The Annual August Surprise

When I worked for a news organization, you couldn’t help but notice that August was a funny time. Everyday of the year you worried that in the 12 to 18 hours between writing something and its appearance in print something would happen in the world to make the piece obsolete and you look stupid.

But August brought with it a different worry; that something interesting, vital, cataclysmic would happen and you’d miss it entirely because you were on vacation. This was less true in the kind of Podunk places I lived, but it was obviously a concern for those in the big city or covering a national beat.

To some extent the lightly staffed news operations of August were a silly anachronism. Before air conditioning, Washington shut down in summer which made sense as a precaution against heat stroke or malaria. But there’s no excuse now for governing on a seasonal basis.

Wall Street too operates on reduced power in August, trading is light and the old slogan, “Sell in May and go away,” might as well still be in force. But things do happen, especially now that markets are global and run at the speed of light. Between the collapse of IndyMac in July 2008 and the Lehman debacle in September, disaster was clearly rushing toward us. One wonders if legislators, regulators, Wall Street mavens and news men hadn’t been on a beach somewhere the mess might have been mitigated, action taken in a more timely manner.

Yet nothing seems to change. Congress has just packed up for five weeks. The president will soon be off to a playground of the rich and well-guarded. And half the media elite are undoubtedly heading for Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons. Tune in any TV news show during August and you are likely to see a gaggle of second string players who are sure to be caught unawares if the usual surprise occurs.

In fact, the August surprise is so regular an occurrence that it shouldn’t be a surprise at all. Many of the great August surprises were long before my time. Vesuvius buried Pompeii in August. It was sort of the Martha’s Vineyard of its day. World War I kicked off in August and the first atom bombs were dropped in this month. By then it was clear the war would be won, but nobody expected a radioactive mushroom cloud to play a part. That was a genuine surprise.

Others include the move to wall off Berlin in 1961 and, to some extent, Nixon’s resignation in 1974. He was probably not going to serve out his term, but the exact shape of the denouement was in question until it wasn’t.

When I was paying close attention to events of the day for living there were two consecutive August surprises that caught everyone flat footed. First, Saddam’s rapid conquest of Kuwait in August of 1990. Then a year later the Soviet coup that toppled Gorbachev and set off a chain reaction that led, within six months, to the end of the Soviet Union after a Cold War that had lasted for my entire lifetime.

This year there’s no need for a surprise and plenty of reason for anyone in government or the news business to regard their vacation plans as contingent on events. Ukraine could easily go from bad to worse. The Middle East is chockablock with ongoing catastrophes — Israel and Gaza, Isis in Iraq, and Syria. Not to mention our own slow motion mess on the Mexican border.

There’s also the fact to consider that August is hurricane season. No surprise there, but the annual storms can present challenges that permit those in power to fumble the ball. The George W. presidency never recovered from his feckless handling of Katrina in August 2005.

In other words, this month is already going to be eventful even without a surprise. And that is just when a surprise is most likely to, well, surprise. So stay tuned news junkies. The worst is probably yet to come.

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