Three big does are concentrating on tufts of early grass at the left side of the front yard this evening. They, or their sisters and brothers, have already dined on the snowdrops in the backyard, although they haven’t eaten up the small daffodils that are just budding, at least not yet.

    Sitting at my computer at the front of the house, I can see what they are up to. I spy on them as they come and go, mingling among what remains of the many-decades-old rosebushes they decimated last summer.

    These three does are probably the same ones that watched me drive away from the house early this morning. They’re a wily bunch. A few nights ago I spied 6, hiking diagonally across the yard, and, about 10 days ago, I counted 12 marching through, moving quickly.

    I wonder where all these animals go when they aren’t in my yard. The adjacent properties are protected by deer fences; are the deer slinking across Main Street to some secret deer reconnaissance site?

    As I sit looking out the window I am eating an early supper of asparagus and a vegetable chili made with . . . venison. How do you like that, deer?

    (The recipe, on an old yellowed clipping, comes from The Star’s “Long Island Larder” column, which was written for many years by Miriam Ungerer. Miriam, who lives in Massachusetts now, told me the other day that someone was interested in publishing another book of her recipes, using that title. Miriam has four cookbooks to her name and it’s time she added a new one. I hope it happens.)

    It must be obvious that I am not squeamish about venison, or wild fowl, or any wild edibles, for that matter, having been treated to these local foods from the earliest days of my marriage to Ev Rattray. He was brought up here and had hunted most of his life. One day, though, after our first child was born and John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he decided to put away his shotgun. “There has been enough killing in the world,” he said.

    That didn’t keep us from enjoying others’ quarry. We rationalized it, telling ourselves that it would be worse to waste something that had already been shot. For about 10 years, we were the recipients once a year of a deer that had been hunted on Gardiner’s Island. It would hang in the barn for a time before being taken to a butcher. We liked to make venison stews, and most of the recipes are still around. I am pretty sure we never made venison chili back in those days.

    The chili, with zucchini and peppers and carrots and, of course, beans, was really good. If you told anyone it had been made with beef, they wouldn’t have known the difference. The venison arrived in three huge frozen patties from a friend of a friend of a friend. I guess the intermediaries are a bit squeamish.

    In a Star editorial last week, David Rattray blamed deer for destroying the understory of the woods, suggesting that hunting might be the only practical way to bring their population into balance with that of other woodland creatures, including birds. This week, we will publish a letter from Bill Crain, president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife, who argues against hunting and believes that immunocontraception would work and should be tested.

    I’m of many minds about what would be the right thing to do. Clearly, something must be done. Maybe there is more than one solution. But although tonight’s juxtaposition of does on the lawn and venison chili in my dinner bowl was rather startling — if admittedly somewhat amusing — I am not going to become a vegetarian any day soon.

   After getting my new hearing aid, and phoning Mary, I told her she didn’t need to shout.

    “But that’s the way I always speak when I’m talking to you,” she said.

    “Well, just tone it down a bit, I’m not deaf.”

    And then it occurred to me that, indeed, I am no longer deaf. The technology — though pricey — has finally caught up with me, and I can no longer plead hearing impairment when it serves my purposes to do so.

    “It’s all a cacophony,” I said. “The peanuts squeak between my teeth as I’m chewing, I look like ‘The Scream’ whenever the toilet flushes, the stairs groan unbelievably when I tred on them. . . .”

    “Welcome back to the real world.”

    “But I preferred my own. Despite what I used to say about participating in the dance — dance, it’s more like a stampede — of life. Things were quieter then, I was less tuned in, and rather liked it. For instance, the office, which I used to think was utterly silent, with everyone staring at their computers, is far more distracting than I thought.”

    Of course I can always shut my door — I am one of the few so privileged — but that would be a retreat into the nostalgic past. No, I must face the music. I no longer am in the world yet not of it. I must communicate — a strange imperative to come from the lips of one who’s been in the communications business for as long as he can remember, even when he was in the Army tapping out “Ben’s best bent wire” in Morse code in a Fort Bragg classroom.

    But how can one think with all that’s going on, to my left and right, before and behind, above and below, inside and out — plaints, scratchings, squeaky chairs, rumbles, phone conversations, the incessant traffic, the slurping of soup, the ingestion of sandwiches. . . .

    Accepting the fact that I’m now like everyone else will take some getting used to. It doesn’t quite fit my otherworldly persona. All of a sudden, within the span of a few weeks, I have a laptop computer, the first I’ve ever owned, and a professional-looking case to put it in, and a hearing aid that . . . will you shut up out there! . . . won’t abide my evasions anymore.

    And I thought these were supposed to be the Golden Years.

From time to time, when someone asks why, given my age, I haven’t retired, I explain that I really enjoy editing what others write. The truth, though, is that the pleasure waxes and wanes. If a story is good enough to require very little editing, my work is easy but not much fun. If a narrative is jammed full of extraneous words and ideas — or if the most compelling information is left for the bitter end  — editing can be tough. On those rare occasions, however, when a writer and I work together to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, the job I do is very gratifying. (One of those occasions occurred last week, but I’m not going to tell you which story it was.) 

A nice result of having been an editor for a long time is that I’ve learned a lot about language from experience and others. Staff members have offered helpful tips. One, for example, is how to know when to spell stationery with an “e” rather than an “a.” All you need to remember is that envelopes are stationery.

Not long ago, one of our writers sent along a clipping about the difference between “bring” and “take.” Not everyone goes around mulling over such things, but the editorial “we” enjoys doing so. “Bring” denotes motion toward something while take refers to motion away from something.

Someone also set me straight on the difference between further and farther by simply pointing out that East Hampton’s Further Lane was incorrect. Farther is correctly used for physical distance; further for occurrences or thought.

Language is always in flux, of course, which makes writing and editing a challenge whether or not the task at hand is fun. Everyday speech will sometimes just take over the grammar books. At The Star we hold to many of the recommendations in Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” Some may think this old hat, although the fourth edition of the book was published as recently as 2000. Like The New York Times, The Star follows Strunk and White in forming the possessive singular of a noun by adding an apostrophe and an S. The Times ignores at least one other rule, about the serial comma (a.k.a., the Oxford comma), that we adhere to.

I am not sure whatever happened to parallel tenses, i.e., using “has” when it should be “had.” Jack Graves, our sports editor for lo, these many years, used to try his best to get everyone here to use parallel tenses, but I’m afraid he gave up. And don’t get Irene Silverman, another longtime Star editor, started on the importance of using active rather than passive voice.

Then there are some recent changes in usage that befuddle us; when matters are in transition, rather than settled one way or the other, all bets are off. For example, younger writers often drop the word “the” where I think it is necessary. The subject of a story this week “was on unpaid leave of absence from her job at Springs School.” I would have stuck in “the” before the school’s name. Quicker and snappier is perennially the trend.

Paul Friese, our advertising production manager, whose linguistic skills cannot be faulted, recently sent me a poetic treatise on disparate English spelling and pronunciation, but that is a topic for another day. Meanwhile, you might enjoy looking up “The Chaos” by Dr. Gerard Nolst Trenite. Be forewarned: It runs to more than 3,000 words. 

   Yesterday marked the 14th birthday of our Jack Russell, Petie.

    Fourteen is pretty old for a Jack, and Petie is showing his age. Those formerly fiercely brilliant brain cells, which once allowed him the wherewithal to actually climb a chicken-wire fence to obtain the delicious decomposing deer leg on the other side (but not, unfortunately, to climb back and therefore Not Get Caught), have been all but extinguished.

    His eyes are empty. When you look into them, you can almost hear the static. He is also deaf. And his stiff movements confirm joint pain that baby aspirin and a soft dog bed cannot seem to assuage.

    Petie was one of a litter of six puppies we bred out of Jane Russell, our beautiful bitch, and Jackson, a Sag Harbor gadabout who was once profiled in Dan’s Papers as a village favorite.

    Petie was the last puppy out. Like Lucky in “101 Dalmatians,” I needed to assist with the birth; Jane was tired and done pushing. The little bag over his head had to be pinched with fingernails, but still there was no breath, no body movement. Only vigorous rubbing — which I learned from repeated viewings of that Disney movie — finally brought a little yawn to that tiny mouth and a brief mewing noise that let us know he was going to stick around for a while.

    We named him Petie for the brown circle around one eye, like the dog in “The Little Rascals,” a circle that has gone gray with age in the last few years. We needed to put down his mother four years ago, and it seems like that was when Petie grew up, and then very quickly, grew old.

    There are some things about Petie that haven’t changed.

    He will eat anything that falls on the ground. This includes all manner of food, except blueberries, which confound him for some reason. It also includes money, earrings, small bits of paper, and recently-swatted flies.

    He continues to hate the black Pug, snarling whenever Tobias G. Willikers gets within Petie’s personal bubble. They have been companions for over four years — and, in fact, share yesterday as a birthday (but the Pug isn’t very interesting to write about since he was obviously bred for beauty and not brains. In fact, it may be difficult to tell when he enters his own stage of doggie dementia).

    Petie still shows extreme patience when my children color him. Yes, the white dog gets markered up on appropriate holidays — black and orange for Halloween, red, white, and blue for Independence Day, and no doubt a deep Kelly green this weekend.

    Petie has always had the shakes. A lot of Jack Russells do. My husband, the beautiful Eric Johnson, calls it “Barkinson’s disease.” Lately, the shaking is almost constant. And he can’t quite make it through a night now without scratching at our bedroom door to go out. At least he still remembers to do that . . . most of the time.

    After those 4 a.m. moonlight rambles, when he sometimes can’t find his way back to the porch unless I flick the light on and off, I let him in and lift him gently up onto our bed, mindful of his arthritis. Being on the bed has been a no-no since he was little. But I want him to be comfortable. He has trouble breathing sometimes, and I stroke his head, mumbling, “Good dog, good dog,” under my breath.

    And I think of all the times in the past 14 years that he has been there for me, without complaint: acting as a sentry for my babies as they slept, always available for cuddles during scary movies and gratefully sharing popcorn, alerting me without fail to the appearance of mailmen and friends, keeping my kitchen floor spotless and my yard squirrel-free.

    And I look into those empty eyes, and whisper loving words to him that he can no longer hear. He gazes at something just beyond my shoulder, smiles, and weakly thumps his tail.

    I hope he sees his mother, Jane, standing next to a ripe and tasty deer leg, with no more fences to climb and no more black pugs to annoy.

    And, for his sake, I secretly hope he’ll get there soon.

    Bridget LeRoy is a reporter at The Star.

   We preach to the choir at our house, and when, following her excellent exegesis the other night of the world situation in which I could only nod in assent as each point was hammered home, Mary asked me what I thought, I said I thought it was about time to go to bed.

    Before I did, though, we agreed that if we had our druthers, we’d vote in the general election for one-fourth of Ron Paul, that quarter which says we should avoid foreign entanglements, and for three-quarters of Barack Obama — that part of him which sees the folly of combining a tax holiday for the rich with puritanical belt tightening for the rest of us and which is for education and for something approaching universal medical care.

    As for the $2 trillion or so we owe for our regrettable military adventurism in the past decade, which, aside from many dead and wounded servicemen, has achieved a civilian body count far and away surpassing the 3,000 killed in the World Trade Center attacks, and which has alienated countless more hearts and minds than ever would have been had we not acted in such haste, I can only advise that they start passing the hat.

    They can start at these debates. It’s the patriotic thing to do.

    And while the hat is being passed about, rugged individualists who want to forswear the trappings of the Welfare State, who want to get an intrusive government off their backs, should, when they dig deep for the Pentagon — presumably they will be so inclined — sign pledges to forgo Social Security payments and Medicare coverage. It’s the patriotic thing to do.

    Independent of this, on reading the other day that Plato’s school had over its entryway the inscription “Let no one untrained in geometry enter here,” I alit on what I thought was a marvelously clever idea.

    “Ah,” I said to Mary, “I’ll put one up over my office door that says, ‘Let no one untrained in absurdity enter here!’ ” And so I did.

    “Philip Roth would be proud,” she said when I made the announcement. But then, on reflection, she advised against it. “That means you’d be including all these absurd G.O.P. debaters, you know.”

    “I agree; it would be a big tent, a mighty big tent.”

    This morning I took it down from the lintel. At the moment, because I can’t bear to let it go quite yet, the red-lettered injunction is Scotch-taped to an inner wall under my favorite bumper sticker, “Honk If You Love Peace And Quiet.” I feel I owe absurdity that much.

   This week’s cold snap notwithstanding, spring has come early this year. Bruce Collins, who lives in East Hampton Village, phoned recently to say he had seen red-wing blackbirds in his yard more than a week ago, something he did not recall before the middle of March.

    Out where we live on the southeastern reach of Gardiner’s Bay, things are a week or so behind the village. I noticed the rusty-wire call of my first red-wing on Saturday though, which is early enough. There have been no spring peeper frogs yet; their trills are at least another 10 days off.

    It had been another cleaning and organizing weekend around the Rattray household. The kids have been growing (as usual), and there were clothes to be given away. The chicken coop, which had not been swept out since the fall, was due for a change of bedding. An old mattress took a last ride to the town dump. Amid all the trips back and forth, I spent a lot of time outdoors, listening to the birds, paying attention to the season’s signals.

    A cardinal perched in a scrub oak on the water side of the house held forth in the morning. Chirps and whistles from birds I could not identify came from unseen redoubts in the surrounding marshes. The bay was oddly quiet.

    Most winters the bay rattles with the gabbling of the long-tailed ducks, which raft in large, extended families a good way offshore. I assume they have been scarce this winter because their preferred grounds to the north have remained free of ice.

    There have been the usual gulls along the shore most days — herring gulls and a few black-backs. At dawn, when the wind has been from the north, they hurry to pick up scallops blown in overnight. They squall and bicker over what they find and quiet down once feeding is through.

    It may have been a mild winter on land, but dawn on the beach is bitter when the wind is up. Mostly, it is the gulls’ domain, for a few more weeks at any rate. The gulls’ lot is a hard way to make a living, although until it warms up they have little competition. Some mornings I see raccoon or fox tracks in the sand. Deer, too, walk the beach, though for what purpose I can’t be sure.    It may have been a mild winter on land, but dawn on the beach is bitter when the wind is up. Mostly, it is the gulls’ domain, for a few more weeks at any rate. The gulls’ lot is a hard way to make a living, although until it warms up they have little competition. Some mornings I see raccoon or fox tracks in the sand. Deer, too, walk the beach, though for what purpose I can’t be sure.

I do not know if you can ever understand loss, no matter how many times you experience it. In most things in life, repeated experience is a teacher, but each time you experience true loss, the circumstances are always unique, so the lessons are limited in use.  

    The second time in my life I experienced loss was in 1963 when I was 7 years old.

    There was a little patch of dirt on the side of our house on Lexington Avenue in West Hempstead. Every day that summer, I took my dump truck and my cement mixer and my bulldozer and I built a road in that patch of dirt. My roads may have led to nowhere, but they took me on a daily journey.

    I would speak for the imaginary men involved, who always seemed to be named Joe or Mack.

    “Hey Joe, better dig that hole right there,” Mack would shout.

    “All right, Mack.” And the hole would be dug, only to be filled in and redughe next day.

    And every day our neighbor, Mr. Laurel, would stop by and lean over the white picket fence that separated my construction site from his driveway and ask me what I was doing. I would explain to him the various ongoing projects, and he would smile and nod his head as if what I was saying to him was real and meaningful. I enjoyed talking to him because he actually listened to me.

    Mr. and Mrs. Laurel had moved in that spring. They were an older couple. Mr. Laurel was the first adult I had met whom I considered a friend.

    One day I was digging, with Mack barking orders to the ever-compliant Joe, when an ambulance pulled up in front of the Laurels’ house. Two men got out of the vehicle with a stretcher and went inside.

    A few minutes later they came out, carrying Mr. Laurel. They put him in the back of the ambulance and drove away.

    I never saw him again.

    My parents tried to explain death to me, but it was a concept strange, foreign. I remember that Mrs. Laurel came over one afternoon to sit with me.

    I had experienced loss the first time more than a year earlier. It was not a person or a thing I lost, it was a place.

    My father was, and still is, a writer, a newspaperman who also wrote short stories and, recently, a book. Before him, his father was a newspaperman and a writer, a very successful short story writer, selling over 100 stories to The Saturday Evening Post. His name was regularly featured on the Post cover with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Booth Tarkington, Agatha Christie, and Ring Lardner. His success gave him something most writers don’t have: money. The McMorrows weren’t rich, but they certainly were affluent.

    He took some of that money in the early 1920s and bought the family a beach house in the newly formed village of Ocean Beach on Fire Island. The house sat on a dune at the end of Bungalow Walk, facing the ocean.

    My earliest memories are like glittering grains of sand, splashed across the floor. The ride to Bay Shore. Daddy parks the car. We get on a ferry, cross the bay, get off on the dock. We have a wagon, our wagon. If there wasn’t too much on the wagon I’d pull it, or even ride in it. Ice cream cone at John and Anne’s, head down Bungalow Walk, cross Midway. Midway was magic. We were almost there, the ocean, the house. Sleep at night, the sound of the waves, sometimes crashing, sometimes gentle, the lullaby of the waves.

    Breakfast in the morning, out onto the beach. All day on the beach. Me and my two sisters and mom and Tante Frieda and Mum-Mum, Dad there on the weekend, all women during the week unless my cousins were there, in which case there were three other boys to play and race and wrestle and fight with. Splash in the ocean, dig holes in the sand, run along the beach. Before dinner, we’d go back up to the house. Play around the house, but stay off the dune, never play on the dune. The dune was sacred.

    If it was just me and my sisters, maybe we’d take turns riding the wagon downhill on the Bungalow path from the beach across Ocean View. Or else they would do girl things and I’d get out my trucks and dig away.

    If our cousins were there, I’d play with Bunky. His name was Tommy but to me he was Bunky. We weren’t supposed to go under the house but one time we did, opening up the storage area, pulling out old toys our own fathers had played with.

    Dinner was fish, almost always fish. One time a bone got stuck in my throat. It hurt. The adults were concerned. There was a doctor nearby. We went there and he reached in and pulled the bone out. To this day I love fish but am phobic about the bones.

    At night, the adults smoking, laughing, drinking. Mum-Mum always had a little whiskey and ice in her glass, the sound the ice cubes made in her glass, a light clinking-clink.

    Then to bed, to sleep, to rejoin the ocean’s serenade.

    In my memory, those were the summers of my early childhood. In reality, they were the May and June and September, even October. The house was always rented during the season to pay the bills.

    March 9, 1962. The house in West Hempstead. Somber. Dark outside and dark in. My father, distraught.

    He was holding pictures of the beach house, where he’d grown up and then started to raise his own family, large photographs that a newsman had taken of the wreckage. Piles of wood were all that was left. Smashed by the ocean. Holding the photos in his hands, slowly tearing them up, one by one.

    A storm had hit, a powerful northeaster. It began on March 6, the same day as the new moon, the highest tide of the month. It battered the East Coast for three days, for five high tides.

    The Army Corps of Engineers had built a huge revetment to protect the houses on the dune on Ocean Beach. Over the course of five high tides, the ocean had breached the dune behind the revetment, forming a powerful pulsing wave of water running behind the dune, a stream that sucked in the homes that sat there, one by one.

    In the end, only three houses remained on the dune after the storm. Ours was not one of them. The land that the destroyed houses had stood on was condemned by the state, never to be built on again. 

    We went to Ocean Beach once that summer. It was strange, sitting on the beach in front of where our house had been — that beautiful two-storied shingled beach house, now just an empty dune, glistening sand — returning that night to West Hempstead.

    T.E. McMorrow is a reporter at The Star.

   About this time 25 years ago, in a fit of pique prompted by what I thought was an untimely weekend invasion of city folk seeking summer rentals, I wrote a column whose envoi, “go home scumbags,” sparked a six-week firestorm of reproval, each letter writer apparently thinking I’d been referring to him, when, in fact, I had been more enamored of the delightful rhythm of the phrase than put out by anyone in particular.

    And, as my wife has reminded me many times since, the point of the column was that, in the end, I, the so-called nativist, advocated ear­nestly in behalf of a weekend visitor who’d arrived too late to be served dinner at a restaurant whose owner I knew, and had begged leave to serve as his and his wife’s guide to the area’s chief points of interest.

    But the enraged, I think, didn’t read that far, put off, I suppose, by a fanciful vow to take up arms against the invading horde. As if I could do anything about it. Subdivide it and they will come.

    And now, dear reader, an intimate revelation: I’m a scumbag! A wretch and no less an arriviste than anyone else whose surname’s not Miller, Bennett, Osborne, Osborn, Lester, or Talmage.

    Scumbag, scumbag, scumbag. There, I’ve said it. It’s just a word, though shitballs remains my favorite.

    I should, I suppose, have fully owned up to my scumbagginess in the neiges d’autant 25 years ago. That was my error, what I think led to all the furor.

    But on this unutterably blithe springlike day at the end of winter, on this gentle day in which Henry and I have drifted like clouds, I feel at peace and at one with all who live or visit here. I never really meant to give offense.

   Traveling with children, as my wife and I did last week, is, for those of you who have not experienced it, anything but relaxing. A man in the San Juan Airport departure terminal Tuesday, noticing Lisa chasing after our 2-year-old, Ellis, remarked out of the blue that she looked tired. I am sure I am looking tired, too, as I write this on a Delta flight back to J.F.K. After we land, we have at least two more hours on the road.

    The trip to Puerto Rico was our first time on a jet plane since we became a family of five. We had waited until Ellis was past the infant stage to pack up and go. Even then, we almost chickened out.

    Beyond the obvious logistics of counting enough diapers into the carry-ons and cramming everything else into rolling suitcases, getting away with the kids is an exercise in diplomacy. I’m not talking about peacemaking with fellow travelers back here in the cheap seats, but brokering the young ones’ differing desires and internal clocks.

    Ellis, being a boy, has two speeds: off and supersonic. The girls, now 7 and 10, are harder to read. A sunburn or a hungry belly can change the tone of a day in a flash from happy to melancholy. One girl may want to go the the beach, the other the pool. Evvy decides she misses her school friends. Her sister doesn’t want to go home.

    Lisa and I spent most of our week away in management mode, ironing out the conflicting moods, packing the Jeep for a ride to the surf, shuttling to another spot for a lunch of chicken pinchos, a kind of kebob.

    The division of labor broke down roughly like this: I took the girls snorkeling while Lisa watched Ellis on the beach. Then we switched; Lisa could take a dip and I’d chase the wild toddler around on the sand. Back at our week’s rental, I’d make dinner; Lisa would get Ellis washed up and into pajamas. The next day, we repeated it all.

    The hours flew past in a blur. In all, Lisa and I had no more than a few minutes when all three kids were occupied and we could hold hands and catch a breath. Not that I am complaining. Being a parent is what it is.

   The  campaigns of those who hope to become the Republican presidential nominee keep reminding me of the Democratic primary in 2008, when I almost lost a friend or two. I had expressed a personal preference for Hillary Clinton as the nominee, and gone to an event in her honor. I admired Ms. Clinton, thought she was brilliant, and found the idea of a woman as president exciting . . . but I had a change of heart and let it be known.

    There was a single compelling reason: I was sure from what she said and from her background as first lady that Ms. Clinton was, to put it bluntly, a hawk; I wanted a president who disapproved of the war in Iraq and was able to articulate diplomatic approaches to the world’s conflicts. Little did I know how things would change.

    Like the Norwegian committee that awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, I was naive. That he chose Ms. Clinton as secretary of state was politically expedient, to be sure, but  it also drew them together as decision-makers. The new president appointed the head of the Central Intelligence Agency to be secretary of defense. He increased the numbers of our troops in Afghanistan, and then he escalated the use of drones on killing missions. A peace president? Hardly.

    After Sept. 11, it was said drones would help us destroy Al Qaeda and stop imminent attack, if necessary. Since then, some 60 deaths have been caused by drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan — where Al Qaeda were said to have set up shop — with others reported just this week. The drones have been sent over Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia, been used in Libya and Syria, and in the Mexican drug war. The Obama administration not only shrouds how targets are determined and strikes approved but it refuses to make public its argument for how drones are justified under international law.

    The hope had been (in my case, it was expectation) that President Obama would reverse what many of us believed were violations of the Constitution under the Bush war on terror. He may have stopped the practice of torture, which the former administration endorsed, but he has approved a law that seems to violate the Constitution in another way: He signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which allows anyone, even an American citizen, whom the government considers to be “a member of, or part of, al-Qaida or an associated force‚” to be held in military custody indefinitely “without trial until the end of the hostilities. . . .”

    Perhaps Mr. Obama was naive, too. Maybe he didn’t foresee how being president would affect his views on war and peace; maybe he had no idea he would find it no longer possible to be (or  pretend to be) a dove. It’s true that he has made some dovelike gestures recently, cautioning against fanning the flames of war with Iran and, this week, reportedly reconsidering our military mission in Afghanistan. But would Ms. Clinton in the Oval Office have been any more hawkish? I doubt it.