SELF-PROMOTION: I recently reviewed Nicholas von Hoffman's book Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinksy for the online edition of TAC (and, as a result, got into an interesting back-and-forth with Andrew Sullivan about the Tea Party movement). I also have an article in the November Reason -- a revised and hopefully improved version of my Web piece "Forced to Be Free."
advised Senator John F. Kennedy during his watershed television debates with Richard M. Nixon in 1960 (and directed the broadcast of the third debate). Mr. Penn's instructions to Kennedy -- to look directly into the lens of the camera and keep his responses brief and pithy -- helped give the candidate an aura of confidence and calm that created a vivid contrast to his more experienced but less telegenic Republican rival.
I'm not sure how Kennedy's debate coach managed to get a gig as a debate director as well, but Nixon was probably stewing about it for years afterward.
Penn's other credits include the revisionist western Little Big Man, the paranoid thrillers Mickey One and Night Moves, and the Arlo Guthrie vehicle Alice's Restaurant, described by my colleague Nick Gillespie as "the greatest anti-hippy movie this side of Joe." He also directed Penn & Teller -- a duo infinitely preferable to Kennedy & Nixon -- in the cult favorite Penn and Teller Get Killed.
I suppose Bonnie and Clyde is Penn's most "important" movie: It set off the whole New Hollywood period, so even if you don't care for the film in itself you have to give it credit for paving the way for all those great early-'70s flicks starring the likes of Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates. But my favorite Arthur Penn picture is Night Moves, with Gene Hackman as a pro football player turned private eye pursuing a mystery that never quite resolves itself. In a sane world, it would have had an impact far greater than that of any mere president.
2. Other environmentalists are not responsible for what he did. As I wrote when Tiller was killed, words do have influence, but that doesn't mean people are morally responsible for all the ways their words can be received. The pro-life movement's rhetoric is not to blame for Roeder, and the green movement's rhetoric is not to blame for Lee. I can't endorse James Delingpole's view that "there is not a cigarette paper's difference" between the ideologies of James Lee and the Prince of Wales. The two men may agree about the virtues of population control, but there's no sign that they agree about the virtues of kidnapping people and threatening to kill them.
3. It's terrorism, but it isn't a particularly menacing kind of terrorism. In The Washington Examiner, Mark Hemingway pivoted from quoting Lee's misanthropic manifesto to suggesting that eco-terrorism is "America's biggest domestic terrorist threat." Well, unlike some of the people who get saddled with the "eco-terrorist" label, Lee really does fit the bill. But consider the small number of lives that were endangered yesterday, and the fact that the only person who ended up dying was the thug who took the hostages in the first place. If eco-terror is the biggest threat, then this couldn't be a good example of it -- or else the other sorts of domestic terrorists are really pathetic.