IN RETROSPECT

by William H. Benson

August 9, 2007

     Here are the lessons we have learned:

1. We misjudged the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries, and we exaggerated the dangers to the U. S. of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for and a determination to fight for freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our misjudgments reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area.
5. We failed to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine in confronting unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements. We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of wining the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
6. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale U.S. military involvement before we initiated the action.
7. We failed to retain popular support in part because we did not explain fully what was happening and why we were doing what we did. We had not prepared the public to understand the complex events we faced. A nation’s deepest strength lies not in its military prowess but, rather, in the unity of the people. We failed to maintain it.
8. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose.
9. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action—other than in response to direct threats to our own security—should be carried out only with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
10. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
11. We failed to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal with the complex range of political and military issues. With this organizational weakness, we thus failed to analyze and debate our actions with intensity and thoroughness.

     I have recorded these eleven lessons, taken more or less verbatim, from pages 321 to 323 of Robert S. McNamara’s book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, which he published in 1995. McNamara had served as Secretary of Defense under both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

     He was at the head of the Pentagon on August 2 and 4, 1964 when North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the American destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy. Three days later on August 7, Congress passed a resolution, which gave President Johnson the power “to repel any armed attack and to prevent further aggression.”

     McNamara saw, and was part of, the debacle in Vietnam as it unfolded. Thirty years later, in hindsight, or “in retrospect,” as he called it, he could admit to the mistakes that he and others made and then list the lessons learned. Hindsight is always 20-20 vision.

     Of course, most striking are the parallels between the failures in Vietnam in the 1960’s and those the current administration made in Iraq. Certain of McNamara’s words jump out: “we misjudged,” “we failed,” “we underestimated,” “our profound ignorance,” “we are not omniscient,” “there are no immediate solutions,” “an imperfect untidy world,” “we do not have the God-given right,” and “not merely cosmetically,” when referring to multinational forces. McNamara’s admissions are so pertinent today and will be.

     Perhaps, someday a cabinet officer from the Bush administration will admit to these eleven lessons to describe their disaster in Iraq, but they refuse to do so today.  

MIDSUMMER DREAMS

by William H. Benson

July 26, 2007

     Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, European-trained physicians, each in turn, drew a map of the human mind, and features on that map included their own inventions: psychic agencies (id, ego, superego), the death drive, the libido, extrovert versus introvert, the mechanisms of defense (repression, projection, regression, and more), and most importantly the unconscious.

     Born on July 26, 1875, Carl Jung explained the formation of the unconscious. Because there are limits to what human beings perceive happening about them, in that their senses have limits, “there are certain events of which we have not consciously taken note.” These events have happened to us, but without our conscious knowledge. We may realize of their existence through intuition, as a sort of afterthought, but most generally the unconscious wells up to our conscious, often through the form of dreams.

     Jung wrote, “The unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as a rational thought, but as a symbolic image. Psychologists first investigated the unconscious through the study of people’s dreams.”

     It is a fact that human beings, when asleep, do dream. The psychologists, trained in the schools of Freud and Jung, believe themselves best equipped to study the human phenomenon of dreaming, through supposed scientific experimentation. The patient lies on the couch and recounts his or her dreams while the psychoanalysis listens. 

     There are others—literary critics, essayists, and dramatists—who would disagree. Ludwig Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s theories and called psychoanalysis “speculation,” not even a hypothesis, only “a powerful mythology.”

     Harold Bloom, the literary critic, believes that psychoanalysis is nothing more than shamanism. “Transference to a shaman is an ancient, worldwide technique of healing. . . . Shamanism preceded psychoanalysis and will survive it; it is the purest form of dynamic psychiatry.”

     Great writers have explored the dream world, using their own resources and literary techniques. Both Mark Twain and also George Bernard Shaw, born on July 26, 1856, wrote of Joan of Arc, the teen-aged French girl who dreamed, heard voices, saw visions, and led the French people in an all-out war against the English.

     The Old Testament writer knew the importance of dreams. At harvest time, Joseph told his brothers of his dream, that their sheaves of wheat bowed down before his. They promptly sold him into slavery bound for Egypt, and there he interpreted dreams.

     One of Shakespeare’s best comedies is about a dream—A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Two girls—Helena and Hermia, and two boys—Lysander and Demetrius, wander into the moon-drenched forest outside of Athens. They are separated, they fall asleep, and they are blissfully unaware of the fairies—Oberon, Titania, Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed—who live in that forest and come out at night.

     The fairies sprinkle on the boys’ and girls’ eyes the juice from a flower called Love-in-idleness, which makes them fall in love with whatever they see upon awakening. There are some delightful confusions, but by the end of the play all is put right.

     A fairy alone on the stage ends the play, “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended, that you have but slumb’red here while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream.”

     Both the scientist, such as Jung, and the fiction writer, such as Shakespeare, have explored this mysterious dream world, which every human being inhabits for seven, eight, or nine hours every night, and it is there that we find our best rest. It is a world that remains for the most part unexplored, a situation that Freud and Jung instinctively understood and tried to remedy, when they equated dreams as symbols with the real world. It may be a correct hypothesis; it may only be speculation, a powerful mythology.

     A full moon will appear on Monday, July 30. Do we dare on that night, a mid-summer night, to walk into an Athenian forest? “To sleep; perchance to dream.”

MARY BAKER EDDY & MARK TWAIN

by William H. Benson

July 12, 2007

     A social wreck most of her life, Mary Baker Eddy is a classic rags-to-riches story. She was born on July 16, 1821 in rural New Hampshire. At nineteen, she married George Glover, but he died six months after the wedding, leaving her pregnant and stranded in North Carolina. She returned to New Hampshire, and following the birth of her only child, a son, she developed a debilitating weakness that left her an invalid for decades.

     She married a second time, to Daniel Patterson, her dentist, who then abandoned her in Boston. An appointment with Dr. Phineas Quimby, a faith healer in Portland, Maine, opened up to her the idea that thoughts can influence the body. She was healed. But then Patterson abandoned her in Boston, and she was forced to live in a series of other people’s homes for years, dependent upon them for food and shelter.

     It was then that she began writing down her ideas, which she then published as the book Science and Health. The book sold well, and with the royalties, she established a church, Christian Science, a new form of the American Religion. By 1900, she was considered the richest and most influential woman in America.

     Many people were full of hostility and suspicion toward her: Mark Twain despised her. He wrote: “I am not combating Christian Science. I haven’t a thing in the world against it. Making fun of that shameless old swindler, Mother Eddy, is the only thing I take any interest in.” Between 1899 and 1903, Twain wrote a series of punishing magazine articles that were later gathered into a book, Christian Science.

     By then Mark Twain was still reeling from a series of losses. In April of 1894, he had voluntarily forced his publishing company into bankruptcy and had then traveled about the globe lecturing in order to pay off the debt. His eldest daughter Suzy had died of spinal meningitis. His wife Livy by then was an invalid, suffering from a series of heart attacks, and she would pass away in 1904.

     Constantly pressed for money, Twain was always looking for a humorous subject to write about. He focused upon Mary Baker Eddy and criticized her writing style, her thirst for money, and her accumulation of power. And yet, he believed in the power of the mind to heal, more than in the medical practitioners of that day. What he despised was Mary’s institutionalization and commercialization of that power.

     Twain appreciated what Mrs. Eddy had achieved. Her publishing company, which printed the Christian Science Monitor and the Christian Science Journal, had prospered where Twain’s had failed. He wrote: “She started from nothing. . . . Measured by this standard, it is thirteen hundred years since the world has produced any one who could reach up to Mrs. Eddy’s stature.”

     He listed her qualities: “a clear head for business, extraordinary daring, indestructible persistency, devouring ambition, limitless selfishness, and a never-wavering confidence in herself.” Truly, Mark Twain is ambivalent about her. Or better yet, he is alienated by a woman with male qualities, which he himself had tried and failed to demonstrate.

     He wrote: “It is conceivable that the persuasive influences around her and within her would give a new and powerful impulse to her philosophizing, and that from this, in time, would result that great birth, the healing of body and mind by the inpouring of the Spirit of God—the central and dominant idea of Christian Science.”

     Mary Baker Eddy and Mark Twain never met. Mary’s biographer, Gillian Gill, wrote, “To have Mark Twain in her study for an hour or so of conversation would have been a treat.” After all, Mary was ensconced in her home in New Hampshire surrounded by her servants and paid staff, and she was starved for good company, for minds as sharp and eager as her own, for someone witty who could make jokes and talk about the world.

     Mark Twain should have called upon Mary Baker Eddy. It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, but he never made the journey to her home.

     Both died the same year, 1910: he in April and she the following December.

A PEOPLE’S HISTORY

by William H. Benson

June 28, 2007

     Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Why can’t somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and a list that everybody says and nobody thinks?”

     Next week is Independence Day, the anniversary of that day during the American Revolution when the Second Continental Congress voted to declare their independence from the British Empire. A statement that could appear on Holmes’s second list is: “The American Revolution enjoyed the full support of the English colonists.” That is an excellent example of something everybody says and nobody thinks through.

     Reading my college textbook recently, I came across a startling statement: “A small group of men representing each of the colonies had begun to take a strong stand against British policy. The activities of this small group led to widespread organized resistance and eventually the Revolution. Ultimately, this group was able to win the support of one-third to two-fifths of the moderate colonists for their demands.”

     “One-third to two-fifths” is certainly less than “full support” of the English colonists in America. Indeed, the truth is that the American Revolution was not nearly as widely supported as is now commonly believed.

     In 1980 the historian Howard Zinn wrote a popular American history he entitled, A People’s History of the United States. About the Revolution, he wrote: “Around 1776 certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery: they found that by creating a nation called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from favorites of the British empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new privileged leadership.”

     Who belonged to this small group of men, this privileged leadership? John Hancock was the wealthiest merchant in Boston. Robert Morris was one of the wealthiest men in Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin owned Philadelphia’s best newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette. Jefferson and Washington both owned expansive tracts of land across Virginia. This small group of men was indeed the privileged, the wealthy, the landed gentry, all eager to break away from England because of what they would gain. 

     Zinn interprets historical events in terms of class struggles, and in so doing, he upends history and looks at events through the peoples’ eyes. This small group of men, Zinn declares, were capable of manipulating certain of the masses of the people into open rebellion, specifically men with guns.

     Zinn wrote that an “American victory over the British army was made possible by the existence of an already-armed people. The revolutionary leadership distrusted the mobs of poor, the slaves, and the Indians, but they knew they would have to woo the armed white population.”

     Jefferson’s document, the Declaration of Independence, included words that spoke of “popular control over governments,” of “the right for people to rebel and revolt,” and of “the indignation of political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks.” Jefferson’s  language was well-suited to unite large numbers of colonists who had grievances with each other to turn against England.

     Not only did this small group of leaders exclude the poor, the slaves, and the Indians, but they also excluded those who disagreed with them—the Loyalists to the crown, whom they derisively called the Tories, men who did not want to revolt. Many fled to Canada, leaving behind their property, land, and homes. Then, in a turnaround of the word, the privileged American leaders called themselves the Patriots, when actually they were the Revolutionaries. It was the Tories who were the true Patriots.

     These American Revolutionary War leaders were terrified of losing control of their followers, for they knew that rebellion in the colonies had been constant. “Starting with Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia by 1760, there had been eighteen uprisings aimed at overthrowing colonial governments. There had been six black rebellions, and forty riots.”

     Is Zinn right in his interpretation? Was the Revolution a diabolical plot created by a small group that foisted a new nation upon the unsuspecting colonists? Perhaps so, but you and I are the beneficiaries of their leadership;  we belong on that list of US citizens.

     Enjoy your Fourth of July.

TEAR DOWN THIS WALL

by William H. Benson

June 14, 2007

     On June 12, 1987, twenty years ago this week, Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Two years later Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did permit the Germans to pull down the wall that had divided East and West Berlin since 1961, since the days of Khrushchev and Kennedy.

     Reagan’s injunction to Gorbachev was Reagan’s finest moment as President, for he understood better than others that America leads best when she promotes peaceful solutions to the seemingly insolvable problems that challenge the world’s nations. Always open, expansive, sunny, and self-confident, Reagan had earlier called the Soviet system “an evil empire” and had predicted that it would end up on “the ash heap of history.” Events in his lifetime proved him correct.

     Walls surround us and dictate where we are, who we are, and what we do. It is human nature to build walls with whatever materials are at hand: trees, sod, stones, or steel, for walls offer us security and protection. A home’s boundaries are determined by its walls.

     Some walls were built to stay, such as the Great Wall of China, built over thousands of years with “dedication and devotion” and “exemplary discipline,” but, as one commentator put it, “This is how the world’s energy is wasted.” And then there are those walls about the castles built all across Europe a millennium ago.

     “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls come a’tumbling down.”

     Today new walls are going up: the wall dividing Israel and Palestine, and the proposed seven-hundred mile wall between the United States and Mexico, even though at last report only two miles had been built.

     Two weeks ago Reagan’s diaries were published, and they show a man very comfortable acting and serving as President. He spent a lot of time watching television and lounging by the pool, and yet he was sensitive to the charge that he did not work hard enough as President. He wrote, “The press keeps score on office hours but knows nothing about the never ending desk & paperwork that usually goes on ‘til lights out.” He was not disengaged, but the walls of the White House determined what he did there and when.

     Above all else, Reagan championed freedom—both political and economic.

     It was Adlai Stevenson who said, “Freedom is a plant which grows only from knowledge. It must be watered by faith. It will come to leaf and fruit and flower only in the benevolent sunlight of peace.” Knowledge, faith, and peace: Let those be our garden’s walls in which freedom can flourish. Of knowledge Thomas Jefferson said, “if a people expects to be both ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.”

     At opposite poles from knowledge, faith, and peace live fear, worry, panic, attacks, and anxiety, and within their ugly walls dwells war, death, destruction, revenge, and utter hopelessness—an accurate portrayal of Iraq today.

     Last week in Newsweek the journalist Fareed Zakaria compared the Reagan years of the early eighties with those of President Bush. “Today the United States sits on top of the world. But the atmosphere in Washington could not be more different from 1982. We have become a nation consumed by fear, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world, we see ourselves besieged and overwhelmed.”

     What Zakaria is pointing out are the walls, ugly walls, walls covered in multi-colored graffiti, walls that hem people in instead of liberating them, and walls that transform people into terrified victims instead of a freed people seeking out new challenges. He sees those walls, and so do I, and so do most people.

     I say, “Mr. President, tear down those walls.”

AMERICA’S RELIGIOUS LEADERS

by William H. Benson

May 31, 2007

     Americans have always paid homage to their religious leaders. Indeed, the persuasive influence of the religious leader has remained one of the few constants of America’s heritage. Americans from every generation seem to want to follow that person with a resonating voice who offers a new slant on the Christian faith.

     At Plymouth Rock in 1620, there was the Pilgrim Separatist William Bradford. At Massachusetts Bay in 1630, there were the Anglican preachers Jonathan Winthrop, Thomas Hooker, Richard Mather, and John Cotton. Although not separated from the Church, they wished to purify it of anything that remained from the Catholic Church.

     The deepest thinker among those early English colonists was Roger Williams, but his intellect led him to two startling conclusions: that politics should not have any bearing upon a religious service, and that religion should not ever enter into politics. Thus, he argued that it was wrong for England to have a cross emblazoned on the English flag, and that it was wrong to say an oath upon a Bible in a court of law. Winthrop thought Williams mad and gave him a choice: leave Massachusetts or live in a jail cell. He left.

     In the nineteenth century, others with their own ideas stepped forward: Mother Ann Lee, the founder of the Shakers; Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons; Mary Baker Eddy, the head of the Christian Scientists; and Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

     Then, in the final decades of the twentieth century, a new generation of evangelists appeared. These were men such as Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, Rex Humbard, Norman Vincent Peale, Oral Roberts, Robert Schuller, James Dobson, and Jimmy Swaggert. They each wanted to lead Americans back to the Bible, to their own notion of salvation, and to an unwavering belief in ourselves as Americans and in the Christian faith. For sixty years, one after another they have stood for a moment tall as giants of the American Christian faith.

     All those men understood the power of the media. They wrote books; Billy Graham’s Peace with God (1953) and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) led the way to a river of books, a few of more lasting quality than others.

     Some built exotic churches: Rex Humbard’s in Akron, Ohio was circular, and Robert Schuller’s in Garden Grove, California is made of glass. They published magazines. They built colleges. They bought businesses. They went on the radio, and they all went on the television, for they clearly understood its power.

     Some, such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggert, failed in their attempts to build ever-bigger media empires; both were brought down and defrocked by their own scandalous actions—Jim Bakker in 1987 and Jimmy Swaggert a year later, and neither have been seen much since. Some, such as Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, were without scandals. 

     But this old guard of religious leaders must pass, like those before them, to others, to a new generation. One can only wonder what brand of cleric will appear in the twenty-first century. Ted Hager of Colorado Springs offered much promise, but he fizzled out in a spectacular scandal last fall before he had achieved national fame.

     Norman Vincent Peale died in 1993. Had he lived he would be 109 today, for his birthday was May 31, 1898. Billy Graham is retired to his home in Montreat, North Carolina, content to end his former globe-trotting days at home with his wife Ruth beside him, and two weeks ago, Rev. Jerry Falwell of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia passed away, due to heart failure.

     One conclusion. Roger Williams would never have approved of James Dobson’s lobbying group—the Family Research Council, nor of Pat Robertson’s feeble attempts to run for President, nor of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Roger Williams insisted upon the absolute separation of the church and the clergy away from the state’s “wicked” political processes. Williams was most concerned about ensuring the purity of the church, and that, he believed, was achieved by avoiding the corrupting influence of the state.

     Politics and religion do not mix easily, something that Roger Williams instinctively believed. Would that all future American religious leaders so believe.