HARRY TRUMAN

by William H. Benson

December 18, 2003

     On the morning of December 5, 1950 President Harry Truman was reading in the Washington Post a most unflattering commentary on Margaret’s singing performance the evening before in Washington.  With his short fuse ignited by this attack on his daughter, Truman grabbed a pen and notepad and dashed off a hot letter to Paul Hume, the Post’s reporter.

     “Mr. Hume:–I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert.  I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an ‘eight-ulcer man on four-ulcer pay.’  Someday I hope to meet you.  When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beef steak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”

     Hume made public Truman’s letter and then sold it.  The entire country was aghast by their President’s ripe language, and yet he claimed that “the parents of children understand and will stick up for me.”

     On April 10, 1951 President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur from his command of as General of the Army after a series of defiant acts of insubordination.  Years later in a hot fury with his blue eyes still blazing at the recollection, Truman recalled that he told General Bradley to do it quickly because he did not want MacArthur to hear about it and resign. 

     “And I told Bradley, I says, ‘The @#$%* isn’t going to resign on me, I want him fired.’”

     In August of 1952 Harry had decided that he would not run for re-election for a third term, and so he threw his support towards the Governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson.  Unfortunately, the intellectual and cerebral Stevenson was on occasion on the receiving end of Truman’s vile and tempered language–Army talk he had learned in Battery D in World War I.  And Stevenson was not the intelligent campaigner that Truman was and had been.

     And then Truman was outraged when he sensed that Stevenson was disassociating himself away from Truman.  He fired off a letter.

     “It seems to me that the Presidential Nominee and his running-mate are trying to beat the Democratic President instead of the Republicans.  There is no mess in Washington.  I’ve come to the conclusion that if you want to run against your friends, they should retire from the scene and let you do it.  I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can.  Cowfever [he meant Estes Kefauver] could not have treated me any more shabbily than have you.”

     Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate handily won the election, and on January 20, 1953, the day of his inauguration, Ike and Mamie drove up to the White House but then refused to get out of the car, expecting the Trumans to come out to them, a clear break in protocol.  The Trumans, humiliated by Ike’s lack of tact, walked to the car.  Conversation was terse and short.

     Years later when reflecting upon Ike’s snub, Truman said, “You can’t very well forget things of that kind.”  And he didn’t.  Straightforward, aggressive, outspoken, and determined, he spoke his mind as he saw and believed it.  To forgive and forget was not one of his tactics.  Rather than let some insult or offense simply pass him by, Truman boldly declared his opinion.

     Sam Rayburn described Truman, “So right on the big things; so wrong on the little ones.”  And it was the little things that would so detract him.  He did not take easily personal slights or snubs or criticisms.  There was never any delicate ground around which he would dance.

     Very few of us during the course of our lives can tell off a newspaper reporter or a presidential candidate or fire a general, even though we may want to.  It is not the way to keep a job or our reputation or friends.  Perhaps only lameduck Presidents and crusty men from Missouri can do so.  Truman cautioned, “Keep your bullets bright and your gunpowder dry.”

     The message of “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men” is a request to release the hatred, give up the need for revenge, and let your enemies be.  The ideal of peace is so easily proclaimed, but so difficult to do, even for Presidents.

     Have a merry, merry Christmas.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

by William H. Benson

December 4, 2003

     Horror has never held my attention.  I have tried to complete a Stephen King novel numerous times, and invariably after a couple of chapters of gruesome and fanciful scenes, I give up.  But then two years ago King wrote a non-fiction book, On Writing, in which he described how he came up with ideas that he was able to translate into his stories.  That book I easily finished.

     Westerns I also cannot finish.  The same can be said of Isaac Azimov’s science fiction stories or of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings tales.  I start, hoping to finish at least one of them, but then other more appealing and more satisfying works just crowd them out.

     If I had more time I would read the classics, those books that Mark Twain said everybody liked but nobody read.  And I especially like to read works that explain the illusive meanings behind Shakespeare’s plays. Arthur Miller said that nobody these days really reads Shakespeare; they read about Shakespeare because the body of work that has built up and around him is much more enriching than the plays are themselves.  I would agree.  

     These days with the limited time available I read mostly non-fiction—intellectual biography and history, but on occasion I will pick up certain detective fiction writers—Sue Grafton’s alphabet series, Robert Parker’s wise-talking Spenser, and Dick Francis’s British horse-racing stories.  I read them rather than solve cross-word puzzles; they seem about the same thing.

     People arrive in this life with certain inclinations or preferences seemingly built into them for what they will read or will not read, and those preferences can improve, depending upon a person’s stage in life, what is going on in their lives, their education level, the time available, and their level of determination to exercise their minds.

    C. S. Lewis, who died on November 22, 1963, the same day as President Kennedy, had the enviable talent of being able to write well in a number of different genre—essays, theology, literary criticism, and fiction–but he is probably best remembered for his extraordinarily successful Christian allegories, The Chronicles of Narnia, today considered children’s literature. In an essay Lewis wrote that there was no single literary taste common to all children; some read nothing other than for information.  They will not read when they can find another form of entertainment.  Some like to read fantasies and marvels.  Some are omnivorous readers, gulping down anything.

     In other words, children are like adults in that they have inclinations to read or not to read and  preferences of what they will or will not read.

     Lewis wrote: “We can approach the matter differently by listing books liked by the young: Aesop’s Fables, The Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Treasure Island; the last was written especially for children, and yet it is read with pleasure by many adults.  I who disliked The Arabian Nights as a child, dislike them still.”

     To Lewis’s list I would also add: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and Martian stories and also Frankenstein.  Both Tarzan and Frankenstein’s creation are most interesting in that they both supposedly learned to read on their own, Tarzan as a juvenile and Frankenstein’s monster as a full-grown creation.  In fact, that monster bypassed Dick and Jane and other children’s stories and began with Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, heavy material for anyone.

     Widespread reading as a child is important, if for no other reason than to discover his or her preferences.  It also leads to better reading.  Harold Bloom, the literary critic, recently published a new book, Stories and Poems for Extraordinarily Intelligent Children of All Ages, in which he wrote, “If one is to ever read Shakespeare and Chaucer, the best way to prepare is to read Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.”

     It also can develop more discerning thought processes and better thinking skills.  For a child, few things are more crucial to their future than reading much and often.  And besides it can be just plain fun.  The stories and ideas we encounter as a child just seem the best, and they remain with us for the rest of our lives.

     This Christmas give the child a book.

WILLPOWER AND GRATITUDE

by William H. Benson

November 20, 2003

M. Scott Peck said in his book The Road Less Traveled that life’s two greatest possessions are a forceful will and a grateful attitude. A person who has a forceful will is considered assertive, proactive, ambitious, driven, and a hustler.  Without it a person appears dull, lethargic, passive, or lazy—ill-equipped to face life’s enormous challenges.  A person with a grateful attitude appreciates what has been given to her or him.  Without it a person seems selfish and heartless.

     This is the season when we think about the Pilgrims, stuck in the bottom of the Mayflower, sailing across a wild and terrible ocean, leaving behind possessions and relatives.  To do what they did demanded an exceptional and forceful will.

     The historian Paul Johnson wrote, “The Mayflower men—and women—were quite different.  They came to America . . . to create God’s kingdom on earth.  They were the zealots, the idealist, the utopians, the saints, and the best of them were fanatical, uncompromising, and overweening in their self-righteousness.  They were also immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous.”

     It had to be people with those unusual qualities, such as William Bradford and William Brewster, who would dare to cross the Atlantic Ocean to establish a new home for their families, bringing with them highly disciplined views of how their lives should be structured.

     On November 21, 1620, two months out of England, the discomforts of the voyage led to dissension to such a degree that the future colony’s leaders drew up what they called the Mayflower Compact.  By its two-hundred words, they created a governing body which would create “just and equal laws.”  It was signed by all forty-one heads of households. 

     Just the day before on the twentieth, a woman named Susanna White gave birth to a son whom she and her husband William named Peregrine—the first child born to English parents on their way to New England.  So those Pilgrims who left so much and brought so little now possessed children and a governing document and that forceful will.

     They needed far more, for by the following spring half of them, about fifty of the one hundred and one colonists, had died of exposure and disease.  And the survivors would have then starved if not for Squanto’s help.

     Paul Johnson described their refusal to quit.  “These were not ordinary pilgrims, traveling to a sacred shrine and then returning home to resume everyday life.  They were, rather, perpetual pilgrims, setting up a new, sanctified country which was to be a permanent pilgrimage, traveling ceaselessly towards a millenarian goal. . . . They were conducting an exercise in exceptionalism.”

     In the fall of 1621, after their first harvest, they gathered to give thanks, for they were now grateful.  Despite the losses of loved ones as well as the disappointments they had suffered, those people mentally set that all aside to remember those things that they did have.

     Thanksgiving begins at the individual level but then it becomes a community event, acted out in families, but extended even wider to the national level.

     A “forceful will” is progressive, looking forward, the act of planning and moving to achieve certain worthwhile objectives.  A “grateful attitude” is looking back, pleased with what has been accomplished.  Having both means emotional balance.  Too much of one and not of another leaves a person lop-sided, out of kilter, either so driven that he or she is out of touch with those around him or her or so content for what is that they cannot see what is possible.

     President Kennedy’s life defined the meaning of a forceful will.  He challenged Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country.”

     He was assassinated on Friday, about noon, on November 22, 1963, forty years ago this Saturday.  I was in the fourth grade.  And we were then supposed to celebrate Thanksgiving the next Thursday.  That Thanksgiving Day in 1963, like that which the Pilgrims celebrated in 1621, was a difficult time for Americans.

     Shocked and stung by real grief and loss, people under those circumstances are forced to hunt to find something for which they are grateful, a search that pushes them in the right direction, toward a greater and better understanding of their own humanity.

     A forceful will and a grateful attitude—life’s best gifts.  Have a great Thanksgiving!  

THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC

By William H. Benson

November 6, 2003

     Although I am not a big fan of Stephen Ambrose, I did read his last book, To America—Personal Reflections of an Historian, which he published just prior to his passing a year ago in October, and I liked it.  Right in the center of the book he began his chapter “The War in the Pacific” with a short declarative sentence–“It was the worst war that ever was.”—and then backs it up with reasons.

     And he really should know why it was the worst.  Ambrose claimed that over his lifetime he had studied and visited most of the major battle sites all over the world: those of the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Indian battles, and the European battles of World War I and II.  Still he concluded that “None was as testing, as difficult, as dangerous, as shocking in the ordeal they presented to the Marines as Peleliu, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.”

     In Europe during World War II it was often Germans fighting German-Americans.  Cousins fighting cousins.  But in the Pacific the Japanese hated the Americans, and the Americans hated the Japanese.  Infantrymen on both sides had been fed a steady diet of racial propaganda by their leaders that had dehumanized the other side.  “The extent of the mutual hatred was higher than the tallest mountains and deeper than the bottom of the sea.”

     The Marines intensely hated the Japanese, in part due to racism and in part due to Pearl Harbor, but mainly because of the Japanese way of fighting.  They shot the medics who wore red armbands.  One of them would pretend to surrender, and then as the Americans approached, others would crawl out of hiding and shoot them. 

     And both sides committed unspeakable atrocities.  Unlike in Europe where the Germans, once out of ammunition, would surrender and expect to be treated decently as a POW, in the Pacific the Japanese would fight to the death, never surrender, hoping to take ten Americans down with him.  There were few POWs.

     Ambrose argued that it is a mistaken idea that Americans won the war in the Pacific because they had superior air power and bombing capability.  From a distance the Marines would watch the pre-invasion bombardment of an island and conclude that “nothing could live through that.”  And yet when they hit the beach, the Japanese defenses were intact, and the men ready to fight.

     The Japanese held out in caves, trenches, foxholes, and tunnels, and so if the battle was to be won, the Americans would have to fight it man-to-man, diving into each tunnel and each cave and each foxhole, until the last Japanese soldier was pulled out.  Superior air power and bombing capability did not give the Marines on those islands as distinct advantage as believed.

     Ambrose is very convincing that the “Marines were the best fighting men of World War II.  The U.S. Army was second, and not far behind.”  In order to take one after another of those islands, the Marines just had to be better soldiers than the Japanese.  And they proved themselves.

     All of those battles on each Pacific island during 1942—1945 were just a warm-up for what they suspected would be the final all-consuming battle, the invasion of Japan itself, the Battle of Tokyo, scheduled for November 1, 1945.  Estimates of the casualties ran as high as 800,000, based on what had happened on the islands.

     But then in August President Harry Truman gave the ok to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, and the Japanese surrendered.  “The worst war that ever was” was over.

     Next Tuesday is Veterans Day, and we should pause and remember the ordeal that those soldiers endured, descending into hell itself, “not as visitors but as participants,” as Ambrose put it.  The citizens of the United States enjoyed peace and security, free from attack, for the next fifty-six years, until 9-11, in no small part because of what those American men did on those treacherous Pacific islands.  It was the worst war that ever was.

SMALLPOX

By William H. Benson

October 23, 2003

     The minister at the North Church in Boston, Cotton Mather, received his first printed copy of Magnalia Christi Americana on October 29, 1702, and on the same day he discovered that his 8-year-od daughter had smallpox.  Soon all four of his children had the disease, and it was a miracle that they all survived, but then on December 1^st, his wife died, but probably of breast cancer. 

     Mather remarried Elizabeth Hubbard, and they produced six more children.  But then the measles epidemic that arrived in Boston in late October of 1713 struck the Mather family hard, taking Elizabeth first, then their maid, then the twins—Eleazar and Martha—only two weeks old, and finally their two-year-old daughter Jerusha.  Cotton was overwhelmed with grief.

     As if that was not enough, yet another smallpox epidemic swept across Boston in April of 1721, but this time Cotton Mather decided to fight back.  He and Dr. Boylston promoted a new technology that Mather had heard about, an inoculation with serum draw from another’s lesions.  Mather’s son Samuel, who was born after the previous epidemic, begged for the new treatment, and although he suffered afterwards, he lived.

     However, James Franklin, the editor of a new Boston newspaper, the Courant, sensed that popular sentiment was set against Mather’s inoculation, and so he shouted in defiance against the treatment.  For months as the epidemic ended up killing over eight hundred people in Boston, young Franklin screamed out a series of editorials against Mather’s inoculation.  When the two men happened to meet on the street, they exchanged harsh words, but it was Mather who was later proven right because the treatment seemed to work; few of those treated died.

     Years later in a kind of turn around, James Franklin’s younger brother Benjamin was then living in Philadelphia when his four-year-old son, Francis, came down with smallpox, and within two weeks he was gone.  Benjamin was never able to relieve himself of the guilt that he felt because he had not inoculated his son, even though by then, he believed in its effectiveness.

     The worst biological disaster in human history occurred in the Americas when Columbus and the other Europeans arrived with their diseases, especially smallpox.  The native population in the Americas had had no experience with this disease, and thus they had not developed any immunity. Any numbers or percentages as to how many died would only be guesses, but it was enormous.

     “The Europeans were able to conquer America not because of their military genius, or their religious motivation, or their ambition, or their greed.  They conquered it by waging unpremeditated biological warfare.”

     In 1796 a scientist Edward Jenner discovered that women who milked cows infected with cowpox did not seem to ever get smallpox.  He withdrew material from a cowpox lesion and inoculated a young boy who, when infected with smallpox, did not get the disease.  He called his serum a vaccine, from the Latin word vaccinus, meaning of or from cows.

     Unlike influenza which is found also in chickens, turkeys, and pigs, besides humans, it is only the humans who can suffer from smallpox.  And once contracted there is no cure or even a specific treatment for smallpox.  It is better never to get it, because the mortality rate in the worst variety is 20 to 40%. 

     The last recorded case of smallpox occurred in 1977 in Somolia.  It was a human triumph that the World Health Organization eradicated smallpox from the globe that year.  Today the virus exists in two laboratories: one in Atlanta Georgia and the other in Novosibirsk, Russia, and in early 2002 WHO officials voted against destroying the remaining stock of the virus, choosing instead to retain it for research purposes.  But in the wrong hands those vials would have serious consequences, a weapon of mass destruction, for the mass of population today is not immunized. 

     If alive today, Cotton Mather would feel vindicated, and he would think that our good fortune to have a vaccination.

TUESDAY–SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

by William H. Benson

September 11, 2003

     Last week Newsweek reported that Osama bin Laden, hiding in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, spoke last January at the funeral of one of his daughters-in-law, who had died in childbirth, and he blamed America for her death.  He said, “I had enough riches to enjoy myself like an Arab shiek, but I decided to fight against those infidel forces that want to sever us from our Islamic roots.  For that cause, Arabs, Taliban, and my family have been martyred.”

        The Islamist extremists, such as bin Laden, are scathing in their denunciation of the United States and the way the American people live such shallow, casual, and undisciplined and irreligious lives.  Majid Anaraki, an Iranian, described the United States as a “collection of casinos and supermarkets linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere.”

     They are aghast that this corrupt and sinful culture through satellite television and the internet can infiltrate into what they see as the superior and purer Islamic nation and influence its citizens to abandon their committment to Allah and his prophet Mohammed.

     They are especially offended that Christian America and the Israeli Jews hold a measure of control over two of the holiest places in the Islamic faith: Mecca and Jerusalem.

     In 1998 Osama bin Laden told his followers, “The call to wage war against America was made because America has spearheaded the crusade against the Islamic nation, sending tens of thousand of its troops to the land of the two holy mosques.” 

     He was referring to the first Gulf War when the ruling elite in Saudia Arabia allowed American soldiers to step on the land of Mecca and Medina in order to defend them against Saddam Hussein.  This was a humiliation from which the Islamic nation has never fully recovered.

     All of Islam is offended by the Middle East’s weak and powerless position and the backwardness of its people, for some one thousand years ago, the Middle East was vastly superior to both Europe and Africa which were seen as outposts of ignorance and barbarity.  And then Europe caught up and surpassed the Middle East, vastly outdistancing their civilization.

     Bernard Lewis in his book What Went Wrong makes the point that the works of Mozart, Voltaire, Shakespeare, Stravinsky, and George Orwell have traveled all over the globe.  But they stop at Islam’s borders, which has shown little interest in how others think, write, and compose.

     Just as easily as the Middle East can point out what is wrong with the West, the Western world can quickly point out what is wrong in the Middle East.  It is a closed society.  Religion is mixed up with politics.  Individual liberties are sublimated in order to maintain religious purity.  An open and liberal education is not readily available.  Women live lives as semi-slaves.  The society discourages the free flow of ideas, both political and religious.

     It is as if two men are standing on either side of a great gulf pointing an accusing finger at the other.  One is powerful; the other is weak.  One tolerates any religion; the other allows only one.  One guarantees personal freedoms; the other demands allegiance to Allah.  One is supposedly corrupted by his wealth and power; the other lives a religiously pure life.  One unleashes “shock and awe”; the other unveils terror.  And both think that they are right. 

     And the fault line that separates the two men runs through places like Ground Zero at the site of the former twin towers and at the Pentagon and in a wooded area in Pennsylvania.

     Bernard Lewis wrote that the Arab world is now continually asking itself pertinent questions, such as: Who did this to us?  What did we do wrong?  How do we put it right?  What has Islam done to the Muslims? or better yet–What have the Muslims done to Islam?

     Lewis makes the case that if the Middle East continues to follow the path the extremists demand, “the suicide bomber will become the metaphor of the Middle East and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression. The road to democracy is long and hard and full of pitfalls and obstacles.”

     Two years separate us now from the second bloodiest day in U.S. history (behind Antietam in the Civil War), when on Tuesday morning, 9/11/2001, just over 3000 people died at the hands of suicide hijackers.  The healing process, if there can be such a thing, is just beginning.