throughout the weekend, Frank and Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut and the chairman of the Senate banking committee, worked with colleagues in both parties to come up with a plan that they thought could win widespread support. The following Wednesday, September 24th, John McCain, the Republican Presidential nominee, announced that he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to address the crisis. Although McCain had played no part in the negotiations, the White House promptly scheduled a meeting of the President, the congressional leadership, and the two Presidential candidates for the following afternoon, Thursday, September 25th. By this time, a deal seemed to be in place. Congressional leaders announced that they had agreed in principle to an amended version of the Administration’s bailout proposal. Before the meeting, the Democrats at the White House, including Frank, Pelosi, and Barack Obama, had caucused privately in the Roosevelt Room about their strategy for the day. “Barack said, ‘I think we need to go ahead with this,’ ” Frank recalled. “He was being conciliatory, because he thinks it’s very important for us, both in public policy and politically, that we don’t get blamed for fucking up the economy. And that we not fuck up the economy.”
The meeting with the President nearly destroyed the good will that had been generated during the previous week. John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House, expressed disapproval of the proposal, arguing that it did not reflect a bipartisan consensus. Frank tried to put McCain on the spot: would he back the House Republicans or Bush and the rest of the congressional leadership? As Frank recalled, “I said, ‘John, what do you think?’ ‘Well, I think the House Republicans have a right to their position.’ ‘Fine. You agree with that position?’ ‘No, I just think they have a right to their position.’ He looks like your old uncle, just shrivelled and shrunk, and he just didn’t look good. And we kept pressing him, saying, ‘What is your plan?’ ” McCain wouldn’t say.
“The protocol is you’re not supposed to talk to the President directly,” Frank said. “We just ignored that.” But the President didn’t bring the group together, and the meeting ended without a decision. The Democrats returned to the Roosevelt Room to plot their next move, and Paulson joined them. As Frank recalled, Paulson “literally drops to the one knee” and begged Pelosi to bring the bailout up for a vote in the House, despite the Republican opposition. “But we start yelling at him,” Frank said. “ ‘Jeez, work on your assholes over there—your guys. I mean, you know, we’re trying to do it, and your guys are playing games.’ ”
Two tumultuous votes in the House followed. On September 29th, the bailout was unexpectedly defeated, 228–205, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged seven hundred and seventy-eight points. Congressional leaders and Administration officials made small, mostly cosmetic changes to the bill and, citing the turmoil in the stock market, urged their colleagues to support the measure. On October 3rd, the revised bill passed the House, 263–171. What Frank and the other sponsors of the bailout actually accomplished, however, remains uncertain.
It appears that Frank failed to achieve three of his four initial objectives. The Treasury Department eventually did make direct investments in financial-services firms, but the bill includes few meaningful restrictions on executive compensation, and the oversight provision will likely have only a modest influence on how the bailout money is distributed and spent.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
One of Frank’s primary goals for the bailout—providing assistance to homeowners to avoid foreclosures—remains unrealized, even though the Treasury Department has already allocated half of the seven hundred billion dollars. On November 20th, Frank wrote a letter to Paulson, “to urge you in the strongest possible terms to use [bailout] funds to support significant steps that can help stem the tidal wave of foreclosures threatening the stability of our financial system and our economy.” He has held committee hearings to praise banks like J. P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, which have instituted programs to modify the terms of some mortgages. He has urged support for a proposal by Sheila Bair, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to enable homeowners to renegotiate mortgages and, potentially, prevent an estimated one and a half million foreclosures this year.
Frank defends the bailout legislation. “Sure, this sucks,” he told me, “but if it wasn’t for what we did, it would suck worse. We were looking at the possibility of a global economic collapse, and that didn’t happen. We are better off than if we hadn’t passed it.” I asked him whether he thought his efforts to force the Administration to modify the bailout, especially on foreclosures, were having any effect. “Jack Newfield, while writing for the Voice under Lindsay, said he didn’t have any governmental power—he had the power to make the dinner parties of the Lindsay-administration officials unpleasant,” Frank replied. “That was his pressure point. That’s part of it. You know, no one, almost no one, is totally indifferent to public opinion. So you have hearings to pressure people. People don’t like to be embarrassed. You have hearings to send messages. So they can have an impact. Sometimes they’re a waste of time. And you can get too diffused. But I think these hearings had some impact.” At the moment, Frank can claim that he played a significant role in creating a tenuous lifeline for banks and other institutions (many of which have yet to resume normal lending), while encouraging the federal government to provide some assistance to terrified homeowners (which may not happen).
In November, Pelosi asked Frank to lead the effort in the House to pass another bailout, for the Big Three American carmakers. On the morning of December 5th, the day that Frank had summoned the chief executives of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler to testify before his committee, the government reported that the unemployment rate had jumped from 6.5 per cent to 6.7 per cent in a single month. Frank used that news to inject a note of drama into his opening statement. “Context is especially important this morning,” he said. “A failure, to some extent, of three of our major domestic manufacturing entities would be a very serious problem in any case. In the midst of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, it would be an unmitigated disaster.” Opposition from Senate Republicans prevented legislation to rescue the automakers from coming up for a vote. On December 19th, President Bush used his executive authority to offer $13.4 billion in loans from the federal bailout fund to General Motors and Chrysler, which appeared to be enough to enable the companies to survive for a few months—until the new Congress and the Obama Administration devise a long-term recovery plan. “I think what Bush did was right,” Frank told me. “He kept the companies alive until Obama takes over.”
In 1986, Frank approached Tip O’Neill on the House floor to tell him that a forthcoming book would refer to Frank as a gay man. “He said, ‘Oh, Barney, don’t listen to that crap,’ ” Frank recalled. “They say stuff like that about all of us.’ I said, ‘Well, Tip, it’s true.’ And he sort of slumped in his chair and said, ‘Oh, Barney, I’m so sad. I thought you might be the first Jewish Speaker.’ ” (O’Neill, who had little facility for contemporary slang, prepared his staffers by saying that Frank had decided to “come out of the room.”) Two decades later, Frank’s ascendancy in Congress suggests that O’Neill had too little faith in Frank—and in the ability of the country to change.
Frank’s work as a committee chairman absorbs virtually all his time, but he is also, unofficially, the congressman for gay America. “I remember when I first came to Congress, twenty-one years ago,” Nancy Pelosi told me. “And I heard a congressman, William Dannemeyer, on the floor, saying the most hateful things about AIDS and gay people. It was regular fare at the time. I just didn’t get it. And I called Barney to see what we could do about it. And he said, ‘Why are you calling me? Go down there and challenge him!’ ”
Frank remains a sporadic target for anti-gay-rights groups. In the 2006 campaign, John Hostettler, a Republican congressman from Indiana, ran a radio ad that said, “Pelosi will then put in motion her radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda, led by Barney Frank, reprimanded by the House after paying for sex with a man who ran a gay brothel out of Congressman Frank’s home.” (In 1990, the House Ethics Committee rejected the charge that Frank knew about the prostitution ring, which was for straight men.) Asked about his gay agenda, Frank says, “I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the Army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.” (Hostettler lost the 2006 race.)
Frank’s mordant view of human nature presents a contrast to the sunnier approach of President-elect Obama, a difference reflected in their dispute over Obama’s choice to have Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor, give the invocation at the Inauguration. “Obama tends to overstate his ability to get people to change their opinions and underestimates the importance of confronting ideological differences,” Frank told me. “It’s one thing to talk to somebody. I talk to more conservatives than anyone, because I’m trying to get legislation passed. But it’s another to make Rick Warren the most honored clergyman in the world.” In California, Warren supported Proposition 8, the successful anti-gay-marriage referendum. “Now, when we fight Warren in California, we are going to hear, ‘Oh, yeah, but Obama picked him for the inaugural.’ He doesn’t deserve that honor. And I don’t want to hear that the other clergyman at the inaugural, Reverend [Joseph] Lowery, supports gay rights. I didn’t vote for a tie in the election.”
Frank worries that Obama’s evenhandedness may prove to be a political liability. “On the financial crisis, Obama said that both sides were asleep at the switch,” Frank said. “But that’s not true. The Republicans were wide awake, and they made choices to oppose regulation. They had bad ideas. He says, ‘I don’t want to fight the fights of the nineties,’ but I don’t see any alternative to refighting the fights of the nineties if we want to change things.”
Still, Frank is uncharacteristically hopeful about the future, including gay rights. “We’re going to do three things in Congress,” he told me. “First, a hate-crimes bill—that shouldn’t be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come.”
To Frank, the future looks bright even for the economy. In 2009, he predicts, the federal government will take steps to stop some foreclosures, and produce a stimulus package that will reinvigorate the economy. “It will all work together, and it will work,” he said. “Obama’s almost lucky. He can do all these things on the economy, and both the real and psychological effect of what he’s doing is going to kick in soon after he takes office. And the recovery is going to start about six months before the 2010 elections. That’s pretty good.”
In 2004, when it appeared that John Kerry might win the Presidency, Frank prepared to run for Kerry’s Senate seat. But Frank’s age and the committee chairmanship suggest that he is likely to remain where he is. In October, he began holding hearings on how to transform the laws that govern banks and financial-services companies, with the goal of reforming the system so that the current crisis will not recur. “We are at a moment now when liberalism is poised to have its biggest impact on America since Roosevelt, because the conservative viewpoint has been so thoroughly repudiated by reality,” Frank said. “Someone asked Harold Macmillan what has the most impact on political decisions. He said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ Events have just totally repudiated them, and we’re now in a position to take advantage of that.” He went on, “You know Hegel. Thesis: No regulation at all. Antithesis: Now the government owns the banks. What I gotta do next year is the synthesis.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
The title of the book suggests the basis for the widespread interest: “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman.” Now sixty-eight years old, Frank has represented Massachusetts’s Fourth Congressional District since 1981, and he remains best known for his decision, in 1987, to reveal that he is gay, becoming the first member of Congress to do so voluntarily. At the time, the disclosure provoked more curiosity than controversy, but, two years later, Stephen Gobie, a prostitute whom Frank had patronized and then befriended, made a series of lurid allegations about him—claiming that they had had sex in the House gym and that Frank had permitted Gobie to run a prostitution ring out of his home. An investigation by the House Ethics Committee failed to substantiate those charges, though it determined that Frank had written a misleading letter of recommendation for Gobie and had Gobie’s parking tickets waived. Nevertheless, Frank was reëlected with ease, and he became a pointed critic of the Republicans who took control of the House in 1994 and a passionate opponent of Clinton’s impeachment, in 1998. A witty and effective presence on the House floor and in committee rooms, Frank in recent years has settled into the roles of wise guy and wise man of the Democratic Party. (Conservatives “believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth,” he once remarked. More recently, he noted that Barack Obama’s continued insistence that we have one President at a time “overstates the number of Presidents we have.”) In a 2006 poll of Capitol Hill staffers by Washingtonian, published shortly before the elections that gave Democrats control of the House for the first time in twelve years, Frank was voted the brainiest, funniest, and most eloquent congressman—a notable achievement, since he often speaks in a barely comprehensible mumble.
During the financial crisis this fall, Frank’s status as a gay trailblazer suddenly seemed remote and irrelevant. After the Democrats’ victory, he became chairman of the Committee on Financial Services, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, designated him the Democrats’ chief negotiator with the Bush Administration on legislation to address the crises in the banking and auto industries. “Through this all, the quarterback for us is Barney,” Pelosi told me. “He’s solution-oriented, respectful of different perspectives, and brilliant. And it’s brilliance that saves time, because he simplifies the complex for us. He is an enormously valuable intellectual resource for the Congress.”
For the first time in more than forty years of public life, Frank has real power, and he is wielding it in a characteristically idiosyncratic manner. He remains a national symbol of outré sexuality as well as a rare wit in generally humor-deficient Washington. But in Congress he is thought of no longer simply as a liberal of the old school (which he is) but also as a grind. His expertise is in one of the least glamorous subjects on the national agenda—housing, particularly rental housing for poor people—and he is using that knowledge to confront the nation’s economic crisis. “For Barney, the question has always been: What works? What can government do to see that people have the decent necessities of life?” his sister Ann Lewis, the longtime Democratic activist, says. “Now he’s right there. Barney’s been preparing for this moment for his entire life.”
The contours of Frank’s Massachusetts district have shifted over the years, but his political base has long been the liberal, heavily Jewish suburbs of Newton and Brookline. (Brookline was once part of the district represented by Tip O’Neill, the former Speaker of the House, but he surrendered it to Frank’s predecessor, Father Robert Drinan, saying, according to Frank, “I can’t take all the phone calls. Those nice Jewish ladies even call when they agree with you!”) Much of the campus of Boston College, a Jesuit institution, also lies within Frank’s district, and two days after the recent election he paid a visit to the B.C. Real Estate Council, an alumni group.
Boston College has become a major national university in recent years, but the hundred or so older graduates at the luncheon reflected the school’s Irish-Catholic roots. Frank ambled to the podium in his standard uniform: a monochromatic suit, a white shirt, and a rep tie. The look is an improvement on the dishevelled attire that was once his trademark. When Frank was running for state representative in Boston, in the early nineteen-seventies, a campaign poster featured his photograph and the words “Neatness Isn’t Everything.” In conversation, and even in his speeches, Frank often refers to his lifelong struggle to lose weight, but he is well into his seventh decade, and that battle seems to have been lost, a plight accentuated by his apparent tendency to buy shirts in his aspirational, rather than his actual, size.
Frank never speaks from a prepared text, and he talks so quickly that transcription is nearly impossible. His staff in Washington sometimes posts videos of his remarks on the Web instead. Frank has lived in Massachusetts since he was a freshman at Harvard, in the late nineteen-fifties, but his accent is still marked by a virulent strain of his native New Jersey—he is from Bayonne. (Early in Frank’s congressional career, Toby Moffett, a representative from Connecticut, jokingly asked for U.N.-style simultaneous translations of Frank’s remarks during committee hearings.)
Frank rarely smiles, even when he’s being funny. “There are three lies politicians tell,” he told the real-estate group. “The first is ‘We ran against each other but are still good friends.’ That’s never true. The second is ‘I like campaigning.’ Anyone who tells you they like campaigning is either a liar or a sociopath. Then, there’s ‘I hate to say I told you so.’ ” He went on, “Everybody likes to say ‘I told you so.’ I have found personally that it is one of the few pleasures that improves with age. I can say ‘I told you so’ without taking a pill before, during, or after I do it.” A priest and several older men at my table realized that Frank was talking about sex, and, embarrassed, they stared at their hands. But the moment passed quickly. In Frank’s district, at least, his homosexuality provokes little controversy, even at a Catholic school. (Elsewhere, Frank no longer censors his ribald sense of humor. Not long ago, Paul Begala, the political strategist, was speaking at a fund-raiser for a gay-rights group and said, “When I told my father, back in Texas, that I was speaking to an L.G.B.T. group, he said that sounded like a sandwich.” From the audience, Frank called out, “Sometimes it is!”)
Frank told the group at Boston College that he predicted, and might have prevented, the real-estate crisis that has engulfed the economy. By this time, many aspects of the crisis were well known. The end of the housing bubble had caused home values to plummet and mortgage defaults to rise, particularly among subprime borrowers. Many financial-services firms had assembled mortgages and bought and sold them as securities, and the value of those assets had also declined sharply—a development that devastated the firms. The investment banks Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers had closed their doors, and the financial-services industry was on the brink of collapse, even after Congress authorized an emergency seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout, in October.
According to Frank, at the root of the real-estate crisis was a misguided notion that homeownership should be available to all people—what President Bush has called “the ownership society.” “The ‘I told you so’ here is that homeownership is a nice thing but it is not suitable for everybody,” Frank said at Boston College. “There are people in this society who don’t have enough money to be homeowners, and there are people whose lives are not sufficiently integrated for them to take on the responsibility to be a homeowner. And we did too much pushing of people into inappropriate mortgages and into homeownership.” He said that many people would always be renters, and that there was nothing wrong with this. “We need to get back in the business of building rental housing and preserving the housing we have,” he said.
In one respect, Frank went on, the current crisis has had a salutary effect: home prices have fallen, making homes more affordable for those who still have the money to buy them. “But we need to be bringing down the cost of housing in an orderly way, like by building new housing to increase the supply,” he said. “We’ve brought the cost down a little bit in a less orderly way. I tend to eat when I’m under stress. I want to lose twenty-five pounds—but not by Sunday. And that’s how home prices have come down.” (Frank speaks incessantly about food. In “Let’s Get Frank,” he complains about the low-fat provisions given to Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee during the impeachment debate. Referring to Dick Gephardt, who was the Minority Leader at the time, Frank says, “They got all this jelly-doughnut shit in there, and I gotta eat this stuff. . . . Gephardt’s a sheygets—whaddaya expect from Gephardt?” Sheygets is Yiddish for a male Gentile, and thus one who cannot be trusted to provide acceptable snacks.)
Frank arrived in Congress when the Reagan Administration was withdrawing the federal government from the business of building housing for the poor. At the time, it was clear that the private sector had little incentive to build low-income housing without government assistance in the form of tax breaks or subsidies. The Reagan Administration assisted low-income renters by offering them vouchers to help them pay rent and by providing tax credits to local developers who built low-income housing. In subsequent years, Frank has fought with intermittent success to preserve such programs from major budget cuts.
In 2001, Frank embraced a new approach. That year, Bernie Sanders, then a representative from Vermont, sponsored a bill to create a government trust fund that would be used for building and renovating low-income housing. Sanders’s legislation didn’t pass, but the idea was later reintroduced, and Frank backed a proposal for funding the trust with a portion of the annual revenue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation, the two giant, government-backed mortgage companies. The funding for the trust would be automatic—not subject to annual congressional approval. “I realized, because housing has been a backwater, getting appropriations for housing is going to be tough,” Frank told me. “First of all, if you want to build housing, it can’t be year by year. You know, it’s construction. But, two, I’m finding money outside the appropriations process, money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So I can do a lot of units without directly competing for the appropriations.”
The idea was based on a variety of similar programs at the state and local levels. In the past few decades, governments across the country have set up nearly six hundred trust funds to build low-income housing, typically by collecting small taxes or fees from real-estate transactions. “There was positive buzz for what was happening with state and local trust funds, but the amounts were really a drop in the bucket,” Barbara Sard, the director of housing policy at the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said. “But the dream for making a real difference in low-income rental housing has been to do it at the federal level, and that’s what Barney has been trying to do.”
In 2007, Frank used his influence as committee chairman to insure that the housing trust-fund bill finally passed the House. In 2008, a similar measure made it through the Senate as part of a larger bill, which President Bush signed. By that time, however, Fannie and Freddie were mired in debt, and the value of their shares was collapsing. And, because Frank’s committee was supposed to oversee the two mortgage giants, he faced questions about what he might have done to avoid the catastrophe.
The Committee on Financial Services, which has seventy members, is one of the biggest panels in Congress. (It was known as the Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs Committee until the Democrats lost control of the House in 1994, and Frank attributes the change to “Republican political correctness.”) Congressional hearings customarily begin with statements from members, a practice that can take hours. Frank and Michael Oxley, the Ohio Republican who was his predecessor as chairman, shared a distaste for the tradition, and together they were known as the “impatient caucus.” Still, Frank allows his colleagues to speak briefly before a hearing, and, on October 21st, Scott Garrett, a conservative Republican from New Jersey, used his time to attack Frank—in particular, his claim that he had anticipated the crisis.
“Before we are able to go forward with new and important changes to the over-all regulatory structure for our financial-services industry, I do believe that it is essential that we better understand just how we got into this problem,” Garrett said. “Now, one of the main parts of the problem was poor regulation in the past, specifically in the area of Fannie and Freddie.” According to Garrett, “our distinguished chairman” had no right “to claim the mantle of being a champion of reform with Fannie and Freddie.” On the contrary, Garrett argued, he and other Republicans had wanted to “raise the capital levels, to reduce the retained portfolios, to lower the conforming loan limits.”
Garrett’s accusations were genteel compared with those made by Bill O’Reilly, a few weeks earlier, when Frank appeared on his show on Fox News. “You blame everybody else! You’re a coward!” O’Reilly bellowed. “In any private concern, you’re out on your butt! But not here in the federal government!” Frank, in turn, berated O’Reilly for his “ranting” and “stupidity.” (The confrontation has been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.)
At the hearing, Frank responded testily to Garrett. “The purpose of this hearing was to be forward-looking,” he began. “And I had hoped we could focus on that. But, after the gentleman from New Jersey’s comments in having decried partisanship, he then practiced it. It does seem to me to be important to set the record clearly before us.” Frank pointed out that when Garrett had attempted to tighten regulations on Fannie and Freddie, Republicans had controlled the House. “Had a Republican majority been in favor of passing that bill, they would have done it,” Frank said. “Now he has claimed that it was we Democrats—myself—who blocked things. The number of occasions on which either Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay consulted me about the specifics of legislation are far fewer than the gentleman from New Jersey seems to think.
“I will acknowledge that during the twelve years of Republican rule I was unable to stop them from impeaching Bill Clinton,” Frank went on. “I was unable to stop them from interfering in Terri Schiavo’s husband’s affairs. I was unable to stop their irresponsible tax cuts, the war in Iraq, and a Patriot Act that did not include civil liberties.” In other words, Frank insisted, if the Republicans had wanted to try to prevent the mortgage crisis, they would have had plenty of opportunities to do so.
Frank and I discussed his role in the housing crisis at his district headquarters, in a small office building in Newton. His boyfriend, Jim Ready, who runs an awning company in Maine, had just returned from Whole Foods with Frank’s lunch, a salad, which he was eating with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm. Frank explained that he first became interested in housing during his service, in the late sixties, as the top aide to Kevin White, who was then the mayor of Boston. The city had a long history of building public housing, mostly high-rises, and White pledged to encourage the construction of small apartment complexes, in keeping with the scale of most Boston neighborhoods.
“At first, when you talk about affordable housing and subsidized housing, people immediately ask, ‘What sort of public housing?’ ” Frank said. “ ‘Is it run by the city, like Cabrini-Green?’ ”—a notorious, now demolished project in Chicago. “And we long ago learned how not to do that, but that still was in people’s heads. And if you can do a word-association test, where a picture floated out in people’s heads, there would be these sterile high-rises. And it struck me, before I conceptualized this, that the answer to that was public-private partnership, that that’s the way to do affordable housing. And then it struck me: You know what? This is the model for other things. Public-private-sector coöperation.”
When White was mayor, one of the most infamous public-housing projects in the city was Columbia Point, in Dorchester. The project was said to be so dangerous that ambulances refused to enter it without a police escort. In a process begun under White, and shepherded in its early days by Frank, Columbia Point was turned over to a private developer, who converted it to a mixed-income community, which included housing for the poor and market-rent apartments for the more affluent. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz “Barney is a real capitalist,” Joe Corcoran, the developer who took over Columbia Point, told me. “He understands that we have to make a profit. Barney is the smartest politician I’ve ever seen. I have no problem with him being gay, or being Jewish. I like Jews. I like doing business with Jews. They know how to make a deal.” http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
Frank’s experience in city hall in Boston led to an impatience with abstractions. He recalled a comment by Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, who will be the director of the National Economic Council in the Obama Administration: “Larry said, ‘Oh, well, in the history of the world, nobody ever washed a rented car.’ Well, people wash leased cars all the time. And, secondly, poor people don’t rent cars. It’s just one of those irrelevant things.” Frank went on, “In 2004, it was Bush who started to push Fannie and Freddie into subprime mortgages, because they were boasting about how they were expanding homeownership for low-income people. And I said at the time, ‘Hey—(a) this is going to jeopardize their profitability, but (b) it’s going to put people in homes they can’t afford, and they’re gonna lose them.’ ” (In a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence B. Lindsey, a former economic adviser to President Bush, wrote that Frank “is the only politician I know who has argued that we needed tighter rules that intentionally produce fewer homeowners and more renters.”) Frank recalled with disdain a Bush Administration proposal to allow time limits on rental vouchers for poor people. “They said, ‘Well, don’t you agree that we should limit the amount of time people have a voucher?’ I said, ‘Yes, if you limit the amount of time they can be poor—“I’m sorry, you can only be poor for four years.” ’ ”
In 2005, while the Democrats were still in the minority, Frank contributed to a bipartisan effort to put his objectives—tighter regulation of Fannie and Freddie and new funds for rental housing—into law. At the time, Fannie and Freddie were regulated by a small agency within the Department of Housing and Urban Development; the bill proposed to create an independent agency to monitor their operations. Frank and Michael Oxley, who was then chairman of the Financial Services Committee, achieved broad bipartisan support for the bill in the committee, and it passed the House. But the Senate never voted on the measure, in part because President Bush was likely to veto it. “If it had passed, that would have been one of the ways we could have reined in the bowling ball going downhill called housing,” Oxley told me. “Barney, to some extent, is misunderstood—with this image of him as a fierce partisan. He is an institutionalist. He believes in the House and in the process. He eschews the grandstanding style that so many members use and prefers to work behind the scenes and get something done.”
Frank’s prescience on the housing crisis should not be overstated, because Fannie and Freddie represented only one aspect of the problem. “Fannie and Freddie were contributors to the bubble, but they came late in the really bad loans, after the private issuers like Merrill and Citigroup,” Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, said. “The law probably would have curtailed their lending, but it’s hard to say it would have made any difference. The real problem was outside of Fannie and Freddie, with the banks, and nobody in Congress was talking about it.”
Frank hopes that the housing trust fund won’t have to rely entirely on Fannie and Freddie for money. He intends to secure additional funding from, among other sources, the Federal Housing Administration, a division of the Department of Housing and Urban Development which insures mortgages. Specifically, he wants to fund the trust with profits from an F.H.A. program that allows older homeowners to borrow money against the equity in their homes. “We’re going to expand that program, which makes money for the federal government, and start with part of the profits from it,” Frank told me. “If you know how the government works, you can find ways to do what you want.”
The number of housing units that will be built or renovated with funds from the trust is likely to be modest at first. (Frank declined to provide an estimate.) But the money will be available to both nonprofit and commercial developers, fulfilling Frank’s longtime goal of promoting public-private partnerships. “Barney has been our champion in the House, and he has been unbelievably effective,” Sheila Crowley, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which lobbied for the establishment of the trust, said. “If the bill hadn’t come out of Barney’s committee to the House with universal Democratic support and strong support from moderate Republicans, the Senate wouldn’t have paid any attention. But Barney got it done.”
The bill takes effect this year, but it’s unclear whether the housing trust will work as Frank expects. “I am skeptical that a national housing trust will address the real problems in our housing markets,” Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics professor who studies the housing market, said. “In many places, there is a lot of housing available at low prices. In Buffalo and throughout the industrial Midwest, there’s loads of low-cost rental housing available. The private sector in Houston does a great job of providing low-cost rental housing without help from the government. The question is whether this program will make a difference in places like New York and San Francisco, where there is a shortage. It’s not obvious that you want to think about new or renovated housing for poor Americans. Poor people buy used cars. There’s no reason to think that used housing isn’t often the right answer as well.” Moreover, it’s not clear that Frank’s determination to avoid the annual congressional appropriations process makes good public policy. “Once you have funding on automatic pilot, the money is spent regardless of what other priorities are there for the federal government and whether it’s properly targeted and properly administered,” David John, who studies housing as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said. “This is why we have an appropriations process.” Scott Garrett, Frank’s colleague and ideological adversary on the Financial Services Committee, told me, “Barney has a great deal of faith in government’s ability to solve people’s problems. The question is whether that faith is justified.”
When the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, the Democratic leadership in the House made Frank a kind of one-man immediate-response team to Newt Gingrich, the new House Speaker. Frank and Gingrich sparred almost daily, and Frank still professes surprise that Gingrich took their disagreements personally. “Barney Frank hates me,” Gingrich said at the time. (He would not discuss the matter for this article.) According to Frank, Gingrich is a “bleeder”—a derogatory term for a boxer who is prone to cuts. For Frank, the word has particular resonance: one of his high-school classmates was Chuck Wepner, a heavyweight boxer who was known as the Bayonne Bleeder.
“My first day of high school, I was sent to the vice-principal for discipline, because I got in trouble for talking too much,” Frank told me. “When I got to her office, Chuck was already there. He’d gotten into a fight with the toughest kid in the school.” (In 1975, Wepner went fifteen rounds in a heavyweight championship bout against Muhammad Ali and, in so doing, it has been said, inspired Sylvester Stallone to create the character Rocky.)
Frank’s parents, Sam and Elsie, raised their four children in a distinctly less rarefied setting than the ones in which they all eventually arrived. Sam Frank operated Tooley’s Truck Terminal, near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City. “My father ran a truck stop,” Frank told me. “He sort of lived on the fringes. We’re talking about Hudson County—Frank Hague was the boss—a totally corrupt place. In 1946, my father’s brother Harry got the contract to sell cars to the city, and of course he had to give a kickback to the guys who ran the city. My father was a middleman or something.” Sam was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about the matter. He refused and was found in criminal contempt. “For a while, he was hiding out from the cops in New York,” Frank recalled. “I was six years old, and once I went to see him in the city, and we saw ‘Robin Hood,’ with Errol Flynn. The next day, the cops came to my first-grade class to interview me, to see if I had been with my dad. My father’s sister, Aunt Minnie, taught at the school. She heard about the cops coming and went straight to my classroom to break it up, so I didn’t have to talk.”
Eventually, Sam returned to New Jersey, and was jailed for refusing to testify. “They treated him nice,” Frank said. “They let my mother bring him food. He served for about a year.” The incident notwithstanding, Frank’s parents instilled in their children a belief in the power of the government to do good. “We had this great good fortune of growing up with parents who took politics seriously,” Frank’s sister Ann Lewis told me. “The idea that people could choose their leaders was not a small thing in the aftermath of World War II.” Lewis, who is two years older than Frank, said that Frank was outspoken even as a boy. “Our uncle Rosie was a sportswriter, and Barney was a huge Yankees fan, and one day around 1950, when Barney was around ten, Rosie brought home a talent scout for the Yankees,” she said. “And I remember Barney asking the guy why the Yankees didn’t have any black ballplayers. I was very struck by that. I looked at the kid, and I thought, That’s a really tough thing to do. Good for you.”
“Barney was a famous person at sixteen,” Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor, who dated a classmate of Frank’s at Bayonne High School, said. “He talked exactly like he talks now, and he was always talking, always involved in every kind of politics. Because Bayonne was such a sleazy place, nobody knew whether Barney was going to wind up in Congress or in jail.” According to Frank, his father was involved with the Mafia. “Funzi Tieri, a big-time gangster with the Genovese family, came to my brother David’s bar mitzvah, when I was twenty-three,” he said. Sam Frank died at the age of fifty-three, while Barney was an undergraduate at Harvard, and Barney took a year off to help resolve the family’s tangled financial affairs. “The Mafia guys were very helpful to me at the time,” he said.
All four Frank children settled far from Bayonne. Ann Lewis, the eldest, was the director of communications in the Clinton White House and a top aide to Hillary Clinton during her Presidential campaign. David Frank works as a speechwriter for the A.A.R.P., and Doris Breay is an administrator at Brandeis University who frequently campaigns for her brother. In the nineteen-seventies, Elsie Frank moved to Boston and later became the president of the Massachusetts Association of Older Americans. During Barney’s first reëlection campaign, in 1982—a tough race, because redistricting forced him to run against another incumbent, Margaret Heckler—Elsie was featured in a series of television commercials for her son. She died in 2005.
Earlier this fall, the Democrats in the House had to take sides when Henry Waxman, of California, challenged John Dingell, of Michigan, for the chairmanship of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, which Dingell had held for a year. (Dingell also chaired the committee from 1981 to 1995.) The contest represented a classic ideological confrontation between the left and the center of the Democratic Party. As chairman of the House oversight committee, Waxman, an outspoken, pro-environment liberal, led high-profile investigations of Republican wrongdoings, while Dingell, a pro-labor moderate, is known as a behind-the-scenes player, often on behalf of the automobile industry.
Frank voted for Dingell, who lost, 137–122. “I thought Henry was making a great mistake,” Frank told me in his office in the Rayburn House Office Building. “One of the advantages we have today is that we appear to be much less ideologically driven than the Republicans. I think there is a danger of what will look like liberal overreach. We need all the moderates to pass legislation, even at two hundred and fifty-seven”—the number of Democrats in the House after the 2008 election. “If Dingell and Waxman were running ab initio, I’d vote for Waxman. But I do think there should be some burden of proof before you throw out a chairman.”
To the public, Frank looks much like Waxman—a blunt partisan with a flair for sound bites—but, like Dingell, he has a record as a pragmatic legislator. He graduated from Harvard in 1962 and began a long, ultimately unsuccessful quest there for a Ph.D. in government. (I once asked him the subject of his planned dissertation. “The Massachusetts legislature,” he told me. What about the legislature? “I never got much farther than that,” he said. He later attended Harvard Law School, and graduated in 1977.) In the mid-sixties, as a teaching assistant at Harvard, Frank lived on campus and had time for non-academic pursuits. He spent five weeks registering black voters in Mississippi, and travelled around the country as an organizer for the activist Allard Lowenstein, an early leader of what would become the student movement of the late sixties. Frank also befriended a group of young, reform-oriented politicians, who hoped to wrest control of the commonwealth from the long-serving Democratic Party stalwarts who dominated state government. In time, his circle of politician friends coalesced into an entity known as the Democratic Study Group, for which Frank served as an unpaid executive director, and which quickly came to center on a young state representative from Brookline named Michael Dukakis.
“At the time, Massachusetts was one of the three or four most corrupt states in the country,” Dukakis told me. “About twenty or thirty of us young reform types decided to start a little organization that would give us some clout, on basic progressive legislation and conflict-of-interest and integrity stuff. We persuaded Barney to take the Red Line down from Harvard to be our staff guy—for free. He hasn’t changed. He was smart as hell and funny as hell and worked like hell.”
In 1967, Frank was invited to work on Kevin White’s first campaign for mayor of Boston. White, who was thirty-eight, belonged to a generation of charismatic young politicians—including John V. Lindsay, in New York—who ran on platforms dedicated to empowering neighborhoods and cooling inner-city tensions, and he narrowly defeated Louise Day Hicks, a former chairperson of the Boston School Committee, who opposed the desegregation of local public schools. “The White administration was an incredible burst of energy, and Barney was effectively Kevin’s chief of staff,” Fred Salvucci, who ran White’s “little city hall,” in East Boston, said. “We stopped the expansion of Logan Airport, traded highway funds for mass transit, did all this stuff, and Barney was the guy we went to for answers. Other than saying, ‘Talk faster, I’m busy,’ because his mind was working faster than mine, he was great to work with, even though I couldn’t understand his accent a lot of the time.”
In 1972, Frank ran for state representative in a district that included much of Boston’s Back Bay. He profited from student enthusiasm about the Presidential race that year. “I am one of the few people in the country who can say he benefitted from George McGovern’s coattails,” he has said. Once elected, Frank became known for witty banter and harsh partisanship. After Michael Dukakis won the governorship, in 1974, Frank became one of his most vociferous critics, repeatedly accusing him of betraying his liberal principles.
“I inherited a mess,” Dukakis told me. “The state was a shambles, with twelve and a half per cent unemployment. Time magazine was calling us the New Appalachia. It was depressing stuff. I had to do some hard cutting, and Barney was upset about it, and I can understand why.” Liberal outrage at Dukakis grew so intense that in the 1978 election he drew a primary challenger from the left, Barbara Ackerman, a former mayor of Cambridge, in addition to an opponent from the right, Edward J. King, a pro-business former football player. Frank endorsed Ackerman over Dukakis. “The real point of Ackerman’s campaign,” Barney told his biographer, Stuart Weisberg, “was to show Dukakis that there was a price to be paid for hurting poor people.”
King defeated Dukakis in the Democratic primary and went on to become a conservative governor. “Yeah, I didn’t see Ed King coming on as strongly as he did,” Frank told me. “I was very angry at Mike. And I thought he was doing permanent damage to liberalism.” Frank insists that Ackerman did not cost Dukakis the primary, but he remains troubled by his misjudgment in the race.
Two years later, in 1980, Pope John Paul II instructed priests to withdraw from electoral politics, and Father Robert Drinan, at that time the congressman representing Massachusetts’s Fourth District, complied by not running for reëlection. Frank, with Drinan’s endorsement, easily won the general election. (Afterward, Frank joked about papal infallibility.) In 1982, Dukakis defeated King in a rematch and served two more terms as governor. He said that he had no hard feelings for Frank. “He has always been a strong progressive force around here,” Dukakis said. “He’s a guy who still represents me in Congress and does so very well.”
Frank’s role in crafting the government’s response to the current economic crisis suggests both the promise and the limitations of his pragmatic liberalism. On the evening of Thursday, September 18th, during one of the most tumultuous weeks in American economic history, Frank was summoned to an emergency meeting in the office of Nancy Pelosi. That Monday, the federal government had declined to intercede as Lehman Brothers, the investment-banking firm, declared bankruptcy. But the following day the Federal Reserve provided American International Group, the insurance company, with a bailout worth eighty-five billion dollars, to prevent it from going out of business. Many in Congress viewed these developments with alarm.
“On that Thursday afternoon, I was meeting with my leadership, and I realized I had not heard from Hank Paulson”—the Treasury Secretary—“that day about the markets,” Pelosi told me. “So, because the situation was looking chaotic, I called Hank and said I wanted him to come in the following morning at 9 A.M. with Ben Bernanke”—the chairman of the Federal Reserve—“to brief me and the whole Democratic leadership. I reached him at about 3 P.M., and he said tomorrow morning might be too late. He had to come by that night.”
Pelosi asked Frank and a bipartisan group of senators and representatives to meet with the Administration officials in her office. “That evening, when we met with them, they painted a very dismal picture,” Pelosi continued. “They said if we don’t act now we may not have an economy on Monday night.” Paulson proposed that Congress authorize the Treasury Department to buy large amounts of the so-called toxic assets—mostly mortgage-backed securities—from financial-services companies that were on the brink of collapse. “We kept asking them, ‘Why do you want to buy these assets?’ ” Pelosi said. “ ‘Why not just buy their stock to recapitalize them?’ They just said this was their break-the-glass project—‘In case of emergency, break glass.’ It was waiting in the wings, and they wanted to use it. Harry Reid”—the Senate Majority Leader—“kept asking how much it would cost, and Paulson wouldn’t commit to a number.”
Frank laid out the provisions that the Democrats wanted in a bailout bill: equity for the taxpayers, like any other investors; a program to limit foreclosures for beleaguered homeowners; compensation reform for executives at companies receiving bailout funds; and strict congressional oversight of the whole process. Two days later, on Saturday, September 20th, the Treasury Department sent Congress a formal proposal of sorts. In a text just three pages long, the Treasury asked for seven hundred billion dollars from Congress but provided few details about how the Administration would spend the money. “It was just ridiculous,” Pelosi told me. “They wanted us to surrender all authority and give them seven hundred billion dollars.”
Throughout the weekend, Frank and Chris Dodd, the Democratic senator from Connecticut and the chairman of the Senate banking committee, worked with colleagues in both parties to come up with a plan that they thought could win widespread support. The following Wednesday, September 24th, John McCain, the Republican Presidential nominee, announced that he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to address the crisis. Although McCain had played no part in the negotiations, the White House promptly scheduled a meeting of the President, the congressional leadership, and the two Presidential candidates for the following afternoon, Thursday, September 25th. By this time, a deal seemed to be in place. Congressional leaders announced that they had agreed in principle to an amended version of the Administration’s bailout proposal. Before the meeting, the Democrats at the White House, including Frank, Pelosi, and Barack Obama, had caucused privately in the Roosevelt Room about their strategy for the day. “Barack said, ‘I think we need to go ahead with this,’ ” Frank recalled. “He was being conciliatory, because he thinks it’s very important for us, both in public policy and politically, that we don’t get blamed for fucking up the economy. And that we not fuck up the economy.”
The meeting with the President nearly destroyed the good will that had been generated during the previous week. John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House, expressed disapproval of the proposal, arguing that it did not reflect a bipartisan consensus. Frank tried to put McCain on the spot: would he back the House Republicans or Bush and the rest of the congressional leadership? As Frank recalled, “I said, ‘John, what do you think?’ ‘Well, I think the House Republicans have a right to their position.’ ‘Fine. You agree with that position?’ ‘No, I just think they have a right to their position.’ He looks like your old uncle, just shrivelled and shrunk, and he just didn’t look good. And we kept pressing him, saying, ‘What is your plan?’ ” McCain wouldn’t say.
“The protocol is you’re not supposed to talk to the President directly,” Frank said. “We just ignored that.” But the President didn’t bring the group together, and the meeting ended without a decision. The Democrats returned to the Roosevelt Room to plot their next move, and Paulson joined them. As Frank recalled, Paulson “literally drops to the one knee” and begged Pelosi to bring the bailout up for a vote in the House, despite the Republican opposition. “But we start yelling at him,” Frank said. “ ‘Jeez, work on your assholes over there—your guys. I mean, you know, we’re trying to do it, and your guys are playing games.’ ”
Two tumultuous votes in the House followed. On September 29th, the bailout was unexpectedly defeated, 228–205, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged seven hundred and seventy-eight points. Congressional leaders and Administration officials made small, mostly cosmetic changes to the bill and, citing the turmoil in the stock market, urged their colleagues to support the measure. On October 3rd, the revised bill passed the House, 263–171. What Frank and the other sponsors of the bailout actually accomplished, however, remains uncertain.
It appears that Frank failed to achieve three of his four initial objectives. The Treasury Department eventually did make direct investments in financial-services firms, but the bill includes few meaningful restrictions on executive compensation, and the oversight provision will likely have only a modest influence on how the bailout money is distributed and spent.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz
One of Frank’s primary goals for the bailout—providing assistance to homeowners to avoid foreclosures—remains unrealized, even though the Treasury Department has already allocated half of the seven hundred billion dollars. On November 20th, Frank wrote a letter to Paulson, “to urge you in the strongest possible terms to use [bailout] funds to support significant steps that can help stem the tidal wave of foreclosures threatening the stability of our financial system and our economy.” He has held committee hearings to praise banks like J. P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, which have instituted programs to modify the terms of some mortgages. He has urged support for a proposal by Sheila Bair, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to enable homeowners to renegotiate mortgages and, potentially, prevent an estimated one and a half million foreclosures this year.
Frank defends the bailout legislation. “Sure, this sucks,” he told me, “but if it wasn’t for what we did, it would suck worse. We were looking at the possibility of a global economic collapse, and that didn’t happen. We are better off than if we hadn’t passed it.” I asked him whether he thought his efforts to force the Administration to modify the bailout, especially on foreclosures, were having any effect. “Jack Newfield, while writing for the Voice under Lindsay, said he didn’t have any governmental power—he had the power to make the dinner parties of the Lindsay-administration officials unpleasant,” Frank replied. “That was his pressure point. That’s part of it. You know, no one, almost no one, is totally indifferent to public opinion. So you have hearings to pressure people. People don’t like to be embarrassed. You have hearings to send messages. So they can have an impact. Sometimes they’re a waste of time. And you can get too diffused. But I think these hearings had some impact.” At the moment, Frank can claim that he played a significant role in creating a tenuous lifeline for banks and other institutions (many of which have yet to resume normal lending), while encouraging the federal government to provide some assistance to terrified homeowners (which may not happen).
In November, Pelosi asked Frank to lead the effort in the House to pass another bailout, for the Big Three American carmakers. On the morning of December 5th, the day that Frank had summoned the chief executives of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler to testify before his committee, the government reported that the unemployment rate had jumped from 6.5 per cent to 6.7 per cent in a single month. Frank used that news to inject a note of drama into his opening statement. “Context is especially important this morning,” he said. “A failure, to some extent, of three of our major domestic manufacturing entities would be a very serious problem in any case. In the midst of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, it would be an unmitigated disaster.” Opposition from Senate Republicans prevented legislation to rescue the automakers from coming up for a vote. On December 19th, President Bush used his executive authority to offer $13.4 billion in loans from the federal bailout fund to General Motors and Chrysler, which appeared to be enough to enable the companies to survive for a few months—until the new Congress and the Obama Administration devise a long-term recovery plan. “I think what Bush did was right,” Frank told me. “He kept the companies alive until Obama takes over.”
In 1986, Frank approached Tip O’Neill on the House floor to tell him that a forthcoming book would refer to Frank as a gay man. “He said, ‘Oh, Barney, don’t listen to that crap,’ ” Frank recalled. “They say stuff like that about all of us.’ I said, ‘Well, Tip, it’s true.’ And he sort of slumped in his chair and said, ‘Oh, Barney, I’m so sad. I thought you might be the first Jewish Speaker.’ ” (O’Neill, who had little facility for contemporary slang, prepared his staffers by saying that Frank had decided to “come out of the room.”) Two decades later, Frank’s ascendancy in Congress suggests that O’Neill had too little faith in Frank—and in the ability of the country to change.
Frank’s work as a committee chairman absorbs virtually all his time, but he is also, unofficially, the congressman for gay America. “I remember when I first came to Congress, twenty-one years ago,” Nancy Pelosi told me. “And I heard a congressman, William Dannemeyer, on the floor, saying the most hateful things about AIDS and gay people. It was regular fare at the time. I just didn’t get it. And I called Barney to see what we could do about it. And he said, ‘Why are you calling me? Go down there and challenge him!’ ”
Frank remains a sporadic target for anti-gay-rights groups. In the 2006 campaign, John Hostettler, a Republican congressman from Indiana, ran a radio ad that said, “Pelosi will then put in motion her radical plan to advance the homosexual agenda, led by Barney Frank, reprimanded by the House after paying for sex with a man who ran a gay brothel out of Congressman Frank’s home.” (In 1990, the House Ethics Committee rejected the charge that Frank knew about the prostitution ring, which was for straight men.) Asked about his gay agenda, Frank says, “I do not think that any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the Army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.” (Hostettler lost the 2006 race.)
Frank’s mordant view of human nature presents a contrast to the sunnier approach of President-elect Obama, a difference reflected in their dispute over Obama’s choice to have Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor, give the invocation at the Inauguration. “Obama tends to overstate his ability to get people to change their opinions and underestimates the importance of confronting ideological differences,” Frank told me. “It’s one thing to talk to somebody. I talk to more conservatives than anyone, because I’m trying to get legislation passed. But it’s another to make Rick Warren the most honored clergyman in the world.” In California, Warren supported Proposition 8, the successful anti-gay-marriage referendum. “Now, when we fight Warren in California, we are going to hear, ‘Oh, yeah, but Obama picked him for the inaugural.’ He doesn’t deserve that honor. And I don’t want to hear that the other clergyman at the inaugural, Reverend [Joseph] Lowery, supports gay rights. I didn’t vote for a tie in the election.”
Frank worries that Obama’s evenhandedness may prove to be a political liability. “On the financial crisis, Obama said that both sides were asleep at the switch,” Frank said. “But that’s not true. The Republicans were wide awake, and they made choices to oppose regulation. They had bad ideas. He says, ‘I don’t want to fight the fights of the nineties,’ but I don’t see any alternative to refighting the fights of the nineties if we want to change things.”
Still, Frank is uncharacteristically hopeful about the future, including gay rights. “We’re going to do three things in Congress,” he told me. “First, a hate-crimes bill—that shouldn’t be too hard. Next, employment discrimination. We almost got that through before, but now we can win even if we add transgender protections, which we are going to do. And finally, after the troops get home from Iraq, gays in the military. The time has come.”
To Frank, the future looks bright even for the economy. In 2009, he predicts, the federal government will take steps to stop some foreclosures, and produce a stimulus package that will reinvigorate the economy. “It will all work together, and it will work,” he said. “Obama’s almost lucky. He can do all these things on the economy, and both the real and psychological effect of what he’s doing is going to kick in soon after he takes office. And the recovery is going to start about six months before the 2010 elections. That’s pretty good.”
In 2004, when it appeared that John Kerry might win the Presidency, Frank prepared to run for Kerry’s Senate seat. But Frank’s age and the committee chairmanship suggest that he is likely to remain where he is. In October, he began holding hearings on how to transform the laws that govern banks and financial-services companies, with the goal of reforming the system so that the current crisis will not recur. “We are at a moment now when liberalism is poised to have its biggest impact on America since Roosevelt, because the conservative viewpoint has been so thoroughly repudiated by reality,” Frank said. “Someone asked Harold Macmillan what has the most impact on political decisions. He said, ‘Events, dear boy, events.’ Events have just totally repudiated them, and we’re now in a position to take advantage of that.” He went on, “You know Hegel. Thesis: No regulation at all. Antithesis: Now the government owns the banks. What I gotta do next year is the synthesis.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
foster 4.fos.999 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Neglected and abused infants shuttled from one foster-care setting to another have every reason to feel anxious and threatened in the presence of caregivers. However, if placed with a nurturing foster mother as late as age 1 1/2, children with such backgrounds usually develop a secure relationship with her in a matter of months, a new study suggests.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
Surprisingly, 1-1/2-year-olds responded as well and as quickly to a nurturing foster mother as did much younger infants, who had experienced less neglect and fewer disrupted foster placements, say psychologist Mary Dozier of the University of Delaware in Newark and her coworkers.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
"Even though late-placed foster infants initially push their caregivers away, they're capable of forming secure attachments [with a nurturing foster parent]," Dozier's group concludes in the September/October Child Development.
In related research, children adopted by age 2 fare better emotionally and academically than those adopted at later ages, regardless of any deprivations suffered before the adoption (SN: 8/13/94, p. 104). Scientists have yet to track the long-term emotional development of infants placed with foster parents at various ages.
Dozier and her colleagues studied 50 infants�32 black, 14 white, and 4 Hispanic�and their foster mothers. Infants had been placed with these caregivers between birth and 20 months of age. They began receiving foster care after their biological parents had neglected, abandoned, or abused them. Twenty-two of the children had one to five previous foster placements.
Foster mothers ranged in age from 26 to 69, and each cared for one to five foster kids during the study. Half the foster mothers lived with a husband or partner.
A little more than 3 months after placement, the researchers observed each infant's style of relating to the foster mother during a series of brief separations and reunions. In separate studies of children and their biological mothers, secure infants look to a friendly experimenter for solace when the mother leaves but are more readily calmed by the mother upon her return.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
Insecure infants either shun or angrily resist their mother when upset. Other children, who fit neither category, look dazed, freeze, or otherwise appear to be disorganized in the face of distress.
Of 26 secure foster infants in the new study, 23 had foster mothers who, in interviews with the researchers, placed great value in warm, trusting family relationships. In contrast, of 24 insecure or disorganized infants, 13 had foster mothers who expressed significant conflicts or confusion about their family relationships and their roles as foster mothers.
Infants' responses showed no link with their foster mothers' age, race, marital status, or number of foster siblings.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Surprisingly, 1-1/2-year-olds responded as well and as quickly to a nurturing foster mother as did much younger infants, who had experienced less neglect and fewer disrupted foster placements, say psychologist Mary Dozier of the University of Delaware in Newark and her coworkers.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
"Even though late-placed foster infants initially push their caregivers away, they're capable of forming secure attachments [with a nurturing foster parent]," Dozier's group concludes in the September/October Child Development.
In related research, children adopted by age 2 fare better emotionally and academically than those adopted at later ages, regardless of any deprivations suffered before the adoption (SN: 8/13/94, p. 104). Scientists have yet to track the long-term emotional development of infants placed with foster parents at various ages.
Dozier and her colleagues studied 50 infants�32 black, 14 white, and 4 Hispanic�and their foster mothers. Infants had been placed with these caregivers between birth and 20 months of age. They began receiving foster care after their biological parents had neglected, abandoned, or abused them. Twenty-two of the children had one to five previous foster placements.
Foster mothers ranged in age from 26 to 69, and each cared for one to five foster kids during the study. Half the foster mothers lived with a husband or partner.
A little more than 3 months after placement, the researchers observed each infant's style of relating to the foster mother during a series of brief separations and reunions. In separate studies of children and their biological mothers, secure infants look to a friendly experimenter for solace when the mother leaves but are more readily calmed by the mother upon her return.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN-ESQUIRE.US
Insecure infants either shun or angrily resist their mother when upset. Other children, who fit neither category, look dazed, freeze, or otherwise appear to be disorganized in the face of distress.
Of 26 secure foster infants in the new study, 23 had foster mothers who, in interviews with the researchers, placed great value in warm, trusting family relationships. In contrast, of 24 insecure or disorganized infants, 13 had foster mothers who expressed significant conflicts or confusion about their family relationships and their roles as foster mothers.
Infants' responses showed no link with their foster mothers' age, race, marital status, or number of foster siblings.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Monday, December 22, 2008
stake 8.sta.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher and slightly wacky astronomer. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com His version of Christianity is impossible to label. Educated by the Dominicans — the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy in those days — he revered certain scriptures and the writings of St. Augustine, always doubted the divinity of Jesus and flirted with dangerous new ideas of Protestantism, and yet hoped that the pope himself would clear him of heresy.
Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.” Was he some sort of scientific pioneer, to be compared with Galileo, whose milder encounter with the Roman Inquisition — indeed, with the same inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine — followed not long afterward? Like Galileo, Bruno rejected the earth-centered cosmology and Aristotelian physics endorsed by the church. In the 19th century, historians of science saw him as an early proponent of atomic theory and the infinite universe. Or was Bruno an occultist dreamer, more magician than mathematician, as the renowned historian Frances Yates influentially argued in the 1960s? Either way, Bruno suffered for speaking his mind, though he also had a lot of bad luck, some of which he brought upon himself.
His story begins in Nola, a small city to the east of Naples. Bruno referred to himself as “il Nolano,” and Rowland echoes this, calling him “the Nolan” and frequently speaking of the “Nolan philosophy.” (This moniker may be harmless in America today, but it has awkward connotations for those who remember the Nolans of the 1970s and 1980s European pop scene, and their biggest hit, “I’m in the Mood for Dancing.”) The son of a well-connected professional soldier, Bruno entered the Neapolitan convent of San Domenico Maggiore at the age of 14 and was quickly noticed for two things. First, there was his prodigious memory: as a 20-year-old he was sent to perform his feats of recall before the pope. The ancient art of enhanced memorization was what he was best known for in his own time, and teaching it to others was his most marketable skill. Mnemonic feats were not only a practically useful party trick, but were often held to enable a practitioner to arrive at a systematic understanding of the world. Second, there was his religious unorthodoxy. As a boy, he removed all pictures from his convent cell, keeping only a crucifix, and he scoffed at a fellow novice for reading a devotional poem about the Virgin.
Although he was ordained a priest in 1572 and licensed to teach theology three years later, he was soon under investigation by the local head of the Dominicans for his irregular and outspoken views. By 1576 he had fled to Genoa and abandoned his clerical garb, teaching astronomy and Latin in a nearby town. The next 15 years were spent wandering through Europe on a hunt for patrons and professorships. First came Venice, then Padua, then Lyons, then a copy-editing job in Calvinist Geneva, where he was jailed and excommunicated for publishing an attack on a local philosopher. After two years of lecturing in Toulouse on Aristotle and astronomy, he had some success in Paris teaching the art of memory, with Henry III as royal patron. It was in Paris that he published a long philosophical drama, “The Candlemaker,” which Rowland implausibly suggests can be staged successfully, despite its five-hour running time. Its title page names the author as “Bruno the Nolan, the Academic of no Academy; nicknamed the exasperated.”
In 1583 Bruno joined the household of the French ambassador in London, where he published his major philosophical works, all dialogues, in which he espoused an infinite universe teeming with life. The timing was bad for such unorthodox cosmology. A century earlier, a German cardinal and mathematician, Nicholas of Cusa, made similar suggestions; but back then the church was not yet threatened by Protestant heresy and took a more relaxed attitude to strange views. A century later, a book by a writer of the early French Enlightenment, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,popularized the same idea. (Though technically banned by the church, Fontenelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” was a literary sensation.) Bruno was both too late and too early to paint a universe in which man and his planet were not the center of a cozy domain.
In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.
Bruno made a few unwise admissions to his Inquisitors, but denied most of the accusations. One informant was not enough for a conviction — a second witness was needed — and Bruno was willing to repent in order to gain release. The matter could have ended there, but the Roman Inquisition asked for Bruno’s extradition, and Venice, after months of negotiations, complied. The Romans interviewed many of Bruno’s old cellmates from Venice, and found one — an unstable Capuchin friar, himself later burned at the stake — who falsely believed that Bruno had denounced him and decided to return the favor.
Even with this second witness, it took the Roman Inquisition nearly seven years to bring the case to its sorry conclusion, and it managed to do so only when the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine took charge. Rowland quotes Bellarmine as once saying that “I hardly ever read a book without wanting to give it a good censoring.”Bruno’s fate was sealed when he unsuccessfully attempted to appeal over the heads of the Inquisition to the pope himself. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com
Though it can be hard to follow the story line in Rowland’s early chapters, where the background to Bruno’s later work is jumbled in with biographical fact, her telling of his end is gripping. As an intellectual biography, however, the book has too little examination of his ideas. Although Rowland would like us to see Bruno as a martyr to science, his work comes across more as theologically inspired science fiction. He was a poetic speculator, not an empirical or systematic investigator. Thus it is still not clear what the great master of memory should be remembered for. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.” Was he some sort of scientific pioneer, to be compared with Galileo, whose milder encounter with the Roman Inquisition — indeed, with the same inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine — followed not long afterward? Like Galileo, Bruno rejected the earth-centered cosmology and Aristotelian physics endorsed by the church. In the 19th century, historians of science saw him as an early proponent of atomic theory and the infinite universe. Or was Bruno an occultist dreamer, more magician than mathematician, as the renowned historian Frances Yates influentially argued in the 1960s? Either way, Bruno suffered for speaking his mind, though he also had a lot of bad luck, some of which he brought upon himself.
His story begins in Nola, a small city to the east of Naples. Bruno referred to himself as “il Nolano,” and Rowland echoes this, calling him “the Nolan” and frequently speaking of the “Nolan philosophy.” (This moniker may be harmless in America today, but it has awkward connotations for those who remember the Nolans of the 1970s and 1980s European pop scene, and their biggest hit, “I’m in the Mood for Dancing.”) The son of a well-connected professional soldier, Bruno entered the Neapolitan convent of San Domenico Maggiore at the age of 14 and was quickly noticed for two things. First, there was his prodigious memory: as a 20-year-old he was sent to perform his feats of recall before the pope. The ancient art of enhanced memorization was what he was best known for in his own time, and teaching it to others was his most marketable skill. Mnemonic feats were not only a practically useful party trick, but were often held to enable a practitioner to arrive at a systematic understanding of the world. Second, there was his religious unorthodoxy. As a boy, he removed all pictures from his convent cell, keeping only a crucifix, and he scoffed at a fellow novice for reading a devotional poem about the Virgin.
Although he was ordained a priest in 1572 and licensed to teach theology three years later, he was soon under investigation by the local head of the Dominicans for his irregular and outspoken views. By 1576 he had fled to Genoa and abandoned his clerical garb, teaching astronomy and Latin in a nearby town. The next 15 years were spent wandering through Europe on a hunt for patrons and professorships. First came Venice, then Padua, then Lyons, then a copy-editing job in Calvinist Geneva, where he was jailed and excommunicated for publishing an attack on a local philosopher. After two years of lecturing in Toulouse on Aristotle and astronomy, he had some success in Paris teaching the art of memory, with Henry III as royal patron. It was in Paris that he published a long philosophical drama, “The Candlemaker,” which Rowland implausibly suggests can be staged successfully, despite its five-hour running time. Its title page names the author as “Bruno the Nolan, the Academic of no Academy; nicknamed the exasperated.”
In 1583 Bruno joined the household of the French ambassador in London, where he published his major philosophical works, all dialogues, in which he espoused an infinite universe teeming with life. The timing was bad for such unorthodox cosmology. A century earlier, a German cardinal and mathematician, Nicholas of Cusa, made similar suggestions; but back then the church was not yet threatened by Protestant heresy and took a more relaxed attitude to strange views. A century later, a book by a writer of the early French Enlightenment, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,popularized the same idea. (Though technically banned by the church, Fontenelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” was a literary sensation.) Bruno was both too late and too early to paint a universe in which man and his planet were not the center of a cozy domain.
In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.
Bruno made a few unwise admissions to his Inquisitors, but denied most of the accusations. One informant was not enough for a conviction — a second witness was needed — and Bruno was willing to repent in order to gain release. The matter could have ended there, but the Roman Inquisition asked for Bruno’s extradition, and Venice, after months of negotiations, complied. The Romans interviewed many of Bruno’s old cellmates from Venice, and found one — an unstable Capuchin friar, himself later burned at the stake — who falsely believed that Bruno had denounced him and decided to return the favor.
Even with this second witness, it took the Roman Inquisition nearly seven years to bring the case to its sorry conclusion, and it managed to do so only when the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine took charge. Rowland quotes Bellarmine as once saying that “I hardly ever read a book without wanting to give it a good censoring.”Bruno’s fate was sealed when he unsuccessfully attempted to appeal over the heads of the Inquisition to the pope himself. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com
Though it can be hard to follow the story line in Rowland’s early chapters, where the background to Bruno’s later work is jumbled in with biographical fact, her telling of his end is gripping. As an intellectual biography, however, the book has too little examination of his ideas. Although Rowland would like us to see Bruno as a martyr to science, his work comes across more as theologically inspired science fiction. He was a poetic speculator, not an empirical or systematic investigator. Thus it is still not clear what the great master of memory should be remembered for. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
wind 44.win.9993 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . In centuries past throughout the world, windmills dotted bucolic landscapes, where millers ground cereal grains into flour. Later, farms and ranches harnessed the power of the wind to pump water. Although most farms and mills now run on electricity, wind power's appeal is reemerging. Several major food companies are investing in wind farms to cover all or part of their substantial electricity needs.
http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com
On Jan. 25, the Environmental Protection Agency recognized the top 25 institutions committed to making significant investments this year in ecologically responsible, "green" power systems—especially wind farms.
The Air Force topped EPA's new list, with a commitment to buy more than 1 million megawatt-hours (mWh) of renewably generated power—electricity equal to 11 percent of its projected use. Food companies came in second, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth place, a remarkable showing for one industry. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com
Electricity moves about the U.S. power grid like water through a network of streams. Power created in one place may be consumed locally or more than 1,000 miles away, depending on how electrons get shunted through the system. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
Some farmers have installed turbines on their land to serve not only their own needs but to produce a crop of electrons to sell into a regional electrical grid (SN: 7/21/01, p. 45). Companies and institutions on EPA's new list, by contrast, are investing in a host of green-power systems including biomass energy and solar power. However, because wind-generated electricity is among the more affordable of alternative electricity-generating options, the majority of investments by institutions on EPA's new top-25 list—including those of all the food-related companies—went to wind power.
Green-power investors buy some share of the output of renewable-energy facilities, such as wind farms, and receive credit that can be exchanged for a comparable amount of power from a local utility.
The grocery chain Whole Foods Market, number two on EPA's green list, has committed to buying more green energy this year than even EPA itself buys for its many offices and operations. Both Whole Foods and Starbucks—number six on the green list—have purchased more green energy than the U.S. Energy Department has for its own operations.
The other food companies on EPA's greenest-25 list are Safeway and WhiteWave.http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
Institutions on the list that don't make food their major business: Johnson & Johnson, the World Bank Group, the U.S. General Services Administration, HSBC North America, the city of San Diego, New Jersey Consolidated Energy Savings Program, Advanced Micro Devices, Staples, the Austin (Tex.) Independent School District, Mohawk Fine Papers, the Tower Companies, FedEx Kinko's, the Army's Fort Carson, the University of Pennsylvania, Montgomery County in Maryland, a consortium of Dallas-area hotels, Western Washington University, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Science News Online contacted the food companies on EPA's new list to find out what prompted them to go green.
Whole Foods (Green-Power Ranking: 2)
This 25-year-old Austin, Texas–based grocery chain—renowned for promoting natural and organic foods—has 180 stores, all but 10 of them in the United States. "We felt that as we were becoming a larger company, we needed to really give back to our community and the environment," explains Margaret Wittenberg, the firm's vice president for communications and quality standards.
Last Dec. 9, the company purchased wind-power credits to offset all of its projected North American power needs for 2006—some 458,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. It was the largest wind-energy purchase in U.S. history, the company announced last month, "and makes Whole Foods Market the only Fortune 500 company purchasing wind energy credits to offset 100 percent of its electricity use." Previously, 20 percent of the company's stores were purchasing some type of renewable energy.
access
This new recycled-paper cup is another way Starbucks is reducing its environmental footprint.Starbucks Coffee Co.
"Conventional electricity generation is the largest industrial source of air pollution in the United States, and wind power is a clean and renewable alternative," says Kurt Johnson, who directs EPA's Green Power Partnership program, which compiled the new list. "Whole Foods Market's commitment to wind power is providing an outstanding example of environmental leadership."
Whole Foods purchased its credits from the wind-power broker Renewable Choice Energy of Boulder, Colo. The total should match the electricity demand by its stores, bakeries, and operations facilities this year. "This wasn't just a 1-year trial," Wittenberg says, but something the company plans to invest in over the long term.
Wittenberg won't give financial figures but acknowledges that her company's wind credits cost more than conventional electricity. Typically, wind power costs about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) more than conventionally generated electricity. "But for us it's cost-neutral," says Wittenberg, since the company will finance the extra from savings elsewhere in its budget.
Green power is part of an overall trend for the company in reducing its environmental footprint. For instance, some of its stores use solar panels to generate electricity on-site. Some Whole Foods trucks run on biodiesel—a conventional-fuel substitute made from food or crop wastes (SN: 12/5/98, p. 364). Several stores—including the company's flagship grocery in Austin—even compost food wastes and sell the product to gardeners.
Starbucks (Green-Power Ranking: 6)
"Agricultural-based companies have reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of climate change on very sensitive ecosystems," says Ben Packard of Starbucks Coffee Co. That's why his firm bumped up its purchase of green power from the equivalent of 5 percent of the firm's electricity consumption by North American company-owned stores last year to 20 percent this year.
EPA equates Starbucks' green-power total to eliminating 237 million pounds of carbon dioxide that would be spewed if conventional fossil-fueled plants were used to meet the company's electricity needs.
This green-power initiative is consistent with Starbuck's longstanding goal to become a corporate leader in social and environmental responsibility, Packard says. He points to the company's policy of:
* Paying premium prices for its coffee to help farmers in developing countries make a fair income.
* Operating a center in Costa Rica that provides local farmers the technical training and aid needed to produce high-quality coffees while preserving the environment.
* Purchasing substantial amounts of coffee from shade-grown plants, which conventionally don't yield as much as full-sun coffee plants but are more likely to attract natural pollinators, which increase yields without the use of environmentally damaging fertilizers and pesticides (see The Buzz over Coffee).
* And creating and supporting a Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) project that favors farmers and coffee suppliers that demonstrate they're sustaining the environment and trading coffee fairly.
Those are behind-the-scenes changes that customers don't see. This month, however, the company will start handing customers paper cups that are better for the environment than the stores' cups are now.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
Worldwide this year, Starbucks expects to dispense some 1.9 billion paper cups. Those in North America will incorporate 10 percent post-consumer recycled paper fiber. This might not sound like much, says Packard, but no other company has gotten Food and Drug Administration support to use recycled-paper packaging in direct contact with food or drink.
"We anticipate that the switch . . . is going to lower our use of new tree fiber by a little over 5 million pounds," Packard says, which will eliminate the logging of some 60,000 trees. On Jan. 24, the National Recycling Coalition presented Starbucks with its "Recycling Works Award." The prize recognized the company for a range of activities, but especially its 8-year effort to bring a recycled paper cup to the marketplace.
Safeway (Green-Power Ranking: 8)
Last September, Safeway Inc. became the largest purchaser of renewable energy in California, its home state. This national supermarket chain purchased wind credits for 78,000 mWh—enough electricity to power all 270 of the company's gas stations, 15 of its grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay area, and its two corporate campuses.
Although the green-power commitment was for this year only, "in the future we do hope to expand our purchases . . . powering more of our operations with wind or another form of renewable energy," says spokesperson Teena Massingill.
She says that the green-power purchase is part of a trend—"to be as environmentally friendly as possible"—that the company has been phasing in during stores' construction and renovation. For instance, many of the company's facilities are cutting back on electric lighting and making greater use of natural light through skylights. More subdued illumination "makes for a friendlier shopping environment" while cutting the company's electric bills, Massingill says.
Safeway announced that its wind energy "will come solely from newly constructed wind-turbine generators."
WhiteWave (Green-Power Ranking: 14)
WhiteWave—the company that makes Silk, a soy-based milk alternative—started investing in wind power in 2003. Last year, the Broomfield, Colo.–based company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dean Foods in Dallas, which markets the Horizon brand of organic dairy products.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
This year, WhiteWave is offsetting 100 percent of its projected electricity use in manufacturing Silk and Horizon products—almost 50,000 mWh—with wind credits. Such green-power investments are expected to "continue inching up," notes the company's Ellen Feeney.
Green power is "in keeping with our culture [of] a real nuts-and-bolts organic lifestyle." Wind investments are just one feature of WhiteWave's environmental program. Indeed, Feeney notes, the company's new headquarters is pushing recycling to the limit—even to the point of composting food scraps from kitchens used by employees.
This "ecosensitivity," Feeney says, is not only what the employees want, but also what studies have shown appeal to the company's core customers, made up primarily of baby boomers.
Other greens
Most of the companies on EPA's new top-25 list are investing in wind-generated electricity. However, it's hardly their only green option. The agency invites public and private institutions to consider solar and geothermal energy, small hydropower systems, and biofuels such as wood, straw, manure, and methane.
In an effort to wean the United States from its addiction to fossil fuels, EPA offers a "green power locator" map, where homeowners and corporate managers can find companies marketing renewable energy credits in their area, if not nationally (http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/locator/md.htm). For instance, Maine Power Options (http://www.mainepoweroptions.org/GreenPower.htm) offers buyers credits for a 50:50 mix of biomass- and hydropower-generated electricity, and it markets these credits to power users as far away as California and Washington State. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com
On Jan. 25, the Environmental Protection Agency recognized the top 25 institutions committed to making significant investments this year in ecologically responsible, "green" power systems—especially wind farms.
The Air Force topped EPA's new list, with a commitment to buy more than 1 million megawatt-hours (mWh) of renewably generated power—electricity equal to 11 percent of its projected use. Food companies came in second, sixth, eighth, and fourteenth place, a remarkable showing for one industry. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com
Electricity moves about the U.S. power grid like water through a network of streams. Power created in one place may be consumed locally or more than 1,000 miles away, depending on how electrons get shunted through the system. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
Some farmers have installed turbines on their land to serve not only their own needs but to produce a crop of electrons to sell into a regional electrical grid (SN: 7/21/01, p. 45). Companies and institutions on EPA's new list, by contrast, are investing in a host of green-power systems including biomass energy and solar power. However, because wind-generated electricity is among the more affordable of alternative electricity-generating options, the majority of investments by institutions on EPA's new top-25 list—including those of all the food-related companies—went to wind power.
Green-power investors buy some share of the output of renewable-energy facilities, such as wind farms, and receive credit that can be exchanged for a comparable amount of power from a local utility.
The grocery chain Whole Foods Market, number two on EPA's green list, has committed to buying more green energy this year than even EPA itself buys for its many offices and operations. Both Whole Foods and Starbucks—number six on the green list—have purchased more green energy than the U.S. Energy Department has for its own operations.
The other food companies on EPA's greenest-25 list are Safeway and WhiteWave.http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
Institutions on the list that don't make food their major business: Johnson & Johnson, the World Bank Group, the U.S. General Services Administration, HSBC North America, the city of San Diego, New Jersey Consolidated Energy Savings Program, Advanced Micro Devices, Staples, the Austin (Tex.) Independent School District, Mohawk Fine Papers, the Tower Companies, FedEx Kinko's, the Army's Fort Carson, the University of Pennsylvania, Montgomery County in Maryland, a consortium of Dallas-area hotels, Western Washington University, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Science News Online contacted the food companies on EPA's new list to find out what prompted them to go green.
Whole Foods (Green-Power Ranking: 2)
This 25-year-old Austin, Texas–based grocery chain—renowned for promoting natural and organic foods—has 180 stores, all but 10 of them in the United States. "We felt that as we were becoming a larger company, we needed to really give back to our community and the environment," explains Margaret Wittenberg, the firm's vice president for communications and quality standards.
Last Dec. 9, the company purchased wind-power credits to offset all of its projected North American power needs for 2006—some 458,000 megawatt-hours of electricity. It was the largest wind-energy purchase in U.S. history, the company announced last month, "and makes Whole Foods Market the only Fortune 500 company purchasing wind energy credits to offset 100 percent of its electricity use." Previously, 20 percent of the company's stores were purchasing some type of renewable energy.
access
This new recycled-paper cup is another way Starbucks is reducing its environmental footprint.Starbucks Coffee Co.
"Conventional electricity generation is the largest industrial source of air pollution in the United States, and wind power is a clean and renewable alternative," says Kurt Johnson, who directs EPA's Green Power Partnership program, which compiled the new list. "Whole Foods Market's commitment to wind power is providing an outstanding example of environmental leadership."
Whole Foods purchased its credits from the wind-power broker Renewable Choice Energy of Boulder, Colo. The total should match the electricity demand by its stores, bakeries, and operations facilities this year. "This wasn't just a 1-year trial," Wittenberg says, but something the company plans to invest in over the long term.
Wittenberg won't give financial figures but acknowledges that her company's wind credits cost more than conventional electricity. Typically, wind power costs about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) more than conventionally generated electricity. "But for us it's cost-neutral," says Wittenberg, since the company will finance the extra from savings elsewhere in its budget.
Green power is part of an overall trend for the company in reducing its environmental footprint. For instance, some of its stores use solar panels to generate electricity on-site. Some Whole Foods trucks run on biodiesel—a conventional-fuel substitute made from food or crop wastes (SN: 12/5/98, p. 364). Several stores—including the company's flagship grocery in Austin—even compost food wastes and sell the product to gardeners.
Starbucks (Green-Power Ranking: 6)
"Agricultural-based companies have reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of climate change on very sensitive ecosystems," says Ben Packard of Starbucks Coffee Co. That's why his firm bumped up its purchase of green power from the equivalent of 5 percent of the firm's electricity consumption by North American company-owned stores last year to 20 percent this year.
EPA equates Starbucks' green-power total to eliminating 237 million pounds of carbon dioxide that would be spewed if conventional fossil-fueled plants were used to meet the company's electricity needs.
This green-power initiative is consistent with Starbuck's longstanding goal to become a corporate leader in social and environmental responsibility, Packard says. He points to the company's policy of:
* Paying premium prices for its coffee to help farmers in developing countries make a fair income.
* Operating a center in Costa Rica that provides local farmers the technical training and aid needed to produce high-quality coffees while preserving the environment.
* Purchasing substantial amounts of coffee from shade-grown plants, which conventionally don't yield as much as full-sun coffee plants but are more likely to attract natural pollinators, which increase yields without the use of environmentally damaging fertilizers and pesticides (see The Buzz over Coffee).
* And creating and supporting a Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) project that favors farmers and coffee suppliers that demonstrate they're sustaining the environment and trading coffee fairly.
Those are behind-the-scenes changes that customers don't see. This month, however, the company will start handing customers paper cups that are better for the environment than the stores' cups are now.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
Worldwide this year, Starbucks expects to dispense some 1.9 billion paper cups. Those in North America will incorporate 10 percent post-consumer recycled paper fiber. This might not sound like much, says Packard, but no other company has gotten Food and Drug Administration support to use recycled-paper packaging in direct contact with food or drink.
"We anticipate that the switch . . . is going to lower our use of new tree fiber by a little over 5 million pounds," Packard says, which will eliminate the logging of some 60,000 trees. On Jan. 24, the National Recycling Coalition presented Starbucks with its "Recycling Works Award." The prize recognized the company for a range of activities, but especially its 8-year effort to bring a recycled paper cup to the marketplace.
Safeway (Green-Power Ranking: 8)
Last September, Safeway Inc. became the largest purchaser of renewable energy in California, its home state. This national supermarket chain purchased wind credits for 78,000 mWh—enough electricity to power all 270 of the company's gas stations, 15 of its grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay area, and its two corporate campuses.
Although the green-power commitment was for this year only, "in the future we do hope to expand our purchases . . . powering more of our operations with wind or another form of renewable energy," says spokesperson Teena Massingill.
She says that the green-power purchase is part of a trend—"to be as environmentally friendly as possible"—that the company has been phasing in during stores' construction and renovation. For instance, many of the company's facilities are cutting back on electric lighting and making greater use of natural light through skylights. More subdued illumination "makes for a friendlier shopping environment" while cutting the company's electric bills, Massingill says.
Safeway announced that its wind energy "will come solely from newly constructed wind-turbine generators."
WhiteWave (Green-Power Ranking: 14)
WhiteWave—the company that makes Silk, a soy-based milk alternative—started investing in wind power in 2003. Last year, the Broomfield, Colo.–based company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dean Foods in Dallas, which markets the Horizon brand of organic dairy products.
http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com
This year, WhiteWave is offsetting 100 percent of its projected electricity use in manufacturing Silk and Horizon products—almost 50,000 mWh—with wind credits. Such green-power investments are expected to "continue inching up," notes the company's Ellen Feeney.
Green power is "in keeping with our culture [of] a real nuts-and-bolts organic lifestyle." Wind investments are just one feature of WhiteWave's environmental program. Indeed, Feeney notes, the company's new headquarters is pushing recycling to the limit—even to the point of composting food scraps from kitchens used by employees.
This "ecosensitivity," Feeney says, is not only what the employees want, but also what studies have shown appeal to the company's core customers, made up primarily of baby boomers.
Other greens
Most of the companies on EPA's new top-25 list are investing in wind-generated electricity. However, it's hardly their only green option. The agency invites public and private institutions to consider solar and geothermal energy, small hydropower systems, and biofuels such as wood, straw, manure, and methane.
In an effort to wean the United States from its addiction to fossil fuels, EPA offers a "green power locator" map, where homeowners and corporate managers can find companies marketing renewable energy credits in their area, if not nationally (http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/locator/md.htm). For instance, Maine Power Options (http://www.mainepoweroptions.org/GreenPower.htm) offers buyers credits for a 50:50 mix of biomass- and hydropower-generated electricity, and it markets these credits to power users as far away as California and Washington State. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
nylon 88.nyl.00003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Each year, thousands of tons of nylon end up in landfills. But small-scale experiments may offer big hope for efficient recycling of some types of the material.
Nylon-6, an artificial polymer used in carpets, clothing, and car parts, is made by chemically linking large numbers of molecules derived from a petroleum product called caprolactam. Current processes to break apart, or depolymerize, nylon-6 typically must take place at high temperatures and high pressures. The processes are also relatively inefficient, says Akio Kamimura, an organic chemist at Yamaguchi University in Ube, Japan. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
On the other hand, incinerating the polymers in mixed trash can create prodigious amounts of toxic compounds (SN: 1/29/00, p. 70). That's why nylon-6 usually ends up in landfills. Each year in the United States alone, carpets containing about 500,000 metric tons of nylon-6 end up at the dump.
Now, Kamimura and his colleague Shigehiro Yamamoto have developed a process that depolymerizes nylon-6 and regenerates caprolactam. The researchers describe their bench-scale experiments, which use common laboratory equipment, in the June 21 Organic Letters.
Kamimura and Yamamoto placed chips of nylon-6 and small amounts of a catalyst in various ionic liquids, which consist solely of positively and negatively charged ions (SN: 9/8/01, p. 156). At a temperature of 270°C, the depolymerization reaction was inefficient, and the team recovered only 7 percent of the caprolactam contained in the nylon chips, says Kamimura. At temperatures above 330°C, the reaction was more efficient, but only 55 percent of the caprolactam was recovered because some of the substance decomposed in the heat.
At the intermediate temperature of 300°C—low by industrial standards—the yield of caprolactam approached 86 percent, says Kamimura. More important, he notes, at that temperature the ionic liquid didn't become tainted with by-products of the reaction. The researchers were able to reuse their ionic liquid five times without significant drops in caprolactam yield.
The team's approach is novel because it uses ionic liquids under conditions less harsh than those needed for other solvents, says Michael P. Harold, a chemical engineer at the University of Houston. He suggests, however, that several issues may stand in the way of making the process economically feasible. For instance, because ionic liquids are typically quite costly, expanding the process to an industrial scale would require the solvent to endure hundreds of depolymerization cycles.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
"Ultimately, the economics [of the process] will dictate the success," says Harold. "If the ionic liquid is very expensive and not sufficiently durable, the concept will not be viable."http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
John D. Muzzy, a chemical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his colleagues are developing a different sort of chemical reaction to unzip nylon-6. In the lab, they've used a liquid catalyst to melt the nylon and cleave its long molecules. The researchers haven't yet published their findings, but Muzzy and his team estimate that a single facility using this process to recycle nylon-6 would be able to recover about 90 percent of its caprolactam. It could generate more than 4,600 metric tons of an impure solution of caprolactam each year at a cost of about half the current market price.
Nylon-6, an artificial polymer used in carpets, clothing, and car parts, is made by chemically linking large numbers of molecules derived from a petroleum product called caprolactam. Current processes to break apart, or depolymerize, nylon-6 typically must take place at high temperatures and high pressures. The processes are also relatively inefficient, says Akio Kamimura, an organic chemist at Yamaguchi University in Ube, Japan. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
On the other hand, incinerating the polymers in mixed trash can create prodigious amounts of toxic compounds (SN: 1/29/00, p. 70). That's why nylon-6 usually ends up in landfills. Each year in the United States alone, carpets containing about 500,000 metric tons of nylon-6 end up at the dump.
Now, Kamimura and his colleague Shigehiro Yamamoto have developed a process that depolymerizes nylon-6 and regenerates caprolactam. The researchers describe their bench-scale experiments, which use common laboratory equipment, in the June 21 Organic Letters.
Kamimura and Yamamoto placed chips of nylon-6 and small amounts of a catalyst in various ionic liquids, which consist solely of positively and negatively charged ions (SN: 9/8/01, p. 156). At a temperature of 270°C, the depolymerization reaction was inefficient, and the team recovered only 7 percent of the caprolactam contained in the nylon chips, says Kamimura. At temperatures above 330°C, the reaction was more efficient, but only 55 percent of the caprolactam was recovered because some of the substance decomposed in the heat.
At the intermediate temperature of 300°C—low by industrial standards—the yield of caprolactam approached 86 percent, says Kamimura. More important, he notes, at that temperature the ionic liquid didn't become tainted with by-products of the reaction. The researchers were able to reuse their ionic liquid five times without significant drops in caprolactam yield.
The team's approach is novel because it uses ionic liquids under conditions less harsh than those needed for other solvents, says Michael P. Harold, a chemical engineer at the University of Houston. He suggests, however, that several issues may stand in the way of making the process economically feasible. For instance, because ionic liquids are typically quite costly, expanding the process to an industrial scale would require the solvent to endure hundreds of depolymerization cycles.http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
"Ultimately, the economics [of the process] will dictate the success," says Harold. "If the ionic liquid is very expensive and not sufficiently durable, the concept will not be viable."http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
John D. Muzzy, a chemical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and his colleagues are developing a different sort of chemical reaction to unzip nylon-6. In the lab, they've used a liquid catalyst to melt the nylon and cleave its long molecules. The researchers haven't yet published their findings, but Muzzy and his team estimate that a single facility using this process to recycle nylon-6 would be able to recover about 90 percent of its caprolactam. It could generate more than 4,600 metric tons of an impure solution of caprolactam each year at a cost of about half the current market price.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
epigenic 5512.epi.0025 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. As I wrote in my story in the New York Times today, much of your DNA is shut down by molecules collectively known as epigenetic marks. Roughly 100 sites are notable exceptions to this rule: your mother’s copy of these stretches of DNA are silenced, while your father’s are free to make proteins and RNA–or vice versa. This imbalance, known as imprinting, is utterly fascinating, and when the imprinting system goes awry–when dad’s genes start becoming active when they shouldn’t, or when mom’s genes go quiet when they should be active–the effects can be catastrophic. I first became familiar with gene imprinting while writing an article for the Times a couple years ago about a scientist at Harvard named David Haig, who has a theory for how it had evolved. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang He argues that gene imprinting is the result of an evolutionary tug of war between mothers and fathers, because mammalian parents have an evolutionary conflict of interest.
Now a couple scientists are extending this conflict theory to explain why so many imprinted genes are turning up in psychiatric disorders, ranging from autism to schizophrenia. They argue that the conflict between our parents plays out in our brains, too. This morning you can read about this provocative idea in my latest Discover column on the brain, or in this article by Benedict Carey in the Times. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
These articles ought to come with a disclaimer: when we write about conflicts between parents, we are speaking metaphorically. We are actually referring to the rise and fall of different genes over millions of years, as natural selection acts on populations of thousands or millions of individuals. Just because you inherited imprinted genes from your mother or father doesn’t mean they sat down and drew up plans for using to maximize their own reproductive success. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
Now a couple scientists are extending this conflict theory to explain why so many imprinted genes are turning up in psychiatric disorders, ranging from autism to schizophrenia. They argue that the conflict between our parents plays out in our brains, too. This morning you can read about this provocative idea in my latest Discover column on the brain, or in this article by Benedict Carey in the Times. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
These articles ought to come with a disclaimer: when we write about conflicts between parents, we are speaking metaphorically. We are actually referring to the rise and fall of different genes over millions of years, as natural selection acts on populations of thousands or millions of individuals. Just because you inherited imprinted genes from your mother or father doesn’t mean they sat down and drew up plans for using to maximize their own reproductive success. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
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