9/1/23
Newsletter #445
The Crack of Dawn
Here’s a stray interesting fact. In 1919 Dwight Eisenhower was a brevet Lieutenant Colonel in the army. He was included in a troop movement called the Trans-Continental Convoy along what was known as the Lincoln Highway from Washington D.C. to San Francisco. They traveled in military trucks. The journey took 62 days because there was no Lincoln Highway. There were no decent, let alone paved, roads anywhere outside the cities. As Ike bumped along day after day, his military mind kept returning to the question, “What if we have to mobilize? What if the Japanese attack? We can’t take a month and a half to get troops to the west coast.” As an historical note, Colonel William (Billy) Mitchell, known as “The father of the United States Air Force,” got himself court-martialed in 1925 for predicting that the next military threat to the U.S. was going to come from Japan, so Eisenhower considering the idea of a threat to the west coast was not just idle speculation. Nearly 40 years after Ike’s bumpy, 62-day journey to San Francisco, as the president he enacted the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956. That’s when they began building all of the freeways. The entire interstate freeway system is legitimately known as, The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
So, Donald Trump gave Barack Obama shit about golfing as much as he did while he was president. As a matter of fact, Barack Obama golfed 333 times in eight years. Trump almost matched him in one term with 298 times. Dwight Eisenhower dwarfed them both by golfing over 800 times during his two terms (1953-61). Apparently, Ike was not a very good golfer. As a soldier, and the former Supreme European Commander of American forces in WWII, he was known as an extremely cool customer who never got mad, although he did chain-smoke six packs of Camels a day. Oddly, a good movie about Ike is A&E's 2004 made-for-TV movie Ike: Countdown to D-Day, with the seemingly miscast Tom Selleck, who does a first-rate job. They properly and correctly show him smoking like a fucking crazy man all the time, one off the other, but he kept his shit together and ran the biggest military invasion in history.
OK, everybody, fasten your seatbelts and hold on to your hats, I’m going to do something that’s politically incorrect. Get this:
I smoke cigarettes, and honestly, I love them. Nearly all of my favorite people – William Wyler, Bette Davis, et al. – smoked cigarettes. Or cigars, which I can’t stand, but I don’t make people put them out. I hate perfume and cologne, but I don’t bitch about that, either.
So, Ike smoked six packs of Camels a day and rarely got mad. On the drizzly, gray morning of June 6, 1941, he pointed his index and middle fingers, no doubt a filterless Camel smoldering between them, pointing across the English Channel and said, “Let ‘er rip,” and D-Day, the invasion of Europe, began.
However, at the age of 60, Ike’s doctor had the temerity to suggest that Ike should consider cutting back, like to maybe four packs a day. Eisenhower said, “If I can’t smoke six packs a day, I don’t want to smoke at all,” and quit on the spot. He lived twenty more years, and incidentally became president at the age of 63, serving two terms until he was 70. He was incredibly calm and composed in all of his filmed speeches and interviews. But Eisenhower was clearly not a happy man from the moment he quit smoking.
Back on the golf course, where Ike spent over 800 days of his presidency, without any cigarettes, he became the biggest son of a bitch bad golfer that anyone around him had ever met. Screaming, swearing, wrapping clubs around trees, throwing his mashies and his niblicks into water hazards, but he never went to war. His Joint Chiefs of Staff constantly followed him around the golf course advising that he drop atomic bombs on North Korea and China and Eisenhower just wouldn’t listen. But there were also lobbyists willing to follow him, and he felt the increasing pressure from the “military industrial complex” – as well as watching his military budget go up and up – and he was convinced that you can’t keep building weapons and not eventually use them.
Other than Ike smoking a lot of cigarettes, where this stream-of-consciousness began was with the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, which is where I know most people’s minds were. Once upon a time — let’s just call it 1951 — Senator Joseph McCarthy was the Republican senator from Wisconsin who had a really big bug up his ass that Communists had infiltrated the American government, the military, and worst of all, Hollywood. Joe McCarthy was a fame-starved alcoholic who had many, many followers, and two overly zealous young aides – Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn.
I personally think that Roy Cohn was a far more nefarious character than Nixon, but that’s for another day. Roy Cohn (a Jew who went bad) was coincidentally the mentor of a fellow named Donald Trump. There was something truly ghastly and awful about Roy Cohn. He seemed to me like a Universal monster or Rondo Hatton’s cousin. This piece of shit took glee in sending his fellow Jews, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to the electric chair for treason — giving the Russians military secrets, which apparently, they did. The electric chair was the punishment for treason in 1954. Roy Cohn’s acolyte will now get to discover what the punishment for treason is now.
But that isn’t the point. My point, if indeed I ever had one, was Joe McCarthy use of Congressional hearings and federal jail terms to eliminate imaginary evil, and how a majority of zombie-like Republican senators and congressmen followed along blindly still boggles me, although I can’t imagine why.
When it began in 1950, President Harry Truman was flatly against McCarthy, but he left office right as McCarthy was gaining momentum in 1952. Then camed President Eisenhower, who was also against McCarthy, but a lot quieter about it. He was preoccupied with pitching his golf clubs into the drink. Until the Army-McCarthy hearings in the spring of 1954, Truman and Eisenhower were on perfectly reasonable terms. As a rule, Truman didn’t like generals, thought that they made terrible presidents, and wasn’t shy about saying so. He really despised General Douglas MacArthur and his corncob pipe and busted him (my dad held a grudge against Truman for that, but Truman was right, MacArthur had lost his marbles). Ironically, one of Truman’s very best friends was General George Marshall, of Marshall Plan fame.
OK. So, when Joe McCarthy came after the imaginary Communists in the U.S. Army, he specifically called out General Marshall. [I’m going to stick my neck out. It’s quite possible that General George Marshall was the greatest general in U.S. history, beside that vile slave-owner, George Washington). Anyway, Truman was horrified, but he wasn’t president anymore and his word was that of a civilian in Missouri, although he did loudly proclaim Marshall’s innocence. But he believed that Dwight Eisenhower, who was second-in-command to Marshall during the war would defend him. And Ike intended to defend Marshall, who was ostensibly his friend, and he even wrote a speech, then didn’t deliver it.
Harry Truman, who is one of my heroes, not only never spoke to Eisenhower again, but he also never spoke his name again. He wouldn’t allow Ike’s name to pass his lips. Truman only referred to Eisenhower as, “That fella that followed me in the White House.”
Dawn is just breaking.
Good-on-ya.