Assassinations in the 1960’s

by William H. Benson

April 5, 2018

In January 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald—a former U.S. Marine, twenty-four years old, and living in Dallas, Texas—purchased through the mail a .38 Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver. In March that same year, he purchased a secondhand 6.5mm caliber Carcano rifle for $29.95. 

On the evening of April 10, 1963, Oswald approached the home of retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker, who sat at his desk near a window, in his Dallas, Texas home. From a hundred feet away, Oswald fired the Carcano rifle, but the bullet stuck the window frame.

Oswald escaped the scene, and police officials failed to connect him to the shooting. At home, he admitted to Marina—whom he had met and married in the Soviet Union—that he had shot at Walker.

In the autumn of 1963, President John F. Kennedy authorized American support for a military coup that would gain control of South Vietnam’s republican government. According to the historian Paul Johnson, “the CIA provided $42,000 in bribes for officers to set up a military junta.” 

On November 1, 1963, the military officers seized Ngo Dien Diem, then president of South Vietnam, and the following day, they assassinated him, and his brother. Lyndon Johnson said, “the worst mistake we ever made.” From then on, South Vietnam’s government lacked sufficient strength to withstand Ho Chi Minh and North Vietnam’s repeated attacks.

Three weeks after the coup in Vietnam, the U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, was murdered.

On Friday, November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald waited in a corner room, hidden behind some boxes, on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where he worked. At 12:30 p.m., as the President’s motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, Oswald fired his rifle four times. 

One bullet passed through the President’s neck and struck Texas Governor John Connelly. Another struck the back of the President’s head. At Parkland Hospital, at 1:00 p.m., doctors pronounced Kennedy dead. He left behind his wife Jackie, his daughter Caroline, and his son John.

Oswald fled the Depository, took a bus to his rooming house, changed clothes, and walked away on foot. A Dallas police officer named J. D. Tippit drove up next to Oswald, and the two men exchanged words. At 1:15 p.m., Tippit stepped out of his car and approached Oswald, who then aimed his revolver and shot Tippit four times. Tippit left behind his wife Marie, two sons, and a daughter.

Oswald snuck into a movie theater and sat near the back. Dallas policeman Nick McDonald arrived and approached Oswald, who withdrew his revolver, aimed it at McDonald, and pulled the trigger. It failed to fire though, because as McDonald grabbed for the weapon, the hammer struck the webbing between Oswald’s thumb and index fingers. McDonald hustled Oswald out of the theater.

On Sunday, November 24, at 11:21 a.m., Dallas police officers were transferring Oswald from city jail to county jail, when Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, distraught over Kennedy’s death, stepped forward, and shot Oswald in the stomach. At Parkland Hospital, at 1:07 p.m., doctors pronounced Lee Harvey Oswald dead. He left behind his wife Marina, and their two young daughters, June and Rachel.

Fifty years ago this week, on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King, Jr. He left behind his wife Coretta Scott King, two sons, and two daughters. 

Two months later, on June 5, 1968, Sirhan Sirhan, a twenty-four year old Palestinian of Jerusalem, shot Robert Kennedy, who had just won the California primary, as he walked through the Ambassador Hotel’s kitchen. Robert Kennedy left behind his wife Ethel and their eleven children. 

Thirty years later, on April 23, 1998, James Earl Ray died in prison of liver disease. Sirhan Sirhan though still resides in Federal prison. Fifteen times he has appealed for parole, and fifteen times officials have denied his request. He turned seventy-four last month. Fifty years in prison.

This series of assassinations were touchstones of the 1960’s, symptomatic of the deep disaffections that separated people then and now: between America and Russia, between West and East, between the Communist and free worlds, between Palestinians and Israelis, and between white and black people. From these touchstones, one can trace the continual tragic events that have unfolded since.

Or as Marc Antony says in William Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.” The unleashed dogs of war of the 1960’s have hounded the world for fifty plus years. 

But how does a person begin to understand Lee Harvey Oswald? 

The Warren Commission said that he acted alone, that, “he was moved by an overriding hostility to his environment, unable to establish relationships with other people, committed to Marxism, and able to act decisively and without regard to the consequences when such action would further his aims of the moment. These factors molded his character, into a man capable of assassinating the President.”

Stephen Hawking and Billy Graham

by William H. Benson

March 22, 2018

A preacher and a scientist passed away weeks ago: Billy Graham on February 21, and Stephen Hawking on March 14. One lived in the USA, and the other in the UK. One promoted religion, the other physics. Billy was 99, and Hawking was 76.

Both men achieved unparalleled success, even celebrity status, despite their frailties.

Billy Graham suffered poor health for much of his life. When first married, he came down with the mumps. His biographer said he endured “hernias, ulcers, tumors, cysts, polyps, infections, pneumonia, high blood pressure, headaches, spider bites, and a series of falls that broke eighteen of his ribs,” plus a broken pelvis and hip, and also excess fluid on his brain that required a shunt.

In 2014, his son Franklin said, “He’s hard of hearing, can’t see very well, but his mind his clear.”

None of Graham’s suffering though can compare to Stephen Hawking’s. In 1963, when 21, and studying at Oxford, Hawking’s voice slurred, and he fell down often. Doctors diagnosed Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. They gave him two years to live, but later, doctors decided that his was an early-onset but slow-progressing type of ALS, and that he would live.

Over time, Hawking lost his voice, was forced into a wheelchair, and prior to his passing, caregivers fed him and lifted him in and out of his bed and wheelchair.

Billy Graham preached more than 400 crusades, in tents, stadiums and parking lots, around the globe from 1947 until 2005, when he retired. His lifetime audiences topped 2.2 billion. People everywhere recognized his distinct North Carolina trumpet-like voice. “He preached the Christian faith to more people in person than anyone ever or since in all of Christianity.” 

Billy wrote 33 books, all of a religious nature, and the royalties he received he gifted to his children and grandchildren’s educations.

Hawking was the 17th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position he held for thirty years, until he retired in 2009. He wrote academic papers, plus books on mathematics and black holes.

In 1982, Hawking wrote a popular, easy-to-read book on the universe. Motivated by his need to finance his children’s education, his A Brief History of Time was first published in April of 1988. It sold over 9 million copies.

Billy married once. Ruth Graham said she had the better job. She watched their five children grow up, at their home at Montreat, North Carolina, near Asheville, while Billy traveled the world.

Ruth joked that when Billy gets to heaven, he will ask for a key to his hotel room.

A historian of religion, Grant Wacker, said, “People who didn’t like Billy Graham spent a lot of time trying to find personal violations of his moral and ethical code, and they couldn’t. They didn’t exist. He was a man who maintained absolute marital fidelity and moral and financial integrity. He was an evangelist who lived the way he preached.”

Hawking married twice. In 1995, after thirty years of marriage and three kids, he divorced his first wife, Jane, who felt overwhelmed. Her husband’s need for nurses and therapists, and his celebrity status intruded into their family life. Also, her strong Christian faith contrasted with his avowed atheism.

After the divorce, that same year he married one of his nurses, Ellen Mason, but that marriage also ended in divorce, eleven years later in 2006.

Because Billy was absolutely convinced of his message, that faith in Christ is essential, he convinced millions of others. In an interview with Brian Williams, Billy said, “The mystery of death. I think there’s a mystery to it. And I’m looking forward with great anticipation to going to heaven.”

Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”

Yet, Hawking did write, in A Brief History of Time, “If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we should know the mind of God.”

One interesting note. The Queen approached Stephen Hawking about a knighthood in the 1990’s, but he refused, in protest to scarce government funding for science.

Later, the Queen approached Billy Graham, and he accepted. In a ceremony performed at the British Embassy, in Washington D.C., on December 6, 2001, Sir Christopher Meyer, the British Ambassador, on behalf of the Queen, made Billy Graham an Honorary Knight.

Two celebrities. One a believer in Christianity, the other a believer in science. One wrote books on angels and Peace with God. The other wrote on space and time and how they related. One accepted the Queen’s Knighthood, the other refused. Both suffered poor health. May they now rest in peace. 

Tara Westover’s Educated

by William H. Benson

March 8, 2018

I just finished listening to Tara Westover’s riveting memoir, Educated, an account of her years growing up as the youngest of seven children, in a fundamentalist Mormon family in southeastern Idaho, at the base of a mountain, Buck Peak. 

Tara’s dad, Gene, (a pseudonym) ran a junkyard, and her mother earned money as a midwife, but she also concocted a variety of herbs, oils, and tinctures, potions that she believed healed all ailments.

Dad feared the federal government. He buried gasoline tanks, guns, and ammunition in holes that he dug around his house. He told Tara, “When the feds come to Buck Peak, we’ll be ready.” 

Dad feared hospitals and doctors. “You’re worse off going to the hospital,” he would say. As a result, Tara did not receive a birth certificate until years later, but no one remembered her birth date.

In the home, there was no television, no telephone, no pain relievers, and no vaccinations. 

Dad feared the school system. He pulled Tara’s older brothers out of the public school when they were in grade school. He said, “school was a ploy to lead children away from God.” Mom home-schooled the boys for a time, but Dad needed their help in the junkyard. 

By the time Tara came along, mom had dropped all pretense at home-schooling, and as a result, Tara never received any education. No lessons, no math, no essays, no homework, and no tests. There were books: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and sermons by Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.

Tara wrote, “I understand that it was this fact, more than any other, that made my family different. We didn’t go to school.” 

Instead, she worked in the junkyard. For the children, it was dangerous work: amputated fingers, gashes in arms, and horrific burns. There was a car-crusher, and a set of shears that cut angle iron but sent it flying at heads and arms. Then, Dad would throw things. He threw a steel cylinder once that caught Tara in the stomach. Another time, he almost ran her through the car-crusher.

Later, Dad started to build milk-barns and haying sheds for neighbors, and Tara’s job was to crawl around on the roof thirty feet high, and drill screws into corrugated metal sheeting, in the wind.

The worst though was the abuse she endured from her older brother Shawn (another pseudonym). When riled, Shawn would twist Tara’s wrist back, or he would grab her by the hair and slam her face first into the toilet. This happened again and again, and her parents chose not to see their son’s abusive acts directed at their youngest daughter, despite a broken toe, and a snapped wrist.

Tara wrote, “My family had violence in it, especially violence against women. We did not confront the patriarch, the father. It would have been inappropriate for me to challenge his authority.” She also said, “In families like mine, there is no crime worse than telling the truth.”

When seventeen, Tara was adamant; she would attend college at Brigham Young University, even though her dad warned her, “You are whoring after men’s knowledge and not God’s.”

At BYU, her ignorance was profound. She knew so little of anything. During a lecture she raised her hand and said, “What is the Holocaust?” She knew nothing of slavery, the Civil War, of Martin Luther King, and the civil rights movement. Yet, she was bright, intelligent, and she knew how to work. 

Her roommates had to help her find clothes other than the men’s jeans and work shirts she always wore, and they had to give her lessons on washing her hands after using the bathroom, and on washing dishes, rather than letting them stack up in the sink for later. 

Tara did well at BYU, and earned a semester at Cambridge, in England, but her dad threatened not to attend her college graduation, unless she admit that her success was due to her home-schooling.

Tara won a Gates Scholarship to study at Cambridge, and also a fellowship at Harvard. She has since completed a Ph.D. in intellectual history at Cambridge University, where now at the age of 31, she lives and works. Hers is a Horatio Alger story, a remarkable story, most astonishing. 

Of all the memoirs I have read, including Angela’s Ashes, Glass Castles, and Hillbilly Elegy, I think this memoir exceeds them all, in terms of the terror and powerlessness that she must have felt when a young girl. I wonder if any producer would dare to make this book into a movie. It was so painful to listen to the book, that I dare not imagine what it would feel like to watch it on the screen also.

Tara recently said that she identifies with the lyrics to a Bob Marley song, “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. No one but ourselves can free our minds.”

MASH

by William H. Benson

February 22, 2018

The Korean War and the draft swept up Richard Hornberger into the U.S. Army in the early 1950’s. A recent graduate of Cornell University Medical School, Hornberger operated on wounded American boys in the the 8055th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. A colleague said Hornberger “was a very good surgeon with tremendous sense of humor.”

After he returned to the States, he settled in Waterville, Maine, and established a surgical practice there. He retired in 1988, and then passed away died from leukemia in 1997 at age 73.

Horberger’s single claim to fame was the book that he wrote and published in 1968, MASH: A Novel of Three Doctors, a fictional account of his days in Korea. Only 219-pages long, it appeared on bookshelves in 1968, sold well, but under Hornberger’s pen-name, Richard Hooker. 

Instead of the 8055th, Hornberger changed it to the 4077th, and the three doctors included Captains Duke Forrest, Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, and “Trapper” John McIntyre. The three live in a tent that they dub “The Swamp,” that was “hot in the summer and colder than cold in the winter.” 

The three manufacture their own still to ensure a steady supply of alcohol. Then, showing no mercy, they tease the nurses, especially Margaret Houlihan, whom they nickname “Hot Lips,” and they make life miserable for the pompous Major Frank Burns.

One of the characters, “Painless” Waldowski, the 4077th’s dentist, suffers a bout of depression. The three doctors stage a “Last Supper” for Painless. They give him a sleeping pill, rather than a poison pill, and Father Mulcahy performs last rites. The next morning Painless awakes, and reports to Hawkeye that his depression has subsided.

Hornberger made a mistake when he sold the film rights to his book for only a few hundred dollars. “He was so furious that he never signed another copy of his book.” Too late he realized that he should have demanded a percentage of the movie’s revenue.

Robert Altman earned $70,000 for directing the movie, MASH, that appeared in theaters in 1970, the year’s biggest comedy. Donald Sutherland played Hawkeye, Elliot Gould played Trapper John, and Tom Skerritt played Duke Forrest. Sally Kellerman played Hot Lips Houlihan, Robert Duval played Major Frank Burns, and Gary Burghoff played Corporal Radar O’Reilly.

At one point, Altman instructed his son, Michael, to write the lyrics for a song for Painless’s “Last Supper” scene. “It has to be the stupidest song ever,” Altman told his son. In about ten minutes Michael wrote “Suicide is Painless,” and Johnny Mandel added the music. For his ten minutes of work, Michael earned over two million dollars, far more than Robert Altman did for directing it.

Four years later, the producer Larry Gelbart broadcast MASH on television. He picked Alan Alda for Hawkeye, Wayne Rogers for Trapper John, McLean Stevenson for Lt. Col. Henry Blake, and Gary Burghoff for Radar. The show first aired on September 17, 1972, and Gelbart played the movie’s theme song “Suicide is Painless,” at the beginning and ending of the 256 episodes. A very recognizable song.

An estimated 121.6 million viewers watched the final episode, “Goodby, Farewell, and Amen,” that aired on February 28, 1983, thirty-five years ago this month, the most watched television broadcast in American history, until the 2010 Super Bowl surpassed it. In the final scene as the helicopter ascends, the doctors and nurses have arranged a series of white rocks that spells out the words “Good-bye.”

Richard Hornberger liked the movie, but he did not watch the television show much, because he did not like Alan Alda’s portrayal of Hawkeye, whose constant anti-war remarks irked Hornberger.

The book, the movie, and the television episodes reveal dark humor at its best. The reality is tragic. The United States military bombed the northern part of the Korean peninsula back into the Stone Age. This ugly war tore bodies apart, spilled blood, and causes millions of needless deaths, but the three surgeons crack jokes, tease nurses, and humiliate other officers. 

Comedy is comedy, and tragedy is tragedy. The two do not mix well. To insert comedy into tragic events requires imagination. “Comedy is the thinking person’s response to an experience, either good or bad, but tragedy records the reactions of a person with deep feeling to a tragic experience.”

The North Koreans have not forgotten America’s bombs. Their country was leveled, their citizens massacred. The Korean War killed an estimated five million people, and of those almost three million were civilians, “about ten percent of Korea’s prewar population.” For the Korean survivors the war was an apocalypse. It is doubtful that many who lived through those dark days would laugh at MASH, either the book, the movie, or the television show. 

Whistleblowers

by William H. Benson

February 8, 2018

In December of 1773, near the time of the Boston Tea Party, Benjamin Franklin admitted that he had passed on to the Boston Gazette twenty letters that the Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchison had written, calling for an “abridgment of the colonists’ rights.” In so doing, Franklin acted as a whistleblower, before the word was a word, or our country was a country.

In 1777, during the American Revolutionary War, ten naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, signed a petition that they addressed to the Continental Congress that stated the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Navy, Ezek Hopkins “treated British prisoners of war in the most inhuman and barbarous manner.”

On July 30, 1778, Congress responded to Shaw and Marven’s petition by passing a resolution that stated, “it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, to give the earliest information to Congress of any misconduct, frauds, or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states.”

This was the United States’ first attempt to protect those who reveal to the public damaging information. July 30 is now marked as National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.

In the last fifty years, we have witnessed a number of “whistleblowers,” a word that the activist Ralph Nader may have coined. As in a basketball game, the referee blows the whistle to call a foul.

On April 25, 1970, Frank Serpico, a New York City policeman, contributed to the New York Times reports that stated that the New York City Police Department was rife with corruption and fraud.

Daniel Ellsberg, a RAND corporation employee, copied 7000 pages of top secret documents when he worked at the Pentagon. The documents indicated that an early date—in the Kennedy and Johnson years—Pentagon officials and the presidents suspected that the U.S. military could not win the war in Vietnam, even though they continued to assure the American public that they could.

In mid-June, 1971, Ellsberg delivered the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

Some historians consider W. Mark Felt—the former FBI agent and informant known as “Deep Throat” during the Watergate crisis—as the most famous of all whistleblowers. For months in 1973 and 1974, Felt passed on secret information about President Nixon’s coverup of the burglary at the Watergate Hotel to Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters at the Washington Post.

Karen Silkwood, an employee at an Oklahoma nuclear facility, raised concerns about the health and safety of the employees who worked with plutonium. Witnesses stated that the documents that she had lifted from her employer lay in a binder on the seat beside her the day she was killed when another driver rear-ended her, November 13, 1974. The documents were never found.

Harry Markopolos alerted authorities three times—in 2000, 2001, and 2005—about Bernard Madoff’s scheme, but they did nothing. Markopolos entitled his book, No One Would Listen.

On April 10, 2010, Bradley Manning, a U. S. Army soldier in Iraq, working as an intelligence analyst, stole from the military and then downloaded to WikiLeaks 734,119 diplomatic cables and Army reports. He was sentenced to 35 years at Fort Leavenworth, but served only 7, after Barack Obama commuted Manning’s sentence for time served.

In June of 2013, Edward Snowden stole 1.7 million classified documents from the National Security Agency that revealed the Federal government’s continuing surveillance, through the computer and internet, of American citizens. Fearing an imminent arrest, Snowden fled to Russia, where officials have granted him asylum ever since.

On a TED talk in 2014, remote from Russia via computer, Snowden made a series of startling statements. “NSA breaks privacy rules thousands of times per year.” “Your rights matter because you never know when you are going to need them.” “You have a right to privacy.”

In 2015, an anonymous individual, who calls him or herself John Doe, passed on to a German newspaper, 11.5 million documents taken from Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian legal firm that specializes in setting up shell corporations in the British Virgin Islands to hide money from legal authorities. This treasure of documents revealed how the rich and powerful shelter their secrets.

Other journalists from across the globe received private invitations to look at the Panamanian Papers, and then on April 3, 2016, together the 100 plus journalists published their stories.

Whistleblowers face a variety of fates. Some are shot. Some are killed. Some are imprisoned. Some are not believed. Some remain anonymous. Some seek asylum elsewhere. Some suffer no consequences for their actions. One thing they all share though is moral strength and bravery. Edward Snowden said it best, “I am comfortable with the decision I made.”