ANNE FRANK

by William H. Benson

June 6, 1944

     In his recent book The O’Reilly Factor Bill O’Reilly wrote that the mean-spirited and truly evil- minded people of the world have a run of power, but only for so long, and then they are over powered.  For example, he wrote that Hitler had about a dozen years.  He and others of his kind have the ability to create terrifying conditions for the innocent, but only for a season.  And yet, even within the harshest climates, flowers occasionally do bloom.

      Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager, living in Holland wrote a diary which she began on June 12, 1942 and ended on August 1, 1944.  She wrote about the trials of hiding in what she called “the secret annex” with seven others while the German Nazis controlled Holland.  Like many others, I watched the recent television miniseries on Anne Frank along with my wife and two daughters.

     Almost immediately my daughters asked the question.  “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”  I wonder if there is even an answer to the question.  How do you explain irrational hatred–racism and facism, an adult thing, to a child?  Even Anne Frank struggled with the question.  At one point in the miniseries she asked an older lady, “Is it something that we have done wrong?”

     On the morning of August 4, 1944 between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. a car pulled up to 263 Prinsengracht, and the SS sergeant Karl Josef Silberbauer with at least three members of the Dutch Security Police entered the secret annex.  They demanded all their valuables and cash and then arrested them.  The eight were sent to Westerbork, a transit camp for Jews in the north of Holland, and then on September 3, 1944 they were deported on the last train to leave Westerbork and arrived three days later in Auschwitz, Poland.

     Anne’s sister–Margot, her mother–Edith, and Anne were transported from Auschwitz at the end of October to Bergen-Belsen, a camp near Hannover, Germany.  On January 6, 1945 Anne’s mother died of exhaustion and hunger.

     The typhus epidemic that broke out in the winter of 1944-1945, as a result of the horrendous hygienic conditions, killed thousands of prisoners, including Margot and a few days later Anne.  She died in late February or early March of 1945, and her body was probably buried in a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen.  The British liberated the camp six weeks later on April 12, 1945, and Hitler committed suicide on April 30th.  Seven days later Germany surrendered.

     Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was the only one of the eight to survive.  He went back to Holland to their secret annex and found Anne’s diary and had it published. 

     The diary ends with this final entry.  “A voice within me is sobbing, ‘You see, that’s what’s become of you.  You’re surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don’t listen to the advice of your own better half.’ . . . because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.”  

     June 6, 1944.  D-Day is now synonymous with righting wrongs, with a change in the tide of affairs, and a correcting swing of the pendelum.  Those who play a game of murder, theft, destruction, lying, cheating, and hate create shabby foundations upon which a nation or a people can build.  Their construction timber is full of holes, termite-eaten, and a D-Day eventually comes around to knock the whole thing over.

     Voltaire, the father of the French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, signed all his correspondence with “Ecrasez l’infame”, which means “Crush the infamy”.  What he meant by that was to join him in a war against religious intolerance, for he believed that true religion is a source of peace.  Intoleration of others because of their religious beliefs, he argued, is a source of great evil in the world.  It was Voltaire who transformed “intolerance” into a vice and “toleration” into a virtue.  Let others believe as they want to believe, he urged.

     Eight people hid in a secret annex for over two years, all were arrested, seven died, and only one lived.  They had broken a law that declared that all Jewish people were enemies of the state.  “Intolerance” had become a national policy–but only for a dozen years.    

GRADUATION

by William H. Benson

May 24, 2001

     On May 26, 1954 archaeologists digging in the sand next to Cheops’s Great Pyramid at Giza discovered a pit carved into the bedrock and covered with blocks of stone.  Once inside, the Egyptianologists found a boat made of cedars from Lebanon that was broken down into pieces.  Reconstructed it measured 150 feet long and probably conveyed Cheops’s body from the east to the west bank of the Nile for burial–only some four thousand years ago.

     Stay with me while we now switch gears.  Graduation season is upon us, and with it the national columnists are voicing their opinions on the state of education in America.  Thomas Sowell last week commented that everybody eventually drops out of the educational system at some point, some sooner than others.  He points out that even the Ph.D.’s drop out–either before or after completing their work, and many who do drop out often return to school later.  In the U.S. education is always available and is achievable. 

     Charley Reese, on the other hand is very much down on what he calls the “government-funded and government-controlled” secular system which produces what he sees is a flawed product.  He suggests that parents should pull their children out of public schools and place them in private schools.  It is his opinion–right or wrong.

     But what else can today’s high school graduate take with them to the university?

     I recently read a quote about Irving Berlin and his philosophy of life.  He saw life as composed of a few basic elements: life and death, loneliness and love, hope and defeat–not many more.  With those as givens, he realized that approval is better than complaint, hope more viable than despair, and kindness nobler than cruelty.

     Applying that to the high school graduate, I would suggest that college is not a place where the complainers, the despairing, and the cruel belong, but it is a place for the thoughtful, the approving, the hopeful, and the kind-hearted.  With just a medium measure of brain-power and gigantic doses of determination and hustle, a person can achieve remarkable success at the university, if one learns to quickly put aside the loneliness and defeated attitudes that can cripple even the smartest.

     Above all, a measure of enthusiasm is required.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”  Beware.  In this dumbing down America we live in, a four-year degree is still something we must label “great”.  Emerson would have agreed.

     Now what does education have to do with a buried boat in the Sahara?  I think it addresses the other big problem that college students endure and that is “envy”.  Not everyone goes to college.  Instead, they get jobs, make money, get married, start a family, buy a house with furniture to fill it, perhaps a farm, a business, a car, a pickup, and a boat, and none of those things are wrong.  They want to build a pyramid–gigantic, colossal, grand, rock-solid, powerful, stretching into the sky.

     Now how can the college student compete with that?  He or she is buried in a bedrock of books, term-papers, reports, lectures, and class notes, usually poor without much income and a lot of expenses.  He or she faces a tough slog.  Locked in a self-imposed tomb, stuck in the sand, while beside them stands a pyramid.  But eventually graduation day arrives, (and it may feel like four thousand years instead of four), and the college graduate sails away.

     The difficulty with the pyramid is that no one can move it.  It faces a lot of weather, a blistering hot sun, and pirates gut it of its internal treasures.  Above all else, it cannot float.  There it  stands–forever.  The fancy economic phrase for this is “delayed gratification”.

     Another thing not to be slighted.  A college student has a chance to meet the wild and crazy, the witty, the intelligent, the determined, the grand, and the truly outstanding.  They are all there.  Why would anyone pass up the chance to meet them?

     A farmer entered his mule in the Kentucky Derby.  When asked if he thought his mule had much of a chance of winning, he replied, “No, but I feel the association will do him good.”

     Despite a recent scandalous admission, Jessie Jackson used to say something of importance to his audiences, “If you’re in school, stay there.  If you’re not in school, go back.”

IMPEACHMENT

by William H. Benson

May 10, 2001

     Just weeks after gaining the Vice-Presidency, Andrew Johnson moved into the White House and the Oval Office after John Wilkes Booth had done his damage in Ford’s Theatre.  The new President sought to carry out Lincoln’s generous policy toward the Southern states but without Lincoln’s political skill.  The Radical Republicans in Congress wanted revenge and treated the Southern states as conquered territories, rather than as fellow states in the Union.

     A hopeless conflict ensued.  Congress would pass vindictive legislation.  President Johnson would then veto it, and Congress would then try to override his vetoes.

     John F. Kennedy told the story of the showdown in his book, Profiles in Courage.  Johnson fired Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War and a fierce Radical Republican bent on punishing the defeated South.  In firing Stanton, Johnson openly defied and, in fact, broke the Tenure of Office Act.  The House refused to accept Stanton’s firing and voted for impeachment.

     Out of the total 54 votes in the Senate, 36 were needed for the 2/3’s vote to remove Johnson from the Oval Office.  On May 16, 1868 the final vote came in at 35 for impeachment, one vote short of the necessary.  Seven Republicans, including Edmund G. Ross from Kansas, voted their conscience and refused to allow partisan politics to determine their vote.  Ross later said that he voted as he did because he feared a Congressional autocracy. 

     He later wrote, “I almost literally looked down into my open grave.”  As it turned out, he did commit political suicide.  His career in Washington ended, and back in Kansas he and his family suffered social ostracism, physical attack, and poverty.

     Of Congress’s 35 attempts at impeachment, only 16 have actually happened, and of those, only 9 have gone to trial.  Two of those were for Presidents–Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.  Another President, Richard Nixon, chose to resign on August 9, 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee issued 3 Articles of Impeachment.  Nixon well understood that the Senate had the necessary 2/3’s votes to give him the boot.

     Two years have passed since the last impeachment trial–that for Bill Clinton, indicted on two charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.  When pressed for a resignation, Clinton responded curtly, “Never.”  Because the Senate did not have the 2/3’s vote, the acquittal came on February 12, 1999.

     Recently, I read Bill O’Reilly’s book, The O’Reilly factor.  Outspoken, abrasive, opinionated, and blunt, he wrote of Clinton, “What a ridiculous waste!  Full of promise, intelligence, and charisma, this man will go down in history alongside Warren Harding and Richard Nixon as the most corrupt presidents of the twentieth century.

     “The much-publicized affair with Monica Lewinsky was trivial (except to Hillary and Chelsea).  What was not trivial was his lying about the whole thing, which paralyzed the nation’s executive and legislative branches for more than a year.  This man did tremendous damage to our country.

     “We Americans have the right to expect honest, disciplined leadership.  And we also deserve a leader who adheres to a decent standard of behavior within the walls of the White House.”

     Now some would conclude that O’Reilly overstated his disgust of Clinton’s sorry behavior, but others would not.  Loved by his friends and hated by his enemies, he remains today what he always has been–an enigma. 

     Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton–different times, different reasons, different facts, and different cases, and yet, the law is there.  Its gears turn slowly, but the machinery works.  The Constitution spells it out, defining impeachable offenses as those considered “high crimes and misdemeanors”.  The faces change, but the law remains steadfast, clearly what the Founding Fathers wanted and created.

CHERNOBYL

by William H. Benson

April 26, 2001

     Mount Vesuvius covered Pompei.  An earthquake struck San Francisco.  The Titanic bumped an ice berg and sank, and the Hindenburg was destroyed by fire at a tower mooring.  But the world’s biggest and worst accident to date happened at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986 in the Ukraine near the town of Chernobyl.

     While technicians shut down the fourth unit of the V. I. Lenin nuclear reactor for routine maintenance and testing, the steam pressure increased until the graphite core exploded.  Hundreds of tons of fuel, concrete, steel, and other debris rocketed into the night sky and then rained down over the surrounding area.

     Even more deadly were the several tons of radiation that rose ever upwards into the atmosphere creating a nuclear wind that swept across the Soviet Union and Europe poisoning millions.  Immediately, pilots began performing death-defying and heroic acts flying choppers into the smoke and fire and radioactive cloud to dump sand, boron, and lead onto the burning reactor.

     The Chernobyl accident rendered an area the size of New York State unsafe for human habitation.  A city of 42,000 was abandoned for at least the next 500 years.  It killed, according to the official account, 31 people almost immediately, and 224 others in the next few weeks, but actually the death toll was probably in the several hundreds and may even reach tens of thousands once all that radioactive waste has completed its course.

     People began to die.  First it was the firefighters and the cleanup crews who had been inside the reactor.  Then, men, women, and children across the Soviet Union began to develop radiation-linked diseases.  Since the explosion, cancer rates in the former Soviet Union have risen 300 percent, respiratory diseases 2,000 percent, and the number of babies born with birth defects has soared to record numbers.

     As is true of all accidents, everyone points a finger at another.  Government officials accuse the workers of being inept.  The workers accuse the power plant’s builders of shoddy construction.  Mothers with sick and dying children accuse the government.  Scientists and engineers contradict one another. 

     Actually, the Chernobyl fiasco was a combination of things that came to a focal point on that spring night fifteen years ago.  From the start the power plant was doomed to disaster, for it was poorly designed, poorly constructed, and poorly managed by poorly trained engineers.

     What was remarkable was that the Soviet Union admitted to a failure–the first time ever.  The Soviet Union’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, confessed that mistakes had been made.

     Today a sarcophagus of steel-and-concrete walls and ceiling encloses the fourth unit reactor.  It must stand and remain intact for the next several tens of thousand years.  At the bottom in the basement lies a pool of deadly radioactive material that no one has actually seen, but a photograph suggests it resembles a giant elephant’s foot standing on the floor.

     The sarcophagus was built very quickly by untrained workers more interested in surviving than doing a good job.  Rain leaks through cracks in the roof and then leaks out through cracks in the floor.  It is a continual disaster. 

     Before he became President, Ronald Reagan wrote that communism is neither an economic nor a political system, but a form of insanity, an aberration.  “The Russians have told us over and over again their goal is to impose their incompetent and ridiculous system on the world. . . . How much more misery will it cause before it disappears. . . . It will not survive because it lays the groundwork for its own destruction by suppressing economic, political, and social freedom.  Given the opportunity, people will seek freedom.”

     Chernobyl was the largest nail into the coffin of the Soviet Union’s empire, which had become unmanageable, teetering on the verge of economic collapse, rife with corruption, incompetence, political paranoia, and an unbending bureaucracy.  Reagan was right.  Communism did collapse, and Chernobyl was symbolic of what was wrong with communism–poor quality, hazardous to the environment, shortened human lives, and an accident waiting to happen that unfortunately did.

BRUCE CATTON

by William H. Benson

April 12, 2001

     My favorite writer on the Civil War is Bruce Catton.  He wrote easy-to-read and popularized versions of the Civil War that still line the shelves of most libraries.

     At age 49 Bruce chucked aside his career as a newpaper reporter and did what he really wanted to do–write Civil War history.  He quickly published three books on the Army of the Potomoc–Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomatox, none of which sold very well.  However, the Pulitzer Prize committee noticed them, and he was awarded a prize.  Suddenly, his trilogy became an overnight success.

     Bruce grew up in Benzonia, Michigan, where his father was a Congregational minister.  As a boy Bruce remembered going to the services in the Town Hall on Decoration Day and seeing the Civil War veterans dressed in their blue uniforms, sporting white beards.  They would then walk out to the cemetary and put lilacs on the graves of the veterans who had already passed on.  Those old men gave a color to village life, and Bruce wanted to know what made them tick. 

     He later realized that those old men in 1910 were either teenagers or in their twenties in the 1860’s and that they had passed through a fire then unlike anything else that had ever happened to them since.  It was an induction into adulthood that surpassed all others.  Bruce began writing to seek out what it was that drove those young men of the 1860’s so relentlessly forward.

     Through the narrative, the attention to detail, and even the maps, Bruce brings the battles and the war to life.  Always Bruce Catton ended up astonished at the courage those farm boys and small town sons from both the South and the North displayed on a battlefield in places like Shiloh, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg, where the carnage was so ugly and emotionally overwhelming.

     Elbow to elbow in a line one and two miles long they marched forward with their muskets raised, their bayonets poised, their swords rattling while overhead the colorful flags waved and whipped in the wind.  And the enemy, just across a few hundred yards of open field, had lined up in a similar fashion and was coming at them.  They met in terrible clashes.  What strength of desire can propel a young man forward when the odds are so firmly stacked against him?

     After years of studying the Civil War, Bruce concluded that despite the ugly cost of lost men, the war was worthwhile, for it did accomplish something.  It gave to Americans a geographic and a political unity.  It kept the country from fragmenting into a number of separate and independent and uncooperative states.  The North American continent was not Balkanized.  And this single geographic and political unit made possible the prosperity and power of later days.

     Ulysses Simpson Grant was Bruce Catton’s favorite Civil War character.  Bruce admired Grant for his tencity.  No matter how ferocious the battle, no matter how slim the chances of victory, Grant never faltered.  He revealed the qualities of a great military commander in that he took the initiative, fought aggressively, and made quick decisions.

     On a Sunday, April 9, 1865, Grant met Lee in a farmhouse owned by Wilmer McLean at Appomatox Court House, Virginia.  Grant offered generous terms;  the soldiers of the defeated Southern Confederacy could keep their horses for spring plowing.  Lee dressed in full military dress uniform accepted the terms. 

     On the evening of Good Friday, April 14, Abraham Lincoln went to Ford’s theatre to see the play, Our American Cousin, and there John Wilkes Booth, an actor and a Southern sympathizer, shot President Abraham Lincoln.  He died at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday morning, April 15.  Those dramatic events in our nation’s history appear to us now like a tragedy of Shakespearean quality, all acted out on a national stage and replayed again and again in the history books.

     Bruce Catton captured in words and detail the battles, the surrender at Appomatox, Lincoln’s assassination, and the “great lost cause” which the Southern Confederacy had so relentlessly pursued for four bloody years.

     Once Bruce was asked how he knew about a certain detail of the war, and he wistfully replied, “I don’t know.  Maybe I was there.”