Mike Nichols, Celebrated Director, Dies at 83

By BRUCE WEBER NY TIMES

Mike Nichols, one of America’s most celebrated directors, whose long, protean résumé of critic- and crowd-pleasing work earned him adulation both on Broadway and in Hollywood, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 83.

His death was announced by James Goldston, the president of ABC News. Mr. Nichols was married to the ABC broadcaster Diane Sawyer. A network spokeswoman said the cause was cardiac arrest, giving no other details.

Dryly urbane, Mr. Nichols had a gift for communicating with actors and a keen comic timing, which he honed early in his career as half of the popular sketch-comedy team Nichols and May. An immigrant whose work was marked by trenchant perceptions of American culture, he achieved — in films like "The Graduate," "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Carnal Knowledge" and in comedies and dramas on stage — what Orson Welles and Elia Kazan but few if any other directors have: popular and artistic success in both film and theater.

His career encompassed an entire era of screen and stage entertainment. On Broadway, where he won an astonishing nine Tonys (including two as a producer), he once had four shows running simultaneously. He directed Neil Simon’s early comedies "Barefoot in the Park" and "The Odd Couple" in the 1960s; the zany Monty Python musical, "Spamalot," four decades later; and, nearly a decade after that, an acclaimed revival of Arthur Miller’s bruising masterpiece, "Death of a Salesman."

In June 2012, at age 80, he accepted the Tony for directing "Salesman." When his name was announced at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the neighborhood where he grew up, he kissed Ms. Sawyer, stepped to the stage and recalled that he once won a pie-eating contest in that very theater.

"It was nice, but this is nicer," he said. "You see before you a happy man."

From 1968 to 2000 his work included revivals of classics like Chekhov’s "Uncle Vanya" and Lillian Hellman’s "The Little Foxes"; astringent dramas tied to world affairs like "Streamers," David Rabe’s tale of soldiers preparing to be shipped out to Vietnam, and Ariel Dorfman’s "Death and the Maiden," about the revenge of a former political prisoner; incisive social commentaries like "The Real Thing," by Tom Stoppard, and "Comedians," by Trevor Griffiths; and comedies, by turns acid (Mr. Rabe’s "Hurlyburly"), sentimental ("The Gin Game," by D. L. Coburn), dark (Mr. Simon’s "The Prisoner of Second Avenue") and light (his "Plaza Suite," a tripartite work that goes from melancholy to loopy to slapstick).

In 1984, as a producer, Mr. Nichols brought a talented monologuist to Broadway, supervising the one-woman show — it was called, simply, "Whoopi Goldberg" — that propelled her to fame. Alone or with the company he founded, Icarus Productions, he produced a number of well-known shows, including the musical "Annie," from which he earned a fortune (and a Tony); "The Real Thing" (another Tony); and Jules Feiffer’s play "Grown Ups."

Conquering Hollywood

The first time Mr. Nichols stepped behind the camera, in 1966, it was to direct Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in an adaptation of Edward Albee’s scabrous stage portrayal of a marriage, "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The film was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including one for best director. Though he didn’t win, the film won five.

Mr. Nichols did win an Oscar for his second film, "The Graduate" (1967). A social satire that lampooned the Eisenhower-era mind-set of the West Coast affluent and defined the uncertainty of adulthood for the generation that came of age in the 1960s, the film anticipated the antiheroism of many movies to come.

The film also made a star of an unknown actor, Dustin Hoffman, who was nearly 30 when he played Benjamin Braddock, the 21-year-old protagonist, a Southern Californian and a track star who sleeps with the wife of his father’s best friend and then falls in love with her daughter. A small, dark, Jewish New York stage actor (though he was born and raised in Los Angeles), Mr. Hoffman was an odd choice for the all-American suburban boy whose seemingly prescribed life path has gone awry.

"There is no piece of casting in the 20th century that I know of that is more courageous than putting me in that part," Mr. Hoffman said in an interview with The New Yorker in 2000.

By the end of Mr. Nichols’s career, he was bravely casting the star Hoffman of a different generation — Philip Seymour — with whom Mr. Nichols made the political film "Charlie Wilson’s War" (2007) and, later, more provocatively, the Broadway production of "Death of a Salesman." He cast Hoffman, then 44, to play Miller’s tragic American in defeat, Willy Loman, a man in his 60s. In addition to Mr. Nichols’s Tony Award for directing, the play won for best revival.

He had also turned his attention to television, winning Emmy Awards for directing adaptations of two celebrated plays for HBO: Margaret Edson’s "Wit" (2001), about a woman dying of cancer, and Tony Kushner’s AIDS drama, "Angels in America" (2003).

Driven, forceful and, for all his wit and charm, known occasionally to strafe the feelings of cast and crew members, Mr. Nichols was prolific — too prolific, according to some critics, who thought he sometimes chose his projects haphazardly or took on work simply for money.

Not every project was a winner; he had a number of duds, and for periods — part of the 1970s, when he made the science-fiction thriller "The Day of the Dolphin" and a comedy about bumbling hustlers, "The Fortune"; and the late ’80s and early ’90s, when his work included "Regarding Henry," a sappy tale about a hard-driven lawyer who learns the true meaning of life as he recovers from a shooting, and "Wolf," the macabre tale of a book editor (Jack Nicholson) who turns into a werewolf — his career lost a bit of luster.

Still, his projects almost always had a high-profile glow, mainly because stars flocked to work with him.

He directed Julie Christie, Lillian Gish, George C. Scott, Richard Dreyfuss and Morgan Freeman on Broadway. Off Broadway he directed Steve Martin and Robin Williams as Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot." Outdoors, at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, he directed Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Christopher Walken, John Goodman and Kevin Kline in Chekhov’s "The Seagull."

Mr. Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts, Ron Silver, Anne Bancroft, Candice Bergen and Gene Hackman all worked with Mr. Nichols more than once. When he directed Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley on Broadway as appealingly bickering newlyweds in "Barefoot in the Park" (1963), they were largely unknown. When he directed Burton and Taylor in "Virginia Woolf," they were the biggest stars in the world.

"A director’s chief virtue should be to persuade you through a role; Mike’s the only one I know who can do it," Burton said after the film was finished, a remarkable compliment from a renowned actor for a fledgling director. "He conspires with you to get your best. He’d make me throw away a line where I’d have hit it hard. I’ve seen the film with an audience and he’s right every time. I didn’t think I could learn anything about comedy — I’d done all of Shakespeare’s. But from him I learned."

Mining Relationships

Unlike other celebrity filmmakers — his contemporaries Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, for example — Mr. Nichols was never known as an auteur. He did not create a recognizable visual style or a distinct artistic signature. And his thematic interests were disparate.

"I’ve always been impressed by the fact that upon entering a room full of people, you find them saying one thing, doing another and wishing they were doing a third," he said in a 1965 interview with the weekly newspaper The National Observer, now defunct. "The words are secondary and the secrets are primary. That’s what interests me most."

To that end, romantic narratives were his main vehicle. He examined marriages — from the nascent, as in "Barefoot in the Park"; to the suddenly crumbling, as in his film adaptation of "Heartburn" (1986), Nora Ephron’s novel about a wife betrayed by her husband; to the weathered and unbearably brittle, as in "Virginia Woolf."

He examined courtship rituals in films like "Carnal Knowledge," which told the abrasively comic story, written by Mr. Feiffer, of the sexual education over 25 years of two men (Art Garfunkel and Mr. Nicholson) who were college roommates, and "Closer," adapted from Patrick Marber’s play about seduction via the Internet; and in plays like "The Real Thing," Mr. Stoppard’s excavation of the meaning of love, with Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close, and "The Gin Game," about the evolving connection between an elderly pair of card players played by Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn, who were married in real life.

"I think maybe my subject is the relationships between men and women," Mr. Nichols said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1986, "centered around a bed."

Even so, he found equally rich material in gay relationships, as exemplified in "The Birdcage," a 1996 comedy about sexual identities adapted (with a script by Elaine May) from a French play by Jean Poiret and a subsequent French film, both called "La Cage aux Folles."

And he often strayed to other kinds of stories, as in his adaptation of Joseph Heller’s sardonic war farce, "Catch-22" (1970).

"Silkwood" (1983) was the fact-based drama of a whistle-blower at a plutonium plant; starring Ms. Streep and Cher, it was nominated for five Oscars, including best director. "Working Girl" (1988), which was a revenge-of-the-working-class comedy about the triumph of a secretary (Melanie Griffith) from blue-collar Staten Island over her smug, condescending Manhattanite boss (Sigourney Weaver), earned Mr. Nichols another Oscar nomination. "Primary Colors" (1998), adapted from the novel by Anonymous (a.k.a. Joe Klein, the political commentator), was a presidential campaign tale about a Clintonesque candidate played by John Travolta.

Nichols and May

Rather than theme, subject or style, what tied his work together were qualities less tangible — or at least less readily discernible. He was known among actors for finding inventive physical actions for them to enliven writers’ lines, and for concentrating on making each scene independently lucid. His generally unobtrusive visual perspective made the occasionally striking camera angle more provocative; think of the nervous Ben Braddock, alone with the seductress Mrs. Robinson, viewed through a space defined by her bent, black-stockinged leg.

Especially consistent was his wry and savvy sensibility regarding behavior, derived in part from his early success in nightclubs and on television with Ms. May. Their program of satirical sketches depicting one-on-one moments of social interaction reached Broadway, where "An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May" opened in October 1960 and ran for more than 300 performances; the recording of their show won a Grammy Award.

Developed through improvisation, written with sly verbal dexterity and performed with cannily calibrated comic timing, a sharp eye for the telling gesture and an often nasal vocal tone that both of them employed, their best-known routines became classics of male-female miscommunication and social haplessness: a mother haranguing her scientist son for not calling her; teenagers on a date in the front seat of a car; an injured man and a doltish emergency room nurse; a telephone operator and a desperate caller in a phone booth.

Their work, along with the cartoons of Mr. Feiffer and the stand-up routines of Bob Newhart and a young Mr. Allen, defined comic neurosis for the American audience before it became a staple in the hands of Albert Brooks, Richard Lewis and countless others.

"Most of the time people thought we were making fun of others, when we were making fun of ourselves," Mr. Nichols said in 2000. "Pretentiousness. Snobbiness. Horniness. Elaine was parodying her mother, as I was mine, and a certain girlishness, flirtatiousness, in herself."

Mr. Nichols said in interviews that though he did not know it at the time, his work with Ms. May was his directorial training. Asked by Ms. Ephron in 1968 if improvisation was good training for an actor, he replied that it was, because it acclimates the performer to the idea of taking care of an audience.

"But what I really thought it was useful for was directing," he said, "because it also teaches you what a scene is made of — you know, what needs to happen. See, I think the audience asks the question, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ And improvisation teaches you that you must answer it. There must be a specific answer. It also teaches you when the beginning is over and it’s time for the middle, and when you’ve had enough middle and it’s time already for the end. And those are all very useful things in directing."

Critics speculated that Mr. Nichols’s portrayals of American life were especially shrewd because he came to this country as a boy, felt alienated and never lost his outsider’s point of view.

Berlin Beginnings

Mr. Nichols was born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin on Nov. 6, 1931. His maternal grandparents were distinguished: his grandmother, Hedwig Lachmann, was a translator who wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss’s opera "Salome," and his grandfather, Gustav Landauer, was an anarchist leader who was killed by right-wing opponents.

Mr. Nichols’s father, from whom Mr. Nichols said he got his sense of humor, was a Jewish doctor from Russia who fled to America to escape the Nazis in 1938, Anglicizing part of his name — Nicholaiyevitch — to become Paul Nichols. Michael and his younger brother, Robert, joined him in New York the next year. Michael knew two sentences in English, he recalled in a 1964 interview in Life magazine: "I do not speak English" and "Please don’t kiss me."

His mother, Brigitte Landauer, who had been ill, and whom Mr. Nichols described as miserable and manipulative, followed her husband and children in 1941. The fragile family fragmented further when Paul Nichols died of leukemia the next year.

Young Michael’s sense of being a stranger in a strange land was aggravated by the loss of his hair at age 4, the result of a reaction to an inoculation for whooping cough.

"I was a bald little kid," he recalled in a 1984 interview. He wore wigs the rest of his life.

He attended several schools, public and private, in and around New York City, and after a brief false start at New York University, went to the University of Chicago, where he threw off what he had considered a lonely and difficult childhood.

"I never had a friend from the time I came to this country until I got to the University of Chicago," he told one interviewer. To another, he described the university as "paradise."

"I began to see there was a world I could fit in," he said. "I was happy and neurotic."

Critics’ Picks: ‘The Graduate’

For the season of caps and gowns, A. O. Scott reviews Mike Nichols’s 1967 Oscar-winning film about coming of age in an uncertain world.

It was in Chicago that Mr. Nichols first began his many years of therapy. (He suffered periodically from depression and in the 1980s went through a psychotic episode in which he considered suicide, brought on by his use of the drug Halcion.)

He directed his first play there: Yeats’s "Purgatory," which starred a classmate, Edward Asner. And it was there, in 1953, that he met Ms. May, the daughter of an actor in Yiddish theater. They moved in overlapping circles and, according to the recollections of both, loathed each other on sight. The oft-told story is that Ms. May saw Mr. Nichols in a production of Strindberg’s "Miss Julie."

"One night in the audience a dark-haired, hostile girl was staring at me," Mr. Nichols recalled for Newsweek in 1966. "I knew she hated it, and I hated her because I knew she was right."

They continued to encounter each other now and again with largely silent vitriol until a chance run-in at a train station, where Ms. May was seated on a bench. "I went up to her and said, in a foreign accent, ‘May I sit down?’ She said, ‘If you vish.’ We played a whole spy scene together."

In 1953, Mr. Nichols joined a group called the Playwrights Theater Club, a predecessor of the seminal performance troupe the Compass Players, itself a predecessor of the Second City. But the next year he dropped out of school for a while, went to New York and briefly studied Method acting with Lee Strasberg. He returned to Chicago in 1955, joined Compass, of which Ms. May was a member, and the team of Nichols and May was born.

By 1959 they were in New York, where they played clubs like the Village Vanguard and the Blue Angel and began appearing on television. Despite bickering onstage and off, they stayed together until their show closed on Broadway. But Ms. May had had enough, and the end of their partnership — and for a time their friendship — left Mr. Nichols floundering.

"When Elaine and I split up — that was a shattering year for me," he said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1984. "I didn’t know what I was. I was the leftover half of something."

The producer Arnold Saint-Subber changed that, hiring him in 1963 to direct a new comedy by a rising young playwright, Neil Simon. The play, "Nobody Loves Me," about Manhattan newlyweds in a sixth-floor walk-up, was subsequently retitled "Barefoot in the Park." It received ecstatic reviews, as did Mr. Nichols’s direction, especially his handling of the play’s running gag — the exhaustion with which characters enter the apartment after ascending the stairs.

"Those entrances could become classics of a kind for students of advanced acting," Howard Taubman wrote in his Times review.

Mr. Nichols won his first Tony for "Barefoot." He was awarded a second for his direction of two shows: Murray Schisgal’s "Luv," an arch comedy about romantic misery that starred Alan Arkin, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, and Mr. Simon’s celebrated portrait of mismatched roommates, "The Odd Couple," whose original cast included Art Carney as the neatnik Felix Ungar (it was spelled Unger in the TV show) and Walter Matthau as the sportswriter slob Oscar Madison. Both were staged in the 1964-65 season.

Though Mr. Nichols failed to win a third Tony for his next show, the Sheldon Harnick-Jerry Bock musical "The Apple Tree," it was, like the first three, a hit, and for several weeks after it opened in October 1966, Mr. Nichols’s entire Broadway oeuvre was up and running at the same time. ("Luv" closed in January 1967, and the three others all closed later that year.)

More than 40 years later, in 2008, he directed a revival of Clifford Odets’s backstage drama, "The Country Girl," with Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand, and left his penultimate mark on Broadway with his acclaimed "Death of a Salesman." Fittingly, attention was paid. (In 2013, he directed Harold Pinter’s "Betrayal," a backward-in-time-traveling drama about an adulterous affair, starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz.)

Mr. Nichols, who lived in Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard, married Ms. Sawyer, his fourth wife, in April 1988. His first three marriages ended in divorce. He and his first wife, Patricia Scott, a singer who sometimes opened for Nichols and May, had no children.

In addition to Ms. Sawyer, he is survived by a daughter, Daisy, from his second marriage, to Margot Callas (who had been a muse to the poet Robert Graves and a lover of the writer Alastair Reid and who was sometimes described as an Elaine May look-alike); and another daughter, Jenny, and a son, Max, from his third marriage, to Annabel Davis-Goff, a novelist.

He is also survived by a brother, Bob Nichols, and four grandchildren.

Through Icarus Productions, Mr. Nichols was also an active producer away from the stage. He produced the highly regarded television series "Family" and a number of movies, including many that he directed, as well as "The Designated Mourner," an adaptation of Wallace Shawn’s chilling, futuristic play about the disintegration of a marriage set in an unnamed, repressive, youth-dominated country. Mr. Nichols acted in the film — as he did in the play’s 1996 premiere in London — in the title role of a man whose ideals have yielded to an embrace of conformity.

At his death, Mr. Nichols had at least one project on his plate, as the director and executive producer of "Master Class," an adaptation for HBO of Terrence McNally’s play of the same title about Maria Callas, starring Ms. Streep.

In 1999, Mr. Nichols was honored at Lincoln Center for a lifetime of achievement, and Ms. May, his onetime foil and, after a hiatus, his longtime friend, addressed the crowd and offered an encomium with just enough bite to make it ring true.

"So he’s witty, he’s brilliant, he’s articulate, he’s on time, he’s prepared, and he writes," she said. "But is he perfect? He knows you can’t really be liked or loved if you’re perfect. You have to have just enough flaws. And he does. Just the right, perfect flaws to be absolutely endearing."

Dr. Irving Peress, Target of McCarthy Crusade, Dies at 97

By SAM ROBERTS NY Times

Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade had reached a fever pitch in 1954 when Irving Peress, a New York dentist who had been drafted into the Army, became the beneficiary of a seemingly routine promotion from captain to major.

What followed was anything but routine. Dr. Peress was branded a Communist, and his promotion — unsought by him, a reluctant warrior from the start — became a Cold War battle cry, spurred a nationally televised congressional investigation and all but ended McCarthy's anti-Communist campaign and political career.

The chant "Who promoted Peress?" rumbled across America and ultimately claimed the jobs of several top Army officials, cost Dr. Peress much of his private dental practice in Queens and even drove his wife, Elaine, to resign under pressure as editor of the Parent-Teachers Association bulletin at Public School 49 in Middle Village, Queens.

A resident of Queens since 1958, he died at his home in Queens on Thursday at 97, his son, Jeffrey, said on Sunday.

Dr. Peress found himself in McCarthy’s cross hairs as the senator, a Republican from Wisconsin, was waging a relentless campaign to root out suspected Communists from the government. In the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, he attacked Army officials for allowing Julius Rosenberg to penetrate the Signal Corps. Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, were convicted as Soviet spies and executed in 1953.

McCarthy contended that Dr. Peress’s promotion had been directed by a "silent master who decreed special treatment for Communists." Dr. Peress, he said, represented "the key to the deliberate Communist infiltration of our armed forces." McCarthy called him a "Fifth Amendment Communist."

Dr. Peress (pronounced PEH-ress) invoked the Fifth Amendment dozens of times at a Senate subcommittee hearing after a New York City policewoman swore that he and his wife were Communists and had attended a leadership class run by the party.

Dr. Peress did testify that he would oppose any group that sought a violent or unconstitutional overthrow of the government. He quoted the Book of Psalms: "His mischief shall return upon his own head and his violence shall come down upon his own pate."

　

He also said that anyone, even a senator, who equated the invoking of constitutional privileges against incrimination with automatic guilt was himself guilty of subversion.

McCarthy, as chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations, accused the Army of coddling Dr. Peress. He said it had promoted him despite questions about his loyalty; had acceded to his request not to be assigned to Japan; and had allowed him to be honorably discharged despite McCarthy’s demand that he be court-martialed.

In fact, Dr. Peress’s promotion to major, along with hundreds of others, was considered largely automatic under legislation passed by Congress, and the change in assignment, forwarded by the Red Cross, was granted because his wife and young daughter were ill. As for the honorable discharge, the Army argued that invoking the Fifth Amendment was not sufficient grounds for military prosecution.

　

The senator’s bluster during the hearings, his denunciation of Brig. Gen. Ralph W. Zwicker as "unfit" to wear his uniform, and his pressuring the Army for preferential treatment for G. David Schine, a draftee who was an associate of the McCarthy counsel Roy Cohn, finally prompted a showdown with the White House and, later that year, McCarthy’s censure by the Senate.

Had Dr. Peress, in fact, been a Communist?

"Not when I was in the Army, not for one minute," he replied in a 2005 interview with The New York Times, the first time he and his wife talked about the case and its consequences.

And before that?

"I’m not going to tell you," he said. "Nothing can accrue to it."

"I never advocated the violent overthrow of the government," he offered.

"I’m far from a Marxist scholar," he said, "but from my skimming of Marx, it was always reasonable, appropriate: democratic control by people of their own destinies and in control of the means of production. It’s so utopian and mythological, it’s hard to conceive. Who would be against it? And what the Soviet Union was on its way to was enough to convince me."

Why not just say that to the committee, he was asked, instead of invoking the Fifth Amendment?

"The next thing is, ‘Name names,’ " he said. "That’s the follow-up question. I have a constitutional right not to tell you. Even Oliver North took the Fifth Amendment," he added, referring to the Marine lieutenant colonel and White House intelligence official who was called to testify before Congress during the Iran-contra affair in the 1980s.

"The common knowledge according to all of us who were involved was, if you answer one question, you give up your constitutional privileges," he said.

"Were we Communists?" Elaine Peress interjected. "I don’t see why I would need to answer that question. It’s nobody’s business. You don’t say you pray every morning; you don’t have to answer, ‘Do you believe in God?’ "

After the hearings, the Peress home in Queens was stoned. Not only did Elaine Peress become a target by association, pressured to step down as editor of the P.T.A. bulletin, but someone called leaders of the Brownie pack that one of their daughters belonged to and warned them to be wary of possible subversion. A dentist with whom Dr. Peress practiced persuaded him to take his name off the door. Dr. Peress sold the practice in 1980 and retired in 2003.

The son of a tailor, he was born in Manhattan on July 31, 1917, and graduated from George Washington High School there. At City College, he enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. He recalled playing box ball on campus while classmates debated the relative merits of Trotskyism. He went on to study at New York University Dental School.

Irving Peress was largely apolitical at dental school, until he met and married Elaine Gittelson, a politically active English teacher who became a therapist and psychiatric social worker. They had two daughters besides their son, all of whom survive him, along with grandchildren. Elaine Peress died in 2012.

　

After graduating from dental school in 1940, Dr. Peress sought a commission as an Army dentist but was rejected because of a hernia. By the time over-age doctors and dentists were being drafted during the Korean War, he had established his practice and had no desire to leave it, so he fattened up to aggravate his hypertension in hopes of failing his physical. He passed anyway.

When he applied for a commission as an officer in 1952, he signed an oath declaring that he had never belonged to an organization that sought to alter the government by unconstitutional means. ("I didn’t consider the American Labor Party or the Communist Party subversive organizations," he said.) But on subsequent loyalty forms he wrote "federal constitutional privilege" when asked about membership in groups deemed to be subversive.

"A Communist who’is trying to infiltrate isn't going to call attention to himself," Dr. Peress said.

Had his views about Communism evolved? "I am more and more confused," he replied in the 2005 interview. "I was a true believer until the not-too-distant past. I have no doubts about the crimes of capitalism, even though it’s such an efficient system on paper."

Also, no regrets. "Regrets? That I acted appropriately?" he said. "No. None at all. True believers don't have regrets."

So who promoted Dr. Peress?

He blamed red tape. "You know who promoted me?" Dr. Peress asked rhetorically. "Somebody was eating lunch or making a telephone call when my promotion passed across their desk. I slipped through."

The Harder Part

George Packer The New Yorker Commentary

 

 

In the two decades between 1968 and 1988, Democratic candidates lost the Presidency five times out of six. This miserable run forced the Party to move closer to the electoral center on issues from welfare and crime to the role and the scope of government in postindustrial America. In 1992, Bill Clinton, calling himself a "New Democrat," broke the spell and initiated a two-decade period in which Republican candidates for President failed to prevail five times out of six. (The Supreme Court prevented the country from definitively establishing the result of the 2000 election.) President Obama’s reëlection in 2012 devastated Republicans. They reacted, as Democrats had, by asking themselves what went wrong. They wrote earnest opinion pieces, organized soul-searching retreats, formed high-minded study groups, and launched reformist efforts such as the Growth and Opportunity Project, which published a scathing report about the dire state of the Party.

On November 4th, it all seemed to pay off. Political offices around the country, from governorships and state legislatures to Congress, are now decisively red. Even given the Republicans’ advantages in electoral geography and turnout, their sweep should be more chilling to Democrats than the Tea Party triumphs of 2010, because it came in a period of partial economic sunshine, with Republicans statistically less popular than Democrats. The Party that has spent the past six years doing everything in its power to prevent the President from stimulating growth, boosting wages, improving infrastructure, controlling health-care costs, and regulating Wall Street was rewarded with clear majorities in both houses. The only prize left is the big one in 2016.

Republican leaders, determined to prove that they can build as well as destroy, have made a mighty effort not to seem high on victory. "There will be no government shutdowns," Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader-elect, promised. Cory Gardner, the Senator-elect from Colorado, warned, "If Republicans don’t prove that we can govern with maturity, that we can govern with competence, we’ll see the same kind of results two years from now, except it will be a wave going back a different direction." Senator Rand Paul, a potential candidate for the Presidency, said, "You know, I think the gridlock is going to end." He sounded like a patient trying to talk his way out of rehab.

There are reasons to be skeptical that the Party has really turned a corner on its chronic obstructionism. Within ten days of the election, McConnell was sounding like himself again. After China and the United States announced common goals for reducing greenhouse gases, he accused Obama of sending "a signal that he has no intention of moving toward the middle"—a place, apparently, where the two parties agree on limitless carbon emissions from coal plants, like the ones in McConnell’s home state, Kentucky. The House Speaker, John Boehner, concurred: "The President intends to double down on his job-crushing policies no matter how devastating the impact."

The recent, utterly alarming report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change got through to the Chinese leadership, but not to the G.O.P.’s. The probable next chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, who has called global warming a "hoax." He’s joined in ignorance by Senator Ted Cruz, the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Science and Space, and Senator Jeff Sessions, who will likely chair the Budget Committee. The Republican leadership is determined to prevent or undo any executive action by Obama on greenhouse gases, as well as on immigration reform.

When the Republicans talk about proving that they can govern, they don’t mean that they intend to solve the country’s core problems. The bills that the leadership has vowed to bring to the floor include corporate tax reform, fast-track trade agreements, construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, and a repeal of the tax on medical devices. Most of these proposals are marginal enough to betray a tactical mind-set: the purpose is not to address important issues but to corner the President with bipartisan votes and improve the G.O.P.’s image ahead of 2016.

In a post-election editorial, the conservative National Review dismissed the whole idea that congressional Republicans need to mature, arguing that the "desire to prove Republicans can govern" will only divide the Party between its establishment and its extremists, play into the hands of opponents in the Democratic Party and the media, and perhaps even persuade voters to keep government divided by electing a Democratic President in 2016. The editorial urged the Republican leadership to dedicate itself to one goal: winning the White House—an extension of McConnell’s stated determination in 2010 to make Obama a one-term President. In both cases, the main objective is power. You can hear the voice of the Party’s enablers: why sober up now that the bad behavior is paying off?

A party that dedicated itself to extreme policy positions and a strategy of legislative intransigence won’t find reform easy. Some moderate Republicans studied the résumés of the midterm candidates and decided that the Party was returning to its respectable self of the Eisenhower years—the party of Rotarians, prudent business owners, patriotic veterans. This is wishful thinking. That party no longer exists, and neither does the political consensus of the postwar years. It was based on a wide distribution of economic rewards, a high degree of civic participation, and respected national institutions, including the federal government, which the modern Republican Party has done everything it can to discredit (with help from feckless Democratic ideas and actions, not least the rollout of Obamacare).

The fact that there were no rape gaffes from Republican candidates this year doesn’t mean that the Party has moved toward the center. Instead, it has learned how to muffle its extremism. The Growth and Opportunity Project’s withering assessment had no new policies to propose—it seemed wary of the very notion of ideological debate. The report was a strategy plan—a guide to using messaging, polling, technology, fund-raising, and other "campaign mechanics," in order to reverse the Party’s growing isolation as a bastion of the older, rural, white electorate.

By the standard of the midterms, the report was a success. But building a Republican Party that can entertain ideas and pass laws with far-reaching answers to the country’s problems is harder than winning an election. It might even take losing another one. ♦

From The Observer (London Guardian) UK

An Editorial

　

Vladimir Putin and Russia

　

　

The steady advance of Russian tanks, artillery and troops into the rebel-held Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, documented last week by Nato and independent international observers, is an alarming reminder that the crisis that followed last March’s annexation of Crimea is far from over. As was the case in August, when the arrival of Russian reinforcements presaged renewed fighting between the all-but-defeated separatists and government forces, Moscow flatly denies involvement. If Russian soldiers are present in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, it must be because they are there on holiday, the Kremlin suggests. Such risible mendacity is a measure of the vast contempt in which Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, holds last September’s Minsk ceasefire agreement, the democratically elected government in Kiev and the international community as a whole.

As ever, Russia’s intentions in Ukraine are unclear. The troop movements, possibly including Chechen and Cossack mercenaries, may simply be an attempt to bolster the separatists who do not have the numbers or the weaponry to resist Kiev’s will indefinitely. Or they may be part of a wider effort to underpin the independence of the Donbas, following recent separatist victories in rigged elections that all but Moscow deemed illegitimate. Some analysts fear Putin, pursuing his dangerous fantasy of a restored Russian imperium, harbours longer-term plans to turn eastern Ukraine into a permanent, militarised bridgehead or statelet – a sort of modern Sparta – from which to project an ongoing campaign of destabilisation against Ukraine and its pro-western leadership.

Whatever he is up to, the fact that all this was happening at the very moment when Putin was meeting Barack Obama, David Cameron and other world leaders at this weekend’s G20 summit in Brisbane is little short of incredible. Since Putin began illegally seizing Ukrainian territory, the international community has imposed extensive sanctions in a bid to stop him. But numerous attempts to engage him diplomatically and personally, not least by Obama and Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, have all failed miserably. Putin’s rejection of such entreaties, fortified by his perception of western weakness, his grievances with the US, and his apparently immeasurable contempt for his critics, seems invincible. To his credit, Cameron did not mince words during "robust" bilateral talks with Putin. His message that there cannot be business as usual as long as Russia’s Ukraine intervention continues is wholly right. Putin appeared in no mood to listen. But his decision to leave the summit early, while suggesting continuing recalcitrance, may also reflect his surprise, even shock, at the fierce criticism directed at him there. This might just have some beneficial effect in the longer run.

It is not just Ukraine. The pattern of accelerating Russian confrontationalism abroad and authoritarianism at home, evident since Putin first took power as prime minister in 1999, is unmistakable. As a report published last week by the European Leadership Network demonstrated, close military encounters between Russia and the west are now back at cold war levels, with all the associated dangers that entails. Russia has resumed long-range patrols by nuclear-capable bombers, discontinued in 1992, to destinations as distant and provocative as the Gulf of Mexico. Russian warships showed up last week in international waters off Australia, crudely advertising Putin’s arrival in Brisbane.

Avid for its resources and oblivious to the environmental consequences, Moscow plans new military bases and operations across the Arctic. Meanwhile, figures as diverse as Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, and Sauli Niinistö, Finland’s president, have warned that the world is on the brink of a new cold war. In the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, across eastern Europe, in Georgia and Moldova and throughout Scandinavia, concern is rising about renewed Russian aggression amid a flurry of maritime and airspace violations.

Putin’s disregard for international norms is mirrored at home by his disrespect for individual human and civil rights. Russia under Putin is a country where the rule of law and property rights are not guaranteed, where the police and judiciary lack independence, where the legislative process is wholly dominated by the executive, where the media and civil rights groups are co-opted or persecuted, and where brave individuals such as the Pussy Riot punk group or the investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya pay a terrible price for their defiance.

At least the Soviet Union had a distinct ideology based on ideals, however deluded they proved to be. Putin’s only principle seems to be national and personal aggrandisement. "We in the west need to reassess our relations with Russia," says Finland’s prime minister, Alexander Stubb. "We have put in a lot of effort to try to integrate Russia into western institutions and we slightly idealistically believed that Russia could become a normal, liberal market democracy that relies on international institutions. It hasn’t."

It is difficult to justify Putin’s invitation to Brisbane, and other international forums such as last week’s Apec summit in Beijing. It requires a pretence that his repeat acts of geopolitical hooliganism are somehow tolerable. They are not and he is not welcome (as the G7 grouping has previously ruled). Putin surely has no place in the high councils of an international system whose rules and values he so blatantly subverts. In short, it is time to end wishful thinking about a change of heart in Moscow, to stop pulling punches and to let Putin know that until Russia accepts the inviolable sovereignty of international law and the moral imperative of universal human rights, it will be an outcast among nations.

The means of bringing Putin to heel, in Ukraine and elsewhere, are available. Russia’s economy has been badly hit by sanctions, but their indirect effect has been even greater. Foreign investment has slumped as confidence crumbles. Russia’s central bank recently downgraded its growth forecasts again and said capital flight was approaching record levels. Russia’s currency, the rouble, has lost almost 30% of its value this year, prompting sharp price rises. Despite new oil and gas export deals with China, the regime is running on empty as international oil prices drop. And polls suggest most Russians do not believe Ukraine is worth fighting for.

Putin is vulnerable. Increased financial pressure coupled with intensified diplomatic action and bolstered Nato support for European countries bordering Russia could convince Moscow that the costs of its antisocial behaviour are too high to bear. As for Putin, world leaders should stop treating him as if he were somehow one of them. Putin and Putinism are a throwback to a more polarised and aggressive era. He must not be allowed to drag the world back to the past

Obama, Down but Not Out, Presses Ahead

By PETER BAKER and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVISON NY TIMES

WASHINGTON — President Obama emerged from last week’s midterm election rejected by voters, hobbled politically and doomed to a final two years in office suffering from early lame-duck syndrome. That, at least, was the consensus in both parties. No one seems to have told Mr. Obama.

In the 10 days since "we got beat," as he put it, by Republicans who captured the Senate and bolstered control over the House, Mr. Obama has flexed his muscles on immigration, climate change and the Internet, demonstrating that he still aspires to enact sweeping policies that could help define his legacy.

The timing of the three different decisions was to some extent a function of separate policy clocks, not simply a White House political strategy. Mr. Obama, for example, had been scheduled to travel to China for a summit meeting in mid-November, and American officials have been trying for most of the year to negotiate a climate agreement for him to announce while in Beijing.

Still, even if by happenstance, the back-to-back moves have reinforced Mr. Obama’s desire to assert himself in a period when his poll numbers and political capital are at their lowest ebbs. While losing Congress was a grievous blow that will further challenge his capacity to govern, advisers said that he feels liberated. He can now pursue his long-term agenda, they said, without being tethered to the short-term electoral concerns of his party’s leadership in Congress.

In the process, though, Mr. Obama has angered Republicans who accuse him of essentially defying the message sent by the electorate. All of the talk by the White House in recent days of working together with the new Congress seems belied by a president who has wasted little time advancing some of the same policies that were renounced just a week ago, Republicans said.

"The president is completely ignoring the will of the American voters, who turned out on Election Day and overwhelmingly elected people who wanted to change the direction of the country," Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, said in an interview. "Even today, the new polls show Americans would rather have Republicans make the agenda changes than the president."

But aides said Mr. Obama has concluded that he cannot let opposition from the other party stop him from advancing his priorities, and in his postelection comments, Mr. Obama predicted he would take actions that Republicans would not like. While White House advisers interpreted the election results as a mandate to work across the aisle, they said that cannot simply be a prescription for more gridlock where the president does nothing without Republican approval.

"Our bottom line is we think people want results," said Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director. "They want things to improve. They want you to take action. They’re more focused on outcomes than process."

Although they do not present it this way, in some ways Mr. Obama and his aides are taking a page from President George W. Bush’s playbook after his own "thumping" in his final midterm elections. Instead of pulling out of the deteriorating war in Iraq, as Democrats interpreted Mr. Bush’s election mandate, he sent more troops. Democrats like Mr. Obama, then a senator, accused the president of defying the voters. In the end, the reinforcements and a strategy change helped turn around the war.

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama will continue to have a relatively free hand on foreign policy, although he has asked Congress to fashion a new authorization for his own air war in Iraq and next-door Syria against the Islamic State militant group. But it remains less clear how far he can go toward other goals without Congress.

His agreement with China to reduce carbon emissions over the next decade is not binding and ultimately will depend on his successor enacting policies to achieve those goals. Likewise, his planned immigration executive order providing work permits to millions of people in the country illegally will remain in force only as long as he is in office.

Still, aides said Mr. Obama seems energized by the postelection actions. As early as the day after the voting, senior officials described him as impatient to reclaim the presidential megaphone and argue for policy initiatives after a year of hanging back in deference to Democratic operatives worried about the backlash for vulnerable candidates.

It is a change in tone that has been apparent to liberal activists who have often criticized Mr. Obama for being too timid and willing to compromise. Public interest groups and technology start-up executives said they saw the new dynamic at work on Monday, when they got a heads-up to watch the White House website for an announcement that would please them.

Mr. Obama’s videotaped call for a free and open Internet "completely upended the debate, and it was the kind of clear, bold statement we had been waiting for, reconnecting to that language you heard in 2008, where he came out in very stark terms in a pro-public interest way," said Craig Aaron, the president of Free Press, an advocacy group.

While there is still considerable concern among some White House allies that Mr. Obama will allow Republicans to set the terms of debate over trade, taxes and infrastructure spending, many argue that the devastating scale of the election losses may have raised pressure on the president to go big in other areas, if only to prove his relevance and agenda-setting authority.

"The president has seen what happens when he doesn’t step forward and Democrats don’t inspire the public or their base — we win on the issues, but lose at the polls — so we can’t do worse," said Anna Galland, the executive director of MoveOn.org, the progressive advocacy group. "Let’s try being bold."

Republicans did not see it as bold so much as defiant and said it may cost Mr. Obama the opportunity to make more progress collaboratively.

"I’ve been very disturbed about the way the president has proceeded in the wake of the election," said Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the incoming Republican majority leader.

"I had maybe naïvely hoped the president would look at the results of the election and decide to come to the political center and do some business with us," he added. "I still hope he does at some point but the early signs are not good."

Obama Plan May Allow Millions of Immigrants to Stay and Work in U.S.

 

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, JULIA PRESTON and ASHLEY PARKER

WASHINGTON — President Obama will ignore angry protests from Republicans and announce as soon as next week a broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration enforcement system that will protect up to five million unauthorized immigrants from the threat of deportation and provide many of them with work permits, according to administration officials who have direct knowledge of the plan.

Asserting his authority as president to enforce the nation’s laws with discretion, Mr. Obama intends to order changes that will significantly refocus the activities of the government’s 12,000 immigration agents. One key piece of the order, officials said, will allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away.

That part of Mr. Obama’s plan alone could affect as many as 3.3 million people who have been living in the United States illegally for at least five years, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration research organization in Washington. But the White House is also considering a stricter policy that would limit the benefits to people who have lived in the country for at least 10 years, or about 2.5 million people.

Extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, and to their parents, could affect an additional one million or more if they are included in the final plan that the president announces. White House officials are also still debating whether to include protections for farm workers who have entered the country illegally but have been employed for years in the agriculture industry, a move that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.

Mr. Obama’s actions will also expand opportunities for legal immigrants who have high-tech skills, shift extra security resources to the nation’s southern border, revamp a controversial immigration enforcement program called Secure Communities, and provide clearer guidance to the agencies that enforce immigration laws about who should be a low priority for deportation, especially those with strong family ties and no serious criminal history.

A new memorandum, which will direct the actions of enforcement and border agents and immigration judges, will make clear that deportations should still proceed for convicted criminals, foreigners who pose national security risks and recent border crossers, officials said.

White House officials declined to comment publicly before a formal announcement by Mr. Obama, who will return from an eight-day trip to Asia on Sunday. Administration officials said details about the package of executive actions were still being finished and could change. An announcement could be pushed off until next month but will not be delayed to next year, officials said.

Announcing the actions quickly could hand critics like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas a specific target to attack, but it would also give immigration advocates something to defend. Waiting until later in December could allow the budget to be approved before setting off a fight over immigration.

"Before the end of the year, we’re going to take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system," Mr. Obama said during a news conference a day after last week’s midterm elections. "What I’m not going to do is just wait."

The decision to move forward sets in motion a political confrontation between Mr. Obama and his Republican adversaries that is likely to affect budget negotiations and the debate over Loretta E. Lynch, the president’s nominee to be attorney general, during the lame-duck session of Congress that began this week.

Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday afternoon that if Mr. Obama went forward on his own, House Republicans would "fight the president tooth and nail."

Mr. Boehner is considering suing Mr. Obama over immigration — as Republicans have said they might do on the president’s health care law — and on Thursday he refused to rule out a government shutdown, despite saying that was not his goal.

"We are looking at all options, and they’re on the table," Mr. Boehner said.

In the Senate, a group of Republicans — led by Mr. Cruz, Senator Mike Lee of Utah and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama — is already planning to thwart any executive action on immigration. The senators are hoping to rally their fellow Republicans to oppose efforts to pass a budget next month unless it prohibits the president from enacting what they call "executive amnesty" for people in the country illegally.

"If the president wants to change the legal structure, he should go through Congress rather than acting on his own," Mr. Lee said Thursday. "I think it’s very important for us to do what we can to prevent it."

But the president and his top aides have concluded that acting unilaterally is in the interest of the country and the only way to increase political pressure on Republicans to eventually support a legislative overhaul that could put millions of illegal immigrants on a path to legal status and perhaps citizenship. Mr. Obama has told lawmakers privately and publicly that he will reverse his executive orders if they pass a comprehensive bill that he agrees to sign.

White House officials reject as overblown the dire warnings from some in Congress who predict that such a sweeping use of presidential power will undermine any possibility for cooperation in Washington with the newly empowered Republican majority.

"I think it will create a backlash in the country that could actually set the cause back and inflame our politics in a way that I don’t think will be conducive to solving the problem," said Senator Angus King of Maine, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and supports an immigration overhaul.

Although a Republican president could reverse Mr. Obama’s overhaul of the system after he leaves office in January 2017, the president’s action for now will remove the threat of deportation for millions of people in Latino and other immigrant communities. Officials said lawyers had been working for months to make sure the president’s proposal would be "legally unassailable" when he presented it.

The major elements of the president’s plan are based on longstanding legal precedents that give the executive branch the right to exercise "prosecutorial discretion" in how it enforces the laws. Those precedents are also the basis of a 2012 decision to protect from deportation the so-called Dreamers, who came to the United States as young children.

"I’m confident that what the president will do will be consistent with our laws," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Thursday.

The White House expects a chorus of outside legal experts to back the administration’s legal assessment once Mr. Obama makes the plan official.

In several "listening sessions" at the White House over the last year, immigration activists came armed with legal briefs, and White House officials believe those arguments will form the basis of the public defense of his actions.

Many pro-immigration groups and advocates — as well as the Hispanic voters who could be crucial for Democrats’ hopes of winning the White House in 2016 — are expecting bold action, having grown increasingly frustrated after watching a sweeping bipartisan immigration bill fall prey to a gridlocked Congress last year.

"This is his last chance to make good on his promise to fix the system," said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. "If he delays again, the immigration activists would — just politically speaking — jump the White House fence."