Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Betty Alexandra Bastidas for The New York Times
William Bryan Purcell offered nail painting in his all-pink tent at "The Muster," a public art event held at Governors Island on Saturday.
May 16, 2005
Desert Island Fantasy With a Tent and a Cause
By RANDY KENNEDY
It sounds like the ultimate urban childhood fantasy, hatched while staring out a window at a brick wall: take over a deserted island for a day, camp out in a grassy field, make crazy tents and dress up in crazy costumes, and then invite people to get on a boat and come see the results.
On Saturday, with the help of the Public Art Fund, the artist Allison Smith and more than 100 other artists achieved this fantasy, within the shadows of Manhattan's skyscrapers, commandeering Governors Island to create a kind of conceptual art version of day camp. Or maybe a Dadaist's dream of a craft fair. Or else a mini-Woodstock in which music was replaced by artists taking the stage in mock-military style to declare that they were fighting for causes like "sequined religious figures," "the right to sing sentimental songs in full," "the right to be scared" or more straightforward causes like financial support for AIDS research and ending overfishing of the oceans.
The setting for the event - which Ms. Smith called "The Muster," using the theme of Civil War re-enactment as a loose aesthetic organizing principle - was almost as surreal as the encampment of artists itself. Nearly deserted since the Coast Guard closed its base there in 1996, Governors Island feels ghostly, even on a sunny weekend day - its hotel, beauty salon, bowling alley, movie theater, nine-hole golf course, Burger King restaurant and Georgian-style mansions all sitting empty, awaiting a decision by state and city officials about what the 172-acre island will become.
Tom Eccles, director of the Public Art Fund, said he and Ms. Smith, who had created a smaller version of "The Muster" last year on a farm in Pennsylvania, saw the island as the perfect place for the event, both practically and metaphorically. "This is almost like a free zone right now," Mr. Eccles said. "It doesn't really come under the kind of constraints you have in other parts of the city. It would be very difficult to do this kind of project in, say, Central Park or even Prospect Park."
At times on Saturday, the gathering had the feel of any normal, impromptu cookout in a park. Shaggy teenagers played Hacky Sack. Little girls had ribbons braided in their hair. Fried chicken and pasta salad were served on tables with red-checkered tablecloths. But in line to be served there was a woman with oversized female genitalia sewn onto her leotard. And out in the field, there were tents like the all-pink one by William Bryan Purcell, who said his cause was "the just representation of female intentions."
"I'm offering nail painting, hair brushing, intimate conversation, makeovers - basically anything you need to get yourself fixed up," said Mr. Purcell, an artist, who was also smoking a large cigar. ("I didn't want to come across as too pink," he explained.)
Ms. Smith said that by the end of the day, about 1,500 people had made the trip by ferry. One of them, Michele Siegel, who wandered by Mr. Purcell's tent with a friend, Margie Weinstein, said the whole event felt like "Burning Man for lazy people," referring to the annual counterculture event staged in Nevada, in one of the country's most remote places. (Governors Island is only 800 yards from the tip of Manhattan.)
Civil War re-enactment was the guiding idea in large part because Ms. Smith grew up in Manassas, Va., and has always been fascinated by the obsessive dedication to authenticity of Civil War re-enactors. But many of the 40 or so tents, shacks and teepees scattered across a field near an old fort where the event took place ignored the theme altogether. One looked like a ship, and out front sat a man in a striped prison uniform playing a guitar and singing the blues song "Caldonia." In another, a large trampoline served as the floor, and a third looked like a Day-Glo maypole.
Others did toy with the military idea, mostly in a nonpolitical way. Gary Graham, a fashion designer, made ghostly military uniforms and enlisted his friends Charles Beyer and Brianna Espitalier to dress in them with gory makeup. A woman sat inside the tent with votive candles, reading "On Being Ill" by Virginia Woolf. While some of the tents and costumes seemed like leftovers from a school play, Mr. Graham's were serious.
"Hair and makeup people came over on the first ferry this morning at 7:30 - we had a bugle call to get up," said Mr. Beyer, who, like many of the artists, slept in their tents on Friday night.
Across the way, students from the Rhode Island School of Design, under the direction of Liz Collins, a professor, put up a tent filled with knitting machines, where they cranked out a huge abstract red-white-and-blue cotton banner during the afternoon. Julia Bryan-Wilson, another professor, said that earlier in the day, the knitters were approached by a man who had come to the island thinking there was going to be a real Civil War re-enactment. "He was just really confused," she said. "When I said that we were fighting for a sovereign nation of knitters, he didn't like that at all."
If he did not like that, then he probably hated the tent run by the artists Nicole Eisenman and A. L. Steiner. It included a bench where passersby were summoned to kneel, confess their sins through a megaphone and be whipped with a leather belt. "We're the negative energy vortex here," Ms. Eisenman said. "We give a home to everyone's yang. It has to go someplace, so it comes here."
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Hector Mata/AFP ? Getty Images
Los Angeles City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa defeated Mayor James Hahn to become the city's
first Hispanic mayor in more than a century.
L.A. Elects Hispanic Mayor for First Time in Over 100 Years
By JOHN M. BRODER
LOS ANGELES, May 18 - Antonio Villaraigosa, who won the mayor's office in a thorough trouncing of the incumbent, James K. Hahn, said today that he intended to be the mayor of all of Los Angeles, not just the nearly 50 percent of Latino heritage. But his victory confirmed the rising political power of Latinos in the nation's second-largest city.
After a lackluster term tainted by accusations of corruption at City Hall, Mr. Hahn was turned out of office in favor of a high school dropout who went on to become speaker of the California Assembly and a member of the Los Angeles City Council.
With virtually all of the votes counted, Mr. Villaraigosa had 260,721 votes, or 58.6 percent, to 183,749 votes, or 41.3 percent, for Mr. Hahn, according to the city clerk's office. Mr. Villaraigosa swept nearly every ethnic group in this diverse city and won in almost every neighborhood, except Mr. Hahn's home area of San Pedro, near the port, and the conservative northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley.
The mayor-elect was joined this morning by two prominent African-American leaders, Bernard C. Parks, a councilman and former chief of police, and John W. Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League. All three spoke of the significance of Mr. Villaraigosa's strong majorities among the city's black and Latino populations.
"I'm an American of Mexican descent and I'm proud of that," Mr. Villaraigosa, 52, said at an auto repair training center sponsored by the Urban League. "But I intend to be mayor of all of Los Angeles. As the mayor of the most diverse city in the world, that's the only way it can work."
He said he had no national ambitions, even though as mayor of Los Angeles he now becomes one of the most visible Latino leaders in the country. He will take the oath of office on July 1.
At a victory celebration on Tuesday night, supporters chanted "Si, se puede!" - Spanish for "Yes, we can!" - as Mr. Villaraigosa strode to the podium. He thanked his family and the people who had inspired him over the years, and promised to "bring this great city together."
"You all know I love L.A., but tonight I really love L.A.," an exuberant Mr. Villaraigosa told his supporters.
The two candidates were a study in contrasts. Mr. Hahn, the son of one of the region's most popular politicians, Kenneth J. Hahn, who served 40 years as a county supervisor, was buttoned-down to the point of drabness. He acknowledged a case of "charisma deficit disorder," but said he was interested in getting things done, not touting his accomplishments.
Mr. Villaraigosa, who is as outgoing as Mr. Hahn is shy, was raised on the Latino east side by a single immigrant mother. He dropped out of high school for a time, then worked his way through the University of California, Los Angeles, and became a union organizer, then speaker of the State Assembly. He has been a member of the Los Angeles City Council since 2003.
The contest was a rematch of the 2001 mayoral race, which Mr. Hahn won by seven points after trailing Mr. Villaraigosa for much of the campaign. That race featured a number of late attacks by Mr. Hahn, who repeatedly attacked Mr. Villaraigosa for a letter he had written seeking clemency for a convicted cocaine trafficker.
Mr. Hahn's campaign was similarly negative this time, even using the same slogan, "Los Angeles can't trust Antonio Villaraigosa." Mr. Hahn accused his opponent, a former president of the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, of being soft on crime. He also noted that Mr. Villaraigosa had accepted thousands of dollars in campaign donations from out-of-state businessmen bidding on city contracts.
Mr. Villaraigosa, who outpolled Mr. Hahn in the primary election by 33 percent to 24 percent, generally ran an upbeat, front-runner's campaign. Although some of his advertisements noted the federal investigation of possible corruption in city contracting under Mayor Hahn, Mr. Villaraigosa mainly stressed what he called his ability to bring Los Angeles's varied geographic, ethnic and racial communities together.
In this he was aided by Mr. Hahn's two most significant actions as mayor. In 2002, Mr. Hahn engineered the ouster of the Los Angeles Police Chief, Bernard Parks, an African-American, which alienated many black voters who had supported Mr. Hahn in 2001. Mr. Hahn also campaigned vigorously to defeat an effort by residents of the San Fernando Valley to secede from the city of Los Angeles, angering a part of the city that had provided a major share of his margin of victory over Mr. Villaraigosa four years ago. Mr. Villaraigosa will be the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since 1872, but he won the office on more than the votes of the city's Latinos, who make up nearly half of the city's population but barely a quarter of the electorate.
"If you look at Antonio, he would be a credible candidate from any ethnic group," said Harry Pachon, director of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute at the University of Southern California, which studies trends in Latino politics. "He has a liberal background, he's an ex-president of the A.C.L.U. for Southern California, he has union credentials, he was speaker of Assembly. He's punched his ticket in so many places."
Dr. Pachon said Mr. Villaraigosa was also able to split the African-American vote, which had been solidly in Mr. Hahn's column in 2001. It was the first time a Los Angeles mayoral candidate had successfully melded a Latino-black coalition to win office, he said.
"I will never forget where I came from," Mr. Villaraigosa said Tuesday night. "And I will always believe in the people of Los Angeles."
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Jarno Trulli leads Fernando Alonso
Monaco GP: Red Bull preview
Racing series F1
Date 2005-05-15
Some say it's the humour. Others say it's the epic sweep. Many believe it's the memorable characters. Everyone finds something to love in the Star Wars Saga, but one thing everyone agrees on: No film series has more thrilling action than the tale of a galaxy far, far away. And what is a better place to promote the film than during the Monaco Grand Prix weekend.
With the famous Cannes Film Festival taking place just a few kilometres down the coast from Monte Carlo, Red Bull Racing and the makers of the Star Wars films are staging a promotional partnership over the weekend of the Monaco Grand Prix. "Revenge of the Sith" is the sixth film and is due to go on general release shortly. The film's director, George Lucas and some of the stars of the film will be guests of the team in Monaco.
David Coulthard:
"There's something special about driving round the Monaco GP circuit. The first time I drove a GP car here I was sure that my back wheel would catch the barrier at some of the tighter corners, it just didn't look possible to squeeze the car through."
"To be the fastest car around Monaco you need to have the wall of the rear tyre just kissing the barrier at several places on the circuit, which is an intense experience because of the concentration it takes. One slip and it's all over, there's nowhere you can relax. I've won Monaco twice and I drove one of the best laps of my life to take pole there too. I'll be happy if we can come home in the points again and I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to."
Tonio Liuzzi:
"I have raced here twice before in F3000: two years ago I had a big crash and last year I won. I like the challenge of this place, because you are faced with the two options of being quick and accurate or ending up in the wall. I've never been a big fan of street circuits, but Monaco is something special and I love it. The atmosphere is fantastic."
"The trick here is to have confidence in yourself and in the car. You need a different approach, because with no run-off areas, you can't tell yourself you will brake later and see what the car does. I am feeling confident and well prepared and our car is good in terms of traction, which is very important here, so I think we can have a good weekend. The only negative thing is that I will be first on track for Saturday's qualifying."
Christian Horner, Sporting director:
"In many respects Monaco is the highlight of the Grand Prix calendar and is certainly a huge challenge for both drivers and teams. It is currently the only street race of the year and its unique layout makes overtaking virtually impossible to achieve. David has a fantastic track record at this circuit having won there twice. I also have fond memories of Tonio winning F3000 there last year."
"Red Bull Racing are collaborating with the new Star Wars movie, Return of the Sith, in Monaco. Characters from the movie will be guests of the team in the paddock and on the grid, which I'm sure will generate a great deal of interest. Monaco is the perfect setting to promote a movie and we are delighted to be part of the fun. Hopefully the force will be with us!"
Gunther Steiner, Technical Director:
"The test programme in Paul Ricard went well. We got all our tyre testing done and we are very happy with the choice of tyres that Michelin has provided. We also tested some aerodynamic parts that we will introduce at this grand prix. They will give us more efficiency, which is very important at this circuit."
"Traction control is another area that we focused on during the test. With our current test programme we hope that we can continue to make improvements to keep up with the progress that the big teams are making."
Simon Corbyn, Head of Race Engineering, Cosworth:
"The unique nature of the Monaco circuit places maximum emphasis on good engine driveability and effective engine control systems. Cosworth have no concerns with the two TJ2005 race engines carried forward from the Barcelona GP and we will run with increased engine performance in the race at Monaco. Cosworth are well prepared for this event."
-redbul
Still here!
May 17, 2005
Who among the teenyboppers shrieking for the Rolling Stones during their first American tour in June 1964 could have possibly imagined that some of their grandchildren would be shrieking for the Stones with the same levels of delirium in 2005, more than 40 years later?
Mick Jagger's mug may have the look of a petrified fielder's mitt, but 25-year-old Laurin Mack of Middleburg, Va., still thinks he's the sexiest man on the planet. "I realize he's as old as my dad," she said, "but it's like a chemical reaction. He was probably born sexy."
When the Stones first came to the states (four months after the Beatles), the Watusi and the monkey were big dances, Barry Goldwater embodied the hopes of the Republican Party, and John Kennedy had been dead less than a year. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were both 17.
"It was the first time we went to Omaha that I really understood how heavy it could get," said Keith Richards in an oral history compiled by the Canadian writer Alan Lysaght. "We were just sitting around drinking whiskey and Coke out of little cups before we went on and the cops walked in and said, 'What's in that cup?"'
Richards replied, "Whiskey, sir." A cop said, "You can't drink that here; it's a public place. Throw it down the drain." Richards said, "No."
When he looked up, Richards recalled, a loaded pistol was pointed at his head.
Three of the current Stones were on that tour ? Jagger and Richards, who are now 61, and Charlie Watts, who will be 64 in two and a half weeks. Joking about their ages has proved irresistible.
The Daily News came up with titles for new songs they might consider playing on their upcoming tour, including "(I Can't Get No) Metamucil" and "Let's Take a Nap Together."
A young New York Times employee was astonished to learn that Richards is old enough to have been evacuated with his family during the bombing of London by the Nazis in World War II.
You could get a ticket to a Stones concert in 1964 for $2 or $3. They didn't have a huge hit record and were pretty widely viewed as a rowdy, unkempt imitation of the Beatles. Forget 2005 (and its top ticket price of $453). They seemed unlikely to survive until 1965.
But while no one would have guessed that the Stones were 21st-century bound, the essential ingredients for their longevity were already in place. They were decent musicians and they put on a great show. The main attraction was Jagger's manic magnetism. Short, skinny and 21, he was a cross between a rooster and a lightning bolt.
The Stones were fun.
The whole key to the Stones was that they were masters of make-believe. They played at being blues musicians.
They gleefully marketed themselves as the outrageous, anarchic alternative to the Beatles, when in fact, as Richards noted in the oral history, the Beatles "were the same kind of blokes as us."
Now, in the latest of their incarnations, they are charming, aged delinquents playing their former selves.
The Stones really did love the blues, and they promoted the old blues masters. But the Stones' own music was a different story. They took the blues and wrung out the grief and sadness until all that was left in most cases was the fun. (My father would have said they took out all the vitamins.)
When the Stones, in "The Last Time," sang, "It's too much pain and too much sorrow," they sounded like the happiest guys in the world. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" sounds like the temporary disappointment of a frat boy on an off night.
While entertaining, those kinds of pieces are a long way from the sound and feel of Robert Johnson singing, "Li'l girl, my life seem so misery," or Muddy Waters begging, "Baby, please don't go."
The Stones learned enough from the blues to lift their best work above the level of the rock 'n' roll mainstream, and the rest was pretty much unadulterated fun. It's been working for them for more than 40 years.
"You don't find bands like that anymore," said Brendan Burke, a 22-year-old Stones fan who graduated last year from New York University. Their age, he said, doesn't bother him at all.
On a hunch, I asked him what he thought of as the age when people started getting old.
"Forty," he said. There was silence on the telephone. Brendan hung in there. "Forty or 45," he said.
Bob Herbert is a New York Times columnist
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Reservoir 3 Photos Courtesy Leon Yost One of the last of its kind in the United States, Reservoir 3 on Summit Avenue was built between 1851-74 as part of an extensive water works system that provided fresh drinking water to an expanding Jersey City and a busy immigration station known as Ellis Island. The design of the structure?s massive perimeter walls indicate influences of the Egyptian-Revival Style while its two pump houses are characterized by Romanesque-Revival features. Reservoir 3, emptied and unused, is now home to an emerging ecosystem, wetlands, and wildlife sanctuary. May 15, 2005 An Oasis of Wilderness, in the Middle of Jersey City? By PETER APPLEBOME Jersey City STEVE LATHAM had just finished giving an informal inventory of the fauna and flora flourishing against all odds in the oasis in the middle of Jersey City: red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons, swans and egrets, perch and goldfish, red oaks and birch, mulberries and black cherry trees. And then suddenly, standing on a rock at the water's edge, as long, thin and angular as a great blue heron, he looked up as if stunned. "Look at this," he said, gesturing toward the black forms of a half-dozen good-size large-mouthed bass swimming near the shore at the abandoned city reservoir in the Jersey City Heights. "Look how big they are. It's amazing they're even there, and look how many. I've never seen them like this before." You would think that if anyone knew all there was to know about the secret world of Reservoir 3 - built from 1871 to 1880, abandoned and forgotten around 1989, and now suddenly a public crusade - it would be Steve Latham. Mr. Latham, 49, a restaurateur on hiatus from the restaurant business, first began to explore the abandoned 14.3 acres a few years back, adopted it as a place to kayak and teach his kids about nature, and then slowly turned it into something between a cause and an obsession. So there's a statistical possibility that even without his interest there might be a huge banner across Central Avenue reading: "Save Reservoir 3: Hidden Jewel of Jersey City," but it's far more likely that if it's still open space a decade from now, he and the residents working with him will have had a lot to do with it. The words "Jersey City" and "wilderness" go together about as naturally as "Paris Hilton" and "reclusive," but in this densely populated slice of Hudson County, an accident of history has allowed one almost-invisible oasis to exist in the middle of the city for almost its entire history. Reservoir 3 - not exactly a glamorous name but the only one it has ever had - was the third part of a system created to supply the city with water from the Passaic River. Built behind imposing 20-foot-high basalt walls in Egyptian Revival style, it has an air, in old drawings and photographs, of 19th-century elegance, with Oriental rugs in the brick pump house providing an atmosphere of rather stately repose. Eventually, water from the Boonton Reservoir replaced the increasingly dubious water from the Passaic, and it was finally closed altogether around 1989 - the water drained, the site padlocked, left behind like a spooky artifact from the city's past. There was talk of building homes on it, or ball fields, or developing it as the other two reservoirs had been. But it didn't happen, and even lifelong neighborhood residents never got a glimpse behind the walls. Mr. Latham, who grew up in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, decided to wander in a few times and saw the reservoir had filled naturally with snowmelt, spring water and rainwater. It had naturally reforested, it was full of wildlife, it was like a wild miracle in the middle of a congested city, with hawks circling overhead and the Empire State Building and the towers of Manhattan poking up in the distance. Not degraded, not developed, not tended. He was taken aback. "Here was this beautiful wild spot - not manicured, not planted, but planted by nature. It was this beautiful, secret spot, this very special place." SO he wrote a letter to the local newspaper about it, discussed it with friends, stirred up some interest and founded the Jersey City Reservoir Preservation Alliance. This year the organization, with about 50 active members, put together two public tours, the second one yesterday. They drew more than a thousand people, most of whom gawked in wonder at the hidden world in their midst. What happens next is not clear. There is no shortage of worthy suggestions for its use, particularly as a school or ball fields. And Mr. Latham's dream of a natural public park, with jogging trails, a waterfall, bridges, fishing, a boathouse and a windmill all ringing a pristine pond and wilderness preserve would cost millions, he admits. Still, if nothing else, he has helped make Jersey City's secret garden at least a public secret, a place that, if it ever goes, will not go quietly without a fight. "It's still a gorgeous urban oasis, but it's no longer a secret," said Mariano Vega, a City Council member who supports keeping land as pristine as possible. "They've got it on people's radar screen, which is a good thing. Because you can never again create something like that in Jersey City. Once it's gone, it's gone forever." E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections RSS Help Contact Us Back to Top
May 16, 2005
60 Years Later, Debating Yalta All Over Again
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON
When President Bush declared on May 7 in Latvia that the 1945 Yalta agreement led to "one of the greatest wrongs of history," he reignited an ideological debate from the era of Joseph McCarthy. For more than a week now, the left and the right have been arguing over the president's words and rearguing the deal made by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill in an old czarist resort near the Crimean city of Yalta in the closing days of World War II.
Mr. Bush has criticized Yalta at least six other times publicly, usually in Eastern Europe, but never so harshly. In the dust kicked up by the quarreling, the central questions for White House watchers are these: How did the unexpected attack on Yalta get in the president's speech? What drove his thinking? Did the White House expect the fallout?
First, the history and the debate.
Yalta effectively recognized Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, and set the stage for what later became known as the cold war. In the view of many conservatives, the dying Roosevelt did nothing less at Yalta than sell out Eastern Europe to Soviet control for the next 50 years. In the view of liberals, including major historians, Roosevelt ceded Poland and parts of Eastern Europe to Stalin because the Red Army controlled the territory anyway, and Yalta changed no realities on the ground. Yalta also called for free elections in Poland, which Stalin later ignored.
Mr. Bush not only sided with the conservatives in his speech in the Latvian capital, Riga, but he also took a harder-line view against Yalta than any other American president, including Ronald Reagan. By far Mr. Bush's most hotly contested formulation was his assertion that Yalta followed in the "unjust tradition" of the secret nonaggression deal between the Nazis and the Soviets known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the British appeasement of Hitler in the Munich pact.
"Which is a bit much," said John Lewis Gaddis of Yale, a leading historian of the cold war. "Munich and the Nazi-Soviet pact caused things to happen. Yalta didn't change anything. If the Yalta conference had never taken place, the division of Europe into two great spheres of influence would still have happened."
Robert Dallek, a Boston University historian and an expert on Roosevelt's foreign policy, agreed. "Republicans have been beating on this issue since the end of the Roosevelt presidency, and they have been consistently off the mark," he said. "This idea that Roosevelt and Churchill gave away Eastern Europe to the Soviets is nonsense."
David M. Kennedy, a Stanford historian, put it this way: "This was a stick to beat the Democrats up with in the McCarthy era."
Conservatives are equally adamant. In his syndicated column last Wednesday, Patrick J. Buchanan said that Mr. Bush told "the awful truth" about who really triumphed in World War II east of the Elbe - "it was Stalin, the most odious tyrant of the century" - and that the pact that Roosevelt and Churchill co-signed at Yalta was a "monstrous lie."
On the same day, Anne Applebaum, a columnist for The Washington Post, wrote that "a small crew of liberal historians and Rooseveltians have leaped to argue that the president was wrong." In fact, she said, Yalta and other wartime deals "went beyond mere recognition of Soviet occupation and conferred legality and international acceptance on new borders and political structures."
At the White House, Mr. Bush's speech was written by Michael Gerson, the assistant to the president for policy and strategic planning and the former chief speechwriter who still has a big hand in Mr. Bush's major addresses. The language in Mr. Gerson's Latvia speech that Yalta, in an "attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability" left a continent "divided and unstable," built on steadily intensifying language over the previous four years.
In June 2001 in Warsaw, Mr. Bush said, "Yalta did not ratify a natural divide, it divided a living civilization." In November 2002 in Lithuania, he declared that there would be "no more Munichs, no more Yaltas." In May 2003 in Krakow, he said, "Europe must finally overturn the bitter legacy of Yalta." This February in Brussels, Mr. Bush said, "The so-called stability of Yalta was a constant source of injustice and fear."
An administration official said on Friday that in the discussions about Mr. Bush's address - the president typically gives his speechwriters big-picture thematic direction and then has a heavy hand in the editing - the goal was to make the point that "countries need to look at their pasts." In this case, the White House wanted to make the point that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Bush's host the following day, should apologize for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which led to the Soviet annexation of Latvia and the other Baltic states.
So Mr. Bush's assertion of American failure at Yalta was viewed at the White House as a model for what Mr. Putin should - but did not - do. It was also a poke in the eye to the Russians, salve to Mr. Bush's Baltic hosts and an effort to contrast what Mr. Bush promotes as his uncompromising vision for democracy in the Middle East with what he sees as the expedience of the past.
The administration official, who requested anonymity because he said he wanted to let the president's words speak for themselves, said the White House had not anticipated last week's fallout, nor had anyone there discussed what he called the "nasty and stupid" Yalta politics of the McCarthy era.
"The point was, it was a lousy agreement," the official said.
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