America at War

by William H. Benson

May 30, 2019

     On Palm Sunday, April 14, this year, former President Jimmy Carter told his Sunday School class at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, that President Donald Trump had called him the day before, on Saturday, for the first time since voters elected him president in November of 2016.

     To his class, Carter explained that Trump is fearful that China is “getting ahead of us.” On the phone, Carter asked Trump, “And do you know why that is? Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war.”

     Carter then told his class that the United States is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world due to our desire to impose American values on other countries. China is investing in high-speed railroads, rather than in defense.”

     “How many miles of high-speed railroads do we have in this country?” he asked his class.

     “Zero,” his class members answered.

     Carter said. “We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that is why they’re ahead of us in almost every way. If you take $3 trillion and put it into American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion left over.

     “We’d have high-speed railroads. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing. We’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.”

     Carter makes some valid points, although not all are politically popular.

     Transportation officials define high-speed railroads as those that run in excess of 250 kilometers per hour (160 mph). As of December 31, 2018, China claimed 29,000 kilometers (18,000 miles) of high speed railroads, two-thirds of the world’s total.

     A pleasant thought: instead of a two plus hour drive to a major airport, a forty minute ride.

     Carter’s comment that the U.S. is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world” is astonishing when one remembers that he is a 1946 graduate of the naval academy at Annapolis. Historians though might argue with him that ancient Rome exceeded the U.S.’s talent for declaring war.

     On Sunday, May 14, the New York Times featured two articles on America at war.

     The first appeared in the “Book Review.” The historian Joseph J. Ellis reviewed Rick Atkinson’s book, The British are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777. Ellis praises how Atkinson displays “a novelistic imagination that verges on the cinematic.”

     Atkinson begins his “brutal and bloody” account of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and ends it at Princeton on Christmas Day, 1777, after Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware River at night and attacked the unprepared Hessians at daybreak.

     Atkinson intends “to rescue the American Revolution from the sentimental stereotypes and bring it to life as an ugly, savage, often barbaric war. Unlike in World War II, most of the killing occurred up close. If a continental soldier was hit in the torso, his chances of dying were more than 50 percent.”

     The second article appeared in the “Sunday Review” section under the headline, “A Battle in Falluja, Revisited.” Elliot Ackerman, Marine and First Platoon leader, wrote of his fierce days fighting door-to-door in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004.

     Ackerman writes, “This is the 15^th Memorial Day since the battle of Falluja in late 2004, in which 82 American service members died. The battle was a key operation at the outset of the Iraq War and resulted in the fiercest urban combat since the battle for Hue in Vietnam in 1968.”

     Ackerman says, that as a platoon leader, “You are responsible for everything your platoon does or fails to do. Responsible for everything.”

     A handwritten note scrawled on the wall of the government center in Ramadi, Iraq, in January 2007 said it well, “America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war: America is at the mall.”

     Indeed, it is the military service organizations—the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—that fight the wars that the politicians select, while the vast majority of Americans live their lives unperturbed. America has been and will be, it seems, at continuous war.

     And yet, as Americans we have a choice: continue to engage in a stream of wars far into the future, or, as Jimmy Carter advises, apply the revenues intended for war to our faltering infrastructure and to our schools. He urges the government to spend its revenues more wisely, with a better return.

     Carter said that Trump is worried about China surpassing the U.S. as the world’s top economic power, but he said, “I don’t really fear that, but it bothers President Trump, and I don’t know why.”

Australia’s Feral Animals

by William H. Benson

May 16, 2019

     Australia is a world away from the United States. Ask a typical American for details about Australia, and he or she may recollect three familiar items: sheep, kangaroos, or rabbits.

     Today, Australia’s shepherds care for some 75 million sheep that graze on huge pastures that the natives call stations. Also, the kangaroo is a marsupial, those mammals that evolved on the Australian continent, and are known for a mother’s pouch where the infant resides for weeks after birth.

     Then, the rabbit is one of the ecological disasters that resulted after Europeans introduced their animals into Australia. Australian officials have since tried to manage a series of invasive species.

     Feral rabbits spread across the continent, mainly because they face no natural predators, like wolves or coyotes. One incredible statistic, almost unbelievable, claims that by 1920, Australia’s ranchers and shepherds were facing as many as 10 billion rabbits.

     A rabbit’s ability to destroy a pasture is astonishing. It leaves nothing behind, not a single spear of grass, and then the soil erodes. To reduce rabbit numbers, Australians have built fences, shot them, poisoned them, and introduced a killing bacteria. Today, their population stands at about 200 million.   

     Another ecological disaster is the hog. In a short amount of time, domesticated hogs that escaped farms turned feral. Today, an estimated 24 million hogs ravage Australia’s pastures.

     One official said that “feral hogs are prolific breeders, more akin to the breeding habits of rabbits. Sows produce two litters per year, and four to 10 pigs per litter.” Ranchers build fences, but the hogs burrow under them.

     Then, there are 5 million feral donkeys, 2.6 million feral goats, 400,000 feral horses, 300,000 feral camels, 150,000 feral water buffalos, and a number of feral dogs, the dingoes.

     But of all the invasive species, it is the feral cat that Australian officials are most determined to cull. A recent New York Times Magazine article reported that between two and six million feral cats reside across 98% of Australia’s landmass, but an official pushed the number higher, close to 20 million.

     These feral cats are “catastrophic cats,” not your sweet, gentle house cat. The male feral cats are vicious predators that have mastered the art of hunting birds, mammals, retiles, amphibians, and that go on profligate sprees. They climb trees, find the birds’ nests, and eat the eggs or hatchlings.

     “They hunt no matter what. Even if not hungry, they are programmed to stalk available prey. The cats kill an estimated 377 million birds and 649 million reptiles every year in Australia.”

     As a result, “an estimated 34 mammal species are now extinct, and the cats are blamed for 22 of those extinctions. Officials list another 100 plus species in Australia as ‘near threatened,’ or ‘critical’.”

     John Woinarski, an Australian conservation researcher, said, “Recent extinction rates in Australia are unparalleled. It’s calamitous.”

     “In 2015, the Australian national government adopted a plan to kill two million feral cats by 2020, out of grave concern for the nation’s indigenous wildlife, groups of small and threatened rodent and marsupial species, for which cats have become a deadly predator.”

     Today, hunters kill the cats with either bullets or with arrows, or they trap them and then shoot them, or they poison them. Pilots eject 50 poisoned sausages per square mile from airplanes in certain targeted areas, “laying down nearly half a million baits in the course of one month.”

     “The sausages include kangaroo meat, chicken fat, a mix of herbs and spices, along with a poison—called 1080—derived from gastrolobium plants and highly lethal to cats.”

     Cats first arrived in Australia in the mid-eighteenth century and then “spread with astonishing speed,” across the continent. In 1885, a rancher reported, “It is a very remarkable fact that the domestic cat is to be found everywhere throughout the dry back country. I have met with cats, some of enormous size, at least 50 miles from water.”

     A backlash erupted against the killing, but from foreigners, who organized petition drives to save the cats. “The petitions were met with scorn in Australia.” The Australians asked, “Why has someone started a petition to save the feral cats? Pure stupidity as cats kill more and more native animals.”

     In the U.S., Alley Cat Allies and other organizations promote a no-kill, or a catch-neuter-release policy, a program that may stop the cats’ proliferation, but will not stop the wildlife devastation now.

     Australians will continue to try to manage the feral animal populations, especially the cats, but the sheer numbers overwhelm them.

Watergate—Woodward and Bernstein

by William H. Benson

May 2, 2019

     After police arrested five burglars in the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in a suite on the sixth floor of the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. on June 17, 1972, the Washington Post‘s editor, Benjamin Bradlee assigned two young reporters, Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein, to investigate.

     Their names and the Post‘s have been tied together to the Watergate scandal ever since. 

     “The Post put Watergate stories on its front page seventy-nine times during the 1972 election, and from October 10 and on, began publishing a series of ‘investigative’ articles seeking to make the burglary a major moral issue.”

     Woodward and Bernstein did not know then that their investigation would lead to President Richard Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974, two years after his landslide re-election in November of 1972.

     Did they and the Post perform a valuable service to the country and to democracy, or did they create a hostile environment where government found it difficult to function, to conduct official business?

     One author, Rodger Streitmatter, wrote that Woodward and Bernstein “begged, lied, badgered sources, and on occasion, broke the law” in order to get leads and confirmations needed to run their stories. That said, “Few though would dispute the importance of their reporting.”

     Woodward relied upon a source, code named “Deep Throat,” an unidentified official in the Federal government. Woodward agreed to never identify this official, and to use his information only to confirm other sources’ information.

     Woodward and Bernstein mention this official on page 71 of their 1974 book All the President’s Men. On occasion, Woodward would move a potted plant to the rear of his balcony, a prearranged signal that Woodward needed to meet the official. At 2:00 a.m. that night, the two would meet in a hotel’s underground parking garage and discuss information.

     This was collusion between a high-ranking government official, charged with keeping national secrets, and a newspaper reporter, charged with divulging information.

     Woodward dared to call the official at least once. “The tone of the conversation that Sunday afternoon was ominous. When Deep Throat heard Woodward’s voice, there was a long pause. This would have to be their last telephone conversation, he said flatly. Both the FBI and the White House were determined to learn how the Post was getting its information and to put a stop to it.”

     Leaking secret government information does have certain consequences.

     The historian Paul Johnson wrote, “In Nixon’s first five months in office, twenty-one major leaks from classified National Security Council documents appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post. It is not known how many US lives were lost as result of these leaks, but the damage was in some cases considerable.”

     When Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the press the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the US military’s involvement in Vietnam, Nixon’s officials, including Robert Haldeman and John Erlichman, approved a Plumbers Gang, a clandestine group assigned to stop leaks, the same machinery that led to the break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

     Paul Johnson believed the media’s attack was unfair and unbalanced, over the top. He wrote,

     “The anti-Nixon campaign, especially in the Washington Post and the New York Times, was continual, venomous, unscrupulous, inventive, and sometimes unlawful.” It later reverted to “the hysteria usually associated with American witch hunts.”

     A question needs asked. What do we as Americans want? An Imperial Presidency? “Please give us a king!” or do we want an Imperial Congress?” or do we want an Imperial Media? Perhaps we should return to a balanced and just government that acts according to compromise and consensus.

     Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian, said, “Watergate inaugurated an era of politics by other means, where political opponents attempted, instead of defeating one another’s arguments, or winning elections, to oust each other from office by way of ethics investigations.”

     In the 1976 movie All the President’s Men, Robert Redford played Robert Woodward, Dustin Hoffman played Carl Bernstein, Jason Robards played Benjamin Bradlee, and Hal Holbrook played Deep Throat.

     On May 21, 2005, thirty-one years after Nixon’s resignation, an attorney came forward and identified the associate FBI director in 1973, W. Mark Felt, then suffering from dementia, as Deep Throat. Woodward and Bernstein confirmed the attorney’s information.    

Watergate—Cracks in the Coverup

by William H. Benson

April 4, 2019

     Martha Mitchell was the flamboyant and outspoken wife of John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s former Attorney General and then, in the summer of 1972, the head of Nixon’s re-election campaign. After police apprehended five burglars inside the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C on June 17, 1972, Martha suspected that Nixon and her husband were involved.

     For one thing, Martha knew James McCord, one of the five burglars, because he had worked as her daughter’s bodyguard and her driver. Martha knew that McCord and Mitchell knew each other, and she had also overheard her husband’s phone calls. She put the coverup plan together before anyone else did.

     Martha said, in reference to her husband, “I love him very much. He loves me because I’ve stood up for him. But he is defending the president, who planned the whole thing. I’m under surveillance day and night. I’m no fool.” Martha’s loose lips terrified White House officials.

     Later that summer, a White House operative named Stephen B. King detained Martha for twenty-four hours in a hotel room in Newport Beach, California, and refused to let her have access to adequate food or to a telephone. She was hysterical and said that she was “kept a prisoner.”

     When Martha tried to call out for help, King yanked the cord out of the wall. When she tried to escape through a window, she cut her hand on the glass. When the doctor arrived to stitch her wound, he and King held her down long enough for the doctor to give her a tranquilizing shot in her hip.

     Once back at her home in New York City, she called a White House reporter named Helen Thomas and said, “They’re not going to get away with this, Helen.” She then wrote a letter to Parade magazine and revealed all she had endured in that hotel room.

     The White House proceeded to smear Martha’s reputation, saying that she was “insane,” “a gossip and a drunk,” that “she needed institutionalized,” and that no one should believe her tall tales. It was “a sexist campaign to discredit a woman who knew too much.”

     Martha did drink, she did spread rumors, she was hysterical, but she was right about Nixon. She said, “I will not let these lies be told.”

     After James McCord appeared before Judge John Sirica, and he realized that he may face a stiff prison sentence, he fired off a letter to the judge on March 19, 1973, and said,

     “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. Perjury occurred during the trial in matters highly material to the government’s case, others involved in the Watergate operation were not identified during the trial, and Watergate was not a CIA operation.”

     Two days later, on March 21, 1973, John Dean III, Nixon’s legal counsel, confronted Nixon in the Oval Office and told him that “Watergate is a cancer on his presidency,” but Nixon refused to back away from his coverup.

     Dean said, “The day I told Mr. Nixon there was a cancer on his presidency was the day I met the real Nixon. I knew I had to break rank.”

     On April 6, 1973, Dean hired an attorney and pleaded for leniency in exchange for his testimony before the Senate Watergate committee. He later said, “Nixon thought I should lie for him. I should fall on the sword. I should go to jail, so he can continue to be who he wants to be. I didn’t see it that way.”

     For five days, beginning on June 25, 1973, Dean testified before the Senate committee. His prepared statement was some 60,000 words, and over 80 million people watched his testimony. He implicated himself, John Mitchell, and President Nixon in the coverup. Nixon denied each of Dean’s accusations.

     On October 19, 1973, Dean pleaded guilty to “a single felony county of conspiracy to obstruct justice and defraud the United States,” and the judge reduced his sentence to time served, four months.

     Who do you believe? A talkative woman like Martha Mitchell, a burglar like James McCord, a polished White House legal counsel like John Dean, or the President of the United States? At the time, Republican party loyalists believed Nixon, but others were convinced Nixon was lying.

     Ever since, mental health professionals have labeled those who appear and act delusional but speak the truth the “Martha Mitchell effect.”

     Martha and John Mitchell separated in 1973. It was rumored she threw her husband’s clothes out of the window into the street below. She passed away on May 31, 1976, at fifty-seven, of multiple myeloma, but she lived to see Nixon resign in disgrace on August 8, 1974. Her estranged husband served nineteen months in prison.

     In 2017, President Trump appointed Stephen B. King Ambassador to the Czech Republic.

     Next time in these pages, “Watergate—the White House Tapes.”

Watergate—Conspiracy to Coverup

by William H. Benson

March 21, 2019

     On June 17, 1972, police nabbed five burglars inside the Democratic National Party’s headquarters, in a sixth floor suite in the Watergate Hotel, alongside the Potomac River, in Washington D.C.

     On June 23, 1972, President Nixon met with his chief of staff, Robert Haldeman, who disapproved of the FBI’s investigation thus far to determine who had overseen and funded the burglary.

     To the President, Haldeman said, “The only way to solve this is for us to have CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters call Pat Gray [the FBI director] and just say, ‘Stay out of this. We don’t want you to go any further on it.’” Nixon approved. “All right, fine,” he said.

     Thus began Nixon’s conspiracy to coverup his associates’ criminal actions.

     Nixon instructed the CIA to thwart the FBI’s investigation into a criminal case that would have implicated White House officials. According to historians and legal pundits, this conversation was Nixon’s “smoking gun,” an “abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice.”

     Also, Nixon’s personal attorney, Herbert W. Kalmbach, distributed “hush money. He “funneled over $200,000 to the five burglars and to the two men who had orchestrated the break-in, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt.” “Haldeman let Kalmbach use a $350,000 cash fund from the White House.”

     Late in June, Nixon’s press secretary Ron Ziegler dismissed the Watergate break-in as “a third-rate burglary attempt.”

     Then, when asked, Nixon’s former attorney general and head of Nixon’s re-election campaign John Mitchell, “denied any involvement with Watergate and disavowed any knowledge whatsoever of the five burglars.”

     On August 29, 1972, Nixon met with reporters at his San Clemente, California residence, and said that “an internal investigation into the June break-in revealed that no one on the White House staff, in his administration, or anyone ‘presently employed’ was involved.”

     On March 21, 1973, forty-six years ago this month, Nixon met John W. Dean III, Nixon’s young legal counsel, in the Oval Office to discuss the hush money that Kalmbach had paid thus far.

     Dean then delivered dire news to Nixon. “We have a cancer—within—close to the Presidency, that’s growing daily. It’s compounding.”

     Dean asked the president to consider Kalmbach’s hush money payments to the burglars, and then Dean delivered his punchline. “Bob [Haldeman] is involved in that; John [Ehrlichman] is involved in that; I’m involved in that; [John] Mitchell is involved in that. And that’s an obstruction of justice.”

     At that moment, Nixon could have stopped the coverup. He could have called in FBI agents, and told them what he knew, and when he knew it. He could have directed them to John Dean. Those actions might have saved his presidency, even though his associates may have gone to jail.

     Instead, that same day, Nixon discussed with Dean an additional payment to E. Howard Hunt, who was to appear before a judge in two days and receive sentencing. Hunt was now demanding another $122,000, in order to buy his further silence.

     Nixon asked Dean, “How much money do you need?”

     Dean replied, “I would say that these people are going to cost, uh, a million dollars over the next, uh, two years.”

     Nixon said, “We could get that. If you need the money. You could get the money. What I mean is, you could get a million dollars. And you could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten. But the question is, ‘who would handle it’”

     Evan Thomas wrote in his 2015 biography of Nixon, “It is hard to explain this failure of judgment, the most critical mistake Nixon ever made. Favoring hush money over full disclosure was a moral lapse, regardless of whether Nixon had committed a crime, but the reasons for his actions are complex and not easy to sort out.”

     Thirteen months later, on April 30, 1973, Nixon appeared on television and again proclaimed his innocence. That day, he accepted Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s resignations, and he fired John Dean.

     Nixon said, “America, in its political campaigns, must not again fall into the trap of letting the end, however great that end is, justify the means. The easiest course would be for me to blame those to whom I delegated the responsibility to run the campaign, but that would be the cowardly thing to do.”

     Next time in these pages, Watergate—Cracks in the Coverup.