Orlando Patterson with a memory of a meeting with President Ford, and Maureen Dowd who, as usual, cannot say what's on her mind without being that catty highschool "in crowd" girl we all learned to loathe.

In the summer of 1975, I was asked by Robert Goldman, President Ford’s in-house intellectual, to participate in a discussion on ethnicity at the White House, one of a series put on for the edification of the president.

America was then going through the so-called ethnic revival. Talk about the recovery of threatened ethnic heritage was everywhere, the beginnings of what later evolved into the multicultural and identity movement. Politicians had been quick to grasp the movement’s potential, and it would become a controversial issue in the subsequent presidential election.

I gathered from our conversation that the unusual nature of Ford’s ascent to the presidency had prevented the normal electoral process of learning that transformed local politicians into potential statesmen, and that the discussions were a crash course substitute. The other members of the ethnicity session would be Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future senator from New York, Nat Glazer, my colleague at Harvard, Michael Novak, a writer and public speaker who had recently emerged as the leading ideologist of the revival, and John Higham, the historian of immigration. I was flattered to be so honored, but felt it necessary to point out that I was then the friend of and special adviser to the second most radical leader in the hemisphere, Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica, who at the time was very much on the radar screen of the C.I.A. and State Department. They already knew that, but my associations were deemed irrelevant. I was impressed.

We met one Saturday in an airy, informal part of the White House, the room flooded with the late-morning light of early fall. The president’s golf game had gone on a bit longer than anticipated, and as we waited I mused to myself that we were being asked to perform the intellectual version of a medieval jousting tournament. Novak would passionately defend the ethnic revival; I was strongly against it. Higham was more of my persuasion. Moynihan and Glazer were presumably the moderates, but since their recently published text, “Beyond the Melting Pot,” had rapidly become the locus classicus of the new ethnicity, it was hardly an even match.

The president’s entry was refreshingly lacking in drama. There was no sudden hush, no ego filling up the room, not the slightest whiff of alpha male testosterone. He was a fine-looking man, in a Lake Wobegon sort of way. Casually dressed and relaxed in manner, he shook hands firmly, apologized for being late with a self-effacing remark about his game, then invited us to have drinks with him. He finished two martinis before lunch. Moynihan and I happily joined him, while the others discreetly held glasses filled with something else.

Accompanying the president was the soft-spoken young aide who had initiated and made this all possible. His shoulders hunched in a confiding way as he addressed us, and his thoughtful, collegial manner put us instantly at ease. This was Dick Cheney, the chief of staff, and I will never be able to reconcile the open, intellectually broad-minded person I met that day with the secretive éminence grise of today.

During the discussion’s more formal phase, I told the president that I had been drawn to America by the cosmopolitanism of its mainstream, not to seek sanctuary in an atavistic cocoon. I argued that all ethnic movements are two-edged swords. Beginning benignly, and sometimes necessary to repair injured collective psyches, they often end in tragedy, especially when they turn political, as illustrated by German history.

I also argued that the ethnic revival was partly a reaction against the recent gains of black Americans. Sadly, black leaders’ shift to separatism and identity politics had legitimized this reactionary backlash against them. Whatever the president’s personal position, I urged him to keep the state out of it.

Throughout our discussion the president listened attentively. He occasionally asked a question — nothing profound, but enough to suggest that he was following it all quite closely. As we talked over lunch it slowly dawned on me that the president’s behavior was the most inspiring display of self-assured humility I had ever witnessed. Here he sat, the most powerful man in the world, eager to learn about his own society, even from a recent immigrant.

He was a man at peace with himself. Uncomplicated but without a trace of shallowness; calm, dignified and quietly engaging, a person you would like to be your friend.

Orlando Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, is a guest
columnist.

Next up, Maureen Dowd, who might actually have had something to say, can’t resist being a catty bitch. I guess that’s her tiger …

There was a touch of parody to the giddy Democrat takeover this week: Nancy Pelosi indulging her inner Haight-Ashbury and dipping the Capitol in tie-dye, sashaying around with the Grateful Dead, Wyclef Jean, Carole King, Richard Gere, feminists and a swarm of well-connected urchins.

The first act of House Democrats who promised to govern with bipartisan comity was imperiously banishing Republicans from participating in the initial round of lawmaking. Even if Republicans were brutes during their reign, Democrats should have shown more class, letting the whiny minority party offer some stupid amendments that would lose.

Perhaps the Democrats’ power-shift into overdrive is a neurological disorder, or neuropolitical disorder.

If free will is an illusion — if we are, as one philosopher put it, “nothing more than sophisticated meat machines,” doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over — that would explain a lot about the latest trend in which everyone is reverting to type.

William James wrote in 1890 that the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”

But in Science Times this week, Dennis Overbye advised Dr. James to “get over it,” observing that “a bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control.”

As Mark Hallett of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke told Mr. Overbye, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. ... The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it.”

That would explain why, after voters insisted that the president wrap it up in Iraq, he made a big show of pretending to listen, then decided to do a war do-over.

Is this just the baked-in stubbornness of one man, or is W.’s behavior evidence that he has no free will? Is the Decider freely choosing another huge blunder or is he taking instructions from his genetic and political coding, fearing that if he admits what a foul hash he’s made of Iraq, he’ll be labeled a wimp, as his dad was?

If W. is trapped on a tiger, he’s not the only one.

John McCain can’t get beyond seeing himself as a maverick now that he’s become a nonmaverick, a right-wing Republican urging an escalation of a hopeless war, even though he’s already lived through an escalation of a hopeless war.

“There are two keys to any surge in U.S. troops,” Senator McCain told an appreciative audience at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday. “It must be substantial, and it must be sustained.”

With the letter she and Harry Reid wrote to the president yesterday, warning him that “we are well past the point of more troops for Iraq,” Speaker Pelosi tried to exert her free will to stop the Surge. But the Democrats aren’t willing to take real action and cut off money for the Surge. They’re predetermined to want to have it both ways: not to be blamed for the war and not to be blamed for pulling the plug on the war.

Iraq has become a snake pit of factions failing to escape fate. Shiites and Sunnis have been fighting and killing each other for about 1,400 years over who was the rightful heir to Muhammad, and yet the entire American high command was somehow taken aback that Shiites and Sunnis can’t muster the free will to keep their country from disintegrating.

Could it have been kismet that there were Shiites taunting Saddam at his hanging? Maybe it was preordained back in the days when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and the British diplomat Gertrude Bell drew the boundaries of the modern Iraq that a security guy with a cellphone would capture the spectacle.

Despite all the talk back in the 2000 campaign about a robustly experienced foreign-policy dream team, it may have been destined that the Bush administration would be asleep in the run-up to the insurgency, just as it was asleep in the run-up to 9/11, to Katrina, to the occupation and to the refugee crisis in Iraq. Either all that was predetermined, or the administration was preternaturally negligent.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher who said a man can do what he wants but cannot will what he wants, would have understood W.’s nonsensical urge to Surge.

We don’t know if human beings have free will. We just know that human beings in Washington appear not to.