January 2011

25 Years Ago

January 25-26, 1978 A Midwest blizzard kills 100 people; on February 5-7 a New England blizzard kills 60 more.

March 25, 1978 The nation’s coal miners end a 110-day strike, their longest ever.

50 Years Ago

January 2, 1953 A Senate subcommittee reports that some of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist activities have been “motivated by self-interest.”

January 21, 1953 A federal jury convicts 13 Communist leaders of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government.

100 Years Ago

February 14, 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt signs an act of Congress creating the Department of Commerce and Labor. In 1913 it will be split into two departments.

On February 2, 1953, in his first State of the Union address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced that the U.S. Navy would no longer shield the Chinese mainland against attack from Taiwan. Since the mainland was controlled by communists, while Taiwan was in the hands of Western-friendly nationalists, Eisenhower might seem to have been stating the obvious when he said, “We certainly have no obligation to protect a nation fighting us in Korea.” Yet not everyone agreed. The foreign secretary of Great Britain, an ally in the United Nations coalition in Korea, said that the move would have “very unfortunate political repercussions, without compensating military advantages.” A mainstream newspaper in India decried Eisenhower’s “specious and calamitous reasoning,” and said its “only result can be to extend the area of war.”

Who Let the Dogs Out? We did! Why Do We Say That? The Man Who Looked at Snowflakes Screenings Editors” Bookshelf

I read with great interest your article “Special Forces” in the November/ December 2002 issue, and I wanted to call your attention to two significant anniversaries (plus my own minor brush with history).

This past June, ceremonies were held at Fort Bragg in North Carolina to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Special Forces. Several thousand active and retired Green Berets and their families turned out, among them Col. (Ret.) Aaron Bank, first commander of Special Forces and considered by many the father of the Green Berets. Colonel Bank celebrated his 100th birthday this November.

I was able to take a picture showing Colonel Bank talking with Maj. Gen. Geoffrey C. Lambert, the current commander of Special Forces. The two men embody a most impressive 50-year tradition.

I was present at Fort Bragg with the colonel’s family (his wife Catherine and daughters Linda and Alexandra; I’m the son-in-law married to Linda).

The Jaw-Dropper Award this year goes to Max Morath: Bob Dylan is not a great songwriter because he didn’t cross over into cabaret. Yes, and I hear Einstein couldn’t cook, either.

In 1945, I was a 14-year-old boy living on the south edge of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Like many of that age and time, I was very provincial. In my mind, Fort Wayne was the center of the universe, and I was concerned because the United States had just dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I figured that any retaliation would be aimed right at us. So, when a plane came roaring low over my house, I thought it might be the first Japanese bomber.

Worse still, packages were being dumped from the airplane: incendiaries! They turned out to be small broadsides announcing that Japan had surrendered and that more details were available on the local radio station, WGL.

My friends and I spent the rest of the day picking up these advertisements, far more interested in the fact that we were holding something that came from an airplane than in the message they contained.

Two questions occurred to me that day, and they stuck with me all my life. Who was flying that airplane, and why was this unusual method of communication used?

The Bill of Rights is properly considered as a body. Clearly, the rights are enumerated, not granted , and are reserved to “the people,” not any one group such as the militia or the press. Mr. Evans is confused as to subordination. The amendment states “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” If the intent was to create and arm the military, why would “the people” be included in the language?

I certainly hope that Harold Evans knows more about the twentieth century than he apparently does about the eighteenth. The term “well regulated” does not refer to governmental supervision. Rather, it means “effective,” or “well practiced.” Viewed from this perspective, it does tend to give the Second Amendment a different meaning from what Mr. Evans espouses. He then concludes that the people have a right to bear arms, but not “sawed-off shotguns, machine guns, and other means of mayhem our day may contrive.” In fact, short-barreled (read: sawed-off) shotguns have been used in virtually every war this country has fought.

...Clear, sudden miracle: cloud breaks, Tatter of cloud passes, there ahead, Beside, above, friends in the desperate sky; And below burns like all fire the target town, A delicate red chart of squares, abstract And jewelled, from which rise lazy tracers, And the searchlights through smoke tumble up To a lovely apex on some undone friend;... —William Meredith, “1942”

We were victorious, but the sight of dead bodies is scattered among the poems about World War II the way bodies were washed up on the invasion beaches or left as markers along the trail to show the new infantrymen moving forward the lace of death. And then subliminally present are those killed in the clean war, the new war in the air, “who,” as Howard Nemerov writes, “rarely bothered coming home to die.”