WATERGATE

by William H. Benson

June 17, 1999 

     The “long national nightmare” began on June 17, 1972 as a bungled third-rate burglary into the Democratic National Party’s sixth floor suite at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C.  Captured in the act was the Plumbers Gang–James McCord and four others who were following  orders given by White House aides, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.  Eventually, Liddy, Hunt, and McCord went to prison, and a spokesman for the White House said there “was absolutely no evidence that others were involved” in either the break-in or the coverup.

     How much did President Nixon and his White House staff really know about the break-in, and more importantly, the coverup?  That became the question asked by Congress and the American public for months.  Nixon lied repeatedly.  (The words still sound today so cruel, and yet it accurately described his actions.)  He claimed he knew nothing of the break-in nor of the coverup until many months afterwords.  But two reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post with Ben Bradlee’s and Katherine Graham’s approval kept “following the money” and listening to an unidentified White House source, code named “Deep Throat”, and finally the truth came out.

     On June 25, 1973, one year after the break-in, John Dean, a former White House counsel, testified to the Senate Committee that President Nixon had participated in the Watergate coverup for as long as eight months, and he had warned Nixon that covering up the truth was “a cancer growing on the Presidency.”  Dean implicated Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon’s righthand men, as the two prime orchestrators of the coverup.  Three weeks later Alexander Butterfield revealed to the Senate that Nixon had secretly recorded conversations in the Oval Office.  Congress suspected that those tapes would constitute incriminating evidence, ie. a “smoking gun.”

     For a year Nixon stubbornly refused to surrender the actual tapes, choosing instead to submit an edited version without the missing 18 1/2 minutes of a key conversation Nixon had had with Haldeman.  In a session with reporters, Nixon lashed out, “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook.  Well, I’m not a crook!”  On July 30, 1974 the Supreme Court by an 8 to 0 vote said Nixon must turn over the actual tapes.

     He did so, and the tapes proved that six days after the break-in he had ordered a halt to the investigation–an act constituting obstruction of justice.  Knowing that he had no support in either the House nor in the Senate to avoid impeachment, on the evening of August 8, he resigned the Presidency, and six weeks later President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, a highly debatable act.

     The Founding Fathers in the Constitution stated that “high crimes and misdemeanors” were impeachable offenses by a President, and it was around this phrase that much of Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999 revolved.  Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers failed to clearly define those terms.  However, Congress believed in 1974 that what Nixon and his collegues had done fell within that category.  But what really disgusted the American public was Watergate’s shabbiness: leaving payoff money in phone booths, the filthy language Nixon used in the Oval Office, the stonewalling, the hypocritical lying, and the bullheaded refusal to release the tapes. 

     Will there be other Watergates?  There have been, and there will be.  Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  If freedom and the Bill of Rights are to have any meaning and be retained by this nation’s citizenry, the public must continually prepare themselves to face with resolve and willpower repeated Watergates–“long national nighmares”. 

TIANANMEN SQUARE

by William H. Benson

June 3, 1999 

     U.S. relations with the Communist Red Chinese once again are strained, the typical situation  for Mao Tse Tung’s revolutionary Red Chinese government, now in its fiftieth year.  Three weeks ago three NATO bombs slammed into the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing four and wounding twenty others.  In response, thousands of protesters in Beijing turned out the next day chanting, “Down with American imperialists!” and “NATO Nazis!”  And then there is the mysterious case of the suspected Los Alamos spy–Wen Ho Lee, who the FBI alleges may have traded nuclear secrets to the Red Chinese government.

     This week on the fourth marks the tenth anniversary of the Tinananmen Square massacre, and a week ago a dissident in China urged his fellow Chinese to light candles in memory of those killed in 1989.  He was promptly arrested and now faces possible time in a labor camp for his suggestion.  This year the Chinese leaders are especially anxious to ensure that the tenth anniversary of the crackdown passes without incident.

     It begain on April 15, 1989 when Hu Yaobang died.  Hu had joined the Red Party in the 1940’s and then in the 1980’s had become the general secretary of the Communist Party.  In part, because of his fondness and respect for learning and his unease with Communist dogma, Hu was forced out on June 16, 1987.  Then, he died, and the entire nation grieved his passing. 

     The Chinese public by a mistaken and vague hope had believed that someday Hu would return to power to promote political reform in China, but by his passing, all hope of that had been dashed.  Only the Gang of Old retained an iron-fist control.  Sadness and resentment rose.

     Finally, on April 22, 1989, 200,000 students gathered to grieve in Tiananmen Square, and there they and thousands of others stayed for the next 44 days.  They demanded a re-evaluation of Hu Yaobang’s achievements and to allow freedom of the press.  The Square turned filthy with litter.  It stank.  The students fashioned a 33-feet-high paper-mache Statue of Liberty, a Goddess of Democracy.  Some students fasted, and ambulances rushed in and back out carting off the ill.

      Deng Xiaoping, the undisputed head of the country, bided his time.  During the first few weeks, his military oscilated, refusing to strike out at the protesters.  Wang Weilin, the one person the whole world now remembers, stood in front of a whole line of tanks and defied them to run over him.  The tanks stopped, and armed soldiers refused to shoot.

      The students paraded one banner which said, “Deng Xiaoping, your mind is muddled, step down and go play bridge!”

      Then, on June 4th, Deng Xiaoping struck.  The soldiers opened fire, and the tanks rolled over the students.  The free-flowing blood turned the Square more “red” than ever.  The massacre killed an estimated three thousand people.  Then, in the following weeks, the soldiers pulled students from their college dorm rooms to face imprisonment and execution.

     Can one find fault with these students?  For perhaps being foolhardy?  For demanding too much?  For failing to act as a cohesive body willing to negotiate with the leaders?  For taking to the streets without clear objectives and backup contingency plans?  For a lack of level-headed thinking?  And for having an idealistic revolutionary mindset without the discipline of a pragmatic workable new government as an alternative?  One should answer “yes” to all those questions. 

       Afterall, as one commentary pointed out, the Statue of Liberty standing in New York’s harbor holds up a torch of liberty in her right hand and a lawbook in her left, next to her side.  The Founding Fathers understood that freedom cannot exist apart from a body of laws.  The Chinese students’ Goddess of Democracy had both hands lifting up that torch of liberty, but that lawbook was conspicuous by its absence.

FRANK SINATRA 

     The Voice was pure and pitch perfect.  His stage presence was always the best.  He knew when to breath and when not to, when to hold back and when to move ahead of the beat, and when to bridge the lines and phrases–anything to WOW the audience.  He had that innate instinct for the truth of the lyrics and the uncanny ability to implant the emotions of those lyrics into the listener’s mind.  The audiences loved Frank Sinatra.

     His biographer wrote, “He almost always knows exactly what songs are right for his voice, for his moood, for his life at the time.”  Sinatra had a way, particularly with ballads, of using his own experiences to get at a song’s emotional core.  Jeanne Martin, Dean’s ex-wife, said, “Frank’s taste was exquisite.  He only sang the great songs from the great writers.  Dean didn’t want that.  Dean just wanted to be funny.  Frank lived for the music.”

     So he sang the superior songs like, “Strangers in the Night”, “All the Way”, “That’s Life”, “It Was a Very Good Year”, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, “New York, New York”, and then the big hit–“My Way”, which became his signature song.

     In the late 30’s and the 40’s Frank sang with the big bands–first with Harry James and then with Tommy Dorsey.  In 1939 Harry James told one inquiring reporter, “The kid’s name is Sinatra.  He considers himself the greatest voice in the business.  Get that!  No one’s ever heard of him.  He’s never had a hit record.  he looks like a wet rag.  But he says he is the greatest.”  This kid eventually went solo and left Harry James and Tommy Dorsey and the other big band leaders far behind as he achieved extraordinary stardom and wealth in music and film.

     Besides being born with sizeable musical talent, Frank was a man of passion, the kind of guy who refused to just let life pass him by.  He had the courage to take on the world in the way he did.  His biographer wrote, “He truly lived his life with passion, for the sake of passion.  In search of it.  In the moment of it.  All of it.”

      The passion pushed him high, but to those around him who supported him and helped him, he could be so petty, unforgiving, and trivial.  Constantly he used people and then tossed them aside, especially the wives and the countless number of women.  He was all passion and very little prudence.

     He grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, the only son of Martin and Dolly Sinatra.  He quit high school at age 16, and to placate his father went to work in the shipyards.  He quit that to pursue a singing career.  He quit the Hoboken Four, just on the verge of success.  His father Marty called him a quitter, and repeatedly for years afterwords shouted that demoralizing name at him again and again: quitter.  And whenever his life took a different direction, his mother would say, “You ready to go to work now, Mr. Smarty Pants?  Mr. Big-Shot Singer.  So, you a star yet?”  The pain of his parent’s ridicule stuck with him all his life and drove him on to new heights.  “My dad stepped on my dream,” he said years later.

     Frank was totally determined to show them and everyone else that he was the best and that he would become the biggest star ever.  When it happened, his attitude was, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.” 

     “And now, the end is near; And so I face the final curtain.  My friend, I’ll say it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain.  I’ve lived a life that’s full.  I’ve traveled each and ev’ry highway; But, more, much more than this, I did it my way.”

      No single American could sing that song with as much true meaning as did Frank Sinatra.  One year ago, on May 14th, he died of a heart attack in Los Angeles.

MARK TWAIN

by William H. Benson

April 22, 1999

     Months before Mark Twain’s demise, a newspaper erroneously ran an article announcing that he had already died.  Invariably ready with a quick remark, he responded, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”  He then sent a humorous paragraph by telephone to the Associated Press denying the charge that he was dying and saying, “I would not do such a thing at my time of life.”  Even about the morbid, he kidded; his wit never ran to empty.

     But then at age 74, he was awakened on December 24, 1909 and was told that his deeply loved daughter, Jean, in the midst of an epileptic seizure, had passed away there in his home in Connecticut.  Her passing jolted him.  The final chapter of his autobiography was devoted to her.  “Has any one ever tried to put upon paper all the little happenings connected with a dear one–happenings of the twenty-four hours preceding the sudden and unexpected death of that dear one?  Would a book contain them?  Would two books contain them?  I think not.  They pour into the mind in a flood.”

     The passing away of loved ones–family and friends, figured prominently throughout Mark Twain’s life.  When he was four years old, his sister, Margaret, just five years older than he died.  Then, four years later, his older brother, Benjamin, died.  Then, three years later his father, the Judge John Marshall Clemens of Hannibal, Missour, died when Samuel Clemens was eleven years.  At age 22 he discovered that his younger brother, Henry, was aboard the steamship, the Pennsylvania, when she exploded.  Mark Twain that night watched Henry die.  Then, years later he buried first his daughter Susy, then his wife, Olivia, and finally Jean.

     Is is any wonder that his attitude late in life deteriorated into a pessimism, a depression, and a nihilism that left him bitter towards life and living?  A skeptic, uncommitted to any particular religious persuasion, he preferred to play the part of the outside critic; neither dogmatic in belief nor in unbelief, he lived uncommitted.  Throughout his life curiousity led to intrigue, and then to fascination, but never to a complete leap into commitment to any religious belief.  Eventually, his particular brand of skepticism bore its fruit, when he wrote, “Nothing exists; all is a dream.”

     And yet, during virtually all of his life he was such a dazzling personality–more attractive than even his literary art, which was the ultimate in American-syle, without a shred of European influence.  Heralded by princes and paupers alike, loved by millions all over the world, he relished the limelight, choosing to dress in a white suit, vest, and hat, while chomping furiously away on a series of cigars.  After-dinner speeches at banquets became his second career.  People just simply loved to hear him rant and swear and serve up that volcano of opinions on all subjects crossing the American cultural landscape.

     He gave us picturesque slices of life along the Mississippi River in a town called Hannibal, Missouri filled with people like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, Sid, Aunt Polly, and In’jun Joe.  And the steamboat skidded gently along the river’s surface with Captain Bixby at the wheel and Mark Twain at his side, stopping ocassionally at ports like Hannibal.  Although he only lived there until he was seventeen, he brought the town to life for everybody.

     Yes.  He did become a bitter old man, flailing away at windmills created in his own mind, deeply hurt by the passing of his family members and close friends, but he gave us so much more: an irreverent attitude, a charming wit, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

     On April 21, 1910, four months to the day after Jean’s passing, Mark Twain, exhausted after a completely filled-up life, died.

TITANIC

by William H. Benson

April 8, 1999 

     The Titanic departed the harbor at Southampton, England on April 10, 1912, and five days later she lay on the ocean floor.  Of the 2340 passengers and crew, only 745, mostly women and children, survived to see New York City’s harbor, and so 1595 people perished.

     Speeding arrogantly along at 21 knots through an icefield, the Titanic struck an iceberg.  Those on board felt only a slight tremble and not a jolt and were so unconcerned that they chose to remain in their staterooms to dress for dinner.  But the much-praised water-tight compartments proved useless once the sea water began pouring through the torn metal fabric, and then, horrified as tragic realization dawned, the people understood that too-few life boats were available, only half as many as needed for the entire crew and passengers.

      Choices were quickly made.  Woman and children were first.  John Jacob Astor gallantly helped his ailing new bride into a lifeboat, lit a cigarette, and then proceeded to help other women into the lifeboats.  But tragically in a panic the men failed to fill the lifeboats to capacity, and many needlessly drowned.  John Jacob Astor went down with the ship, and so did the captain, most of the officers, and oddly a number of wives who chose to stay and to hold hands with their husbands.  Stoically, the band played on.

     Within hours the passenger vessel disappeared beneath the surface, not to be found until September 1, 1985.  Using new undersea robots equipped with television cameras, the oceanographer Robert D. Ballard explored the Titanic lying 12,000 feet deep south of the Newfoundland shoreline.

     Few, if any, absolutes exist in life.  The potential for great achievement into the beyond equals that for great sorrow and tragedy into the depths.  People live their lives trusting and hoping and thinking that “this will not ever happen to me”, “my neighbors will never treat me badly”, “my enemies will never force me out of my home”, “the engineers have made sufficient precautions”, and “a holocaust will never happen”.  Such hopeful thinking does not prepare a person for the moment when a madman, like Slobodan Milosevic, walks in and strikes hard.

      The Christians, Muslims, Croats, Serbs, and Albanians have lived side by side for centuries, and as long as a superior power, such as the former Soviet Union, ruled with a heavy hand, peace endured.  But with self-rule came Balkanization and the release of pent-up hatreds between the nationalities.  Prejudices rallied around the slogan of “ethnic cleansing”. Killing erupted.

     The ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo have lived in their villages as simple and poor folks, but hopeful.  Suddenly, without warning the Serbs have hounded and harrassed them and told them to get out.  The Serbs want Kosovo.  The unthinkable is happening.  Choices must be quickly made.  Stay and fight and be annihilated, or give up and run for shelter.  For the tens of thousands daily streaming with their wives and children and parents into neighboring Albania and Macedonia, the choice is easy.  Find a “lifeboat” and get to it quickly.

     What does the typical person do when informed that he or she has only a handful of hours to gather up belongings and prepare to escape?  “This boat is sinking!”  “The Serbs are coming to kill you!”  Tragedy has hit the innocent repeatedly during this twentieth century, and quick choices were made: stay with your husband/wife and hold hands, jump on the lifeboat, or run away.  Fortunately, this time the U. S. is not acting like the band aboard the Titanic, oblivious to what was happening– insisting on playing music and doing nothing to help. 

SIR ROGER BANNISTER 

     Although the Marathon has become the most popular running event during the past twenty years, for many years track enthusiasts considered the mile run the event that fascinated them most.  Today high school distance runners do not run the mile, but instead they run 1600 meters, which is approximately thirty yards more than the mile.

     But, the International Amateur Athletic Federation, the world body of track and field, recognizes today only records in metric distances, except for the mile.  It is still in the record books.  The mile, that part of the old British measurement system, still remains for track enthusiasts the last lone surviving vestige in the wholesale sellout to the metric system.  Please, do not remove the mile run.  It has too much history to be shoved aside.

     The mile requires the sprinting ability of a 400 meters runner plus a portion of the endurance necessary to complete a marathon.  Judgement of pace, knowing when to speed up and when to slow down and reserve strength, becomes crucial.  It often becomes a race of wits.  One competitor puis his intelligence and determination as well as his or her speed and stamina against another at all stages of the event.   

     Twenty-nine years ago this spring I was a high school sophmore running the mile and was not winning any ribbons and certainly not setting any records.  It was for me painfully difficult work, but still I read and dreamed of what a Wichita, Kansas high school/college student named Jim Ryan had done setting records in both the 880 yard run and the mile.  America felt proud.  Then there was his main competitor, Kipchoge Keino from Kenya, Africa, who beat him in the 1500 meters run at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

     Eventually, I stumbled across the story of Roger Bannister.  In 1913 a guy named John Paul Jones set the first official mile record at 4:14.4, and throughout the next forty years exemplary runners like Glenn Cunningham and Gunder Haegg of Sweden steadily approached but never quite broke through the four minute mile.  In fact, Gunder Haegg set the record in 1945 at 4:01.4, and there it stayed for the next nine years until Roger Bannister broke it.  It had become a psychological barrier.

      To run a sub four minute mile means that a runner must run four laps around a track layed out to include 440 yards at an average of less than sixty seconds for each lap.  Roger Bannister’s plan was to concentrate on his quarter mile times.  On May 6, 1954 in windy conditions at a meet at Oxford, England, Bannister electrified the world when he broke the record with a time of 3:59.4, the first person below four minutes.  With the help of two teammates who set the pace, his quarter mile times were 57.5, 60.7, 62.3, and 58.9.

      Amazingly enough, six weeks later on June 21, 1954 John Landy of Australia broke Bannister’s mark with a time of 3:58.  Then, the following August the two met at the British Commonwealth Games, and there Bannister beat Landy.  But both had times under four minutes.  With the barrier cracked others, such as Peter Snell, Steve Ovett, and Sebastian Coe, lowered the record even further.  Today the record is held by Noureddine Morceli of Algeria with a time of 3:44.39, a full fifteen seconds off Bannister’s time.

      And whatever happened to Roger Bannister?  He retired from competitive racing in 1955 to concentrate on his medical studies, eventually receiving his M.D. degree at Oxford in 1963.  Then, in January of 1975 Queen Elizabeth II knighted him, and so he became a very surprised Sir Roger Bannister.  And the last I heard about the American hero, Jim Ryan, was that he was now the head librarian at one of the Kansas universities.