Fiona has been with us a week now, and it’s only today when I was able to articulate why I adopted her a week ago today, Saturday.
She was abandoned in her carrier that Friday in the airport terminal at San Luis Obispo, this big steel-and-glass place where the people are always in a hurry. So was the man who left her inside. The backstory was that Fiona belonged to his longtime significant other. She died. He drinks, so he’s on his way to dying. That Saturday, he was on his way out of town. He called a relative of the woman he’d lived with to tell her couldn’t take care of the cat anymore and told her, too, where he would leave her.
Then he flew away.
Fiona’s experience is mirrored in my family’s history.
The little girl in the photo below is my mother. We think, but are not sure, that the snappily-dressed fellow with his hands on the chair is her father, Edmund Keefe, the son of County Wicklow Famine immigrants. We think he was handsome and charming. We know that he was a drunk. He also had a tendency during benders to “borrow” cars, in Taft, California, where I would be born in 1952, that didn’t belong to him. The articles are from April 1925.
Then, sometime in 1925, he disappeared, never to be heard from again. This is my grandmother and my mom at about that time. My niece, Emily, found this 1925 clipping from the Oakland Tribune. (His first name varies in the old papers: “Edmund” or “Edward”).
My mother never knew what happened to him, but the melancholy he left behind stalked her for her entire life. She died at 48. What she left behind—-I can’t quite find the right word—was imperfect but loving and brilliant momsmanship. (Below: as a third grader; with my big brother Bruce, with my big sister Roberta.)
So adopting this abandoned cat was natural to me. She needed a place where she would be safe, where she would never go hungry, and where she would always feel loved. She needs what was taken away from my mother, the very woman who taught me how to give gifts like these.
Since I am emotionally about fourteen years old, I enjoy the Jason Bourne spy movies.
Bourne is an American intelligence assassin so thoroughly trained by his handlers that he can’t remember his real name.
I love the Jason Bourne car chases, the motorcylce chases, the moped chases, the snipers and hitmen he foils, the locales in Europe and New York City, the deft leaps from rooftop to rooftop or from high suspension bridges into any river you’d care to name. I also enjoy, to be honest, the fight scenes, especially the one where Damon’s Bourne subdues his would-be killer with a rolled-up newspaper.
AND Bourne can speak at least five languages effortlessly, has a secret Swiss bank account—no one has ever offered me a secret Swiss bank account, and wherever he is—Istanbul, Moscow, Amsterdam, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, London, New York City—you want to be there, too. Without the killers, of course.
Damon is a wonderful actor (Yes, I’ll grant you Good Will Hunting, but that’s because of Robin Williams, too) but his turn as a stranded astronaut in The Martian is my favorite. It includes the immortal line I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this, when Damon realizes how chancy his survival is. It helps that he uses his own poop to fertilize the potatoes that sustain him.
Having acknowledged what a fine actor Damon is, I think that this young woman, Oksana Akinshina, is even better. The emotions that cross her face are kaleidoscopic—terror, disbelief, shock, grief.
There is also a fleeting moment, when she smiles, that shows she is sympathetic. That’s indelible.
Our niece Emily, lives in Brooklyn and works the usual three-plus jobs so that she can earn food and rent money between auditions.
Emily can act like this. She is brilliant and brave, and I am so proud of her..
Slave shackles from the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture
The Oval Office has been ambushed by gold furnishings, some of them imported from exotic places as far away as Mar-a-Lago, in Florida. Now, it seems, the President wants his history golden, as well. His attack on the Smithsonian’s African American Museum—“too much emphasis on slavery”–was echoed by this young woman, charged with dispatching a study team to cleanse the place of Wokeness.
It was obvious that Ms. Halligan could muster, at most, about 150 words about the history of American slavery. Her boss’s leash is a short one. If you’d pressed her, she would’ve been a perfect example of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”
“When did slaves come to America?” you might ask her. “Who was Nat Turner?” “Why did some slaves about to be sold South mutilate themselves—with one mother using a hatchet to chop off her foot?” “Why was the spiritual ‘Steal Away to Jesus’ a significant signal to enslaved people?”
There would’ve been silence. The photo depicts Halligan desperately searching her own ear for answers.
I’m cheating, of course, because I took a year of the history of the American South in college. I was amazed both at how little I knew and at how rich the history of Black Americans is, including the history of their enslavement (which includes the ingenious ways in which they resisted slavery), the topic that so ruffles the President’s wispy golden hairs.
In truth, the Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Eugene Robinson notes that the history of slavery is housed in the museum’s lower floors. As visitors ascend, the exhibits’ emphasis shifts to Black men and women of accomplishment: poets, musicians, scholars, soldiers, scientists, athletes, activists. (Below: Robinson, activist Ida B. Wells, professional baseball slugger Josh Gibson, poet Maya Angelou.) In a very subtle way, museumgoers ascend to freedom, too.
And, Ms. Halligan, let’s do some math. Slavery was an American institution for 246 years, from 1619 until 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment, the centerpiece for Spielberg’s film Lincoln, was finally adopted.
Then things got worse. After the brief interlude when troops occupied the South, during Reconstruction, what followed was nearly 100 years of segregation, of Jim Crow.
How could that be worse than slavery?
Possibly the only positive attribute of American slavery is that enslaved Americans and White Americans lived in close proximity. White children played with Black children, except when a Master’s son once asked if the could join the enslaved children, who were playing “Auction.”
He was turned down, apologetically. One of the Black kids pointed out that he couldn’t possibly play Auction. He was White and therefore worth nothing.
Most slaveowners were the masters of five or fewer human beings, and so their waking and working lives were within sight and sound and smell of each other. It wouldn’t be accurate to call them “friends,” but they were certainly intimate.
My third great-grandfather, Godfrey Gregory, claimed to be the owner of seventeen human beings, listed, without names, in the 1850 Kentucky Census. I am named for two ancestors, Confederate officers, who did not survive the Civil War.
That intimacy, of course, extended to enslaved women, chattel and therefore subject to the wooing—or, more accurately, the rape–on the part of White masters or overseers. Jefferson’s hostess at Monticello, Sally Hemings, mothered Black children with red hair. (Below: Jefferson, Monticello, Sally Hemings’s quarters, discovered only in the last decade. This room would’ve been the space where she birthed Jefferson’s children.)
On larger plantations, enslaved women became surrogate mothers—more often, mothers in everything but DNA—to White children. Black women nursed Master’s babies. Nannies kept them seen but not heard so that Master and Mistress could cultivate the kind of social lives that the Cotton Aristocracy required.
So nannies were disciplinarians, confidantes, nurses and the driers of tears.
And then, when the time came and the family will was read, these women, these surrogate mothers, became the property of the little boy they’d raised.
When chattel slavery ended, at the cost of 750,000 American lives, Jim Crow emerged as the device to keep Black Americans subservient and obedient. Enforcement included whipping, a staple of slavery, but it also included a century of lynchings—a kind of spectator sport—because now, with the races rigidly separated and unknowable to each other, it was much easier for Whites to murder people who’d become objects.
There were over 4,000 lynchings in the South in the Jim Crow years.
(Below: A nanny and her charge; Laura Nelson and her fourteen-year-old son were lynched in 1911 Oklahoma)
Southerners were not alone in objectifying Black Americans. A less violent cruelty was cultivated by Hollywood, including this scene from the 1943 musical This Is the Army, which incorporated both Blackface and cross-dressing in Blackface.
So, Ms. Halligan, we didn’t come very far after slavery, not with 100 additional years of segregation and of terror. And of mockery. That makes roughly 350 years of institutionalized cruelty visited on a people who’d been stolen from their homes for profit. It’s been about 450 years since Africans were first brought to America. The math alone begs for a museum that emphasizes the history of slavery.
What the President wants is simply a revival of a kind of history—gilt-edged, victimless history—that never really existed, except in Cold War fourth-grade classrooms or in the Technicolor mythology of the O’Hara family’s Tara.
I think that the young Black woman, the Guardsman, just behind the President, belies his painfully childish grip on American history. I think she knows him. Her face reveals that she knows, in a way, that she’s been sold.
The truth’s being sold away, too. The President’s servants, smiling benignly to his left, are enjoying this version of the game “Auction.”
His Da was a merchant seaman and so rarely home. Home was London and, as a toddler, he survived The Blitz. Two decades later he even survived Peter O’Toole, his friend. O’Toole, common to British actors, wasn’t just a drinker. He was a carouser. Maybe this man, Terence Stamp, was among the crowd who went bar-hopping all night Friday and decided to stop into a West End theater for the Saturday matinee. They were there to hoot at the actors from their seats in the dark.
Just before the curtain, though, O’Toole leaped from his seat.
“Good GOD!” he cried. “I’m IN this!”
This story is, of course, apocryphal, but carousing, and booze, was a kind of second Blitz that Stamp survived. He even survived a relationship with the woman, Jean Shrimpton, whom many consider the first modern Supermodel, she who paved the way for Cindy Crawford, Gigi Hadid, Tyra Banks, and even Shrimpton’s contemporary, Twiggy. (Shrimpton is now eighty-two.)
An older O’Toole outside a Soho watering hole.Shrimpton and Stamp, about 1965.
We Yanks take some credit in the creation of this marvelous actor. He was smitten by Gary Cooper when his Mum took him to see Beau Geste when he was a little boy; when he was a teen, James Dean cemented his decision to become an actor.
It was a sound choice. At the very beginning of his film career, Stamp’s range was already extraordinary: He was the guileless and doomed young sailor in Billy Budd, and a few years later was the brooding and paranoid soldier, the flame to Bathsheba’s moth in the first film production of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. (I enjoyed both that version, with Julie Christie, and the later one, with Carey Mulligan. The earlier version led me to Thomas Hardy novels, and that was a good choice on my part. For one thing, I learned as much about dairying from Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles as I had about whales from Moby-Dick, and the former learning was far less painful.)
For purely gratuitous reasons, Carey Mulligan’s horseback ride from the second film version. (The video link should work if you click on it.)
Thankfully, the news services put together a composite of some of Stamp’s roles. He made an indelible impression as General Zod in the first Superman films with Christopher Reeve. He was a superb supervillain, and those were films that he was very proud of.
Because I am a hopeless Romantic, it’s one of his supporting roles that I remember best. The film was called The Adjustment Bureau, and it’s based on a story by the brilliant American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.
The premise is simple, and similar to The Matrix. We are not in control of our lives. They are foreordained, every moment planned from birth to death, and if someone or something threatens to violate The Plan, the Adjustment Bureau intervenes for course correction. They’re easy to spot, because all of them were slim-lined early 1960s suits. And all of them wear hats.
In the film, Matt Damon, as David, is an earnest young United States Senator who falls head-over-heels with a dancer, Elise, played by Emily Blunt. She falls in love with him. He is a button-downed traditionalist. She’s a free spirit. Can’t blame either one.
In The Adjustment Bureau, Blunt and Damon first meet in the men’s room at the Waldorf, where he’s trying to gather himself after a defeated run for office; she’s hiding in there because she’d crashed a wedding party.
But this love is NOT in the young senator’s Plan. So, the Adjustment Bureau agents, led by Stamp, intervene to separate the young couple forever. Stamp’s gravitas is expertly played in this scene, and it allows Damon’s line, at the end, the weight that it deserves. Sometimes there would be cheers from the film’s audiences at this point.
Stamp, an inherently generous actor, made those cheers happen.
My high-school teaching career began at Mission Prep, a Catholic high school, in San Luis Obispo. We older folks were hit smack in the face by the New Wave movement, and we were suitably horrified, mostly by Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone. Her stuff was not Catholic School Approved, after all. And young ladies do NOT wear rosaries as necklaces, although shattered rosaries unearthed during an archaeological dig in the Immaculate Heart Academy’s privy indicate teenaged Bolsheviks as far back in San Luis Obispo Catholicism as the 1870s.
This song, then, was a shocker to those of us from the Boomer Generation.
“Like A Virgin” made me a little uneasy, too, so it wasn’t the first Madonna song that I grudgingly liked. This one, charming, was. I bought the album because of it.
There’s a little bit of genius in what she does with this song twenty years later. Madonna grunge.
My generation, of course, grew up with Marilyn. Even though I was only ten when she died, I had a little-boy fondness for her—even little boys, given the right upbringing, can sense vulnerability in others—and so this song, a wonderful homage, resonated with me.
Yes, I know that this is a tangent, but Nicole Kidman channeled MM well, too, in the Baz Lurhmann film that, on its ending, made me realize that my jaws hurt. I’d been smiling for two hours– up until Satine’s demise.
I’ve got many Madonna songs on my MP3 player, but the incredible pace of this video production of “Ray of Light” makes that song one of my favorites.
At the opposite pole from “Borderline,” this song is heart-breaking, with elements of Irish keening. We’ve all known people like this. The Frozen govern us today.
Milland and Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s 1954 Dial M for Murder!
Easy Money is a Depression-era screwball comedy starring Jean Arthur, one of my favorite actresses. She’s is desperately poor and rides a double-decker bus to a job interview when a fur coat suddenly flies out a Manhattan apartment window and lands on her.
So she keeps it and discovers that it wins her a lot of attentive attention, which she enjoys.
She’s still poor, though.
So she stops at what was called an automat, the Thirties’ version of fast food, for a very little something to eat, and she encounters Ray Milland’s automat attendant.
Ray Milland is not a Cheerful Charlie. He was lugubrious as Oliver’s father in “Love Story,” oily and deceitful as Grace Kelly’s would-be killer in “Dial M for Murder,” and inebriated in “The Lost Weekend.”
But in this scene from Easy Money, he shows that he’s a deft comedian.
He’s a generous actor, too. He shows it here with Arthur and does the same with a Ginger Rogers in a film with a preposterous premise, The Major and the Minor. The two are superb in a film that is very funny and, since it’s set as World War II breaks out, deeply touching.
The film Suddenly begins with languid scene-setting shots, a device Woody Allen used in Midnight in Paris, but these, of course are in black and white, and the little California town, called Suddenly (I’d place it somewhere between Pumpkin Center and Avenal) reveals its church, courthouse, supermarket. One of the first kinetic characters we meet is Sterling Hayden, the sheriff. Hayden was 6′ 5″ and so makes his service revolver look like a Mattel Fanner 50. Here’s the film’s trailer:
And here’s the cast:
A little boy, eight, called Pidge, for some reason–maybe he poops a lot?–adores Hayden’s Sheriff Tod Shaw. Sheriff Tod Shaw adores little Pidge’s mother, Ellen, a war widow who hates guns and who resists the sheriff’s earnest wooing because she won’t betray her husband’s memory. When Shaw buys Pidge a toy revolver, that’s the final straw. Ellen, furious, reads him several riot acts.
Then things get even more complicated. The President of the United States is to make a train stop at the Suddenly station on his way for a little vacation. An advance team of Secret Service agents arrives and swears the sheriff and everybody else to secrecy.
The secret leaks, because Frank Sinatra arrives in Suddenly with two fellow assassins, neither one the reddest fruit in the Tomato Garden of Film Criminals, and the three take up a sniper’s nest in—wouldn’t you know it?— Ellen’s home, with Pidge and her father-in-law, a retired Secret Service agent. Convenient, no?
Here’s where the film gets eerie, at least for us history majors.
Ellen’s home is about 200 yards away from the train station. That’s the president’s Cadillac limousine awaiting for his arrival in the 1954 film. Lee Harvey Oswald’s sniper’s perch was about 200 feet above President Kennedy’s Lincoln; the fatal shot came at about 265 feet. The second photo is from a Secret Service reconstruction in 1964.
Sinatra, out to kill the president in Suddenly, was, in the real world, a close friend of JFK’s. That ended after the 1960 election, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy began a campaign against organized crime, including mobster Sam Giancana. Giancana and Sinatra were partners in the Cal-Neva Lodge. Giancana and JFK shared a mistress, Judith Campbell Exner. One of the it-will-never-go-to-bed rumors (a term that doesn’t apply to Exner) was that JFK’s murder was a mob hit.
Kennedy and Sinatra; Giancana and Sinatra; Judith Exner
Sterling Hayden was the crooked cop whom Michael Corleone shot dead in mid-veal in The Godfather. Michael’s father, the Don, was a composite, but there were strong resemblances to—wait for it!—Chicago’s Sam Giancana.
Another Godfather connection? The movie poster includes Sinatra’s well-deserved Oscar for his portrayal of Maggio in From Here to Eternity. It was the Corleonie family who got fading singer Johnny Fontane his big “war movie” role, thanks to *shiver!* the bigshot producer waking up with his thoroughbred’s head beneath the sheets.
Try the veal. It’s the best in the city. Hayden’s cop a moment before his death; Michael and the Don confer; Sam Giancana.
Hayden was also Gen. Jack D. Ripper, modeled on Air Force Gen. Curtis “Bombs Away!” LeMay, in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which, of course, includes this mesmerizing speech by Hayden/Ripper, directed against fluoridated water, a big issue in the 1960s that is getting trendy again. Here’s the speech:
Lemay and JFK at a missile launch. The president’s Ray-Bans were a kind of sensation. Lemay and the president confer during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lemay had commanded the firebombing campaign against Japan in 1945, during which he ordered his B-29s to fly lower, for accuracy’s sake. He proposed using nuclear bombs against Cuba and the Soviet missile sites there. Kennedy demurred.
Kennedy despised the Central Intelligence Agency, whose bungling of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (Fidel Castro’s takeover is vividly portrayed in The Godfather Part II), but Sterling Hayden, as a World War II Marine—that’s him below— had been an operative in the OSS, the World War II precursor of the CIA.
In the process—he earned a Silver Star for valor—Hayden became deeply sympathetic to the Yugoslav partisans he worked with as they resisted the Nazis who occupied their nation. This led him to an unwise decision: He was briefly a member of the Communist Party USA. The chickens came home to roost in 1951, when Hayden was ordered to testify before the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities. Hayden was in the midst of a hard-fought divorce, and his lawyer assured him that the government, if it wished, could make sure that he would never see his little boy again.
So Hayden testified, and named the names of what were called Fellow Travelers, and the shame of the man once called “the most beautiful man in the movies” followed him the rest of his life.
Hayden testifying; “The Most Beautiful Man” and his beautiful first wife, actress Madeline Carroll.
Hayden sought solace in the sea—part of his OSS spying had involved sailing along the Yugoslav coast to keep in touch with the partisans–and his expertise as a sailor led to two books, the autobiographical Wanderer, which I need to read, and the novel Voyage, which I have read. It is superb.
But I believe I promised an epic death scene in the title of this meandering little post.
Sterling Hayden is fairly passive in Suddenly, the result of a gunshot wound from would-be assassin Sinatra. But the plot thickens.
Pidge—wasn’t I right?—has to go to the bathroom. Along the way, he discovers his grandfather’s old Secret Service revolver. Winks are exchanged when Pidge returns to the living room and deftly switches his toy gun with grandfather’s real one.
This kid is bright.
So’s grandfather. He fakes a heart attack and call for his nitroglycerine capsules. Pidge fetches them, his mom gets a glass of water, and grandfather, demonstrating the same drinking problem depicted in Airplane!, spills it on the floor.
On the floor just below a folding metal table where the assassins have set up their rifle, a M1 Garand graced by a stubby scope above and a big magazine below. During the war, when the M1 was standard issue for American rifleman, it was not known as a sniper’s rifle, and it had a glaring deficiency: when the rifleman had emptied his eight-round clip, a bracket was ejected that made a loud “PING!” That informed any nearby enemy who was paying attention that the Yank was out of ammunition.
Sinatra plays a G.I. who discovered, in Italy, how thrilling it was to kill Nearby Enemies. So his weapon of choice is an M1, but with a difference: It sports a clip that looks as if it could hold twenty rounds.
So now we’ve got a rifle mounted on a metal table with spilled water on the floor. We’ve also got a TV repairman who wandered into a bad situation. A tube needs replacement (convenience stores in Arroyo Grande used to have tube-testers so you could figure out which one you needed to replace. And TV repair was once a secure occupation.)
Grandfather, recovered from his alleged heart attack, muses aloud to the TV repairman: “Boy, I bet if you attached this wire here from the back of the TV to the leg of that metal table, it’d be a natural antenna. We’d get such a good picture for the ball game.”
I think he has to repeat this a couple of times, including using semaphore flags. The TV repairman’s eyes finally brighten.
So when, just before the president arrives, one of Sinatra’ henchmen stumbles and finds himself pulling the rifle’s trigger. He is not-so-instantly electrocuted. In his convulsions, his finger remains on the M1’s trigger and the rifle keeps firing, over and over, and so alerts the authorities that something peculiar is going on in that house above the train station.
It’s a stunningly violent scene for 1954—maybe even for today—but because you don’t really see it coming until the TV repairman does, it’s a corker.
Oh, and the sheriff winds up with the girl, with Ellen. Satisfying all around, by golly.
Alan Magee was a ball-turret gunner on a B-17 based at RAF Molesworth in March 1943. A key responsibility of his bomb group, the 360th, and his squadron, the 303rd, was to assault the German U-boat bases along France’s western coast. The U-boats themselves, as long as they were in their pens, were safe; the concrete and steel protection, built by slave labor, was so indestructible that the French Navy used the sub pens for their submarines throughout the Cold War.
In 1943, the U-boats were attacks were devastating, the tonnage sunk so vast that England was in danger of starving. (My father gifted a British family, in 1944, with a bag of California oranges. The mother of the family burst into tears. They hadn’t seen fresh oranges since 1939. That was the work of the U-boats.)
Later, the Halcyon brothers, the Varians, would help to develop the klystron tube, an improvement on radar that, in air attacks, devastated the U-boats once they’d slipped into the slipped from their protection at St. Nazaire or Lorient. I once read a gripping autobiography written by a U-boat captain, appropriately entitled Iron Coffins; by 1944, that’s what they’d become.
So it wasn’t the sub pens themselves that were the targets of Magee’s squadron: it was the yards where torpedoes were gathered after their shipment from German factories to the French coast.
His B-17 was named “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” after the Rice Krispies characters, which made for far less racy nose painting than the generously-bosomed Vargas girl imitations that adorned so many B-17s. (Pilots averaged around twenty-two; some gunners, liars, were fifteen.)
Since Magee was a ball-turret gunner, that meant he was the tiniest of the nine men he flew with. Only a small man could fit in the bubble beneath the B-17. An electrical motor rotated the turret; the exit hatch, however could only be opened from inside the B-17’s fuselage, .
Magee was lucky. When “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” was riddled by German fighters on the St. Nazaire mission, on January 3, 1943, He found his way onto the flight deck, inside the seeming safety of the fuselage.
That’s when the B-17 blew up.
Magee was thrown out by the blast, semiconscious, and began to fall.
He had no parachute.
He had 22,000 feet to fall.
What broke his fall was the steel-and-glass roof of the St. Nazaire train station, made famous in studies by the Impressionist Claude Monet, obsessive, in 1877, about capturing light properly at different times of the day, experiments he could continue with the Rouen Cathedral and along the banks of the Seine.
The train roof broke Magee’s fall, and it broke Magee. One arm was nearly severed. one leg was broken, he suffered massive internal injuries and the surface of his body was peppered by bits of shrapnel. In a story not uncommon for the war in Europe, a German military doctor saved his life. The antiaircraft crew that had shot down another Morro Bay copilot offered him a hot bowl of potato soup once they’d recovered him, about to be shot by an irate German farmer. When he was on his way to a POW camp, he boarded a train with his Luftwaffe guard, who slipped the latches of the briefcase he was carrying, removed its contents, and wordlessly offered Lt. Robert Abbey Dickson a thick slice of sausage atop black bread.
Robert Abbey Dickson survived the war and over two years in a POW camp. He became the father of three little girls who adored their dad.
In the 1990s, Alan Magee returned to France for the unveiling of this memorial to the crew of “Snap! Crackle! Pop!”
That might be the end of the story, but of course it isn’t. Weeks later, another member of the 303rd Bomb Squadron was killed returning from a raid on the submarine facilities at Lorient. Clair Abbot Tyler was from Morro Bay. I once lived on Piney Way, the street where he grew up. The best man at his wedding, to a schoolteacher and descendant of the Dana family, was Alex Madonna, for whom my father worked.
Like so many fliers I wrote about in Central Coast Aviators in World War II, Tyler left a little girl behind.
Here is his story.
And one final point, but this one about U-boats. There have been so many fine World War II films, and one of the finest is German, written and directed by Wolfgang Petersen. Das Boot (1981) humbled me in that it separated Germans from Nazis. In this scene, the crew sings a popular British tune from the First World War, mostly to infuriate the boat’s political officer. He got off easily. In The Hunt for Red October, Sean Connery strangled his political officer.
“Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev … I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Trump said in Friday’s social media post.
So the president has repositioned two Ohio-class submarines, among our most potent offensive weapons, in response to a taunt from Medvedev, who pointed out that Putin’s Russia still has the destructive power of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. In the process, announcing the movement of even two American submarines is a major faux pas—Trump is no more judicious in his use of than was Medvedev in his–in that even the vaguest citation of nuclear submarines is never to be disclosed.
Loose lips sink ships.
I couldn’t help but think of the contrast between this president’s intellect and that of John F. Kennedy’s. Kennedy was a quick study, not a deep one, but what separates these two so much is the fact that Kennedy read books. True some of them were James Bond novels, but one of them, in 1962, was Barbara Tuchman’s incredible historyof the outbreak of World War I, The Guns of August. It’s a history so rich and yet so full of bravado, braggadaccio and deep hatreds that it makes, oddly, for compelling reading. The video below will explain a little more, but Kennedy was reading this book just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he averred then, and I paraphrase, that after being confronted with stupidity on such a massive scale, that he was not going to be the man responsible for starting World War III.
So, in October 1962, a historian I would not read for many, many years may, in fact, have helped to save my life.
Donald Trump, of course, does not read. He had to be told which side won the war that Tuchman wrote about. And he always rises to the bait, with his skin as thin as onion paper, as he did with the former premier.
By contrast, it was Robert Kennedy, in October 1962, who did the opposite. Khrushchev, when challenged about the presence of Soviet offensive missiles in Cuba, sent the White House a conciliatory letter. That was followed, and very quickly, by a letter that was threatening and bellicose.
It was Robert Kennedy who suggested replying only to the first letter, ignoring the second one altogether. That response provided a sliver of movement that eventually defused the crisis that threatened all of our lives, including mine, at ten, in the Upper Arroyo Grande Valley of California.
John and Robert Kennedy confer during the Democratic National Convention, 1960.
One of the most plaintive anecdotes of the earlier crisis, the one in August 1914, was the bellicose and fiercely-mustachioed Kaiser Wilhelm—he whose personality approaches that of Donald J. Trump— asking his military advisors, plaintively, if the German troop trains now bound for the Franco-Belgian frontier and for Russia couldn’t be called back.
No, sire, he was informed. It is too late for that. In the meantime, on August 2, an itinerant and luckless artist, Homburg in hand, reacted jubilantly to the war news when it arrived in Vienna. Corporal Hitler would be a brave soldier, gassed amid the carnage that followed and demented but calculating after the bloodletting was ended by the fractured peace at Versailles.
August 1914.
The Missile Crisis made such a deep impression on me that fifty years later, I turned it into a simulation for my AGHS AP European History classes. A preview is below: Each student was assigned a role as a member of EXCOMM, Kennedy’s advisers during the ten-day crisis. The genuine passion, even anger (especially the groups that featured Gen. Curtis “Bombs Away” Lemay) that animated them as they acted out their roles was one of the most satsifying lessons of my teaching career. They understood what the stakes were in October 1962.
A Work in Progress 