03 January 2007

The Arb

My pal and his wife were walking through the Arboretum in Ann Arbor yesterday, as is their custom. They enjoy the peace of the place. It came as a bit of surprise when they heard the sound of engines above, and thought perhaps some terrorist was intending to crash an airplane into The Big House, the biggest college stadium in the country, or the Student Union where John Kennedy announced the creation of the Peace Corps.

They looked up to see a gigantic white-and-blue aircraft making a low pass over the town, headed over Geddes toward Hill Street, and then climbing out, headed toward western Michigan.

It was former President Jerry Ford's last visit to his alma mater, and I know that he remembered the paths of the Arboretum. It did not come up in the eulogies about his humanity and common sense, or the quiet dignity he brought to the White House after the horror show of the man he replaced.

They mentioned the story about his dog, Liberty, who soiled the expensive carpet in the Oval Office. Mr. Ford would not allow the Navy enlisted guy from the White House Mess to clean it up. He said that "Men do not make other men pick up after their dogs."

Those are words to live by, and so was the way he could set an example about what was right.

In 1934, Mr. Ford had been elected Captain of the Michigan football team that had just won two national championships. Some very talented teamates had graduated, and the season was a disappointment. In one game, Georgia Tech came to play at The Big House, but refused to take the field because the Wolverines had an Africa-American palyer named Willis Ward on the squad.

Michigan caved into the Georgian's demand that Willis be excluded from the game, and Ford got angry enough to quit on the spot in protest.

Ward appealed to Ford's sense of responsibility, and got him to play. The team must hve been fired up, since it was the only game they won all year.

The “Arb,” as it is called by the locals, is a place you can walk off the frustrations of a bad football season, and I know that Mr. did that season, as many of us have. It is an island of tranquility in the bustling University town. It is a multi-use facility, home to all manner of flora and fauna, four legged and two.

In the winter months, which are seven in Michigan, we would get good and fired up and then ride down the hills on cafeteria trays appropriated from the dorms. It was an exhilarating enough activity that personal injury was possible, and even actually incurred.

I flew high enough and came down hard enough to break my coccyx, the vestigial tailbone that we all carry, and which normally rests peacefully where the sun shouldn't shine.

It was 1970, and I was laid up for a couple weeks, sequestered in embarrassment. “What's the matter, Vic?” my friends would ask.

“Broke my ass,” I replied grimly.

Mr. Ford was the Minority leader in the House at the time. He had a dream, which was to be the Speaker of the House, and it almost seemed possible. The People in their Wisdom had recoiled from the chaos in the streets and were looking for adult leadership in Washington. Watergate was still two years away, and it appeared that peace might be at hand in Southeast Asia.

Anti-war sentiment was boiling on campus. It was the defining issue of the day, the galvanizing force that brought a generational rejection of just about everything, and the real prospect of a revolution of some sort. Between January 1969 and tApril 1970, when I was fully healed from my Arboretum injury, there were more than 40,000 bomb-related incidents, either threatened or actual.

More than $21 million in property was damaged, and 43 people were killed. This was not just sporadic violence, but an actual terrorist campaign aimed at the foundations of American social life. It convinced those in the government that they were actually at war, not only in Southeast Asia, but in the streets of America.

Those responsible were a small, but dedicated, group of revolutionaries. Some of them managed to blow themselves up at the University of Wisconsin around that time. They tapped into so much latent anger. Conflict over Civil Rights, women's rights, Gay rights were fueled with drugs. Anarchy were in the streets. Everything seemed to be in motion, including the government.

Lyndon Johnson had been chased out of the White House by the specter of clean Gene McCarthy, the anti-war warrior.

The bitter acrimony of the time goes a long way to explaining the motivation for Watergate, when you consider that President Johnson's bombing pause in 1968 almost saved the day for his designated successor, the happy warrior from Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey.

I know that it was ugly and nasty at every level of government. Washtenaw County Sheriff Doug Harvey had a personal crusade against the students at the University, and delighted in administering jail-house haircuts to those detained for various misdemeanors.

For his part, Dick Nixon privately intervened with South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to stonewall, promising him a better deal under his leadership.

As much as we revile the mean-spirited petty partisanship of the political process today, the stakes have been much higher and hands dirtier. Both parties were playing politics with the lives of the troops in the field.

Compared to what we have invested in Iraq, it is quite stunning, and the old wounds of that war are being played out in this one.

Nixon never had a “secret plan” for ending the conflict overseas, though that is how I remember it. He only said that "new leadership will end the war." The shorthand phrase actually came from a reporter desperately seeking a lead for a story about a vague promise to end the war without losing. When pressed for details, Nixon said that discussion of the matter would tip his hand in the negotiations that were continuing in Paris.

Nixon told Michigan Republican congressman Donald Riegle that the war would be over within six months of his assumption of office. I remember Don as a personable young figure from the raw-boned industrial town of Flint, where his father had been mayor. He had graduated from the University of Michigan in 1960, and he doubtless had his Arboretum stories, too, though to my knowledge he never commented on them publicly.

Riegle went on to turn into a Democrat and a U.S. Senator, though he got caught with his hands in the cookie jar in the Keating Five Savings and Loan scandal. He retired from public office with regret. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were also fingered in that affair, though they “stayed the course” and came out just fine.

But back in 1969, the six-month deadline approached, we were getting ready to graduate from High School and the draft was very much on our minds. Many of us were headed for Ann Arbor in the Fall, and the student deferment for college was the way to delicately take ourselves out of harms way.

President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger seemed determined to keep us in it, and I have been astonished to see him return to public life as an advisor to President Bush and mesmerized by his eulogy at Jerry Ford's state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral yesterday.

He dominated the making of U.S. foreign policy during the Nixon Presidency, and from his position in the White House, eclipsed the Department of State and its Secretary, William Rogers. According to Kissinger, Nixon did not trust the Foggy Bottom bureaucracy, and essentially cut them out of the foreign policy loop. Kissinger utilized the CA's worldwide communications system to ensure that the diplomats never knew what was going on.

May came and went, and Kissinger asked a group of Quakers to give him another six months, saying that if he hadn't “ended the war by then, you can come back and tear down the White House fence."

We were certainly of a mind to do that in Ann Arbor. I was in no condition to travel though, as the new deadline came and went, and the fence is still up last time I saw it.

They were giddy and maddening times. Henry Kissinger was the superstar in town, dating starlets and managing the world. He managed to eliminate Secretary Rogers completely in the increasingly combative days that followed the Watergate disclosures.

G. Gordon Liddy, the stoic manly man of Watergate, has a radio show here in town. He was the director of the “Plumbers” the unit President Nixon directed to stop the leaks about the unraveling scandal. On the show, he frequently alludes to those days as wartime, and considered what he did to be honorable acts in extraordinary times. He also frequently reviles former Presidential Counsel John Dean as a traitorous and cowardly little rat.

I did not see Mr. Dean, his lovely wife Maureen, or Mr. Liddy in the coverage of the funeral yesterday. Not surprising, I suppose, but everyone else still alive was there. I see Mr. Dean frequently on the television, since he has re-invented himself and resumed a robust public profile. There appears to be nothing that cannot be overcome here, and he is often spotted driving around McLean in an imported sedan.

It was certainly disconcerting to see all those familiar faces at the Cathedral. All the surviving presidents were there, and all the living First Ladies, including Nancy Reagan, who wore enormous square sunglasses. Naturally that included the incumbent, who fidgeted visibly through the ceremony, though he seemed to calm down when his time came to mount the pulpit and say his words.

Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld were highly visible, but Henry Kissinger stole the show, just as he quietly assumed nearly all the powers of the presidency for things foreign in Mr. Nixon's second term. It was a bit odd, since Mr. Ford had fired him as National Security Advisor in the cabinet shake-up November 3, 1975, and replaced him with phlegmatic Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger's deputy.

General Scowcroft was at the ceremony, too, and looking pretty spry.

Mr. Kissinger cut short his vacation in the Dominican Republic to attend the ceremonies, so all things are forgiven in time. It is a mark of that fact that riding on Air Force One as it dipped over the Arboretum was Jimmy Carter, a welcome guest of the family of the man he beat in the 1976 general election.

He was the most notable of the guests on the final leg of Jerry Ford's trip home. As a farmer, I expect if he was looking out the window at my friends down in the Arb he would have liked what he saw. It is a nice piece of property.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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