The night Ronald Reagan was elected to his first term, I was watching the returns at the United States embassy in London. Some diplomats had arranged a link to bring in U.S. network television coverage — no easy task with the technology of 1980 — and invited some of us in the press corps to join them.

The ballot numbers didn’t start trickling in until after midnight, but the results were never in doubt: President Jimmy Carter was headed for spectacular defeat. My diplomatic colleagues, publicly so balanced and nonpartisan, were privately appalled. They were about to work for a president who, unlike Carter, had no foreign policy experience, disliked government, and was a Hollywood actor. The next morning the London papers were awash with similar disdain: A cowboy had captured the White House. Who was he? What could U.S. voters have been thinking?

As a foreign correspondent, I was fascinated by the British response. Part of my task was to interpret the “special relationship” between Great Britain and the United States to readers back home. The question underlying each story I filed was one of identity: Who are these strange and interesting people, and what makes them tick? On top of that lay an equally interesting question: What do we strange Americans look like to the British eye?

As I watched my friends in the British press trying to figure out Reagan, I could see they were both helped and hindered by the analogy with Margaret Thatcher. She had become Britain’s prime minister a few months before, swept into the top office partly through public frustration with relentless union militancy. Cut from a Churchillian cloth of indefatigable determination, mastery of detail, and withering scorn for her enemies, she brusquely set out to swing the ship of state to the right.

Ronald Reagan also put the helm hard to starboard. His early dismissal of striking air traffic controllers signaled a Thatcheresque willingness to take unyielding stands. But he hailed from a Middle-American tradition of small-town optimism, unbarbed wit, and can-do individualism that never questioned the relationship between hard work and personal success. Unlike Thatcher, he was genial even to his worst antagonists, committed to a nine-to-five workday and a good night’s sleep, and happy to leave details to be sorted out by his staff. If she was an admiral in full regalia, blasting away with equal relish at striking miners in Wales and Argentinean generals in the Falkland Islands, he was the impeccably tailored chairman of the board, stopping by to count the silver and dispense avuncular guidance.

But before too many months had passed, a curious change overtook my colleagues in the London media. Their scythe-sharp irony began to abate. It’s not that they embraced him or even began to like him. It’s that they figured him out.

And that took them by surprise. Schooled by centuries of byzantine European politics, where nothing is ever what it seems, they were prepared for a presidency shrouded in mystery, complexity, and nuance. They were masters at peering into the murk and ferreting truth out of vagueness. Yet here came a politician who, well before his first year had ended, had laid to rest the question, Who is Ronald Reagan? He was a man visibly motivated by a few key principles, which were simple and easily understood. It wasn’t that he had no depth. It was that the depth was transparent, so you could see right to the bottom. What you saw was what you got: a kind of Midwestern faith that values, adhered to over time, create progress.

That doesn’t mean the public universally liked him. Like Margaret Thatcher, he oversaw a time of immense transformation. Much of it was good, but by no means all. Perhaps what got him through was that, as Johns Hopkins University professor Kenneth Lynn observed in the New York Times over the weekend, he had “a lack of guilt in his personal life and in America in general.” Or perhaps it was simply that he knew what made him tick — and knew it was not baffling and elaborate, but as plain and unadorned as the heartland sky.

And through it all, he flummoxed the journalistic profession. We thought our task was to unravel the tangled skeins of personal intrigue. He knew his task was to help people see that life wasn’t all that mysterious. We were marinated in skepticism. He was refreshed by a few key values, honestly held and patiently repeated.

Time would prove him successful. And time would send the press back to its old familiarities: Eight years into the Clinton presidency, the question, Who is Bill Clinton? still had huge resonance. Reagan’s distinctness lay in the transparency of his values. Love him or loathe him, you knew who he was.

©2004 Institute for Global Ethics

“Burn, baby, burn.”

– Enron energy traders singing to news that a forest fire had shut down a major transmission line into California, boosting energy prices and company profits. The traders’ gloating was caught on audiotapes obtained by CBS News, which released outtakes last week. According to the report, the tapes, which implicate Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, “also confirm what CBS reported years ago: that in secret deals with power producers, traders deliberately drove up prices by ordering power plants shut down.” (“Enron Traders Caught On Tape,” CBS News, June 1)

WASHINGTON

The scandal spawned by evidence of Iraqi prisoner abuse at the hands of their U.S. captors continued to widen on several fronts last week. Among the developments:

• USA Today reported that more than half of the 37 prisoners who have died while in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan were victims of severe abuse and violence. While four of the deaths — shootings during a riot at the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison — have been ruled “justifiable,” others indicate unwarranted assault, according to the report. At least 10 prisoners died from “blunt force trauma,” excessive force, strangulation, asphyxia, smothering, or “compromised respiration.” No U.S. soldiers have been criminally charged in any of the cases, USA Today reported.
• More than 90 cases of possible misconduct by U.S. soldiers have been the subject of investigations — a number that indicates a broader scale of possible wrongdoing than widely acknowledged by military officials, the Washington Post reported. The 91 cases, disclosed by a U.S. Army official, include 42 of alleged abuse inside detention facilities and 49 outside the facilities. Deaths, assault, and theft account for nearly all of the investigations, 59 of which have been closed, largely without disclosed actions or punishments, according to the Post.
• The Associated Press reported that the Army general who commands the criminal investigators looking into abuse allegations issued a report last fall saying that no such abuse was taking place. His findings, challenged by later investigations and proliferating images of abuse, may create a conflict of interest if his subordinates find evidence that he failed to do his duty or disclose abuse, according to the AP. While Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder’s deputy commander, Col. Scott Taylor, insisted that criminal investigators “feel absolutely unencumbered from command influence,” others are less confident. “It’s a real complicating factor in my mind,” Walter Huffman, the Army’s judge advocate general from 1997 until 2001, told the AP. “It’s obviously unfair to ask [an investigator] who has his career and advancement opportunities in the hands of his commanding general to make a finding adverse to General Ryder.”
• Two U.S. marines were sentenced to prison time for using a power generator to deliver an electric shock to an Iraqi prisoner who irritated them by speaking loudly and throwing trash outside his cell. Pfc. Andrew Sting was sentenced to a year in prison; Pfc. Jeremiah Trefney will serve 18 months. Both 19-year-old men will lose rank and pay and receive bad-conduct discharges for the abuse, which occurred in April, reported the AP. Two other marines implicated in the abuse await courts martial.
• The Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, and several medical and veterans’ groups last week sued the U.S. government for failing to release documents related to the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody. The groups sought the documents last October under the Freedom of Information Act, but have been stonewalled, according to the Agence France-Presse. “The public has a right to know what the government’s policies were, why these abuses were allowed to take place, and who was ultimately responsible,” ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer told the AFP.

SAN FRANCISCO
A U.S. District Court judge in San Francisco last week overturned a federal restriction on abortion, ruling that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act is unconstitutional in at least three separate ways.

The law, the first federal restriction on abortion since the landmark Roe v. Wade case over 30 years ago, was passed by wide margins in Congress and signed into law by President Bush last November.

The process — called “partial birth abortion” by politicians and opposition groups, and “intact dilation and extraction” by most doctors — involves “partially removing a fetus from the uterus and puncturing or crushing its skull,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Two other federal cases involving the act, one in Nebraska and another in New York, are currently pending, and judgments are expected later this summer.

The New York Times reports that U.S. District Court Judge Phyllis Hamilton, in declaring the ban unconstitutional, stated that “it placed an undue burden on women seeking abortions, that its language was dangerously vague, and that it lacked a required exception for medical actions needed to preserve the woman’s health.”

A similar state law adopted by Nebraska was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000. That case,

Carhart vs. Stenberg, was cited by Judge Hamilton in her ruling, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Times also reports that “all three cases challenging the law focused heavily on the testimony of dueling medical experts, who offered diverging views on whether and when the procedure was necessary, how common and safe it was, and whether fetal pain existed.”

Opponents of the act hailed the judge’s decision as a major victory. Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood, which, along with its San Francisco affiliate and the City of San Francisco brought the suit, told the Washington Post that the decision “reaffirmed a woman’s right to choose and a doctor’s right to practice medicine.”

The White House issued a statement saying that “the president strongly disagrees with today’s California court ruling,” according to the New York Times. “The administration will take every necessary step to defend this law in the courts.”

Judge Hamilton’s ruling applies to doctors in the nation’s approximately 900 Planned Parenthood clinics as well as the City of San Francisco — both plaintiffs in the case. She declined to apply the ruling to either Nebraska or New York, deferring instead to the courts in those states, which are expected to rule shortly.

WASHINGTON
While it may disagree with their message, the U.S. government has no right to block ads urging a dialogue over the decriminalization of marijuana, a federal judge ruled last week.

Such ads, which briefly appeared in Washington-area Metro stations and bus shelters, questioned the government’s decision to make marijuana illegal, urging a broader conversation on the issue.

Acting on the indignation of Rep. Ernest Istook Jr. (R-Okla.), the government adopted a law in January that would withhold $3.1 billion from any of the nation’s 53 public transit agencies if they accepted such an ad.

The government provides “major funding to combat drug use, and tax dollars should not be used to subsidize contrary messages,” Istook argued last week.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Paul Friedman said Congress had overstepped its reach and violated the First Amendment’s protection of free speech by approving the law, reported the Washington Post.

While the ads advocating the legalization of marijuana may clash with official U.S. policy on drug control, their message is a matter of policy, not incitements to wanton lawlessness, Friedman ruled.

“The government has articulated no legitimate state interest in the suppression of this particular speech other than the fact that it disapproves of the message,” Friedman said, calling such the move “illegitimate and constitutionally impermissible.”

Art Spitzer, the Washington litigation chief for the American Civil Liberties Union, which was a co-plaintiff in the case, agreed.

“While reasonable people may disagree about drug policy, clearly the Constitution doesn’t allow Congress to try to censor that debate,” he said.

The Justice Department said it has not yet decided whether to appeal the ruling, according to the Post.

MOSCOW
One of Russia’s last independent voices on network TV was fired last week after rebelling against his bosses and Kremlin pressure to kill an interview with the widow of a Chechen separatist.

Leonid Parfyonov was fired after airing the interview on his weekly news-magazine program “Namendi,” which is carried on the state-controlled network NTV, reported the Washington Post.

Parfyonov’s interview with the widow was broadcast on NTV’s far-flung eastern stations, but was pulled before it could be played in Moscow and western areas. Bucking against the censorship, Parfyonov took the dispute public.

NTV summarily fired Parfyonov, saying he had failed to support company policy as required by his contract. Parfyonov and other critics said the real issue was his willingness to challenge state censorship.

Last week’s firing comes amid a wider crackdown on press independence in Russia, where President Vladimir Putin has been concentrating government control over the media, shutting down independent broadcasters and acquiring control over all three national TV networks, according to the Post.

The firing of Parfyonov “is very consistent with Putin’s strategy of building authoritarianism in small steps,” political analyst Anders Aslund of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow told the New York Times.

In an interview with the newspaper Izvestia, Parfyonov lashed out at government pressure to control the content of the news, according to the Times.

“Don’t teach me how to love my homeland,” he said. “I have worked as a journalist for 25 years, and all these 25 years I’ve heard, ‘It’s not the right time yet, brother, not the right time.’ It is about time to understand that information has an intrinsic value. It is neither harmful, nor useful, nor useless.”

The Kremlin last week refused to comment, according to the Post.

NEW YORK
The State of New York last week sued British pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline for allegedly concealing studies showing that its antidepressant drug Paxil might increase suicidal tendencies in children.

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed the suit, accusing Glaxo of withholding studies that showed possible negative results of prescribing Paxil for adolescents.

Spitzer’s suit alleges that Glaxo conducted five studies on Paxil and kids, but released only one while hiding the other four because they indicated possible dangers, reported Bloomberg.

Starting in 1998, Glaxo “suppressed the negative results … which failed to demonstrate that Paxil is effective and which suggested a possible increased risk of suicidal thinking and acts” in depressed children, the suit charges.

Glaxo last week denied any wrongdoing, telling the Associated Press that the company “has acted responsibly in conducting the studies in pediatric patients and disseminating results.”

Spitzer is seeking to recover Glaxo’s profits for Paxil prescribed to children — a figure that totaled $55 million in 2002, according to their estimates — noted the AP.

Special to Newsline from Canadian correspondent Errol P. Mendes

VANCOUVER
Former Canadian judge David Ramsay was sentenced last week to seven years’ imprisonment for serious sex assaults against underage aboriginal prostitutes in Prince George, British Columbia.

A former colleague of the disgraced judge, Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm of the British Columbia Supreme Court, said Ramsay had shamed the judiciary, his family, and himself with his criminal acts.

Dohm imposed what is believed to be the longest sentence imposed on a former judge in Canadian history for what is also believed to be the most serious crime committed by a former judge.

In handing down a longer sentence than asked for by the Crown prosecutors, Dohm stated that Ramsay had used his office to intimidate the girls and shield his actions over a nine-year period from 1992, just a year after he had been appointed to the bench.

The crimes and the sentence have disturbed aboriginal communities and activists throughout British Columbia, many of whom had traveled to Prince George to condemn the reign of terror that the judge had imposed on the underage prostitutes.

LONDON
The former head of U.K. insurer Equitable Life last week was banned from holding any senior management position for six years, as punishment for withholding documents during an investigation.

Chris Headdon, whose leadership preceded the near-collapse of Equitable Life, is “not fit and proper to hold a significant management role at a regulated firm,” the Financial Services Authority (FSA) ruled.

Headdon agreed to the ban after withholding evidence of a side deal with a reinsurance firm in 1999, when Equitable Life was trying to safeguard its revenues, reported the Guardian.

The concealed letter allegedly promised a premature end to the $1.47 billion reinsurance contract if too many claims came in — an arrangement investigators say Headdon hid from the FSA, which had expressed doubts about the deal.

Equitable Life almost collapsed a year later after lawmakers ordered it to honor policies that cost the company more than $2.7 billion, spawning an investor crisis and a harsh inquiry released this March.

That results of the inquiry, known as the Penrose report, criticized Equitable Life’s management, including Headdon and former head Roy Ranson, for lax oversight.

Announcing the penalty against Headdon last week, the FSA said it would not pursue similar action against Ranson, 73, due to his age, noted the Guardian.

Equitable Life is showing no similar restraint, pledging to continue a $3.3 billion negligence suit against Headdon, Ranson, and 13 other former directors, according to the Reuters news agency.

For his part, Headdon last week said the FSA and others were making him a scapegoat for the company’s problems, saying “a minor peripheral issue was being blown up out of all proportion.”

LONDON
Women looking for cracks in the glass ceiling got bleak news last week from both sides of the Atlantic, where pay for men still far outstrips women’s earnings, according to recent surveys.

In the United States, an analysis of statistics from the 2000 census found that women earn less than men in nearly every line of work, with only five exceptions, the Associated Press reported last week.

The five occupations — all of which arise when women try to break into male-dominated fields — include hazardous material removal workers, telecommunications line installers and repairers, meeting and convention planners, dining room or cafeteria workers, and construction trade helpers.

Nationally, the average earnings for a man employed full-time and year-round was about $38,000 — $10,000 more than the average figure for a woman working a comparable job, noted the AP.

In the United Kingdom, the figures were not much better according to figures released last week by PayFinder.com, a Web site used to compare salaries.

The site found the average pay gap to be 24 percent — significantly higher than the 19 percent reported by official government statistics, according to the BBC.

Over the past year, the pay gap has widened the most in Wales, where women earn an average 23 percent less than men — a jump of 9 percent over last year, noted the report.

From CareerBuilder.com:

“Pay disparity continues to be a concern for one-in-five women, who say they are paid less than men with similar talents and experience. The same amount of women reported they have fewer opportunities for career advancement than men at their current organizations, according to a new CareerBuilder.com survey. The CareerBuilder.com ‘Men and Women at Work 2004′ survey of men and women was conducted from April 6 to April 19, 2004.

“When asked why they think men are paid more, four-in-ten women attribute it to favoritism shown by men in management to other men in the organization. Twenty-four percent of men say women are paid more because of their seniority on the job….

“How well one is paid often corresponds with how high one has climbed up the company ladder. While women feel they have fewer opportunities for career advancement than men, four-in-ten men and women agree that career advancement opportunities are lacking at their present employers.

“While almost half of both men and women are satisfied with their career progress to date, three-in-ten men and women are dissatisfied….

“Men and women both reported a decline in overall job satisfaction year over year. Fifty-four percent of men and 56 percent of women are currently satisfied with their jobs; down from 2003 when 59 percent of both men and women were satisfied.”

“Fences are made for those who cannot fly.”

– Elbert Hubbard (U.S. writer, 1856-1915)