by David Bromwich

Walter Mondale, interviewed today by Wolf Blitzer, said that in his judgment Vice President Cheney had "crossed a line" the Carter presidency took care to preserve: the line that stops the vice president from becoming an autonomous actor in the framing and the pursuit of policies. He added that Dick Cheney appears to have constructed "a parallel National Security Council" to control national intelligence. Cheney has thus been able to make the statements he wants and to draw the conclusions he prefers from the captive intelligence estimates. This is a cue the Democratic congress ought to take up soon; and Patrick Leahy, the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, may have the courage to do it. According to Robert Dreyfuss in a searching article, reporters are routinely denied answers to questions as simple as: who are the people who work at the OVP, and what are their titles? Secrecy carried to that extent bears the marks of an imperium in imperio, an unchecked power within the power of government. In 2006, the OVP was strong enough to brush back John McCain's attempt to abolish torture; the counter-campaign by the vice president in this rare instance was conducted in public view. The OVP also had a hand alongside the departments of defense and justice in the Military Commissions Act, which now excludes enemy combatants at Guantanamo and elsewhere from the constitutional right of habeas corpus. David Addington, the top lawyer at the OVP, has spent almost his entire career in the service of Dick Cheney, as Alberto Gonzales has spent almost his entire career in the service of G.W. Bush. Like the idea of an unchecked "interior cabinet," the paths of patronage in this administration are evocative of the early reign of George III. Jane Mayer's profile of Addington remains worth looking up. A more relaxed manner is on display in Malcolm Gladwell's recent puzzler-piece about the Enron case and the conviction of Jeffrey Skilling. The article speaks in passing of the "reckless" and "incompetent" management of Enron; but those euphemisms scarcely touch the character that confronted the jury in the trial. Why not use the old words swindler, con man, thief? They would mar the whimsy and suavity that are the most precious assets of this style of journalism. The article leads with a paradox. Gladwell notices that all the materials necessary to unmask the enterprise were extractable from the shapeless mass of documents the company regularly dumped in a heap at its investors' feet. With so much available, more might have been disclosed, "But what," asks Gladwell expertly and sophistically, "is enough?" If you were a Wall Street Journal reporter, with a few score hours to spare and the prestige to command a face-to-face interview with the Enron boys to test against your unbelief, you could figure out what was going on. Presumably the average investor could have done the same. But the Enron chiefs, who made all the proper disclosures, knew more and other than the disclosures showed at first or second or third glance. That is why they got out early and got out fast. Gladwell says that Enron was less a puzzle than a mystery; a puzzle, he thinks, by its nature is soluble, a mystery is not. The relevant pomo concept is "undecidability"--a word that Gladwell never uses but lives and breathes. But Enron was not undecidable. It was a classic scam, a "bubble" like the South Sea Bubble; those who blew it recognized what they were up to, and showed they knew it by their subsequent actions. I hope someone else will explain the considerable debt owed by a popular intellectual writer like Gladwell to academic interdisciplinary studies. His rhetorical mobility argues conversancy with economics, law, cognitive science, statistics, and sociology; but, working together, what do they bring forth? A distinction, which is close to platitude and useless to judgment, between mystery and puzzle--treated here as separable natural kinds, to which Gladwell devotes a tender concern earlier adepts brought to metonymy and metaphor, or to illocution and perlocution. It is true a felon like Skilling, who cannot be supposed a physical menace, would have been treated differently in a saner society; a non-pomo version of the article might have shown how, in the course of describing the exorbitant sentences that are daily meted out to criminals of all kinds. Probably the savage willfulness and heartlessness that brought Skilling his good times could have been paid for by a sentence half as long as the one he was dealt--provided it were followed by several hundred thousand hours of community service and, perhaps, an hour a day in the pillory for the rest of his life.