Speaking of interpretation: To begin to understand Mansfield’s overall oeuvre, we recommend Mark Blitz’s essay in the current issue (May/June) of Humanities . Blitz captures the good fortune of those Harvard students who have had the privilege of studying with Mansfield over the past 45 years, and provides a clear account of Mansfield’s breathtaking scholarly achievement.

In THE SCRAPBOOK’s humble opinion, it’s rare for a scholar to write something that is both good and original on a single great thinker. What’s striking about Mansfield is that he’s written such studies on at least half a dozen–including Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, and Tocque ville–to say nothing of illuminating in fundamental ways concepts ranging from executive power to manliness. It really may be that Mansfield is both our greatest living scholar of political philosophy and our greatest living political philosopher. It is only a slight black mark on his résumé that he’s also a Red Sox fan.

Wrong for 95 Years

THE SCRAPBOOK admits it: Sometimes things just fall into our lap, or across our desk, that we couldn’t possibly invent. A case in point is this week’s announcement that publisher Andre Schiffrin, founder of the New Press, will be celebrating “oral historian” Studs Terkel’s 95th birthday on Wednesday, May 16, with a series of fun-filled suggestions on his corporate website.

The literary life just doesn’t get any better than this. Admirers of Studs are encouraged to gather in independent bookstores (no chains, please), credit cards in hand, and let the good times roll. You can hear what famous intellectuals think of Studs (“An American treasure”–Cornel West), order free Studs Terkel posters, mix Studs’s recipe for gin martinis, listen to Studs’s favorite music (“Potato Head Blues”–Louis Armstrong), order a pair of Studs-style red socks ($4.99 plus shipping), and add your voice to celebrity tributes (“Still fighting the good fight”–Victor Navasky).

Best of all, the New Press has chartered a skywriter to fly over Chicago, Studs’s adopted hometown, during lunch hour with this message: “Happy 95th B-Day Studs Terkel.”

Now, THE SCRAPBOOK enjoys a good party as much as anyone, especially at an independent bookstore, and we like “Potato Head Blues,” too. But does a bilious radio DJ who turns a tape recorder on and off, and hires somebody to type up the transcripts, qualify as a “historian,” even an “oral” historian? And while we’re impressed by Studs’s longevity, and love skywriting, it’s worth pointing out that 74 of those 95 years were spent extolling the virtues of the Soviet Union, in print and on the air, at the expense of Studs’s native country.

No wonder Studs Terkel has won the George Polk Career Award–named in honor of another media icon whose fraudulent past was exposed in the pages of this magazine.

Coming Around?

Whatever its flaws, George Tenet’s new book seems to be prompting a modest rethinking of the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda. A stark example last week was this comment from the Washington Post‘s lefty military analyst William Arkin, a harsh critic of the Iraq war who remains skeptical of much of the intelligence the Bush administration used to justify removing Saddam Hussein:

Concludes Arkin: “That’s just the credible and validating reporting that Tenet describes from 9/11 through the Iraq war.”

Arkin is not the only person to see it this way. Here’s GOP presidential not-quite-candidate Fred Thompson in his regular ABC Radio commentary:

Thompson is right. And the risk posed by that relationship was plainly one reason Iraq was–and remains–a central front in the war on terror.