On the Dutch king and antisemitism; George F. Will and ‘columny’; Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and their sons; and more
They were “terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom,” said Deborah Lipstadt. What was she talking about? The attacks on Israelis and Dutch Jews in Amsterdam at the time of a soccer match earlier this month. And who is Deborah Lipstadt? She is a historian who serves in the State Department. Her title is something of a mouthful: “special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.” President Biden asked her to serve in that position in the summer of 2021. I talked with Professor Lipstadt early this year, resulting in a piece titled “Lipstadt vs. Jew-Hatred.”
Back to Amsterdam. “Boys on scooters crisscrossed the city in search of Israeli soccer fans,” said the city’s mayor, Femke Halsema. “I understand very well that this brings back the memory of pogroms.”
A “Jew hunt,” is what some of the attackers called it — called what they were engaged in. The hunters were young men of Middle Eastern origin. In the mayhem, no one was killed, but dozens were injured, five of them hospitalized. Dutch police arrested more than 60.
Mayor Halsema got cold feet about her use of the word “pogroms.” She took it back (as you can read here). “I saw how the word ‘pogrom’ has turned very political — into propaganda, in fact.”
You know who was noble — even royal — in all this? King Willem-Alexander, who placed a phone call to Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, the day after the mayhem, the “hunt” — whatever you choose to call it. “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands during World War II,” he said, “and last night we failed again.”
• FDR was probably the most gifted American politician of the 20th century. I once heard someone say, “You have to understand: his coalition ran from northern blacks to the Klan.” By many accounts, there was only one politician FDR feared: Huey Long, the master populist from Louisiana. FDR knew the power of populism and its dark arts; no one practiced them more effectively than Long.
He was killed in 1935. Could he have wrested the Democratic nomination from President Roosevelt?
For The Dispatch, Chris Stirewalt has written a fascinating article about Huey Long and his role in the Chaco War — a bit role, but very interesting to know about. The Chaco War came to my attention when I wrote a history of the Nobel Peace Prize.
The award for 1936 was given to Carlos Saavedra Lamas, the Argentinian foreign minister. He was the first person outside Europe or the United States to win the peace prize. I will quote from that book of mine:
He played the leading role in the mediation that led to an armistice in the Chaco War — a war that lasted from 1932 to 1935. The Chaco War pitted Bolivia and Paraguay over the Gran Chaco region, which was thought to contain oil. Today, few know about this war, at least beyond South America. And it can be presented as a kind of comic-opera affair. But 100,000 men lost their lives (even if the main killers were malaria and the lack of water).
An additional excerpt, if you don’t mind:
. . . to the Chaco War, there is a coda. In April 2009, Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, and Paraguay’s president, Fernando Lugo, signed an accord resolving once and for all — or so it would seem — the countries’ dispute over the Gran Chaco. As they celebrated the accord, they and other South American leaders said that the war had been the fault of foreign interests, namely oil companies, which had pushed the locals into war. That makes a good and comforting story anyway.
Yeah, it does.
• Listen to Congressman Troy Nehls, Republican of Texas: “If Donald Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Period. Because Donald Trump is really never wrong.” Young people will have to believe me: The conservative movement was not like this, and neither was the Republican Party.
But young people have never known anything but Trump and Trumpism, on the right. This will have an effect, surely, for a long time to come.
(You can see and hear Mr. Nehls for yourself, here.)
“If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That’s it.” I have again quoted Congressman Nehls. And, yup, that’s it.
(Once more, to see and hear for yourself, go here.)
• For 50 years now, George F. Will has been a columnist at the Washington Post. And his latest column is about column-writing. A typically beautiful, wise, and interesting thing.
By the way, William Safire used to refer to column-writing as “columny.”
The columnist who captured Will’s imagination, when Will was young, was Murray Kempton. Kempton was a favorite of William F. Buckley Jr’s., too. WFB called him a “literary artist.” That he was (and so was WFB, and so is Will).
Kempton was basically a liberal, but WFB loved to publish him in National Review — which rubbed some people the wrong way: people who thought of NR as more of a political enterprise than a magazine.
In this latest column of his, Will quotes a passage from Kempton, who is writing about President Eisenhower on the campaign trail in 1956:
In Miami he had walked carefully by the harsher realities, speaking some 20 feet from an airport drinking fountain labeled ‘Colored’ and saying that the condition it represented was more amenable to solution by the hearts of men than by laws, and complimenting Florida as ‘typical today of what is best in America,’ a verdict which might seem to some contingent on finding out what happened to the Negro snatched from the Wildwood jail Sunday.
Will goes on to analyze the excellence of that sentence (75 words).
I was talking with Richard Brookhiser the other day. You know who impressed him a long time ago? James Jackson Kilpatrick, writing in NR:
A little after 8 o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, July 11, John W. McCormack came before the Democratic Convention of 1972. He stood at the rostrum like an aging heron on a cypress stump, white-haired, gaunt-eyed. Behind him, at eighty, were sixty years of distinguished service to his party; before him, a sea of indifference. So might the last of the pterodactyls have surveyed the primeval swamps.
A bit later in that article:
It is a fair guess that one-third to a half of the delegates had never heard of John W. McCormack, lately retired as Speaker of the House. They could not exactly place the name. The old gentleman spoke for maybe ten minutes, competing hoarsely against a swelling babble of conversation in the hall. There came a pattering of perfunctory applause, and when we looked up the stump was vacant and the heron was gone.
Say what you will about “Kilpo” — and there’s a lot to say — that is splendid writing.
• “Tiger Woods Watches As Son Charlie Hits Five Birdies In Final Round Of State Championship Event.” “Hits” is a funny word; “makes” would be more conventional. Anyway, I have quoted the headline over this article. And I have a point to make (not a language one).
Imagine Charlie Woods’s teammates. And his fellow competitors, with dad Tiger around. Can you imagine how excited they would be? How wowed, or how daunted?
I have a friend who was the captain of the University of Michigan golf team. He played with — against, I should say — one of Jack Nicklaus’s sons. Jack was around. What a stunning thing, to have Jack Nicklaus watching you play golf.
My friend told me a story about the time Jack asked a kid, “Hey, can I see your driver?” The kid could hardly speak as he offered up the stick to Jack. I think Jack waggled it a few times.
Jack told a story once. He attended a tournament of one of his sons, when the son was just starting out in golf — junior high, maybe. Midway through the round, the son said, “Dad, it makes me nervous, you standing there.” Dad said, “Get used to it.”
• Question — a language one: Can one person “regroup”? I don’t think so. This article — also about golf — says, “On the verge of kicking away what at one point seemed inevitable, the 47th victory of his senior career, Langer somehow regrouped at the 18th hole by holing a 35-foot birdie putt . . .”
No, I don’t think so. Need a group to regroup, I think.
• I was talking to a friend of mine. Referring to a dance teacher, who’s full of verve and encouragement, he said, “She’s a human anti-depressant.” What a wonderful thing to be in life: a human anti-depressant. A high aspiration.
If you would like to receive Impromptus by e-mail — links to new columns — write to jnordlinger@nationalreview.com.