October 4, 2007
"My God did not make this world to be like this! He made it for peace and love, but man just wants to fight."
Leonard Fraser leaned back in his chair in the room he shares with his wife Dorothy at the Fulton Special Care nursing home here in the South Bronx. I’d come over to talk with him about World War II.
He and Dorothy have been watching Ken Burns’s documentary, The War. "They got it basically right," he told me. "What you saw on TV is pretty much what it was like."
Leonard grew up in Harlem and was working in a midtown warehouse when he was drafted into the Army in 1942. After basic training at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the camp reserved for African-Americans, he was sent to New Guinea. "First Battalion, Negro Division, 93rd Cavalry Reconnaissance: That was us. I was trained as an armorer. I could fix any gun you can name, big or small."
He served in the South Pacific for the duration of the war. The battles are mostly a blur to him now, or so he says. "Finschhaven . . . Molotai . . . all the big ones. The enemy was tough. We had to get them out of caves where they dug themselves in. They would die rather than surrender. They would throw themselves off of cliffs to commit suicide. I took a beautiful silver sword off the body of one of the officers. I have it in storage."
He paused, and his face grew blank. "I don’t remember a lot of what happened, but I remember how I felt. I was scared all the time — we all were — but there was nothing we could do about that. We just kept on."
"Malaria," his wife prompted. "You got malaria."
"Yes, I got malaria, we all did. It was jungle warfare. We just kept on."
"He doesn’t remember details anymore," Dorothy said. "He told me so many things, but now I can’t remember them either."
"It’s not a good thing to think about," Leonard said. "You have to forget."
Leonard Fraser got through over two years of combat uninjured. When he heard the news of the Japanese surrender, he sums up his feelings in one word: "Overjoyed."
They sent the troops back to the States packed in the ship like cattle. "He had to sleep on the floor all the way back," Dorothy said. "There were no cots for them."
Did he experience racial prejudice in the service?
"No, except that we were segregated. We fought hard and well, and the white soldiers came to respect us. The only prejudice I remember was stepping off the train in New Orleans for a break on the way out to Arizona. We had to use ‘colored’ bathrooms and eat in the ‘colored’ section of the restaurant. I didn’t like that. But that was just the South, not the Army."
When he returned home, his old job at the warehouse was waiting for him. Soon he met Dorothy, a native of Jamaica who had just come to New York to study fashion design and dress-making. It was mutual love at first sight.
"He was such a handsome guy," she recalled, "and a great dancer. But I wanted to make sure about him. The first thing I asked him was, ‘Do you have a job?’ The second thing was, ‘Do you have a bank account?’ When he took me to meet his mother, I knew we would all get along. I even looked a little like her. We all fit in together. We got married in 1947."
"That’s a war in itself," Leonard laughed.
Their life together was not easy, Dorothy told me. When the warehouse closed down in the mid-1950’s, Leonard did handyman work while Dorothy supplemented the family income designing and making dresses. They had two children, Lenny and June; Lenny died suddenly in 1993. They have three grandchildren.
Tormented by memories of battle, he was in and out of V.A. hospitals all his life. "He has ‘war syndrome,’" Dorothy said. "It’s like he’s there sometimes."
In the mid-1960’s, the family moved into a spacious apartment in the new Webster Houses, a city project in the South Bronx, where they remained for 40 years while the neighborhood disintegrated around them. Leonard became what’s known today as an "outsider artist." He would bring home items he found in the street and make colorful arrays of them in little shrines around the apartment. In the foyer, he had a collection of unmatched baby shoes, meticulously arranged by size and surrounded by American flags. On my visits to their home over the years, Dorothy would complain about the clutter but was resigned to it: "It’s Lenny’s way."
Last year, when Dorothy’s diabetes made her unable to walk, their daughter found a place for both of them in Fulton Special Care, a spotless facility with a pleasant and helpful staff, and good food — too good, according to Dorothy.
"Look at him!" she complained. "He used to be so skinny, and here he’s put on 20 pounds!"
That doesn’t bother Leonard. Untroubled by physical ailments, still youthful in appearance, and preserving the impish smile of a fresh recruit, he celebrated his 86th birthday last week.
But he keeps pondering the war he was in, and all the wars that have happened since.
"When you’re out there under fire, you ask yourself many times: What are you here for? What are you doing? You’ve got to fight for your life."
He turned silent a moment, then said, "If I had to do it again, it would be questionable. Was it worth it? Sixty years later, you turn around and people are still fighting."
"You can write this down: Don’t ever call up Sergeant Fraser again."
Sunday, August 24, 2008
TAPPING THE WELL OF MEMORY
September 27, 2007
When I was growing up in Norwalk, Calif., in the 1950’s, World War II was just a game. At about the age of ten I had a shoe-box full of small olive-drab plastic soldiers and an impressive array of complementing military hardware — mortars, howitzers, jeeps, tanks, amphibious vehicles. When my neighbor Sammy came over with his own battalions to play war, we had a fine fighting force.
The dusty ground beneath the nectarine tree in my family’s back yard became some Pacific island, and we would dig it up with miniature foxholes and riddle it with mud-scattering explosions scooped out by hand. Our tongues and throats perfected convincing sound-effects for screaming bombs, machine-gun fire, flame-throwers, and what he called "hang grenades." When our dads came home from work and our moms would summon us to our respective dinners, we’d call a cease-fire and troop home caked with dirt and pumping with adrenalin from our after-school battle for America.
In the evening, washed and fed and homework done, I’d convince my parents to tune the TV in to "Victory at Sea," "Navy Log," "The Big Picture," and other wartime documentaries and dramas. That way, before hitting the subject in school, I learned about Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, Guadalcanal. I heard Hitler, Churchill, and FDR and tried to imitate their oratorical styles. I saw the night bombings and the dogfights and the kamikaze attacks, and the bodies of dead soldiers bobbing in the surf.
War was a terrible beauty to me then, cinematic, shot by the camera behind my eyes.
Sammy’s dad had served in the Pacific, which is why in our backyards we always fought "the Japs," whoever they were; through random conversation he had taught his curious son about military equipment and gear, and supplied him with cuss-words and randy ditties that appalled my parents. My dad had spent the war running turret lathes in a machine shop in South Gate; he was rejected for service because of anemia (at his induction physical, he often recalled, the medical officer looked at his chart and said, "Your blood count is so low you should be dead"), but he felt perfectly healthy and always considered it something of a lucky mistake.
There were many veterans among my parents’ friends, and the stories they told after a couple highballs only reinforced my romantic image of war: the camaraderie, the pranks, the exotic places they went to on leave. If they had been wounded in battle, they neither showed it nor discussed it, and they never said a word about the killing they may have seen and done. How could they? Highballs and horror don’t mix.
Years later, seeking perspective, I would try to get veterans to talk about their battlefield experiences. Most were evasive. About 20 years ago, a man who was in the D-Day invasion told me bluntly: "It was beyond words, and I try not to think about it. What I can’t get rid of is the stench of dead bodies. To this day it’s still in my nostrils." At around the same time, a neighbor in Van Nuys, whose loopy, happy-go-lucky husband came home from Germany with a metal plate under his skull, often confided, "I didn’t sleep last night. Lou was screaming in his dreams. He’s still fighting the war there."
These recollections from years past are being unlocked by Ken Burns’s documentary The War, airing on PBS this week. The film, hyped for months and supplemented by local productions such as California at War and Latino Stories of World War II on KCET and New York War Stories on WNET here, tries to get at The Big Picture by looking at the small, from the point of view of ordinary Americans who were caught up in it.
Burns has said that he could not have done this type of study even ten years ago because so many veterans were still reluctant to talk. Suffering from what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the only way they could cope with what they had seen and done and live an apparently normal life was to banish it from waking consciousness and release it only in their nightmares. Burns’s own father opened up to his history-obsessed son just once, close to his death in 2001, as the project was beginning to take shape. Only now, Burns claims, with veterans dying at the rate of a thousand per day, have more been able and willing to loose their tongues and share their memory with the world before it is lost forever.
This is not entirely true, of course; over the last decade there have been many first-person accounts of specific battles and domestic wartime life presented on PBS and the History Channel, but it is Burns’s scope that is significant — the tracking of individuals from the war’s beginning to its end, and the changes it effected in their lives and in the life of the four small towns they came from.
Burns determinedly avoids the usual documentary commentary "from above" — the talking heads in this film are not historians and military experts but the octogenarians who had known the war personally, in the battlefield, in the factory, and in the case of Japanese-Americans, in the internment camps. The historians stay behind the scenes, however, in the well-researched narration and vintage film footage that put the experiences of these people in context.
Viewed for itself, the film is often unsatisfying, at least in the two episodes I have so far seen before sending this column off. Burns too frequently returns to quotidian small-town life, leaving the film lacking the sustained tension that should drive the heroic story forward. Wynton Marsalis’s sound-track is decidedly dull, even though the music of the Big Bands was the cement that kept home and abroad together, and there is no haunting and memorable theme-song unifying the film like the "Ashokan Farewell" did in his 1990 documentary The Civil War. And the consistently monotone narration by Keith David is positively soporific.
The War is worth watching, less for what it is as a cinematic piece and more for what it opens in our collective consciousness — for those who lived through the period, for those like myself who knew it in shadow form from their parents, and for the generations for whom it is as distant as the Revolution. It taps the well of memory.
I lost track of Sammy a long time ago. I wonder if he’s been watching.
When I was growing up in Norwalk, Calif., in the 1950’s, World War II was just a game. At about the age of ten I had a shoe-box full of small olive-drab plastic soldiers and an impressive array of complementing military hardware — mortars, howitzers, jeeps, tanks, amphibious vehicles. When my neighbor Sammy came over with his own battalions to play war, we had a fine fighting force.
The dusty ground beneath the nectarine tree in my family’s back yard became some Pacific island, and we would dig it up with miniature foxholes and riddle it with mud-scattering explosions scooped out by hand. Our tongues and throats perfected convincing sound-effects for screaming bombs, machine-gun fire, flame-throwers, and what he called "hang grenades." When our dads came home from work and our moms would summon us to our respective dinners, we’d call a cease-fire and troop home caked with dirt and pumping with adrenalin from our after-school battle for America.
In the evening, washed and fed and homework done, I’d convince my parents to tune the TV in to "Victory at Sea," "Navy Log," "The Big Picture," and other wartime documentaries and dramas. That way, before hitting the subject in school, I learned about Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, Guadalcanal. I heard Hitler, Churchill, and FDR and tried to imitate their oratorical styles. I saw the night bombings and the dogfights and the kamikaze attacks, and the bodies of dead soldiers bobbing in the surf.
War was a terrible beauty to me then, cinematic, shot by the camera behind my eyes.
Sammy’s dad had served in the Pacific, which is why in our backyards we always fought "the Japs," whoever they were; through random conversation he had taught his curious son about military equipment and gear, and supplied him with cuss-words and randy ditties that appalled my parents. My dad had spent the war running turret lathes in a machine shop in South Gate; he was rejected for service because of anemia (at his induction physical, he often recalled, the medical officer looked at his chart and said, "Your blood count is so low you should be dead"), but he felt perfectly healthy and always considered it something of a lucky mistake.
There were many veterans among my parents’ friends, and the stories they told after a couple highballs only reinforced my romantic image of war: the camaraderie, the pranks, the exotic places they went to on leave. If they had been wounded in battle, they neither showed it nor discussed it, and they never said a word about the killing they may have seen and done. How could they? Highballs and horror don’t mix.
Years later, seeking perspective, I would try to get veterans to talk about their battlefield experiences. Most were evasive. About 20 years ago, a man who was in the D-Day invasion told me bluntly: "It was beyond words, and I try not to think about it. What I can’t get rid of is the stench of dead bodies. To this day it’s still in my nostrils." At around the same time, a neighbor in Van Nuys, whose loopy, happy-go-lucky husband came home from Germany with a metal plate under his skull, often confided, "I didn’t sleep last night. Lou was screaming in his dreams. He’s still fighting the war there."
These recollections from years past are being unlocked by Ken Burns’s documentary The War, airing on PBS this week. The film, hyped for months and supplemented by local productions such as California at War and Latino Stories of World War II on KCET and New York War Stories on WNET here, tries to get at The Big Picture by looking at the small, from the point of view of ordinary Americans who were caught up in it.
Burns has said that he could not have done this type of study even ten years ago because so many veterans were still reluctant to talk. Suffering from what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, the only way they could cope with what they had seen and done and live an apparently normal life was to banish it from waking consciousness and release it only in their nightmares. Burns’s own father opened up to his history-obsessed son just once, close to his death in 2001, as the project was beginning to take shape. Only now, Burns claims, with veterans dying at the rate of a thousand per day, have more been able and willing to loose their tongues and share their memory with the world before it is lost forever.
This is not entirely true, of course; over the last decade there have been many first-person accounts of specific battles and domestic wartime life presented on PBS and the History Channel, but it is Burns’s scope that is significant — the tracking of individuals from the war’s beginning to its end, and the changes it effected in their lives and in the life of the four small towns they came from.
Burns determinedly avoids the usual documentary commentary "from above" — the talking heads in this film are not historians and military experts but the octogenarians who had known the war personally, in the battlefield, in the factory, and in the case of Japanese-Americans, in the internment camps. The historians stay behind the scenes, however, in the well-researched narration and vintage film footage that put the experiences of these people in context.
Viewed for itself, the film is often unsatisfying, at least in the two episodes I have so far seen before sending this column off. Burns too frequently returns to quotidian small-town life, leaving the film lacking the sustained tension that should drive the heroic story forward. Wynton Marsalis’s sound-track is decidedly dull, even though the music of the Big Bands was the cement that kept home and abroad together, and there is no haunting and memorable theme-song unifying the film like the "Ashokan Farewell" did in his 1990 documentary The Civil War. And the consistently monotone narration by Keith David is positively soporific.
The War is worth watching, less for what it is as a cinematic piece and more for what it opens in our collective consciousness — for those who lived through the period, for those like myself who knew it in shadow form from their parents, and for the generations for whom it is as distant as the Revolution. It taps the well of memory.
I lost track of Sammy a long time ago. I wonder if he’s been watching.
THE VISION THING
September 20, 2007
Iraq Week at the capital has come and gone, and what a week it was. General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker flew in to give their mandated progress reports to Congress. President Bush followed up with his own address to the nation. The candidates had their opportunity to grandstand. And MoveOn.org revealed its hubris with that vile "General Betray Us" ad. (Punning on a person’s name is the lowest form of the lowest form of humor, and it may cause a self-immolation comparable only to Howard Dean’s "I Have a Scream" speech that shot down his high-flying presidential campaign in 2004.)
What can we make of the week that was?
While there is no doubt that General Petraeus’s report and recommendations were his own, as he made a point of emphasizing at the hearings, there is also no doubt that he and Ambassador Crocker were part of a masterful administration plan to shift the political ground. Nowhere was it clearer than in the president’s address last Thursday.
The speech was laced with the usual self-vindicating hyperbole about the terrorist threat (though the general, when asked by Senator Warner of Virginia whether operations in Iraq are making America safer, said, "I don’t know"). But the word "victory," so long a staple of Bush rhetoric, was conspicuously absent. It was replaced by the equivocal "success," "succeed," and "successful," which he used eleven times. And success, even to the gung-ho president, was now only a grasp at straws. In Anbar province, he proudly noted, some Sunni sheiks, formerly enemy insurgents, have formed alliances with American forces to flush out (also Sunni) Al Qaeda cells (of course, one of those sheiks was murdered the very day of the speech, and the alliances themselves may be of only temporary convenience, typical of the fluidity of the sects and sub-sects all over the country). And yes, he said, "the Iraqi army is becoming more capable, although there is a great deal of work to be done to improve the national police" (actually, the report recently issued by the James Jones commission called the police force "operationally ineffective" and recommended it be disbanded).
These "successes" — neither Petraeus nor Crocker were quite able to call them that — were enough to project sending 5,700 troops home by Christmas and the rest of the surge-force home by July.
"The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq," Bush declared, "is ‘return on success.’ The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home." But, he cautioned, "success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency."
So there you have it: A few bars of "I’ll Be Home for Christmas" and many more of "The Long Run."
Despite the paucity of good news, the political ground shifted. Even though the promised troop reductions are nothing more than a validation of the word "surge," they sparked a faint flame of hope for an end to the occupation. And conversely, even though the predictions of keeping troops in Iraq for years to come were something no one wanted to hear, they gave the sense that at last our leaders were speaking realistically about the situation, with neither the blather of "victory" from the president nor the pseudo-bliss of immediate pullout from dovish Democrats. The president will get his funding. His successor will get it too.
Still, there is no comprehensive plan. The general was there, the ambassador was there, the secretary of defense made the talk-show rounds at the end of the week — but where was the secretary of state? If there ever were a time to reveal a true change of course, a vision for the future calling into play all the nations with a stake in the stabilization and viability of Iraq, this was it. But there is no such vision, from anywhere. This isn’t about Anbar or the body-count in Baghdad; it’s about Iran and Turkey and Syria and Jordan and Israel and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and Dubai and the European Union too. It’s about that despised and sidelined but potentially effective body, the United Nations. And it’s about those two million Iraqi refugees whose flight has sucked the talent and creativity from the country.
And lastly but not leastly, it’s about the Democrats. It is a sad thing to see that sorry bunch of presidential aspirants sniping at each other when they should be working as a team to do what the current administration has failed to do: present to the public a unified eight-year plan for peace across the Middle East. They have no lack of resources for this task - the brightest military and diplomatic minds have been churning out books, articles, and proposals with astounding speed and with no lack of insight. Why couldn’t the candidates and the Democratic leadership subvert the dysfunctional primary process, gather in a smokeless room, and come up with a candidate, a cabinet, and a plan?
In a phrase that tarred the first President Bush, it’s "the vision thing." For four years now, neither the administration nor its opponents have been able to see past the next hurdle. Beyond the fuzzy utopia of "a free Iraq," the "way forward" needs a broad and practical program.
Iraq Week at the capital has come and gone, and what a week it was. General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker flew in to give their mandated progress reports to Congress. President Bush followed up with his own address to the nation. The candidates had their opportunity to grandstand. And MoveOn.org revealed its hubris with that vile "General Betray Us" ad. (Punning on a person’s name is the lowest form of the lowest form of humor, and it may cause a self-immolation comparable only to Howard Dean’s "I Have a Scream" speech that shot down his high-flying presidential campaign in 2004.)
What can we make of the week that was?
While there is no doubt that General Petraeus’s report and recommendations were his own, as he made a point of emphasizing at the hearings, there is also no doubt that he and Ambassador Crocker were part of a masterful administration plan to shift the political ground. Nowhere was it clearer than in the president’s address last Thursday.
The speech was laced with the usual self-vindicating hyperbole about the terrorist threat (though the general, when asked by Senator Warner of Virginia whether operations in Iraq are making America safer, said, "I don’t know"). But the word "victory," so long a staple of Bush rhetoric, was conspicuously absent. It was replaced by the equivocal "success," "succeed," and "successful," which he used eleven times. And success, even to the gung-ho president, was now only a grasp at straws. In Anbar province, he proudly noted, some Sunni sheiks, formerly enemy insurgents, have formed alliances with American forces to flush out (also Sunni) Al Qaeda cells (of course, one of those sheiks was murdered the very day of the speech, and the alliances themselves may be of only temporary convenience, typical of the fluidity of the sects and sub-sects all over the country). And yes, he said, "the Iraqi army is becoming more capable, although there is a great deal of work to be done to improve the national police" (actually, the report recently issued by the James Jones commission called the police force "operationally ineffective" and recommended it be disbanded).
These "successes" — neither Petraeus nor Crocker were quite able to call them that — were enough to project sending 5,700 troops home by Christmas and the rest of the surge-force home by July.
"The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq," Bush declared, "is ‘return on success.’ The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home." But, he cautioned, "success will require U.S. political, economic, and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency."
So there you have it: A few bars of "I’ll Be Home for Christmas" and many more of "The Long Run."
Despite the paucity of good news, the political ground shifted. Even though the promised troop reductions are nothing more than a validation of the word "surge," they sparked a faint flame of hope for an end to the occupation. And conversely, even though the predictions of keeping troops in Iraq for years to come were something no one wanted to hear, they gave the sense that at last our leaders were speaking realistically about the situation, with neither the blather of "victory" from the president nor the pseudo-bliss of immediate pullout from dovish Democrats. The president will get his funding. His successor will get it too.
Still, there is no comprehensive plan. The general was there, the ambassador was there, the secretary of defense made the talk-show rounds at the end of the week — but where was the secretary of state? If there ever were a time to reveal a true change of course, a vision for the future calling into play all the nations with a stake in the stabilization and viability of Iraq, this was it. But there is no such vision, from anywhere. This isn’t about Anbar or the body-count in Baghdad; it’s about Iran and Turkey and Syria and Jordan and Israel and Lebanon and Saudi Arabia and Dubai and the European Union too. It’s about that despised and sidelined but potentially effective body, the United Nations. And it’s about those two million Iraqi refugees whose flight has sucked the talent and creativity from the country.
And lastly but not leastly, it’s about the Democrats. It is a sad thing to see that sorry bunch of presidential aspirants sniping at each other when they should be working as a team to do what the current administration has failed to do: present to the public a unified eight-year plan for peace across the Middle East. They have no lack of resources for this task - the brightest military and diplomatic minds have been churning out books, articles, and proposals with astounding speed and with no lack of insight. Why couldn’t the candidates and the Democratic leadership subvert the dysfunctional primary process, gather in a smokeless room, and come up with a candidate, a cabinet, and a plan?
In a phrase that tarred the first President Bush, it’s "the vision thing." For four years now, neither the administration nor its opponents have been able to see past the next hurdle. Beyond the fuzzy utopia of "a free Iraq," the "way forward" needs a broad and practical program.
ALTERNATIVE HISTORY
September 13, 2007
With just 15 months left in office — a twinkling of an eye to history, an eternity to most of the world today - George W. Bush is looking toward his legacy. Lyndon B. Johnson looms in his side-view mirror, closer than he may appear.
Nearly 40 years ago, Johnson, battered by Vietnam, virtually abdicated his presidency and left office in humiliation. Bush is determined not to let Iraq do that to him.
You can see that attitude in his August 22 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He refuses to follow the path of withdrawal in Iraq, as Johnson and his successors Nixon and Ford did in Vietnam. "Then as now," he declared, "people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end."
After quoting several anti-war naysayers in Congress and the press, he resumed: "Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. . . . Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of American’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’"
Another price of withdrawal, he went on, was the loss of "American credibility" that haunts us to this day; he quotes the taunt of Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri that "there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet."
His explicit linkage of Iraq to Vietnam was characteristically weak: Not a single person today argues that withdrawing from Iraq would end the killing; and as for the Iraqi version of "boat people," refugees are not waiting for an American exit — already two million have fled the country, with another million displaced internally.
However, it was a surprise to many that he compared Vietnam to Iraq at all, after repeatedly denying any such thing, particularly the word "quagmire." The way he finally compared them was even more of a surprise: Was he actually implying that the U.S. should have stayed in Vietnam?
Robert Dallek, author of biographies of both Johnson and Nixon, complained to the press with incredulity, "What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. We were in Vietnam for ten years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives. And we couldn’t work our will."
Of course, the Bush speech was no historical analysis, only dangling assertions begging to be filled in by inference. But those bald statements excite the mind to "alternate history," that fascinating game of "what-ifs": What would have happened if the U.S. had remained in Vietnam?
Johnson’s consistent policy for Vietnam was "containment," not conquest. As Truman had done in Korea, the goal was to keep Communist regimes from toppling their pro-Western neighbors: the "domino effect." The incursions and bombings in North Vietnam were acts of deterrence, not aggression. But the North Vietnamese could not be contained; they were focused on unification with the South, on their terms alone.
In late March of 1968, just days after announcing he would not seek a second term, Johnson called a halt to the bombing and invited peace talks with the North. What if he hadn’t? Would "staying the course" have eventually so worn down Northern resources and morale that Ho Chi Minh would have initiated peace talks instead? Possibly - but at what further cost? By that time, conditions at home were verging on anarchy, and within that same year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would be dead; could Johnson have continued the war of attrition without destroying his own country in the process?
There is a second what-if: What if Johnson had changed his war policy from containment to conquest? What if he had gone for the throat of North Vietnam as some "hawks" had suggested, obliterating Hanoi, eliminating the Communist leadership, and forcing unification on his own terms? Would that "victory" have saved his presidency, reversed the nation’s slumping morale, and restored the image of America the Invincible? On the other hand, would victory in Vietnam have precipitated a disastrous conflict with the Soviet Union and/or created an American colony, angry and restive and ready to explode anew?
Because of its complexity, the possible alternative histories of Vietnam are endless. What Bush’s own may be, we’ll probably never know, just as we do not know his scenario for "victory" in Iraq, over which he has some actual control. But it is clear that like Johnson in Vietnam, Bush has no real vision of victory, despite his rhetoric. He and his agents General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, who are testifying to Congress this week, cling to the hope that given more time, U.S. military presence will prevent total chaos and allow for a kind of natural shakedown among the warring factions that will eventually result in social reconfiguration and political stabilization. That’s hardly victory, but then again, this is hardly a war anymore; it’s a waiting game that may take decades to resolve.
An air of resignation seems to have settled on the country. Calls for immediate pullout grow fewer and fainter as the reality of the situation sets in. With Petraeus and Crocker paving the way, President Bush is slowly positioning himself to hand the tar-baby of Iraq to his successor without acknowledging defeat.
He has Lyndon Johnson in the mirror.
With just 15 months left in office — a twinkling of an eye to history, an eternity to most of the world today - George W. Bush is looking toward his legacy. Lyndon B. Johnson looms in his side-view mirror, closer than he may appear.
Nearly 40 years ago, Johnson, battered by Vietnam, virtually abdicated his presidency and left office in humiliation. Bush is determined not to let Iraq do that to him.
You can see that attitude in his August 22 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. He refuses to follow the path of withdrawal in Iraq, as Johnson and his successors Nixon and Ford did in Vietnam. "Then as now," he declared, "people argued the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end."
After quoting several anti-war naysayers in Congress and the press, he resumed: "Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. . . . Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of American’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps,’ and ‘killing fields.’"
Another price of withdrawal, he went on, was the loss of "American credibility" that haunts us to this day; he quotes the taunt of Al Qaeda leader Zawahiri that "there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet."
His explicit linkage of Iraq to Vietnam was characteristically weak: Not a single person today argues that withdrawing from Iraq would end the killing; and as for the Iraqi version of "boat people," refugees are not waiting for an American exit — already two million have fled the country, with another million displaced internally.
However, it was a surprise to many that he compared Vietnam to Iraq at all, after repeatedly denying any such thing, particularly the word "quagmire." The way he finally compared them was even more of a surprise: Was he actually implying that the U.S. should have stayed in Vietnam?
Robert Dallek, author of biographies of both Johnson and Nixon, complained to the press with incredulity, "What is Bush suggesting? That we didn’t fight hard enough, stay long enough? That’s nonsense. We were in Vietnam for ten years. We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than we did in all of World War II in every theater. We lost 58,700 American lives. And we couldn’t work our will."
Of course, the Bush speech was no historical analysis, only dangling assertions begging to be filled in by inference. But those bald statements excite the mind to "alternate history," that fascinating game of "what-ifs": What would have happened if the U.S. had remained in Vietnam?
Johnson’s consistent policy for Vietnam was "containment," not conquest. As Truman had done in Korea, the goal was to keep Communist regimes from toppling their pro-Western neighbors: the "domino effect." The incursions and bombings in North Vietnam were acts of deterrence, not aggression. But the North Vietnamese could not be contained; they were focused on unification with the South, on their terms alone.
In late March of 1968, just days after announcing he would not seek a second term, Johnson called a halt to the bombing and invited peace talks with the North. What if he hadn’t? Would "staying the course" have eventually so worn down Northern resources and morale that Ho Chi Minh would have initiated peace talks instead? Possibly - but at what further cost? By that time, conditions at home were verging on anarchy, and within that same year Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy would be dead; could Johnson have continued the war of attrition without destroying his own country in the process?
There is a second what-if: What if Johnson had changed his war policy from containment to conquest? What if he had gone for the throat of North Vietnam as some "hawks" had suggested, obliterating Hanoi, eliminating the Communist leadership, and forcing unification on his own terms? Would that "victory" have saved his presidency, reversed the nation’s slumping morale, and restored the image of America the Invincible? On the other hand, would victory in Vietnam have precipitated a disastrous conflict with the Soviet Union and/or created an American colony, angry and restive and ready to explode anew?
Because of its complexity, the possible alternative histories of Vietnam are endless. What Bush’s own may be, we’ll probably never know, just as we do not know his scenario for "victory" in Iraq, over which he has some actual control. But it is clear that like Johnson in Vietnam, Bush has no real vision of victory, despite his rhetoric. He and his agents General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, who are testifying to Congress this week, cling to the hope that given more time, U.S. military presence will prevent total chaos and allow for a kind of natural shakedown among the warring factions that will eventually result in social reconfiguration and political stabilization. That’s hardly victory, but then again, this is hardly a war anymore; it’s a waiting game that may take decades to resolve.
An air of resignation seems to have settled on the country. Calls for immediate pullout grow fewer and fainter as the reality of the situation sets in. With Petraeus and Crocker paving the way, President Bush is slowly positioning himself to hand the tar-baby of Iraq to his successor without acknowledging defeat.
He has Lyndon Johnson in the mirror.
BUSH'S KOREAN CONNECTION
September 6, 2007
In his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on August 22, President Bush made an unprecedented appeal to history to support his policies on Iraq and Afghanistan. While it was atypical for him to make any reference to history at all, it was typical for him not to reason from premise to conclusion: Thanks to American occupation after World War II, he summarily stated, Japan was transformed from a totalitarian state into a thriving democracy; thanks to American intervention, South Korea was not overrun by the North and became an economic powerhouse; and conversely, thanks to the anti-war movement, South Vietnam was overrun by the North, causing "agonies" to "millions of innocent citizens." History in the Bush mind is a simple "was/is," with no steps in between — very much like his "was/will be" vision of a democratic Iraq.
His use of history in this speech was, of course, not analytic but polemic: to denounce naysayers in Congress and the press, past and present. "Will today’s generation of Americans," he asked, "Resist the lure of retreat, and will we do in the Middle East what the veterans in this room did in Asia?"
Despite his omissions, or even because of them, the speech is valuable as a challenge to refresh our own historical knowledge and memory and do the reasoning that he refuses to do. It’s a ready-made assignment for a history class.
In last week’s column I tried to fill in Bush’s blanks on post-war Japan, concluding that its dramatic transformation into a Western-style democracy was the result of a comprehensive American reorganization and re-education plan for Japanese society, something entirely lacking in the administration’s policy on Iraq.
What about his history lesson on Korea? "After the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel in 1950," Bush begins, "President Harry Truman came to the defense of the South." Not true; the United Nations did it. Rather than bypassing the U.N. as Bush did in invading Iraq, Truman immediately went to the Security Council for resolutions condemning the Communist aggression and requesting member nations to assist the Republic of South Korea in its self-defense. Though the U.S. was given overall command of the operations and supplied much of the manpower and equipment, 15 other U.N. members sent troops and over 50 contributed medical or economic aid.
On July 19, 1950, less than a month after the Communist invasion began, Truman addressed the nation on TV. As David McCulloch writes in his biography, Truman, the president stressed that American forces "were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was ‘a landmark in mankind’s long search for a rule of law among nations.’"
"Nor was he the least evasive about what would be asked of the country," McCulloch continues. "The ‘job’ was long and difficult. It meant increased taxes, rationing if necessary, ‘stern days ahead.’" Contrast the Bush approach to national commitment to "getting the job done" in Iraq.
But what was the job in Korea? After pushing the invading forces back across the 38th parallel in October of 1950, U.N. commander Douglas MacArthur proposed continuing the drive northward to unite the two Koreas. Since unification was an expressed goal of the United Nations that had been blocked by the Soviet Union, Truman agreed. Then Communist China entered the conflict, surprising the advancing U.N. forces, driving them down, and eventually retaking much of the South. MacArthur pleaded to employ Nationalist Chinese troops from Taiwan and even to use up to 50 atomic bombs to take out major cities on the Chinese mainland. As summarized by McCulloch, General George Marshall warned Truman that "the United States must not get ‘sewed up’ in Korea, but find a way to ‘get out with honor.’" "There was no doubt in my mind," Truman later wrote, "that we should not allow the action in Korea to extend to a general war. All-out military action against China had to be avoided, if for no other reason than because it was a gigantic booby trap." He reconsidered the unification goal, and when MacArthur questioned his judgment, Truman fired him.
MacArthur was unrepentant. In his "old soldiers never die" farewell speech to Congress in April of 1951, he defiantly declared: "In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory. There were some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They were blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches, with unmistakable emphasis, that appeasement begets new and bloodier war."
Under the new U.N. commander, General Matthew Ridgeway, Communist forces were turned back and the situation eventually stabilized into skirmishes and mutual bombardments across the 38th Parallel while the U.N. and the Communists squabbled over the terms of a truce. An armistice establishing the present borders of North and South Korea was at last signed in July of 1953.
In his speech, Bush quotes (but, strangely, does not name) many politicians and pundits critical of U.S. involvement in the Korean conflict, an implicit chastisement of his own critics on Iraq. He never utters his favorite word, "victory"; how could he? He would sound more like the fanatical MacArthur than Truman, who thought it wiser to settle for a stalemate that contains violence rather than a rash move in the name of honor that spreads it.
What Bush also misses is what may be the real comparison of Korea to Iraq: that it has taken 50 years and countless coups and juntas for South Korea to settle down, and that there are still 30,000 U.S. troops stationed there.
"I recognize," Bush concludes, "that history cannot predict the future with absolute certainty." In this case, it might.
In his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on August 22, President Bush made an unprecedented appeal to history to support his policies on Iraq and Afghanistan. While it was atypical for him to make any reference to history at all, it was typical for him not to reason from premise to conclusion: Thanks to American occupation after World War II, he summarily stated, Japan was transformed from a totalitarian state into a thriving democracy; thanks to American intervention, South Korea was not overrun by the North and became an economic powerhouse; and conversely, thanks to the anti-war movement, South Vietnam was overrun by the North, causing "agonies" to "millions of innocent citizens." History in the Bush mind is a simple "was/is," with no steps in between — very much like his "was/will be" vision of a democratic Iraq.
His use of history in this speech was, of course, not analytic but polemic: to denounce naysayers in Congress and the press, past and present. "Will today’s generation of Americans," he asked, "Resist the lure of retreat, and will we do in the Middle East what the veterans in this room did in Asia?"
Despite his omissions, or even because of them, the speech is valuable as a challenge to refresh our own historical knowledge and memory and do the reasoning that he refuses to do. It’s a ready-made assignment for a history class.
In last week’s column I tried to fill in Bush’s blanks on post-war Japan, concluding that its dramatic transformation into a Western-style democracy was the result of a comprehensive American reorganization and re-education plan for Japanese society, something entirely lacking in the administration’s policy on Iraq.
What about his history lesson on Korea? "After the North Koreans crossed the 38th Parallel in 1950," Bush begins, "President Harry Truman came to the defense of the South." Not true; the United Nations did it. Rather than bypassing the U.N. as Bush did in invading Iraq, Truman immediately went to the Security Council for resolutions condemning the Communist aggression and requesting member nations to assist the Republic of South Korea in its self-defense. Though the U.S. was given overall command of the operations and supplied much of the manpower and equipment, 15 other U.N. members sent troops and over 50 contributed medical or economic aid.
On July 19, 1950, less than a month after the Communist invasion began, Truman addressed the nation on TV. As David McCulloch writes in his biography, Truman, the president stressed that American forces "were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was ‘a landmark in mankind’s long search for a rule of law among nations.’"
"Nor was he the least evasive about what would be asked of the country," McCulloch continues. "The ‘job’ was long and difficult. It meant increased taxes, rationing if necessary, ‘stern days ahead.’" Contrast the Bush approach to national commitment to "getting the job done" in Iraq.
But what was the job in Korea? After pushing the invading forces back across the 38th parallel in October of 1950, U.N. commander Douglas MacArthur proposed continuing the drive northward to unite the two Koreas. Since unification was an expressed goal of the United Nations that had been blocked by the Soviet Union, Truman agreed. Then Communist China entered the conflict, surprising the advancing U.N. forces, driving them down, and eventually retaking much of the South. MacArthur pleaded to employ Nationalist Chinese troops from Taiwan and even to use up to 50 atomic bombs to take out major cities on the Chinese mainland. As summarized by McCulloch, General George Marshall warned Truman that "the United States must not get ‘sewed up’ in Korea, but find a way to ‘get out with honor.’" "There was no doubt in my mind," Truman later wrote, "that we should not allow the action in Korea to extend to a general war. All-out military action against China had to be avoided, if for no other reason than because it was a gigantic booby trap." He reconsidered the unification goal, and when MacArthur questioned his judgment, Truman fired him.
MacArthur was unrepentant. In his "old soldiers never die" farewell speech to Congress in April of 1951, he defiantly declared: "In war, indeed, there can be no substitute for victory. There were some who, for varying reasons, would appease Red China. They were blind to history’s clear lesson, for history teaches, with unmistakable emphasis, that appeasement begets new and bloodier war."
Under the new U.N. commander, General Matthew Ridgeway, Communist forces were turned back and the situation eventually stabilized into skirmishes and mutual bombardments across the 38th Parallel while the U.N. and the Communists squabbled over the terms of a truce. An armistice establishing the present borders of North and South Korea was at last signed in July of 1953.
In his speech, Bush quotes (but, strangely, does not name) many politicians and pundits critical of U.S. involvement in the Korean conflict, an implicit chastisement of his own critics on Iraq. He never utters his favorite word, "victory"; how could he? He would sound more like the fanatical MacArthur than Truman, who thought it wiser to settle for a stalemate that contains violence rather than a rash move in the name of honor that spreads it.
What Bush also misses is what may be the real comparison of Korea to Iraq: that it has taken 50 years and countless coups and juntas for South Korea to settle down, and that there are still 30,000 U.S. troops stationed there.
"I recognize," Bush concludes, "that history cannot predict the future with absolute certainty." In this case, it might.
HISTORY AS MYSTERY
August 30, 2007
The speech George Bush delivered to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Mo., last week was surely the most intriguing one of his presidency. It is actually thought-provoking - something extremely rare from any contemporary politician - though I’m not sure he intended it to be. In it, he turns to history to buttress his position on terrorism in general and Iraq and Afghanistan in particular — this from a man who, aside from the tired Munich/appeasement cliché applied by everyone to any confrontation deemed non-negotiable, has demonstrated no prior regard for history other than the history he is making for himself.
The speech is so uncharacteristic that you have to wonder who got his ear, who wrote it for him. Whoever it was, we should be grateful. It is still pure, unnuanced Bush, but with consciousness expanded. His understanding of the American dynamic in post-war Japan, in Korea, and even in Vietnam — a subject he’s heretofore denied as an analogy to his own adventures in Iraq — now provide us with a broader perspective on his worldview, self-image, and sense of destiny.
After his introductory remarks, in which he proudly declares that "I stand before you as a wartime President" engaged in "a struggle for civilization," he initiates his thesis with "a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack" by an enemy that "despises freedom" and "turns to a strategy of surprise attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight.
"If this story sounds familiar," he continues, "it is — except for one thing": The enemy he means is not Al Qaeda (or Saddam Hussein, whom he neglects to mention) but Imperial Japan. The attack is not 9/11 but Pearl Harbor, and the ultimate result of the American response to it was a Japan transformed from a totalitarian state into a Western-style democracy that "has brought peace and prosperity to its people" and "helped jump-start the economies of others in the region."
How did this transformation occur? Bush does not say. What he does say, with copious citations, is that critics both inside and outside the Truman administration believed "Japanese culture was inherently incompatible with democracy," and that "Americans were imposing their ideals on the Japanese," especially in regard to women’s suffrage and freedom of religion.
"You know," he wryly concludes with one eye to the Congress and the other to the academy, "the experts sometimes get it wrong."
Typically, he lets his implicit comparison between the American occupation of Japan and the American occupation of Iraq dangle in the air, presuming them self-evident, without need for further thought. But such allusions should send every citizen to the history books or their on-line equivalents, seeking either to confirm his assertions or call his bluff.
My own brief research into post-war Japan brought up the following. Check it against U.S. policy in post-war (i.e., after the toppling of the Hussein regime in May, 2003) Iraq.
When the United States occupied Japan in the fall of 1945, complete control over the society was placed under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Immediately, what was left of the Japanese military was demobilized and all war equipment was seized and destroyed. Conspicuous war criminals were tried by military tribunals, but all governmental structures and most of their personnel were left in place. Then the reconstruction began.
Bush is right that the prevailing strategy of the Truman administration for the rebuilding of defeated Japan was to actively shape it into a Western-style democracy. The plan was headily ambitious: The entire culture was targeted for transformation, from top to bottom.
From the start, political parties cooperative with the occupation’s goals were allowed to emerge, and the first free elections were held in April of 1946, eight months after the surrender. Later that year, an American-drafted constitution was adopted by the interim Japanese government. It relegated the Emperor’s once all-powerful role to a "symbol of the unity of the state," disestablished Shinto as the state religion and guaranteed the other freedoms and legal safeguards of the U.S. Bill of Rights, decentralized the government, and officially abolished the military, making Japan a pacifist state.
In addition, social programs modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were set in place: The huge landed estates were redistributed among the tenant farmers, the largest corporations and financial institutions were broken up, laws regulating labor practices were enacted, and a social security system was established. Further, rigid traditional family structures were tempered by laws guaranteeing the rights of wives and grown children. Most especially, the educational system was completely "de-ideologized" to encourage historical objectivity and a respect for human rights and democratic government.
The American command implemented these goals indirectly. On every level of government, American advisors, both military and civilian, communicated the command’s directives as "suggestions" to the Japanese officials with whom they closely worked, and who through fear or deference eagerly carried them out.
Despite the reach of this enterprise, there was little opposition. Perhaps the Japanese people, after centuries of imperial rule, were culturally conditioned to respect and accept authority. Perhaps, as Bush believes, they responded to "the universal appeal of liberty." In any case, they seemed to see something in the Americans and their policies that they liked.
In September of 1951, six years after the surrender, the United States relinquished control and returned full sovereignty to a Japan that was adjusting to its new identity and poised for prosperity.
Bush, we see from his speech, takes Japan’s revitalization as one of his models for the future Iraq and Afghanistan, if only he were allowed to "finish the job."
But what job is that? There may have been parallels to Japan when the totalitarian regimes of the Taliban and Saddam were overthrown, but Truman and MacArthur did not allow Japan to dissolve into chaos in the name of self-determination. Now there may be no parallels at all.
The speech George Bush delivered to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Mo., last week was surely the most intriguing one of his presidency. It is actually thought-provoking - something extremely rare from any contemporary politician - though I’m not sure he intended it to be. In it, he turns to history to buttress his position on terrorism in general and Iraq and Afghanistan in particular — this from a man who, aside from the tired Munich/appeasement cliché applied by everyone to any confrontation deemed non-negotiable, has demonstrated no prior regard for history other than the history he is making for himself.
The speech is so uncharacteristic that you have to wonder who got his ear, who wrote it for him. Whoever it was, we should be grateful. It is still pure, unnuanced Bush, but with consciousness expanded. His understanding of the American dynamic in post-war Japan, in Korea, and even in Vietnam — a subject he’s heretofore denied as an analogy to his own adventures in Iraq — now provide us with a broader perspective on his worldview, self-image, and sense of destiny.
After his introductory remarks, in which he proudly declares that "I stand before you as a wartime President" engaged in "a struggle for civilization," he initiates his thesis with "a story that begins on a sunny morning, when thousands of Americans were murdered in a surprise attack" by an enemy that "despises freedom" and "turns to a strategy of surprise attacks destined to create so much carnage that the American people will tire of the violence and give up the fight.
"If this story sounds familiar," he continues, "it is — except for one thing": The enemy he means is not Al Qaeda (or Saddam Hussein, whom he neglects to mention) but Imperial Japan. The attack is not 9/11 but Pearl Harbor, and the ultimate result of the American response to it was a Japan transformed from a totalitarian state into a Western-style democracy that "has brought peace and prosperity to its people" and "helped jump-start the economies of others in the region."
How did this transformation occur? Bush does not say. What he does say, with copious citations, is that critics both inside and outside the Truman administration believed "Japanese culture was inherently incompatible with democracy," and that "Americans were imposing their ideals on the Japanese," especially in regard to women’s suffrage and freedom of religion.
"You know," he wryly concludes with one eye to the Congress and the other to the academy, "the experts sometimes get it wrong."
Typically, he lets his implicit comparison between the American occupation of Japan and the American occupation of Iraq dangle in the air, presuming them self-evident, without need for further thought. But such allusions should send every citizen to the history books or their on-line equivalents, seeking either to confirm his assertions or call his bluff.
My own brief research into post-war Japan brought up the following. Check it against U.S. policy in post-war (i.e., after the toppling of the Hussein regime in May, 2003) Iraq.
When the United States occupied Japan in the fall of 1945, complete control over the society was placed under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers. Immediately, what was left of the Japanese military was demobilized and all war equipment was seized and destroyed. Conspicuous war criminals were tried by military tribunals, but all governmental structures and most of their personnel were left in place. Then the reconstruction began.
Bush is right that the prevailing strategy of the Truman administration for the rebuilding of defeated Japan was to actively shape it into a Western-style democracy. The plan was headily ambitious: The entire culture was targeted for transformation, from top to bottom.
From the start, political parties cooperative with the occupation’s goals were allowed to emerge, and the first free elections were held in April of 1946, eight months after the surrender. Later that year, an American-drafted constitution was adopted by the interim Japanese government. It relegated the Emperor’s once all-powerful role to a "symbol of the unity of the state," disestablished Shinto as the state religion and guaranteed the other freedoms and legal safeguards of the U.S. Bill of Rights, decentralized the government, and officially abolished the military, making Japan a pacifist state.
In addition, social programs modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were set in place: The huge landed estates were redistributed among the tenant farmers, the largest corporations and financial institutions were broken up, laws regulating labor practices were enacted, and a social security system was established. Further, rigid traditional family structures were tempered by laws guaranteeing the rights of wives and grown children. Most especially, the educational system was completely "de-ideologized" to encourage historical objectivity and a respect for human rights and democratic government.
The American command implemented these goals indirectly. On every level of government, American advisors, both military and civilian, communicated the command’s directives as "suggestions" to the Japanese officials with whom they closely worked, and who through fear or deference eagerly carried them out.
Despite the reach of this enterprise, there was little opposition. Perhaps the Japanese people, after centuries of imperial rule, were culturally conditioned to respect and accept authority. Perhaps, as Bush believes, they responded to "the universal appeal of liberty." In any case, they seemed to see something in the Americans and their policies that they liked.
In September of 1951, six years after the surrender, the United States relinquished control and returned full sovereignty to a Japan that was adjusting to its new identity and poised for prosperity.
Bush, we see from his speech, takes Japan’s revitalization as one of his models for the future Iraq and Afghanistan, if only he were allowed to "finish the job."
But what job is that? There may have been parallels to Japan when the totalitarian regimes of the Taliban and Saddam were overthrown, but Truman and MacArthur did not allow Japan to dissolve into chaos in the name of self-determination. Now there may be no parallels at all.
HONEYBEE SUMMER
August 23, 2007
It’s the summer of the honeybee.
In my eight years of keeping bees, I’ve not seen such intense interest in these insects as I have this season. Enticed by best-selling books like The Secret Life of Bees, people have become enamored; alerted by apocalyptic media coverage of the disappearing bees, people have become concerned. Local folks see me at work with my three hives at Genesis Park Community Garden and shout over the fence, "Hey, Mistah, what’s happening to the bees?" Reporters Google "Beekeeping New York City," find something written by me or about me, and track me down for interviews. Photographers and film-makers documenting unusual aspects of urban life lug over their cumbersome equipment and shoot closeups of the un-self-conscious creatures going about their work and long-shots of the self-conscious beekeeper in coveralls and veil, pacifying the hives with smoke. The talks and gloves-on workshops that I give to community gardeners and to visitors at Wave Hill, the forested mansion overlooking the Hudson River in the Bronx, always fill up quickly.
Children are particularly attracted. Last Thursday the Bronx Helpers, a neighborhood youth organization, brought a dozen rambunctious pre-teens to the garden for a beekeeping demonstration. When they arrived, they were twitching in panic, batting away flies and yellow-jackets and screeching in fear of stings. Two hours later, after I’d opened a hive and brought combs thick with docile and disinterested bees right in front of their faces, they left with a new, positive attitude toward the honeybee.
Last Friday I brought some equipment and an observation hive - a slim wooden box with plexiglass sides for viewing the bees at work on their combs - to Camp Kiwi, a suburban summer refuge 50 miles north of here. Kids and counselors alike were fascinated, seeing for themselves what they’d read about in school and watched on the Discovery Channel. I felt a bit ashamed that some of the children knew more about bees than I do.
The growing interest in the local-foods movement brings people to the garden to taste and buy honey. Last week, Santa Cruz surfer-turned-restaurateur Jim Denevan featured it in complement with cheeses and wines from Long Island at his annual gourmet dinner to benefit New York urban farmers. Allergy sufferers claim near-miraculous cures from daily doses of honey made in their vicinity - theory has it that honey made from the same flowers that provoke their allergic reactions acts as a natural antidote.
Others come to learn about beekeeping first-hand, hoping to set up a hive or two in their back yard or community garden, or even to try a career at it. On Saturday a Haitian man and his eleven-year-old son helped me harvest honey and extract it from the comb. The son was serious and attentive, wide-eyed with wonder; the father was practical and inquisitive about equipment and hive-management; he and a partner envision a large beekeeping operation in Haiti.
I spent the first week of August at the annual convention of the Eastern Apicultural Society, held this year at the University of Delaware at Newark. A couple hundred beekeepers from Maine to Florida, from Long Island to Iowa, gathered to hear scientists discuss the latest diseases, mead-makers and chefs share their honey-based recipes and give generous tastings, and craftspeople demonstrate making candles, soaps, and tinctures of propolis.
Usually I can’t stand conventions, but this one was different. There is something about honeybees that shapes the people who work with them and brings them together in a kind of shared priesthood, mediating the natural and the human. Beyond all the science - the experts reported they still aren’t sure why the bees are disappearing - and the practicalities - how best to purify beeswax for making candles - were the lunchtime conversations that sometimes bordered on the mystical. A wizened career beekeeper from upstate New York, after recounting his woeful experience with bears ("They outsmart even electric fences to get at that honey. I tell you, Winnie the Pooh they ain’t"), concluded, "Still, I wouldn’t be doing anything else. I love working with the bees in the apple orchards in spring - open sky, fresh air, smell of blossoms. Nothing better." A young marine archaeologist from Delaware told me that when she decided to start beekeeping last spring, she set up an empty hive-box in her back yard and was about to buy a colony from a local bee farm when a swarm of wild bees came out of nowhere, found the box, and settled in. Next month she’s having a priest bless them.
At the whimsical social event called the Bee Bawl, where prizes are awarded for the best bee costume (imagine that happening at a wasp convention), the group celebrated almost a dozen wedding anniversaries of couples who had met at the convention in years past. Two engagements were also announced.
It’s the summer of the honeybee.
It’s the summer of the honeybee.
In my eight years of keeping bees, I’ve not seen such intense interest in these insects as I have this season. Enticed by best-selling books like The Secret Life of Bees, people have become enamored; alerted by apocalyptic media coverage of the disappearing bees, people have become concerned. Local folks see me at work with my three hives at Genesis Park Community Garden and shout over the fence, "Hey, Mistah, what’s happening to the bees?" Reporters Google "Beekeeping New York City," find something written by me or about me, and track me down for interviews. Photographers and film-makers documenting unusual aspects of urban life lug over their cumbersome equipment and shoot closeups of the un-self-conscious creatures going about their work and long-shots of the self-conscious beekeeper in coveralls and veil, pacifying the hives with smoke. The talks and gloves-on workshops that I give to community gardeners and to visitors at Wave Hill, the forested mansion overlooking the Hudson River in the Bronx, always fill up quickly.
Children are particularly attracted. Last Thursday the Bronx Helpers, a neighborhood youth organization, brought a dozen rambunctious pre-teens to the garden for a beekeeping demonstration. When they arrived, they were twitching in panic, batting away flies and yellow-jackets and screeching in fear of stings. Two hours later, after I’d opened a hive and brought combs thick with docile and disinterested bees right in front of their faces, they left with a new, positive attitude toward the honeybee.
Last Friday I brought some equipment and an observation hive - a slim wooden box with plexiglass sides for viewing the bees at work on their combs - to Camp Kiwi, a suburban summer refuge 50 miles north of here. Kids and counselors alike were fascinated, seeing for themselves what they’d read about in school and watched on the Discovery Channel. I felt a bit ashamed that some of the children knew more about bees than I do.
The growing interest in the local-foods movement brings people to the garden to taste and buy honey. Last week, Santa Cruz surfer-turned-restaurateur Jim Denevan featured it in complement with cheeses and wines from Long Island at his annual gourmet dinner to benefit New York urban farmers. Allergy sufferers claim near-miraculous cures from daily doses of honey made in their vicinity - theory has it that honey made from the same flowers that provoke their allergic reactions acts as a natural antidote.
Others come to learn about beekeeping first-hand, hoping to set up a hive or two in their back yard or community garden, or even to try a career at it. On Saturday a Haitian man and his eleven-year-old son helped me harvest honey and extract it from the comb. The son was serious and attentive, wide-eyed with wonder; the father was practical and inquisitive about equipment and hive-management; he and a partner envision a large beekeeping operation in Haiti.
I spent the first week of August at the annual convention of the Eastern Apicultural Society, held this year at the University of Delaware at Newark. A couple hundred beekeepers from Maine to Florida, from Long Island to Iowa, gathered to hear scientists discuss the latest diseases, mead-makers and chefs share their honey-based recipes and give generous tastings, and craftspeople demonstrate making candles, soaps, and tinctures of propolis.
Usually I can’t stand conventions, but this one was different. There is something about honeybees that shapes the people who work with them and brings them together in a kind of shared priesthood, mediating the natural and the human. Beyond all the science - the experts reported they still aren’t sure why the bees are disappearing - and the practicalities - how best to purify beeswax for making candles - were the lunchtime conversations that sometimes bordered on the mystical. A wizened career beekeeper from upstate New York, after recounting his woeful experience with bears ("They outsmart even electric fences to get at that honey. I tell you, Winnie the Pooh they ain’t"), concluded, "Still, I wouldn’t be doing anything else. I love working with the bees in the apple orchards in spring - open sky, fresh air, smell of blossoms. Nothing better." A young marine archaeologist from Delaware told me that when she decided to start beekeeping last spring, she set up an empty hive-box in her back yard and was about to buy a colony from a local bee farm when a swarm of wild bees came out of nowhere, found the box, and settled in. Next month she’s having a priest bless them.
At the whimsical social event called the Bee Bawl, where prizes are awarded for the best bee costume (imagine that happening at a wasp convention), the group celebrated almost a dozen wedding anniversaries of couples who had met at the convention in years past. Two engagements were also announced.
It’s the summer of the honeybee.
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