02 November 2003

First Tuesday

It is that time of the year that we celebrate the great ritual of the Democratic process, the General Election.

First Tuesday in November we troop to the polls to cast our ballots for the great issues confronting the Republic. Of course that isn't true this year. We will get to vote on that next year. This is the last hurrah for my Dad, who was going to retire from politics with this election. He is the Ward Two Councilman back in Petoskey, and has proudly served as the Mayor Pro Tem. He was going to let it go this year as he celebrates his eightieth birthday.

But he has been asked to run once more, since some whacko is running against him, a nutcase who worked the nominating convention and has a scary agenda. He has a personal vendetta against the City Manager he has to be stopped. Dad is standing up to the task, throwing his hat in the ring once more.

The beginning of November carries a lot of baggage, and I hate to disagree with Tip O'Neil, but not all politics is strictly local. On this day in 1917, preoccupied with a war on the continent and hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded Empire kids, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour expressed support for a national home for the Jews of Palestine. It became known as the Balfour Declaration, and can arguably be said to be the justification for the Zionist movement. Can you remember when that was not a pejorative term? I cannot, though I remember reading the Leon Uris epic "Exodus" and the biography of David Daniel "Mickey" Marcus, a tough Brooklyn street kid, rose by virtue of his courage and intelligence through West Point to become a Colonel in the U.S. Army. In 1948, he resigned his commission to help save Israel and become its first general since Judah Maccabee.

There are politics and there are politics. Israel is a product of one kind and so was Vietnam. In 1963, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dihn Diem was assassinated in a military coup orchestrated by the United States. I had a chat with retired General Stillwell, who had been there with the Military Assistance Group in Saigon. We talked about the biography of John Paul Vann, and how we came to have backed into that particular quagmire. There is a lot of talk about that in the press, how the situation in Iraq is so similar. I don't think so, and I reminded someone that we had almost 4,000 American casualties in the Tet offensive. But I hear the news this morning about the Chinook helicopter that was shot down near Faluja, in the Sunni Triangle. Fifteen dead and twenty wounded. And a convoy attacked nearby with another four dead. I am not so sanguine. We didn't have media then like we do now. I'm listening to it now, the words forming a steady drumbeat and Secretary Rumsfeld on the talk circuit this morning, trying to put a positive spin on it.

The troops were headed for Baghdad International, which is still closed. The airplanes come in just like they did in Vietnam, approaching the field at an altitude above small arms fire, then cork-screwing steeply down, remaining inside the perimeter of the field to minimize exposure. The commercial guys have a hard time doing it that way.

It is an anniversary of another peculiar flight path that limited exposure. The Spruce Goose flew today in 1947, the most gargantuan wooden airplane ever built with Dashing Howard Hughes at the controls, meeting the minimum flight standards for the Government contract. He had been partners in the endeavor with industrialist Henry Kaiser, master of the Liberty Ship, who recognized the threat of the Nazi U-boats and conceived the idea of giant flying boats in 1942 to ferry supplies and troops to Europe. He joined forces with Hughes, a perfectionist. The H-4 Hercules cost far more than planned and the war was over before it was finished. Built largely out of non-strategic materials, it got the famous nickname although it was largely constructed of birch and glue. A disgruntled U.S. Senator dubbed it the "flying lumber yard," and it had a wingspan of 320 feet and could carry nearly a Brigade of troops and their equipment. It might be a useful capability for Iraq.

Hughes fired up the eight mighty 3,000 horsepower Pratt and Whiney Engines. Then he taxied the mighty airplane back to the ramp and put it in storage in Long Beach at climate-controlled Government expense. Terms of the contract included the stipulation that the aircraft be maintained in flight status, and so the engines were upgraded and started once a month until his died. Tough negotiator.

The next year, President Harry S. Truman surprised the pundits on the first Tuesday in November, narrowly winning re-election over Republican Thomas E. Dewey and producing what is arguably the most famous political picture in American history, waving the erroneous headline of Dewey's victory in the Chicago Daily Tribune.

Truman had been running a campaign as much against the Eightieth Congress as against Dewey. Truman as pushing civil rights as part of an astonishing agenda to carve a new world out of the global carnage of the Second World War. He had proposed the previous February legislation guaranteeing the rights of blacks to vote. The Solid South rebelled, again. At the Democratic Convention Truman was praised for his progressive stand on civil rights and his plan to integrate the Armed Forces. Thirty-five delegates walked out, including all of the Mississippi and half of the Alabama delegates. The resulting split in the Party spawned the candidacy of South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond as a Dixiecrat. Strom took the national stage then, and he was a fixture right here in Our Fair City until this year, celebrating his hundredth birthday still in the Senate. He even succeeded in changing his stripes, which is something not many tigers can do.

We remember Truman as a plain-talking man of common sense and integrity. "The Buck Stops Here" said the plaque on the desk in the Oval Office. Dewey came across as an arrogant figure. The referred to him as "the only man they knew who could strut sitting down." Richard Rovere, of New Yorker, said, "he comes out like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind" at rallies. He said things like "Oh, Lord" and "Good Gracious." Was Truman behind in the polls and the Dewey campaign was laid-back and mild. Dewey's running mate, Earl Warren, got so frustrated with the low-key campaign, that he commented to the media, "I wish just once I could call somebody an S.O.B.!"

Dewey was down a quart on situational awareness, too. He was conducting a whistle-stop tour from the back of a train, maybe the last Presidential election when that was an end in itself and not a photo-op. At one stop, Dewey commented that it was nice to see so many children, and that they should be lucky he got them a day off from school. One kid yelled, "It's Saturday."

I think Dewey looked a lot like Howard Hughes with that Boston Blackie pencil moustache. Art imitating life, I suppose, as the B-movie detective hero hero was a dead-ringer for the dashing aviator. It was a hell of a look. There is something about that picture of Howard at the controls of the H-4 with his Fedora pushed back and that curl of the lip under that dark line of a moustache. He was a guy who could take on the world on his terms. We need him to replace Paul Bremmer in Baghdad. Where are the heroes when you need them?

My Dad would remember. He was freshly demobilized from the Navy in 1948, marrying Mom at the Little Church Around the Corner in Manhattan that year. Dad is going to stride into the First Tuesday, still in the political game, still standing when all the rest of them are gone. If Strom Thurman is any guide, Dad could be down to his last couple decades in politics.

We'll see what happens on Tuesday.