JOHN WALKER LINDH

by William H. Benson

January 3, 2001

     Born on January 3, 106 B.C., Cicero, the Roman orator, politician, and philosopher sent his son, Marcus, to study in Athens, the center of Greek learning.  Soon, reports floated back to Cicero in Rome that Marcus was drinking heavy, typical of college students, and he was failing in his studies.  Incapable of doing anything else, Cicero wrote a lengthy letter to his son which later earned the title of De Officiis (On Moral Obligations).

     Written as a moral guide, Cicero urged his son to consider the ethical teachings of the ancient Greeks and see if he could apply them to his own life, especially the virtues of wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

     Information is simply facts and figures, but knowledge is the analysis and the weaving together of those facts.  But wisdom is the application of knowlege to our own personal lives, to teach us how to live.  And justice revolves around the concept that good deeds do not ever go unrewarded and that bad deeds do not go unpunished.  Courage is the stamina required to forge ahead with what is right and true and proper.

      Moderation, Cicero explained, was the Greek’s philosophical gift to the world–that too much of anything is wrong, in either direction.  For example, between the two extremes of total selfishness and absolute selflessness lies a balance, a Golden Mean, the correct posture in this life.

     All of this was obviously good advice, but Cicero’s son Marcus failed to heed much of it; the heavy drinking continued after his college days were over, deeply disappointing his father.

     Now over the past few weeks we have witnessed another strained father-son relationship that has become the focus of international attention–that of Frank and John Walker Lindh, and questions about this case jump out at us.

     How did an American boy from California end up hanging out with a gang of terrorists in Afghanistan intent on killing Americans?  Why was John Walker so attracted first to Islam and then to the most vicious strain of that religion?  What do we do with John Walker now? A Congressman on “Larry King Live” recently said that “this young man certainly deserves more from us than a shave and a haircut.”  Perhaps a bath?  or a change of clothes? or a change in attitude?

     Where were the parents in all of this?  Where was the dad?  Why would he pay his son’s way to go live first in Yemen and then in Pakistan to study and memorize all 6,666 lines of the Koran?  Why did he not cut off the money?  Did he not know that this would end up badly, as it has?

     The words of the dad, Frank Lindh, are revealing, if not disturbing.

     “He was always intellectually coherent, and he had a wonderful sense of humor.  And none of that changed when he converted to Islam.  I never had any major misgivings. . . .  He’s a victim who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. . . . I was proud of John pursuing an alternative course. . . . I wanted to support my son’s passion and his committment to learning. . . . My son’s message [about the attack on the USS Cole] raised my concerns, but my days of molding him were over.”

     Wisdom?  Justice?  Courage?  Moderation?  Both the father and the son committed some very unwise acts.  Participating with a crowd bent on killing innocent people is not seeking justice nor a courageous venture.  “Faceless cowards” is how the President described them.  And at some point both John and Frank threw moderation out the window when the dad watched the Muslim religion overtake his son’s life to the exclusion of everything else, and the dad did not say nor do anything to counter such obsessive behavior.

     Also born on January 3, but in 1892, was the English writer J.R.R. Tolkein.  One of his major characters, Bilbo Baggins, said, “Sometimes it is a dangerous thing to go out your front door.”  Of course it is, but to be easy on yourself, you do not have to go to Yemen, nor all the way to Afghanistan, nor do you have to join up with a crazed madman, such as Osama bin Laden.  After all, stupidity is evil’s dimwit half-brother. 

CLOSE ELECTIONS

by William H. Benson

December 21, 2000

     Along with the legal debacle that followed the 2000 Presidential election, pieces of the past jumped forward into the present.  Bush and Gore as well as the media reached back into the past for previous examples of close elections to guide themselves through this constitutional swamp.

     For example, after Gore’s concession speech, Bush referred to the election of 1800, two hundred years prior to his own.  John Adams, a Federalist, had been elected in 1796 and ran again in 1800 against Thomas Jefferson, a Republican, and his running mate Aaron Burr.  Jefferson beat Adams in the electoral college 73 to 65, but Aaron Burr, of the same party as Jefferson, had also received 73 votes.  ( In 1804 the Twelfth Amendment removed the possibility of a tie between two candidates on the same ticket.)

     The Constitution dictated that should a tie occur in the electoral college, the House of Representatives should then decide.  After 35 ballots the House was deadlocked over Jefferson or Burr until February 17, 1801 when Jefferson privately assured the many Federalist office-holders that if they chose him, they would keep their jobs.  Jefferson, the exalted idealist, thus began his presidency with a bit of a deal.  

     Then, the election in 1824 involved another Adams–this time John Quincy Adams, John Adams’s son.  Although the electoral college was a reality, this was the first election in which popular voting was also important.  Andrew Jackson, the immensely popular General, won the popular vote 153,544 compared to Adams’s 108,740.  Of the 261 electoral votes cast, Jackson won 99 to Adams’s 84, but because two other men, William Crawford and Henry Clay, had also gathered electoral votes, Jackson had not won a majority of those electoral votes.

     According to the Twelfth Amendment, if no candidate earned a majority, the House would decide.  Henry Clay was Speaker of the House and the power broker.  He met with John Quincy Adams in January of 1825 and cut a deal.  Clay would select Adams if Adams would then in turn appoint Clay Secretary of State.  It went as planned, and Adams became President even though by any reckoning Jackson was the clear winner.

     Jackson exploded in anger and wrote, “Was there ever witnessed such bare-face corruption?”  He devoted the next four years to campaigning for the 1828 election which he then handily won.

     But, the first Presidential election I can remember was in 1960, and it was close.  Kennedy defeated Nixon.  However, the historian Paul Johnson stated the outcome bluntly, “This was a crooked election, especially in Texas and Illinois, two states notorious for fraud, and both of which Kennedy won.”  If he had not, he would have lost the election. 

     Lyndon Baines Johnson, the very unscrupulous Texan and Kennedy’s running mate, gave Kennedy Texas.  In one Texas polling station 4,895 voters were registered and yet 6,138 votes were cast.  LBJ was not above stuffing the ballot box in Texas.

     In Illinois, Nixon carried 93 of the state’s 102 counties, and yet lost the state by 8,858 votes.  This was due to Mayor Richard Daley who gave Kennedy the Windy City by the astonishing margin of 450,000 votes, and the evidence was overwhelming that fraud was committed on a large scale in Kennedy’s favor in Chicago.

     In fact, the evidence of fraud in both Texas and Illinois was so blatant that Eisenhower and other Republicans urged Nixon to issue a formal legal challenge to the election, in other words to demand a recount.  The ever-shrew Nixon declined.  He reasoned that there had never been a recount for a presidential election and the machinery for it simply did not exist.  He understood that a legal challenge would have produced a “constitutional nightmare” (a glimpse of which we received exactly forty years later).  Nixon bided his time, and eight years later was elected.

     In Newsweek two weeks ago the columnist Anna Quindlen put into perspective the 2000 election, “Every vote counts.  This is the most important thing you’ve learned from this election, and it will be part of your heart for the rest of your lives.  Government by the people.  Democracy at work.  Your vote is important.”

PEARL HARBOR

by William H. Benson

December 7, 2000

     At first, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto refused to consider attacking the U.S.  He had lived and studied in the U.S. in the 1920’s and had also served as a Japanese attache in Washington.  He fully appreciated American industrial strength and its citizens’ willpower.  But then when politics and militarism overruled him, it was he who devised the idea of a surprise attack that would cripple the U.S. Pacific fleet.  But he had no illusions about a lengthy war.  He warned that if the resulting war lasted longer than a year, he said, “I have no expectations of success.”

     On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, (Honolulu time), the attack came in two waves:  the first at 7:49 a.m. and the second at 8:55 a.m.  “Tora!  Tora!  Tora!” was the code for an attack (To)  that was a complete surprise (ra).

     The damage was extensive:  in a matter of a couple of hours 2403 Americans were killed;  1178 were wounded; 169 aircraft were obliterated; and three battleships–the Arizona, the Oklahoma, and the Utah–were completely destroyed.

     Mary Ann Ramsey, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a naval commander, found safety during the attack in a basement on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor.  She recalled that morning, “Then our wounded arrived–some with filthy black oil covering shredded flesh.  We placed them on mattresses and gave cigarettes to those who wanted to smoke, even holding them for the ones who could not use their hands.  We tried to reassure them  With the first sailor, so horribly burned, personal fear left me;  he brought me the full tragedy of that day.” 

     Immediately President Roosevelt addressed Congress, “December 7th, 1941–a day that will live in infamy.”  He asked for and received a declaration of war.  It would have been a unanimous vote except for a solitary negative vote by a Congresswoman from Montana.  However, due to the attack on Pearl Harbor Americans threw themselves fully into the war effort.  American determination and willpower demanded nothing less than “unconditional surrender”.

     The Arizona still rests today at the bottom of Pearl Harbor in about forty feet of water and is visible from the Memorial which stretches at right angles above the surface of the water and the ship.  Ferry boats transport some 1.5 million visitors–many of them Japanese–back and forth to the Memorial each year.

     How much did President Roosevelt know about what was to happen.  John Toland, the World War II writer, sifted through all the evidence and concluded that Roosevelt “had known” the attack was imminent.  But other historians read the same evidence and conclude otherwise.  David Kahn, a writer in Foreign Affairs, wrote, “Though war with Japan was indeed expected, it is impossible in logic to leap from a general belief to a specific prediction.”  The clues are there that he may have known, but they are not entirely conclusive.

     Although I have never visited Hawaii, I have been told that it is an exceedingly beautiful corner of the world (perhaps an understatement).  The attack on Pearl Harbor was indeed a sorrowful incident.  A South Pacific island with palm trees, white sand beaches at Waikiki, and friendly natives should not be the scene of geopolitical confrontation, massive numbers of dead, and destruction.  But it did happen on Oahu, and if President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have it his way, the day–December 7th, 1941–will live in infamy.

ELOQUENCE AT GETTYSBURG

by William H. Benson

November 22, 2000

     At the dedication of the cemetery at Gettyburg, Pennsylvania on November 19, 1863, the featured oration was delivered by Edward Everett, the prominent orator, and following him were the dedicatory remarks given by the President of the United State–Abraham Lincoln.  Read slowly, he took three minutes, even though the crowd’s applause interrupted him five times.

     What had happened at Gettysburg on those three hot days the previous July was so ugly and so emotionally overwhelming that Americans seemed to have turned vicious upon themselves.  What could Lincoln say that could even begin to diminish the damage done four months before?

     And yet, as Gary Wills, the historian pointed out, “It would have been hard to predict that Gettysburg, out of all this muddle, these missed chances, all the senseless deaths, would become a symbol of national purpose, pride, and ideals.  Abraham Lincoln transformed the ugly reality into something rich and strange–and he did it with 272 words.  The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration.”

     Lincoln was a student of the word.  He loved playing with words and even enjoyed working with grammar.  In his verbal workshop he tinkered with words and sentence construction.  He did not just say, “I close,” as Seward, his speech writer suggested.  Instead, he said, “I am loth to close.”  Each sentence his speechwriters would hand him, he would rework.

      As a result, Lincoln’s words acquired a flexibility of structure, a rhythmic pacing, a variation in length of words and phrases and clauses and sentences that yielded to what he wanted–his own meaning.  With a kind of verbal athleticism he remained partial to grammatical inversion throughout his life.  In his Second Inaugural Address, he did not say, “We fondly hope and fervently pray.”, but instead “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray.”    

     He read and studied Hugh Blair’s work on ancient rhetoric.  Blair wrote, “Thought and language act and react upon each other mutually, . . . and he that is learning to arrange his sentences with accuracy and order is learning, at the same time, to think with accuracy and order.”

Gary Wills observes that this, surely, is the secret of Lincoln’s eloquence.  He not only read aloud, to think his way into sounds, but wrote as a way of ordering his thought.

     In the Gettysburg Address Lincoln interlocks his sentences with a hook-and-eye method to join the speech’s parts.  He uses conceived twice, dedicated six times, and consecrated twice.  Then, he matches who struggled here with who fought here, and then he pairs up these honored dead with these dead.  Three times he writes nation.  Field and battle-field are linked.  In other words, each paragraph is bound to the preceding and the following by some repetitive word or clause, except the first and last (because they cannot).

     Examining his meaning, Lincoln appealed back to the Declaration of Independence and to Jefferson’s words “that all men are created equal.” and gave that document and its words the pre-eminent position in American ideals.  Not everyone at the time agreed.  Afterwords, the Chicago Times pointed out the letter of the Constitution to Lincoln–noting that it was the legal document governing the nation and it did not refer to equality and, in fact, even tolerated slavery.

     If Lincoln had talent, it was to block out all the tragedy that life could throw his way and cut to intellectual truth.  He dealt daily with his wife’s mental instability, an issue on which he was not in denial.  He surrendered hourly to the pain of the tragic passing of his young son Willie.  He heard the arguments of the Southern states who had created their own nation, in part, because he had been elected President.  All this he blocked out, spent time with ink and paper working with words, and in so doing recast the great conflict into something bright and hopeful–“that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom.”

     Ever since the Gettysburg Address, the Civil War is to most Americans what Lincoln wanted it to mean–a fight for people to govern themselves and for greater human equality.  His vision of what the war meant became the official version, whether or not it really was the true version.  His words had to complete the work of the guns.    

ARMISTICE DAY

by William H. Benson

November 9, 2000

     The Great War introduced to the world the trench–an end-to-end grave, international in length.  Deep gashes in the idyllic French countryside, the trenches became the scenes of repeated mass attacks and mass slaughters, and then when the rains came, the trenches turned into rat-infested muddy swamps.  Inside them life was exceedingly miserable.

     “Over the top!” a battlefront commander would shout to his men, and then they would climb up and out of the trench, dash into the no-man’s land, throw their grenades, and then struggle through the barbed-wire.  Enemy machine gun fire mowed them down and made successful charges virtually impossible.  The trench system of warfare became a human meatgrinder.

     Men had to look deep inside themselves for the courage to climb up and out of the trench and then charge at the enemy, knowing full well that death was more than just a potential but almost a definite thing.

     The casualties escalated exponentially.  Some 8,538,315 men were killed during those four years in the trenches.  Also, of the 7,750,919 others taken prisoner or missing, well over a million were later presumed dead; thus, the total deaths approached 10,000,000, and this does not even include the civilians killed.  This ten million plus figure dwarfs even the number lost in the Holocaust decades later.

     The war ended, and then the ongoing trauma set in which quickly yielded to disillusionment.  The realization of what had occurred fell hard among the more thoughtful Europeans.  “How could this have been allowed to happen?” was a frequent question they asked, for diplomacy with its safeguards had failed; rather, it was the politicians who had utterly failed.  And it was they who then pointed their fingers at the convenient nearby scapegoats–the Communists or the Jews, rather than shoulder the burden of their own guilt of their own failure.

     Europe was supposed to have the most advanced and the most civilized of the world’s nations.  The same countries that had produced opera, Mozart and Beethoven, the stage, the cathedrals, and the centuries-old traditions of royalty had in four short years slid deep into a morass, into a barbarism where young men were not asked to pursue the arts and the sciences and the trades, but instead were asked to die in muddy trenches on Flanders Fields.

     So little was accomplished in those trenches, other than sew the seeds of a second World War, for the peace treaty failed to solve the problem of Germany.  When he read the peace treaty, the German Marshal Foch burst out, “This isn’t peace!  This is a truce for twenty years!”  The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919.  Twenty years and sixty-seven days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Hitler’s Germany.

     More than any other conflict in human history, the Great War illustrates the wastefulness of war as a social process.  The chief difficulty of violence is its uncontrollability.  Both world wars of the twentieth century have demonstrated man’s willingness to go as far as he physically could on the path to self-destruction.  Once man enters the world of force and the world of the irrational, his ability to impose rational limits on his actions becomes increasingly precarious.    

     For those men stuck knee-deep in water and mud inside those trenches during those first few days of November 1918, the future looked very bleak.  Winter was approaching.  It would soon be their turn to do their duty and go over the top.  Then, they heard the good news that the nations’ leaders on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 had agreed to stop the fighting.

     “But now the thing was over.  An uncanny silence enveloped the trenches.  Cautiously, unbelievingly, the men raised themselves above their trenches, shell holes, and dugouts, and stared at the opposing lines.  Soon they became very excited, and often regrettably drunk; and, as the once-hostile armies merged, the men exchanged cigarettes, wine, embraces, and souvenirs.  Then came the stern, inevitable order forbidding fraternization with the former enemy.”  

     Armistice Day had arrived.