Abraham Lincoln & Edwin Stanton

by William H. Benson

February 12, 2015

     Today we honor Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

     In the summer of 1855, George Harding hired Abraham Lincoln to assist him in a patent infringement case because Harding needed an attorney knowledgeable of Illinois law, such as Lincoln.

     At the last moment, the trial was moved from Chicago to Cincinnati, and so Lincoln’s services were not needed. Instead of withdrawing from the case though, Lincoln headed to Cincinnati to offer his help. In the meantime, Harding hired Edwin Stanton, a polished lawyer from Ohio.

     In Cincinnati, Harding and Stanton were shocked when Lincoln first approached them. He was a “tall, rawly-boned, ungainly back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella.”

     Stanton pulled Harding aside, and asked him, “Why did you bring that long armed Ape here? He does not know any thing and can do you no good.” Lincoln felt their rejection. He was never invited to discuss the case with them and was never asked to join them for a meal, but he attended the trial and listened to Stanton’s arguments. There he stood in “rapt attention . . . drinking in his words.”

     Six years later, Abraham Lincoln would win the 1860 election for President, and in January of 1862, he would name Edwin Stanton his new Secretary of War. As he did with Stanton, again and again Lincoln would demonstrate his ability to set aside slights, humiliations, and insults. Resentments never rankled or accumulated within Lincoln.

     One day George Harding assumed that Stanton had written some “some remarkable passages” in one of President Lincoln’s messages, but Stanton corrected Harding. “Lincoln wrote it—every word of it; and he is capable of more than that, Harding; no men were ever so deceived as we at Cincinnati.”

     Stanton was not alone in making a snap judgment of Lincoln. Others who witnessed Lincoln’s face, his body, and his bearing concluded that he was an ignorant and “long armed Ape.” His appearance hid his piercing intellect, his skill with the English language, and his over-arching ambition.

      Lincoln chose well when he chose Stanton, who whipped the war department into shape. Because he was responsible for an army of more than two million men, he was merciless in the exacting demands he issued to his subordinates. He ruled others by fear.

     All this was required, an absolute necessity. After all, there was a war to win, the nation had divided into two parts, and four million people were locked and chained into bondage and slavery. What Stanton did or did not do would effect the nation and its future.

     Stanton’s secretary, A. E. Johnson, observed Lincoln and Stanton and said, “No two men were ever more utterly unlike.” Whereas Lincoln was tall and lean, Stanton was short and round.

     “The charity which Stanton could not feel, coursed from every pore in Lincoln,” who “was for giving a wayward subordinate seventy times seven chances to repair his errors; Stanton was for either forcing him to obey or cutting off his head without more ado.” Lincoln was “calm and unruffled,” but Stanton “would lash himself into a fury.” Lincoln “would tell a funny story,” but Stanton was “all dignity and sternness.”

     What the two men did share was an enormous capacity for work. Johnson wrote, “Yet no two men ever did or could work better in harness. They supplemented each other’s nature, and they fully recognized the fact that they were a necessity to each other.”

     Neither knew how to play. Neither “cards, the bottle, or dice” diverted their attentions. A relentless ambition and a focused intellect drove them forward day after day. Although Lincoln would concede that Stanton was the better legal mind, mainly because he had received a formal legal education, Lincoln was more widely read.

     Lincoln knew Shakespeare, he knew the English poets, and he knew the King James Bible. He absorbed the English language, it imbedded itself deep into Lincoln’s mind, and he would use it to great effect when he would write his speeches and his letters.

     When those who hated Stanton urged Lincoln to terminate him, Lincoln said, “He is the rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and roar without ceasing. He fights back the angry waters and prevents them from undermining and overwhelming the land. Gentlemen, I do not see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him, I should be destroyed.”

     When told of Lincoln’s assassination, Stanton rushed to Lincoln’s side and said to the others gathered around his bed, “Now he belongs to the ages. There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen.” From outright hostility and disrespect, Edwin Stanton had yielded first to admiration and then to profound love for Abraham Lincoln.

Self-Government and Modernity

by William H. Benson

January 29, 2015

     Historians rank Frederick Jackson Turner one of the most noted of all American historians. In 1893, in Chicago at the American Historical Association, he delivered a paper he entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and in it, he argued that the frontier shaped the American character.

     Turner insisted that on the frontier pioneers dropped their European characteristics and values, and picked up a respect for democracy, an intolerance of social hierarchy, a distrust of authority, and a dependency upon local political organizations. Not all, but many historians then and since Turner’s day have agreed with his thesis that the frontier fostered self-government.

     Turner’s critics point out that the frontier disappeared in 1890, three years before Turner delivered his paper, and so they wonder, “how does self-government occur today, in the absence of a frontier?”

     In The New York Times Sunday edition, two weeks ago, a writer named Sam Quinones published a column he entitled, How Mexicans Became Americans. In it, Sam described the process he observed in South Gate, California (pop. 96,000), a suburb southeast of Los Angeles. “In the late 1970s,” he wrote, “the factories started leaving, and so did the white people. By 1990, towns like South Gate that had been 90 percent white were more than 90 percent Latino.”

     These recent immigrants to South Gate came “straight from the ranchos, the small villages on Mexico’s frontiers, far from the center of government,” where “they had shunned politics,” lived a “tradition of non-engagement,” and were expected to defer to the all-powerful “cacique,” the village’s political boss. Because they had no experience in self-government, at first they were swayed by flimsy propaganda, by promises of giveaways, and by the crooked and greedy who almost bankrupted the city.

     Once the immigrants acquired citizenship and the right to vote, Sam wrote, “the voters woke up,” and felt “ashamed they’d been duped.” They voted the crooks out of office, sent some to prison, and realized that it was their responsibility to monitor and participate in their municipal government.

     South Gate’s citizens now consider the city their home. Here they have jobs, send their children to school, and plan for a future. Then, because of the recent violence in northern Mexico, many Mexican-Americans hesitate to return to their villages. Jorge Morales, a South Gate city councilman, said, “My parents always talked about going back to Mexico. Now it’s a place they’ll visit, but this is home.”

     In 1979, Eugen Weber, a history professor at UCLA, published his book, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, and in it, he described a similar process, whereby the peasants who lived in small villages all over France were forced to confront modernity.

     Late in the nineteenth-century, France’s countryside was a place “where many did not speak French or know the metric system, where pistoles and écus were better known than francs, where roads were few and markets distant, and where a subsistence economy” existed for generations.

     “Significant portions of rural France continued to live in a world of their own,” Weber wrote, “until near the end of the nineteenth-century.” So, how was the peasant transformed into a Frenchman?

     Weber believed it resulted from at least two things: better roads and better schools. He entitled his twelfth chapter, “Road, Roads, and Still More Roads.” With an abundance of useful roads that criss-crossed France, the time required for a peasant to cart his fruits, grains, and vegetables to Paris or Nice or Lyon dwindled. This development opened up new and more promising markets and higher prices.

     Weber entitled his eighteenth chapter, “Civilizing in Earnest: Schools and Schooling.” In the villages’ schools, teachers revealed to the peasants’ children the world that existed beyond the village’s borders and fields. The brightest students escaped the fields’ mind-numbing drudgery, and so the abundance of roads and exceptional schools transformed France’s peasants into Frenchmen.

     Not everyone is attracted to modernity or self-government though. The terrorists in Paris who killed seventeen people earlier this month displayed an utter disregard for advanced and civilized thought. The two brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, murdered twelve people in Paris at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and Amédy Coulibaly murdered four Jewish shoppers and a policewoman at a kosher supermarket.

     Because “Muslim immigrants to France were never required to adopt Western values of tolerance, free speech, and secularism,” they can turn to an extreme set of beliefs that directs them to terrorism.  Both modernity and self-government expect people to act reasonable, without resorting to violence, and to believe that the vote and the market are more powerful than all the world’s guns and bullets.

     On the American frontier, in South Gate, and in rural France, the modern self-governing model won the day, despite mistakes along the way. Today many—Christians, Muslims, and Jews—hope that modernity and self-government will also convince the vulnerable young men and women, those attracted to extreme beliefs, to lay aside the guns and participate in local governments and markets.

Basketball

by William H. Benson

January 15, 2015

     Vivek Ranadivé coached his daughter’s National Junior Basketball team at Redwood City, south of San Francisco, in Silicon Valley. Because Vivek had grown up in Mumbai, where he had played cricket and soccer, Vivek knew very little about basketball,  His daughter’s team was composed of twelve-year-old girls, who were short, white, and displayed no talent. They could barely shoot, dribble, or jump, and yet they won most of their games, losing only in the championship game. How?   

     Malcolm Gladwell tells of this junior-high dream team in his recent book, David and Goliath.

     Vivek insisted that his girls run a full-court press. A team has five seconds to pass the ball inbounds to a teammate, and then another ten seconds to cross the mid-court. Vivek’s team contested that inbound pass. He told his girls, “Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbound plays.”

     One of Vivek’s girls explained, “We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams better than us, and we would beat them.”

     Vivek did not bother teaching his girls to shoot three-pointers, or set a pick, or execute a play. Instead, he taught them to rattle the other team’s players, steal the ball, and make a quick layup. They ran and chased the ball, but under their own basket. Vivek said, “We followed soccer strategy in practice. I would make them run and run and run.”

      If the other team did complete that first inbound pass, Vivek’s girls would trap and force a turnover. Vivek’s assistant explained, “What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses.” Gladwell explained that this was how David, small and weak, defeated Goliath, tall and strong.

     Gladwell states the obvious. “The puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular.” Why is that? First, it exhausts the players, and then, a well-prepared opponent can break a press, or run it themselves. Yet, it can give a poor team an advantage.

     Gladwell tells of a game played in January of 1971 between the University of Massachusetts and Fordham University. The great Julius Irving, “Dr. J,” played for Massachusetts, but Irish and Italian kids from New York City, with only a fraction of Massachusetts’ talent, played for Fordham. Yet, Fordham won that night 87-79, because those city kids ran a full-court press for four quarters.

     One Massachusetts player there that day, Rick Pitino, sat on the bench, astonished, and came away a believer in the press. Later, as a college coach first at Boston, then Providence and Kentucky, and now at Louisville, he instituted the press and took those teams to the NCAA tournament eighteen times. Gladwell writes, “Again and again, in his career, Pitino has achieved extraordinary things with a fraction of the talent of his competitors.” He is David, and he faces Goliath.

     Sports writers consider the Washington Generals “the sorriest team in the history of sports—14,000 losses and counting.” The team has won only six games in the past sixty-two years. Who are they? In 1952, Abe Saperstein asked Louis “Red” Klotz to put together a team to tour with and play against Abe’s Harlem Globetrotters, as a foil for their comedy routines. Crowds pay to watch the Generals lose every game to the Globetrotters.

     Yet, the Washington Generals won on January 25, 1971 at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Red Klotz, only five feet and seven inches tall, made a two-handed shot, and put his Generals up 100-99. With seconds to play, Meadowlark Lemon hooked his shot, missed, and the buzzer ended the game. Perpetual underdogs, the Washington Generals, had beaten the perpetual winners, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the spectators booed. David should not have defeated Goliath.

     Perhaps, if the Washington Generals would run a full-court press, they would win more often. Gladwell says, “every team that comes in as an underdog should play that way. So why don’t they?”

     Gladwell points out that effort can trump ability on the basketball court, on the battlefield, in business, or in academics. Those who ignore the conventions of the day, hide their weaknesses, take daring risks, and maneuver themselves into position for a steal can slaughter their competitors. That is guerrilla warfare, that is judo, and that is how the English defeated the Spanish armada.

     Gladwell says, “When effort trumps ability, the game becomes unrecognizable.” Panic strikes, and the Philistines run for cover.

     “Only a boy named David. Only a babbling brook. Only a boy named David, but five little stones he took.” But then he used just one stone. Gladwell writes that “David brought a shepherd’s rules to the battlefield,” and that “we all assume that being bigger and stronger and richer is always in our best interest. Vivek Ranadivé and a shepherd boy named David will tell you that it isn’t.”

      This basketball season cheer for the underdog.

Cuba and North Korea

by William H. Benson

January 1, 2015

     The two Communist holdouts from the Cold War dominate the news again: Cuba on one page, and North Korea on the other. First, President Barak Obama wants to re-establish diplomatic relations with Cuba after five and a half decades of Communist rule. Then, the FBI has traced “one of the most punishing cyber-attacks on a major American corporation in recent memory” back to the Guardians of Peace, all because of a new movie that mocks Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s dictator.

     Both Cuba and North Korea are Stalinist-styled governments: brutal, repressive, and tyrannical. Since 1959, a single family has controlled Cuba: the Castro family, or Fidel and his brother Raul. Since 1946, a single family has controlled North Korea: the Kim family—Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un; or father, son, and grandson.

     Those fortunate Cubans who fled their country decades ago and found refuge in Miami have adapted to American life, and some have even prospered and become wealthy. Conditions though in Cuba are appalling. The automobiles are of 1950’s vintage, the economy is stagnant, critics are silenced, and no one in Cuba today claims much wealth, except the Castro brothers and their friends.

     The two countries lost legitimacy decades ago. South Korea is a rich economic powerhouse, but North Korea has no allies, not even Russia or China, produces nothing the world needs, suffers under the heaviest trade sanctions on Earth, but terrifies the world with its nuclear tests. The Korean people north of the DMZ suffered through a devastating self-induced famine in the 1990’s that, it is rumored, resulted in cannibalism.

     The government responded with a program it called, “Let’s Eat Two Meals a Day.”

     Both governments in Cuba and North Korea terrorize their people. In 1959, after Fidel Castro seized control of the island, he executed hundreds who had opposed him, saying, “We are not executing innocent people or political opponents. We are executing murderers, and they deserve it.”

      Kim Jong-un is thirty-one years old—too young to own a nuclear arsenal—and, since 2011, he has ruled hard over the North Koreans. By executing dozens, if not hundreds, he has purged the country of his suspected enemies. On December 12, 2013, the state media warned the people that the army “will never pardon all those who disobey the order of the Supreme Commander.”

     The United States government instituted trade embargoes upon Cuba and North Korea more than five decades ago, and they failed to weaken the Castro or the Kim families’ grip on power. Instead, the sanctions impoverished and starved the people. “Isolation has not worked,” said Obama, referring to Cuba. “It’s time for a new approach.”

     Before Obama would re-establish relations with Cuba, he insisted that Cuba release Alan Gross, a contractor imprisoned in Cuba for five years. Gross was arrested when working to expand Internet access for Havana’s Jewish community, an act that Cuban officials considered “undermining the state.” Cuban officials released Gross in exchange for the release of three Cuban spies imprisoned in America. 

     Both countries have refused to provide their citizens with the latest technology. Cuba’s citizens want  to own cellphones, but the phones they buy cannot access the World Wide Web.

     A Korean-American named Suki Kim published this month her memoir of her days teaching English at a North Korean university. She entitled her book, “Without You, There is No Us,” and in it she describes the students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, who “do have access to an internal network, or intranet, but it’s not connected to the Internet, and they use their computers mostly as dictionaries.”

     The sight of these whiz kids, Suki Kim writes, “staring blankly at screens was so pathetic that I was seized by a pang of anger, mixed with sadness, and soon left the room.”

     Kim Jong-un’s government did display some technical skill when the Guardians of Peace routed their cyber-attacks “through China and then through servers in Singapore, Thailand, and Bolivia.”

     An interesting fact. Kim Jong-il, who died on December 17, 2011 at the age of seventy, owned a huge collection of Hollywood movies, estimated between twenty and thirty thousand. He especially loved watching Sean Connery’s James Bond movies, and Kim Jong-il was such a great fan of Elvis Presley, that the dictator arranged his hair in a bouffant style, wore Elvis-like dark shades, and dressed in jump suits, reminiscent of Elvis’s Las Vegas performances.

     Now, his son, Kim Jong-un, feels offended because Hollywood would dare to ridicule him in a low-brow farcical movie that few people with any sense of discernment would care to watch. So offended is he that he steals from the production company and then makes threats if they release “The Interview.” Someone should remind him that he is not the dictator of the United States.

     Citizens of Cuba and of North Korea live on opposite sides of the planet, and yet both suffer for the same reason: the people have no rights because their dictators are committed to Marxist philosophy.

Christmas

by William H. Benson

December 18, 2014

     Della sold her hair to buy “a platinum watch fob” for Jim, her husband, and he sold his watch to buy “tortoise shell combs” for Della’s hair. On Christmas Day they opened their presents, and neither he nor she could enjoy his or her gift. Without her long hair, she no longer needed the combs, and without his watch, he no longer needed a watch fob. That is the plot that the American author O. Henry reveals in his splendid short story, The Gift of the Magi.

     “The Grinch hated Christmas.” And why did he feel that way? “It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right. It could be, perhaps that his shoes were too tight, or perhaps that his heart was two sizes too small.” Whatever his motivation, he decides to steal Christmas. When Cindy Lou in Whoville asks the Grinch why he was taking her Christmas tree up the chimney, he lies, and says that he needed to return it to his workshop to repair “a light on this tree that won’t light on one side.”

     After he steals all the trees, presents, and food, “leaving crumbs much too small for the other Who’s mouses,” he hears singing down in Whoville. “He HADN’T stopped Christmas from coming! Somehow or other, it came just the same!” That is the plot that Dr. Seuss reveals in his children’s book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

     Charlie Brown feels depressed because of the commercialization of Christmas. To snap him out of his blues, Lucy van Pelt suggests that he direct the Christmas play, and he tries, but the other children are more interested in dancing to Schroeder’s song that he plays on his small piano rather than learning their lines. Charlie Brown leaves and purchases a pitiful sapling that he brings back to the auditorium. The other children see his tree, ridicule it, laugh, and leave.

     Charlie Brown wonders aloud if he knows what Christmas is all about. Linus overhears him, and so he reads aloud the Christmas story. He reads of shepherds who watch over their flocks at night, of an angel that appears before the shepherds, of the angel’s glad news that a child is born that night and is lying in a manger, and of the “heavenly host singing ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and goodwill towards men.’” Linus concludes, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown!”

     That is the plot of Charles M. Schulz’s animated cartoon special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, that first aired on December 9, 1965.  

     Ebenezer Scrooge’s business partner, Jacob Marley, appears one night in Scrooge’s dream, even though Marley had died seven years before. Scrooge notices that Marley carries chains, and so Scrooge asks him, “You are fettered. Tell me why?” Marley replies, “I wear the chains I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”

     Marley warns Scrooge that three ghosts will appear that night. The ghosts so terrify Scrooge that when he awakens, he decides that he too will celebrate Christmas that year. That is the plot that Charles Dickens reveals in his classic tale, A Christmas Carol.

     James Herriot, the country veterinarian in England, receives a call on Christmas day from Mrs. Ainsworth. “It’s Debbie,” she says. James learns that Debbie is a stray cat who appears at Mrs. Ainsworth’s door every two weeks to warm herself before the fire for no more than ten minutes and then leaves. On this day though she appears with a small kitten in her mouth, and then she stays.

     James examines Debbie and discovers “a hard lobulated mass deep among the viscera. Massive lymphosarcoma. Terminal and hopeless.” There, before the fire, Debbie slips into a coma and dies. Mrs. Ainsworth sobs as she pets Debbie’s matted hair.

     One year later, on Christmas day, Mrs. Ainsworth invites James into her home, and he sees that that pitiful kitten, now named Buster, has grown into a sizable tomcat that loves to retrieve a hard rubber ball. Mrs. Ainsworth says, “Debbie would be pleased. Buster is the best Christmas present I ever had.” The Christmas cat is just one story in James Herriot’s wonderful book All Things Wise and Wonderful.

     In The Gift of the Magi, the difficulty is not permanent. Della’s hair would grow and months later she could use the combs, and Jim could save some of his salary until he could purchase another watch. Both the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge experience a welcome change of heart, and each can then enjoy Christmas. Charlie Brown listens and understands the Christmas story, and Mrs. Ainsworth’s sorrow and tears, when she watched Debbie die, were replaced by pure joy when she cared and played with that Christmas kitten that she named Buster.

     When we read the texts of Christmas—the season’s sights, sounds, smells, and symbols—we transform ourselves into better people. Charles Dickens said it best. “Nearer and closer to our hearts be the Christmas spirit, which is the spirit of active usefulness, perseverance, cheerful discharge of duty, kindness and forbearance!” Although Andy Williams is no longer with us, we still hear his words, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” ‘Tis true. If we read the season’s texts, we can enjoy Christmas.

Space Flight

by William H. Benson

December 4, 2014

     On November 23, a week ago last Sunday, another Soyuz rocket launched three astronauts into outer space from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and after a six-hour flight they docked at the International Space Station 268 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The three included the Russian cosmonaut Anton Schkaplerov, the European Space Agency astronaut from Italy Samantha Cristoforetti, and NASA’s Terry Virts.

     They joined the three others already there: NASA’s Barry Wilmore and two Russian cosmonauts, Elena Serova and Alexander Samokuyaev. On Thanksgiving Day, the six-person crew of Expedition 42 enjoyed smoked turkey, candied yams, green beans, cornbread dressing, and cherry-blueberry cobbler. The six will conduct experiments aboard the ISS over the next five and a half months.

     United States astronauts and Russian cosmonauts assembled the ISS a unit at a time. The Russians launched the first unit, Zarya, on November 20, 1998, and two weeks later, on December 4, NASA launched the Unity Module. When the the third unit, Zvezda, docked with the first two units on July 12, 2000, it permitted a crew of at least two to live inside the three units for weeks at a time.

     After twenty-six space shuttle flights that carried a stream of units, trusses, and solar panels into space, ever since 1998, the ISS now has fifteen pressurized units: seven from the United States, five from Russia, two from Japan, and one from Europe. The ISS’s total cost now stands at $150 billion. NASA has focused upon the ISS since July of 2011, after Congress, in a budget-cutting frenzy, terminated the space shuttle program after thirty years and 135 missions.

     There are some though that are not sorry to see the space shuttle retired. Carol Pinchefsky of Forbes magazine argued that “it killed more people than any other space vehicle in history,” that “it was very expensive,” that “it never went very high,” and that “it was designed to fly fifty missions per year.”

     Fourteen people died in the two space shuttle explosions. It cost a total of $173 billion, or an average of $1.3 billion per flight. It was intended to last for only ten years, and yet NASA extended its life for another twenty years past its expiration date. On average it flew only four missions per year.

     In 2005, the NASA official Michael Giffin called the program “a mistake,” and “inherently flawed.” Because it stifled creativity and innovation, it missed its intended goal to “get more people into orbit, more often, and for a far reduced price.”  

     NASA has decided for a time to exit the space entry business, turn it over to private industry, such as SpaceX, and concentrate on experiments in space at the ISS.

     While NASA was spending vast sums of money on the space shuttle, the Russians stuck with their big, simple, and inexpensive Soyuz rockets, designed in the 1960’s. “Russia in seen as having the world’s safest, most cost-effective human spaceflight system available.” Although the Russians hesitate to provide official data, rumors speculate that each Soyuz flight costs less than $100 million.

     NASA now depends upon the Russians to deliver its astronauts to and from the ISS, a predicament for the United States, and some have warned of the consequences. First, the Russians will continue to increase the price NASA pays. This year NASA signed a deal with the Russians that will last until 2017 to pay $70.7 million per seat to fly on a Soyuz rocket, an increase of about $8 million. 

     Prior to his passing, Neil Armstrong said that we now have an “unacceptable flight risk,” because “Soyuz lacks airlocks, life support systems, and a robotic arm to repair the ISS.”

     Chris Kraft, a retired engineer from the Johnson Space Center, warned of a “catastrophic re-entry” of the 400-ton space station should it collapse into “a shower of debris” upon Earth’s surface. “It is never wise to play Russian roulette in space,” he said. John Glenn said that “Our astronauts will have to be launched in Russian spacecraft, from a Russian base in Kazakhstan, to go to our space station,” and so he added, “this is hard to accept.”

     And after witnessing Vladimir Putin’s seizure of the Crimea this year, we know that the Russian leader is determined and aggressive, someone the United States should hesitate to trust. 

     The two questions of the day are, “How will NASA sustain the ISS’s operation without the space shuttle, and how can NASA lessen its dependence upon the Russians?” NASA is not forthcoming with answers, but the space organization must answer them someday. As for the second question, I say that either a private company or NASA should begin building its own Soyuz-styled rockets, inexpensive but effective and safe. NASA needs a taxi into space that is based upon United States soil now.

     As for the first question, I wonder if it is wise for NASA to focus upon the ISS and lessen its focus upon space missions, manned or unmanned, to the moon, to Mars, or to Jupiter. The questions remain.

     In the meantime, the six-person crew will celebrate Christmas at the ISS in three weeks.