PARTISAN POLITICS AND APPOINTMENTS MAY BE RUSHING U.S. TO WAR -- With Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and several other top advisors, George W. Bush took office with an administration laden with experience in military and diplomatic affairs. So why does the United States now find itself on the brink of a war many Americans don't support and still fighting for international support and U.N. Security Council votes? "The Bush administration pridefully ignores two old political axioms: first, after a close election a president usually builds bi-partisan coalitions at home; and, second, politics stops at the water's edge," says Temple historian Jim Hilty. "President Bush, by contrast, appears to believe he can succeed without either Democratic advisors, Democratic votes, or coalitional partners, either at home or abroad. Such a strategy is likely to produce either a great accomplishment for the president and his party or a great failure, leaving Democrats no opportunity to claim any part of the credit in the event of victory but also free of blame in the event of failure." Hilty points out that unlike many administrations, Bush has surrounded himself with like-minded Republicans in nearly every position of influence. "For purposes of building bi-partisan support for military-diplomatic policies, many presidents have turned to members of the opposing party to fill one or more key advisory slots. FDR, for example, selected the venerable Republican Henry Stimson to guide the War Department in World War II, Truman built a bi-partisan foreign policy aided by Republican senator Arthur Vandenburg, and JFK and LBJ placed great faith in Robert McNamara (CEO of Ford and a Republican)."
STUDENTS AND PROFESSORS VOICE DISSENT AT TEACH-INS -- During the conservative Reagan era and the economic boom of the Clinton years, college students across the country seemed less interested in politics than partying. But with a pending war in Iraq, college campuses are once again becoming hotbeds of dissent. "Students are beginning to get very serious about studying the historical background of present-day events. They are getting far more intellectual and serious than students only five years ago," says Temple history professor Ralph Young, who has organized a series of teach-ins under the banner "Dissent in America." "It reminds me of what was going on in the sixties after the 'silent generation' of the fifties who liked Ike, wore flat-tops and white bucks and didn't spend much time being critical of the administration's policies." Teach-ins are held every Friday from 2:30-3:30 p.m. at Temple's Gladfelter Hall in room 946. Topics have included Bush's national security strategy, Eurocentrism and the war with Iraq, post-9/11 civil rights, and more. Discussions are led by both students and professors. "At the first teach-in at the start of the semester we had about 20 students. Now there's more than 50," says Young. "I would guess there's been over a hundred different people who have attended."
MISSING CHILDREN: NO EASY ANSWERS --The safe return of Elizabeth Smart, kidnapped from her home nine months ago, brings into the national spotlight the broader issue of children who go missing--and why. "It's an opportunity to remind the public that the problem of missing children is far more complex than the headlines suggest," notes Heather Hammer, principal investigator for NISMART-2, the Second National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children, and senior study director at Temple's Institute for Survey Research. NISMART-2 found that victims of nonfamily abductions were predominantly (81 percent) teenagers age 12 or older, and most were girls. "But headline-making kidnappings such as Elizabeth Smart's actually represent a very small fraction of all missing children abducted by a nonfamily perpetrator," Hammer says. NISMART-2 also provides data on family abductions (typically involving custody disputes), runaway/thrownaway episodes, involuntarily missing, lost or injured events, and missing benign explanation situations.
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