O. J. SIMPSON

by William H. Benson

October 7, 1999

     The evidence all pointed to him.  The LAPD found drops of Simpson’s blood at the murder scene.  A stocking cap with hairs matching his was found next to Ron and Nicole’s dead bodies.  One of Simpson’s leather gloves was lying between them.  The other matching glove was found outside his house stained with the victims’ hair and blood.  His shoe prints were stamped in the victims’ blood at the scene.  His own blood dripped up his driveway and into his house.  He had cuts on his hand the day after the murders but offered no adequate explanation.  His socks in his home were spattered with his and Nicole’s blood.  The evidence piled upon itself.

     Daniel Petocelli, the prosecuting attorney in the later civil trial wrote, “His blood, his cuts, his clothing, his gloves, his shoes, his car, his house, his ex-wife’s blood, Ron Goldman’s blood . . . all pointed to O. J. Simpson and to no one else.”

     And yet, on October 3, 1995 at the conclusion of the criminal trial, the jury acquitted him of double murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman.  How could this be?

     Called the Trial of the Decade, or perhaps of the Century, it had immediately turned into a carnival-like atmosphere, much like another celebrated trial earlier in the century–the Scopes Monkey Trial.

     But the O. J. Simpson criminal case is a study in deceptions.  All those involved–Judge Lance Ito, the Dream Team of defense lawyers, the prosecution team, and Simpson himself–were primarily interested in their own well-being, their own cause, and how they looked to the millions who eagerly watched on television.  In such an atmosphere, a patsy must be sacrificed, and that, as it turned out, was the LAPD police detective Mark Fuhrman.

     Johnny Cochran and F. Lee Bailey, the Dream Team of defense attorneys, viciously pounced upon Fuhrman until the jury believed that the LAPD was so filled with incompetencies that none of the evidence could be trusted.  And then they accused Fuhrman of distorted attitudes and of deliberately trying to frame Simpson for the murders by tampering and even planting evidence.

     Also, the prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, repeatedly flubbed, at the best a D- performance.  At the trial Simpson couldn’t put on the glove.  Christopher Darden in his summation to the jury said, “Nobody wants to do anything to this man.  We don’t.  There is nothing personal about this, but the law is the law.”  (Can you imagine being almost apologetic to a jury when you believe the person you’re prosecuting committed a brutal double murder?)

     The theory is that by applying the facts to the known rule justice will be found.  But the practical reality is that at various times juries do not want to base their decision solely upon a general law, thinking that in all fairness it is better to decide each individual case upon strictly its own merits.

     An old judge at a different time once remarked, “A jury has its uses.  It is like a cylinder head gasket.  Between two things [law and facts] that don’t give any, you have to have something that does give a little, something to seal the law to the facts.  There’s no focal point with a jury; the jury is the public itself.  That’s why a jury can say what a judge couldn’t.”

      In the O. J. Simpson case, the law was the law, and the facts were the facts.  But in between those solid and implacable iron plates stood the jury members who saw only a loveable and famous football player who ran and jumped through airports on television.  They did not perceive that he was a raging cold-blooded and calculating killer capable of slashing his ex-wife’s throat seven times and stabbing her protector thirty times.

     Before her death Nicole Brown Simpson prophetically and truthfully saw, perceived, and summed up the situation better than anyone at the trial when she told her close female friends, “O.J. is going to kill me someday and he’s going to get by with it.”  

RONALD REAGAN

by William H. Benson

October 21, 1999

     Ronald Reagan’s enemies called him the Teflon President–slick, without substance.  Walter Cronkite said that of all the Presidents he knew, the most knowledgeable by far was Jimmy Carter who had a profound grasp of all the issues.  But of Ronald Reagan, Cronkite’s assessment was the exact opposite.

     Late in October of 1980 Reagan and Carter met in a final debate before the 1980 Presidential election.  President Carter came across as petulant, defensive, and accusatory;  he called for arms control to reduce the risk of war and characterized Reagan’s stated nuclear policy as “extremely dangerous and belligerant”.  Reagan, on the other hand, hammered on Carter’s dismal economic record, and asked the American public, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” 

     Carter bantered back, and Reagan with a genial toss of his head, chuckled, and said, “Now there you go again.”  Calm and reassurring, Reagan completely disarmed Carter.

     Only those who are over twenty-five years of age today can remember the Carter years.  The economy was rife with problems.  The military was being dismantled despite the threat of overwhelming worldwide Soviet superiority.  The rest of the world looked on the United States as a “has-been”.  Even though President Carter fully understood the issues, he seemed unable or was ill-equipped to overcome and solve them.  He appeared on national television and talked about a “national malaise”;  the American public reacted as if they had been slapped in the face.

     Ronald Reagan seemed to know that what the American people needed at that moment was leadership, confidence, and pride in themselves.  He gave all that and more.  Frequently during those fall days of the campaign, he said that America’s best days were not over but just about to begin.  In retrospect, Reagan was clearly right, for he set the stage for America’s prosperity today.

      He was divorced.  He was a former movie star.  At age 69 he was the oldest man ever elected to the Presidency.  But with his simple stack of 3 x 5 index cards, he prepared for the role of his life, and  the American people believed him.  He won 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49.

      Critics have ripped apart the new Reagan biography entitled Dutch just published three weeks ago.  Its author, Edmund Morris, after fourteen years of research and writing, puts himself into the biography.  He is there alongside Reagan growing up in Iowa and then in the early days in California.  Morris claims that the literary device gives the biography a more immediate and personal focus for someone such as Reagan who, he says, is so mysterious and inscrutable.

     Jeffrey Hart, the columnist, blasts Morris’s biography, “This isn’t history or biography.  It’s anti-history, anti-biography.”  And to the charge that Reagan was so mysterious, Hart disagrees.

     “Reagan believed certain things, and it was obvious to everyone what they were.  He had confidence in himself.  He knew where he wanted to go, and he knew what he would try to do when he got there.  The surprising thing is that he succeeded to such a degree.”

     Reagan served two terms and then retired back to his home in California.  Diagnosed several years ago with Alzheimer’s, the horrible disease has wiped clean his personal history of what he achieved and who he is.  Two weeks ago Ronald Reagan Jr. admitted on “60 Minutes” that his father has not known him for at least five years.

     We hear from the background noise that we are about to start another campaign race.  The thoroughbreds such as Al Gore, Bill Bradley, George W. Bush, are gathering at the starting gates ready to sprint, at first in Iowa and then in New Hampshire.  Circling in a not- so-shy manner behind them are the Wild Bunch:  Warren Beatty, Jesse Ventura, Donald Trump, Patrick Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and even Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Who among this race of stallions will assume the White House in January 2001?  That history is yet to be lived, but he or she would be wise to draw from Reagan’s playbook.  Focus upon the one or two really big issues and ride them into the Oval Office.  

THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

by William H. Benson

September 23, 1999

     Dave Barry, the syndicated columnist, in last week’s column volunteered a rather dreary opinion of the recent and wildly successful movie–“The Blair Witch Project”.  He wrote, “Apparently SOMETHING terrifying is happening, but you can’t really tell what it is, because pretty much all you see is the ground, or total darkness.  Much of the footage near the end appears to be shot deep inside a sleeping bag.”

     Although I have not seen it yet (and probably won’t), according to Dave Barry, the three characters walk into an uninhabited forest in Maryland and with a videocamera search for the legendary Blair Witch.  The movie is seen through that videocamera tape.  All three end up killed, but because the film is so dark, it’s difficult to know precisely how.

     This week, actually the 19th of September, marks the 307th anniversary of the final executions at Salem, Massachusetts during the infamous summer of 1692.  Giles Cory was layed between two boards and then the authorities placed stones atop the top board until the sandwiched victim was crushed.  His last words were said to be, “More weight.”  His wife Martha had already previously been executed, but by hanging.

     Altogether 25 people were either crushed or marched to Witch’s Hill outside of Salem and swung from the gallows.  The first to hang was Bridget Bishop, a tavernkeeper, on June 2nd. Also there was Tituba, Sarah Gadge, Sarah Osbourne, and also Sarah Good who remained defiant to the end.  “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard,” she told the attending minister.  The authorities even rode north to Maine and arrested a former minister in the Salem village, George Burroughs, and tried, sentenced, and executed him for being a wizard.

     Who was accusing them?  The answer is adolescent girls with innocent-sounding names like Abigail Williams and Mary Warren and others who exhibited contortions and fits when stood before the supposed “witches and wizards”.  Were these girls shamming and pretending?  Some historians say, “Yes!”, but others qualify their position by pointing to the ideological atmosphere at the time in Salem.  The Devil and witches and witchcraft were commonly-held beliefs in New England, and this eruption was a logical, though not inevitable, conclusion to those beliefs.

     Whichever it was, those wrongly accused could confess and escape death, but if they did confess, they were then expected to name others.  And so the web of accusations grew thoughout that summer.  August produced six more trials and five hangings.  By September over a hundred suspected witches sat in jail.  Early in October Increase Mather called a hault to the whole thing.

     What are we to learn of the Salem experience?  Above all else we learn how powerful the “accusation” is.  Although we in the twentieth century have not yet turned full circle and allowed teenage girls to accuse their neighbors of witchcraft, it seems to me that anybody can say anything about another and somehow convince others to believe it.  In such a situation, truth spreads its mighty wings and flies right out the window.

     And it must have been a heady experience for those teenage girls.  Imagine yourself in their place.  People pay attention to you, hanging on every word.  The gears and machinery of government turn at your command.  Suddenly, (like Monica Lewinsky) you’re in the center, in the limelight, and everything is topsy-turvy and revolving around what you’re saying and what you’re doing.  You’re smiling one moment–contorting, and throwing a fit another.  What power!

    And what is it like to be on the receiving end–to be the accused?  It has to be black and dark; others have pointed out your human failings and then exacerbated them into something spectral, sinister, and tainted with evil.  In so doing, their accusation overreaches your fault.  The punishment far exceeds the human failing.  It’s like you’re deep inside a sleeping bag, and the video camera is rolling, and no one has the courage to reach down and unzip it and let you crawl out and into the light.

HAYMARKET SQUARE AFFAIR

by William H. Benson

September 9, 1999 

     By May of 1886 conditions in Chicago were tense and volatile.  The previous winter had been extremely cold, and thousands were without work.  The bread lines were long, and the soup kitchens could not handle all the applicants.  What jobs that existed meant long hours, poor pay, and horrible conditions.  The laborers had struck repeatedly the previous year, albeit unsuccessfully;  each time they had struck, the Chief of Police of Chicago John Bonfield had broke up the strikers.

     Finally, on May 1 30,000 men struck, and the police, as promised, struck back.  Three days later on the 4th a crowd gathered late in the evening in Haymarket Square to protest the police’s brutality.  At 10:00 p.m. in the midst of a wind and a light rain, a company of 180 police officers entered the square and headed for the wagon  that had served as a speaker’s platform.  The police ordered the crowd to disperse immediately.

     Someone–an anonymous person who was never identified–tossed in a bomb.  The dazed police opened fire on the 300-400 remaining people who ran for their lives.  The bomb had killed one policeman and injured more than 60 others, and of those, 6 more died during the next few weeks.  One crowd member was killed by the police fire.

     An outrage against the labor movement erupted across the nation.  Everywhere editorial writers fulminated against communists, anarchists, and radicals in general.  The Albany Law Journal deplored the fact that “the lives of good and brave men [are] . . . at the mercy of a few long-haired, wild-eyed, bad-smelling, atheistic, reckless, foreign wretches, who never did an honest day’s work in their lives.”  In Chicago the air was charged with anger, fear, and hatred.

     The police rounded up the leaders of the crowd that night, and the resulting trial was not a search for justice but an outlash against the labor leaders.  No evidence was ever found or presented that linked the accused with the making or throwing of that bomb.  Eight men were convicted and sentenced, and on November 11, 1887 4 of those men swung from the gallows.  Their names were Fischer, Engel, Spies, and Parson.

     The labor movement was held in traction for those 18 months, and the country was deeply divided over what had happened.  Labor issues still today drag up bitter emotional outcrys.

     What did the labor leaders want?  Why did they strike?  Better wages, an eight-hour day, and better working conditions.  Clarence Darrow, the famous Chicago lawyer, said, “This demand for 8 hours is not a demand to shirk work, as is claimed in this case.  It is a demand for the individual to have a better life, a fuller life, a completer life. . . . The laborer who asks for shorter hours asks for a breath of life;  he asks for a chance to develop the best that is in him.”

     Eventually, over the years, labor did get the 8 hour day, and to no one’s astonishment, civilization was not destroyed, nor did American society collapse.

     Egypt’s pyramids, China’s Great Wall, and Stalin’s Gulag Archipelago all were built with men and women who worked constantly and could only could dream of an eight hour day.  Finally, in America it did come true.

     Studs Terkel, the American writer, once wrote, “You know why you work 8 and not 18 hours?  Because 4 guys got hanged 100 years ago.  It’s the Haymarket Affair in Chicago when guys got hanged fighting for the 8 hour day.  It’s true.”

     Last Monday we paused for a day from work and from our jobs, and now today we have reflected on labor’s gigantic strides across the years.  In so doing perhaps we can better appreciate the American work force, arguably the best.

JULIUS CAESAR

by William H. Benson

August 26, 1999 

     Born in 100 B.C., Julius Caesar was by training a politician and an orator (second only to Cicero).  But he understood that to achieve the kind of immense power he wanted, he needed military fame.  So for nine years he lived with his army in tents and fought alongside his soldiers as they attacked and conquered the native tribes of Gaul (modern-day France and Belgium).  He then built a bridge, crossed the Rhine River, and beat back the Germanic tribes.  Finally, on August 26, 55 B.C. Julius Caesar’s Roman ships sailed for Britain, but as his soldiers waded ashore they were attacked.

      “They had to jump from the ships, stand firm in the surf, and fight,” Julius Caesar wrote later of that day.  His bold amphibious raid swelled his reputation in Rome, and a year later he returned to the British Isle, but this time with 30,000 men.

     Many of his foes across Europe felt his heavy crushing fist, and knew they had been beaten by the best.  Caesar proved that he was a military genius, for he only lost two of the dozens of battles in which he personally fought.  Julius Caesar handed Europe over to Rome.

     His experiences in Gaul and Britain he wrote down in a straight-forward manner that he entitled Commentaries on the Gallic War.  This work became well-read, and schoolchildren across Europe for centuries studied Latin by conjugating verbs from Julius Caesar’s Commentaries.

      Then, he and his army in 48 B.C. headed south to Rome, crossed the Rubicon River, and conquered Rome itself.  Having carved out a huge empire for Rome, he then made himself dictator for life, and he was not even 50 years old yet.  He promptly went to work.  He unified the calendar and brought time under his control.  He stopped corruption in commerce.  He sailed to Egypt and fell in love with Cleopatra, the Queen of the Nile.  So, most of Europe and the Mediterranean world lay at his command.

      Julius Caesar epitomized the word “ambition”.  Ruthless, he had a consuming need for power, to force people to bend to his wishes, and an excessive need to achieve greatness.  In a small and insignificant mountain village, he told his soldiers, “I would rather be the first man here, than the second man in Rome.”  As a young man he had read the life of Alexander the Great and began crying.  When asked why, he replied, “At my age Alexander had conquered so many nations, while I have done nothing that is in any way remarkable.”

     He became an effective politician, a military genius, a conqueror, a wise administrator, a capable writer, and a great speaker.  Was there anything this enormously talented and driven man could not do?  The answer is “Yes”, for he could not placate his enemies–those who were horrified at his naked grasp for power and his disregard for the people’s voice–the Senate.  Brutus and Cassius and others eventually ganged up and stabbed him to death, at the age of 56, probably the greatest tragedy of the ancient world.

     Who in the twentieth century compares equally to Julius Caesar.  Fortunately, very few, if any, for the world would not survive should we have an excessive number.  Perhaps only Hitler, in terms of a ruthless and unabashed grasp for territory and power, equalled Caesar.

      In terms of statesmanship few in American history fully approach the scope and size of Julius Caesar’s administrative achievements.  Perhaps only Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln even come close.  And yet, within the American Republic, its citizens specialize in ambition.

      In last week’s issue of Newsweek Robert J. Samuelson wrote, “We are a nation of ambitious people, and yet ambition is a quality that is hard to praise and easy to deplore.  It’s a great engine of American creativity, but it also can be an unrelenting oppressor, which robs us of time and peace of mind. . . . The impulse pervades every walk of life.”

      Julius Caesar would have understood that quote, for the Roman gods to whom Caesar paid homage had unfairly dumped hustle and drive and ambition (enough for a dozen men) squarely upon his shoulders.

THE GREAT WAR

by William H. Benson

August 12, 1999 

     It was 1914, and the guns of August exploded that year, sending shock waves that were heard around the world.  The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austria-Hungary empire, by a Serbian nationalist in the streets of Sarajevo, in Bosnia, just weeks before was the spark that touched off the powderkeg.  Once again, Europe deliberately chose war rather than peace.  We, the living, late in the 20th century, tend to forget how really horrible the Great War was (even though it began in the same place where today’s war is being fought.)

     By the time Armistice Day arrived in November 1918 four years later, more than ten million men had been swallowed up in places like Amiens, Verdun, Flanders Fields, Ardennes, Gallipoli, and Somme.  A whole generation of Europeans were wiped out.  The war was slugged out in mud, in trenches, surrounded by barbed wire, accented by blinding mustard gas.  Like a swirling vortex, those muddy trenches sucked in millions and chewed them into bits.

     Those fortunate enough to live through this meatgrinder and survive strode down different paths after Armistice Day.   

     For example, a 29-year-old corporal in the German army, Adolf Hitler, in the fall of 1918 sitting in the trenches in Belgium suddenly smelled the mustard gas and failed to put on his gas mask quickly.  Blinded, he stumbled up and away from the trenches.  Eventually, he was transported by train to a hospital in Pasewalk, and there he lay blinded in a state bordering on collapse.  His eyes were swollen, his face puffed up.  He irritably rejected the care of the nurses, wanting only to lie still and moan and be delivered from pain, even if by death.

     But the shame of Germany’s surrender on November 11 overwhelmed the young Hitler.  He resolved that if he recovered his sight, he would enter politics, and like Joan of Arc, that night he heard voices asking him to save Germany.  And then the darkness lifted, and again he could see.  Adolf Hitler, the madman, and his crazed drive for power were born that night there in the hospital ward in Pasewalk.

     Another who heard the guns of August was a Missouri farmer, Harry Truman.  He enlisted in the army, served in an ammunition unit, Battery D, and wound up as Captain.  He arrived in France in April of 1918 and left a year later, after the war had ended.  He saw plenty of action, but he and his men lived.  In that year he gained his men’s steadfast respect for his courage and fairness, and they all referred to him as “Captain Truman” from then on.

     Truman enjoyed the Army, the regimentation, the drill, the comradeship, the striving for efficiency in executing orders.  He learned leadership skills on those French and Belgium war fields that he never would have should he have stayed on the farm.  The war redirected him.

     He had left the farmer behind and was returning with a wealth of experience and dozens of friends.  “I’ve always been sorry I did not get a university education in the regular way,” he said later.  “But I got it in the Army the hard way–and it stuck.”

     He returned to Missouri, married, and entered politics, serving first as a county judge, then as a U. S. Senator, Vice-President, and finally President.

     Those guns of August 1914 exploded, and yes, millions of young men, both Europeans and Americans alike, died on the battlefields.  Hitler’s shattering experiences twisted him into a monster, but for Truman it was the genie let out of the bottle who lifted him up and into positions of responsibility.