Academic literature on the topic 'United States. Agricultural Research Administration. Central Project Office'

ABSTRACT The U.S. Department of Transportation, Research and Special Programs Administration (RSPA), Office of Pipeline Safety (OPS) is required to identify areas unusually sensitive to environmental damage in the event of a hazardous liquid pipeline accident. Pipeline segments where a release could impact an USA are subject to additional prevention, mitigation, and response measures than what has previously been implemented by pipeline operators. Ecological USAs have been identified and mapped for the entire United States using data and expertise from many different sources. The final mapping product was completed at Research Planning, Inc, Columbia, South Carolina and was sent to OPS for distribution to the pipeline operators. USAs are selected from a set of candidate resources that include federally threatened and endangered species, imperiled species (generally 20 or fewer known populations world-wide), depleted marine mammals, and high concentration areas for migratory waterbirds. Final USAs include all critically imperiled species (generally 5 or fewer known populations world-wide), multi-species assemblages (three or more overlapping candidate resource types), Ramsar sites (areas designated under the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat), Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN) sites, high quality candidate occurrences (condition or viability of a species occurrence as determined by the Natural Heritage Programs) and candidate species that are aquatic dependent or terrestrial with limited home range sizes. RSPA's Geographic Information System (GIS) model integrates state Natural Heritage Program data, Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) data, Ramsar and WHSRN data and maps, hydrography, and species habitat and range classifications assigned by project ecologists. A summary map of all ecological USAs is presented at a nation-wide scale. The map provides specific examples as given by OPS, of regions: Southern, Southwest, Central, Eastern, and Western. States with high concentrations of liquid pipelines are also presented. This project and its results are unique in that they represent one of the first nation-wide compilations of ecological data for the purposes of a standardized pipeline risk assessment.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Declaring War Soon after Al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the Bush Administration described its new grand strategy: the “Global War on Terror”. This underpinned the subsequent counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and the United States invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Media pundits quickly applied the Global War on Terror label to the Madrid, Bali and London bombings, to convey how Al Qaeda’s terrorism had gone transnational. Meanwhile, international relations scholars debated the extent to which September 11 had changed the international system (Brenner; Mann 303). American intellectuals adopted several variations of the Global War on Terror in what initially felt like a transitional period of US foreign policy (Burns). Walter Laqueur suggested Al Qaeda was engaged in a “cosmological” and perpetual war. Paul Berman likened Al Qaeda and militant Islam to the past ideological battles against communism and fascism (Heilbrunn 248). In a widely cited article, neoconservative thinker Norman Podhoretz suggested the United States faced “World War IV”, which had three interlocking drivers: Al Qaeda and trans-national terrorism; political Islam as the West’s existential enemy; and nuclear proliferation to ‘rogue’ countries and non-state actors (Friedman 3). Podhoretz’s tone reflected a revival of his earlier Cold War politics and critique of the New Left (Friedman 148-149; Halper and Clarke 56; Heilbrunn 210). These stances attracted widespread support. For instance, the United States Marine Corp recalibrated its mission to fight a long war against “World War IV-like” enemies. Yet these stances left the United States unprepared as the combat situations in Afghanistan and Iraq worsened (Ricks; Ferguson; Filkins). Neoconservative ideals for Iraq “regime change” to transform the Middle East failed to deal with other security problems such as Pakistan’s Musharraf regime (Dorrien 110; Halper and Clarke 210-211; Friedman 121, 223; Heilbrunn 252). The Manichean and open-ended framing became a self-fulfilling prophecy for insurgents, jihadists, and militias. The Bush Administration quietly abandoned the Global War on Terror in July 2005. Widespread support had given way to policymaker doubt. Why did so many intellectuals and strategists embrace the Global War on Terror as the best possible “grand strategy” perspective of a post-September 11 world? Why was there so little doubt of this worldview? This is a debate with roots as old as the Sceptics versus the Sophists. Explanations usually focus on the Bush Administration’s “Vulcans” war cabinet: Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who later became Secretary of State (Mann xv-xvi). The “Vulcans” were named after the Roman god Vulcan because Rice’s hometown Birmingham, Alabama, had “a mammoth fifty-six foot statue . . . [in] homage to the city’s steel industry” (Mann x) and the name stuck. Alternatively, explanations focus on how neoconservative thinkers shaped the intellectual climate after September 11, in a receptive media climate. Biographers suggest that “neoconservatism had become an echo chamber” (Heilbrunn 242) with its own media outlets, pundits, and think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and Project for a New America. Neoconservatism briefly flourished in Washington DC until Iraq’s sectarian violence discredited the “Vulcans” and neoconservative strategists like Paul Wolfowitz (Friedman; Ferguson). The neoconservatives' combination of September 11’s aftermath with strongly argued historical analogies was initially convincing. They conferred with scholars such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel P. Huntington and Victor Davis Hanson to construct classicist historical narratives and to explain cultural differences. However, the history of the decade after September 11 also contains mis-steps and mistakes which make it a series of contingent decisions (Ferguson; Bergen). One way to analyse these contingent decisions is to pose “what if?” counterfactuals, or feasible alternatives to historical events (Lebow). For instance, what if September 11 had been a chemical and biological weapons attack? (Mann 317). Appendix 1 includes a range of alternative possibilities and “minimal rewrites” or slight variations on the historical events which occurred. Collectively, these counterfactuals suggest the role of agency, chance, luck, and the juxtaposition of better and worse outcomes. They pose challenges to the classicist interpretation adopted soon after September 11 to justify “World War IV” (Podhoretz). A ‘Two-Track’ Process for ‘World War IV’ After the September 11 attacks, I think an overlapping two-track process occurred with the “Vulcans” cabinet, neoconservative advisers, and two “echo chambers”: neoconservative think-tanks and the post-September 11 media. Crucially, Bush’s “Vulcans” war cabinet succeeded in gaining civilian control of the United States war decision process. Although successful in initiating the 2003 Iraq War this civilian control created a deeper crisis in US civil-military relations (Stevenson; Morgan). The “Vulcans” relied on “politicised” intelligence such as a United Kingdom intelligence report on Iraq’s weapons development program. The report enabled “a climate of undifferentiated fear to arise” because its public version did not distinguish between chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons (Halper and Clarke, 210). The cautious 2003 National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) report on Iraq was only released in a strongly edited form. For instance, the US Department of Energy had expressed doubts about claims that Iraq had approached Niger for uranium, and was using aluminium tubes for biological and chemical weapons development. Meanwhile, the post-September 11 media had become a second “echo chamber” (Halper and Clarke 194-196) which amplified neoconservative arguments. Berman, Laqueur, Podhoretz and others who framed the intellectual climate were “risk entrepreneurs” (Mueller 41-43) that supported the “World War IV” vision. The media also engaged in aggressive “flak” campaigns (Herman and Chomsky 26-28; Mueller 39-42) designed to limit debate and to stress foreign policy stances and themes which supported the Bush Administration. When former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey’s claimed that Al Qaeda had close connections to Iraqi intelligence, this was promoted in several books, including Michael Ledeen’s War Against The Terror Masters, Stephen Hayes’ The Connection, and Laurie Mylroie’s Bush v. The Beltway; and in partisan media such as Fox News, NewsMax, and The Weekly Standard who each attacked the US State Department and the CIA (Dorrien 183; Hayes; Ledeen; Mylroie; Heilbrunn 237, 243-244; Mann 310). This was the media “echo chamber” at work. The group Accuracy in Media also campaigned successfully to ensure that US cable providers did not give Al Jazeera English access to US audiences (Barker). Cosmopolitan ideals seemed incompatible with what the “flak” groups desired. The two-track process converged on two now infamous speeches. US President Bush’s State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002, and US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on 5 February 2003. Bush’s speech included a line from neoconservative David Frumm about North Korea, Iraq and Iran as an “Axis of Evil” (Dorrien 158; Halper and Clarke 139-140; Mann 242, 317-321). Powell’s presentation to the United Nations included now-debunked threat assessments. In fact, Powell had altered the speech’s original draft by I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who was Cheney’s chief of staff (Dorrien 183-184). Powell claimed that Iraq had mobile biological weapons facilities, linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) Mohamed El-Baradei, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Institute for Science and International Security all strongly doubted this claim, as did international observers (Dorrien 184; Halper and Clarke 212-213; Mann 353-354). Yet this information was suppressed: attacked by “flak” or given little visible media coverage. Powell’s agenda included trying to rebuild an international coalition and to head off weather changes that would affect military operations in the Middle East (Mann 351). Both speeches used politicised variants of “weapons of mass destruction”, taken from the counterterrorism literature (Stern; Laqueur). Bush’s speech created an inflated geopolitical threat whilst Powell relied on flawed intelligence and scientific visuals to communicate a non-existent threat (Vogel). However, they had the intended effect on decision makers. US Under-Secretary of Defense, the neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz, later revealed to Vanity Fair that “weapons of mass destruction” was selected as an issue that all potential stakeholders could agree on (Wilkie 69). Perhaps the only remaining outlet was satire: Armando Iannucci’s 2009 film In The Loop parodied the diplomatic politics surrounding Powell’s speech and the civil-military tensions on the Iraq War’s eve. In the short term the two track process worked in heading off doubt. The “Vulcans” blocked important information on pre-war Iraq intelligence from reaching the media and the general public (Prados). Alternatively, they ignored area specialists and other experts, such as when Coalition Provisional Authority’s L. Paul Bremer ignored the US State Department’s fifteen volume ‘Future of Iraq’ project (Ferguson). Public “flak” and “risk entrepreneurs” mobilised a range of motivations from grief and revenge to historical memory and identity politics. This combination of private and public processes meant that although doubts were expressed, they could be contained through the dual echo chambers of neoconservative policymaking and the post-September 11 media. These factors enabled the “Vulcans” to proceed with their “regime change” plans despite strong public opposition from anti-war protestors. Expressing DoubtsMany experts and institutions expressed doubt about specific claims the Bush Administration made to support the 2003 Iraq War. This doubt came from three different and sometimes overlapping groups. Subject matter experts such as the IAEA’s Mohamed El-Baradei and weapons development scientists countered the UK intelligence report and Powell’s UN speech. However, they did not get the media coverage warranted due to “flak” and “echo chamber” dynamics. Others could challenge misleading historical analogies between insurgent Iraq and Nazi Germany, and yet not change the broader outcomes (Benjamin). Independent journalists one group who gained new information during the 1990-91 Gulf War: some entered Iraq from Kuwait and documented a more humanitarian side of the war to journalists embedded with US military units (Uyarra). Finally, there were dissenters from bureaucratic and institutional processes. In some cases, all three overlapped. In their separate analyses of the post-September 11 debate on intelligence “failure”, Zegart and Jervis point to a range of analytic misperceptions and institutional problems. However, the intelligence community is separated from policymakers such as the “Vulcans”. Compartmentalisation due to the “need to know” principle also means that doubting analysts can be blocked from releasing information. Andrew Wilkie discovered this when he resigned from Australia’s Office for National Assessments (ONA) as a transnational issues analyst. Wilkie questioned the pre-war assessments in Powell’s United Nations speech that were used to justify the 2003 Iraq War. Wilkie was then attacked publicly by Australian Prime Minister John Howard. This overshadowed a more important fact: both Howard and Wilkie knew that due to Australian legislation, Wilkie could not publicly comment on ONA intelligence, despite the invitation to do so. This barrier also prevented other intelligence analysts from responding to the “Vulcans”, and to “flak” and “echo chamber” dynamics in the media and neoconservative think-tanks. Many analysts knew that the excerpts released from the 2003 NIE on Iraq was highly edited (Prados). For example, Australian agencies such as the ONA, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of Defence knew this (Wilkie 98). However, analysts are trained not to interfere with policymakers, even when there are significant civil-military irregularities. Military officials who spoke out about pre-war planning against the “Vulcans” and their neoconservative supporters were silenced (Ricks; Ferguson). Greenlight Capital’s hedge fund manager David Einhorn illustrates in a different context what might happen if analysts did comment. Einhorn gave a speech to the Ira Sohn Conference on 15 May 2002 debunking the management of Allied Capital. Einhorn’s “short-selling” led to retaliation from Allied Capital, a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, and growing evidence of potential fraud. If analysts adopted Einhorn’s tactics—combining rigorous analysis with targeted, public denunciation that is widely reported—then this may have short-circuited the “flak” and “echo chamber” effects prior to the 2003 Iraq War. The intelligence community usually tries to pre-empt such outcomes via contestation exercises and similar processes. This was the goal of the 2003 NIE on Iraq, despite the fact that the US Department of Energy which had the expertise was overruled by other agencies who expressed opinions not necessarily based on rigorous scientific and technical analysis (Prados; Vogel). In counterterrorism circles, similar disinformation arose about Aum Shinrikyo’s biological weapons research after its sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on 20 March 1995 (Leitenberg). Disinformation also arose regarding nuclear weapons proliferation to non-state actors in the 1990s (Stern). Interestingly, several of the “Vulcans” and neoconservatives had been involved in an earlier controversial contestation exercise: Team B in 1976. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) assembled three Team B groups in order to evaluate and forecast Soviet military capabilities. One group headed by historian Richard Pipes gave highly “alarmist” forecasts and then attacked a CIA NIE about the Soviets (Dorrien 50-56; Mueller 81). The neoconservatives adopted these same tactics to reframe the 2003 NIE from its position of caution, expressed by several intelligence agencies and experts, to belief that Iraq possessed a current, covert program to develop weapons of mass destruction (Prados). Alternatively, information may be leaked to the media to express doubt. “Non-attributable” background interviews to establishment journalists like Seymour Hersh and Bob Woodward achieved this. Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange has recently achieved notoriety due to US diplomatic cables from the SIPRNet network released from 28 November 2010 onwards. Supporters have favourably compared Assange to Daniel Ellsberg, the RAND researcher who leaked the Pentagon Papers (Ellsberg; Ehrlich and Goldsmith). Whilst Elsberg succeeded because a network of US national papers continued to print excerpts from the Pentagon Papers despite lawsuit threats, Assange relied in part on favourable coverage from the UK’s Guardian newspaper. However, suspected sources such as US Army soldier Bradley Manning are not protected whilst media outlets are relatively free to publish their scoops (Walt, ‘Woodward’). Assange’s publication of SIPRNet’s diplomatic cables will also likely mean greater restrictions on diplomatic and military intelligence (Walt, ‘Don’t Write’). Beyond ‘Doubt’ Iraq’s worsening security discredited many of the factors that had given the neoconservatives credibility. The post-September 11 media became increasingly more critical of the US military in Iraq (Ferguson) and cautious about the “echo chamber” of think-tanks and media outlets. Internet sites for Al Jazeera English, Al-Arabiya and other networks have enabled people to bypass “flak” and directly access these different viewpoints. Most damagingly, the non-discovery of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction discredited both the 2003 NIE on Iraq and Colin Powell’s United Nations presentation (Wilkie 104). Likewise, “risk entrepreneurs” who foresaw “World War IV” in 2002 and 2003 have now distanced themselves from these apocalyptic forecasts due to a series of mis-steps and mistakes by the Bush Administration and Al Qaeda’s over-calculation (Bergen). The emergence of sites such as Wikileaks, and networks like Al Jazeera English and Al-Arabiya, are a response to the politics of the past decade. They attempt to short-circuit past “echo chambers” through providing access to different sources and leaked data. The Global War on Terror framed the Bush Administration’s response to September 11 as a war (Kirk; Mueller 59). Whilst this prematurely closed off other possibilities, it has also unleashed a series of dynamics which have undermined the neoconservative agenda. The “classicist” history and historical analogies constructed to justify the “World War IV” scenario are just one of several potential frameworks. “Flak” organisations and media “echo chambers” are now challenged by well-financed and strategic alternatives such as Al Jazeera English and Al-Arabiya. Doubt is one defence against “risk entrepreneurs” who seek to promote a particular idea: doubt guards against uncritical adoption. Perhaps the enduring lesson of the post-September 11 debates, though, is that doubt alone is not enough. What is needed are individuals and institutions that understand the strategies which the neoconservatives and others have used, and who also have the soft power skills during crises to influence critical decision-makers to choose alternatives. Appendix 1: Counterfactuals Richard Ned Lebow uses “what if?” counterfactuals to examine alternative possibilities and “minimal rewrites” or slight variations on the historical events that occurred. The following counterfactuals suggest that the Bush Administration’s Global War on Terror could have evolved very differently . . . or not occurred at all. Fact: The 2003 Iraq War and 2001 Afghanistan counterinsurgency shaped the Bush Administration’s post-September 11 grand strategy. Counterfactual #1: Al Gore decisively wins the 2000 U.S. election. Bush v. Gore never occurs. After the September 11 attacks, Gore focuses on international alliance-building and gains widespread diplomatic support rather than a neoconservative agenda. He authorises Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and works closely with the Musharraf regime in Pakistan to target Al Qaeda’s muhajideen. He ‘contains’ Saddam Hussein’s Iraq through measurement and signature, technical intelligence, and more stringent monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Minimal Rewrite: United 93 crashes in Washington DC, killing senior members of the Gore Administration. Fact: U.S. Special Operations Forces failed to kill Osama bin Laden in late November and early December 2001 at Tora Bora. Counterfactual #2: U.S. Special Operations Forces kill Osama bin Laden in early December 2001 during skirmishes at Tora Bora. Ayman al-Zawahiri is critically wounded, captured, and imprisoned. The rest of Al Qaeda is scattered. Minimal Rewrite: Osama bin Laden’s death turns him into a self-mythologised hero for decades. Fact: The UK Blair Government supplied a 50-page intelligence dossier on Iraq’s weapons development program which the Bush Administration used to support its pre-war planning. Counterfactual #3: Rogue intelligence analysts debunk the UK Blair Government’s claims through a series of ‘targeted’ leaks to establishment news sources. Minimal Rewrite: The 50-page intelligence dossier is later discovered to be correct about Iraq’s weapons development program. Fact: The Bush Administration used the 2003 National Intelligence Estimate to “build its case” for “regime change” in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Counterfactual #4: A joint investigation by The New York Times and The Washington Post rebuts U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United National Security Council, delivered on 5 February 2003. Minimal Rewrite: The Central Intelligence Agency’s whitepaper “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs” (October 2002) more accurately reflects the 2003 NIE’s cautious assessments. Fact: The Bush Administration relied on Ahmed Chalabi for its postwar estimates about Iraq’s reconstruction. Counterfactual #5: The Bush Administration ignores Chalabi’s advice and relies instead on the U.S. State Department’s 15 volume report “The Future of Iraq”. Minimal Rewrite: The Coalition Provisional Authority appoints Ahmed Chalabi to head an interim Iraqi government. Fact: L. Paul Bremer signed orders to disband Iraq’s Army and to De-Ba’athify Iraq’s new government. Counterfactual #6: Bremer keeps Iraq’s Army intact and uses it to impose security in Baghdad to prevent looting and to thwart insurgents. Rather than a De-Ba’athification policy, Bremer uses former Baath Party members to gather situational intelligence. Minimal Rewrite: Iraq’s Army refuses to disband and the De-Ba’athification policy uncovers several conspiracies to undermine the Coalition Provisional Authority. AcknowledgmentsThanks to Stephen McGrail for advice on science and technology analysis.References Barker, Greg. “War of Ideas”. PBS Frontline. Boston, MA: 2007. ‹http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/newswar/video1.html› Benjamin, Daniel. “Condi’s Phony History.” Slate 29 Aug. 2003. ‹http://www.slate.com/id/2087768/pagenum/all/›. Bergen, Peter L. The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al Qaeda. New York: The Free Press, 2011. Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism. W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2003. Brenner, William J. “In Search of Monsters: Realism and Progress in International Relations Theory after September 11.” Security Studies 15.3 (2006): 496-528. Burns, Alex. “The Worldflash of a Coming Future.” M/C Journal 6.2 (April 2003). ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php›. Dorrien, Gary. Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ehrlich, Judith, and Goldsmith, Rick. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Berkley CA: Kovno Communications, 2009. Einhorn, David. Fooling Some of the People All of the Time: A Long Short (and Now Complete) Story. Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Ellison, Sarah. “The Man Who Spilled The Secrets.” Vanity Fair (Feb. 2011). ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2011/02/the-guardian-201102›. Ellsberg, Daniel. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. New York: Viking, 2002. Ferguson, Charles. No End in Sight, New York: Representational Pictures, 2007. Filkins, Dexter. The Forever War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Friedman, Murray. The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. Halper, Stefan, and Jonathan Clarke. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. Hayes, Stephen F. The Connection: How Al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Heilbrunn, Jacob. They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Rev. ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002. Iannucci, Armando. In The Loop. London: BBC Films, 2009. Jervis, Robert. Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War. Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 2010. Kirk, Michael. “The War behind Closed Doors.” PBS Frontline. Boston, MA: 2003. ‹http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq/›. Laqueur, Walter. No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Continuum, 2003. Lebow, Richard Ned. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Ledeen, Michael. The War against The Terror Masters. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003. Leitenberg, Milton. “Aum Shinrikyo's Efforts to Produce Biological Weapons: A Case Study in the Serial Propagation of Misinformation.” Terrorism and Political Violence 11.4 (1999): 149-158. Mann, James. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004. Morgan, Matthew J. The American Military after 9/11: Society, State, and Empire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Mueller, John. Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. New York: The Free Press, 2009. Mylroie, Laurie. Bush v The Beltway: The Inside Battle over War in Iraq. New York: Regan Books, 2003. Nutt, Paul C. Why Decisions Fail. San Francisco: Berrett-Koelher, 2002. Podhoretz, Norman. “How to Win World War IV”. Commentary 113.2 (2002): 19-29. Prados, John. Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War. New York: The New Press, 2004. Ricks, Thomas. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006. Stern, Jessica. The Ultimate Terrorists. Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2001. Stevenson, Charles A. Warriors and Politicians: US Civil-Military Relations under Stress. New York: Routledge, 2006. Walt, Stephen M. “Should Bob Woodward Be Arrested?” Foreign Policy 10 Dec. 2010. ‹http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/10/more_wikileaks_double_standards›. Walt, Stephen M. “‘Don’t Write If You Can Talk...’: The Latest from WikiLeaks.” Foreign Policy 29 Nov. 2010. ‹http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/11/29/dont_write_if_you_can_talk_the_latest_from_wikileaks›. Wilkie, Andrew. Axis of Deceit. Melbourne: Black Ink Books, 2003. Uyarra, Esteban Manzanares. “War Feels like War”. London: BBC, 2003. Vogel, Kathleen M. “Iraqi Winnebagos™ of Death: Imagined and Realized Futures of US Bioweapons Threat Assessments.” Science and Public Policy 35.8 (2008): 561–573. Zegart, Amy. Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 2007.

During World War II, the Soviet Union’s food supply was in a state of crisis. Hitler’s army had occupied the agricultural heartlands of Ukraine and Southern Russia in 1941 and, as a result, agricultural production for the entire nation had plummeted. Soldiers in Red Army, who easily ate the best rations in the country, subsisted on a daily allowance of just under a kilogram of bread, supplemented with meat, tea, sugar and butter when and if these items were available. The hunger of the Red Army and its effect on the morale and strength of Europe’s eastern warfront were causes for concern for the Soviet government and its European and American allies. The one country with a food surplus decided to do something to help, and in 1942 the United States agreed to send thousands of pounds of meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. After receiving several shipments of the all-American spiced canned meat SPAM, the Red Army’s quartermaster put in a request for a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka. Pound for pound, America sent more pigs overseas than soldiers during World War II, in part because pork was in oversupply in the America of the early 1940s. Shipping meat to hungry soldiers and civilians in war torn countries was a practical way to build business for the U.S. meat industry, which had been in decline throughout the 1930s. As per a Soviet-supplied recipe, the first cans of Lend-Lease tushonka were made in the heart of the American Midwest, at meatpacking plants in Iowa and Ohio (Stettinus 6-7). Government contracts in the meat packing industry helped fuel economic recovery, and meatpackers were in a position to take special request orders like the one for tushonka that came through the lines. Unlike SPAM, which was something of a novelty item during the war, tushonka was a food with a past. The original recipe was based on a recipe for preserved meat that had been a traditional product of the Ural Mountains, preserved in jars with salt and fat rather than by pressure and heat. Thus tushonka was requested—and was mass-produced—not simply as a convenience but also as a traditional and familiar food—a taste of home cooking that soldiers could carry with them into the field. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that the arrival of tushonka was instrumental in helping the Red Army push back against the Nazi invasion (178). Unlike SPAM and other wartime rations, tushonka did not fade away after the war. Instead, it was distributed to the Soviet civilian population, appearing in charity donations and on the shelves of state shops. Often it was the only meat product available on a regular basis. Salty, fatty, and slightly grey-toned, tushonka was an unlikely hero of the postwar-era, but during this period tushonka rose from obscurity to become an emblem of socialist modernity. Because it was shelf stable and could be made from a variety of different cuts of meat, it proved an ideal product for the socialist production lines where supplies and the pace of production were infinitely variable. Unusual in a socialist system of supply, this product shaped production and distribution lines, and even influenced the layout of meatpacking factories and the genetic stocks of the animals that were to be eaten. Tushonka’s initial ubiquity in the postwar Soviet Union had little to do with the USSR’s own hog industry. Pig populations as well as their processing facilities had been decimated in the war, and pigs that did survive the Axis invasion had been evacuated East with human populations. Instead, the early presence of tushonka in the pig-scarce postwar Soviet Union had everything to do with Harry Truman’s unexpected September 1945 decision to end all “economically useful” Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union (Martel). By the end of September, canned meat was practically the only product still being shipped as part of Lend-Lease (NARA RG 59). Although the United Nations was supposed to distribute these supplies to needy civilians free of cost, travelers to the Soviet Union in 1946 spotted cans of American tushonka for sale in state shops (Skeoch 231). After American tushonka “donations” disappeared from store shelves, the Soviet Union’s meat syndicates decided to continue producing the product. Between its first appearance during the war in 1943, and the 1957 announcement by Nikita Khrushchev that Soviet policy would restructure all state animal farms to support the mass production of one or several processed meat products, tushonka helped to drive the evolution of the Soviet Union’s meat packing industry. Its popularity with both planners and the public gave it the power to reach into food commodity chains. It is this backward reach and the longer-term impacts of these policies that make tushonka an unusual byproduct of the Cold War era. State planners loved tushonka: it was cheap to make, the logistics of preparing it were not complicated, it was easy to transport, and most importantly, it served as tangible evidence that the state was accomplishing a long-standing goal to get more meat to its citizenry and improving the diet of the average Soviet worker. Tushonka became a highly visible product in the Soviet Union’s much vaunted push to establish a modern food regime intended to rival that of the United States. Because it was shelf-stable, wartime tushonka had served as a practical food for soldiers, but after the war tushonka became an ideal food for workers who had neither the time nor the space to prepare a home-cooked meal with fresh meat. The Soviet state started to produce its own tushonka because it was such an excellent fit for the needs and abilities of the Soviet state—consumer demand was rarely considered by planners in this era. Not only did tushonka fit the look and taste of a modern processed meat product (that is, it was standard in texture and flavor from can to can, and was an obviously industrially processed product), it was also an excellent way to make the most of the predominant kind of meat the Soviet Union had the in the 1950s: small scraps low-grade pork and beef, trimmings leftover from butchering practices that focused on harvesting as much animal fat, rather than muscle, from the carcass in question. Just like tushonka, pork sausages and frozen pelmeny, a meat-filled pasta dumpling, also became winning postwar foods thanks to a happy synergy of increased animal production, better butchering and new food processing machines. As postwar pigs recovered their populations, the Soviet processed meat industry followed suit. One official source listed twenty-six different kinds of meat products being issued in 1964, although not all of these were pork (Danilov). An instructional manual distributed by the meat and milk syndicate demonstrated how meat shops should wrap and display sausages, and listed 24 different kinds of sausages that all needed a special style of tying up. Because of packaging shortages, the string that bound the sausage was wrapped in a different way for every type of sausage, and shop assistants were expected to be able to identify sausages based on the pattern of their binding. Pelmeny were produced at every meat factory that processed pork. These were “made from start to finish in a special, automated machine, human hands do not touch them. Which makes them a higher quality and better (prevoskhodnogo) product” (Book of Healthy and Delicious Food). These were foods that became possible to produce economically because of a co-occurring increase in pigs, the new standardized practice of equipping meatpacking plants with large-capacity grinders, and freezers or coolers and the enforcement of a system of grading meat. As the state began to rebuild Soviet agriculture from its near-collapse during the war, the Soviet Union looked to the United States for inspiration. Surprisingly, Soviet planners found some of the United States’ more outdated techniques to be quite valuable for new Soviet hog operations. The most striking of these was the adoption of competing phenotypes in the Soviet hog industry. Most major swine varieties had been developed and described in the 19th century in Germany and Great Britain. Breeds had a tendency to split into two phenotypically distinct groups, and in early 20th Century American pig farms, there was strong disagreement as to which style of pig was better suited to industrial conditions of production. Some pigs were “hot-blooded” (in other words, fast maturing and prolific reproducers) while others were a slower “big type” pig (a self-explanatory descriptor). Breeds rarely excelled at both traits and it was a matter of opinion whether speed or size was the most desirable trait to augment. The over-emphasis of either set of qualities damaged survival rates. At their largest, big type pigs resembled small hippopotamuses, and sows were so corpulent they unwittingly crushed their tiny piglets. But the sleeker hot-blooded pigs had a similarly lethal relationship with their young. Sows often produced litters of upwards of a dozen piglets and the stress of tending such a large brood led overwhelmed sows to devour their own offspring (Long). American pig breeders had been forced to navigate between these two undesirable extremes, but by the 1930s, big type pigs were fading in popularity mainly because butter and newly developed plant oils were replacing lard as the cooking fat of preference in American kitchens. The remarkable propensity of the big type to pack on pounds of extra fat was more of a liability than a benefit in this period, as the price that lard and salt pork plummeted in this decade. By the time U.S. meat packers were shipping cans of tushonka to their Soviet allies across the seas, US hog operations had already developed a strong preference for hot-blooded breeds and research had shifted to building and maintaining lean muscle on these swiftly maturing animals. When Soviet industrial planners hoping to learn how to make more tushonka entered the scene however, their interpretation of american efficiency was hardly predictable: scientifically nourished big type pigs may have been advantageous to the United States at midcentury, but the Soviet Union’s farms and hungry citizens had a very different list of needs and wants. At midcentury, Soviet pigs were still handicapped by old-fashioned variables such as cold weather, long winters, poor farm organisation and impoverished feed regimens. The look of the average Soviet hog operation was hardly industrial. In 1955 the typical Soviet pig was petite, shaggy, and slow to reproduce. In the absence of robust dairy or vegetable oil industries, Soviet pigs had always been valued for their fat rather than their meat, and tushonka had been a byproduct of an industry focused mainly on supplying the country with fat and lard. Until the mid 1950s, the most valuable pig on many Soviet state and collective farms was the nondescript but very rotund “lard and bacon” pig, an inefficient eater that could take upwards of two years to reach full maturity. In searching for a way to serve up more tushonka, Soviet planners became aware that their entire industry needed to be revamped. When the Soviet Union looked to the United States, planners were inspired by the earlier competition between hot-blooded and big type pigs, which Soviet planners thought, ambitiously, they could combine into one splendid pig. The Soviet Union imported new pigs from Poland, Lithuania, East Germany and Denmark, trying valiantly to create hybrid pigs that would exhibit both hot blood and big type. Soviet planners were especially interested in inspiring the Poland-China, an especially rotund specimen, to speed up its life cycle during them mid 1950s. Hybrdizing and cross breeding a Soviet super-pig, no matter how closely laid out on paper, was probably always a socialist pipe dream. However, when the Soviets decided to try to outbreed American hog breeders, they created an infrastructure for pigs and pig breeding that had a dramatic positive impact of hog populations across the country, and the 1950s were marked by a large increase in the number of pigs in the Soviet union, as well as dramatic increases in the numbers of purebred and scientific hybrids the country developed, all in the name of tushonka. It was not just the genetic stock that received a makeover in the postwar drive to can more tushonka; a revolution in the barnyard also took place and in less than 10 years, pigs were living in new housing stock and eating new feed sources. The most obvious postwar change was in farm layout and the use of building space. In the early 1950s, many collective farms had been consolidated. In 1940 there were a quarter of a million kolkhozii, by 1951 fewer than half that many remained (NARA RG166). Farm consolidation movements most often combined two, three or four collective farms into one economic unit, thus scaling up the average size and productivity of each collective farm and simplifying their administration. While there were originally ambitious plans to re-center farms around new “agro-city” bases with new, modern farm buildings, these projects were ultimately abandoned. Instead, existing buildings were repurposed and the several clusters of farm buildings that had once been the heart of separate villages acquired different uses. For animals this meant new barns and new daily routines. Barns were redesigned and compartmentalized around ideas of gender and age segregation—weaned baby pigs in one area, farrowing sows in another—as well as maximising growth and health. Pigs spent less outside time and more time at the trough. Pigs that were wanted for different purposes (breeding, meat and lard) were kept in different areas, isolated from each other to minimize the spread of disease as well as improve the efficiency of production. Much like postwar housing for humans, the new and improved pig barn was a crowded and often chaotic place where the electricity, heat and water functioned only sporadically. New barns were supposed to be mechanised. In some places, mechanisation had helped speed things along, but as one American official viewing a new mechanised pig farm in 1955 noted, “it did not appear to be a highly efficient organisation. The mechanised or automated operations, such as the preparation of hog feed, were eclipsed by the amount of hand labor which both preceded and followed the mechanised portion” (NARA RG166 1961). The American official estimated that by mechanizing, Soviet farms had actually increased the amount of human labor needed for farming operations. The other major environmental change took place away from the barnyard, in new crops the Soviet Union began to grow for fodder. The heart and soul of this project was establishing field corn as a major new fodder crop. Originally intended as a feed for cows that would replace hay, corn quickly became the feed of choice for raising pigs. After a visit by a United States delegation to Iowa and other U.S. farms over the summer of 1955, corn became the centerpiece of Khrushchev’s efforts to raise meat and milk productivity. These efforts were what earned Khrushchev his nickname of kukuruznik, or “corn fanatic.” Since so little of the Soviet Union looks or feels much like the plains and hills of Iowa, adopting corn might seem quixotic, but raising corn was a potentially practical move for a cold country. Unlike the other major fodder crops of turnips and potatoes, corn could be harvested early, while still green but already possessing a high level of protein. Corn provided a “gap month” of green feed during July and August, when grazing animals had eaten the first spring green growth but these same plants had not recovered their biomass. What corn remained in the fields in late summer was harvested and made into silage, and corn made the best silage that had been historically available in the Soviet Union. The high protein content of even silage made from green mass and unripe corn ears prevented them from losing weight in the winter. Thus the desire to put more meat on Soviet tables—a desire first prompted by American food donations of surplus pork from Iowa farmers adapting to agro-industrial reordering in their own country—pushed back into the commodity supply network of the Soviet Union. World War II rations that were well adapted to the uncertainty and poor infrastructure not just of war but also of peacetime were a source of inspiration for Soviet planners striving to improve the diets of citizens. To do this, they purchased and bred more and better animals, inventing breeds and paying attention, for the first time, to the efficiency and speed with which these animals were ready to become meat. Reinventing Soviet pigs pushed even back farther, and inspired agricultural economists and state planners to embrace new farm organizational structures. Pigs meant for the tushonka can spent more time inside eating, and led their lives in a rigid compartmentalization that mimicked emerging trends in human urban society. Beyond the barnyard, a new concern with feed-to weight conversions led agriculturalists to seek new crops; crops like corn that were costly to grow but were a perfect food for a pig destined for a tushonka tin. Thus in Soviet industrialization, pigs evolved. No longer simply recyclers of human waste, socialist pigs were consumers in their own right, their newly crafted genetic compositions demanded ever more technical feed sources in order to maximize their own productivity. Food is transformative, and in this case study the prosaic substance of canned meat proved to be unusually transformative for the history of the Soviet Union. In its early history it kept soldiers alive long enough to win an important war, later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritized muscle tissue over fat tissue in the disassembly of carcasses. This transformative influence reached backwards into the supply lines and farms of the Soviet Union, revolutionizing the scale and goals of farming and meat packing for the Soviet food industry, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer. References Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Where: University of Illinois Press, 1998. The Book of Healthy and Delicious Food, Kniga O Vkusnoi I Zdorovoi Pishche. Moscow: AMN Izd., 1952. 161. Danilov, M. M. Tovaravedenie Prodovol’stvennykh Tovarov: Miaso I Miasnye Tovarye. Moscow: Iz. Ekonomika, 1964. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1970. 178. Long, James. The Book of the Pig. London: Upcott Gill, 1886. 102. Lush, Jay & A.L. Anderson, “A Genetic History of Poland-China Swine: I—Early Breed History: The ‘Hot Blood’ versus the ‘Big Type’” Journal of Heredity 30.4 (1939): 149-56. Martel, Leon. Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War: A Study of the Implementation of Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1979. 35. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 59, General Records of the Department of State. Office of Soviet Union affairs, Box 6. “Records relating to Lend Lease with the USSR 1941-1952”. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative reports 1940-1954. USSR Cotton-USSR Foreign trade. Box 64, Folder “farm management”. Report written by David V Kelly, 6 Apr. 1951. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative Reports 1955-1961. Folder: “Agriculture” “Visits to Soviet agricultural installations,” 15 Nov. 1961. Skeoch, L.A. Food Prices and Ration Scale in the Ukraine, 1946 The Review of Economics and Statistics 35.3 (Aug. 1953), 229-35. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Fond R-7021. The Report of Extraordinary Special State Commission on Wartime Losses Resulting from the German-Fascist Occupation cites the following losses in the German takeover. 1948. Stettinus, Edward R. Jr. Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. Penguin Books, 1944.

Introduction A snapshot, not unlike countless photographs likely to be found in any number of family albums, shows two figures sitting on a park bench: an elderly and amiable looking man grins beneath the rim of a golf cap; a young boy of twelve smiles wide for the camera — a rather banal scene, captured on film. And yet, this seemingly innocent and unexceptional photograph was the site of a remarkable and wide ranging discourse — encompassing American conservatism, celebrity politics, and the end of the Cold War — as the image circulated around the globe during the weeklong state funeral of Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States. Taken in 1997 by the young boy’s grandfather, Ukrainian immigrant Yakov Ravin, during a chance encounter with the former president, the snapshot is believed to be the last public photograph of Ronald Reagan. Published on the occasion of the president’s death, the photograph made “instant celebrities” of the boy, now a twenty-year-old college student, Rostik Denenburg and his grand dad. Throughout the week of Reagan’s funeral, the two joined a chorus of dignitaries, politicians, pundits, and “ordinary” Americans praising Ronald Reagan: “The Great Communicator,” the man who defeated Communism, the popular president who restored America’s confidence, strength, and prosperity. Yes, it was mourning in America again. And the whole world was watching. Not since Princess Diana’s sudden (and unexpected) death, have we witnessed an electronic hagiography of such global proportions. Unlike Diana’s funeral, however, Reagan’s farewell played out in distinctly partisan terms. As James Ridgeway (2004) noted, the Reagan state funeral was “not only face-saving for the current administration, but also perhaps a mask for the American military debacle in Iraq. Not to mention a gesture of America’s might in the ‘war on terror.’” With non-stop media coverage, the weeklong ceremonies provided a sorely needed shot in the arm to the Bush re-election campaign. Still, whilst the funeral proceedings and the attendant media coverage were undeniably excessive in their deification of the former president, the historical white wash was not nearly so vulgar as the antiseptic send off Richard Nixon received back in 1994. That is to say, the piety of the Nixon funeral was at once startling and galling to many who reviled the man (Lapham). By contrast, given Ronald Reagan’s disarming public persona, his uniquely cordial relationship with the national press corps, and most notably, his handler’s mastery of media management techniques, the Reagan idolatry was neither surprising nor unexpected. In this brief essay, I want to consider Reagan’s funeral, and his legacy, in relation to what cultural critics, referring to the production of celebrity, have described as “fame games” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall). Specifically, I draw on the concept of “flashpoints” — moments of media excess surrounding a particular personage — in consideration of the Reagan funeral. Throughout, I demonstrate how Reagan’s death and the attendant media coverage epitomize this distinctive feature of contemporary culture. Furthermore, I observe Reagan’s innovative approaches to electoral politics in the age of television. Here, I suggest that Reagan’s appropriation of the strategies and techniques associated with advertising, marketing and public relations were decisive, not merely in terms of his electoral success, but also in securing his lasting fame. I conclude with some thoughts on the implications of Reagan’s legacy on historical memory, contemporary politics, and what neoconservatives, the heirs of the Reagan Revolution, gleefully describe as the New American Century. The Magic Hour On the morning of 12 June 2004, the last day of the state funeral, world leaders eulogized Reagan, the statesmen, at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Among the A-List political stars invited to speak were Margaret Thatcher, former president George H. W. Bush and, to borrow Arundhati Roi’s useful phrase, “Bush the Lesser.” Reagan’s one-time Cold War adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were also on hand, but did not have speaking parts. Former Reagan administration officials, Supreme Court justices, and congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle rounded out a guest list that read like a who’s who of the American political class. All told, Reagan’s weeklong sendoff was a state funeral at its most elaborate. It had it all—the flag draped coffin, the grieving widow, the riderless horse, and the procession of mourners winding their way through the Rotunda of the US Capitol. In this last regard, Reagan joined an elite group of seven presidents, including four who died by assassination — Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy — to be honored by having his remains lie in state in the Rotunda. But just as the deceased president was product of the studio system, so too, the script for the Gipper’s swan song come straight out of Hollywood. Later that day, the Reagan entourage made one last transcontinental flight back to the presidential library in Simi Valley, California for a private funeral service at sunset. In Hollywood parlance, the “magic hour” refers to the quality of light at dusk. It is an ideal, but ephemeral time favored by cinematographers, when the sunlight takes on a golden glow lending grandeur, nostalgia, and oftentimes, a sense of closure to a scene. This was Ronald Reagan’s final moment in the sun: a fitting end for an actor of the silver screen, as well as for the president who mastered televisual politics. In a culture so thoroughly saturated with the image, even the death of a minor celebrity is an occasion to replay film clips, interviews, paparazzi photos and the like. Moreover, these “flashpoints” grow in intensity and frequency as promotional culture, technological innovation, and the proliferation of new media outlets shape contemporary media culture. They are both cause and consequence of these moments of media excess. And, as Turner, Bonner and Marshall observe, “That is their point. It is their disproportionate nature that makes them so important: the scale of their visibility, their overwhelmingly excessive demonstration of the power of the relationship between mass-mediated celebrities and the consumers of popular culture” (3-4). B-Movie actor, corporate spokesman, state governor and, finally, US president, Ronald Reagan left an extraordinary photographic record. Small wonder, then, that Reagan’s death was a “flashpoint” of the highest order: an orgy of images, a media spectacle waiting to happen. After all, Reagan appeared in over 50 films during his career in Hollywood. Publicity stills and clips from Reagan’s film career, including Knute Rockne, All American, the biopic that earned Reagan his nickname “the Gipper”, King’s Row, and Bedtime for Bonzo provided a surreal, yet welcome respite from television’s obsessive (some might say morbidly so) live coverage of Reagan’s remains making their way across country. Likewise, archival footage of Reagan’s political career — most notably, images of the 1981 assassination attempt; his quip “not to make age an issue” during the 1984 presidential debate; and his 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate demanding that Soviet President Gorbachev, “tear down this wall” — provided the raw materials for press coverage that thoroughly dominated the global mediascape. None of which is to suggest, however, that the sheer volume of Reagan’s photographic record is sufficient to account for the endless replay and reinterpretation of Reagan’s life story. If we are to fully comprehend Reagan’s fame, we must acknowledge his seminal engagement with promotional culture, “a professional articulation between the news and entertainment media and the sources of publicity and promotion” (Turner, Bonner & Marshall 5) in advancing an extraordinary political career. Hitting His Mark In a televised address supporting Barry Goldwater’s nomination for the presidency delivered at the 1964 Republican Convention, Ronald Reagan firmly established his conservative credentials and, in so doing, launched one of the most remarkable and influential careers in American politics. Political scientist Gerard J. De Groot makes a compelling case that the strategy Reagan and his handlers developed in the 1966 California gubernatorial campaign would eventually win him the presidency. The centerpiece of this strategy was to depict the former actor as a political outsider. Crafting a persona he described as “citizen politician,” Reagan’s great appeal and enormous success lie in his uncanny ability to project an image founded on traditional American values of hard work, common sense and self-determination. Over the course of his political career, Reagan’s studied optimism and “no-nonsense” approach to public policy would resonate with an electorate weary of career politicians. Charming, persuasive, and seemingly “authentic,” Reagan ran gubernatorial and subsequent presidential campaigns that were distinctive in that they employed sophisticated public relations and marketing techniques heretofore unknown in the realm of electoral politics. The 1966 Reagan gubernatorial campaign took the then unprecedented step of employing an advertising firm, Los Angeles-based Spencer-Roberts, in shaping the candidate’s image. Leveraging their candidate’s ease before the camera, the Reagan team crafted a campaign founded upon a sophisticated grasp of the television industry, TV news routines, and the medium’s growing importance to electoral politics. For instance, in the days before the 1966 Republican primary, the Reagan team produced a five-minute film using images culled from his campaign appearances. Unlike his opponent, whose television spots were long-winded, amateurish and poorly scheduled pieces that interrupted popular programs, like Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Reagan’s short film aired in the early evening, between program segments (De Groot). Thus, while his opponent’s television spot alienated viewers, the Reagan team demonstrated a formidable appreciation not only for televisual style, but also, crucially, a sophisticated understanding of the nuances of television scheduling, audience preferences and viewing habits. Over the course of his political career, Reagan refined his media driven, media directed campaign strategy. An analysis of his 1980 presidential campaign reveals three dimensions of Reagan’s increasingly sophisticated media management strategy (Covington et al.). First, the Reagan campaign carefully controlled their candidate’s accessibility to the press. Reagan’s penchant for potentially damaging off-the-cuff remarks and factual errors led his advisors to limit journalists’ interactions with the candidate. Second, the character of Reagan’s public appearances, including photo opportunities and especially press conferences, grew more formal. Reagan’s interactions with the press corps were highly structured affairs designed to control which reporters were permitted to ask questions and to help the candidate anticipate questions and prepare responses in advance. Finally, the Reagan campaign sought to keep the candidate “on message.” That is to say, press releases, photo opportunities and campaign appearances focused on a single, consistent message. This approach, known as the Issue of the Day (IOD) media management strategy proved indispensable to advancing the administration’s goals and achieving its objectives. Not only was the IOD strategy remarkably effective in influencing press coverage of the Reagan White House, this coverage promoted an overwhelmingly positive image of the president. As the weeklong funeral amply demonstrated, Reagan was, and remains, one of the most popular presidents in modern American history. Reagan’s popular (and populist) appeal is instructive inasmuch as it illuminates the crucial distinction between “celebrity and its premodern antecedent, fame” observed by historian Charles L. Ponce de Leone (13). Whereas fame was traditionally bestowed upon those whose heroism and extraordinary achievements distinguished them from common people, celebrity is a defining feature of modernity, inasmuch as celebrity is “a direct outgrowth of developments that most of us regard as progressive: the spread of the market economy and the rise of democratic, individualistic values” (Ponce de Leone 14). On one hand, then, Reagan’s celebrity reflects his individualism, his resolute faith in the primacy of the market, and his defense of “traditional” (i.e. democratic) American values. On the other hand, by emphasizing his heroic, almost supernatural achievements, most notably his vanquishing of the “Evil Empire,” the Reagan mythology serves to lift him “far above the common rung of humanity” raising him to “the realm of the divine” (Ponce de Leone 14). Indeed, prior to his death, the Reagan faithful successfully lobbied Congress to create secular shrines to the standard bearer of American conservatism. For instance, in 1998, President Clinton signed a bill that officially rechristened one of the US capitol’s airports to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. More recently, conservatives working under the aegis of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project have called for the creation of even more visible totems to the Reagan Revolution, including replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s profile on the dime with Reagan’s image and, more dramatically, inscribing Reagan in stone, alongside Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore (Gordon). Therefore, Reagan’s enduring fame rests not only on the considerable symbolic capital associated with his visual record, but also, increasingly, upon material manifestations of American political culture. The High Stakes of Media Politics What are we to make of Reagan’s fame and its implications for America? To begin with, we must acknowledge Reagan’s enduring influence on modern electoral politics. Clearly, Reagan’s “citizen politician” was a media construct — the masterful orchestration of ideological content across the institutional structures of news, public relations and marketing. While some may suggest that Reagan’s success was an anomaly, a historical aberration, a host of politicians, and not a few celebrities — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger among them — emulate Reagan’s style and employ the media management strategies he pioneered. Furthermore, we need to recognize that the Reagan mythology that is so thoroughly bound up in his approach to media/politics does more to obscure, rather than illuminate the historical record. For instance, in her (video taped) remarks at the funeral service, Margaret Thatcher made the extraordinary claim — a central tenet of the Reagan Revolution — that Ronnie won the cold war “without firing a shot.” Such claims went unchallenged, at least in the establishment press, despite Reagan’s well-documented penchant for waging costly and protracted proxy wars in Afghanistan, Africa, and Central America. Similarly, the Reagan hagiography failed to acknowledge the decisive role Gorbachev and his policies of “reform” and “openness” — Perestroika and Glasnost — played in the ending of the Cold War. Indeed, Reagan’s media managed populism flies in the face of what radical historian Howard Zinn might describe as a “people’s history” of the 1980s. That is to say, a broad cross-section of America — labor, racial and ethnic minorities, environmentalists and anti-nuclear activists among them — rallied in vehement opposition to Reagan’s foreign and domestic policies. And yet, throughout the weeklong funeral, the divisiveness of the Reagan era went largely unnoted. In the Reagan mythology, then, popular demonstrations against an unprecedented military build up, the administration’s failure to acknowledge, let alone intervene in the AIDS epidemic, and the growing disparity between rich and poor that marked his tenure in office were, to borrow a phrase, relegated to the dustbin of history. In light of the upcoming US presidential election, we ought to weigh how Reagan’s celebrity squares with the historical record; and, equally important, how his legacy both shapes and reflects the realities we confront today. Whether we consider economic and tax policy, social services, electoral politics, international relations or the domestic culture wars, Reagan’s policies and practices continue to determine the state of the union and inform the content and character of American political discourse. Increasingly, American electoral politics turns on the pithy soundbite, the carefully orchestrated pseudo-event, and a campaign team’s unwavering ability to stay on message. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ronald Reagan’s unmistakable influence upon the current (and illegitimate) occupant of the White House. References Covington, Cary R., Kroeger, K., Richardson, G., and J. David Woodward. “Shaping a Candidate’s Image in the Press: Ronald Reagan and the 1980 Presidential Election.” Political Research Quarterly 46.4 (1993): 783-98. De Groot, Gerard J. “‘A Goddamed Electable Person’: The 1966 California Gubernatorial Campaign of Ronald Reagan.” History 82.267 (1997): 429-48. Gordon, Colin. “Replace FDR on the Dime with Reagan?” History News Network 15 December, 2003. http://hnn.us/articles/1853.html>. Lapham, Lewis H. “Morte de Nixon – Death of Richard Nixon – Editorial.” Harper’s Magazine (July 1994). http://www.harpers.org/MorteDeNixon.html>. Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Ridgeway, James. “Bush Takes a Ride in Reagan’s Wake.” Village Voice (10 June 2004). http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0423/mondo5.php>. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Zinn, Howard. The Peoples’ History of the United States: 1492-Present. New York: Harper Perennial, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Howley, Kevin. "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>. APA Style Howley, K. (Nov. 2004) "Always Famous: Or, The Electoral Half-Life of Ronald Reagan," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/17-howley.php>.