I read a couple of newspaper articles this morning that made me think about the strange, complicated relationship between men and ambition.

Blogging in the LA Times, Patrick Goldstein writes about the decline of Russell Crowe’s career, and argues that Crowe is falling because a) he hasn’t mastered the art of publicity the way Steve McQueen did, and b) the press now reports on the foibles of Hollywood stars far more than it used to.

Crowe has also run up against something that McQueen never had to contend with: Our culture’s attitude toward masculinity has radically changed in the decades following McQueen’s box-office reign. In mid-20th century America, our heroes had a swagger to their step, a drink in their hands and were allowed, even encouraged, to live outside the bounds of responsible behavior. When Mickey Mantle and his teammates got into an epic brawl at the Copacabana nightclub, it only enhanced his reputation.* When Norman Mailer got into fistfights with other writers and stabbed one of his wives, his literary stock only went up.

In today’s culture, when you throw a phone at a desk clerk, your stock plummets. Is this all for the good? In some ways yes, since the alpha males of the past often ended up ruining their lives, along with most of their marriages, with all their womanizing and boozy excess. Yet we’ve lost something too, since many of today’s best-known actors and athletes are cautious and dull, fearful of jeopardizing their careers with any intemperate behavior.

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe reports on Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe’s “early” departure from a post in the Obama administration; Tribe says it was for medical treatment of a benign brain tumor, while Allan Dershowitz suggests that it was Obama didn’t reward his service richly enough. At issue: Whether Tribe’s job, heading a new Justice Department unit intended to help people who can’t find lawyers, was important enough for Tribe. A former law school advisor to Obama, Tribe wanted a position involving national security.

“He deserved better,’’ said Alan Dershowitz, a longtime associate of Tribe’s at Harvard Law School. “He would have been terrific adviser to the president. . . . He was, after all, one of the president’s mentors. He worked diligently during the [2008 presidential] campaign. I think it would have been in the president’s interest to put him in an advisory position.’’

What an unpleasant thought: That helping the poor and disempowered (awful word, but lacking a better one) gain access to legal resources is so trivial, Tribe “deserved better.”

But Tribe apparently thought his post was insufficiently interesting or important to him.

Tribe’s departure was announced a few weeks after a conservative blogger with the National Review Online published a private letter the Harvard professor wrote last year to Obama angling for different and far broader responsibilities that would include national security, a hot topic since Sept. 11, 2001.

In Washington terms, that’s the equivalent of throwing a phone…**

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* It’s worth remembering that that bar fight got Billy Martin—who was a participant, and was deemed by Yankee brass a bad influence on Mantle and far less valuable to the team—traded, an insult from which Martin never really recovered.

** Apologies for the crazy formatting. It’s not my fault.