Justice Stevens's grandkids may not care, but he has some things to get off his chest

by Ken

Admittedly, as subject categories go, the category "Most Charming Utterance Uttered by the Late New York Yankees Owner George Steinbrenner" doesn't promise to be especially broad or arresting. That said, the most charming utterance I'm aware of The Boss uttering was in a respone to a question about the cartoonish version of himself incorporated as a Seinfeld recurring caricature during the period when, improbably and often disastrously, George Costanza worked for the Yankees.

The caricature was actually surprisingly gentle, but still, George had ample reason to be resentful. Instead, he declared himself delighted. He had become, he said, a hero to his grandchildren. For that matter, I recall that the actor Lloyd Bridges said much the same thing about the hilarious character he created on Seinfeld. Bridges had a long and distinguished career on both big and small screens behind him, but suddenly he was on his grandchildren's radar.

Add to the list now retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who appeared recently before the Arlington (VA) Committee of 100 and, according to the Fall Church News-Press's "Man in Arlington," Charlie Clark, "brought down the house."

Stevens verified a few legends from the sports world. Yes, he knew Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers executive portrayed in the current film "42" who brought up pioneer Jackie Robinson to integrate baseball. He also interviewed Ty Cobb while researching baseball economics.

Most memorably, he did witness, at age 12, Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield stands during the 1932 World Series in Wrigley Field and placing a home run right where he promised to. Decades later, when the Chicago Cubs invited Stevens to throw out the first pitch, "I was a hero to my grandchildren," he said, "which is more important than these other things."

It occurs to me that this might be a better world if our major players thought occasionally about how their deeds would register with the grandkids. Your average Wall Street or bankster predator, for example. It wouldn't provide any guarantee of superior job performance, but it might give some of those folks pause for at least a second thought before doing their worst.

Not surprisingly, Justice Stevens harked back to a different world.

Memories the justice volunteered included several from his 1975 confirmation hearing after having been named by President Ford. As the first nominee to undergo a new tradition of personal visits with senators, Stevens recalled that Barry Goldwater promised his vote because the two shared enthusiasm for airplanes. Strom Thurmond knew not to ask how Stevens would vote on the death penalty -- "It's not proper to probe candidates' views, one requirement being to keep an open mind until you hear the parties and read their briefs," Stevens said. But Thurmond conveyed his support for capital punishment, and at a later meeting, Ted Kennedy conveyed his opposite view.

The audience participated actively, and here, for the record, are some of the points Justice Stevens made:

• The high court needs more diversity, legislative and military experience and trial lawyers such as Thurgood Marshall.

• The Bush v. Gore case resolving the 2000 election "should have been rethought," as suggested recently by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "It was nonsense to apply an equal protection argument to hanging chads versus dimpled chads when the voter's intention for both was clear."

• The 2010 Citizens United decision on campaign spending was "incorrect," but "don't hold your breath for the court to change it."

• The 2012 decision mostly upholding Obamacare vindicated his confidence in Chief Justice John Roberts' "integrity and independence" in following the law even when it's not his policy choice.

• In the coming twin rulings on same-sex marriage, he guesses the court will dismiss the California challenge for lacking jurisdiction and strike down the Defense of Marriage Act as unfair tax policy.

In addition:

Asked by [VA] state Del. Patrick Hope whether he backs mandatory retirement for judges, Stevens said people 70 and older can still contribute. He would have loved to keep working but realized during Citizens United he was having trouble "articulating."

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With his primary sweep yesterday, Willard Inc. uncorked the mightiest KO blow since George Steinbrenner emerged from that empty elevator

Sure, George "The Cleveland Clobberer" Steinbrenner was kind of battered when he emerged from the empty elevator that famous day in 1981 in Los Angeles, but you shoulda seen them other guys. No, really, you shoulda -- 'cause nobody else ever did.


"As Delaware goes, so goes the nation."

-- political saying never said by anyone as far as we know

by Ken

As best we can tell, one man went into that elevator, and that same man emerged from it, battered but unbowed. On the Yankees "Bleacher Report" website, senior writer Tim Wood included this memorable event from the 1981 World Series among his roster of managing partner George Steinbrenner's "25 Most Memorable Yankees Moments":

The Elevator Fight

During the 1981 World Series, the Yankees were on a bad roll against the Dodgers when Steinbrenner called an impromptu press conference in his hotel room.

He showed up with his left hand in a cast and said that he was attacked by two Dodgers fans in a hotel elevator.

No attackers came forward, and it was believed Steinbrenner staged the incident to get his team fired up.

This is an exceedingly charitable account of an event that remains mysterious, sort of. Of course there may be, as Tim Wood suggests, a fairly simple reason why no trace was ever found of those two Dodger fans who waylaid George in the elevator that day.

Nevertheless, on the ground of being the only known survivor of the episode, George has to be counted the winner of this famous brawl, if only by default -- perhaps more of a TKO than a KO, but heck, that counts too, no? So why was the great episode of "Steinbrenner vs. Nobody" the only image that came to mind in the wake of the Incorporated Willard's stunning five-primary sweep yesterday?

Technically, yesterday wasn't a strict case of Willard vs. Nobody. (This is not to be confused with the previous months' grueling ordeal of "Willard vs. nobodies.") Ron Paul is still in the race (isn't he?), and as of yesterday so was Noot Gingrich. In fact, I heard on the radio this morning that Noot had hopes for a Delaware triumph that would jump-start his candidacy -- a sentence of a sort I never expected to read let alone write. Alas the hoped-for Delaware Dinger didn't materialize. I don't have the exact figures, but my impression is that Noot got about 12 votes, and even those were mostly from people he's either been married to or has promised to marry.

At first Noot was pointing out that Willard still doesn't have the number of delegates required for a convention majority. But by daybreak he seemed to have given way to one of his rare visits to reality -- that is, for any purpose other than hauling away wagonloads of Nootbucks. It's the worst-kept secret since
that Noot is preparing to throw in the towel . . . well, sometime this week.

One of those GOP presidential primaries yesterday was here in New York. GOP-registered voters were invited to turn out with nothing else on the ballot. I'm assuming that at least one such voter actually did show up to vote somewhere in the state, and cast his/her vote for Willard; otherwise it might have gotten awkward when it comes to divvying up the NYS GOP delegates.

With the kind of enthusiasm GOP primary voters showed Willard yesterday, is it any wonder that he's cruising unstoppably toward the nomination? OK, it might have something to do with the gazillions of dollars Willard's grass-roots billionaires are chipping into the effort? That, and a candidate field comprising the most ignorant, whacked-out, and loathsome specimens in the history of the human race.

Which includes Willard, by the way.

FOR A CLOSE-UP VIEW OF REPUBLICANS' FERVOR FOR
FOR THEIR NOMINEE, WE TURN TO ANDY BOROWITZ

POLL: Majority of Republicans Guess
They Have to Support Fucking Romney

Lack of Other Option Cited

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) -- In what Romney campaign insiders are hailing as a sign that the party faithful are rallying around the former Massachusetts governor, a new poll released today shows that a majority of Republican voters agree with the statement, "I guess I have to support fucking Romney."

When asked why they were now ready to cast their vote for Mr. Romney, a majority of those Republicans polled "strongly agreed" with the statement, "Why do you think? No one else is fucking running anymore. Stop asking such stupid fucking questions. I don't need this shit."

Underscoring the sense that he is now the presumptive nominee, the Romney campaign unveiled a new slogan this morning, "You Have No Other Options Anymore. Start Dealing With It, Losers."

After sweeping five primary states Tuesday night, Mr. Romney was exultant, telling supporters in Manchester, N.H., "I love American democracy. I'm good friends with the owners of it."

The wins by Mr. Romney forced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to suspend his campaign, telling reporters that he was leaving the race "to spend more time with my families."

As for former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, he offered Mr. Romney this endorsement during an appearance on CNN: "Yeah, I guess I support him, because, well duh, I have absolutely no other choice. Right? I mean, really, Piers, what kind of moronic question is that? I guess this goes to show that you can be a total douchebag and still win the nomination if you have the most dough. I mean come on -- this whole situation makes me want to throw up. My only consolation is that on Judgment Day I'm going to Heaven, and we'll have to see what happens to Mr. Magic Underpants. Haha. Yeah. Sweet."

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Barney Frank's present and former staffers have something to say about the kind of boss he is

Is Barney Frank the kind of boss that "The Boss," the late George Steinbrenner, was -- a pussycat to people with power and a bully to those without? His present and former staffers don't seem to think so.

"My colleagues and I also are grateful to him for his absolute loyalty to us, for his graciousness in sharing credit for what we collectively accomplish and for his respect for our personal lives outside the pressure-cooker environment of Capitol Hill."

-- Bruno Freitas, Barney Frank's chief of staff and legislative director, in a Letter to the Editor of the Washington Post

by Ken

Barney Frank hasn't exactly lacked for detractors during his time in Congress, and it's not surprising that some of them are lobbing spitballs now that he's withdrawing from the congressional arena. And I suppose some of the questions being raised -- whether, for example, he might have accomplished more if he had been less, well, abrasive in his D.C. dealings -- are legitimate, though I'm hard put to see what it is he might have accomplished. Mostly those detractors, and their media enablers, seem dedicated to reinforcing the principle that the correct way for Villagers to deal with one another is to "go along to get along" (or is it the other way 'round?).

This, I think, more than anything, more even than Barney's unapologetically liberal agenda, is what has driven his Village enemies so crazy. He's surely the most independent pol, at least on "our side," to have successfully embedded himself in the machinery of power in my recollection, and I don't really see his successor anywhere on the horizon. That's what has depressed me so much about his decision to leave Congress.

The other day, however, Dana Milbank wrote a column for the Washington Post which I gathered from the blurb in the paper's e-newsletter advanced the proposition that Barney's supposed meanness and orneriness extended to his staff, which again would be a legitimate subject of inquiry if there were any evidence for it. It's not, however, the impression I've gotten from what I've heard from people who actually deal with the congressman. In fact, my impression has been quite the opposite: that he's a caring and responsive boss.

My hunch was that somebody is trying to capitalize on a very real archetype in management circles: the boss in the mold of "The Boss," the late George Steinbrenner, who became famous during his tenure as principal owner of the New York Yankess for bullying, tyrannizing, and terrorizing the underlings at his mercy -- at least if they wanted to continue in his employment. Of course a certain number of them had to be fired just to satisfy George's sense of self-importance.

Most everyone I know has had contact with such a boss, and my own feeling is that this goes beyond being a "perk" of achieving such power as these people achieve in their domains; for many of them it's an important incentive for achieving that power. These are people who are generally all sweetness and light with what we might call "people their own size," even when they're trying to edge a shiv in those people's soft bellies, but then vent their pent-up rage at the helpless help.

Barney, by contrast, has tended to speak his mind to Villagers of equal or greater rank, which is something for which I don't think he could ever be forgiven in certain corners. And now 60-plus of his present and former staffers have joined to offer their corrective view of the kind of person he has been to work for. This letter was published in yesterday's Washington Post:

Letter to the Editor
How Barney Frank’s staff really feels about him

In his Nov. 30 column, "A bully leaves his pulpit," Dana Milbank grossly mischaracterized how I and my colleagues, members of Rep. Barney Frank’s staff past and present, feel toward him. I feel fortunate to have worked for him, and I have the highest respect for his integrity, brilliance and dedication to enduring democratic principles. But my colleagues and I also are grateful to him for his absolute loyalty to us, for his graciousness in sharing credit for what we collectively accomplish and for his respect for our personal lives outside the pressure-cooker environment of Capitol Hill.

In a congressional culture of deference, we all know him simply as Barney. He demands that we deliver at the highest standards of government service, but he often praises us publicly and privately for our work and dedication. He allows us to take time to care for our loved ones and to raise our children, and he respects the importance of family. If he makes a bad decision, he personally takes the heat; he doesn’t use staff as a shield.

This isn’t only my opinion. I speak here for 60 of my colleagues who asked to co-sign this letter. But one simple metric tells the heart of the story: Barney has one of the most tenured offices on Capitol Hill. Where career longevity in "tough" offices can be measured in weeks or months, Barney has 10 staff members who have been with him for more than 10 years.

I have real affection and the highest regard for Barney Frank. When a caller to our office who disagrees with Barney’s politics asked me how I could work for him, I said simply, "with great pride and honor." I know my colleagues would agree.

Bruno Freitas, Washington

The writer is chief of staff and legislative director for Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

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Tuli Kupferberg Died

Tuli, front and center

Roland dragged me to the Nixon Library one time; to him it's like going to see a Pyramid, a Great Wall or a sequoia tree. He's uh... about half my age. And for me it was a tad more emotional. He was mortified and fled unceremoniously when, after waiting patiently on line with the other fine burghers, I very ceremoniously spat on Nixon's grave. (Digby and John reminded me-- and our guests-- the other day that I'm like that. They're still mortified that I screamed out some epithet about Blue Dogs being Wall Street whores at the screen when Michael Moore interviewed Baron Hill, probably because it was the world premiere and we were sitting a few rows behind Moore and Arianna.) Anyway, I have nothing bad to say about George Steinbrenner. I don't follow sports and I have no idea what position he played or how many goals he scored. I just remember he had something to do with the Yankees-- the owner I think-- and that people used to refer to him as the Evil Empire for driving up player salaries into the stratosphere. Oh, yeah-- and that he was indicted on 14 criminal counts in 1974, at the height of the Vietnam War and Nixonian dirty tricks, for illegally funneling a great deal of cash into Richard Nixon's campaign coffers. (Within a day or two of Reagan becoming president, he pardoned him.) Tuesday Steinbrenner died in Tampa of a heart attack, about a week shy of his 80th birthday. Sorry to hear it; rest in peace. Ken did the official-- and appropriate-- DWT obituary last night. Aside from Ken, Matt Taibbi had the best commentary of any I've heard on the passing of Steinbrenner. Hit that link and read his Slobituary, comparing Steinbrenner's passing to Stalin's and Reagan's. Hint: it ends in "Whatever happened to Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead?"

What saddened me was not the wall-to-wall coverage by the mass media. It could have been Paris Hilton, Mel Gibson, Michael Jackson, Charlie Manson or Kim Jong-il. But in my little corner of the universe-- among political lefty tweeters-- there was an awful lot about Steinbrenner, a trending topic, and not a word about Tuli Kupferberg.


Tuli died too, Monday night, actually. He wasn't like a celebrity in our celebrity-mad culture. But he did do a lot for our culture. An anti-war poet, a rock musician, a missing link between beatniks and hippies, Tuli and the band he co-founded with Ed Sanders, The Fugs, was the first band I remember writing and performing powerful songs critiquing the Vietnam War and the inevitable corruption of a war-based ruling elite. I saw his band 100 times; I hired them to play the freshman class dance at my college; I got arrested, went to jail, and shared a cell with them in the first big '60s anti-war demonstration. Maybe if more people had listened to him and learned from him instead of wasting their time of tabloid creations of the mass media, we wouldn't be in the catastrophic Afghan War now. Not maybe-- for sure.

George Steinbrenner (1930-2010)

George vs. George: On HuffPost, Dan Abramson has assembled "George Steinbrenner on 'Seinfeld': The Funniest Moments.'" (History records that then-Yankees manager Buck Showalter hadn't been fired as of when this episode was made. As the TV "Boss" intimates here, though, it was just a matter of time.)

by Ken

For a lot of years, if anyone had told me that the day George Steinbrenner died would be no big deal, I would have been incredulous. For the tempestuous first 10 or 15 years of his tenure as principal owner of the New York Yankees, George -- "the Boss" -- was the man Yankee fans loved to hate, for his bullying imperiousness and his infernal interference with the professional baseball people he had hired to run the team.

Moreover, it seemed clear that George was of that bullying personality type most of us have encountered so unpleasantly in our real lives, the kind who blustered and screamed at and humiliated the people who worked for him, and seemed actually to enjoy having the power to make, say, secretaries cry. (Of course it takes a pretty clueless mogul to think there's some great accomplishment in terrorizing powerless underlings, but it's a personality type that's more common than many people realize.)

Things change, though, and I think most of us have long since made our peace with George. He didn't always, or even often, get it right on the first try, or necessarily on the second or third or fourth, but he was capable of learning -- about baseball, about New York, about his own place in the cosmos. And he not only made the Yankees competitive, but he actually sold his sport, a job that few other baseball owners can be troubled to take on.

Within hours of the announcement of George's death, you could find online links to comments (here, for example) by seemingly everyone who ever had contact with him. The one name that caught my eye was ESPN's Buster Olney, the best baseball beat writer I'm aware of the NYT ever employing, who covered the Yankees for four years in the '90s, and spoke to ESPN Radio about the differences between the Boss he knew and the man he heard all those stories about from the '80s, and also about George's contribution, not just to the Yankees, but to baseball.

There's understandable resentment around the baseball world about the way the Yankees spend money. Hey, it gets fatiguing for us here in New York too, and you wish the team would go back to other ways of making the product on the field competitive -- the rest of the baseball world likes to forget how much of the last great Yankee teams was built on home-grown talent. And loudmouth idiots in the rest of the baseball world manage to ignore how much money the Yankees pour into other teams' coffers; most everywhere they play, they're the biggest draw the home team has, putting fans in the seats whom the local ownerships have no other way of getting there.

Even in the matter of free spending, the rest of the country likes to play dumb (they are just playing, right?) when it comes to the dimension of what the Yankees have achieved commercially. The fact is that the great old Yankee teams of history rarely drew a lot of fans -- it just doesn't seem to have mattered much to the franchise. But George developed the Yankees into an attendance machine. (You can see the numbers here.)

And what the country's Yankee-haters manage not to consider is the dimension of the selling problem a New York sports franchise faces. Sure, this is a "big market." But the competition for local entertainment dollars is several orders of magnitude fiercer than in even the other big markets, let alone the small ones. Not only that, but attendancewise the Yankees are competing with themselves. With the exception of a few games each season that fall into network cracks, every single Yankee game is on television -- and Yankee telecasts are also orders of magnitude better than anything I've seen from anywhere else in the country, not just in technical quality (which money can buy) but in the competence and outspoken frankness of the announcers (money is often used to buy the exact opposite).

Not that George grasped all of these things all at once. For example, he spent a lot of years bitching and moaning that he was afflicted with an antique stadium in ferchrissakes the South Bronx -- without any damn luxury boxes, and in the damn Bronx. He pulled every damn crony string he could to get himself a shiny new stadium somewhere else, maybe anywhere else. He talked to Jersey people. He had Rudy Giuliani trying to hustle him a Midtown Manhattan stadium. In his desperation to escape the Bronx, he all but double-dog-dared Yankees fans to show up in the Bronx. And when attendance crossed the 2 million mark, he kind of had to shut up. Eventually he did get his new stadium, luxury boxes and all, right across the street from the old Stadium, right there in the South Bronx.

Like I said, George was capable of learning.

Thank goodness, while he was still able, he made peace with Yogi Berra. The old George seemed genuinely incapable of understanding how deeply he had hurt Yogi by firing him as manager near the start of a season he had said Yogi would manage all the way through, win or lose, and especially by not doing it himself. Yogi vowed that he wouldn't set foot in Yankee Stadium again while George ran the show, and how hard this must have been for him became clear after the rapprochement, when suddenly it seemed you couldn't keep Yogi away from the Stadium, which is as it should be. Yogi is the beating heart of the Yankees.

And then came George's decline, physical and mental. It's a horrible thing -- horrible to experience, obviously, but pretty horrible to watch, all the more so in George's case when so much of the animus of previous years had dissolved. The Steinbrenner family and the Yankees have been pretty close-mouthed about the extent of that decline, and with his having been kept mostly out of view for years now, it seems safe to assume that the direst rumors about how far gone he was weren't far from the mark. There's something almost scary about seeing someone who had been that controlling, that autocratic, so reduced by time.

All the obituaries are recalling, and rightly so, the weird and wonderful version of George Steinbrenner that Larry David created for Seinfeld (with David providing the voice himself, while actor Lee Bear, always photographed from behind, flailed away) during the time when George Costanza (Jason Alexander) was employed as assistant to the traveling secretary of the Yankees. It wasn't the tyrannical Steinbrenner, although there was never any question about the Seinfeld Steinbrenner's dictatorial powers. It was a rather addled, borderline-ADD dictator, who could fixate on such arrant nonsense as the famous calzones.

But what I remember best about George's (George Steinbrenner's, that is) Seinfeld career is that George himself professed to love it. While it's true that the character soft-pedaled some of his less attractive qualities, it can hardly be said to have been a flattering portrait. But suddenly George found himself a hero to his grandchildren! I remember the late Lloyd Bridges saying something similar -- and some of his grandchildren had pretty famous dads, who probably didn't much impress them either, never mind old Gramps, until he turned up on Seinfeld as that old crackpot Izzy Mandelbaum. If no man is a hero to his valet, the grandkids can be a pretty tough audience too.

So George is gone. I don't even know what to say.

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