Time's Joe Klein: a Supreme Suck-Up

I have a personal connection to Joe Klein, the Time columnist and ex-anonymous author of Primary Colors. His son and I used to share an office at the Moscow Times about 12 years ago. There were a couple of cute Russian girls in the office who were best friends and Chris and I each dated one of them. Chris ended up marrying his; my relationship with the other one didn't last very long, although she was one of the funniest people I've ever met: Tanya's big thing was crushing beer cans against her head and singing the Soviet national anthem naked. She was like John Belushi with tits.

I lost touch with Chris after I left the Moscow Times in 1996. Like most politics junkies I went on to read Primary Colors, and saw the movie (Emma Thompson's most horrifying role, with her terminal-cancer victim in Wit a distant second) and halfheartedly indulged in the literary whodunit over the author's identity. When Klein was outed as the writer there was a brief flurry of phone calls between Moscow Times vets chuckling over the news; I even seem to remember a couple of us using the occasion as an excuse to get together to get drunk one last time.

And that was that; I didn't think about the Kleins again until I came back to the U.S. a few years back and started actually reading the elder's columns. I was initially confused because my original impression of Joe Klein, from afar, had been that of a gossipy, bourgeois suck-up to the Clinton administration. When I came home in 2002, however, the columns I saw under his name seemed to have been penned by a gossipy, bourgeois suck-up to the Bush administration.

I was particularly struck by a piece he wrote in November, 2003 ("It's time for extreme peacekeeping" 11/16/03) in which he argued that the Iraq war was not inspiring idealistic, well-educated young people to military service because no snazzy-sounding special "extreme peacekeeper" corps had been created to attract them. Klein noted that young people had been drawn into the military during the Kennedy administration because, in part, of the "panache" of the then-new special forces uniforms:

At a similar moment, in the early 1960s, when the front lines of the cold war had spread from Germany to the Congo and Vietnam, John F. Kennedy announced his support for an augmented counterinsurgency force -- and gave those soldiers real panache by allowing them to wear headgear frowned upon by the traditional military: green berets.

Klein went on to say that the "excellent nation-building efforts" of the U.S. in Iraq (at that time, in November of '03, Klein was still calling war reports "good news") could similarly attract a new generation of special soldiers if only Bush would make the same kind of appeal to that class of youth. The new fighting class Klein envisioned was a kind of turbocharged warrior-yuppie who went to kick ass in Iraq as a professional career move:

Call them Extreme Peacekeepers or the Freedom Corps or whatever, but seek out the sort of people who aren't normally inclined to join the military -- idealistic college students who hope to become doctors, lawyers, politicians or engineers and are eager to do something noble (and burnish their resumes) by serving their country.

So, to translate, here's Klein's take on the army in the post-Vietnam era:

After sending a generation of idealistic young whippersnappers off to war in Southeast Asia with snazzy new unis, we end up killing two million people from one of the poorest agrarian countries on earth, turning huge sections of North Vietnam as well as illegally-bombed Laos and Cambodia into permanent moonscapes, and sending 60,000 Americans home in body bags, with tens of thousands more coming back crippled, poisoned, or psychologically ravaged. We furthermore let it get out that we started the war under false pretenses and kept up the fight long after even the Pentagon knew the whole thing was a hopeless waste of lives and money. Beyond that, we dump deadly poison on 5.6 million acres of a state the size of New Mexico, creating conditions that would leave every hospital in South Vietnam filling storage rooms, for the next thirty years, with two-and three-headed babies in jars. Photographers like Phillip Jones Griffiths would come back decades later with horrifying galleries of thousands of twisted genetic freaks left to lie for years on mats in malarial villages...