CHANCE

by William H. Benson

August 16, 2001

     There is a word that has inspired more hope and opened more new lands than any other, and that word is gold.  On August 17, 1896 three guys (whom no one today remembers) — George Carmack, Skookum Jim, and Tagish Charlie — discovered gold on Bonanza Creek in the Canadian Klondike.  Of all the thousands of golddiggers across the western United States who patiently panned for gold in hot weather and cold day after day, it was those three guys who found it.  It makes a person stop and wonder.  Why were they the lucky ones?

     At the rodeo last week I watched calf-ropers and saddle bronc riders and barrell racers and bull riders.  I had to ask myself:  why does one cowboy stay on a bull for the required eight seconds and another is immediately tossed aside when barely out of the chute?  Is it skill of the rider or is it how the bull moves and bucks and jumps?  Or is it the luck of the draw, of chance, of which cowboy sits on which bull?

     Football season is rapidly approaching, and in five months it will be over.  We wonder now: which teams will earn the championships?  Those with the best players?  Or those with the most determined players?  Or will a variety of other factors (some unknown even now) taken together dictate who will win?  Do we even dare predict? 

     The wildly improbable happens everyday.  The remarkable brings us up short, and the miraculous takes our breath away.

     For example, fifty years ago Life magazine published a picture of a group of deer that included three albinos.  The photographer Staber Reese took the photo in northern Wisconsin where there lived an estimated 850,000 white-tailed deer, of which no more than twenty were albinos.  Reese calculated the odds of him taking that picture with those three albinos at 79 billion to 1.  Perhaps.

     We are mistaken when we under-rate the influence of “chance” in our lives, for anything can happen to anybody–both the good and the bad.  There is no complete defense against the sea of improbabilities that surrounds us, but there are weapons–probability theory and statistics.

     It is possible to face calmly this world of coincidences and seemingly miraculous events.  The statistical approach is helpful because it teaches that a person cannot always expect the average one hundred percent of the time.  After all, the average is just one single point on a curve.  The bell-shaped normal curve shows that ordinarily there are more medium cases than either those from the extremes–the far left or the far right.  But the extremes exist nevertheless.

     Clear thinking means that in this world there are multiple causes for why things happen, that there are imperfect correlations between events and people’s behaviors, and that sheer unpredictable chance is what we live with everyday.  That type of clear thinking pushes aside the simpler idea that everything and everyone can be categorized into two camps–the good guys or the bad guys, the winners or the losers.  It also shoves aside the idea that everyone-knows-that-this-is-due-to-only-that kind of thinking.

     After three meetings Goldfinger finally recognized James Bond for what he was–a spy and an enemy bent on his destruction.  Immediately Goldfinger had him apprehended and then he said to him,  “Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago:  ‘Once is happenstance.  Twice is coincidence.  But the third time is enemy action.'”

KATHARINE GRAHAM
by William H. Benson
August 2, 2001

     The right to criticize our government and its leaders extends back beyond the Constitution to the colonial days.  On August 4, 1735 the New York Governor William Cosby acquitted John Peter Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, of libel charges.  Zenger had defended himself and won his case by pleading that his charges against the colony’s governor were true, and therefore not libelous.

     Throughout the two plus centuries of this American Republic’s existence, the press and the politicians have bantered back and forth, but in the 1970’s Richard Nixon’s hatred of the press and especially of the Washington Post exceeded the normal to the point of being bizarre.

     Katharine Graham, the owner and publisher of the Post and Newsweek, wrote in her autobiography, Personal History, “Trying to keep all of his hatred of the press, and particularly of the Post, within the confines of the White House proved too much for the president.”

     Henry Kissinger said of Nixon, “He was convinced that the Post had it in for him.  At what point he got that idea, I don’t know, but when I met him, he already had that idea.  He wanted a confrontation with the press.  He really hated the press.”

     Katharine Graham inherited the Post from her father, Eugene Meyer, a wealthy businessman who had purchased the newspaper in June of 1933 at a bankruptcy auction.  He only gave $825,000 for the paper, but it was years before it ever showed a profit.

     Katharine’s husband, Phil Graham, ran the newspaper in the fifties and early sixties, while Katharine played the role of the dutiful “doormat” housewife and mother to their four children.  The difficulty was that Phil, for all of his dazzle and brilliance, was a manic depressive.  On Saturday August 3, 1963, shortly after lunch, he shot himself in the bathroom, and Katharine found him.

     At age 46 she found herself in the top job of publisher and CEO of the Washington Post.  She was a widow.  Shy, insecure, lacking little self-confidence, she somehow found the courage and the internal strength to face the job, to learn what she needed to know, as well as balance her children’s lives with her own.  Decisions were thrown at her.

     In 1971 Katharine Graham gave her editor, Ben Bradlee, permission to publish the Pentagon Papers, information about the decisions leading up to our involvement in Vietnam.  Nixon was furious, which puzzled everyone.  The papers reflected nothing on Nixon personally; they were essentially a history of decisions made before Nixon was even president.  His reaction to the papers was an example of his extreme paranoia about secrecy and national security.

     Then, on Friday night, June 16, 1972, police caught five men breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel, and a national nightmare had begun.  For the next two years the Post kept the story alive.  The Post’s two reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, dug and dug until they found “Deep Throat”, a leak in the White House who willingly talked.  Everything he or she told them checked out.  They knew of a cover-up, but how to prove it?

     At one point Katharine Graham asked Ben Bradlee, “All I want to know is if this is such a great story, where are the other newspapers?”  Fighting a president was not for the faint of heart.

     On August 5, 1974 the “smoking gun” was found.  The White House released three new tapes that recounted conversations between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, 1972, six days after the break-in.  They proved Nixon had directed efforts to hide the involvement of his aides.  On August 9th Nixon resigned.

     Last month Katharine Graham at age 84 died of a brain hemorrhage.  The question many in Washington asked was, “How did she go from daughter, to housewife, to mother, to widow, to newspaper publisher, to a media mogul with the power to topple a president?”

     She had answered that question years before, when she said, “It was different for women of my generation.  We did it like a cake, layer by layer.”      

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

by William H. Benson

July 19, 2001

     Anna Quindlen, the “Newsweek” columnist, describes her defining moment as a mother when she walked into the pediatrician’s waiting room with two children under the age of five, and she herself was pregnant with a third.  She was miserable, hot, nauseated, and tired because her two kids had been up sick all night long.  And then she noticed it–a cross-stitched sampler nailed to the doctor’s wall that read: “God could not be everywhere so he made mothers.”  The emotions that she felt at that moment–incredulity and outright disgust, overwhelmed her physical ailments.

     She and others would concur that despite many very willing volunteers, motherhood in twentieth-century America is not an easy job.

     The author James Michener once suggested that he believed the hardest-working women in the world are American women.  Their job is not the demanding physical labor found elsewhere but is a much more complex occupation, working in public and cultural spheres that demands creativity and punctuality.  They must transport children to and from endless activities, maintain an above-average standard of personal attractiveness and mental alertness, and then emotionally support a husband, besides often hold down a full-time job in an office that they may enjoy. 

     Michener may have been right.  After all he observed women all over the world.  He should know.  However, reaction to his thoughts was mostly negative.  The mail indicated that women did not appreciate Michener’s flattering remarks, and he admitted later that he was astonished by their hostile reaction.

     In a similar vein, another very capable writer, H. L. Mencken, wrote an entire book, In Defense of Women, surprising everyone for his balanced and unbiased approach.  On any given subject, Mencken always attacked, but on this subject of women’s roles he defended the position that life forces upon women.  He was on their defense.

     He wrote, “Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom that comes from experience.  To be a woman is in itself a difficult experience because it consists chiefly of trying to get along with men.”

     What makes Mencken’s view even more confounding is that he was a bachelor when he wrote this.  In fact, he did not marry until much later, past his fiftieth birthday, and then five years later his wife died.  He never remarried.  He perceived much.

     On July 19, 1848 the first women’s rights convention ever met at Seneca Falls, New York, headed by Quaker women, including Lucretia Mott and the fired-up Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who immediately suggested that women should have the right to vote.  A more hesitant Lucretia Mott warned Stanton, “Thou will make us ridiculous.  We must go slowly.”

     All of the convention’s Declarations of Sentiments were passed as resolutions except number 9–women’s right to vote, but then after much debate and prodding by Stanton, it also passed.  A revolution is not won or lost in a few days or even in a few years.  Indeed, seventy-two years passed by before Congress passed the 19th Amendment, and women first voted in the presidential election that same year of 1920.

     Now that we are 225 years past the Declaration of Independence we can see that our republic has constantly and justifiably pushed the boundaries of liberty and equality under the law outward to include virtually everybody.  For a mother, however, the right to vote is one thing, but dealing with sick kids late at night is entirely another.

Of her defining moment Anna Quindlen commented, “If God made mothers because he couldn’t be everywhere, maybe he could have met us halfway and eradicated vomiting and colic, too, and the sugarcoating of what we (mothers) are and what we do that leads to false cheer and easy lies.”

JOHN ADAMS
by William H. Benson
July 4, 2001

     Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years to the day after the 2nd Continental Congress had voted for Independence for the thirteen colonies.  Despite this coincidence, the two men were opposites. 

     Adams was short and chunky, talkative, combative, prone to fits of extreme anger, and a New Englander.  Jefferson was a tall and thin Virginian, who rarely spoke in public and who hated confrontation, more of a bookish intellectual.  Despite their differences, their lives were interwoven in the creation and government of the new country.

     Historians have usually regarded Jefferson more favorably than Adams, (even though Fawn Brodie explored Jefferson’s private life in The Intimate Thomas Jefferson).  After all, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, served effectively well as President for eight years, swung the Louisiana Purchase deal with France, and sent Lewis & Clark off on a very successful expedition.  Adams’s accomplishments seem to hold lesser appeal.

     Recently, however, historians have upgraded Adams’s reputation and lowered Jefferson’s.  Joseph J. Ellis in a recent book, Founding Brothers, made no secret of his partiality to Adams.  And now David McCullough just published a new biography on John Adams, and he concluded that he likes and approves of Adams over Jefferson.

     McCullough pointed out that Jefferson himself regarded Adams as “the colossus of independence”, and that he was the delegate most responsible for pushing independence through the Continental Congress.  Adams did the hard work; he delivered the votes.  If he had not done so, Jefferson’s document would never have been.  And the Louisiana Purchase came about because of peace with France, something Adams had achieved through personal negotiation and outstanding statesmenship.

     Adams served as Washington’s Vice-President for eight years, and then as the nation’s second President for four years.  He was not a popular President, and was then beaten in 1800 in his bid for re-election by Thomas Jefferson.

     Jefferson’s wife died early in their marriage while delivering a child, and he never remarried. Adams married well when he married Abigail Smith.  They both possessed a powerful sense of public duty, which they fulfilled despite great financial and emotional sacrifice.  For years they lived miserably apart while John carried on his work.  Nevertheless, they wrote often and tenderly, an extraordinary love story.  From France, he wrote to her, “I must go to you, or you must come to me; I cannot live without you.”

     Abigail managed his home and their finances in Massachusetts.  She supported him, and he turned to her for advice.  Their letters indicate that they held immense affection for each other, even though her parents felt that she had married beneath herself.  Still, she loved this chunky New Englander who never failed for words.

     Benjamin Franklin once described Adams as “sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”  His enemies were less kind when they suggested he was “actually insane”.  His episodes of anger shocked and intimidated the faint of heart whom he confronted privately.     

     Nevertheless, he served his new country well–whenever he could.  McCullough wrote, “Never once did Adams refuse a mission for his country because of difficulties or unseasonable conditions, or something else that he would have preferred to do.”

     John Adams left behind an estate worth about $100,000.  Jefferson left behind an estate $100,000 in debt, and immediately after his passing, Monticello and all the other assets had to be sold, at a fraction of what they had cost him.

     Adams or Jefferson?  Equipped with vastly different personalities, they forged ahead, and together these two “founding brothers” created a new nation.

CUSTER AT THE LITTLE BIG HORN
by William H. Benson
June 25, 2001

     What Custer did not know was that the village of Native Americans–Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho–had swelled in just a week’s time from 3000 to 7000 people, from 800 to at least 2000 fighting warriors.  Strung in a three-mile stretch on the west side of the Little Big Horn stood perhaps 1000 lodges.  Because buffalo were plentiful in that area, the tribes had sufficient food.

     Shortly after noon on June 25, 1876, Custer divided his command of 566 men into three units: Captain Frederick Benteen with 125 men, Major Marcus Reno with 140 men, and Custer himself with 225 men.  Custer ordered Benteen south until he came to the Little Big Horn and then turn north and follow the ridges.  Custer then ordered Reno to cross the river and attack the village coming in from the south.  Meanwhile, Custer would head due north protected from sight by the ridges and then sweep into village coming in from the east.

     As the plan worked out, it was not a good one.  It divided Custer’s men when they should have remained together, backing each other up.

     Reno had never fought Native Americans before, but he soon was alarmed at the rush of enemies pounding at him in growing numbers.  He looked back for support from either Custer or Benteen and found none.  He held up his hand and ordered his troops to dismount and take a defensive position.  Two retreats later, Reno with only half his men by then found themselves high up on a bluff, pinned down.  Fortunately, for Reno Benteen found the attacked men, and together they held off the warriors that day.

     Neither Reno nor Benteen knew where Custer was late that afternoon.  They heard gunfire coming from the north, but did not know what was happening.

     Like Reno, Custer intended on attacking as planned, but then when he realized he was outnumbered, he took a defensive position even before he and his men had a chance to cross the river.  Up on Battle Ridge, Custer and his men stood while waves of warriors beat against them.  Soon those warriors were reinforced by the warriors who had given up attacking Reno.  Chief Two Moons, Crazy Horse, and Chief Gall led those attacks on Custer.

     Because there were no survivors among Custer’s men, no one is quite certain how the battle proceeded.  The Lakota Sioux Black Elk said, “There were so many of us that I think we did not need guns.  Just the hoofs would have been enough.”  A Sioux woman later recalled, “The Indians acted just like they were driving buffalo to a good place where they could be easily slaughtered.”

     We do know that the harrassed men finally shot their horses and used them as protective barriers.  There Custer and his men stood until all were killed or wounded, over 200 men in a little over two hours.  By 5:30 p.m. the warriors swarmed in and killed the wounded, and the women and children worked their way up through the ravines to rob the bodies.

     But there was no victory dance in the village that night because the tribes had lost warriors too.  Many suffered wounds.  Sitting Bull is reported to have said, “My heart is full of sorrow that so many were killed on each side, but when they compel us to fight, we must fight.”

     Early the next day, the 26th, the Indians kept up the attack on Reno and Benteen.  Driven wild with thirst, the soldiers at one point that morning attacked, allowing others to sneak down to the river for water.  But by noon the warriors gave up.  Sitting Bull and the other chiefs had decided to leave.  They dismantled the lodges and headed out of the valley bound for the Big Horn Mountains.  By 7:00 p.m. the valley was deserted.

     The next day, the 27th, Reno and Benteen heard the news that Custer and his men were wiped out and neither could believe it, until they rode north and saw the bodies.

     Custer’s Last Stand is truly the most overworked event in American history and from it, we can conclude that Custer and his troops lost that day because the Sioux and the Cheyenne outnumbered the soldiers three to one, because their families were in immediate danger, and because they were united, sure of themselves, and angry.