CAMPAIGNS

by William H. Benson

August 3, 2000

     Who do you like–Nixon or Kennedy?  In the close 1960 election Kennedy was given the win but only because he won Texas and Illinois.  Evidence existed that those electoral votes were fraudulently obtained.  And, Kennedy’s 112,803 margin in the popular vote over Nixon’s was, no doubt, a myth.  Paul Johnson, the historian, writes that Nixon actually won the popular vote by about 250,000, but that Nixon refused to contest the outcome.  So, Kennedy and Jackie moved into the White House.  Camelot had begun. 

     The best bumper sticker in 1964 was “I like AuH2O”, but not enough people did for Lyndon Baines Johnson completely crushed the Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater in a lopsided election.

     During the following four years the Democrats slowly divided over what to do about the Viet Nam War.  Then, in November of 1967 Eugene McCarthy, the quiet and soft-spoken Minnesota Senator, announced he would run for President, promising that if elected he would end the war.  He gathered wide support among students and then won the New Hampshire primary, surprising the other hopeful Democrats.  At that point Bobby Kennedy decided to run, and he won in California, only to be assassinated on the eve of that victory in June of 1968. 

     The Democrats were then in a shambles, and the Chicago Convention turned ugly when Mayor Richard Daley called out the police to club and gas the anti-war demonstrators in Grant Park.  Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut even denounced the mayor from the podium for “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”  Finally, the Convention selected Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s Vice-President, but Nixon, this time, won the election.

    In 1972 Nixon, the incumbent, won again but was so suspicious of McGovern throughout the campaign, to the point of paranoia, that he committed egregious mistakes culminating in Watergate.  Two years later he was forced to resign or face certain impeachment.

     The 1976 election ended in a big disappointment.  To many Americans it just did not seem possible that a peanut farmer from Georgia would succeed in the White House, and he failed miserably.  He bungled the economy, was hung in effigy by shouting Iranians, and then told the American people on national television that they suffered from a “national malaise”.

     The Republic Convention in 1980 focused on one theme, “No more Jimmy Carter!”  Almost 70-year-old Ronald Reagan burst on the scene, and told Americans that their greatest days were yet ahead of them.  He was right.  It seemed the right guy won this time.

     In 1984 Walter Mondale did not stand a chance.  He won his native state, Minnesota, and Reagan quipped, “I want Minnesota too.”

     George Bush wanted the White House so badly in 1988 that he resorted to playing dirty tricks on the defenseless Michael Dukakis.  The worst was when Bush accused the governor of Massachusetts of being soft on crime and releasing early prisoners who then committed more crimes.  The accusation focused upon a face–Willie Horton’s.  Dukakis did not stand a chance.

     In 1992 Bush tried the same tactics with the Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, but Bush had bumped up against someone much smarter and more wily and vastly more determined than Dukakis or even Bush himself.  Clinton described his style, “I just won’t ever give up!”  He won.

     Despite all of his private scandalous behavior, Clinton was easily re-elected in 1996.  Bob Dole’s starched white shirts, ties, and suits did very little to excite the younger Americans.

     Now this year, we have George W. Bush and Al Gore, and neither seem that exciting to either the young nor the old.  The others–Bill Bradley, Elizabeth Dole, Steven Forbes, have all fallen aside, defeated in the primaries.  The conventions this summer are designed to unite all the factions from each party behind one candidate and one party platform, and how successful the convention is in unifying the party will determine in no small part who will win.  The Democrats support Al Gore, and the Republicans have chosen George W. Bush; eventually the American people will have to face the unpleasant fact that one of them will be President in January.

1. K. ROWLING VS. U. S. GRANT

by William H. Benson

July 20, 2000

     Harry Potter made the cover of Newsweek this week with the release on July 8th of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, in the seven-book series.  J. K. Rowling, a single mother who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, wrote much of the first Harry Potter book at a table in a neighborhood coffee shop while her daughter slept in the stroller.

     In her books Rowling creates a fantasy world;  Harry Potter is a teen-age boy, but he is also a Wizard and is invited to attend a school for Wizards called Hogwarts.  As an infant he was struck in the face and now sports, along with black-framed glasses, an ugly lightning-like gash down the center of his forhead.  His birthday is July 31st (the same day as Rowling’s), but there is also a Deathday Party, celebrated by a ghost on the anniversary of its death.  Rowling’s fantasy world includes its own vocabulary, its own code of behavior, and its own cast of characters.

     It seems the British write the best fantasy; J. K. Rowling fits into the category of fantasy writer along with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  Tokien’s Hobbit world and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia still, after a couple of generations, captivate both the juvenile and the non-juvenile reader.

     Writing is solitary work.  It is selfish work.  It requires a ruthless demand for time alone.  A good writer pushes all else aside, including family and friends, for some time every day to write.  Few can do it.  Thousands of books are started every year, but only a small fraction are ever finished.  Rowling admitted that she was very happy when she finished the first Harry Potter book, because she had written two previous books and had failed to finish them.

     Recently, I read a biography on Ulysses S. Grant.  He was the great Civil War General, who displayed a remarkable determination and drive to win at all costs..  His classic line was that he intended “to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”  Prior to the Civil War he failed as a farmer, a clerk, and a peddler, and after the Civil War he was elected President and proved to be an inept bungler, imperceptive to the graft and corruption that permeated his White House.

     But the amazing part of his biography was what happened just prior to his death.  In 1884 he found himself penniless and was then diagnosed with lung cancer.  To support himself and his wife, Julia, that last year he began to write magazine articles of his Civil War experiences twenty plus years before.  Mark Twain read the articles and promised Grant that if he finished an entire work of his Personal Memoirs he would see that they were published.  Grant had never written anything before, but he took up the task with his usual characteristic stubborness.

     He wrote in longhand for a full year and pushed everything else aside, including his own burial.  He completed the two volumes, and less than two weeks later on July 23, 1885, he died.  True to his word, Mark Twain published Grant’s Personal Memoirs, and promptly paid Julia Grant $450,000, a huge sum for then.  The Memoirs fall into the same category as does Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, the best in a personal narrative of military exploits.

J. K. Rowling and U. S. Grant. One is British, and the other American.  One writes fantasy, and the other history.  One earns millions and much acclaim, the other dies never realizing what he had achieved.  The differences are so apparant.  But what they had in common was that selfish, almost ruthless, brand of determination to see the work finished.  One waited anxiously for her daughter to sleep in the stroller at a coffee shop so she could write, and the other virtually postponed his own burial until he had written “The End”.

     Grant said it best: “To fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

by William H. Benson

July 5, 2000

     George III was the King of England, and he was young, self confident, ignorant, opinionated, and inflexible.  His appointments to administer his vast empire were a succession of second-raters and nonentities–the Earl of Bute, George Grenville, Marquis of Rockingham, the Duke of Grafton, and Lord North, and behind them, in key jobs, were other nobodies–Charles Townshend and Lord George Germaine.  King George III entered the contest over the fate of the American colonies inadequately staffed.

     This situation would not have mattered much if he had faced men of ordinary stature, of average competence and character.  But this was not to be, for the men who spearheaded the American Revolution were a most remarkable group of men–sensible, broadminded, courageous, usually well educated, gifted in a variety of ways, mature, and long-sighted, sometimes lit by flashes of genius.

     Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Adams each had strengths and weaknesses that compensated each other, so that they were infinitely more formidable than the sum of their parts.  They were the Enlightenment made flesh.  And behind this front line was a second and even a third line of solid, sensible, and able men, capable of rising to a great occasion.

     Ususally the best teams win athletic competitions, and the best teams usually have the best players.  Great events in history are determined by all kinds of factors, but the most important single one is always the quality of the people in charge; and never was this principle more convincingly demonstrated than in the struggle for American independence.

     Benjamin Franklin visited England often enough to realize that there was a constitutional gap, as wide as the Atlantic, between the British and the colonists in their interpretation of who ruled.  The Earl of Granville bluntly told an astonished Franklin that “The King is legislator for the Colonies, and His Majesty’s instructions are the law of the land.”  Franklin replied, “I told him this was a new doctrine to me.  I had always understood from our charters that our laws were to be made by our assemblies, but the Earl assured me I was totally mistaken.”

     Franklin understood better than the Earl that colonial America was an experiment in self-government.  New England’s town meetings, Virginia’s House of Burgess, and the colonial assemblies were repository’s of local self-rule.  Franklin foresaw the future and realized that self-government on a national scale was indeed a very real possibility.  And when it came, he was saddened about the break with England, but he was confident that America’s huge strengths would make it a certain victor.

     George Washington’s burning ambition was to get a regular commission in the British army.  He tried repeatedly, for it would have changed his life.  It would mean global service, promotion, riches, and possibly a knighthood, but the system was against him.  Colonial army officers were considered nobodies and treated with contempt by the English officers.  Washington felt the sting and the insult of this injustice and promptly placed his superior military and administrative talents with his native America.  Without Washington’s skill, the colonists may very well not have won the war.  He did not get a knighthood, but his face is on the American dollar bill yet today.

     Thomas Jefferson brought an intellectual power to the Revolution.  He had read Chapter Five of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, which argued that merit and capability and industry should determine men’s and women’s position in society, and not into which family they are born.  Onto Locke’s idea of a meritocracy Jefferson grafted two other ideas: the importance of individual rights–life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and also the linking of liberty with popular sovereignty.  Jefferson’s ideas gave the American colonists a strong, clear, and plausible basis for freedom and their move for independence.

     On July 4, 1776 the Second Continental Congress approved Jefferson’s written document, the Declaration of Independence, and the members, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the others signed it.  In this political contest their team had the better players and would go on to win.

NATIONAL RELIGIOUS LEADERS

by William H. Benson

June 22, 2000

     Those religious leaders from America’s past who achieve notoriety on a national scale are not always well treated and accepted.

     It is a sobering footnote in our nation’s history that on June 27, 1844 a mob broke into the jail at Carthage, Illinois and shot and killed Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum.  Governor Thomas Ford had promised Joseph safety if he turned himself in, but Ford did not fully understand the level of hatred that had arisen against Joseph that drove the mob to a point they were ready to kill him.  His neighbors around Nauvoo, Illinois hated him because he had such a despotic control over his followers, for they believed him a prophet and did whatever he wanted.  Joseph paid the ultimate price for his actions and his beliefs and died at age thiry-eight years and six months.

     Most religious and cultural historians have considered Joseph Smith a very low character with little ethical restraints; however, most recently that evaluation has been upgraded drastically.  Harold Bloom, the religious critic, has even dared to label Joseph Smith the one true American genius, and that the church he founded is the archetype of the American Religion. 

     Bloom wrote, “Though I do not lack respect for the Mormon religion, and possess a healthy fear of its immense future, as a religious critic I judge Smith to be greater and more interesting than the current faith of the people that he created.  Partly this is because he died much too soon. . . . Partly this is because there has been a falling-away from his teaching and his example . . . in the last century or so.  He had an enormous religious imagination. . . . “

     Nevertheless, Joseph Smith dared to create a new American Religion and dared to challenge existing social mores, and in so doing brought out the very best in some and the very worst in others.  He was divisive.

     Two hundred years before the events in Carthage, Roger Williams, a young Puritan minister, arrived in Boston and voiced his opinion that church and government should not be too closely aligned, as it was being practiced in Boston  The outraged magistrates promptly arrested him, brought him to trial, and convicted him of heretical notions.  Facing sure deportation back to England, he chose instead to flee to Rhode Island and establish his own colony.  So angered were the Boston authorities by his opinions that they permanently banished him from ever living in or even passing through the Massachusetts Bay colony.   

     Then, more than three centuries later, in the early 1980’s, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Jim Bakker built the biggest and most influential religious broadcasting system ever, bringing in at its peak $160 million a year.  Millions watched him, and the millions poured in.  Then, came the announcement of the Jessica Hahn affair, Bakker’s resignation, Jerry Falwell’s inept bungling, and the declaration of PTL’s bankruptcy.  In two years Jim fell further than any other American.  He and his wife Tammy Faye became the national laughing-stock, grist for David Letterman’s jokes late at night.

     In the fall of 1989 federal prosecutors tried Jim Bakker, and a jury convicted him of fraudulently selling lifetime partnerships over the television airwaves.  Judge Rober Potter slapped the stunned Bakker with a 45-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.  The judge was very anxious to sever the pipeline connecting Bakker and the people.  Four and 3/4 years later, on July 1, 1994, he stepped out of the prison camp at Jessup, Georgia, a deeply reduced and humbled man, who has deliberately shunned the limelight ever since. 

     Peering into the 21st century and on into the third millennium, I wonder what characters will come to the forefront of future religious movements across America.  Whoever they are and whatever they institutionalize, America will find a place for them, for the first Amendment assures them of that.  But if the past is a prologue, I suspect that the solid–such as perhaps the Billy Graham’s, will probably receive the acclamation and respect that they more or less deserve.  Those who make promises on the airwaves and then fail to deliver on them will probably go directly to jail.  Those who think further and deeper than any others on the religious issues and problems of the day will, no doubt, suffer cruelly at the hands of lesser men. But the fierce extremists–the Jim Jones and the David Koresh’s, they will quickly find themselves in trouble–hated and hunted.

     These future faceless and nameless characters will be no less astonishing than those whom we have already seen and heard and even endured.

FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

by William H. Benson

June 7, 2000

     Wednesday of this week, June 7th, is Freedom of the Press Day.  Originally designated by the Inter-American Press Association, it is not a widely celebrated day, but the Founding Fathers understood that their new nation required a strong and independent press.  James Madison put “freedom of the press” in the first amendment of the Bill Rights:  “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. . . . ”  It is the press’s job to reveal the truth and, in so doing, to restrain the government’s reach for unwarranted powers.

     As a result, government officials have, in the past, disliked, mistrusted, and even hated the press.  Adalai Stevenson, the twice-defeated Presidential candidate during the 1950’s, said, “Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.”  Until the Nixon era, the media was extremely selective in the publicity it gave to presidential wrongdoing.  Both Roosevelt and Kennedy had love affairs going on that were known to Washington journalists, but the truth was never revealed while they were President.

     But it was Richard Nixon with his bristling ego and his verbal digs at the media that produced a backlash–the media struck back.  The historian Paul Johnson wrote, “The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful. . . . In the paranoid atmosphere generated by the media’s anti-Nixon vendetta, anything served as ammunition to hurl against the ‘enemy’.”

     Even though Nixon initially knew nothing of the Plumbers breakin of the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on June 17, 1972, Ben Bradlee, editor at the Washington Post, put Watergate stories on his paper’s front page seventy-nine times during the 1972 election, seeking to make the Watergate burglary a major moral issue.  Two years later Nixon was forced to resign.  In a sense, the media toppled Nixon’s Presidency.

     James Fenimore Cooper wrote: “If newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.”

     And so, in turn, we look to the government to restrain the press’s power.  For example, in 1978 the FCC ruled that George Carlin’s X-rated monlogue should not be aired on radio nor television during the day.  “The Seven Dirty Words” case went to the Supreme Court, and they upheld the FCC’s ruling.  The liberals flew into a rage, for they believed that George Carlin should be permitted to say whatever he wanted and whenever.  But when self-administered restraint fails, we look to the courts, to the laws, and to the government for censorship.  Once again, but in a different manner, it becomes a moral issue.

      Today, the entertainment industry has unparalleled power to produce whatever and whenever.  Fred Friendly, a former television executive said, “Television and movies make so much money at their very worst, why would they ever want to be their very best?’

      A columnist wrote, “We are drowning our youngsters in violence, cynicism and sadism piped into the living room and even the nursery.  The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because the Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn’t slugged, raped, and thrown into a Bessemer converter.”

     The historian, Barbara Tuchman wrote, “The cause of pornography is not the same as the cause of free speech.  There is a difference.”  

     So, we witness a dance between the government and the media; the media reigns in the government, and the government pulls back on the media.  It is a dance in which each takes turns leading, searching for an equalibrium.  In this late date of our American republic, we are now looking for stronger means to control the trash flooding our televisions, theatres, and computer monitors.  This low quality substance can and will capture the minds of the young Americans, damaging them forever.  Freedom of the press is one thing; pornography and violence is another.  There is a difference.