RICHARD NIXON AND BILLY GRAHAM

by William H. Benson

August 7, 2008

     The two men—Billy Graham and Richard Nixon—were great friends. They had known each other since 1950. About the same age with children about the same age, the two families often visited each other. Graham was an unabashed and loyal supporter of Richard Nixon, something that observers who detested Nixon could not understand.

     In January of 1969, Billy Graham attended Nixon’s inauguration and gave the prayer, offering his thanks to God that, “in Thy sovereignty, Thou hast permitted Richard Nixon to lead us at this momentous hour of our history.”

     During Nixon’s first four years in the White House, Billy Graham had immediate access to the President. In 1970 a Nixon aide said, “Others may have trouble getting through the White House switchboard, but not Billy; Billy can get through right away.”

     “But it was as if Graham, in his confederation with Nixon, proceeded in a kind of perceptual and moral glaucoma,” wrote the journalist Marshall Frady.

     Billy was so trusting in Nixon’s integrity that he invited the President to attend and speak briefly at the Billy Graham Crusade in Knoxville, Tennessee in May of 1970. This came shortly after Nixon had authorized the raids into Cambodia and the resulting violence that had erupted at Kent State and other college campuses across the country. Hecklers showed up that night to shout at the President, “Peace Now!”

     Nixon easily won the 1972 election, trouncing George McGovern, and again Billy prayed the prayer at Nixon’s second inauguration. Even the news of crimes being committed at the Watergate Hotel in June of 1972 did not disturb Graham, who said, “I don’t think anyone, even the President, knows the whole truth. . . . I have known him a long time, and he has a very strong sense of integrity.”

     As the Senate hearings droned on through 1973 and into 1974, Billy Graham began to feel that Nixon had cut him off. Of this, he seemed baffled, saying, “I don’t know what my relationship is now. I heard from a friend of the President that he didn’t want to get Billy Graham involved, so maybe he just wanted to keep me entirely out of it.”

     Billy was floored when Nixon’s financial records were made public: he had tapped into government funds to enhance his plush personal retreats at San Clemente and at Key Biscayne, and he had given so little to charities or to church.

     Graham said, “I just couldn’t understand it. He’d never seemed to me to really want things like that. He never wanted clothes or fancy things around him or money or anything like that. . . . I could hardly believe it.”

     In the spring of 1974, the transcripts of Nixon’s private Oval Office sessions, with all the “expletives deleted,” were released. Publicly, Billy Graham said, “I just didn’t know that he used this type of language in talking to others.” But privately, Billy wept, so devastated was he. “I’d thought he was a man of such great integrity. . . . I’d never, ever, heard him tell a lie. But then the way it sounded in those tapes—it was all something totally foreign to me in him. He was just suddenly somebody else.”

     On the evening of August 8, 1974, Nixon announced that he would resign the next day at noon.

     Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s aides, later said, “Nixon had a penchant for knowing how to use and manipulate people. He was the consummate politician. He would demand great loyalty, but as Watergate proved, he never quite gave it back.”

     For years after Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, Billy was entirely sincere when he insisted that Nixon had not ever manipulated the world-renowned evangelist for his own political purposes. Leighton Ford, Billy’s brother-in-law, said, “I have never heard him say one thing that made me believe he thought he was being used.”

     Another close associate stated it more bluntly, “For the life of me, I honestly believe that after all these years, Billy still has no idea of how badly Nixon snookered him.”

DEAN MARTIN AND JERRY LEWIS

 by William H. Benson

July 24, 2008

     Joseph (Jerome) Levitch, aka Jerry Lewis, of Russian Jewish heritage and from Newark, New Jersey, had an act: on stage, he would play records of famous singers and then pantomime their voices. In 1946, he was twenty years old, a geeky-acting kid who did not get many laughs, but he kept finding work.

     Dino Paul Crocetti, aka Dean Martin, of Italian heritage and from Steubenville, Ohio, had an act: he would sing, as a crooner, as did Harry Mills and Bing Crosby. In 1946, Dean was twenty-nine years old, handsome, with curly black hair, loveable, and he too kept finding work. Yet, neither had earned a top billing.

     Coincidentally, they found themselves working the same clubs at the same time up and down the Atlantic seaboard. On one occasion, late at night at the Harvard-Madrid on Broadway between Fiftieth and Fifty-first, Jerry started to tease Dean, who was trying to sing, and Dean heckled him back. They were just having fun, blissfully unaware.

     Weeks later, Jerry was performing at Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club in Atlantic City, when the lead singer came down sick. For a replacement, Jerry suggested Dean Martin, and Skinny agreed. Dean showed up thinking that he was going to sing, but Skinny thought the two of them should try some comedy. Quick-thinking Jerry improvised.

      Dean played the part of the smooth and easy singer, who was always cool, who loved the women. He would play it straight. Jerry played the part of a child, a comic with outrageous and unpredictable antics. Jerry explained the act to Dean: “I’m the kid, and you’re the big brother. I’m the busboy, you’re the captain. You’re the organ-grinder, I’m the monkey. You’re the playboy, I’m the putz.”

     Dean would sing, but Jerry would drop plates, toss people’s steaks like a Frisbee, and make a shambles of Dean’s performances. It was slapstick with a smattering of old jokes—whatever popped into their heads. On the night of July 24, 1946, the two took the stage together for the first time, and the effect on the audiences was electric. Later Skinny D’Amato said to them, “Now that is what I call lightning in a bottle.”

     The press reported: “These two crazy kids are a combination of the Keystone Kops, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello. They will leave their mark on the whole profession.” Years later, Alan King, the comedian, said: “I have been in the business for fifty-five years, and I have never to this day seen an act get more laughs than Martin and Lewis. They didn’t get laughs—it was pandemonium. People knocked over tables.”     

     The act lasted for ten years. It brought them fame and fortune, and took them to Hollywood, where they made 17 movies together. Jerry was intense about the movie business, a workaholic, anxious to get it right, but Dean was far less so. Somehow, the movies never did capture the spontaneity that their live act had. There were arguments, and Dean and Jerry decided to end their partnership.

     On Tuesday night, July 24, 1956, ten years to the day after their first performance together at the 500 Club, Martin and Lewis played their final three shows at the Copacabana at 10 East 60^th Street. Each show ended with a song, “Pardners,” in which they sang, “You and me, we’ll always be pardners. You and me, we’ll always be friends.”

     Alas, it was not to be. Their break-up was marked by a mountain of animosity, and years passed when they never spoke nor saw each other. Both enjoyed enormous success as a solo act, Jerry as a movie actor and Dean as a singer at Las Vegas and on television. 

     One day in 1983 Jerry with his wife, Sandra, walked into an Italian restaurant, La Famiglia, on Rodeo Drive, and they saw Dean Martin eating alone. Jerry was stunned at how Dean, then almost sixty-six, had aged. They spoke, but it was clear that Dean wanted to be left alone. Jerry wrote: “As we ate, I watched him eat. It’s a very strange thing to watch someone you know well eating alone. I tried my hardest not to be sad, but the feelings washed over me.”       

     The ancient Greeks had two masks—one with a smile and the other with a frown. Comedy usually first and then comes the tragedy. For Martin and Lewis the smiles had indeed turned to frowns.

JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

by William H. Benson

July 10, 2008

     Next Monday, July 14, marks the anniversary of the Storming of the Bastille, the day that the French Revolution began in 1789 in Paris. The Bastille was the King’s prison, a hated symbol of oppression under the absolutist monarchy, and on that day, the people had captured it to secure arms and release any political prisoners.

      The Revolution turned violent and bloody, and thousands perished under the knife of the guillotine during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, but by 1799 when the Revolution breathed its last, French royal power was gone, swept aside. The King, Louis XVI, and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, too had been marched to the guillotine.

     Jean Jacques Rousseau, the French writer and philosopher, had died a decade before the Revolution began, and yet, many, including Louis XVI and Napoleon, blamed him for the Revolution. The English philosopher Edmund Burke, said of the revolutionaries: “There is a great dispute among their leaders which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. . . . He is their standard figure of perfection.”

     To whom do the people listen? Who best can diagnose the difficulties of any society and offer solutions? Who holds the power to change a society?

     For centuries, people in Europe had looked to the Church and to the clergy for direction, but by the eighteenth century clerical power had waned. The Kings in the principalities spread across Europe had then claimed a “divine right,” to rule, a philosophy crushed by revolution. In democratic societies, people listen either to the glib politicians, or to the journalists who often slant the news toward their own bias.

     Over two hundred years ago, people began to listen for the first time to the secular “intellectuals,” men such as Thomas Paine in America and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France. Rousseau did not have any authority or power; all he had was his own common sense, his vision of what was wrong in France and what needed changing, and an especially agile ability to write. And the people read and heeded his words.

     Rousseau wrote of the importance of staying close to nature, for there, he believed, people were essentially good. It was when people formed communities that they became evil because of competitiveness, inclined toward aggression and egotism. He believed that children should be taught with sympathy by appealing to their interests and not through discipline and harsh lessons.

     In his major work, The Social Contract, Rousseau argued that governments should be established only by the sovereignty of the people, not by the Church or the King. This was revolutionary, a stunning and liberating idea. Governments, he argued, are formed by a compact among the people themselves.

     People accept Rousseau’s ideas today, and consider them modern, but they were not when he first wrote them. “He shifted around the furniture of the human mind.”

     What is surprising is that Rousseau may have been a visionary genius when dealing with society, but as a person, he was weak, quarrelsome, supersensitive to injustices, and filled with vice: he gave away to an asylum each of his five children immediately after their birth. Those who befriended him came away convinced that he was unhinged.

     David Hume said that he was “a monster who saw himself as the only important being in the universe.” Diderot labeled him “deceitful, vain as Satan, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, and full of malice.” Another said he was “odious, monstrous.” Voltaire, called him “a monster of vanity and vileness.” A woman’s last words to him were, “I have nothing left for you but pity.”     

     All this is baffling. That anyone would read anything that such a social pariah would write is astonishing, evidence of human gullibility, and yet people did and still do read him. The historian Paul Johnson summed up Rousseau. “[He] was a writer of genius but fatally unbalanced both in his life and in his views.”

     Again, the question is before us—to whom should we the people listen? The religiously-inspired televangelist? The persuasive politician? The media talking head? The maniacal intellectual? Rousseau is proof that grand ideas that will dramatically improve our lives can originate from even the most unlikely sources.  

L. PAUL BREMER III

by William H. Benson

June 26, 2008

     In the May 5^th edition of Time magazine, former Congressman Newt Gingrich was asked the question: “Do you see a clear path for a resolution to the Iraqi occupation?” Gingrich had answered: “Well, I said in December 2003, ‘We’ve gone off a cliff.’ I think [special envoy to Iraq L. Paul] Bremer’s decisions in June of 2003 were an absolute, total strategic fiasco. When political leaders decide they can violate all the rules of war, they get beat.”

     I would have liked Gingrich to elaborate and explain what he meant. Specifically, what were Bremer’s catastrophic decisions, and why did they violate the rules of war?

2003. Paul Bremer III arrived in Iraq on May 11, 2003, a month after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Appointed by President Bush and reporting to Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defense, Bremer served as head of Iraq’s Coalition Provisional Authority.

     As head of CPA, Bremer resided in Iraq for thirteen months, until June 28, 2004, the day when he signed sovereignty over to Iraq’s interim government, and the same day he left the country. While in Iraq, Bremer signed nearly 100 Orders.

     Order Number 1 was to remove former members of the Ba’ath Party, Saddam Hussein’s ruling party, from their positions of authority. Many were skilled and a-political, including thousands of competent government workers and schoolteachers, and suddenly they had lost their jobs because of their former party affiliation. Bremer’s policy of de-Ba’athification fostered bitter divisions in the country, fueled the violence that subsequently tore Iraq apart, and was not reversed until January of 2008, five years later.

     Order Number 2, issued on May 23, 2003 disbanded the Iraqi army, putting 400,000 former Iraqi soldiers out of work. This was truly disastrous because it created a pool of armed and angry youths from which the insurgency could then pull recruits.

     Jay Garner, the first head of CPA, tried to dissuade Bremer from such a rash decision, but Bremer replied, “The plans have changed. The thought is we don’t want the residuals of the old army. We want a new and fresh army.” To this, Garner replied, “You can get rid of an army in a day, but it takes years to build one.” 

     Bremer, to this day, still defends his decision, claiming that the army had already disbanded when Baghdad fell, a claim not altogether supported by the evidence.

     Order Number 12, issued on June 7, suspended all tariffs, customs duties, and import taxes. Order Number 17 granted foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from any of Iraq’s laws. Order Number 39 privatized Iraq’s 200 state-owned businesses, and allowed foreign companies to purchase up to 100% of each of them.

     Order Number 40 created a market-driven banking system. Order Number 49 lowered the individual and corporate tax rates to a flat 15%. Order Number 57 allowed Bremer to appoint Inspectors General, who would root out corruption, and were equipped with sweeping powers to investigate, even after Iraq would have created its own government.

     Critics argued that this series of Orders not only served American interests first, but that they were illegal. They violated the Hague regulations of 1907, the 1949 Geneva Convention rules, and the U.S. Army’s Law of Land Warfare, because a conquering power, according to those laws, is forbidden to rewrite the laws of the occupied country.

     Under Bremer’s leadership, billions of U.S. dollars were spent haphazardly, supposedly to “kickstart the Iraqi economy,” but without adequate financial controls, without month-end cash reconciliations, and without his cooperation with the qualified internal auditors. As a result and predictably, as much as $9 billion dollars evaporated. “Many of the funds appear to have been lost [due] to corruption and waste. . . . Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents.”

     On March 24, 2004, Bremer shut down a newspaper, al-Hawza, because within its pages the Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had encouraged resistance against the Americans. This was widely criticized as flagrantly undemocratic. And then there were rumors that Bremer had initiated during his tenure in Iraq a love interest with a young Iraqi translator.

     “[An] absolute, total strategic fiasco,” is how Newt Gingrich had described Bremer’s policies in Iraq, and I would agree.

MICKEY MANTLE

by William H. Benson

June 12, 2008

     “So it happened that my father, Mutt Mantle, decided that if he couldn’t become a professional baseball player, I should. He was almost comic in his determination to make a baseball player out of his little boy.” So wrote Mickey Mantle. Both Mickey’s father and his grandfather, Charles Mantle, had played amateur and semi-pro ball throughout the northeast corner of Oklahoma, but Mutt wanted far more for Mickey: he wanted his son to play in the majors.

     Mutt worked in the zinc mines near Commerce, Oklahoma, but from the time he arrived home until it was dark, nearly three hours, he pitched right-handed to young Mickey. Charles would join them and pitch left-handed to his grandson, and so Mickey learned to switch-hit, batting from each side of the plate. From his father and grandfather, he learned to hit, what were called, tape-measure home runs.

     When still a boy he played Class D ball, but well enough that he caught the eye of a Yankee scout. At eighteen, he joined the Yankees at their spring training camp in Phoenix, and they then sent him to Kansas City to play with their minor league team. A slump in his hitting there—twenty-two times at bat without a hit—compelled him to write his father to come and get him: he was quitting baseball.

     Mutt Mantle told him, “If that’s the way you’re going to take this, you don’t belong in baseball anyway. If you have no more guts than that, just forget about the game completely. Come back and work in the mines, like me.” Mickey stayed with baseball.

     For the Yankees he played 18 seasons—1951 through 1969, and hit a lifetime 536 home runs. During those seasons, often away from home, he partied and drank, especially with his two best friends then on the Yankee team—Whitey Ford and Billy Martin. “I drank because I thought we were having fun,” he later wrote.

     Then, once he had retired, his drinking accelerated. “My thirst went from steady to almost non-stop. . . . By the late eighties, I was drinking at lunch more frequently. Sometimes that would continue into the night. The weeks, months, and years began to be a blur. I was getting drunk more frequently.”

     As it always does, the drinking took its toll. His wife Merlyn separated from him, after raising their four boys on her own. About his boys—Mickey Jr., David, Danny, and Billy—Mickey wrote late in his life: “We gave them everything but discipline and a sense of purpose. . . . My greatest regret was that I didn’t spend a lot of time with my sons until they became my drinking partners. I just never learned how to be a father.”

     In public, he acted like a drunk. “I am embarrassed by what I did when I drank: the foul language, the rudeness, having to face people the next day, whom I didn’t remember insulting the night before.”

     In the early 1990’s Mickey’s friend, Pat Summerall, a television sports announcer, checked into the Betty Ford Center; eventually, Mickey decided he too should follow: the stomach pains, the memory loss, and the panic attacks had overwhelmed him. Standing up in a group at the Center, he said the words, “I’m Mickey, and I’m an alcoholic.”

     A month later, he returned home, and he claimed, and others have verified it, that he remained sober from then on, but filled with self-loathing for his forty years of drinking.

     On May 28, 1995, a case of severe stomach cramps required that he seek medical attention at Baylor University’s hospital, and the doctors diagnosed liver cancer. On June 8, he underwent a liver transplant, but on July 28, the doctors announced that the cancer had spread to his new liver, his lungs, and pancreas. Mickey Mantle passed away on August 13, 1995 at the age of sixty-five.

     “I was too busy to stop for Death, so Death stopped for me,” wrote Emily Dickinson.

     These four generations of Mantle’s—Charles, Mutt, Mickey, and Mickey’s four sons—underscores the overpowering influence that fathers have upon their sons. Tinged with undeniable remorse, Mickey late in life had stated what he believed: “Mickey, Jr. could have been a major league baseball player if my dad had been his dad. . . . Our lives have been in shambles for a lot of years, much of it flowing from my drinking.”

     Sunday is Father’s Day, a day reserved for, among other things, sobriety. 

NATIONAL MEMORIALS

by William H. Benson

May 29, 2008

     On the east bank of the Potomac River stands the Lincoln Memorial. Dedicated on May 30, 1922, it was made of marble mined in Tennessee and also limestone from Indiana. The statue inside, entitled “Seated Lincoln,” faces eastward across the length of the reflecting pool toward the Washington Monument and beyond to the Capitol.

     Other Presidents have their own national memorials in West Potomac Park. There are statues of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, which stand on the shore of the Tidal Basin, and across it is Thomas Jefferson’s Memorial. Lyndon Baines Jonson has a Memorial Grove on the Potomac, and on Theodore Roosevelt Island within the Potomac River is a memorial to T.R.

     Lincoln also has a second National Memorial, located in Indiana, and it honors his boyhood home. Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota then brings together the faces of four of the Presidents: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt.

     The answer to the old joke, “Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?” is that the bodies of both President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia lie in dark wood caskets in a tomb, the largest mausoleum in the U.S., on the east bank of the Hudson River at 125^th Street in New York City.

     Currently, the United States government, through the National Park Service, administers 29 National Memorials. Besides former Presidents, there are memorials dedicated to war heroes: Oliver Perry of the War of 1812, Robert E. Lee of the Civil War, and Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish hero of the American Revolutionary War.

     There are five memorials honoring early American exploration: the Arkansas Post, Fort Caroline in Florida, the Jefferson National Expansion in Missouri, and memorials to two Spanish explorers—Coronado and Desoto. Another memorial, Chamizal, in El Paso, Texas honors the agreement settling the boundary dispute between the U.S. and Mexico. 

     Memorials to national tragedies recognize the victims at the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood in 1889, those on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the passengers aboard the aborted Flight 93 that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. In addition, there is the Astronaut Memorial at the JFK Space Center, which remembers those who died while conducting U.S. space programs.

     Alexander Hamilton’s home in New York City; Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City; Kitty Hawk in North Carolina, the site of the Wright brothers’ historic flight, and Roger Williams’ home in Rhode Island are included as National Memorials.

     Also in West Potomac Park are the three veterans’ memorials: World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Of these, the latter has received the most acclaim. Two wings come together at a steep angle to create a Wall that cuts into the side of an incline. One wing aims towards Washington Monument and the other juts out towards the Lincoln Memorial. On 140 panels are inscribed the names of 58,256 veterans, missing or killed while serving in Vietnam.

     Maya Lin, a Yale architectural student who designed the Wall in 1982, later said, “I didn’t want to destroy a living park. You use the landscape. You don’t fight it. You absorb it. When I looked at the site, I just knew I wanted something horizontal that took you in, that made you feel safe within the park, yet at the same time reminded you of the dead. So I just imagined opening up the earth.”

     In 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke at the dedication service of Concord’s new cemetery, appropriately named Sleepy Hollow, and he said, “In this quiet valley as in the palm of Nature’s hand, we shall sleep well when we have finished our day.” And, then, Emerson tossed out a question, “We shall bring hither the body of the dead, but how shall we catch the escaped soul?”

     Memories—so pleasant and so fond—attach us to those souls who are in an instant set free, and thus we feel ourselves still connected to those who once lived, through our private memories and our National Memorials.