THE TRAGEDY OF LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

by William H. Benson

March 20, 2008

     On Sunday evening, March 31, 1968, forty years ago, the President of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson, appeared on nationwide television and announced, “I am taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict. Tonight I have ordered our aircraft and our naval vessels to make no attacks on North Vietnam, except in the area of the Demilitarized Zone. I call upon President Ho Chi Minh to respond positively and favorably to this new step of peace.”

     The American people who were watching their black and white television screens that night most assuredly breathed a collective sigh of relief. They felt that the end of this horror story in southeast Asia may now finally be in sight. (But, alas, it was not to be.) But, why had the President changed his policy after three years of stubbornly professing that we were on the verge of winning the war? Why had he finally buckled?

     LBJ by the spring of 1968 was under enormous pressures. In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive over the previous two months had demonstrated the Viet Cong’s resolve to defeat American and South Vietnam forces. Anti-war demonstrators, mainly students, were marching upon the nation’s college campuses, demanding an end to the draft and to the war. LBJ’s approval ratings on how he was handling the war had dropped to 28%.

     Then, a quiet unknown Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, won the Democratic Presidential primary election in March in New Hampshire with 42% of the vote, stunning Johnson. McCarthy had entered the presidential campaign with a single promise: if elected, that day he would bring all the American soldiers home from Vietnam. Then, on Saturday, March 16, Robert F. Kennedy announced he would also run for President, Johnson’s worst fear.

     For three years LBJ had buried himself in a dreamlike world, that the outcome of the war was about to turn, but by early 1968 the dream had evaporated. His daily contact with the real world—rampant inflation, the Tet Offensive, students marching, and the Presidential primaries—had forced him back to reality.

     “Hating the days, Johnson hated the nights even more,” wrote LBJ’s biographer, Doris Kearns Goodwin. He would crawl out of his bed, and holding a small flashlight, he wandered about the White House until he stood in front of Woodrow Wilson’s picture, which he would reach up and touch. “This ritual, however, brought little lasting peace. . . . Johnson’s enthusiasm and vitality steadily receded. He was really tired, and he knew it.”

     “I felt,” Johnson said, “that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions. On one side, the American people were stampeding me to do something about Vietnam. On another side, the inflationary economy was booming out of control. . . . After thirty-seven years of public service, I deserved something more than being left alone in the middle of the plain, chased by stampedes on every side.”        

     “How is it possible,” Johnson asked, “that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I had given them so much? . . . . Take the students. Young people by the thousands leaving their universities, marching in the streets, chanting that horrible song about how many kids I had killed that day. . . . I felt as if I’d been slapped in the face.” Johnson heard the taunts and chants, and they wounded him deeply.

     The American people who were seated in their living rooms on that Sunday night stared at the heavily-lined face of their President, and suddenly, they heard him say, “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” He had had enough.

     On Thursday of that week, April 4^th, James Earl Ray was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, and on June 5^th, Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles and died the next day. In January of 1969, Richard Nixon was inaugurated President, and LBJ flew back to Texas, back to his beloved ranch near Johnson City. Four years later, in January of 1973, he passed away, and in April of 1975, Saigon fell to the Viet Cong.

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

by William H. Benson

March 6, 2008

     William F. Buckley, Jr., at the age of eighty-two, passed away last week, on Wednesday morning, February 27, at his desk at his home at Stamford, Connecticut, while working on his memoirs of Ronald Reagan. Bill Buckley was a unique American, a Renaissance man, multifaceted, and multitalented, and above all else the founder of the conservative movement that captured much of the government and media in the 1980s.

     Charlie Rose once introduced Buckley: “Before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater. Before Goldwater, there was the National Review. And before there was that magazine, there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and that spark in 1980 became a conflagration.”

     As a young man, shortly after graduating from Yale College, Buckley wrote his first book, God and Man at Yale, in which he criticized Yale’s faculty and administration for leaning too heavily upon atheism and the liberal political philosophy. That first book instantly made him a national figure. In 1955, he borrowed $100,000 from his wealthy father and began his own magazine, the National Review, dedicated to crafting a winning alternative to New Deal liberalism.

     Alone, he forged a conservative movement, driving from its ranks the kooks, the oddballs, the anti-Semitics, the isolationists, the John Birchers, and the lovers of Ayn Rand, giving his conservative movement a respected and philosophical edge that fully blossomed under Ronald Reagan. Consistently well-informed and constantly thinking, Bill Buckley was staunchly and unapologetically anti-Communist and anti-Socialist.

     In 1966, he started his own PBS talk show, Firing Line, and for decades, he interviewed America’s leaders and thinkers. His moderate tone, his civilized manners, and his charm and wit won over many potential enemies. An observer said of Bill Buckley, “He didn’t want to be unduly harsh or unfair, and he felt deeply hurt if something he wrote or said hurt someone personally.” This stands in vivid contrast with the shrill type of commentary we often hear from the media pundits today.

     He loved adventure, especially sailing his yacht across the Atlantic. With his wife Patricia, he loved entertaining people of all ages at their home on Park Avenue at 73^rd Street: both young college graduates and retired business leaders, giving each a chance to stand and say whatever. He taught himself to play the harpsichord. An observer said, “With everything he did, he was always doing something more.”       

     Above all else, Buckley loved words, especially long ones: he often claimed he was a sesquipedalian. He wrote 45 books, several of them best-selling mystery novels featuring the CIA agent Blanchford Oakes, as well as 5200 opinion columns. He gave an average of seventy speeches a year. Like his friend Alistair Cooke, he too made a great Masterpiece Theatre host.

      In 1963, he began one of his columns with a rhetorical question: “Have you noticed that the use of an unusual word sometimes irritates the reader to such a point that he will accuse the user of affectation?” His long words truly annoyed and irritated many.

     It is sad but true that Buckley’s conservative movement is now faltering under the guise of George W. Bush’s leadership. In July of 2004, Buckley wrote that if “I had known back then in February of 2003 what we know now I would not have counseled war against Iraq.”

     More than fifty years ago, William F. Buckley, Jr., said, “The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers,” and their conservative opponents. And yet, as one commentator has pointed out, “today with the occupation of Iraq, we have a supposedly conservative administration that has assumed the most daunting and expensive social engineering project in U.S. history, and after nearly five years, there is no end in sight.”

     Alistair Cooke referred to Buckley as the “lover of the last word.” And yet Bill Buckley often admitted that he suffered from “en espirit d’escalier,” a French phrase to describe that which you wish you had said by way of a devastating retort; “Typically it is a sunburst that hits you as you reach the bottom of the staircase.”

     After decades of smoking took his beloved wife Patricia last April, emphysema from smoking cigars did the same to William F. Buckley, Jr, an American sunburst that had reached the bottom of his staircase.

NINE WORLD WARS

by William H. Benson

February 21, 2008

     In Europe, it was named the Seven Years’ War, because it lasted from 1756 until 1763, but in America, it was the French and Indian War, because the English colonists and the British redcoats fought mainly the French and the Indians.

     In 1753 the Governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, commissioned George Washington, a young Virginian, then only twenty-one but quite tall and muscular, to head west into the Ohio River Valley and order the French to evacuate the region.

     The English colonists in Virginia had claims upon 800,000 acres of the strategic valley, but the French—Canadians and their Iroquois allies—were drifting south from the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River into the Ohio region. There they had constructed forts, trapped for furs, and claimed Ohio for the King of France.

     Thus, both European powers, the British and the French, were marching toward another confrontation, another war, this time for a prize—the disputed Ohio River Valley, and in a larger sense, all of North America.

     George Washington, born on February 22, 1732, did as Dinwiddie had instructed him, but Washington discovered that his words were not going to force the French to budge, let alone evacuate. The next year he returned with 150 Virginia militiamen, and his troops opened fire—the first shots of a fourth world war.

     British redcoats and English colonial militiamen fought the French on land and sea in a gigantic death struggle to decide who would own North America. William Pitt, the British leader in London, threw the entire weight of the British army and navy, and its treasury against the French. When the English General, James Wolfe, crushed the French general Montcalm at Quebec in 1759, England drove the French empire off the continent.

     Thus, English is the dominant language of North America, rather than French.   

     Scholars identify nine world wars, beginning with King William’s War, 1689-1697, and ending with World War II, 1941-1945. All of these world wars resulted in a fierce struggle upon the world’s oceans and upon the soil of two hemispheres—Europe and North America. The American people, whether as British subjects or American citizens, were unable to stay out of a single one of these nine wars. Neutrality was illusory.

     In the first four wars, the British fought the French. In the fifth world war—the American Revolution—it was the British colonists, led by George Washington, who fought the British, but Washington probably would not have defeated the British without the assistance of the French army, and especially her navy.

     The sixth war was the fallout that resulted from the French Revolution—the beheading of King Louis XVI, the fall of the French aristocracy, and the creation of the French republic. Napoleon’s bloody sweep across Europe that began in 1803 brought on the seventh world war. In the United States, it became known as the War of 1812 when Great Britain attacked Washington D.C., even torching the White House.

     The eighth and ninth wars, World Wars I and II, pitted the British, French, Americans, and Russians on one side against the Germans and the other Axis powers on the other.

     Today, February 21, marks the 92^nd anniversary of the beginning of arguably the worst battle of the worst of the nine world wars: the Battle of Verdun during World War I. Germany’s High Command decided early in 1916 that they would attack the French position at the town of Verdun in eastern France and thus clear a path to Paris. The French forces, though badly outnumbered, would not yield, and when the battle ended on December 15, there were 304,000 soldiers killed or missing. The worst of the worst.

     The following year the Americans, under General “Black Jack” Pershing, entered the war, and effectively determined the outcome in favor of the Allies.

     Last week Newsweek wrote, “World War I has no national monument. No iconic images. And only one soldier is still alive.” The one solitary surviving U.S. veteran of World War I, Frank Woodruff Buckles, turned 107 this month.

     England, France, America—enemies at times and allies at others. Five years ago next month, England’s Tony Blair sided with the U.S. President, George Bush, in his decision to attack Iraq, but France’s people and government wisely chose to sit this one out.

CITIES

by William H. Benson

February 7, 2008

     Cities across the globe attract millions of new immigrants each year. Some of these new arrivals find a much better life than they could have experienced should they have stayed in their rural native hinterland. For others though, the city grinds them up, pushing them into urban poverty, into the ghetto, where life is “short, nasty, and brutish.” Some find hope; others are swallowed up in hopelessness and despair.

     The decisions that emanate from certain cities impact people’s lives around the globe. A rumor originating in Washington D.C. is magnified manifold until it is heard in Asia, Europe, South America, Africa, and the Middle East. All concerned U.S. citizens seem to develop an ear that is tuned to the machinations coming out of Washington. Art, the publishing business, and the garment industry all revolve around New York City. Hollywood, California boasts of the film industry.

     Certain people are associated with a particular city. Benjamin Franklin found his fortune in Philadelphia, and then could afford to live for years in London and Paris. Bill and Hillary Clinton were Little Rock, Arkansas residents until they changed their address to Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. for eight years, and then they moved to New York City. Baghdad belonged to Saddam Hussein for decades, as did Moscow to Joseph Stalin.

     Think of Salt Lake City, and you think of Brigham Young. Harry Truman had Independence, Missouri. Jimmy Carter still lives in Plains, Georgia. Richard Nixon often escaped the Oval Office for San Clemente. After college, Ronald Reagan left his native Illinois and adopted Hollywood for his own.

     With the expansion of professional sports, we tend today to associate a city with their football, basketball, or baseball teams. Denver is the home of the Broncos and the Rockies. Los Angeles owns both the Raiders, formerly of Oakland, and also the Rams. Philadelphia claim the Eagles, Pittsburg the Steelers, and Green Bay the Packers. Boston has the Red Sox, but all of New England claims the Patriots.

     We know those cities’ coaches and players, those of today and of yesterday. Denver had Dan Reeves and John Elway. Vince Lombardi and Bart Starr found fame and fortune in a northern Wisconsin city called Greenbay, and Chicago had a Refrigerator.

     The name of a city can signify much more than a professional sports team though. One day the Greek mathematician Archimedes was absorbed in thought over a mathematical diagram he was sketching in the sand. So intent was he that he failed to hear the approach of a Roman soldier who told him to desist his drawing. Because he did not instantly obey, the Roman soldier killed Archimedes. That tale, true or not, encapsulates the difference between the ancient Greek and Roman cultures, between Athens and Rome.

     Athens represented the pursuit of the good life: beauty, art, sculpture, drama, literature, philosophy. Rome, on the other hand, represented political power: the sword, war, and brutally crushing any and all opposition. “Pay your taxes and keep the peace,” was Rome’s constant threat, “or else.”

     If Rome was to the far left of Athens, (both geographically and culturally) to the far right was Jerusalem, the home of the ancient Hebrews. In this city, the emphasis was upon worship, finding the proper form and duty, something that the ancient Greeks and Romans gave only occasional attention.

     Today’s world-class cities fascinate modern men and women: London, Tokyo, and New York City each have their own culture, their own aura. They excel at creating their own kind of citizen, a man or a woman who loves to live in such a megalopolis, capable above all else of riding the subways and fighting the crowds.

     Next Tuesday is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. Save for his childhood and the Presidency, he lived his adult life in Springfield, Illinois. It was there in that town that he explored the ideas and then put them into the words that would propel him into national prominence and eventually put him into the White House in Washington D.C., the nation’s capital, a city.  

THE NUMBER VS. THE WORD

by William H. Benson

January 24, 2008

     “Science is vastly more important than art, hands down,” so said a prominent writer in his most recent book. At first glance, and in light of what science and mathematics has accomplished over the past century, it appears that he is probably correct. Yet, I would contend that the liberal arts also deserve a prominent place in our lives.

     The numbers that live within the sciences and businesses are important, life-changing, the very bases for our technological breakthroughs. Without a working knowledge of mathematics, job hunters are at a serious disadvantage, virtually disabled and unable to compete for the better jobs within the workforce.

     But the words and ideas that make up our arts—literature, philosophy, theology, law, journalism, history, and psychology—are essential, a necessary component of our lives. Without words, without language, and the bodies of learning that words inhabit, we would live very poor lives indeed. I think it unwise to place the world of science and numbers superior to that of arts and words, or vice versa, for it seems that one compliments the other.

     We live in a world that includes both sets of knowledge—the number and the word, the equation and the sentence, the theorem and the paragraph, the graph and the explanatory footnote. There is number dexterity, and then there is word dexterity. Quantification is a necessary skill, but so too is qualification—the number’s explanations and meanings. Grade school students may groan, but math story problems incorporate both words and numbers, and adults daily apply numerical skills to their lives.

     Few people have successfully circumnavigated and made outstanding contributions in both worlds. Offhand, I can think of only two—Blaise Pascal and Pythagoras—both mathematicians and both philosophers.

     Numbers fascinated the ancient Greek mathematicians, men such as Pythagoras, who believed that numbers were austere, full of meaning and mysticism. They believed that all of mathematics and all science could be explained by numbers. A distinguished physicist once said, “An equation is the most serious and important thing in mathematics.” We are all richer because some brilliant minds of the past discovered equations, formulated theorems, and laid down algebraic and geometrical principles.

      Numbers do a great job of measuring the world about us, of identifying trends and projecting them into the future, defining the dimensions of objects within the natural world, and a myriad other tasks.

     But numbers do a very poor job in certain areas, such as sketching our own internal worlds. Human beings live in their thoughts, images, imaginations, dreams, emotions, and hopes, and outsiders are often in the dark as to what people are truly like on the inside, “in those places,” Charles Dickens said, “where the meanings live.” Only words and stories can even begin to diagram a human being’s internal software.

     We live in the Great Information Age. Information is in abundance, at our fingertips, easily and freely obtainable, in the form of graphs, tables, bar charts, and statistics. What is rare is “meaning” behind much of that information. Only a word person can provide that meaning or the explanation.

     Lee Iacoca once said, “There were a lot of guys a lot smarter than I was. They were engineers, design architects with lots of technical skill, numbers guys, and yet I surpassed all of them. I had something they didn’t—the ability to speak, to persuade, to convince, to lead, and to manage.”

     A student once asked the author James Michener what she should study at college, and he replied, “Unless I had extraordinary aptitude in the sciences, I’d stick with liberal arts every time. The pay isn’t as good. The jobs aren’t waiting when you graduate. But forty years from now the scientists in your class will be scientists. And the liberal arts men will be governing the world.”

ACHIEVEMENT

by William H. Benson

January 10, 2008

     I watched the presidential candidates debate the issues on television last Saturday evening, prior to New Hampshire’s primary vote on Tuesday, and I was impressed. Each of the Republicans first and then the Democrats next seemed intelligent, articulate, and determined to redirect our country’s future with definite plans.

     Of the four Democrats—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson—I thought that Hillary dominated the debate. As the campaign gears up, and even though I may not agree with her political views, I suspect that she will be difficult to beat. All four of the Democrats vowed that if elected they would bring the troops home from Iraq, a promise I was glad to hear. One of them, perhaps it was John Edwards, said, “To end the war, we must end the occupation.” How true.

     A clear winner did not appear among the Republicans, and yet, I would say that Mitt Romney appeared on the defensive. Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas Baptist minister who won in Iowa’s caucus vote, seemed intense, even wound up, whereas Fred Thompson and John McCain came across relaxed and confident. But, it would be a mistake to count Giuliani out, for the race among the Republicans is wide open; any of them could win the next handful of primaries, even though McCain and Thompson have the most experience.

     By the time you read this, we will know the two winners in New Hampshire, and I predict Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

     Any American who wants to run for the highest office in the land belongs to a select group of very driven and focused people, who must endure a lot of criticism and verbal abuse. Originating from ordinary backgrounds, they are now extraordinary people, and plenty has gone into making these people so driven that they strive for the Oval Office.

     Recently I re-read the book Profiles of Power & Success in which its author Gene N. Landrum identified the traits of the overachiever: intuitive-thinking, an exceptional amount of self-esteem and optimism, a talent for risk-taking, an obsessive will power, manic energy, a dedicated work ethic, plus tenacity and perseverance. In addition, there is usually at least one crisis in such a person’s background, possibly a whole series of them.

     The crisis is not a desirable episode in anyone’s life, and yet, “it appears from the research that such events are the catalysts for transforming average people into overachieving visionaries. The crisis becomes their inspiration.” People who have suffered a great trauma are imprinted by their experience; they are either destroyed by it or pushed into a higher gear and armed with a manic need to succeed.

     The crisis can appear in several forms: a disabling injury, the loss of a parent or sibling when a child, a bankruptcy, imprisonment, a divorce, or abandonment by family members. ”Psychological suffering, anxiety, and collapse can lead to new emotional, intellectual, and spiritual strengths—confusion and doubt can lead to new ideas.” And to new thoughts about who they are and what they will achieve.

     Their lives have become “a Horatio Alger story.” Upon this very theme—of rags-to-riches—did Horatio Alger, Jr. write over 100 books, selling 20 million copies, and once you have read one, you have read them all, even though the titles may change. There was Luck or Pluck, Sink or Swim, Ragged Dick, and Tattered Tom, fictional stories in which a street urchin who, through his own industry, honesty, and perseverance, rises to the top.

     Unfortunately, Alger failed to apply those same qualities to his own life. He wasted his book royalties living the fast life in New York, San Francisco, and Paris, and dying in 1899 in his sister’s home in rural Massachusetts, drained of any semblance of success.

     To throw your name in the ring, to declare yourself a candidate for president, to ask voters for their vote in a primary is to take a gigantic personal risk: it is not for the faint of heart. Few have the gumption to do it, and among those few, only one wins. It is more by pluck than luck and by swim than sink that anyone wins. In 2008 may the voters elect the best person—man or woman—for the job.