 
WHAT IS TRUTH?

POWERS THAT WERE, POWERS THAT ARE

The shifting history and impact of communications, movements and the media

By STEVEN TRAVERS

COPYRIGHT BY

Steven R. Travers (2014)

To my good friends,

the Seltzers

Contents

Prologue: What price journalism?

Plato's Republic

Machiavelli's The Prince

These truths remain self-evident

Dress rehearsal for Communism: 18th and 19th Century European revolutions

Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto

Manifest Destiny

Charles Dickens and Mark Twain: the first modern media superstars

". . . Beyond the darkness the West"

Citizen Hearst

The radicals

The Great American Novel

The gladiators

Propaganda

Hitler, Gandhi and the lie of moral relativism

Noir

The gulags: Communism's Holocaust

McCarthyism

The great divide: Chambers vs. Hiss

Hollywood Left, Right and beyond

Checkers

Castro

The Kennedys: American royalty

Spartacus rising

The media age

The Times they are a changin'

The decade

Turmoil

Vietnam and triangulated global diplomacy

Watergate

The "church of America": Central Intelligence Agency and the Church Committee

Natural ability was closer to God. It meant you were wellborn. Bantu blacks in Africa, I John Lennon sang "Give peace a chance," and Southeast Asia "imagined" Pol Pot

America in decline

A visionary

The "Reagan revolution"

A Times to live and a Times to die

Rome is burning

Muslims and distortions of history

The dominant media culture

Socialism works. Cuba might prove that. I think it's conclusive that there have been areas

Truth, lies and the great American divide

Are liberals less patriotic?

Pejorative

Backlash

Social justice

Postlogue: Hope, but keep the change

Man will not only endure, he will prevail.

Interviews

Acknowledgements

This book is as much a result of my political philosophy and personal quest for Truth as the title suggests. Ultimately, my thanks go to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who propels me to seek Truth in a world of lies. My late father, Donald E. Travers, was an attorney, political activist and historian who taught me to look for truth within myself, not just what the news media told me to believe. This as much as anything is the impetus behind this book.

My grandfather and parents inculcated me with books and a love of reading early in my life. This desire to seek knowledge led me to the great works that influence the research found herein. Primary among these sources are Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, which forced me to confront the fact America, for all her beauty and grace, is not immune from shameful acts; John Baxter's Hollywood in the Sixties, read when I studied film at USC and was expanding my horizons; Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, maybe the best book ever written about the movie industry; Norman and Mindy Cantor's The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times; Whittaker Chambers's seminal Witness, which is as much a spiritual as well as historical tome; The Constitution of the United States; Ann Coulter's Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism; Dennis Dalton's Power Over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, which in the beginning inspired this effort; Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolf's Thinking Big: The Story of the Los Angeles Times, Its Publishers, and Their Influence on Southern California, which feeds my insatiable quest for knowledge of my native state; David Halberstam's The Powers That Be, one of the best books of all time; Godfrey Hodgson's America in Our Time: What Happened and Why, which kind of started me on my quest for political knowledge when I first graduated from USC; The Holy Bible, for obvious reasons; G. Gordon Liddy's Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy, which combined with the author's speech at USC in 1983 changed my life forever; Dennis McDougal's Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty, one of my favorite subjects; Richard Nixon's Memoirs of Richard Nixon, which I voraciously read on a hot bus in the summer of 1985 commuting from Orange County to downtown Los Angeles, the freeway criss-crossing Nixon's own Southland; Thomas Paine's Common Sense; Priscilla Robertson's enlightening Revolutions of 1848: A Social History; Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel's The Venona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors; Steven Ross's Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics; Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, read while in grade school; Theodore White's In Search of History: A Personal Adventure, a great adventure for me; Inventing L.A.: the Chandlers and their Times, a great documentary; William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, which along with the movie Patton helped teach me that there does exist evil, and in this world at least, nobody is better prepared to fight it than the United States of America.

STEVEN R. TRAVERS

USCSTEVE1@aol.com

(415) 456-6898

http://redroom.com/member/steven-robert-travers

Behold, a king shall reign in righteousness, and princes shall rule in judgment.

And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

And the eyes of them that see shall not be dim, and the ears of them that hear shall hearken.

The heart also of the rash shall understand knowledge, and the tongue of the stammerers shall be ready to speak plainly.

The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl said to be bountiful.

For the vile person will speak villainy, and his heart will work iniquity, to practice hypocrisy, and to utter error against the LORD, to make empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail.

The instruments also of the churl are evil: he deviseth wicked devices to destroy the poor with lying words, even when the needy speaketh right.

But the liberal deviseth liberal things; and by liberal things shall he stand.

\- Isaiah 32: 1-8

Prologue: What price journalism?

It would not matter if three-quarters of the human race perished . . . the important thing is that the remaining one-quarter be Communist.

\- V.I. Lenin, 1920.

During World War II, the United States and the British, led by American General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell, fought alongside Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist forces against the Japanese. It was a nasty, hard-fought series of jungle battles. To the American public, the China theatre placed a distant third in their order of importance. The first and foremost priority was to defeat Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in Europe. Second was to knock off the Japanese in the South Pacific. China was a mysterious place, its people unknown to us. Most Americans had nothing in common with them. Racism against the Chinese was still embedded and had been in America since the Chinese were brought over to build the railroads in the 19th Century. There was little concern for the humanity of the Chinese conflict. It was seen mainly as a strategic part of a global chessboard, as much a part of the new, complex, very troubling conflict with our supposed "allies," the Soviet Union, as a battle with Japan.

But Time-Life publisher Henry Luce did not see it that way. Luce's parents were missionaries and, in his youth, Luce grew up in China. He was a Calvinist Protestant, filled with the Holy Spirit. He loved the rural China where he lived. He was inculcated with a messianic desire to save souls. China was his passion, his reason for being. After returning to the United States to attend Yale, Luce began publishing Time and Life magazines. His number one priority was to promote the Kuomintang, the political-military entity headed by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, the glamorous, American-educated Madame (Soong May-ling) Chiang. A Christian women, she socialized with Luce and established rapport with General Stilwell. The personal relationship inter-twined with Luce's coverage of China. It was quickly established that Time's positive coverage of Chiang and his cause was directly related to American support and monetary contributions, both from the government and through donations, towards the Kuomintang.

The United States engaged in what was known as "gun boat diplomacy," propping up its own interests in China even as Mao Tse-tung began the so-called "Long March," an effort to turn the giant nation into a Communist monolith. When Japan invaded in the 1930s, it diverted Chiang's efforts, forcing him to fight the invaders on one front, the Communists in the hinterlands. When the U.S. was drawn into World War II by Pearl Harbor in 1941, Luce was pleased that finally his beloved China was directly allied with his home country. Through his efforts above all others, China was kept in the public eye even as America battled Germany and Japan in an "island hopping" campaign. Beyond any other considerations for Henry Luce, freeing China from the threat of Communism was his number one priority. He was a visionary who saw the world from a Calvinistic, Pentecostal perspective. He saw in this vision what China would look like if it went Red. He saw a picture of hell.

His full name was Henry Robinson Luce. He was a formal man, yet went by the name Harry. To call him Henry was a sign that one was not close to him, part of his inner circle. He was close to General Dwight Eisenhower, part of the Republican Establishment recruiting him to leave SHAEF and run for the Presidency. He was terribly disappointed when a letter from Ike started "Dear Henry."

Luce attended a British school in China, where he was constantly harassed over his Americanism. It caused him to be an uber-American, super patriotic, always wanting to prove himself and, by extension, his country. It was Luce who would coin the phrase, "American Century," that being the 20th, the great dividing point in world history. But his isolated youth left him always defensive, seeking approval, from the Rockefellers, from the liberal press that he dominated, from the effete cocktail crowd that secretly found him to be a hick. He could be rude and abrupt, graceless even.

Luce was a big thinker. Empires, armies, conquests, however, were the work of men. Individuals embodied the countries and ideas that were fought or presided over. His images of larger than life generals and statesmen during the war and the Cold War tended to be shot from below, their ribbons and medals shining, creating images of Ike, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall; not merely of mortals but gods, an oddity from such a Christian fellow.

America, in his view, was the voice of new Christianity, the Promised Land. Capitalism was an extension of his Presbyterian seriousness, in which hard work and sacrifice was rewarded. Money, the root of all evil, could be used for the cause of goodness, thus making Satan's greatest asset his enemy.

Calvinism, a Christian ideology that rose in the years after the Reformation, was his driving force. At the heart of the concept was the view that all was pre-destined. The world was engulfed by Original Sin. No man was worthy, or could "earn" entrance into Heaven by good deeds. Paying remonstrance to the Catholic Church certainly could not save him, his or his dead loved one's souls. Good deeds were not "points" on a Heavenly scorecard, but rather commandments by God to be done not to help ones' self, but to please and worship the Good Lord. Each man was an individual, tasked to do God's work, whatever it was, big or small. Luce believed his particular task to be big. His marching orders from on high were to save the world from Communism, Satan's political party. He felt he was precisely the right man, at precisely the right moment in history, with precisely the right tools at his disposal, to see this crusade to its inevitable victory.

Luce started Fortune magazine, which was a bulwark against the New Deal and the Great Depression of the 1930s. He originally thought to call the magazine Power, because it was not the money, per se, that moved him, but rather what it meant, what it could do for him and his cause. The devil's play things used against him. But it was also his upbringing. His father, Reverend Henry Winters Luce, who loved the great anti-corruption reformer, President Theodore Roosevelt, infused his son with the concept of power for moral good. Whatever money Luce and his enterprises made; whatever successes and accomplishments and accolades were awarded him; it was all for the glory of God.

Reverend Luce passed on to his son an idealized version of America, truly an exceptional nation. He grew up more patriotic than almost any American in America could be. The corruptions of China were constantly pointed out as examples of the rest of the world, while his beloved America was different. So it was that Luce left China, first for the prep school Hotchkiss, then Yale, filled with this wide-eyed idealism. His worldly, wealthy classmates belittled the poor parson's son, but Luce's drive, intelligence and will won out. Against all odds he was invited to join Scull and Bones, the most influential, powerful fraternal organization in the world; the maker of Presidents and potentates.

All in the name of God.

Luce never fell for the niceties of elite society. He ordered applesauce for his duck canard a l'orange in the fanciest of French restaurants. When questioned by snooty waiters he made it clear he knew that it was supposed to be orange, not applesauce, but he simply preferred the applesauce. He did not care if this made him look simple to others. He was on a Godly mission, and impressing those with lesser purpose was unimportant to him.

When strange "religions" began to rear their heads, as with Jean-Paul Sartre's French existentialism, he used his power to belittle them. He saw such permissiveness as antithetical to the Puritan work ethic, therefore the work of the Enemy.

In the 1930s Luce started both Time and Life magazines. It cannot be expressed too forcefully what a powerhouse these two publications were on America and the world. Prior to their inception, no single form of media impacted as these two did. Cinema was, of course, an enormous enterprise, but it was the Germans and Russians who mostly saw its propagandistic value before the Americans did. There was still a frivolity to it, Hollywood being a playground of the hedonists. Radio at first seemed to be the province of Notre Dame football, Italian operatics, and staged theatrics, at least until Edward R. Murrow's broadcasts from war-torn Europe. The New York Times was still rather regional. The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times were unrecognizable by later standards.

William Randolph Hearst used his empire to push America into war with Spain, the last act of Manifest Destiny, the launching pad of our eventual entrance into World War I and, with it, true acceptance of global power. But Hearst was a vilified man, his newspapers accused of "yellow journalism," by the 1940s caricatured in Citizen Kane.

Life was global and dazzling, introducing the world to photojournalism. Time, the first of the weekly news magazines, was hopelessly jingoistic in Luce's image, but staffed by green, young Yalies, far out-distancing previous standards of reporting by the "ink-stained" wretches of the news corps. Its ultimate accomplishment was its vision. America in the 1930s was isolationist, having quickly disrobed itself of the mantel of world power earned with victory in the Argonne. She was now mired in the Great Depression, abjectly watching German Nazism, Russian Communism, Japanese Imperialism, Italy's Fascist declaration of a revived Roman Empire, and European anti-Christianity, astride the world stage. Americans were considered backwoods hicks embracing such strange provincialisms as the KKK and the anti-Papal tent revival movement.

This was when Luce made his move. He predicted her entrance into World War II, to great criticism from a largely non-interventionist public. But to Luce, World War II was an opportunity. He saw in this conflict a great battle between good and evil. The previous Great War had been a big misunderstanding, a Baltic family squabble gone terribly wrong. Now demonic forces were loosed upon the Earth, and America alone was capable of standing up for righteousness. Luce excoriated President Franklin Roosevelt for so under-preparing America for war. He later felt one of his, and the world's greatest failures, was not holding FDR responsible for his terrible performance in the 1930s, when the New Deal did not work, and the American military was so badly demoralized and dismantled that just at that precise moment when the U.S. was most needed, Roosevelt failed the world so totally. It was to Luce and those of like mind, only America's inherent might, and the greatness of true patriots like Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur, George Patton and Omar Bradley, that the United States escaped the terrible role of historic failure at its most critical time of need.

Other worthy American journalists of the era, such as Walter Lippmann and Bill Fulbright, criticized Luce's view that America deserved total power, greater than Rome or Alexander's Greece at their zenith. His nationalism helped Time become the organ of American media, above the New York Times or even William Paley's Columbia Broadcasting System. Time hooked readers with deep reportage of major global political and military issues, then informed them of American culture with stories on religion, the theatre, film, and literature, found in the magazine's back pages. Luce, like Rupert Murdoch some 50-plus years later, also understood Middle America.

"I want more corn in the magazine," he told his staff. "Yes, I know you don't like it, you're too Ivy League and sophisticated, but we need more corn in it." He promoted the films of a young actor named John Wayne, championed by a young West Coast staffer named Jim Murray, who "apologized" to the Harvard crowd, knowing what Middle America, which he identified as pretty much everything between Pomona and Pawtucket, preferred (with the box office to prove it).

Luce saw his magazine as one that helped educate the populace and answer their questions. Early on it was polled that there were 1 million college graduates in America. Luce determined to reach every one of them. "Those editors who were blind to it – Hearst comes to mind – saw their once powerful empires dissipate," wrote David Halberstam.

Luce started Time with a Yale classmate, Briton Haddon, but after he passed away took more control. After that Time became intensely Republican. Luce was warned he was going too far, but just said Truth was on his side. Over time this caused problems with his reporters. He was intensely anti-Communist from the beginning, eventually taking a strong stance against the Soviet Union. He was a visionary who saw the war in many ways as a dress rehearsal, a preparation of sorts, for the "real" war, the struggle with Communism that inevitably followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a man of will who overcame boyhood stammering through sheer effort, and was said by golfing buddies to have the ability to drive a golf ball 200 yards not because he had a good swing (he did not), but because he willed it so.

Once Luce took a reporter named John Hersey to lunch with London correspondent Walter Graebner, theoretically to hear Graebner talk about the progress of the war. Food was ordered and consumed while Luce talked and talked and talked. Neither Hersey nor Graebner got one single word in edge-wise. Afterward, Luce berated the waiter for not taking their order, so strong-willed he did not take notice of it.

It was the age of architecture, new monuments to man in a New Greece, as written about by Ayn Rand in The Fountainhead. The great glass-and-steel skyscrapers of Manhattan were all going up, each a paen to a corporation or corporate titan: CBS, Seagram, Rockefeller. Luce ordered the Time-Life building to be constructed in minimalist fashion because it was "a building for work."

His youth invoked in him a certain innocence. Racial problems would be taken care of by a loving God in His good time, not by rabble-rousers and street liberals. He was a self-admitted "square." He knew playwrights and artists, urging them to back off their dark narcissisms in favor of, say, the Studebaker industrialist. "All wonderfully Protestant and wonderfully American," wrote Halberstam.

He was friends with his exact opposite, Joseph P. Kennedy, and enjoyed a vicarious relationship with the moral wanderings of such men. But when "Old Man Joe" suggested Luce "buy" his son Hank a "safe Congressional seat," as he did for Jack Kennedy in 1946, he reacted as if the devil himself was tempting him. Luce had no need for money personally, naturally an area of argument when he married the beautiful Clare Boothe. "Harry, are we rich or are we poor?" she complained to him. Probably agonizing over Mark 10:25 ("It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God"), he finally admitted they were rich, to which she replied, "Good, then I can redo the apartment."

When Clare bought a staggering $300,000 set of pearls, Luce became enamored over how such worldly things could captivate the human imagination. He did not see the difference between his wife's pearls and the $100 pearls worn by a staffer. He ordered the magazine to do exhaustive stories on pearls. He did not care for money, only power and influence. He put his money into Time-Life, Inc., and made sure he never gave away shares lest somebody could do a power grab against him down the road. He was not really a good businessman beyond the strict confines of his publications. He bought into oil wells for $200,000, but quickly sold for $1 million even though it annoyed the syndicate, not to mention cost him multi-millions over succeeding years. It also cost him a place in the social hierarchy, which be-deviled him. He simply despised owing money, even if it were part of a deal that would eventually pan out to enormous future returns. He looked down on financiers like Joe Kennedy and the Rockefellers. He had contempt for William Paley because his main goal as owner of CBS was not to change the world socially, which the network could certainly do, but rather to earn huge profits.

Luce was a print journalist through and through, filled with curiosity. His trips to foreign countries left his handlers exhausted trying to answer every question about the people, the landmarks and the general mood of nations, as if such a monolith existed. He resisted the chance to become a media empire of radio and television networks, which would have been very lucrative. He felt New York Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger shirked his duty because he acquiesced to his reporters instead of dominating every word of copy. He failed to see the partisan nature of Time made it slightly less "credible" in the eyes of the intelligentsia.

He was, "A curious blend of a man," wrote Halberstam in The Powers That Be. "Part sophisticate and part hick. At once shy and incredibly arrogant . . . desperately lonely," adding that the "beautiful and lovely things were sinful to him," not to be enjoyed fully. Once he admitted to Pearl Buck, herself a product of Chinese missionaries, that he hated how he felt in college because of the poverty of his youth. In this respect he was like Richard Nixon, and even a little like Dwight Eisenhower; poor children who sought out rich tycoons for golf and friendship as a way of ridding themselves of their rigid childhood responsibilities. As with Nixon, it was a way of proving himself to others. Years after attaining the heights of power and prestige, he would stand in the doorway at the appointed time, desperately afraid nobody would show for a scheduled cocktail party.

The Democrats were never going to give him anything, but when the Republicans took power in the 1950s he was disappointed at not being named Secretary of State. But he was obstinate. Eventually offered an ambassadorial post, he turned it down. His wife, now Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, became an influential member of the Eisenhower foreign policy team.

"He was an unabashed patriot in a profession which plays down overt patriotism," wrote Halberstam. "The American flag was never far from the pages of Time and Life," adding that he was no "small-time Babitt" (referencing a Sinclair Lewis novel). He helped recruit Eisenhower as President and, by extension, the partisan Dick Nixon. He was expedient in his Republicanism, seeing the larger picture of what was better for America, naturally angering much of the media, even Left-leaning in those days. But he used Time and Life as "good cop, bad cop," once exclaiming that the politics of Time juxtaposed with the photo-friendly humanity of Life meant Time made enemies while Life made friends.

Liberals found much fault with his over-ripe coverage of China, which was in his mind even more a mission than the Soviet Union, which at least had a Catholic past. In this Luce developed a conundrum, which is that he hired his best, brightest reporters for the China beat, then repelled them with his stranglehold over its coverage. He constantly rebuffed them, talking many out of resigning in protest. The money was good, the expense accounts generous, but despite his cantankerous nature, these men and women were his bread and butter. He loved them and developed his closest relationships with many of them, almost all of whom remained very fond of Harry long after leaving his employ.

"Listen, I don't pretend that this is an objective magazine," he once told his friend, the liberal lawyer Paul Ziffren. "It's an editorial magazine from the first page to the last and whatever comes out has to reflect my view and that's the way it is."

But with World War II won, many no longer shared Luce's messianic vision. There was an enormous chasm between those who believed the Soviets, our war-time allies, were a bigger threat than Hitler, and those who ranged from outright sympathy for Communism, to weariness of such an adversarial way of life. Organized labor, internationalism, the United Nations, espionage . . . these were new post-war issues. The fact the poor boy Luce was a Republican, the wealthy aristocrat Franklin Roosevelt a Democrat, was both an affront to Luce's sense of class treachery, but foreshadowed the strange twist of the 2000s, when Democrats were much associated with elitism, the old country club Republicans now "banjo pickers."

Luce took great pride in his magazine's role in de-bunking the New Deal, pointing out how it never ended the Great Depression, that only the war economy did that. Harry and Clare had dinner with the Roosevelts at Hyde Park. Coldness and anger dominated. The quasi-lesbian Eleanor Roosevelt patronized the young, pretty, Republican Clare. Harry felt that a man who violated his own personal class so completely as FDR was somehow not merely un-patriotic, but rather subversive to the point of being a kind of "enemy within." When his own editor, Whittaker Chambers later revealed incredible, shocking details of exactly that, a Communist cabal operating right there in Roosevelt's Oval Office, Luce jumped on it with both feet, probably displeased that the old lefty was not alive to publicly face disgrace.

It is also worth noting that the technological advancements allowing for the new, slick Life magazine were seismic; perhaps not as tremendous as television or the Internet, but certainly a game-changer. It also ushered in a new age of advertising, as businesses could promote their products in glossy, sexy ways as never before. People lined up for new issues of Life, the way they might wait for the arrival of a new iPhone today.

In June of 1941, Henry Luce traveled to China. Life's war photography astonished the populous. He was also the man who kept China on the front burner of the American consciousness.

After Wendell Willkie's loss to FDR in the 1940 Presidential election, Luce now stood as the most powerful Republican in the United States. His empire made him a de facto Secretary of State, the influence of both Time and Life vital to the shaping of American war opinion. He was a huge threat, as well as ally, to FDR. His interest in Asia was very visionary, even if its roots were his ancient Christian missionary doctrines formed in rural villages early in the century. He saw that the future, America's future, was at least as tied to Asia as it was to its European past.

Even before Pearl Harbor, Luce's March of Time newsreels, shown in movie theatres, depicted brave Chinese fighting the barbaric Japs. He always had a staff in China, the only major American media with real presence in the country. One of those staffers was 26-year old Theodore White, already the "doyen of the Chungking press corps," to quote Halberstam. White's talent was so obvious that he was viewed with awe.

White and Luce were diametric opposites. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who came to the New Country and forged success through education. Ted was chubby and bright, full of energy, determined to prove himself in the way immigrants did in those days. Harvard discriminated against Jews, but he got in anyway and thrived. Luce and Time discriminated against Jews, but he got in and thrived there, too. He had a chip on his shoulder and was not going to be a company man even if it was Henry Luce's company. He chose to study Chinese at Harvard and the University of Michigan, received a prestigious fellowship, and was eminently qualified for a Time magazine assignment in China that could not be denied. John Hersey, a favorite of Luce, discovered him and brought him along.

Within a short period of time journalists twice White's age were asking him advice, quoting him, deferring to him. He was a wonder. He had a way of communicating that cannot be taught, an ability to convey the truth of the situation that few writers can match. He went behind Japanese lines with the Chinese horse cavalry, earning his bona fides. But Luce found his Jewishness an oddity, his looks disconcerting. Time and Life writers tended to be handsome, a trait not unlike the tendency of J. Edgar Hoover hiring matinee idol types as FBI agents, for the image of it. The fact his family name had been Americanized probably helped him get by-lines and masthead notice. He may have called Luce "Mr. Luce" once, but after that it was Harry.

Despite being opposites, they were attracted by magnetism, power, talent. A small fissure developed regarding Chiang. Luce believed in men; George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt. White was slightly radicalized by the Depression and placed more premium in movements. Chiang could be corrupted, could be found wanting, and then what? He felt Luce placed too much emphasis on this cult of personality, this husband-and-wife team. White's father also passed on to his four children the notion that capitalism was exploitative. Teddy was horrified by the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti for anarchism.

When Luce came to China he was given the VIP treatment in Chiang's mansion. White "rescued" him and took him around the city to get the real sights and sounds, rickshaw-style. Luce's own Chinese dialect returned from his youth, and he gobbled up every scrap of street information. Luce understood the sheer romance of the times, as if viewing a Steven Spielberg film. White knew the horrors of war; he was not sequestered in a Manhattan skyscraper or Chiang's mansion. Both loved China with a passion and wanted the Japanese defeated. Luce introduced Clare to White, and he educated her on China.

After returning to New York, the Japanese attacked American forces in Hawaii. This quickly made the United States allies with China, which delighted Luce no end. He had been preparing for it, educating his readers on this issue, for years. His father, the Reverend Luce, passed away shortly thereafter. Luce took it as a joyful sign.

"Teddy," he told White, "he lived long enough to know that China and America were allies again."

This was the key moment in God's history, the time for a forceful America to stand up and defend Christianity. MacArthur used similar phraseology, stating his duty was to "save the world for Christendom." Strong men capable of strong deeds.

The United States was enamored of the war leadership of Franklin Roosevelt; the young Dwight Eisenhower; his old mentor, Doug MacArthur; the steady Washington hand, George C. Marshall. But Luce focused on General Joe Stilwell and his patrons, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Madame Chiang. Luce loved them. They were Westernized, capitalists, Madame Chiang in particular a refined Christian woman, educated in the United States. "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell had long been considered the man who would take over as a Supreme Commander, the role of General "Black Jack" Pershing in World War I, should such a conflict reignite.

But Stilwell spoke Chinese and had a strong relationship with the Chiangs, particularly Madame Chiang, who may have used her subtle feminine charms to get Stilwell to think the way she and her husband wanted him to think in the beginning. He was told sorry, he may have been better qualified than Ike, but his skill-set was so particular to China that he was indispensable there. History does not rank him among the "gods" Eisenhower and Marshall, but his performance in the China theatre was nothing less than heroic and legendary.

Luce was the one American publisher who concentrated on him. Facing extinction early, he led his forces on a desperate escape through impassable trails, allowing his army to live and fight again at a time when the Japanese looked invincible. Luce romanticized it as if describing Ivanhoe.

But after the Americans arrived in China White, given greater access and also getting closer to the truth through his own dogged research, began to see that Chiang was "not China." To Luce and most of his New York staff, there could be no disavowal of the Chiangs. They were like "family." Luce reminisced about the town of Tengchow, where he grew up a missionaries' son, and longed to return to it in peace, a Christian gift, but White reported on a floundering Chiang.

After Marshall made a mission in 1946 conservative writer Charles J.V. Murphy wrote a glowing piece about Chiang. Luce hated Communism. It was evil, Godless, freedom was not a construct within its parameters. His reporters were not sufficiently anti-Communist. The State Department asked that he hold the piece back, as they felt it might disturb the fragile coalition they were trying to keep together. He agreed and always hated himself for doing so, believing the disaster that eventually followed stemmed in part from this.

Washington bureau chief Felix Belair disagreed with Luce's jingoisms to the point where he eventually left for the New York Times.

"I don't think you'll ever be happy with us and our report," Belair told Harry. "Frankly, I think you're wasting the $150,000 a year you pay for our salaries because we're sending you what is, and you're putting in the book what you think this ought to be."

"That's it, Felix!" Luce enthusiastically agreed. "But that's the function of enlightened journalism, to lead, to put in what ought to be."

Luce knew the Germans and the Soviets used propaganda to the extreme. In fighting them, he saw no moral problem, indeed found it a moral imperative, to use boosterism on behalf of a righteous cause. For many years, at least until the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s, the Central Intelligence Agency employed writers, ran front public relations/advertising agencies, and publishing houses, to create books, magazines, articles, even graffiti and popular culturisms, to promote the value of America in the larger public mind.

Communism never took root in the United States, as it did in Greece, Italy, Spain, France; but it had its proponents. The Great Depression made people think of it as viable. Our alliance with the Soviets legitimized it to many others. But Luce understood its evil nature from the get-go. He knew it was demonic. He knew that defeating the Japanese in China was only half the battle. Waiting in the wings was the "monster" Mao Tse-tung, a stand-in for Satan himself.

The tension between Luce's home office and his China correspondents started heating up in 1943, a pivotal year in world history. In 1943, the United States began to turn the tide of the Western Front in Sicily; the Soviets held in Stalingrad ("Not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning," as Winston Churchill said), and the Venona Project began. Venona was the military intelligence intercepts of Soviet cable traffic (originally started when the Navy suspected the Soviets would cut a separate peace with the Nazis). Venona was top secret but enough of it found its way into the hands of conservative elements of American politics to begin a widespread conspiracy theory of Communist espionage into our government.

Between March of Time, Time, Life and government censorship, relations with the Nationalists reached an all-time high, but Luce's reporters were frustrated because they knew it was a front. White learned of a brutal famine in Honan Province. Against all odds he went there, saw it to be true, and reported on it. The backlash was terrible, but it forced Chiang to address the situation, probably saving 1 million lives. 3 million refugees roamed the streets. The Army insisted on collecting a grain tax that starved the peasants. Only White skillfully sneaking out photos for Chiang to see with his own eyes convinced the generalissimo of its truth. Madame Chiang demanded White's firing.

"The country is almost dying before my eyes," he wrote Luce.

Pearl Buck, who knew China from living there, wrote a scathing piece for Time that backed up White. Luce understood these reports were accurate, but saw a bigger picture. If the Nationalists lost, all was lost. Only if the government prevailed, then could the peasants be fed. In many ways it was a classic example of conservative realism vs. liberal dreaming, although it had the odd effect of emanating from true reporting . . . by the liberal.

"We believe in truth," wrote Buck, adding that America had been deeply hurt by propaganda from Berlin and Moscow. As if putting aside White's Jewish doubts, Luce wrote him, stating he needed "faith," as if God would save all in the end, and he needed to write like this. White thought this was hocus-pocus.

In 1944 he returned home, exhausted, and co-wrote a piece on China with Luce. It revealed that Chiang had held some of his best units from fighting with the Japanese in order to defend a rear guard action against Mao's forces. This was a new twist. Stilwell was winning against the Japanese. Chiang took advantage of his allies' great strength. The American government, however, held little hope that they could sustain a two-front war in China against the Communists as well as the Japanese. They began urging a compromise with Mao to stop the Japanese.

Stilwell knew Chiang to be corrupt and barbarous, treating his own soldiers as fodder to protect his fiefdom. He and White got along well, but White saw little resemblance between his reports from Chungking and the articles under his name in Time. Then, in 1944 Whittaker Chambers was named foreign editor of Time magazine.

"Chambers," wrote David Halberstam in The Powers That Be. "His name is stamped indelibly on that era. Much of an intellectual generation that came to maturity in the '30s and '40s defines itself on how it feels about Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss."

Indeed, Chambers embodies the great dividing line of American politics and journalism, as much an end of innocence as the atomic bomb and world war itself. There resides within his story, his own Christianity and the role Christ played in the monumental decisions he unleashed, that plays all of the 20th Century – his time, most apropos, was in the absolute middle of this 100-year war of ideas – directly under the shadow of a great image. That image is of Christ Himself standing next to Pontius Pilate as the Roman Governor of Israel asks Him, "What is truth?"

Truth, the great mystery, which Plato, Socrates and Aristotle bandied about; the root of all philosophy. The notion that there is a Truth, that even if 100 million people believe something, it does not mean it is True unless it actually is. It is not a coincidence that Chambers was hired and promoted by Luce, and made White's boss. Such a twisting, turning story. White was telling the truth about China. Luce and Chambers did not want the truth to come out. Why? Because they saw and pursued a larger Truth! At the heart of who was right, ultimately, is the root of this thesis, and perhaps a life-meaning way of understanding how the devil and God do battle.

"The only American in The Brothers Karamazov," Alfred Kazin wrote of Chambers. Chambers knew something that Luce, White nor barely anybody else outside the highest levels of the American security apparatus, and the American Soviet espionage wing, knew. He could not reveal it. It was top secret. Without freedom to reveal the conspiracy he knew about, he looked like a rumpled, brooding loser. Because of what Chambers knew, he suspected everybody of being in on it, including Time reporters. He was caught in the vortex of what Ronald Reagan, a great admirer of his, called "war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced Mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars . . ." It was likely Chambers influenced a later sentence in Reagan's hallowed 1964 campaign talk, known as the Speech, when he further reiterated, "If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth."

These were the kinds of big issues Chambers, who Luce loved, and Luce himself understood. Teddy White did not, in their view. White saw Chambers as an obstacle in his important personal relationship, even friendship, with Harry Luce. Luce played it coy and let Chambers be the lightning rod because the rumpled editor had the thickest possible skin. The barbs of reporters' complaints were nothing compared to the scabbards tearing Christ's flesh on the cross, the nails in his hands. This was how important he believed the conflict was, his role in it.

White was now a "partisan," Luce said. "He's given up on Chiang." When Annalee Jacoby sent back a mild interview with Chiang, which Chambers (Luce) turned into a vicious anti-Communist diatribe, he began to sympathize with the Marxists. White was not surprised with its popularity with the peasants, but more important, he saw that this popularity began to play itself out in the form of Communist military victories over corrupt Nationalist forces. He began urging they be given a place in the eventual formation of a Chinese government.

White "went rogue," so to speak, after receiving a letter from his old Harvard professor, John Fairbank, at the time with the Office of War Information in India. Fairbank had good information that the Nationalists were losing to the Communists. He wrote to White that he was "ashamed" at White's reporting (apparently not realizing his reports were completely re-written by Luce and Chambers).

"This is an epic moment and this is the time to state your case," he wrote the young journalist, who was shattered by its contents.

This was when White decided to break with Luce. He began preparations for his seminal book on the experience, Thunder Out of China. That summer Nationalist forces fell apart in what came to be known as the East Asia Retreat. White called it a "collapse." At that point Chiang was losing to both the Japanese and the Communists. FDR cabled Chiang "ordering" him up to give up command and place all faith in General Stilwell. Chiang's priorities were a disaster. His first concern was personal power, not victory over both these lethal enemies. In making this petty choice he threatened American interests and the overall war effort.

A fight ensued and, in a dastardly act of betrayal, Roosevelt re-called Stilwell, which would have been like firing Ike after the failure of the Market Garden campaign in September of 1944. White wrote a scathing piece, stating Chiang had "outlived his historical usefulness." Luce ran none of it, instead propping up Chiang. Luce wrote a 30-page missive to White, warning that his writing was hurting China and America. But in the summer of 1945, the U.S., having vanquished Germany, won the "island hopping" campaign in the Pacific, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally defeated Imperial Japan.

Even though Luce already declared White to be a de facto traitor, having gone to the "other side," it seemed at the time the Japanese surrender, which of course meant they were now out of China, would prop up Chiang, allowing him to finally concentrate on the Communists. White cabled Time that, in essence, journalistic ethics were more important than partisan side taking, even with an ally of the United States in which the stakes were enormous if U.S. interests lost in the end. It was a classic example of the difference between White and Luce, of Luce's "big thinker" outlook.

White returned to New York after the Japanese surrendered on the USS Missouri, planning to write his book about China. White and Luce were now enemies. A promised assignment to Moscow did not come. The Soviets were now a huge potential enemy. Luce did not want White writing pro-Russia pieces.

Lines were drawn in America over Communism and Communist sympathies. The 1946 mid-term elections ushered in a new era. Many war veterans (including John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon), a fair amount of them Republicans, were taking the first major cut at the New Deal. FDR was dead. The Right wanted his policies and legacy dead, too. The FBI was busy investigating espionage. The Cold War was on.

White wrote Thunder Out of China, which was a hard, truthful account of his experiences; Chiang's failings, his battles with Luce, the incompetence and harshness of the Nationalists, for all practical purposes a public relations piece for Mao Tse-tung. It was a big seller, and became a guidepost of a sort for the American and international Left. The conservatives were furious, made to look like fools and stooges for backing a loser against all obvious facts.

Luce was aghast, but worse, White influenced George C. Marshall. After the war he became President Harry Truman's Secretary of State. He lost his homeland because of that "ugly little Jewish son of a bitch." Time columnists started calling White a "pinko." Luce flat called him a Communist in an interview. To Luce it was a betrayal not just of him, his magazine and his country, but of God.

Luce returned to China after the war and was given the red carpet treatment. Chiang put up a veritable Potemkin Village for his patron, who only saw what he wanted to see. Told by Shelly Mydans of Life that in fact Mao was winning in the countryside, he brushed it off as the ramblings of a woman.

So, the lines were drawn. The news media was now a political organ and would remain so to this day. Winston Churchill made a trip to Missouri and called the new East Bloc borders the Iron Curtain. In 1947 the sound barrier was broken by a West Virginia good ol' boy named Chuck Yeager, meaning the jet age and, by inference, the nuclear arms race and space race was on as well. In 1948 Berlin became the boiling point, with President Truman orchestrating an airlift to fly supplies to the beleaguered free Germans, surrounded by Communist East Germany.

Time and Life continued to write glowing pieces about Generalissimo and Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the brave Nationalist forces, and the evil "Long Marchers" of Mao. But White's articles and book let the cat out of the bag. The elites, the intellectuals, the Leftists, the fellow travelers, now ranged from openly hostile to Chiang to openly rooting for Mao. That was not the half of it. It was now a completely partisan issue. During the war, America and China were in it together, all about defeating the Japanese. With Japan vanquished, FDR gone, and Truman battling what he called a "do nothing" Republican Congress, the Democrats had little vested in Nationalist victory. Conservative America and partisan Republicans, many of them new and shrill like the young Californian Richard Nixon, were lonely cheerleaders for Chiang Kai-shek.

Time-Life, Inc., while still the most powerful media organization in the world, lost major credibility from many who read White's accounts and determined Luce and his magazines were not telling the truth. To Luce, they were, because they were telling a larger truth that was cosmic, not merely the Xs and Os of a boots-on-the-ground military struggle. This was his China, a metaphor for the greatest struggle in the Universe, the battle for man's soul between Jesus Christ and Lucifer. To see Mao win would be to see China gone to hell, symbolic in Luce's view and, considering what did eventually happen, almost literal in scope and horror.

Slowly but surely, the train wreck that was China unfolded, to the horror of Luce and so many others, especially veterans of the China-Burma Theatre who gave their all to see the country made free. In 1949 Chiang's forces collapsed and Mao's armies won. China was lost, a Communist country, a full partner with the U.S.S.R. Suddenly some three-fifths of the world lived under Communism. It was a shock to America beyond words. A mere four years earlier the U.S. dwarfed all previous empires, from Alexander to Caesar to Great Britain at its height, in terms of power, scope, military, economic might, and global influence. They and they alone owned "the Bomb." Had they wished to determine which countries were threats and simply wipe them off the planet, they had the ability to do so with a few pushes of the button, an act of power they did not engage in that virtually all previous powers from Rome to Napoleon to the Kaiser to Hitler to Stalin to Mao, with the possible exception of the British, would almost surely have done.

Now, China meant freedom was in the minority. It was a whole new game. There was an enemy within; spies, paid informants and agents, fellow travelers, sympathizers, and outright Communist apparatchiks in the West. Robert Oppenheimer, the Left-leaning architect of the Manhattan Project, essentially shared atomic secrets with Russian scientists out of a sense of "fairness." Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sold the secrets the Russians needed to actually build and explode viable atomic and hydrogen weaponry.

What happened after that was inevitable. The adventurous Communists made their move in Korea, then 1 million Chinese crossed the Yalu River to do battle with MacArthur's Army, costing some 36,000 American lives. Korea remains divided today, the north a belligerent, nuclear-tipped enemy and constant threat. Next came Vietnam, where another 58,000 American servicemen perished. There were other battles, proxy wars, stand-offs, a missile crisis in Cuba, trillions spent on defense and intelligence, a propaganda struggle unlike any previously conceived. Had China not been allied with the Soviets, the U.S.S.R. may not have grown to the power they became, or engaged in such expansionism. China eventually went nuclear, too. India stayed neutral a long time and also went nuclear. France took a neutral stance in the 1960s. Luce may not have seen all this coming exactly as it happened, but he understood the overall risk. Beyond everything else, however, his beloved China was gone forever.

"Lovable, friendly, subservient Christian China turning overnight into 600 million angry, hostile Communist Chinese," wrote Halberstam in The Powers That Be. He was heartbroken and never had the same spring in his step again. The Republican Party picked up on the theme and went full steam ahead with it. It may have been their strongest political argument since the Emancipation, although it ultimately proved to be arguably as harmful to their cause as it was, in the short term, helpful.

No sooner were Mao's forces firing celebratory weapons into the air in Peking than Republicans like Nixon, engaged in a nasty California Senate campaign with a liberal woman, Helen Gahagan Douglas (wife of actor Melvyn Douglas), indelicately stated that she was "Red right down to her underwear." The GOP demanded to know, "Who lost China?" This rhetorical question devastated the Democrats. The answer to this question ranged: Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, the State Department, Communist infiltration, Alger Hiss, the U.N., Hollywood, the liberal media, Theodore White, all the above and more; a smorgasbord of conservative targets. When Korea broke out it was further blamed on liberal treachery. Truman's firing of General MacArthur sealed the deal. McCarthyism was underway in full swing. The Republicans, led by Dwight Eisenhower with Nixon as his Vice President, swept to victories. Luce rejoiced in all of this. His power was in the ascent, but happiness was always replaced by the tragedy of his beloved China.

In 1949, Luce heavily promoted a young preacher named Billy Graham, who was spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ across the land. Millions of broken veterans, fighting despair and alcohol after the war, found salvation in his message. Luce began to think that maybe, just maybe, this was how Christ would win, the Holy Spirit would spread and turn "swords into plowshares" across all borders and imprisoned nations until peace came through the word. He held hope of this.

Luce backed Joseph McCarthy until the Wisconsin Senator took it too far, then opposed him. It probably re-enforced his faith in Graham, the notion that real peace and victory came only by Christ defeating sin, that even American glory had limits. Even in backing away from McCarthy, Luce never had sympathy for those sacrificed to the witch hunters. They were on the wrong side of history, of the moral equation, of God.

Halberstam wrote that Luce's worst error was in "ignoring" the realities of China; first Chiang's corruption, then actually leading the political decision to simply not recognize Red China as a nation. The U.S. had no diplomatic relations with them, no embassy, and they influenced the United Nations into following suit. Chiang Kai-shek and his wife went into exile, forming a Nationalist government on the tiny island of Formosa, later called Taiwan. This has been a huge bone of contention with many supporters and detractors ever since.

Luce and the Chiangs grew old together, like silent movie stars who met every Saturday night to re-live the glory days in a Technicolor world of Gary Coopers, Laurence Oliviers and Katherine Hepburns. Luce continued to cover the Chiangs as emperors of China, a joke. Madame Chiang, with her long-stemmed cigarettes and flowing Oriental gowns, gave policy directives while her husband sat, silent and stunned by the turn of history against him.

White naturally took no responsibility, blaming Luce for both Korea and Vietnam because he printed lies in the first place. To him this was the Original Sin that led to China's downfall. He and Luce did not speak for a decade. White became a hero of the liberal media. He moved on to Europe, where everything was really happening in the 1950s, and wrote a book called Fire in the Ashes, an enormous hit. He was the Colliers political correspondent in Paris when he was told Luce was in town. They met and repaired their relationship, albeit with the caveat of time and tempered by the lessons of the past. Luce offered him a job and White wrote for Life. Cocktail party conversations between White and Luce, as like one at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, 1964, were legendary, the two pontificating while others watched in awe.

After China's downfall, Luce became a kingmaker. His magazines made Eisenhower and MacArthur out to be marble statues come to life. Luce as much as any Establishment figure was responsible for Ike being recruited to run, then win, as a Republican President in 1952. In so doing Luce had to "destroy" an old friend, Ohio Senator Robert "Mr. Republican" Taft, a fellow Yale Bonesman.

"I thought the American people should have the experience of living under a Republican administration and discovering they were not reduced to selling apples on street corners," Luce said in reference to his view of Democrats as low rent, halfway men with a grudge against capitalism.

Nixon, who did much of the dirty work, owed Luce too. When a "slush fund" scandal hit in 1952, he gave an exclusive to a young Time entertainment writer, Jim Murray, who was at the last minute given the train-stop political assignment of the V.P. candidate's campaign because he was in California where Nixon was. Nixon gave Murray an exclusive, basically his "Checkers" speech ahead of time. Murray had a huge scoop for Time, but more important to Luce, made the liberal The Nation look like fools.

Luce also destroyed Adlai Stevenson, but oddly, despite his conservatism and Christianity, he was considered a moderate of the era. This was the main reason he sacrificed Taft for Ike, although the general's popularity was impossible to beat.

White became one of the most respected journalists in American history. In 1960 he covered the mythical Kennedy-Nixon campaign. He loved JFK, despised Nixon, and admit it or not, let it show in his coverage. He wrote the first of several seminal books on modern campaigning, The Making of The President 1960, the first of a franchise, like the Rocky movies, that materialized every four years after that. When Kennedy was assassinated, White did the first real interview with Jacqueline Kennedy. It was in that piece where she compared his life and Presidency to Camelot, which was running on Broadway at the time. This became the signature description of JFK's years in office, to the disgruntlement of many on the Right.

Slowly but surely, Luce lost power and influence at Time magazine, which by the Kennedy years was actually liberal. Editors like Tom Matthews were tilting the magazine to the Left, away from Luce and the conservative Otto Fuerbringer. The 1960s - Vietnam, the free speech movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam protests, hippies, the Summer of Love, the sexual revolution, the pill – all conspired to make America almost unrecognizable to Henry Luce. His last hurrah was a spectacular set of bibliographical photo spreads of the Mercury astronauts, but that was over by 1963. By the time man landed on the moon in 1969, he was dead two years.

The last salt rubbed in his now-large wound was a 1966 Time cover story asking, "Is God Dead?" That same year, Mao Tse-tung, broken from the Soviets and possessing nuclear weapons of his own, began the peculiarly named Cultural Revolution. In all of human history, it may have been the dastardliest act ever committed by humans to other humans, certainly on par with the Holocaust and the Siberian gulags. China has never been defeated and occupied, its records ransacked. No photo teams were ever sent in to record the atrocities, as Eisenhower smartly did when Auschwitz and the camps were unearthed. There was not even a Venona Project, such as the military began to track Soviet espionage during World War II, revealed in the 1990s when the U.S.S.R. dismantled itself. All there is, is truth, and the truth is that roughly 55 million human beings were murdered, mostly between 1966 and 1976, the decade of the Cultural Revolution.

55 million human beings!

What does this mean? Who was right, and who was wrong? What is Truth? Unquestionably, Theodore White correctly wrote the Nationalists were corrupt, incompetent, and harsh under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his controversial "dragon lady" wife, Madame Chiang. If a time traveler could go back and kill Adolf Hitler, would it be morally defensible? What amount of propaganda, lies, deceit, deception, would have been considerate appropriate to stop the Holocaust? Hitler "only" killed 6 million Jews, "only" killed 12 million in the camps, was "only" responsible for 60 million people dead, in one form or another, as a result of the war he and Japan's Hideki Tojo unleashed on the world.

Consider the Central Intelligence Agency, which in the name of the American tax-paying public regularly engages in activities that can only be called lies, in order to out-smart and overcome the enemies of freedom. "All's fair in love and war," as the saying goes. Henry Luce understood America was in a war against the most wicked of enemies. He understood that this enemy was capable of murdering 55 million human beings, and in fact more; some 110 million men, women and children as of the latest count since the Russian Revolution in the Soviet Union, Red China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, the East Bloc, Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific. An international terror organization more pernicious and evil than any other, even worse than the Nazis. The greatest lie ever assembled.

If Theodore White's articles and books, as if like picking from the Tree of Knowledge, opened the door just a little more to this horror, should it not have been stopped? Is this how the devil operates, whispering in the ear of an otherwise good man like Theodore White, playing on his pride and vanity?

"C'mon, man. You're a journalist, respected, a talent. Think how yer liberal friends will love you. You'll get the Pulitzer, the Nobel, have lunch with President's wives. Besides, that old Luce, he's just a little anti-Semitic, right? Right? Screw him, Teddy." What price journalism?

Luce was a Christian, not a prophet. God, in the form of a Burning Bush or an angel or any other incarnation, did not come to him and show a picture of Mao's devastation. He only had his gut. Had he said, "This is God's plan," he would have been mocked, as George W. Bush was simply for repeating his pastor's admonition that running for President was His plan for him.

What is Satan's way? How, for instance, does he control a world in which a good man who believes in God, Dwight Eisenhower, personally makes orders that result in the killing of more humans than all but maybe five other people who ever lived?

Harry ended up losing control of his now-liberal magazine, dying while the world was in flames, an immoral abyss of drugs, sex, anti-Christianity, and war. In 2008, international sports fans arrived in Beijing, China only to see huge posters and murals of Mao Tse-tung proudly displayed in the streets. This is no different than seeing posters of Hitler in Berlin, Stalin in Moscow. The Chinese have infiltrated America and today in San Francisco's Chinatown posters of Mao are displayed. Stanford University's marching band once did a "tribute to Chairman Mao" at halftime of a football game. Displays of Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese Communist flag flew during anti-Vietnam rallies on college campuses. Ho's goatee became all the rage among American youth.

Somehow Communism, as if protected by an unseen hand diverting people from Truth, does not rank with the Nazis. Why? Perhaps it is because the international Left's policies are not all that much different from the Socialism/Marxism-Leninism of the Soviets and Red Chinese. Perhaps because there is an underlying Truth which must not be exposed, that these evil people were merely intellectuals, as with Cambodia's notorious Pol Pot, a Paris-educated schoolteacher, and their excesses are simply a picture of the unrequited Left's policy, unstopped by conservatism. How else to explain that a man like Che Guevara, a Communist doctor who used his skills to torture humans and commit mass murder, is depicted on "cool" t-shirts worn by dumbellionite youngsters? Perhaps because if the Left truly admitted how evil and pernicious Communism not only was but continues to be, it is to tacitly admit that they were "useful idiots," used to make happen the worst crimes in the history of humanity.

Meanwhile, Teddy White was the toast of the Washington-New York-Paris "cocktail courage" crowd. The man who interviewed Jackie, gave voice to Camelot. Ah, the splendor.

What price journalism? What is Truth?

Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews?

Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?

Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?

And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

\- The Gospel According to St. John 18: 33-38

WHAT IS TRUTH?

POWERS THAT WERE, POWERS THAT ARE

Plato's Republic

The unexamined life is not worth living.

\- Socrates

The study of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are interesting and begin a trend that threads through history. That trend is to gain understanding in the aftermath of tragedy. It seems that man often does his best thinking when he is desperate to do so. War brings on such desperation. The post-mortem of war provides a bounty for philosophical thought, but we also know that such philosophies can be just as dangerous as they are good. Niccolo Machiavelli did his writing in light of Italian military defeats. So did Adolf Hitler. To the extent that any "philosophers" existed in the Reconstructionist South, little good came from them in the ensuing 100 years of Ku Klux Klan terror.

The Peloponnesian War

The Greeks extracted lessons of goodness, not evil, in the disastrous aftermath of the Peloponnesian War. The Peloponnesian War is one that gets a lot of attention. It is studied at West Point. Generals like Napoleon Bonaparte, George Patton and Douglas MacArthur studied lessons from this ancient conflict, fought more than 400 years prior to the birth of Christ. The reason this battle lives on in memory is because a Greek general named Pericles took the time to analyze the Peloponnesian War in a book called Funeral Oration. It was the best seller of its time.

Thucydides, the "First Citizen" of Athens at that time, analyzed Pericles's book, which is the beginning of the whole debate on "how we went wrong," to put a modern spin on it. Thucydides then wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, detailing Athens' losing battle with Sparta from 431 to 404 B.C. Athens' mishandling of power under Pericles' leadership served as the construct on what to avoid in creating a good society. Thucydides had a pessimistic view of human nature, but Plato differed in his assessment.

Athenian Democracy gave every male adult citizen a share in direct rule. The assembly met once a month, and no requirements other than the above related were required. Its huge membership was in direct proportion to its restrictions. Women, metics (resident aliens) and slaves were not allowed membership, which meant that Athens, a city of 350,000, was ruled by 40,000 of that population. Obviously, considering these numbers, amateurs dominated rule of Athens. It was this absence of professionalism that concerned Plato.

Pericles was a leading general and dominant public figure in Athens during what was called the "Golden Age" (461 to 429 B.C.). In his famed speech "Funeral Oration," Pericles extols Athenian virtues of honor, courage and freedom, identifying the city's political achievements as a model for all of Greece. In so doing he differentiates Athens from Sparta. He cited the Spartans' "state-induced" courage. The Spartans were force-fed military discipline instead of the spontaneity of Athenian society. Pericles also had, for the time, not surprising observations of women. They should "avoid public duties and strive not to be spoken about by men."

Where Thucydides and Pericles differed was in their interpretation of the Peloponnesian corruption of Athens. Pericles maintained a Pollyanna view of Athens, preferring to still see glory, while Thucydides clearly saw attrition, embodied by the events of a civil war on the island of Corcyra.

On Corcyra, a terrible fight erupted between pro-Athenian and pro-Spartan forces. Thucydides pulled no punches, noting that, "People went to every extreme and beyond it." Fathers killed sons, and people were killed within the precincts of religious temples.

"War," said Thucydides, "is a violent teacher." His account was the crux of Plato's and Aristotle's attempt to examine the corrosive nature of humans in search of a good society. The war on Corcyra swept away civilization. People put new emphasis on words and phrases, using them to characterize degenerative deterioration of people's ungovernable passions.

Thucydides found that power operated through greed and personal ambition, the "cause of all evils." This might be the root of the phrase "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely," for in Thucydides' view power cannot be used for good. It was the search for the good use of power that lies at the heart of Plato's teachings. The contrast is between Thucydides' realism and Plato's idealism. Thucydides did not feel that human nature had much promise, even if exposed to education, once power was allowed to rear its ugly head. Plato said people can be taught perfectible humanity.

The battle on Corcyra was so terrible because it came on the heels of Athens' great achievement. By 431 B.C., Athens was at its height. Athenians had come to believe their society was vastly superior to all others, and to any in history. The lessons of Corcyra can be applied in the desultory way in which they have been repeated, over and over, throughout the history of man.

At Corcyra, Pericles depicted a complete breakdown of order. This anarchy came as such a shock because it was felt that Athens had achieved a society that would withstand such assaults on Democratic values of goodness and decency.

As Thucydides wrote, the civil war instructed people on barbarism. Individual, small groups and cabals were formed at Corcyra, each driven by a "violent fanaticism." Thus was the Corcyrian dilemma, where local warlords abandoned all previous identification with Athens, with Greece, and with Democratic values. Instead they recognized the creation of small fiefdoms within their control, to be protected because it was in their immediate self-interests.

The Greeks tried to make some sense of Corcyra. They came to a pretty interesting conclusion, one that may have been fairly revolutionary. They determined that Pericles, who helmed the losing campaign, was as responsible as anybody they could try to pin it on. Since he was a military commander, trained not in civil skills but rather in the art of war, then it stood to reason that civilian values must be charged to civilians.

There is much to admire in Pericles's "Funeral Oration." Since Athens had lost the Peloponnesian War, Pericles was the scapegoat. However, certain facts seem to contradict the scapegoating of the general. Pericles found much value in military virtues of honor and courage. However, it was a strict adherence to such codes of military behavior that was attributed to Sparta's victory. The Athenians were said to have lost because they placed too much value on individual creativity. Pericles wrote about a post-war scenario: "When our work is over, we are in a position to enjoy all kinds of recreation for our spirits."

This is the refrain of military/political planners, the idea that the hard work must be done now so that future generations can enjoy freedom. Pericles demonstrates some useful ideas about society and economics when he wrote ". . . our love of the things of the mind does not make us soft. We regard wealth as something to be properly used, rather than as something to boast about. As for poverty, no one needs to be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it."

Pericles also makes an interesting point in light of the Hindu observations on fear of the unknown: "Others are brave out of ignorance; and, when they stop to think, they begin to fear." In other words, bravery and fear are often very close to being the same thing. True bravery, Pericles said, is found when a man has full knowledge and meets the challenge head on.

Pericles makes the point that Athens was a city of kind people with charitable hearts. Their frequent military invasions were seen as the result of an adventurous spirit. The colonialist philosophy lives in Pericles's words, but the Greeks did not invent such an attitude. Nations had been plundering each other for centuries prior to his time. But the theme of "charitable hearts" is worth examining. Pericles seems to be saying that his people have so much to offer; once the war is over the survivors will surely benefit. This is a theme of power repeated many times.

Pericles was prescient of revolutionary spirit when he wrote, "The people who have the most excuse for despising death are not the wretched and unfortunate, who have no hope of doing well for themselves, but those who run the risk of complete reversal in their lives, and who would feel the difference most intensely, if things went wrong for them."

What he foretells with this statement was the nature of revolution and uprising. Throughout history, the dispossessed, feeling they had nothing to lose, were the ones who rose up and attempted to overcome their suppressors. Pericles herein tries to attribute nobility to the Athenians who fought, as if to say that they were placing themselves at risk in order to achieve a noble cause. This falls short in light of the fact that the Athens of Pericles's time was an invader more often than a defender, and the hapless chose to fight because life offered little hope.

Almost as an afterthought, Pericles made his observation of women, in particular the widowed brides of dead soldiers.

"Your great glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you, and the greatest glory of women is to be least talked about my men, whether they are praising or criticizing you," he wrote.

Where Pericles found much to glorify in "Funeral Oration," Thucydides recounted the disaster of the Peloponnesian War, focusing on the Corcyrean civil war. The island was split into rival factions, one siding with Athens and the other with Sparta. Thucydides saw these factions as a microcosm for Greek society. Terrible acts of retribution and revenge were committed upon varying ethnic, religious and political groups. They were singled out as enemies by the people who had enough of an upper hand to single them out, group them together and commit atrocities upon them. All semblance of justice and order went out the window. The Corcyreans killed many who they said had conspired to overthrow Democracy, but in reality the killings were done on the grounds of personal grudges over money and other mundanities.

Eventually, the events on Corcyra spread through the whole of the Hellenic world, with Democrats trying to "bring in" Athenians, and oligarchs trying to "bring in" Spartans. Strange bedfellows are created during war. Rival factions, considered enemies during peace, were joined in an effort to extract ruthless changes in government and the social order, without respect for reason or justice. These collaborations had a calamitous effect, and as Thucydides noted, the worst of human nature resulted in great savagery. Where the deprivation of people's daily wants occurs, Thucydides wrote, "it brings most people's minds down to the level of their actual circumstances."

The aftermath of Corcyra was terrible because of the slow-moving news. Word spread to other cities, and the violence was exaggerated, the lies tailored to create zealous hatreds that played themselves out depending on individual situations. Words were changed to fit needs. Descriptions of thoughtless aggression were changed, now regarded as courageous. Prudence, on the other hand, was said to be cowardly.

At the same time, Thucydides made note of "fanatical enthusiasm," which was said to be the mark of "a real man" by those who would use the term to disguise and legitimate their violence. Plots, counter-plots and conspiracies created fear and mistrust everywhere. Therefore, people used this as an excuse to lash out pre-emptively. Families were torn asunder. Partners were formed in crime, not ideology. Acts of propaganda and misinformation were made to reduce the effect of opponent's speeches and good acts.

Revenge became greater than self-preservation, and pacts between groups were dissolved as soon as they no longer served respective purposes. Treachery was considered a virtue. Villainy was called clever, while honesty was called simple-minded.

So hostile did sides become that fear overcame all subsequent efforts to create peace. Poor people, seeing a breakdown in law and order, used the revolutions to rob the rich. Envy overcame all control of passions.

In the wake of Corcyra and the awful conflicts that followed, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle tried to make sense of things, to define what "just" really is, and to address fundamental questions about the true nature of man.

Attica was the leading Greek "city-state" during the fifth century B.C., and Athens was its principal city. Attica was about the size of Rhode Island. The term "Democracy" has been coined in describing Athens, while Sparta was said to be an "oligarchy," but Athenian political rights were limited, not to mention diluted.

In Athens, citizens composed of 160,000 men, women and children, but among this group, only 40,000 adult males had political rights. "Outlanders" included 96,000 non-Athenian Greeks, Phoenicians and Jews, 24,000 of them alien adult males, but none had political rights. However, some enjoyed wealth and economic rights, and were important members of Attican society. There were some 100,000 slaves, and they had no rights. Plato and Aristotle saw slavery as a simple fact of nature.

Athenian slavery

"The lower sort of Mankind are by nature slaves," Aristotle stated. Most slaves were "imported barbarians" who served as domestics, or as assistants in business.

There is no disputing that the Greek philosophers were intelligent men whose teachings have had an enormous impact on the world for thousands of years. They were legitimately great men. Yet, they not only tolerated, but also advocated as natural, slavery. Considering this imprimatur of legitimacy, one can see how slavery existed as a thriving institution for so long. In light of the fact that we now see it for the evil it is, the entire question of moral relativism must be addressed to their teachings, even their own pointed efforts to address that very question. Slavery, and the subjugation of women, were both considered being the manifest way of human nature in Greek society.

The teachings of these philosophers, a profound part of upper crust English education for years, helped justify British colonialism. The English simply acknowledged themselves as superior to the dark-skinned peoples who they ruled over in an empire that never saw the setting of the sun. The facts justified their worldview. In India, the British thoroughly ruled the sub-continent despite being outnumbered 400,000 to one. Their superiority of intellect, their ability to organize and to create order where chaos reigned, presented themselves as justifiable facts that needed no commentary. It was only after generations of natives were exposed to Western religion, teaching and manners that they even hinted at revolution. This lesson was the reason American slave owners frowned on teaching them how to read.

If Plato argued about true justice in his day, then he must also be held accountable for the blinders that kept him from protesting Greek slavery. An honest accounting of righteousness is imperative no matter how many sacred cows are pierced. In its place are lies, large and small, that is at the heart of evil.

Progress eventually created racial equalities that make such obtuse divisions of class and justifications based on superiority passé. Getting back to the scientific aspect of human progress, it seems that over time races simply evolve. In the rhythm of human history, where time is immemorial, "white superiority," if ever a reality, is just a phase, not a timeless fact. Of course, the slavery question historically was not always race-based, and in Plato's day slaves came in all shapes and colors. The accident of nationality and military weakness was much more prevalent in creating slavery than was race.

Antigone

The Greek name for "city-state" was polis, or polity, and they had a very high rate of public involvement, which contrasted with Sparta, also known as Laconia, which had a population roughly the same size. Sparta was a military society, while in Athens 20,000 men were on the political pay roll, while 6,000 comprised the armed forces.

There were no particular requirements for membership in the Athenian Assembly, which met once a month, with 6,000 people considered a quorum. Any citizen could address his grievance to the assembly. Within the assembly, the agendas were prepared either by the Council of Five Hundred (the Boule, or ballot) or an "inner council" of 50 men. The assembly controlled all legislation, administration and justice. The court system consisted of 101 to 1,001 men, most of whom were amateurs. Plato was a critic of the system, his main complaint being the lack of professionalism.

Plato's philosophy was given voice in Sophocles' tragic play, Antigone. The play addresses three main questions. First, whether and under what circumstances it is legitimate to challenge authority. Second, weighing social order with conscience. Third, the compatibility of man-made law and divine law.

All of Plato's "crisis of conscience" questions are colored by his acceptance of the "natural" state of slavery. Sophocles lived from 495-406 B.C., and is considered one of history's great dramatists. He wrote 120 plays, 96 of which won first prize in dramatic competitions against such esteemed playwrights as Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes. Antigone was part of a trilogy that also includes Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. So popular was Antigone that Sophocles was named a general.

The play opens in Thebes after a conflict in which Antigone's two brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, killed each other. Two themes are immediately apparent. One is the fratricidal violence that the Peloponnesian War created, and the other is the role of women. Antigone is left without brothers, and she is a woman in a society in which women are regarded in the highest esteem if they just stay silent.

Creon, ruler of Thebes and the uncle of Antigones (and her dead brothers) orders Eteocles honored because of his loyalty, while Polynices is to be thrown to the dogs because he plotted Creon's overthrow. Antigones vows to defy Creon and bury Polynices, citing her defiance as an adherence to divine law vs. Creon's "profane" law. Antigone therefore introduces us to a heretofore-unknown concept: civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is defined in Antigone for its contrast to ordinary law breaking, and foreshadows the later actions of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Creon sees things differently, of course (what is drama without conflict?). He asserts that his word is the law, citing the importance of political stability vs. anarchy. The play winds itself around the merits of this theme, and predictably demonstrates that Creon has too much hubris, or arrogance, against the gods. The conclusion, as demonstrated by the chorus representing public opinion, is that ruler's must demonstrate good sense and moderation. Antigone is seen as a cautionary tale (after the fact) against the excesses of the Corcyrean civil war and its subsequent revolutions. It also breaks new ground by showing a woman to be strong and willing to speak up.

Creon's tyrannical rule parallels his view of women, who he says need to be kept under wraps. Antigone has also been compared to "Funeral Oration," with Pericles shown as the military commander who may have chosen not to highlight the result of military defeat, but nevertheless espouses Democratic leadership. These two works have been used over time to demonstrate moral command in the military.

Plato read Antigones and "Funeral Oration." He was greatly influenced by them. He incorporated Pericles's value of bravery, which has a mystical quality, into a vision of the future in which political leaders would have a vision of higher law. But he took Pericles further by advocating equality for women (like Antigone) who demonstrated equal intelligence with men.

Socrates

Plato, who authored Republic, is seen as the most influential of the "big three" because he was the protégé of Socrates and the mentor of Aristotle. But to understand all them one need retrace their steps back to Socrates. Socrates asked a simple enough question: "what is the best way for humans to live?" This got him in hot water.

Influenced by the Hindus, Socrates sought knowledge through life's journey, and in another book by Plato, Apology, Socrates offered up truth as a method instead of a possession, and wisdom as awareness of one's own ignorance.

This gets to the nature of hubris, of people arrogantly informing other people of "facts." "I possess the knowledge that..." or "The fact that such-and-such is true is within the province of my knowledge." It lacks Socratic self-deprecation.

Mohandas Gandhi certainly made much of his "awareness of his ignorance." He used it as a powerful tool of persuasion, getting people to do the right thing by "teaching him" what Gandhi knew was the moral way, then giving them credit for it. The Orientals might call this "saving face." Western political leadership has been less concerned with letting their enemies (and friends) save face.

In Plato's Symposium, Socrates says the meaning of love, which comes from self-knowledge, occurs when man seeks not simply to know goodness, but embraces good with genuine love for it. This is an extraordinary point, and worth repeating. To know real love only, man must not simply know goodness, but he must LOVE goodness.

This allows man to expand his love to many. Man will love selfishly, and while love of family and friends is admirable, many criminals and immoral men have loved their mothers and wives. Socratic love is a love of good things, even if there is no payoff to it. The love may be of a distant thing, or in the most telling case (and one picked up on by Christianity), love of ones' enemies (". . . I forgive those who trespass against me . . .").

Socrates lived from 470-399 B.C. and was the leading philosopher in Greece. Much of his teachings were reflected in Platos's writing. His question about which course of life is best is discovered in Plato's Gorgias. Socrates eventually accosted businessmen and important figures in Athenian society on the street, asking them out of the blue to answer his question.

Since many asked the question were corrupt in one way or another, Socrates's questioning had the corrosive effect of embarrassing them. After developing a big following among Athens' youth, he was in 399 B.C. placed on trial for impiety and corruption of his followers. Plato's Apology describes the trial, and he personally begged his mentor to apologize, or admit wrongdoing, which presumably would have ended the trial. Like Jesus of Nazareth some 334 years later, Socrates chose the path of righteous martyrdom instead. He was given hemlock that ended his life.

Socrates made an important point in differentiating philosophy from religion when he said that philosophy seeks the truth, while religion claims to possess it. Socrates's truth is dialectical, and found through dialogue. Thus, the "Socratic method," which consisted of intense question-and-answer sessions with his students that probed each other for the deepest meaning of things. If you walk into a law school classroom, you likely will see the Socratic method in action, with a professor who is not content with his students reading the cases, reciting them in writing, and understanding what the law is. The verbal back-and-forth in law school forces students to explain and analyze the law, which serves to deepen understanding while getting them to question both sides of the issues.

The Socratic quest for "goodness, beauty, justice and freedom" becomes revolutionary when it is considered that Socrates was not advocating this simply to people in a benign setting. Like Christ he was confronting the power structure at great, and ultimately mortal, danger to himself. Socrates is considered the "father" of Democracy. Socrates' willingness to die for what he believed in, even though he had much to lose, influenced the American Founding Fathers who put their lives on the line, too.

"The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates declared. While Socrates said this to explain his "higher obligation" to seek truth, to exhort others to do the same, and like the Hindus to view as most important the "big questions," the concept that such bravery, intellectual curiosity and moral righteousness are the requirements of all is far too demanding. Either Socrates is asking this of all people, which is unrealistic, or he is saying that only those with the moral and intellectual compass to take on his challenge are worth being on this Earth. Certainly many people live their lives without thinking these deep thoughts, but they contribute to the love and beauty of humanity.

The Greeks were quite obsessed with love in all its forms. Their poetry, art and mythology often centered on love. Pausanias defined love as physical lust, not an unusual determination for the Greeks. They loved the human form and worshipped it in a narcissistic way. The Olympic Games derived from this.

Aristophanes saw in love the romantic elements of searching for one's "better half," but his explanation for this term is found in mythology. In mythology, humans originally were a combined male and female form, but Zeus, jealous of human happiness, split them in half.

However, the second part of Aristophanes' definition bears value to this day. He said love came about when, after the separation, one half seeks to pursue the part that "completes" the whole.

Socrates refuted both definitions, calling Pausanias's definition shallow because it ignored romance in favor of sex, and Aristophanes's version because it was too selfish. Love is found not in lust or in satisfying our personal needs for it, but in loving goodness. Socrates also attributes a metaphysical quality to love. That is that all reality is perceived as good, while evil has no reality. Had Socrates watched Indians being burned to death during the Spanish Inquisition, or Jewish farmers starving in the Russian countryside during the 1930s as a result of forced collectivization, he may have rescinded his theory on the reality of evil. It would seem that the recent Peloponnesian War had driven home to him the reality of evil, but Socrates was not a military man and there were no TV cameras to bring the atrocities into his home. Still, he read Thucydides's horrid descriptions of the civil wars and revolutions. He was still able to quantify evil in some safe place that is not part of his reality.

Socrates, like the Hindus, regarded physical love as the first step on a ladder, but ultimately insufficient. Evil is an illusion to him. Self-mastery is achieved by loving, which is noble and true.

Plato's Republic is the "seminal text of the Western philosophical tradition," and receives extraordinary attention in all study of Western Civilization. Plato picked up on Socrates's fundamental issues (malleability of human nature, origins of right conduct, qualifications for exercising political power, reasons for obedience to the law, and mutual obligations in individuals and the state). He did this to be alert to the high purpose and consequence of such an undertaking, his mentor having been put to death for his insightful teachings.

Plato differed from Hinduism in that he envisioned the state as an agent of virtue, whereby the Hindus saw it only as a coercive force. Plato must be considered quite the optimist, considering that it was the state that executed his friend and teacher. His willingness to still maintain optimism for the state, however, lies at the heart of his ideal world. To succumb to vengeful thoughts because of Socrates would not differentiate Plato from those who committed atrocities at Corcyra, and it was Corcyra and the Peloponnesian War that Plato wanted to learn from in order to make a better world.

At the heart of the state's role is education, and the teaching of "right conduct." Current educators differ from this, choosing to legally remove God from the classroom and insisting that teachers are not there to instruct in values, or tell the children what the difference between right and wrong is. In Republic, Plato pointed out that Socrates's view of "right conduct" was not based on religious theory.

Polemarchus did find right conduct as emanating from religion, while Thrasymachus felt that only the strong had the will to the right thing. Socrates then says that justice consists of "right ordering of the whole, with no part usurping the functions of any other part and with reason ruling over all." One could imagine some Red Guard revolutionary espousing these words at a show trial. Perhaps it is just esoteric.

Socrates obviously was dissatisfied with Athens, which Plato said was a "ship of state" steered by demagogues, misled by passion and deceived by illusion. What Plato foresees is an educational system devised to create leaders who seek and cultivate "ultimate truth" more than their own common interests. The Hindus sought such qualities within the individual, but felt that achieving it was the result of self-discipline. In other words, it was a self-taught virtue. Plato was convinced it could be taught. The Hindus simply did not believe political power could be wielded wisely, but Plato believed in the possibility. In Republic, Plato delivered dialogue between Socrates and his questioners, and as they say, everybody has an opinion.

Polemarchus focused on "giving each man his due," based on the retributive justice embodied by the phrase an "eye for an eye." Socrates told him that while this may be expedient, it is never just to harm another person. What constitutes "harm" is not fully explained, and it is not therefore established that Socrates somehow infers criminals not be punished. But beyond the language one surmises that he has a deeper meaning in mind, based not on letting wrongdoers off scot-free, but hopefully based on a system of justice that is "corrective" in nature.

Thrasymachus said that "might makes right," that what is right is based on what is in the stronger party's interests, and that injustice brings happiness to those who practice it. Socrates recalled the Hippocratic Oath by making reference to the role of physicians, stating that the ruler must endeavor not to help himself but his people (or patients). What is imperative is the concept that the ruler possesses the scientific knowledge to do the right thing, just as a doctor must. Thus was born the concept of the professional ruler.

Glaucon wanted Socrates to more completely refute Thrasymachus' premise, and advocated the idea that justice is not a spiritual value but the result of expedience, and at its heart is the desire by the weak to seek protection from the strong. This varies somewhat from Socrates, who seems to think that a "trust me" philosophy is possible. But Glaucon wanted safeguards, and said that if there is a "social contract," then it must be codified into law. Socrates replied that the state has an "appetite," but his idealism was so obvious because he somehow thought that appetite would naturally find the right order of reason, spirit and desire. He thought this could happen by virtue of three "waves." First, he held the revolutionary idea that qualified women should hold office, that the nuclear family and private property must be abolished in order to reinforce its adherence to the common interest, and that philosophers should rule.

These ideas were highly dangerous to the Athenian power structure. It helps explain why the man was given the hemlock. His idea for women was admirable, and certainly gave credence to Socrates' morality as being universal (as opposed to the apathy held apparently by all towards slavery). Antigone helped to influence his view regarding women, because the play gave voice to a large class of widowed women (even though Antigone lost brothers, not a husband, but the point was the same). Pericles said these women should just stay quiet, but he probably advocated that more to relieve his own conscience as the commander who ordered many of their husbands to their demise, rather than addressing some kind of quiet strength of women.

Socrates's views on the abolishment of private property and the break-up of the family were dangerous. It is instructive to understand the nature of Greek Democracy as advocated by the "big three." Socrates's Socialistic views are discredited theories, some of which are found in Communism and totalitarian despotism. What could have made Socrates advocate the break-up of the family? Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse-tung and Joseph Stalin advocated an allegiance to the state that caused many cases of children "turning in" their parents. It is hard to think of anything more repugnant. One questions Socrates on a personal level. Did he want to avoid the kind of anarchy that occurred in Corcyra, where "fathers killed sons"? Or was Socrates a homosexual who, because of his condition, wanted to dismantle one of the rocks of society because he would never be the head of a nuclear family? What was his relationship with his students? When Athens executed him for "impiety" and "corrupting the youth," were they referring to his sexual antics?

Socrates was considered a great philosopher and a man whose values are inculcated into our most cherished political structures. What is important to understand out of this is that Socrates was the first of the three "superstar teachers," as we might call them. Those who came after him were allowed the chance to learn not just from his good ideas, but to understand his mistakes, as well.

Plato had poor experiences with Athenian Democracy, which he considered to be a mob. It was that mob mentality that led to the death of his mentor. Plato said that Democracy failed to distinguish between freedom and license; catered to desire ahead of civic duty; and the central theme of his and Socrates's teachings was that it was run by opinion, not knowledge.

What would Plato say about opinion polls, and how pols use them to make their decisions? What would he have thought about the "one man, one vote" concept of Jeffersonian Democracy? Obviously, people do not determine what is "right" and therefore create "genuine knowledge" by virtue of a vote. Plato's teachings have a Quixote-like quality to them. A realist like Winston Churchill, not prone to chasing windmills, gave voice to the anguished hopes and cries of Plato by simplifying the whole concept.

"Democracy," said Churchill, "is the worst form of government known to man, with the exception of all other forms of government known to man."

But Plato lived some 2,400 years before Churchill, and was not privy to all of Democracies' alternatives. He knew of military rule and the kind of autocratic power imposed by kings. He lived in a time of slavery, and was aware of the Egyptian-Jewish dilemma in the Middle East. But he never saw Communism or National Socialism. Would a modern Plato have accepted the Churchillian compromise?

He advocated meritocratic rule. Democracy was a deficient ship of state, physically imposing but shortsighted. If we were to see Plato's system put in place today, instead of elections a group of wise men would create a test, like the bar exam for lawyers or the medical exams given by each state to doctors. But how effective would that be? Joseph Mengele, the "Angel of Death," was a brilliant physician but obviously he chose to harm many patients in the death camps. Few in American society have a worse reputation than lawyers, every single one of whom graduated first from law school, then passed the bar.

The tests can be manipulated. Plato would say that committees could be formed to study indiscretions, just as those who violate medical and legal ethics are subject to inquiry. Plato makes the metaphor of the "ship of state," stating that the ship (demos) must be steered by a navigator who knows the science of the seas, as opposed to a crew that makes it decisions based on whim and opinion.

Plato's "knowledge" is presented as stages of cognition. The first stage involved uncritical acceptance of the known world. The next stage was a critical examination of society. Next was advancement from opinion to knowledge. Plato said that if man could pursue knowledge of abstract reality as in the study of mathematics and astronomy, why not politics? Finally, he saw a perception of people's humanity, defined as "seeing each other in ourselves."

Like Socrates, Plato herein grasps at things that are either too difficult for most to fully comprehend, and he is opening the door to some potentially dangerous concepts. Where Plato is given the benefit of the doubt is in reducing the area of "knowledge" that he seeks to develop, as within the sphere of natural law.

Plato's concepts are seen as precepts of Communist "re-education," as practiced especially by the Red Guard and Pol Pot. These re-education camps made no attempt to say they were teaching ideology, but tried instead to teach Marxist-Leninist doctrine as simple fact, not to be disputed. But Plato was not advocating lower taxes, or separation of church and state, or decision-making power shared between a chief executive and his legislature. Plato was keeping his "knowledge" within a narrow area of right and wrong. Much of politics is driven by economics and changing times. A large, diverse country like America may have different political and economic needs than a small, educated, homogenized society like Sweden. Plato's nostrums link America and Sweden together as being under the umbrella of natural law. In both countries, moral leadership is beneficial to the people. Leaders not only must not be allowed to get away with corruption, but they must be taught not to. Where modern Democracy differs is that we assume corruption will exist, and therefore the emphasis is on the people more than the government. It is the people who, given free choice, have safeguards against these wrongs. Plato thought it was possible to make these safeguards unnecessary, or at least secondary, to "facts." The wonderful documents of freedom are willing to use language like "we hold these truths to be self-evident" and "unalienable rights." Again, the key point is that Plato is getting to the rights of man, or the "pursuit of happiness," whereas the Marxist-Leninist "facts" are entirely worldly, economic and driven by the lowest common denominators.

While Plato's natural law may not address the right or wrong of the Stamp Act, it conceivably could address something like abortion. If Plato advocated goodness and justice, would he justify killing unborn children? Or would he favor the rights of mothers who choose not to be mothers? Would his cognitive reasoning allow him to address the consequences of people's actions in such a case? Cleansing truths enlighten the reader by virtue of obvious things that need no commentary.

Plato uses the "cave allegory" to describe cognition. When man lives in the cave, he fears all outside the cave. Only after leaving the cave to discover the "truth" of life outside its environs does the man gain the credentials for leadership in the cave. Plato does ask man to question the truth, for only in so doing does he separate it from illusion. Only those who have "left the cave" wield power wisely.

However, Plato seems to have missed an important point. Why are only some men able to leave the cave? Instead of power being given only to a select few who leave the cave and return a better man for it, why should not all the people be allowed to leave the cave and experience the truth that exists outside it?

Polemarchus felt that justice is to help friends and harm enemies. The Chinese adopted the latter part of his statement in their famous phrase, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Socrates did not agree with the part of justice that seeks retribution, since this involves harming others, even if such harm is punishment of a criminal for a crime.

Thrasymachus had a more Machiavellian perspective, equating justice with the interests of the stronger party.

Socratic justice demands correct perception of interests by the ruler. Thrasymachus said rulers must have knowledge and training, like physicians, in order to make the correct decisions. Socrates added to the physician analogy by stating that the ruler not only knows what is "right" but has an interest in the subject's interests.

Thrasymachus said the ruler must exploit his subjects to his own advantage, but

Socrates disagreed with the exploitation of Thrasymachus, stating that justice is based purely on acting on the advantage of the subject. Thrasymachus, on the defensive, and having been proved on the wrong side of the moral equation, actually defends injustice. Socrates said justice is balance, while injustice has no measure or limit. Picture the image of the lady balancing scales of justice in each hand.

Thrasymachus felt injustice is a source of strength, superior in power to justice.

Socratic injustice fosters weakness. Here Socrates makes great sense. History has shown many unjust rulers who gained power through strength, but ultimately that strength is a weakness.

"Only fair treatment can make man friendly and of one mind," said Socrates in one of his more profound statements.

Thrasymachus replied that injustice brings happiness because it brings one more than one's fair share of power and wealth, but Socrates said justice rather than injustice brings happiness. This is an interesting concept in examining the mind of the despot, who has all the worldly things that he likes, including money, access to women, entertainment, and power. But is he happy? His constant excesses might be a vain attempt at finding satisfaction that he never achieves. Mahatma Gandhi eschewed many worldly desires available to him, but by all accounts he achieved satisfaction. What about psychopaths and mentally unstable people?

Glaucon finds a moral relativism in Thrasymachus's argument that he agrees with. Justice, he says, is not universal but rather based on changing laws, and is demanded only by the weak, who lack the power to commit injustice. He says anybody who gains power then acts in self-interest, and in fact possesses the kind of wealth and cunning required to do injustice and get away with it. Such cynicism, unfortunately, has its pockets of truth. Unjust people will commit unjust acts on anybody if they have to. They are not going to "do the right thing" just because those they wrong are friends. Doing things in a just manner can be nothing more than a strategy. Simply wronging people for no reason has no good purpose. Impressing others with good acts often works as an advantage, but when push comes to shove there will be no sacrifice in favor of selfish interests.

Adeimantus says Socrates "insists that the current use of education to indoctrinate justice and virtue is a farce . . . "

"There will never be a finer saying than the one which declares that whoever does good should be held in honor, and the only shame is in doing harm," says Plato on page 155 of Republic.

Socrates, however, is an interesting study because he focuses on enemies, not just friends. It is obvious that in his time, harsh justice and vengeance were doled out upon "enemies," but Socrates seems to find the greatest nobility in forgiveness. For this he should be accorded high status. This is the basis of Christian doctrine. Somehow these tenets were never given much credence in Islam, which had almost 1,000 years of hindsight and analysis of Socrates prior to the formation of this "religion of peace," yet chose to sever hands and tongues for acts of petty thievery. 1,500 years of progress later, these acts are still common in their "justice system."

Res ipsa loquiter.

The Hippocratic Oath, written by the physician Hypocrites (460-377 B.C.) states, "I swear by Apollo Physician . . . that I will carry out, according to my ability and judgment, this oath . . . I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrongdoing. I will keep pure and holy both my life and my art. In whatsoever houses I enter, I will enter to help the sick, and I will abstain from all intentional wrongdoing and harm."

Plato took this oath and applied it to politics. So where do we see this philosophy in American justice? We find a mixed bag. In the U.S., we are prevented from administering "cruel and unusual punishment." Any prisoner is allowed access to competent medical care. America used to have chain gangs, but today such punishment is no longer found. Prisoners are not placed in the "hot box" like in the film Cool Hand Luke. However, we allow capital punishment. At some point we felt that the liberalism of Socrates and Plato was going too far. Placing a man in prison might not be doing "harm" to that individual, but what would Plato have us do? Would he simply apply a "hands off" policy to criminals?

What would Hypocrites say about abortion? Given a healthy, pregnant woman who is carrying a healthy child, would Hypocrites find that cutting up the woman, reaching into her, removing the life, and rendering it lifeless, is "abstaining from all intentional wrongdoing and harm"?

Would Hypocrites find legitimate argument in the concept that to abort a child provides "freedom" to women? Would he give credence to the countless tales of "free" women who live lives of agony and regret for 60 years with the memory of the child they aborted? The child who by then would have given them memories of high school proms, college graduations, weddings, grandchildren, and all the other joys of life? Are there really two sides to this issue?

At the heart of the criminal justice system advocated by Socrates and, to a lesser extent, by Plato, Socrates insisted that to punish "bad men" only makes them "worse men." Somehow Socrates seemed to think that the unpunished criminal would not do crime again. However, he modified his stance somewhat on page 148 of Plato's Republic when he says, ". . . one should avoid doing wrong <or injury> with more care than being wronged . . ." At least here Socrates allowed that criminals should be punished, albeit the punishment should not exceed the crime.

As Plato then pointed out, thankfully, these concepts of non-injury are ideals, not "attainable in the Earthly republic." His ideal, while beautiful, is simply not one we are not even close to living in. We simply must deal with the world as it is presented to us. The pessimistic part of this is that 2,300 years after Plato's time, we are really not any closer to the "non-injury" system than in his day.

Plato finally adhered to these realities after letting the argument play out, when he admitted the necessity of war (as a defensive measure), capital punishment, and the cultivation of military attitudes.

One gains a greater understanding of Plato's sense of idealism in his vision of three cities. He finds contemporary Athens to be corrupt. His Republic envisages the ideal. Finally, he outlines an "eternal city" that exists as a "transcendental idea."

In Athens, Plato was dissatisfied by the wide swings of extreme forms of government, ranging from Democracy to oligarchy. Plato wrote that while he initially yearned for a public career, he became disillusioned by such a prospect as time went by. Plato found the Democracy of Athens and the oligarchy of Sparta, despite their differences, both sharing in an arrogance of power. He was particularly disgusted with the execution of Socrates. It was Plato's exposition of corruption of power within Democracy that the American Founders observed when they drew up their "checks and balances" in the Constitution.

It is in the earthly ideal that Plato's vision begins to take real shape. He has actually arrived at his conclusions in a powerful way, by giving voice to different opinions via the Socratic method. Now, in describing his ideal vision of a real city, Plato begins to bring utopian views into practice with real-world concerns.

Socrates had thought the best polis would be one where each citizen did what he was best suited to do, perhaps modeling this on the original Hindu caste system (not the segregated system it became). Plato sees three major changes in the new city. He wanted access to rule by qualified women, a unified "community of guardians" that was integrated as a single person, differentiated from family or allegiance to property, and rule of reason.

What is important to understand about the Socratic-Platonic view of government is that it is a constant battle. They admitted that achieving it would be hard, but "achievement" is never-ending. Assuming it is ever achieved, the challenge to Democracy is that it must be achieved over and over again. It is not reasonable to think that one society can accomplish a great society, and that all societies that follow will simply continue to uphold the tradition.

In understanding the fluid nature of history, Plato's Republic becomes that high ideal that all future governments strive to attain. Like the Hindus, it is in the attempt to attain these ideals, not actually getting there, where excellence is found. What Republic does is something that science fiction writers did centuries later, which is to describe some kind of "alternate universe" that gives humans a glimpse of what could be if we attained perfection.

Plato then moved on to discern three elements in individuals and in the state. He saw the rule of reason as the correct rule. Plato made an interesting point by showing that Socrates was a man of such reason, that he was "the most righteous man in Athens," but for this reason he cannot attain power. Plato envisioned philosopher-kings who meshed philosophy with politics. These people would be selected after their qualities, which would be a "passion for wisdom" and a "passion for truth." The resulting training would teach them the difference between knowledge and belief, and their two corresponding powers. Plato added that such people would not love money. Plato wrote that lesser rulers tragically reacted to things they were not sure of, making use of the allegory of the cave. Lives were lost, civilizations ruined in fighting over something that meant nothing. The philosopher-kings, Plato said, would be reluctant rulers.

Plato based his observations on spirit mostly on Pericles's "Funeral Oration." Pericles infused his speech over and over with references to "honor," "gallantry," "meaning of manliness" and other testosterone-laced perorations. The "warrior spirit," Plato noticed, is not associated with reason or intellect. He made the leap that while such traits infused the Athenian Army, once they lost they must subordinate themselves to reason.

Plato further observed that reason was not applied simply as a safeguard against entering a disastrous war. In fact it is the protector of humanity during a war. Thucydides first recognized this when he described the revolution in Corcyra, where all hell broke loose. The conclusion was that the kind of spirit and gallantry so necessary in developing esprit de corps within the military is quickly turned into something else once war takes a turn for the worse.

Spirit not infused with reason cannot compromise. Physical skills and gung-ho bravery alone can be manipulated into doing the most heinous of crimes. In the Peloponnesian War, the spirit had no outlet once battle plans went awry in the fog of dispiriting defeat. War is a massive psychological struggle, where morale and confidence play as much a role as strategy. The esteemed bravery of the Athenian fighting men turned to blind violence once anarchy replaced the plan of battle.

Plato said this approach had been based on a concept that the "weaker must be kept down by the stronger," and that the rule of spirit without reason leads to irrational mishandling of power.

Aristotle

Aristotle was both Plato's greatest student and one of his most "trenchant critics." They felt similarly about ethics, but arrived at their conclusions in different ways. Aristotle was more of a realist than Plato, and certainly more so than Socrates.

Aristotle posited the theory of the "golden mean." His differences with Plato were partly based upon his personal experiences, which were not the same. Aristotle hailed from Macedonia, and as a younger man was not personally affected by the Peloponnesian War. A similar situation would be an older liberal American who grew up protesting the Vietnam War, mentoring a younger man from Canada who has moved to the United States, and has no personal memories of Vietnam.

Furthermore, Aristotle saw Plato live a long, productive life, while Plato had seen Socrates condemned and executed. Aristotle was middle class, whereas Plato was an aristocrat. Aristotle sought knowledge through biology while Plato sought it through mathematics. Aristotle relied on observation, and found fault in Plato for theorizing, i.e., transcendent forms.

They resembled each other in regarding the state as an agent of virtue. In Renaissance painter Raphael's classic "School of Athens," Plato is depicted focusing on the transcendent realm, Aristotle on the moderate.

Aristotle's first critique was of Plato's "revolutionary wave," notably the concept of women in politics. Aristotle believed that people were derived through nature, and that the union of the family produces an organic order in which the man rules via superior reason and forethought. Those who naturally are ruled by their superiors just as naturally are subservient. His reliance on biology was the locus of this thinking, since the study of animals consistently shows that the male of varied species assumes natural superiority.

Plato relied on mathematics, although his use of math in determining women's place in politics seems less influential on his thinking than Sophocles's play, Antigone. Had one of the Greek playwrights penned a great play showing slaves rising above their condition, something like the film Spartacus, for instance, perhaps he might have changed his attitude about the "natural" role of slaves in Athens.

Aristotle's reliance on biology does not seem to give him the data he might have needed to veer from Plato on the subject of slavery, either. His use of the concept of "natural" social orders does not bode well for any theories of what Aristotle's attitude towards slavery might have been had he lived in different times. Because he was indisputably a moral man, it does not seem to be a stretch that he would have had an open mind (and heart) had he lived during a time of real debate about slavery. He was a product of his times, when it was not a subject of debate. The revolutionary changes these men brought about are such great contributions, to condemn them in the main over this single issue is not a worthy exercise.

The study of slavery gets bogged down in hard moral equations of right and wrong, ignoring the fact that great thinkers like Plato and Aristotle saw it as natural. They may give credence to an intellectual people, yearning to be free, led by a charismatic leader like Moses who advocates their fleeing from Egyptian bondage. Apparently they view many other forms of the human family to be less worthy of freedom than the Jews escaping to the Promised Land.

Less moral men did justify slavery in later eras by pointing to Aristotle's "natural" views of Mankind. In the end, the practice of slavery seems to have survived all theories of science and politics for some 2,220 years. Many religions tolerated it. Judaism-Christianity tolerated it less than all others. In the end run it took a modern version of Democracy advocated by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, now practiced by a union of sovereign states in a new world, to end it once and for all. Placed in the middle of the Christian intellectual argument against slavery, one hopes that these three men would have seen the morality of freeing the slaves.

But we are dealing with Aristotle in his times, and the record says certain things. Aristotle believed that the human soul (psyche) has two elements, one that rules and one that is ruled. Some humans, he said, were slaves because they lacked the ability to reason. Women, he felt, lacked rational capacity. He bases his views on practical observation, but did not say what the future might hold.

Aristotle also criticized Plato's call for abolition of the nuclear family, because just as males are naturally superior, they are naturally the head of the family. Mainly, Aristotle said that break-up of the family is harmful because men pay most attention to what they possess. The protection of the family, knit together within a society of "family men," is beneficial to society and later has been cited as the bedrock of capitalism. The natural care of children is a civic virtue, and goes part and parcel with the possession of private property. To eradicate ownership is "wrong and futile," and characterized an extremist attitude on Plato's part. Aristotle placed some limits on private property, but understood that charity stems from private ownership.

Aristotle also found fault with Plato's contemplation of the "third wave" that concentrates power in the hands of an elite philosopher class. Here we begin to see correlations with modern thought processes that are telling. Plato, the aristocrat, advocated putting elites in power over the masses while taking away their private property. Aristotle, from the middle class, wanted to give the moderate middle the greatest say in decision-making while advocating giving them an economic stake in the system. He said that the middle classes, more likely to be run by reason, are less likely to be as extreme as the rich or the poor.

Aristotle differentiated himself from his predecessors more by advocating these virtues than by any other means. In so doing he emerges as the champion of future Western forms of Democracy and capitalism. Modern conservatives speak ill of an "elitist" class of people who presume to make decisions for the rest of us, because we are not able to make smart decisions for ourselves. The moderns place great emphasis on private property not simply because it is fair to keep what one works to attain, but because to do so invests one in the community.

While Plato's views regarding private property never seem to find any logical home, his views of the elitist classes should be studied and given some leeway. Plato did not like the way the Athenian Assembly was constructed, because he rightly saw a "mob mentality" in its thousands of members making decisions that later might have been considered the famous "tyranny of the majority."

Aristotle eschewed radicalism and saw the middle class, from whence he emerged, as the protectors against it. Plato is viewed by history as the revolutionary. Aristotle is the reformer. Much of the difference between the two is traced to the fact that Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) did not experience the severe crisis of the Peloponnesian War. He was more of an optimist than Plato, and saw Athens as less corrupt than his mentor. He did not advocate sweeping change. While not a product of the aristocracy, Aristotle certainly grew up in affluence. His father was the court physician to the previous King of Macedonia. Aristotle's reliance on biology is traced to his father. He stressed empirical analysis over abstract reasoning. One might say he advocated realpolitik while Plato was more of a dreamer.

Aristotle studied under Plato for 20 years, from 367 to 347 B.C., beginning at the age of 18. Eventually Aristotle founded the Lyceum, which was located next to Plato's Academy. Raphael's painting demonstrates the difference between them by showing Plato gesturing toward the heavens, while Aristotle is pointing forward. Regarding the complicated role of women, Aristotle disagreed with Plato's view of them as potential rulers, but he does not ascribe them as "natural slaves" within the family. This followed his concept of "naturalism" embodying his ideas of slavery. He did not view intelligence and reason as sex-linked. He found women inferior to men because they could not reason, but above slaves because they fulfilled natural functions within the family, which he was an advocate of.

Machiavelli's The Prince

Indolent princes "thought . . . that it sufficed . . . to think up a sharp reply, to write a beautiful letter, to demonstrate wit and readiness in saying and words, to know how to weave a fraud . . . to keep many lascivious women around, to conduct [themselves] avariciously and proudly, to rot in idleness, to give military rank by favor, to be scornful of anyone who shows them a praiseworthy path."

\- Niccolo Machiavelli

Realpolitik is a term that is often ascribed to Florentine diplomat and political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli. Of course, the term, which obviously means "real politics," is as old as man and applies to almost everything. The first humans had to deal with the "reality" of survival. Plato's allegory of the cave is an attempt to show that man has not always known what was real, but reality is always with man; the reality of life and death, of sickness, of enemies, of danger, of the need to eat, to sleep, to survive. What man knows may not be everything there is to know, but it is always real. Lies and deception are real. Military planners and CIA handlers are among those who count on this "reality."

Everything is real. The French existentialists may have tried to steer away from this, but even their work is based in the realm of reality. Even looking inward and conceiving of nihilistic nothingness, of a purely individual existence, does not stand with the fact that they wrote books for others to read, had relationships, survived, met their needs, and influenced their realm. The very fact that they dealt with these real aspects of life is evidence of a reality they philosophized against.

European politics, staggered by wars and tragedy, are infused by realpolitik. In the post-Napoleonic era, continent-wide revolutions eventually led to treaties that weakened France, strengthened Germany and led to more tragedy: World Wars I and II.

Former American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany, employed realpolitik. He was influenced by one of the major practitioners of the art, Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Minister of State who acted as the President of the Vienna Congress. Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who brought glasnost to Eastern Europe, emphasized realpolitik.

Realpolitik gained credence because of Machiavelli's influence, but in general principle has not been the guiding force of American political theory. This begs the question, Are Americans too idealistic? War-weary Europeans rejected Plato's idealism in Republic, but the young Americans gave it a home. Somehow, this country has remained idealistic for almost 230 years. Is it our idealism that keeps us strong, or our strength that keeps us idealistic?

As with most things, and the moderate Aristotle would agree, the answer is somewhere in between. Realpolitik does not dominate American policy, but it is always part of the decision-making process. Protesters, militants, and rabble-rousers raise the loud hue and cry for change or peace. They are usually tongue-tied when asked to present alternatives. Realpolitik presents itself most obviously when the reformers and the idealists occasionally grab power, and to their horror find that the policies of those they fought against are the only ones that really work.

The only idealism that really has survived realpolitik is based on a Judeo-Christian morality that has tempered America's place as a country and world leader. It has survived European ridicule, Socialism, Communism and all others isms.

As mentioned, realpolitik always has and always will be an important part of diplomacy and planning. Machiavelli marks the transition between classical and modern tradition. Contrast Machiavelli's theories regarding human nature and power to those of Creon, Thrasymachus, Glaucon, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Machiavelli has much in common with Plato. This is interesting because at first blush it would seem that Plato would despise Machiavelli, while Machiavelli might think Plato a dreamer.

Both men lived during times of political crisis, and looked for power-based solutions to the problems of their day. They both felt power should be accorded to the few, not the many. They disagreed on methodology.

In this last regard, it would appear that both men would advocate strong leadership that is willing to make difficult decisions even if they may be unpopular. In a free Democracy, protest is allowed and, if organized well enough, can appear to be quite the chorus. Any human would be affected, probably swayed, by large demonstrations. Machiavelli would disregard the protesters as a distraction from the real work that the powerful must do. Plato would find them to be a "mob," not the professional leadership that he advocated. Aristotle's downplaying of the importance of political leadership was reflected by the calm times he lived in, as opposed to the rocky climate of Plato and Machiavelli.

The first big difference between Machiavelli and the Greeks is that he views government not as an agent of virtue, but an instrument of masculine force. The primary role of government is to provide security and survival. All other things emanate from it. This does not address the other very important goals of government, which is to protect civil rights and promote all the general benefits of a peaceful society. Politics, Machiavelli said, is about how we really live, not how we ought to live.

In his book, The Prince, Machiavelli warned that the prince would be destroyed if he becomes too idealistic. He says the prince must not be too good, doling out goodness only as it is required, while practicing vice for the sake of political gain. His view of human nature is closer to Thucydides or Thrasymachus than Plato or Aristotle. Pragmatism is his way. Virtue is not part politics, only false virtue.

All the trappings of Machiavellianism played itself out when the French tried to emulate America years later. Machiavelli would have been utterly mystified by the American experience. He would have seen the French Revolution to be predictable, preventable only by playing it his way ahead of time. His ghost seemed to have had Napoleon's ear in the aftermath of the days of guillotine.

Machiavelli emphasizes that the prince is better off feared than loved. He seems to be advising a Mafia boss more than a leader of a country. He should ask if he prefers respect, a word that too often gets thrown around when it means fear, but actually should replace love. The great leader does not need to be loved, but he must be respected. Machiavelli would disagree with the concept that only through moral virtues such as honesty and spirit, can he earn respect. The prince must use violence or he risks losing his position, which echoes Creon, for people will not offend those who they fear will do violence against them. Bonds of love are easily broken, while fear endures. Finally the prince, in order to avoid hate, must not molest his subjects' wives or property.

Machiavelli lacks broad vision, not to mention nobility. Nevertheless, to deny that his views have merit in some circumstances would be to turn one's back on reality. Machiavelli believes it is of value for the prince to keep his word, but he is more likely to gain and keep power by using deception. Machiavelli says it is "praiseworthy for the prince to keep his word," but he is advocating truth as a strategy.

As Machiavelli advised, the truth is a weapon to be used effectively, and not veered from without good reason. Obviously, if the truth is only available when it is convenient, then a man is not trustworthy.

Machiavelli said the ends always justify the means. Machiavelli discussed two conceptions of power in The Prince. Fortune (fortuna), characterized by irrationality, is a powerful force. It is characterized by women, who must be held down by men.

Virtu is the masculine face of power, is rational, and therefore can be guarded against.

Medici's feudal Italy

Machiavelli (1469-1527) was born in Florence the year that Lorenzo "the Magnificent" de Medici came to power. Lorenzo was the grandfather of the Lorenzo to whom The Prince was dedicated. Machiavelli held the post of Florentine Chancellor between 1498 and 1512, then he was exiled until 1527. He wrote The Prince and The Discourses while in exile.

As with Plato and Socrates, Machiavelli's work emanated from political change of crisis proportions. He lived during a time in which the politics of Mediterranean Europe surrounding Italy were marked by transitions from weak and decentralized feudal regimes to the more centralized rule of despotic monarchs and princes in Spain, France and also in England (who because of their strong navy and trade economy were a force in the region, too). Italy did not fall under powerful rule, however. Machiavelli observed his country remaining weak, and therefore subject to victimization by its neighbors.

In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella (1479-1516) created a nation-state, and later Phillip II further transformed Spain into a power. Louis XI (1461-1489), Charles VIII (1492-1498) and Francis I (1515-1547) were strong rulers of France. In 1494, France invaded Italy.

The War of the Roses (1455-1485) marked English history during this period. Henry VII (1485-1509) established the Anglican Church, and Elizabeth I held the throne despite great Machiavellian-style conspiracies in Britain, from 1558-1603.

Italy was still experiencing the long, difficult aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire. Religious power and theology created conflict and introspection in the country over its role in the world. Arguments between advocates of Italian world dominance (the empiricists) and the guilt-ridden passivists only served to split the country. Out of this turmoil, Machiavelli could have had one of two distinct visions. He could have advocated the building of coalitions, embracing old enemies, and creating a peacemaker with great political power. Or, he could have advocated the creation of a smaller fiefdom for the prince he advised; one that gave the prince limited but secure power.

As this was the age of Martin Luther, Calvinism and Henry VIII, bitter acrimony developed between Catholics and Protestants. Luther was a Catholic priest in Germany who loathed the tithes that parishioners had to pay in order to "petition" God. He firmly believed that individuals could commune with God not through the priests, but through direct prayer with Jesus Christ.

Henry VIII was so incensed by Sir Thomas Moore, who as liaison between the English Catholic Church and the throne, informed Henry VIII that he could not marry Ann Bolyn and remain king because of Catholic strictures against divorce. Henry VIII responded by beheading Moore plus several of his wives over the years. He created a new Church of England, the Anglicans (in America, the Episcopalians).

Machiavelli viewed all of this and was cynical about religion, which helps explain why moral questions of right and wrong do not enter into his political equations. Machiavelli paid "lip service" to Catholicism because it suited his needs to do so. The Papacy in his time was strong, and in those days intervened in Italian politics. Italy's role in the death of Christ historically played a role in creating guilt and a strong church. In turn, it has been used to justify intervention with the affairs of state, to "right the wrongs" of previous Italian governments who opposed Christianity.

Pontius Pilate had been appointed Governor of Jerusalem by Rome, and acted with the authority of Rome and with the army of the great legion to imprison and crucify Jesus. The capture of Christians and the feeding of them to lions in the Roman Colloseum were done with the approval of the government. Then the Emperor Constantine saw a vision of Christ while in battle, and everything changed.

Almost overnight, Italy became a Christian country, with the Catholic Church set up at the Vatican of Rome. By Machiavelli's time, Catholicism was the dogmatic word of Italy. Alexander VI (father of Cesare Borgia) was the Pope from 1492-1503, followed by Julius II (1503-1513) and the military leader Leo X from 1513-1521. In Florence, Savonarola led a Dominican sect when Machiavelli was a youth there.

Machiavelli lived during a time of great artistic beauty. The Italian Renaissance reached its peak in the 15th and 16th Centuries, marked by the great works of Giovanni Boccaccio (author of "Decameron"); Sandro Botticello (master painter famed for his "Botticelli angels"); Leonardo da Vinci ("Last Supper," "Mona Lisa"); Raphael Sanzio da Urbino (who painted the Plato/Aristotle classic "School of Athens"); and Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti (who painted the Sistine Chapel).

Five states made up the Italian peninsula during Machiavelli's time. The Duchy of Milan and the Republic of Venice were in the north, the Republic of Florence and the states of the church (which included Rome) made up the central area, and in the south was the Kingdom of Naples. Florence went from a first-rate power into an also-ran, under Spanish rule, and was further weakened by French invasions under Charles VIII in 1494, then under Louis XII in 1499.

The aristocratic family of Medici and the populist Soderinis directed Florentine politics with poor effect. When the Medicis took power from the Soderinis in 1513, Machiavelli, an advisor to the Soderinis, found himself exiled. Instead of holding the Medicis in contempt for taking action against him, he admired them and dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo de Medici.

Various dark actors made up the Italian landscape of that era, including Cesare Borgia, who with the help of his father the Pope, attempted to gain control of the entire country. In 1502 Machiavelli met Borgia. He thought him skilled in the intertwined arts of politics and military strategy. Borgia demonstrated terrific sales ability. Machiavelli modeled The Prince on him.

Two kinds of leaders ruled the varied provinces of Italy. There were adventurous princes and mercantile princes. The land did not yield great abundance, moral or material. There were no great traditions to guide any leaders or would-be leaders. The Roman Empire offered history but not a popular model, even if its glory could have been re-captured. Instability was the order of the day.

The country lacked a good military. Its neighbors felt no sympathy for the country in light of the Romans' long history of invasions. They felt no compunction about attacking and taking what they could get.

Despite the rise of Christianity emerging during the dark days of the empire, the Protestant Reformation had not yet happened. The church held almost no sway over the people, much less the various political groups. These groups attempted to use cunning and duplicity to one-up each other. The result: various small tyrants came to power, only to fall. The Medici family became dukes in Florence, the Sforzas in Milan, and in Venice and Genoa, the republics were narrow oligarchies.

Out of this low period, Machiavelli yearned to return Italy to the glory that was Rome. Machiavelli admired not the later caesars, who presided over the drunken, fat, amoral fall, but rather the early, militaristic Rome that brought patriotic virtue to the lands they conquered. The 15-year old Machiavelli was not enamored by Italian art. He coveted military power. In 1494, the French followed Hannibal's path, crossing the Alps and invading Italy in a way that eventually resulted in a divisive battle between France and Spain, who had invaded earlier, on the countries' peninsula.

Machiavelli's country fell to varied hordes of Spanish, German, and renegade Italian armies, who made their way to Rome. They sacked the city in an orgy of rape and pillage. The Pope was imprisoned and his Cardinals publicly disgraced. Machiavelli wrote The Prince in order to give advice to future Italian leaders, hoping they would use his ideas to prevent such a disaster. Unfortunately, Machiavelli correctly predicted that the country was beyond prescription. He is one of the world's most influential political advisors, yet his advice was unable to prevent his country from becoming a disaster for 300 years. The virtu of Machiavelli was not employed by any Italians of his lifetime.

Machiavelli determined that the crisis in Italy occurred because the public representation and leadership, in place when the barbarians invaded, was bankrupt. The Italians had spent all their time feeding their little fiefdoms, and not preparing for international diplomacy or battle. They paid dearly. In this respect, Machiavelli has something in common with Plato, the man who attempted to come up with answers in light of the Peloponnesian disaster.

While Machiavelli may be viewed as prescribing an unfollowed saving grace for his country, it is not patriotism that endows his words. Neither he nor Plato were concerned with the survival of a system. What concerned them was a "crisis of spirit." Their efforts are to direct a course of action in the minds of men. Human nature is what pre-occupies their philosophies. Both wished to replace amateurs with professionals.

Reality is where Plato and Machiavelli differ. Plato believed morality can be taught as a "form," and that the professional leader can be trained to act with wisdom. At the heart of this is an absolute principle of truth.

Machiavelli, on the other hand, saw only layers of truth, a game if you will. He believed that to blindly adhere to a moral course leads to ruin, not salvation. He only valued strength. Power demands either force or deception, depending upon what is expedient. Machiavelli saw men as liars and deceivers, who can be preyed upon through greed and fear.

Former European powers like Germany, France, Russia, Spain and Italy seem to have eschewed the baser politics of Machiavelli. It is not wholly right to say they are Platonic, either. A kind of realism about their place in the world seems to have created a new Europe in which power is considered a pure burden, to be avoided. America, far more a follower of Platonic justice, achieved a far different destiny.

These truths remain self-evident

There does not exist in the compass of language an arrangement of words to express so much as the means of effecting a counter-revolution. The means must be an obliteration of knowledge; and it has never yet been discovered how to make man unknow his knowledge, or unthink his thoughts.

\- Thomas Paine

The American Founding Fathers based their original documents, among them the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, on Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian Bible. In so doing, they inculcated the language with absolutism. The Declaration of Independence, signed and finalized on July 4, 1776, references the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," later adding, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." A little further down, "evil" is referred to. The Founders do not claim to have abolished evil, but rather to ridding "the forms to which they are accustomed."

The Constitution is more utilitarian, but unquestionably influenced by the same Christianity, in the preamble calling for "a more perfect Union." All of these statements hearken back to Jesus Christ standing before Pontius Pilate, who asked Him, "What is truth?" Christ, when questioned by the "authorities," often replied, "As you say." His words of wisdom confounded the evil, while the righteous "marveled" at them.

In echoing these sentiments as part of official American legal doctrine, the Founders applied the essential Christian thesis that just because 1 million people believe something, and one person believes another thing, it does not preclude that one man from being the only one who is right. The Greek philosophers hung much of their argumentation and reasoning around this concept. The Americans, in so dong, were avoiding the "mob" mentality of Platonic times, which in their view was called the "tyranny of the majority." They strove to find a balance between the "majority vote" of Democracy, and righteousness, even if advocated by a minority. This was the striving principle behind the "checks and balances" offered by three branches of government: the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The best application of this principle is found in the abolishment of slavery, which the Founders did not accomplish, but their language and laws ultimately did; and the Civil Rights Movement, where the Southern majority, at least, advocated immoral laws.

The term "self-evident" truth is particularly perfect language. Based on natural law, or God's law, it says some things simply manifest, or emanate, as is. It requires no skilled orator or advocate in order to convince anybody of its truth. The Latin phrase res ipsa loquitur means "the thing speaks for itself," a similar phrase. This is an important doctrine of common law. It removes it from the realm of opinion. To observe an event or happening with one's own eyes, ears or perception; to therefore analyze what they have seen or perceived; tempered by wisdom and common sense; followed by some further analysis and application of thinking; reveals truth. Therefore, at such time, those who argue against this truth are either ignorant, misinformed or lying. Again, it requires no majority to agree with the self-evident truth. One man may stand against 1,000, but it does not change it from being true. The Founding Fathers believed that a righteous God would inculcate Mankind, through the power of the Holy Spirit, with the ability to see the truth and, in so doing, reject the lies and false works of Satan.

Thus is revealed the ultimate dilemma of man's long history.

George Washington: war criminal?

In 1753, George Washington was 21 years old. He was sent on a daring mission, to carry a message through the American wilderness to Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie to the French troops west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and south of the Great Lakes, then known as the Ohio Country. He was ordered to rendezvous with the Indian chief Half-King, then link up with the French near present day Erie, Pennsylvania.

The letter Washington carried came from "His Britannic Majesty" was a carefully worded warning to the French that "the Lands upon the river Ohio, in the Western Parts of the Colony of Virginia, are notoriously known to be the Property of the Crown of Great Britain," and, in essence, they had better get out of there.

Much of this period comes from The Journals of Major George Washington, which he published at the urging of Governor Dinwiddie. It was one of the first known accounts of the great West; the Indian lands, the territories, the great unknown. This report played an influential role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition many years later.

The French were none too impressed with British claims of sovereignty over this virgin territory. In truth it was open and free for whoever had the gumption to take it. Many desired its rich abundance, for within the heartland of the American continent promised riches beyond scope. For all the talk of liberty and Democracy, a desire to have this land to themselves was very much a motivating force in the colonists' desire to rise up and fight the British years later. The missive carried by Washington was indeed the first salvo in the French and Indian War.

As a young British officer, Washington spent much time in the West between 1754 and 1759, leading expeditions into the Ohio Country. Instead of going to college, Washington "went to war," wrote Joseph Ellis in His Excellency: George Washington. "The kind of education he received, like the smallpox he had contracted in Barbados, left scars that never went away, as well as immunities against youthful idealism."

In 1754 Washington was second in command of a British unit tasked with protecting settlers from the mounting French threat. He learned of a large French build-up at Fort Duquesne. An Indian ally named Tanacharison advised that unless he proceed immediately, the French were in the process of turning the vast Indian tribes into allies against the British.

On May 27, Tanacharison reported the appearance of French troops. The next day, operating on reports, Washington found a French patrol. He ordered an attack, resulting in 10 killed, including the commander, and 21 prisoners. In his report Washington added, "The Indians scalped the dead."

What happened is in debate to this day, a bone of contention between the long rivals, the British and French. There are, however, reports that the French tried to surrender, but were in essence massacred. According to some eyewitness accounts, the French commander, Monsieur De Jumonville, attempted to explain to Washington that his troops were not on a military mission, but rather on a diplomatic mission on behalf of King Louis XV. This was exactly the same mission Washington performed on behalf of the British in the previous year.

But Tanacharison, who spoke fluent French, declared, "Thou art not yet dead, my father," then sank his hatchet into Jumonville's head, splitting his skull in half. He then pulled out his brain and washed his hands in the mixture of blood and tissue. After that, the warriors, to Washington's apparent horror, fell upon the 10 wounded French, scalped them all while alive, then decapitated one and placed it on a stake. There is no record that Lieutenant Colonel Washington tried to stop them, if indeed he had the ability or even the time to do so, as it seemingly happened in very short order.

Washington did not report the whole of this to Dinwiddie. In his diary Washington assuaged his guilt with the assumption that Jumonville said he was on a diplomatic mission in an effort to save his own skin. In a letter to his brother he even described the episode as "charming," indicating a certain taste for the bloodlust of war, which it can be argued is a prerequisite to any good combat soldier.

Dinwiddie promoted Washington, and the Virginia newspapers got hold of the "victory," absent details of any massacre. Washington's statements were self-serving. In England, King George II heard of it, but thought it fanciful. Ellis wrote that Washington was either "a hero, a braggart, or an accomplice to murder . . ." Either way, Washington was America's first war hero.

Unquestionably, Washington performed brilliantly in succeeding years as a British officer before retiring to his farm in Vermont. His overall record made him the obvious choice to lead revolutionary forces when the colonies declared their independence in 1776. His leadership and steady wisdom both in leading the American Revolution to a military victory over the British Empire, the most powerful force in the world; then his devotion not to his own glory but to his young country as President; undoubtedly mark him among the greatest of all men. But he originally made his name and reputation in an incident that may have been a war crime.

Thomas Paine's Common Sense

Thomas Paine had an interest in many and varied things. He wrote about and became a colorful, successful pamphleteer during the time of the American Revolution. In 1776 he wrote Common Sense, which sold 150,000 copies, making it America's first bestseller. His works were re-printed in England and translated into French, Dutch, Russian, and other European languages. His audiences were not monarchs, aristocrats or the wealthy, but plain people. His thesis was human rights and Democratic equality. He raged against hereditary rule, rank and privilege.

Among the phrases he used to fire up his readers were "we have it in our power to begin the world again," "the birthday of a new world is at hand," and his famed "these are the times that try men's souls." He was the man who called 18th Century Enlightenment the "Age of Reason."

The common belief is that Paine was among the great American Founders, part and parcel of the revolution, working arm in arm in with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and many others, to form America into a "more perfect union." Not so. He had many enemies and detractors, not the least of which were some of those very Founders. For one, he was born in England. There was much debate over the nature of true Americanism and loyalty. One's birthplace was an important distinction between "loyalists" and patriots.

Paine did not arrive in America until 1774, but he carried a letter of introduction to Benjamin Franklin himself, then returned to Philadelphia. He began to advocate for an American separation from Great Britain as a writer-editor for the Pennsylvania Monthly. Franklin urged him to write Common Sense, helping him with the manuscript along with the renowned Dr. Benjamin Rush, a respected astronomer (who noted the transit of Venus); David Rittenhouse; and Boston agitator Samuel Adams.

It was at first published anonymously. Most believed the author to be Franklin or Adams, but soon Paine was revealed. When Washington and Thomas Jefferson praised it, the pamphlet skyrocketed in popularity.

John Adams, however, wrote that it went too far. Franklin's own son, the Tory Governor of New Jersey, was appalled with it. Loyalist writer James Chalmers felt Paine criticized England, the "pride and envy of all Mankind."

Nevertheless, its January, 1776 publication is firmly credited as the lightning rod leading to the July 4 Declaration of Independence that year. Jefferson was called "abstract" in his language while Paine's "got rebel men and muskets into the field," wrote historian Jack Fruchtman, Jr.

Paine was sickened by misery and poverty. At the heart of his writings was a desire to improve the human condition. He despised monarchies and called King George III "the Brute of Britain," "Savage" and "Pharoah." The term Common Sense perhaps most aptly described his logical argument that no country should be run by a man or woman (or boy or girl) simply because he or she was the offspring, albeit the first born, of a king or queen. Such a person could be feeble-minded, lacking character; any host of negatives. A leader should be a man of some greatness, recognized by others, who analyze his qualities with due deliberation. In other words, "common sense."

But Paine sometimes tried to play both ends against the middle. He wrote "under the auspices of their Creator," there existed the "illuminating and divine principle of the equal rights of man." But Paine's Christianity was called into question, some claiming he was not a believer of any kind. John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, and old friend Sam Adams excoriated him for being a "non-believer." Many people hear that he was referred to as that "dirty little atheist," without realizing it was not uttered in his lifetime, but by President Theodore Roosevelt. No less an accomplished man than Thomas Edison was still defending Paine in an editorial dated 1925, but he gives no indication Paine was not an atheist beyond writing the term was spoken from "a lack of understanding."

In fact Paine was a Quaker, albeit "on his own terms," or at least he was for a period of time, according to Fruchtman. He announced his belief in God and the afterlife in The Age of Reason. He said he was sure God chose him to do his part in the great events of his day. His goal was to "extirpate the horrid practice of war, and break the chains of slavery and oppression," goals he felt were "acceptable in God's sight." Oddly, if he desired to avoid war, his pamphlets helped start one.

In later years in France, he found more favor in the deism of Franklin, Jefferson and Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire. He told John Adams he essentially wrote to his audience; in America, faithful Christians, and in France atheists and agnostics.

Paine advocated the creation of a single-house legislature, more answerable to the people. He was friends with the English statesman Edmund Burke, a leading advocate of American liberty. The Earth, he wrote in agreement with Jefferson, belonged to "the living," not the will of a king now or in the grave. This was "despotism." He compared legislating to great literature, as if the son of a great writer automatically was a great writer, a laugh. Paine's sentence "these are the times that try men's souls," with its Christian undertones, was said to be the motivating impetus of Washington's men at their lowest ebb.

After General Washington led the Blue Coats to victory over the Red Coats, the Founding Fathers eventually made their way to Philadelphia where, in the summer of 1787, they hammered out the U.S. Constitution. The Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, all were built on the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence, written 11 years earlier:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," is held to be the central thesis of the Declaration.

This quote has been called a "moral declaration," and the single phrase that speaks to American Exceptionalism both during the revolution and even more so in the two centuries-plus since. Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase in answering the question of the divine right of kings. It was thereafter quoted often. Benjamin Franklin also used the phrase.

Christians believe Christ manifests Truth in flesh and deed. The term could be viewed by the questioning as arrogance; America is a Christian nation, and therefore Truth is on our side. It certainly conveys a confidence in the existence of God, and that is: one follows Him as closely as possible, one therefore follows Truth. The Declaration also states that "unalienable rights" are "endowed by their Creator," which is the polar opposite of the French notion later espoused: rights are endowed by men on other men, which of course is subject to every possible human corruption, which are numerous. The founding documents of America are also a paen to small government, to its limited role. They are as distinguishable by what is not in them as what is in them.

There is a reason for this, and it is not merely a desire by politicians to avoid a "welfare state," or stay within budgetary constraints, although these are strong motivators. There is a greater, more spiritual guidepost. It is based on the Christian theology of Original Sin. All of Mankind is corrupt, fallen. Man is irredeemable by his own hand. Only Jesus Christ's saving grace can provide salvation. Since man is corrupt, government will inevitably be corrupt. It is a necessary evil, but an evil anyway. Therefore, the larger the government, the more the corruption. The smaller the government, the less the corruption. A history of governmental growth in the years since provides a clear metaphorical picture of the devil increasing his influence in our world, a modern distinction between liberal and conservative philosophy. Conservatives view themselves acting as "God's lonely man" against its inevitable over-expansion into something that will destroy us.

But Paine was an internationalist, in some ways a professional agitator (although his writings did not make him rich). He came from England, lived in America, and then went on to France. He seems to have followed wherever there was rebellion, or started rebellion wherever he went.

After the American Revolution he advocated for similar revolt in France. In this he split with Edmund Burke. It is likely his role in the French Revolution leads many Americans to view him with a jaundiced eye.

In 1792 Paine wrote Rights of Man, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Again, Paine never earned a penny of it. If Paine was a believer when he wrote Common Sense, and a deist or worse when he wrote Rights of Man, then the success of the first philosophy vs. the faults of the second can be attributed to this very shift.

"Nor are the rights of man logically justified because all men are equal in the sight of the Lord," wrote historian Sidney Hook. "Men could all be recognized as equal in the sight of the Lord but not before the Law." In other words, not all is fair on Earth. This simple fact remains a great philosophical divide between those who possess knowledge of this truth, as opposed to those who attempt to place forth the fiction that "fairness" is obtainable, indeed is a "right" of man.

The American Revolution centered on the notion that man's liberty is a right bestowed on him by God. Rights of Man, almost telling from the title alone, followed up

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Of The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right (Du Contrat Social ou Principes du droit politique), published in 1762. To get to the heart of the French Revolution, and in essence the 200 years that followed, one has to start with the works of Rousseau and Paine. Prior to that, there was little in the way of socio-political movement from the age of the Christ, to the fall of the Roman Empire, to the Crusades, to the Magna Carta, to the Reformation. Throughout all of this time, man lived in poverty, for the most part under the thumb of kings and despots, his only grievance being prayer and petition to the Catholic Church.

But Rousseau placed forth the belief that governments owed a duty of some care to their citizenry. He and Paine have been called the first proponents of the "welfare state." Rousseau's work built in momentum and eventually became the French Revolution (1789), but there is little doubt the French would have revolted had the Americans not won a war against the British six years earlier.

The essential difference between the American and French Revolutions is that the Americans knew God bestowed rights on men, while the French theorized that men bestowed rights. This was the way of the French downfall. The English, in an odd twist, despised Rights of Man, which put them in the difficult position of "supporting" the ideas energizing a revolution against them in the first place, then opposing ideas of their greatest advocate, when adopted by their closest European enemies, France.

Paine seemed always to wear out his welcome. While Rights of Man was worthy of much criticism, it did not advocate "the Terrors," which resulted in the be-heading of the pretty young Marie Antoinette, along with most of the French aristocracy and religious hierarchy.

When Paine protested against it, Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794), a political opportunist-survivor if ever there was one, had him jailed. Paine is little remembered in France. Luckily escaping the guillotine, Paine then used the experience as the impetus for The Age of Reason (1794-95). He then had another epiphany of sorts, leading him to smuggle his letters out of France to his friends in America, protesting the atheism of the French.

Paine never found stature in America again, an unfortunate occurrence. His name was resurrected when, during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln looked to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers as justification for the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt disparaged him, but two world wars, then the 200th anniversary of independence (1976) helped revive Paine in the national consciousness. Oddly, his espousal of what he called "natural rights" became a major selling point of the religious Right. When Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas argued that such a thing even existed during his 1991 hearings, U.S. Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy (D.-Massachusetts) and the Left acted as if he was trying to conduct an exorcism on the Senate floor. Paine's admonition that good law was that which came about by virtue of "consent of the governed," while so simple it seems nothing more than . . . common sense, was in fact revolutionary.

Stanley Hook analyzed Paine for a 200th anniversary edition of Common Sense. He pointed out that one can, "Trace human rights back as far as you wish and you will discover that human beings already had them, or, if they were denied by a king or a bishop, they should have had them." The Christian would further point out while man indeed had natural rights in the beginning, it was the tempter who enslaved man to sin in the Garden of Eden. All manly efforts to hold down his fellow man's rights since then are a result of said Original Sin.

Paine's observation that "it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary" was one of his most cogent arguments against monarchy or aristocracy, both based upon bloodline succession. Paine's time in France seems to have affected his view of government's role. Whereby he previously concentrated on liberty replacing tyranny, France had a cancerous influence. He advocated for increasing government intervention in the affairs of man, which has led some to include he and Rousseau as the "forerunner of the welfare state."

Paine did say man has a right to rebel, to agitate, even overthrow government if said government is inherently wrong to the point of moral illegitimacy.

"In this first parliament every man by natural right has a seat," he wrote. Such a right, he argued, cannot be prosecuted.

Paine truly must go down in history as one of the great heroes of a free press, a true groundbreaker and a heroic one, at that. Paine had optimism in an informed electorate, the opposite of Plato. The famed Greek philosopher argued instead for a professional political class, which in many ways could be called the "elites" which today makes up permanent Washington. He gave great legitimacy to the Boston Tea Party because, while he did not advocate violence, he did say if no means of address against grievance is available, the action was justified. This desperation in the extreme was the justification successfully argued by former President John Quincy Adams on behalf of the La Amistad slaves who rebelled against their Spanish captors off the Cuban coast in 1839.

Paine's American advocacy for freedom from tyranny, for no taxation without representation, and all the blessings of liberty fought for in the revolution, ring true as great doctrines. The American Revolution was extremely unique. Most of its advocates were landowners, members of the landed gentry, in many cases gentlemen, aristocrats, men of power and influence held in high estate by the British. Such men were Washington and Franklin, among many others. Unlike the "rabble," the "masses" and the "mob" that embody virtually all other uprisings in human history, the American Revolution featured more than any other men of stature who had much to lose if they failed. As a direct result, they advocated a more righteous cause than any other revolution, with truly lasting effects, while virtually all the others were doomed to fail sooner or later.

Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy In America

None of the Founding Fathers were starving, imprisoned, or treated ill by the British. It was a political calculation, a very lofty set of ideals that in retrospect seems to have been a sacrifice of comfort these men engaged in for the betterment of a future Mankind, more so then any personal advancement. In this they were wholly unique and remarkable. When British officers and soldiers were captured, they were treated humanely. When the war was over, the English personnel were all let go, allowed to sail back to their homeland. The young America and England quickly developed diplomatic relations of trade and commerce (although the English did try once again to take the country back in 1812 before being rebuffed, the lesson finally learned).

But the French Revolution, as Edmund Burke aptly noted, was no such thing. There may have been lofty aspirations, but the words of Voltaire, Baron de Montesquieu, and their great philosophers were quickly drowned in a sea of "Terrors" after the mobs stormed the Bastille in 1789. They beheaded everybody in sight for years after that. It was a despicable display and an abject failure, especially in light of the great American success. "A blind man," as many a quipster has quipped, "could have seen it in a minute."

The Americans built their young country on Christian principles of strong faith and the Puritan work ethic. The French built theirs on atheism, imprisoning and killing Catholic priests, changing their calendar from the old Christian dates, and creating a welfare state.

The failure of the French Revolution resulted eventually in Napoleon Bonaparte being made Emperor, then his disastrous efforts at conquering the world. The enormous difference in the two revolutions forms the heart of French envy of America. This envy led Alexis de Tocqueville to American shores to find out why the U.S. succeeded where France failed. America was a tiny set of agrarian colonies, separated by ocean from all the salons of intellect, power, and politics. France had every conceivable advantage of European central geography, culture and history. De Tocqueville's search for an answer to this mystery led to the seminal 1831 classic Democracy in America.

The keys to American success were remarkably simple. Throughout European history, a feudal system prevailed. It reached its apex in Medici Italy, which arguably could be called the foundation of the Mafia. If for instance a shoemaker wished to set up shop, he needed to find favor with the ruling family, who "protected" him so long as he paid "tribute." If a rival shoemaker attempted to set up shop in town, a vendetta was declared on him, and he would be run out of business or worse.

In the America de Tocqueville discovered, the citizenry was overwhelmingly Christian, many towns given Biblical names like New Canaan, Bethel, Bethlehem, and so forth. Church was a common place of greeting and good fellowship. If a shoemaker set up shop on one side of town, another shoemaker, perhaps with a different set of specialties, might set up shop on the other side of town. Maybe another shoemaker, or a related kind of business, might set up business within the same area, as well. Instead of declaring vendettas against each other, they tended to join fraternal organizations, like Lions, Rotary, maybe the Masons, and from there create joint funds meant to start up group advertising helping all of the businesses instead of just one of them. It was, take your cliché, a "rising tide that lifts all boats" or "instead of a slice of the pie, a bigger pie." This story replicated itself from end of the Fruited Plane to the other, to this very day. The European feudal systems, on the other hand, morphed into the Mafia, Socialism, and other negligible isms.

De Tocqueville's description of an "irrestible revolution" was based on his view of human progress, also considered a factor in the phasing out of royal power in favor of Democracy. While de Tocqueville's observations are hopeful and even appear to be based on common sense, the revolutions that rocked Europe for almost a century after his book's publication lend the opposing view. If anything, the fact that America and, to a lesser extent Great Britain, were able to thrive based on the precepts set forth by de Tocqueville, in large measure promote the notion of American Exceptionalism to the majority of human behavior.

Origins of the French Revolution: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Of the Social Contract

"The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes."

\- Thomas Paine

What is interesting to note about Communism is that it needed capitalism to rear its head. Throughout human history, people were deemed to be born into various classes. A man, a family, a group of people inhabited higher or lower places in society depending in many ways upon vague, and sometimes not-so-vague, ideas of destiny or God-given rights. The king's subjects might begrudge the king, but generally did not see themselves as worthy of holding the same place in society.

British capitalism and world trade changed the way people viewed their economic condition. Certain people demonstrated greater acumen in the grubby dealings of business. Pure uncanny intelligence in the ways of trade and business dealings were naturally intertwined with corruption, inside deals, back scratching, nepotism and all the other ways that money makes men ugly . . . and rich.

Naturally, large segments of the "great unwashed" found themselves left out of these insider works. The first vestiges of class warfare replaced class distinction. It stood to reason that certain street lawyers would tell the mob that they were being exploited. The masses eventually found eloquent voice. Among the major thinkers of history, their protégés and students often broke from their chidings to make new proposals. Thus, the progression of Socrates to Plato to Aristotle, but also the very different Machiavelli. At the same time, certain similarities are often found among disparate personalities.

In attempting to identify the origins of Communism, the name Karl Marx of course comes first. But Marx was greatly influenced by the writings of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Socrates and Plato (but not Aristotle) also made some statements that give encouragement to later Socialists.

Rousseau was an idealist. Unlike Karl Marx, history accords romanticism to his work. He had much in common with Plato. The common thread between all three was a benign view of human nature, in direct contradiction with Machiavelli. Where Machiavelli thrived on competition and one-upmanship, Rousseau finds wrong in this.

Private property, which Aristotle agreed was the anchor of the middle class, was the bane of society in Rousseau's view. Rousseau and Plato were critical of the societies they lived in, and saw education as the answer to the problems. Ethics were at the heart of their view of reform. They thought private property bred avarice and inequality.
Rousseau said history was built on man's instincts to survive against suffering. The dark side of human action is a reaction to that suffering, but in a world where suffering is alleviated, people are at their heart good. He said this innate goodness is what keeps men from harming others even more than they already do.

Even in his day, Rousseau railed against a society corrupted by "progress" in the form of urbanization that put too many living too close to others in cities, therefore losing their sense of community and humanity. One modern case accentuating what Rousseau was talking about occurred in 1964. Kitty Genovese was raped and eventually killed right under the windows of a New York apartment complex while her neighbors stood by and did nothing. Ironically, his ideas came to fruition in crowded urban settings, while country people most often espouse individual freedom that is antithetical to Rousseau.

Alienation, fear and inter-dependence

Rousseau had little good to say about the educational system in France, and decried economic rivalry. All of his visions for a better society are outlined in his classic book, Of the Social Contract. In this book he attempted to alleviate the fear men have of each other by emphasizing the inter-dependence of humanity, and that justice must replace instinct. Equality can be attained through legislation, particularly as it pertains to the education of young people, and that real freedom is not license. Freedom, he says, carries a responsibility, which is to attain "oneness with others."

This last admonition carries some strong political baggage. Nobody argues the value of people working with each other to build a better world, but the association of "loners" with alienation is one that many disagree with. Some of our greatest literature strives to give face to lonely people who society says are "different" because they choose to be alone. The Boo Radley character in To Kill A Mockingbird is just one example of someone who is demonized as an "other," only to be accorded sweet qualities once he is revealed.

What many do not realize is how different Democracy is from "majority will." Plato disparaged the "general will" of the assembly, calling them a mob. The Roman elite felt the same way about the masses, perhaps more so because the outrageous mob mentality of the crowds who watched gladiators kill each other, demonstrated the worst kind of human behavior.

The Founding Fathers warned of the "tyranny of the majority," and the criminal jury system is devised in such a way that a majority of 11-1 is not enough to convict; a unanimous decision is necessary. Much of this thinking emanates from Rousseau, who said that not all majority decisions are in accordance with general will. The "transcendent" spirit of public goodwill is something Rousseau talked about, as did Plato. The American Founders called it God.

Rousseau lived from 1712-1778, passing 11 years prior to the French Revolution that bore, at first, many of his grievances but certainly did not end up being what he envisioned. His life in France during a time of crisis and inequality permeated his ideas. He was born into poverty in Geneva. His family was dysfunctional. He became a wanderer, settling in Paris where he lived from 1741 to 1762. He published Discourse on the Sciences and Arts in 1750, On the Origin of Inequality in 1775, Emile, his education thesis in 1762, and that same year Of the Social Contract. Considerations on the Government of Poland reflect his wider view of international politics in 1772. In all his works he is viewed as an "outsider," which is ironic considering he advocated a "brotherhood" approach to social problems.

The Calvinists were very influential in the France of the 17th and 18th Centuries. They were very strict moralists who believed in a sense of pre-destiny. Rousseau was shaped by this concept, along with the scientific discoveries of the era, but not in the same way as other theorists such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. Rousseau in fact denounced the Enlightenment ideas of science and rationalism, relating them to the urban, inhumane world he tried to advocate against. He viewed much of these ideas as heartless and devoid of compassion. Whereas Locke had welcomed the Royal Society of London, which was devoted to the sciences and was founded in 1662, and later the Academy of Sciences in France (1666), Rousseau opposed the French Encyclopedists in Paris (1751-1768). Rationalists like Denis Diderot and Voltaire, whose works greatly inspired the French Revolution one year after he died, were opposed by Rousseau.

Rousseau conceived of "the constitution of natural man" being evolutionary.

"Prior to reason" man felt the need for self-preservation, for compassion, and the natural compassion of man was where all our good qualities flowed from. This compassion, he said, would be the basis for a citizenry dominated by "moral liberty" and "legitimate equality." His concept of moral liberty echoes the Greeks, who said happiness came from noble purpose, not acquiring power or money.

Rousseau thought too many "philosophers" were cold and heartless, either ignoring the plight of man, or treating man's problems as abstract. Today, such people would be said to be living in an "ivory tower." Instead of viewing individual property ownership as being part of an intertwined investment in the community, Rousseau saw it as "private interests," "private wills" and "different interest." These private interests are, in his view, the roots of cultural alienation.

The social contract of Rousseau's view is a civil state that leads to the implementation of the general will. Rousseau enjoyed creating a kind of "pro vs. con" lexicon of phraseology: "justice vs. instinct"; "duty vs. impulse"; "law vs. "appetite"; "reason vs. inclinations."

He envisioned a change from "a stupid, limited animal" to "an intelligent being." Nature, he said, is to be replaced by morality. Of course, there are caveats to Rousseau's utopianism. The ideal civil state of his theory is limited to about 10,000 people. In other words, Rousseau describes a small town in America in which the values he espouses roughly make up the reality of his vision.

Compare and contrast the political theory of the realists, the idealists and the reformers. Everybody wants security through a strong political system. Civil and international warfare is something to be avoided at the highest cost. The difference is that realists believe attaining security is paramount, and any idealistic vision of civil rights that threatens security is dangerous. If vice is the vehicle towards security, then so be it, according to Machiavelli's advice for The Prince.

"Machiavelli consciously lowers the standards of social action," wrote Leo Strauss in History of Political Philosophy.

The Aristotelian argument is for diversity in occupation and education. He said power should be in the hands of a few, but distributed because of the "natural equality of all citizens."

"When one of us hurts his finger, the whole extent of those bodily connections which are gathered up in the soul and unified by its ruling element is made aware and it all shares as a whole in the pain of the suffering part; hence we say that the man has a pain in his finger," wrote Plato.

What Plato advocated was creating a polity in which people no longer fear that events will turn others against them; rather, that their pain and their troubles will be absorbed by an empathetic public.

Plato saw his ideas as having an effect on the government, and no doubt it has. His admonitions embody the free press. The free press in a Democratic society provides differing viewpoints and investigative reporting. This is very important. Human-interest stories and in-depth tales of the plight of citizens create awareness and empathy. Rousseau's "organic polis" is one in which the multitudes are united, so the harming of one constitutes the harming of the whole. Many have used this concept, ranging from NATO, to the People's Republic of China, to "the people" represented by the state in criminal courts of law, to Islam.

There is an intimidation factor to the Rousseau/Plato political structure, and Rousseau offers some language that may have been benign at the time, but it was misused disastrously by later regimes.

The legislator should "change human nature; to transform each individual . . . into part of the greater whole, from which this individual receives in a sense, his life and his being; to alter man's constitution in order to strengthen it to substitute a moral and social existence for the independent and physical existence which we have all received from nature," he wrote.

Dress rehearsal for Communism: 18th and 19th Century European revolutions

History has to be burned into the imagination before it can be received by the Reason.

\- Thomas Macaulay, 1847

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book Of The Social Contract, followed by the American Revolution, combined to set off this series of unpredictable events with massive consequence. The Americans began something, a movement so wild and free that it could not be controlled. In this respect it was too great for the world to handle. The American advantages of virgin wilderness, untapped bounty, the almost naïve Christianity inculcating its grateful citizens with the notion that they indeed had arrived and were prospering in the Promised Land, did not replicate itself in Europe. Old feuds, vendettas, rivalries; ethnic and religious hatreds; all conspired to de-spoil any effort at creating American-style freedom.

The American Revolution unquestionably spurred not just the French Revolution but a century of strange European revolutions, none successful, certainly not comparable to the American original. The United States rose inexorably to greater and greater power. France's great rival, England secured the shipping lanes to India when Napoleon's forces were foiled at Trafalgar. England became the greatest empire of the 19th Century.

After the French Revolution, Napoleon tried and failed to conquer the world. When he failed, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, led by the diplomatic brilliance of Henry Kissinger's hero, Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, consolidated at the Congress of Vienna (1815) a new Europe, controlled in the east by Austria, in the west by London, with Russia struggling to understand its place in history.

Beyond the failed French Revolution and simultaneous European revolutions in 1848, the writings and philosophies of  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels led eventually to the Russian Revolution (1917) and the subsequent Communist Soviet Union. Creation of the Soviet Union led to Red China; a Cold War (1946-89); varied proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam); the killing of some 110 million people; and a poisonous disparity of political philosophy, never truly discredited amongst the Left, which today threatens to split America and other free nations apart.

The first half of the 19th Century resulted in numerous revolutions, none of which resulted in any concrete, positive change. When the United States engaged in a Civil War (1861-65) and England ceded power from a monarchy to an elected prime minister (Benjamin Disraeli), Germany emerged in opposition, an autocracy. Led by Otto von Bismarck, the Germans, long the "sleeping giant" of Europe, its militaries often mercenaries in the employ of others, consolidated into a single federation.

This came in confluence with the Industrial Revolution. For all practical purposes, the events of the following 70 years were about Germany trying to "win" the Industrial Revolution, its main competition being the United States and Great Britain.

In 1904-05 the Germans formulated the Von Schliefen-von Moltke Plan, for the beginning of what would become World War I. Possibly because the aggressive Republican Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, the Germans held back on the plan. With Woodrow Wilson at the helm, they attacked Belgium in 1914. Germany allied themselves with the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Turks, knowing that whoever controlled the Middle East oil supplies, controlled the world.

French Revolution

When Chinese Communist leader Zhou Enlai was asked about the French Revolution, he reportedly said it was "too early to tell" what its ultimate effect would be, although other reports have said he was discussing the events of 1968, not 1789.

However, the events of the French Revolution have been shrouded under historical cover. While it unquestionably did not attain the kind of national freedom that the American Revolution achieved, there has been a 200-year-plus lie meant to dissuade people from the truth, even to promote the fiction that there was some value to it. There was not.

To the religious person who believes that history is a struggle between good and evil, that both God and Satan involve themselves in the affairs of man, the French Revolution was a proxy struggle of cosmic proportions that should have been included in The Rolling Stones's "Sympathy for the Devil," just as surely as their admonition that Lucifer "rode a tank in a general's rank, when the Blitzkrieg reigned, and the bodies stank."

The French version bore no resemblance to the American Revolution. It was in fact a misguided carrying on of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's inflammatory book. It spawned a century of European anarchy that changed capitalism, monarchies and the balance of power forever. It destroyed France. The unhappy, irritable Frenchmen, who may not be able to truly state why they are unhappy or irritable, can trace this angst and existential ennui to this period separating their country from greatness; broke centuries-long "deadlock" with Great Britain in favor of the English; but most tragically opened the door to Communism. A Communist like Zhou Enlai should have been the first to recognize this.

Before the French Revolution, no civil disaster in Europe ever approached it. The closest was the Peloponnesian War, but that was nothing next to the "the Terrors." After it followed over a century of European anarchy. Then came the Russian Revolution. Millions died. The French Revolution was a pre-cursor of the Holocaust, the gulags; of the Khmer Rouge, the Red Guards, Tiananmen Square, Rwanda, Darfur, and the Sudan.

It is not impossible to learn true facts of the French Revolution, but they are hidden by liberal historians who would much rather you concentrate on the failure to find WMD in Iraq. The French themselves have whitewashed the events. By the 2000s, things had gotten so bad that it took outwardly conservative writers to unearth such things, like archaeologists on a dig. Thus did Ann Coulter use the French Revolution as an example first of the existence of a malevolent spirit loosed on the world (her book was called Demonic), then as further proof that mob violence is the province of the Left and always has been, beginning with "the Terrors" and carrying on to the modern Occupy Wall Street movement.

"But it wasn't the end of the French Revolution, whose influence would spread around the globe, inspiring catastrophes from Russia to Germany to China and Venezuela," she wrote. "Though it was the inverse of the American Revolution, the ideas of the French Revolution would even take hold in some quarters of America."

In Demonic, Coulter outlines the anti-Christian theology behind the French mob. Queen Marie Antoinette and her Bourbon husband, King Louis XVI, were devout Catholics who exhibited stoic, Christ-like strength in the face of awful treatment. They offered forgiveness to their executors at the scaffolds. The mobs did not merely overthrow a monarchy, they engaged in violent terror previously lacking in human conception. On one day they murdered between 8,000 and 28,000 human beings. Not all the deaths were at the relatively "clean" guillotine, but many died, torn from limb to limb by crazed lunatics using knives, shovels, pick-axes, or any other means to cut off heads, leave them on spikes, dismember bodies, drag corpses through the street, and all other unmentionable depravity.

They were not led by statesmen or commanders, but by wretched fishmongers, gonorrhea-infested prostitutes, and the worst street rabble. The lies they invented were perhaps even more monstrous than their acts, if possible. They justified every horror as somehow necessary because wealth and prosperity were evils to be punished by the worst kind of hell, if they had in fact believed hell was a real place. Instead, they were atheist to the extreme.

When the rural city of Lyon resisted the call to denounce both France and Christianity, they had to be destroyed. Antoinette's son was ripped from her arms, and at a young, impressionable age, forced to believe his mother had sexually abused him. Tens of thousands died. Victims of mistaken identity were killed even after their true identity was revealed, but the mobs were infected by bloodlust and could not resist killing.

All the great thinkers of Paris were killed, many of whom backed the revolution in the beginning only to be caught in its vortex. This explains as well as any other reason why France became a second-rate nation, unable to defend itself against the Germans, their Vietnamese colony against the Communists, or resist Islamic jihad in Algeria. Most of the bad things that mark history can be traced to Paris in the 1790s, and it is not an accident that some of the worst mass murderers ever spent time as intellectuals in French café society. The mob killed the best of their gene pool, the flower of a great nation. They gave Napoleon Bonaparte total control and he spread the misery of France to the entire world until the English finally stopped him at Waterloo.

1848

In 1848, King Louis Philippe was on the French throne, waiting to die. His death was predicted to signal another revolution. Conspiracies to kill the king were afloat, supposedly in the works for seven years. Germany was in revolutionary form, too. Giuseppe Garibaldi was in South American exile, said to be waiting for the Italian revolution that would bring him back to power. In Austria, their monarchy hung on Viscount Metternich. They waited for news of the king's death. In the end, Philippe hung on for two more years. The revolutions his death was supposed to kindle in the rest of Europe had fizzled out. The uprisings failed, this time. Revolutionary spirit would burn, in Marx's Communist Manifesto, and in Eastern Europe. Had World War I never happened, Marx's revolution would likely have fizzled just as the 1848 uprisings did. Never underestimate the power and effect of war, especially major war, on social upheaval. The fact that no major wars catapulted the movements of the 19th Century makes this a historical period for discussion among historians. Most people, however, read this and ask, "There were revolutions in 1848?"

Philippe did get ousted, so he had to die in England. Paris was in a state of consternation, enough so that they would let a Bonaparte take over again. Germany's university students disassembled, as did Italian and Hungarian patriots. There was bloodshed, though. In this case, there is little consensus on what it was all about. Was it Marxism before Marx? That is too simple an analysis. King Louis Philippe had been a "law and order" monarch, which made sense considering recent French history. Both Germany and Italy were still divided into smaller states. Therefore, their revolutions did not have locus on a national government. Even Prussia was not yet ready for the nationalism that would come to Germany a few years later. Revolution broke out in Naples, under a Bourbon throne, resulting in a new constitution there. Neapolitan politics, however, had become a matter of little interest to anybody outside the region.

Discontent reigned throughout the Austrian holdings ruled by the Hapsburgs; Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, northern Italy, and a swath of Poland. Vienna was ruled by an unmodern regime. Liberals throughout the world kept their eyes on Poland, northern Italy and Ireland. The Treaty of Vienna, signed in 1815, had placed restrictions on European countries that not only stifled governments, but also made a repeat of a major 1789-style revolution very difficult to coalesce.

Great changes in industry had created an exploited working class. A potato famine was occurring in Ireland. The Treaty of Vienna not only put a stranglehold on governments, but created difficulties for business, which in turn were felt by the workers. A lot of resentment brewed. The question among this new, modern class was what rights to afford the proletariat emerging from the factories and the mills. Masses of people were doing the work for larger companies; sweaty, dirty, dangerous, work that replaced many individual forms of employment. Machines were being developed to do the work of 100 people, marginalizing the lives of the workers. Questions of whether these people should be given the vote were offered. This is not so hard to imagine since Europe is a continent based, in part, on the works of Plato. Plato, for all his talk about equality, endorsed a system that allowed slavery as natural and reduced the vote to a relatively select group of Athenians.

The men in high position worried that the people would use votes to make precarious the systems allowing them to make a living in the first place. The Germans considered a class of potential voters, called selbstandig, who were felt to be independent enough to be given such a vote. They argued that what made men free was economic independence, not the polling place. The proletariat was, to governments, a fearsome mob.

Nationalism was a stirring force in 1848. Germany and Italy were still not ready, but the idea of powerful, autocratic states did not offer fear. France even debated the idea of carrying still more military campaigns. This time it was to "help oppressed peoples" of other nationalities. Austrian politicians knew only that they ruled people of different races and religions. They did not understand the nationalism that lay at the heart of their complaints.

In 1848, some groups were calling themselves "conservative Socialists." Suffice it to say, they did not know what they wanted. Real Democracy was so new then that there was no template. If this is what the French had in mind when they began their great failure, it must have been a scary concept for anybody contemplating such an "experiment" in 1848. Of course, the English were well on their way. The tides of history were by then demonstrating the English were the upper class of 19th Century Europe.

Democracy represented a foreign concept, but psychological and economic obstacles presented themselves, too. A utopian intellectual class would be generous about social reorganization. What makes this so unrealistic, in looking back, is that lines of demarcation were thoroughly drawn among social classes. Even in England, for all of its success, the lower classes had very, very little in common with their upper counterparts. Any reader of Charles Dickens could attest to this. The "Socialists" of this era were decidedly white collar; they were the liberals of their era. History tells us they were of a class of individuals who probably had never gone so far as to shake hands with a factory worker. They were the first of "elitists." They advocated the 1848 version of "affirmative action."

The social revolutions they espoused were not coming from Marx. They were of a political nature. They shared an allegiance with the modern Left in that they felt they had prescriptions for the common good, but only if they had power. In 1848, and in the years after that, some of these Socialists discovered that they actually feared the people they were trying to benefit. Marxism "worked," eventually, when the workers found this out.

Romantic nationalism involved the revival of long-dead traditions and stressed military glory, even in nations like France that had achieved their nationhood. Balkan nationalism had no main character. It was characterized by rivalry. The German character was taking shape in a way that told its leaders that patriotism was more important than civil liberty. Hungarians and Irishmen wanted only freedom from oppressors, not real power. Power was empire building. The Slavic peoples turned from cultural change to political ambition. The question among many was whether loyalty was owed to his class or to a nation, a very tricky concept indeed. Americans observed this history of Europe in the making, and made a big point of trying to learn from it. Richard Rush was the Minister to Paris, and he recognized the Second Republic. William Stiles told Prince Felix of Schwarzenberg that the Austrian Navy could sink an American frigate, but they could not catch her. Andrew Jackson Donelson requited himself very well as head of the Berlin legation. Giuseppe Mazzini escaped from Italy using a passport issued to him by the American Consulate.

But the Americans were "innocents." They cheered "people's victories" over vicious governments, but failed to understand the importance of class distinctions in Europe. All they could compare anything to was the U.S. There were no real lower classes there, like the huddled masses of Europe. They scorned the capitals of the Old Country as places of degradation.

Alexander Herzen was a Socialist from Russia who came to Western Europe in 1847. When he saw death and destruction amid a Parisian rebellion, he voiced pathos like that of Leo Tolstoy or Fyodor Dostoevsky, instead of the easy dismissals of the Americans, who just placed themselves above the whole mess. A Russian could understand the soul of struggle. The American Revolution had not been like any other. The difference between Herzen and the contemporary American diplomats tell a story that resonates to this day. It is the story of a people (Americans) who are unlike any other. Understanding them, and being understood by them, is to this day a trick not unlike the mysterious relationship between men and women.

"We are a predestined generation," the great French writer Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) wrote. "We have bigger and more frightening tasks than our ancestors. He have not time to hate each other."

The Third Republic was ushered into France after the events of 1848 by Adolphe Thiers. Bismarck unified Germany, and Count Camillo di Cavour the same in Italy. Ferenc Deak de Kehida won autonomy for Hungary within a dual monarchy.

Serfdom ended by decree of the Russian Czar. The People's Charter in Great Britain freed the manufacturing class. But revolution as class struggle failed, for the time being. The biggest reason for this was because groups within the movements differed with each other. The importance of a coherent unit striving for a main aim was made obvious, to be learned eventually by the Communists, the Nazis and the Western dissenters. Forces were typified by Louis Blanc, Heinrich von Gagern, Robert Blum, Alphonse Lamartine, the Reading Club and the Aula in Vienna; between Deak and Lajos, Kossuth, Cavour and Massini. In countries like Italy and Hungary, the struggle against a foreign oppressor was screened by a conflict among classes. Cavour thought that as class distinctions were wiped away, modern societies would strengthen. Violence from the underclasses in the years following 1848 indicated that this was not an idea whose time had yet come. Eventually hope of compromise was replaced with mobilization of the violence.

"The brutality which is present in higher circles filters down, and this brutality which above lives only in thoughts, below takes the form of action," said Karl Vogt, the biologist in the Frankfurt Assembly. "I have heard hundreds and hundreds of times expressions like `The whole bunch ought to be knocked out with grape shot,' `the agitators deserve to be hanged all together.' . . . Such expressions are mostly used by people who are fanatics of order and who make it their business to preach order and peace." This statement was made prior to the most aggressive police violence. As the historian Priscilla Robertson wrote, "A modern psychologist might speculate, where Vogt could not, that unconscious as well as conscious hatreds were bound to pervade any society held together with such rigid and arbitrary bonds as Europe in the mid-19th Century. The mass of the people were kept down not only by laws but by customs, by studied arrogance, by pious sanctions."

Ms. Robertson seems to be referring to the modern movements of nationalism, Communism, Socialism; the new phenomenon of people's revolutions. Aside from Jewish Exodus, possibly Christianity, and a very few other examples, this was a new form of politics. It replaced empire building, power building, the religious coalitions, and the quest for wealth, territory and security that marked history. What she says is that in the 19th (and 20th Centuries), Europe made the big leap from the 12th Century to the new age. Such forces could not be let loose without, as Joseph Stalin once was quoted, "breaking a few eggs." It is out of this mass of movements that great heroism conflicts with great villainy. Separating the characters makes for men of giant stature, good and bad.

The nations of the modern Middle East should study Europe of the 19th Century. It is there that they may find real parallels to their current predicaments. Some have, and the result is not what many Westerners would like to see. The leaders of Iran, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other "friendly" and "unfriendly" Arab states may in fact have learned some of the lessons of Europe. When the upper classes dared to give more equality, the process brought to the surface their greatest fears. The Middle East is a place where history is ready to repeat itself, and that history is a form of Communism. Not the kind of atheistic Communism of Russia. However, the autocracies of the Middle East resemble the czars. If the dispossessed lower classes of the Arab world break free of that yoke, history will repeat until it rhymes. The U.S. never had to face these kinds of hatreds. Assimilation has taken care of those seething feelings. But in the Middle East, the same class distinctions roil within the underclasses that stirred the proletariat.

So what lesson is to be understood? It is the lesson of social upheaval brought about by war. "Communism"-Islamo/Fascism-totalitarianism could come back in the Middle East, if a war were to ravage the region and get out of hand, like World War I did. This is not to say that Israel and the United States should not have a military presence there, and should not make war when circumstances dictate it. What it does say is that these wars had better be won by the right people. The peace had better be won, too. It is worthy to point out that there are no V.I. Lenin's in the Middle East, although the CIA may have a list of such "types." But it is also worth noting that many political parties in the region are or were drawn on the Marxist-Stalinist model, including but not limited to the Ba'ath Party of Saddam Hussein and Moammar Ghadafi in Iraq and Libya, respectively. Saddam modeled himself after Stalin. Saddam would never have led a real Communist revolution, but he could have been the perfect groundbreaker for the Communists of the future. The power and ultimate role of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains an enigma wrapped inside a riddle, but left to his own devices there is no reason to disbelieve his warnings, which resemble a veritable Islamic Hitler carrying out the "good work" his "hero" was foiled at: an Apocalyptic nuclear destruction of Israel's Jews.

Unrest in the region is not just about anarchy. It can coalesce into something history has shown us. The study of 19th Century Europe, therefore, is more than just an exercise in intellectual curiosity. It is a cautionary tale. The greatest mistake the United States can make is to declare the "end of history," which after a swift, stunning victory in Baghdad (2003), American youth, combined with success and hubris, made seem possible. The subsequent ups and considerable downs that marked a decade of the War on Terror may well be the last, best lesson America learns and hopefully uses to improve upon in the future. If not, the United States can only look at failed revolutions, anarchy and lost empires marking history, and so much of 19th Century Europe.

Alexander Herzen noted a Russian writer, of all people, who said that Americans learn notions of law, justice and equality in the cradle. In other words, asking these Europeans of the 19th and early 20th Centuries (and former Third World countries of the 21st) is tantamount to asking a person to learn a foreign language. It can be done, but it requires intelligence, perseverance and motivation.

The Europeans of the upper classes, throughout the ages, had simply felt that the lower classes were not capable of learning this "language." Then there were the philosophers. Massimi d'Azeglio at the time of the revolutions questioned the very human ambivalence towards freedom. Eric Fromm in Escape from Freedom showed that from the time of the Reformation, freedom was a burden, a threat, and most men were not prepared to accept its responsibilities. America enjoyed a tremendous advantage from the beginning. The U.S. is a country founded from its very beginning by men who openly sought and risked everything, for freedom. This was a completely alien concept to most of the men on Earth.

"The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong, and high-spirited," wrote d'Azeglio. "In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the desire to walk." As Priscilla Robertson wrote, the French voted for Napoleon's offspring because he would restore "order." This is like Eastern European countries that still voted for Communists, 14 years after the fall of Communism. Prussians were still paying their taxes after their parliament had been dissolved. The Hapsburg's subjects also chose to let somebody take power over them even when a vacuum in power existed. Moderates accused radicals of destroying order. The radicals were stopped, but they did not go away. Some, like Mazzini, were stopped by foreign intervention, giving them a martyred status that allowed them to fight another day with increased stature. The civil war of Paris' June Days made radicalism appear hopeless. Frederick William said soldiers were the only cure for Democrats.

This lack of desire for freedom marks the big difference between European Socialism and American Democracy. The (non-British) Europeans did not have the gumption to go all the way. Their half-measures ended up being their disaster. When the European middle classes got what they wanted, they found themselves giving up their newfound liberties so as to create equality with the lower classes.

An old proverb tells the story of a man who is asked if he could have anything in the world, provided his worst enemy gets the same thing. He says he wants one blind eye. Marx saw this, and exaggerated class conflict. No soft Socialist like Louis Blanc, no "turncoat" like Lamartine, Marx saw the violence nations make on each other, and turned that inward. French radicals wanted to march into Savoy or the Rhineland. The Germans wanted to march into Schleswig, the Italians to Radetzky. Disarmament was an eccentric notion of Karl Vogt, or Louis Napoleon, neither of whom were part of the spirit of the '48ers.

Marx said nationality was a myth. He wanted one-world government, but Lenin and the Balkan leaders used nationalism as cover. Marxists felt that loyalty to class outweighed national patriotism. Europeans simply did not believe that each man was created equal. They still had their barons, their dukes, their sirs and lords. The King of Prussia could still call working men an assemblage from the "gutter." Thomas Macaulay stood up in the House of Commons, saying universal suffrage destroyed property, and thus civilization. British Ambassador to Turkey Stratford Canning said he would not live in a world of "Reds and demagogues." Metternich thought freedom of the press was impossible. A Viennese army officer threw his shaving water out the window, it hit a man in the streets, and when the man complained he was arrested. Francois Guizot saw no correlation between the welfare of the lower classes with society as a whole.

These attitudes worked the other way, too. The movements were stalled much the same way women's suffrage took a long time to get off the ground. People did not think of themselves as equal to their masters. Therefore, if they could not share government with them, they had to kill them, as in George Orwell's Animal Farm. The American ambassador to Berlin, Donelson, thought the masses could not succeed because they seemed to accept starvation. Cavour said that the lower classes of the New World would have been shocked to see who their "counterparts" were. Predictably, millions immigrated to the U.S. Kossuth called the peasants "you" people, instead of "us." Hitler would learn this lesson, calling for uber alles ("above everything else") to fight together. When Italian revolutionaries pulled Count Joseph Hubner from his carriage, they did not presume to sit in it. Italians equated the word "Democratic" with shabby, a reflection of themselves.

So out of this came mass hypnotists, working their ignorant crowds like a snake oil man at the county fair. Then there were the Democrats who turned into autocrats. Religion played little role in Europe. It had been made to turn inward. The Catholics were disgraced by their bigoted empire. The Protestants were concerned with spiritual matters. In Garibaldi's guerilla army of Italy, a man might be a captain one day, a private the next. L'Atelier, the French workers' newspaper, said they had to succeed and form a club "in order to become men." Race did not play a major role in the revolutions, either.

So, the squabbles of government went on after 1848. Prussia pressed for the Weimar Republic. The Kremsier Parliament, originated in Vienna, then settled in Moravia, addressed the problems of mixed populations under Viennese control. The politicians made all their moves without trusting the people. The people did not trust the politicians. Austria's serfs gained freedom, at the cost of repression for others. Italy made advances, but Germany was disillusioned and ready for military rule. The myths of Marx and Otto von Bismarck seem to have been the only immediate "victors" of the '48ers.

Confidence was lost. Idealism turned to cynicism. Power politics ensued. Realpolitik was the new political phrase of the day. Totalitarianism, nationalism, militarism . . . and Communism, were the ruthless result of 1848. The formation of what would eventually be 20th Century Europe was almost complete.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

\- Matthew 4:4

Russia has been at the center of historical politics and revolution. Some of the great thinkers were Russian. Fyodor Dostoevsky, in particular his chapter on the Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov, provides a window into man's soul. The Grand Inquisitor's power is Freudian, based on individual and mass psychology, not on economic or political forces. His nature clashes directly with the American writer of contemporary times, Henry David Thoreau.

The Grand Inquisitor is in the tradition of Thucydides, Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes, in that people want not freedom, but security. Thoreau thought men are freed by their conscience. The inquisitor thinks them burdened by it. In this regard he resembles Sigmund Freud. They are just sheep who want to be told what to think. In 1843 Karl Marx wrote in his introduction to Philosophy of Right by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, "Religion is the opiate of the people," which Communist revolutionaries later changed to, "Religion is the opiate of the masses." According to the Communists, the atheists, and Adolf Hitler, people want security, not freedom.

Dostoevsky was a novelist, not a political consultant. But he was a notable social thinker. He was born into a middle class Moscow family, flirted with Socialism, got into trouble with the authorities, and was sent to Siberia. The result of Dostoevsky's experience was enmity toward Roman Catholicism, as shown in the Grand Inquisitor.

The chapter starts with Christ returning to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition of the 16th Century. Heretics are being burned at the stake. All the Indians were heretics, since they had never heard of the Lord before the Spaniards showed up. Christ gracefully meanders throughout the city. His radiance and compassion are made obvious. When the people are drawn to him, the Grand Inquisitor has him seized. The Inquisitor delivers a public relations campaign swaying people away from Christ, who is led to prison. The inquisitor then has a private meeting with Christ in his cell.

He tells Christ the people want security, and in worship they only want someone to whom they can hand their freedom over to. Freedom is terrifying to them in a hostile world. The inquisitor sounds much like Hitler later did.

The conversation then centers on Satan's three temptations of Christ. The first is economic. People want money more than freedom. Christ can bring them all to him through bribes. Christ says no.

The next temptation is psychological. The people, who demand signs of Christ's power, require visually satisfying miracles. But Christ disdains such displays because he wants people to choose him voluntarily.

The inquisitor then offers Christ political power, couching his offer in language that describes a "universal" or "world government," which sounds like the "one-world government" Communism later aspired to. Christ rejects this offer, and then kisses the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky describes the inquisitor has having hatred in his eyes that embodies the very highest form of evil. The encounter is telling in its contrasts of good and evil. It is a very pro-Christian message, while being anti-Catholic at the same time, which is very significant. Studies of Dostoevsky by 20th Century scholars have been used to highlight the difference between Mahatma Gandhi's and Adolf Hitler's power. It also symbolizes the widespread abuse of nationalism in pursuit of power.

Security vs. freedom

Born in 1821, Dostoevsky was a contemporary of Marx. His father was an army doctor, and had influence over his son. Dostoevsky wanted to be a writer but his father directed him to engineering. He spent five years in the Army Engineering College in St. Petersburg, but his father was murdered in a peasant uprising. In 1844 Dostoevsky resigned his commission to commit himself to writing. It was at this time that the French utopian Socialists (Henri Saint-Simon and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) influenced Marx. Dostoevsky read their works and became "mildly Socialist," according to Professor Dennis Dalton. He was a critic of Czar Nicholas I (1825-1855).

In a five-year span from 1844-1849, Dostoevsky published 10 novels and short stories. Poor People (1845) was an instant success. Dostoevsky is seen as a literary figure of great influence because he helped create the "social genre" that was later found in the works of Charles Dickens in Britain and John Steinbeck in the U.S.

His truthful description of the plight of the poor in Czarist Russia earned him an eight-month imprisonment in 1849. The charges stated that he was plotting criminal attacks against the government, but also cited the "insolence" of his works. He was sentenced to die and wrote that he "escaped," but the sentence was actually commuted to four years in Siberia. This resulted in a major change of heart. He became an adherent of Nicholas I and Alexander II (1855-1881), committed to his country, to the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church, and his nation's culture. He completely disavowed his early Socialist ideas. Towards the end of his life, when the early stirrings of the Socialist movement were beginning to take place in Russia, he intensely opposed it.

In the 1860s, he wrote Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. His chapter on the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers is set in 16th Century Spain, during the "worst period of the Spanish Inquisition." Started by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1481 to expose Muslims and Jews, Isabella's confessor Tomas de Torquemada (1420-1498) was the first Grand Inquisitor. He had 2,000 people burned at the stake in a public autos da fe, or "acts of faith." It is Torquemada who Dostoevsky models the old Cardinal of his book.

At the beginning of the story, Christ enters and is recognized by the people. This immediately threatens the Inquisitor's power. Dostoevsky obviously thinks history would repeat itself, and is pessimistic about man's ability to learn its lessons. Or, as the philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The inquisitor echoes Pontius Pilate and has Christ seized by his soldiers. The rest of the story is Dostoevsky's philosophy of good vs. evil, showing the people as accepting Christ's imprisonment because they choose to be cowed into submission and obedience. The inquisitor goes on a diatribe intended to justify his blasphemy. In it he announces that he has accepted Satan over Christ because Satan understands human nature. The overriding theme of the story is freedom. Christ sees freedom as being spiritual and says the "truth shall make you free."

"Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone to whom he can hand it over quickly that gift of freedom with which that unhappy creature is born . . ." countered the inquisitor. "Did you forget that man prefers peace and even death to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but at the same time nothing is a greater torture."

Dostoevsky's concepts of freedom are incredibly instructive of our knowledge of European history. In his moody pessimisms about the rejection of freedom, Dostoevsky echoed the sad tide of political history. We see his words resonating out of the French Revolution, when freedom gave way to retribution and left the bewildered, morally corrupt French masses begging for somebody - anybody - to be their master. Thus rose little Napoleon.

Dostoevsky's influence in Russia is tremendous and tragic. The future leaders of Communism used his words, and the people believed them. Europeans were not prepared for an alternative to despotism. Dostoevsky indicated that it is natural. The only exception was Great Britain, which slowly rose above and beyond themselves to become a Democracy.

Dostoevsky must have known the American success story. Perhaps the geographical and metaphysical distance that separates the U.S. from Europe and in particular, Russia, must have made the stories of the American Revolution something exotic and impossible to truly comprehend. Dostoevsky's vision is one of great gloom. He could not comprehend people of freedom and rugged individuality. However, the great influx of immigrants from Russia, Germany, Italy, Ireland and other European countries to America had begun during his life. What motivation did Dostoevsky attribute to all these people?

Instead, through the inquisitor, Dostoevsky wrote that people need to be freed from themselves, because they are afraid and therefore look to authority "and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever."

It is important to note that Dostoevsky was quoting a character he is not sympathetic to. Dostoevsky was sympathetic to Christ and does attribute to Christ a spiritual love of the truth, which might be viewed as "freedom." This gives man some kind of desire to avoid the authority of the inquisitor. But he seems to indicate that the inquisitor has found the pulse of what makes man tick.

In Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, the Grand Inquisitor's view of freedom vs. authority is related to politics, especially Hitler's Germany. Fromm felt that there are different kinds of freedom. John Stuart Mill described a kind of freedom that is more Western in nature, and helps to promote the vision of individualism that makes up the American psyche. Fromm said that in contemporary society, people are afraid of this kind of full freedom. They are afraid because, as Dostoevsky said, they are "alone with his self and confronting an alienated, hostile world."

"The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again," wrote Fromm, in his explanation of why men "voluntarily" eliminate free choice. Fromm pointed to Hitler's Mein Kampf, and his understanding of how to mobilize the masses.

Security lies at the heart of the Hitlerian view of what people want. It is the word that drives explanations for the two massive, totalitarian movements of the 20th Century. While this is one of the most imponderable questions ever asked, there are some explanations. First of all, there is the sheer weight of history in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and in the Orient: centuries of monarchs, despots, wars, torturers, tyrants, plagues, disasters, genocides, racial hatreds, religious hatreds, tribal hatreds, divisions, broken promises, abandonments, and a million other horrible sides of the human condition. All of these conditions met up with the Industrial Revolution, when people went to work in factories. Huge numbers moved from rural farms where they owned the land, to dirty cities where they found themselves to be numbers. New technology and machinery created weapons of killing that were impersonal and efficient.

Fortunately, these conditions are not as much a part of the landscape of America as the rest of world. America is a young country, and it has been forged out of success. They learned valuable lessons about how not to govern, what the dark side of the human condition is, and how to improve upon it. We gained a big boost of confidence when we won our revolution. We saw the French try to copy us. We saw ourselves become an influential country in the world. Our enemies, the English, came around to becoming more like us, led by Lincoln's contemporary, Benjamin Disraeli. We fought a terrible Civil War, but out of that we confronted our worst problems and began the long process of fixing them.

Perhaps most important, we were never occupied. The South was occupied during Reconstruction, but this was a much different set of circumstances than the French being occupied by the English, the Sicilians by the Moors, the Germans by the Romans, the Greeks by the Persians, and all the other results of war.

Let us imagine this scenario. The Civil War started, and around 1862 or so, the French traveled to our shores and joined forces with the Union. Then French forces took the fight to the South. Eventually splits with the Union occurred, especially regarding the lands of Louisiana, in and around New Orleans. The French decided to "re-claim" their lands. The French push the Confederates to defeat, then occupy the South and force the Confederates to free their slaves. Then the English, the long-time enemies of the French, come to the aid of the Confederacy. A major new front is created in which the French and the English fight each other on our soil.

Eventually, the war ends. Various political compromises, treaties and land grabs dot the American landscape. Our states are divvied up between various confederated groups of Franco-Union and Confederate-English military occupations. For years after, we live as an occupied nation. The slave trade ends at the hands of foreign invaders, not of our own will. Our laws and freedoms are dictated in part by these alien people. Various fights and rebellions occur, with different splinter groups trying to fight guerilla wars in an attempt to create little fiefdoms. Had this been our history, then the kind of citizenry Dostoevsky said the inquisitor was satisfying might have developed. The kind that Fromm describes in Germany, and which makes up the landscape of humanity in China, the Middle East, Latin America and throughout the Old World. Then America might have been open to the kind of dictators and dividers who came to power in the rest of world.

Americans are not more intelligent, but are lucky to have had so much history occur before becoming a country, and to learn from past mistakes. But our values could have been rent asunder, discarded like old campaign slogans (see France in the 1790s). Instead, they were immortalized.

God and man

Man, according to the Grand Inquisitor, is "weak, sinful, worthless, and rebellious." Man is worthless! Take everything out of the equation, and if men in power think man is worthless, all other explanations for history come into focus.

Again: "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," Joseph Stalin said.

Contrast this with Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image . . ." If indeed man did render himself "worthless" by falling to sinful temptation, consider John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosover believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life . . ."

The worthlessness of man gives men of "vision" the excuse they need to send them into wars, to kill entire races, to wipe out religions, to abort children by the millions, and to torture the imprisoned. At its core is a rejection of religion, because if man is worthless, then God is irrelevant. The battle is between the concept of man being created in the image of God, nurtured by His love, and protected by His guiding hand, vs. the image of teething masses of human animals.

Humans are "vile and weak," says the inquisitor. "Man is weaker and baser by nature than You believed him to be." Human nature yearns for "miracle, mystery, and authority" to soothe his anxieties.

Dostoevsky poses "three questions," the temptations of Christ found in the New Testament, Matthew 4:1-11, which can be called "plenty, pride and power." They are based on the temptations that Satan offered Christ while he wandered in the wilderness.

"Man cannot live by bread alone," Christ said when the devil offered him a deal whereby he would be a hero by feeding the masses bread.

"In the end, they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, `Make us your slaves, but feed us,' " the Inquisitor screams at the Christ of The Brothers Karamazov. The question is whether people want Earthly or Heavenly bread. The pessimists say that to pursue God is a contradiction of human nature. This fails to address a trend throughout much of the world whereby poor people are more religious than rich. If one were to buy the inquisitor's argument, then the wealthy, who have their "bread" needs taken care of, would turn to God more readily than the poor. The poor would be too busy trying to feed themselves to pray. The dirt-poor peasants of Latin America worship Christ with a love and fervor almost beyond imagination. The notions of man described by these dark artists just do not jive with this reality.

The next temptation that the Inquisitor puts before Christ is an offer to demonstrate himself in a vain display of power. The inquisitor is infuriated by Christ's calm refusal to do so, saying he wishes man to follow him freely, not because of demonstrations of immortality. Dostoevsky's interpretation is a bit obscure in light of the fact that Christ did display His powers in His life, by walking on water among other miracles. What Dostoevsky does, however, is aimed at showing the inquisitor, and therefore the Catholic Church, as being guilty of intellectual arrogance, of "playing God," and of being demonic. In its avowal of infallibility, studies of Dostoevsky's work indicate that he is also showing science to be guilty of the sin of pride. While science is supposed to be open-minded, it is elitist and impersonal.

This seeming side reference to science, which is not the main point of the chapter, nevertheless brings up some very important points about the nature of man in society. It has been pointed out that some dark thinkers believe man to be worthless. This is the heart of the anti-religious concept. Christians believe that God loves Man, and therefore each man is of great value.

But science is a tricky question, and one that gets mixed up with questions of evil as it applies to mammon. Science is prideful, and it displays itself in vulgar demonstrations of its "greatness." Christ chose not to do. The Internet is an example of science, technology and information potentially running amok. It is the natural tool of the hated "one-world government." It has already been shown to be a valuable tool of terrorists and pedophiles, and it is only about 20 years old. The important constraint of science must be in the idea that it serves man, not the other way around.

Science also tends to assert itself as infallible, or true. Dostoevsky saw this as the way of the Catholic Church. Both science and the Catholics view the masses with contempt, and it is for this reason that Dostoevsky views pride as the harbinger of Western downfall.

Dostoevsky viewed the "West" as being the outside world. Russian was not part of it. He said the West had convinced itself that it is endowed by God's grace, and uses this to justify its exploitations of native people's and lands. Marx saw this and thought it the fatal flaw of capitalism.

Pride is a word that has been stretched around. As it applies to the inquisitor and Biblical sins, it is a detrimental human trait. But just as Sigmund Freud's "ego" is different from the ego we use in everyday usage, pride has come to be seen as something of value. Humility and humbleness are valuable human traits, but pride in one's work, family, country, religion, accomplishments - pride in Western culture, in America's place in the world - these are things to be proud of. What must be kept in mind are not the simple concepts of sinful pride, but rather the temperance of pride as being something that each man must measure against something larger than himself.

Power is the third temptation of Christ, in the wilderness and in the jail of Dostoevsky's novel. In the Bible, Satan offers Christ all the land of the world. In it is the implicit parallel of one-world government. This was the goal of international Communism.

Perhaps the greatest, most unlearned lesson in history is that real power is in ceding this power. It is in not utilizing full military might. It is in allowing freedom to reign. This creates greater control, stability and influence than by any other method, yet requires the most God-like lack of vanity. The dark visions of Marx, Dostoevsky and Freud are exposed as frauds, miscalculations, lies, and falsehoods. The freedom of man is not ours to "allow." It is the unalienable, natural right of all men. We cannot "grant" freedom, only help those who are not free gain access to it.

The wicked live, the messy reign, and the corrupt thrive. To get rid of them by overwhelming force and fiat makes us no better than they are. We do this because we believe some have the capability of redemption. We do not believe all the innocent should die so evil may be eliminated. If we did this evil would just take a different form.

The parable of the 20th Century comes at the end of the exchange between Christ and the inquisitor. The inquisitor seems to have hit the nail on the head, his descriptions to Christ describing the worst excesses of our age. But in the end, Christ closes the encounter with a kiss. This "gesture of inclusiveness" is one of incredible symbolism. It represents the Hitler/Gandhi spectrum, the East/West divide, and Judas Iscariot's betrayal.

Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto

"The attempt to make heaven on Earth invariably produces hell."

\- Karl Popper

The nature of man is not only to be free to conform, but free to not conform. The

charisma of actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean was based on their "rebel" attitudes. Even among the social class, this kind of rebel mentality is valued. There is nothing sexy about the Red Guards. Fidel Castro is far less appealing in the romantic mind than Che Guevara, the handsome "revolutionary" he sent to Latin America to foment rebellion from the norm.

Before Che, however, history must pass through Karl Marx, author of The Communist Manifesto (1848). Surely Marx would have been appalled at what happened to his vision. Would he have felt a responsibility for the millions and millions of dead bodies that litter his altar? His name has been vilified, his hoary image despised, his legend trampled on by history. But sitting in his tiny London flat, weighed down by grinding poverty, his beloved daughter dying because he could not afford proper medical care, Marx sought only social justice. It is just and proper to argue that he and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were wrong. Is it valid to blame them for the ultimate tragedy of Communism? The Marx of the 1840s never would have advocated the gulags, the round-ups and the re-education camps. Not the way they eventually occurred. But the worst Communist mass murderers were often intellectuals, school teachers like Pol Pot. There remains a mechanism in Marxism, something that taps into the human psyche allowing so-called peaceful, thoughtful men to descend into madness. It is very difficult for those who believe in God to study this phenomenon, which applies to so much of humanity, seems to have emanated most notably after Christianity was "discredited" by much of Europe, operates most violently in Communism and Nazism; and not conclude that a Beast was loosed upon a vulnerable world.

Marx was born into the German middle class, but when he became involved in Leftist politics was exiled to Paris in 1843. After five years he wore out his welcome. In the year of the European revolutions, 1848, he was exiled to London. He lived there until his passing in 1883. He lived in Dickensian England, a place where many social inequities existed. Nevertheless, it was a place where Marx was fully exposed to Democracy at a time when Benjamin Disraeli was the Prime Minister who orchestrated a power shift from monarchy to Parliament. Marx was not closeted in a place where his ideas were the only solution. Could he not see the changes in England? Disraeli, like Marx, was Jewish. Queen Victoria said he was her "favorite Prime Minister." In the United States, the "experiment" had flourished. Marx was only 47 when the Civil War ended and the slaves were freed. Despite these lessons, he doggedly held to theories he developed in post-Napoleonic times. He lived in a Germany broken up by feudal states, then in a discombobulated France that had seen one revolution feed more scattered revolutions. Then he lived in the London of Ebeneezer Scrooge's time. But he saw change. He saw that the problems he addressed were slowly being addressed.

The problem with Marx is that change did not occur fast enough. Therefore, he envisioned great revolutionary change, massive upheaval that could not occur without uprooting everything around it. Marx did not understand how much the upper classes would fight to retain what they had, and what kind of excesses the lower classes would resort to once they gained the upper hand. Had he not studied the French Revolution? Did the days of guillotined terror not offer lessons to him?

Marx understood that man's first natural instincts were for work, food and sex. He echoes Rousseau in his view of the next stage of social evolution as being about the alienated self in an alienated society. He saw corruption all around him, especially economic corruption. The culprit? Private property and capitalism. He said these tenets perverted human values, exploited women, and encouraged domination. The next stage is classless Communism.

Why Marx thought Communism was coming was because in capitalism he saw contradictions. Greed and avarice would expose society, therefore creating a populace that demanded equality and true justice, i.e., Communism. He failed to see the truths that are exposed by a free society and a free press. What if Germany and France had never exiled him? He viewed the upper classes as repressive organizations, silencing him and his kind. He went to England and wrote. His voice was allowed to be heard. Although he was not popular, he was not silenced. Marx never envisioned investigative reporting with a social consciousness. Marx never envisioned corporations that felt the need to contribute to society, and to even profit from it. He did not envision technological advancements that would not only help millions, but provide goods and services that made life freer, and improved the environment, too.

In large factories, Marx saw only low-paid workers and high-paid bosses. Did he not consider the public that needed the products being made? Did he not see in education the kind of consciousness-raising principles that he advocated? Was it always "greed and avarice," or could Marx respect ambition and accomplishment?

Regarding work, Marx thought that under capitalism, men are not fulfilled by their work, which they perform out of "compulsion." That is, they must do it or starve. Jim Morrison of The Doors called it "trading your hours for a handful of dimes." Marx was thinking about factory work, which was unsafe and debilitating.

The future Marx did not foresee was entrepreneurial capitalism. The Marxist philosophy is wrong because ultimately people improve. Men desire to reach for something beyond themselves. What free societies have provided is an outlet for any man with enough gumption to make better for their families. Marx seemed to envision only soot-covered men who toil at their jobs with no dreams or aspirations.

Of course there was grinding poverty. Many, many workers had no hope of ever starting a company. They were ignorant and uneducated, and hoped only for enough to survive. Marx was unwilling or unable to ask himself the hard questions. That would have forced him to address whether an alternative vision of workers rising above themselves, Horatio Alger-style, was untenable. His alternative is a bleak one, some kind of place that meets basic worker needs without empowering them. The Horatio Alger model occurred in the United States. Marx gave it scant attention. He blinded himself to it. Why? Everybody has their own demons, their own personal animus's. Marx seems to have been less interested in bringing the workers up than he is in bringing the employers down.

Marx said that under Communism, the free development of each would conduce to the free development of all. Marx somehow thought that under Communism, the need for sex would be satisfied in love, and the need for work satisfied by meaningful labor. The Communists ultimately did use sex as a tool of recruitment and also a form of equality. The idea behind this was that by removing morality from the physical act, one removed antiquated, traditional and Victorian repression against women.

Why work was supposed to have become more meaningful under his system is a mystery. If the work was mindless and unfulfilling before, why would that change? Making widgets all day is boring and mind-numbing no matter what. Marx's argument was that if everybody is "in it together," that is, they all share in the profits of the widget sales equally, then the guy on the assembly line is of equal value to the foreman. This "equitable" relationship goes against human nature, as George Orwell's Animal Farm correctly demonstrates. In actuality, Marx's program was never fully implemented.

The "way out": discrepancies between Marx and Lenin

Conservatives argue the fact real Marxism has technically never been implemented is why liberalism still exists. The discrepancy between Marx and V.I. Lenin gives the liberals a "way out," to distance themselves from Communism. The problem, at least according to many on the Right, is that a pervasive thought continues to run rampant in the salons of Leftist thought. This thought is that the program was not bad, they just got it wrong the first time. If they got another chance they would learn from their "mistakes."

Marx's social criticisms, however, are not completely invalidated. He is an enormous historical figure, a man of tremendous importance, and despite pointed barbs, he is a man who apparently meant well. Lenin and Joseph Stalin were men of ruthless ambition. If their true intentions had been exposed they would have been imprisoned. Marx's heart seems to have some "purity" within it.

Therefore, he is a tragic figure. Since he was Jewish (albeit not a practicing Jew), his legacy is even more tragic. Hitler hated Communism, in no small part because Jews dominated it. His actions came about in part because of Marx. What truly would have broken Marx's heart would have been the way Jews were exterminated under Communism. The Jews were the first to be exterminated in the pogroms of farms during the Russian Revolution. Jews paid the heaviest price when Stalin activated his collectivist strategy in the 1930s. Again in the 1950s, Stalin murdered Jews, including, for some draconian reason, Jewish doctors. Jews were rounded up and killed throughout Soviet rule. History shows that it was not done as systematically as the Nazis. Jewish hate did not feed the Soviet propaganda campaigns like it did the Germans. But over a longer period of time, more Jews died under Communism than under Nazism. Of course, because they did have more time, the Communists murdered many more humans than the Germans did.

Marxist apologists point out that the gap between rich and poor in the industrial world has expanded in the past 30-40 years, but this is a total non-argument. Many rich people have established vast wealth, but it is not a zero-sum game. For instance, take 1,000 people, and the top 10 of them make $1 million, while the lowest end make $20,000. 10 years later the lowest end is making $40,000 while the highest end is making $5 million. The income gap has widened, but the lower end has risen nicely. The Republicans call it, "a rising tide that lifts all boats." If the zero-sum argument made sense, then all the people who made $10,000 10 years ago would now owe $4,970,000 per person to the rich people, who by this theory "stole" it from them using some global credit card. The fact is, when the rich got richer, it was their taxes that paid for the services of the low end. They used the extra money to create companies and jobs that helped increase jobs and low-end salaries. This exercise only assumes everybody stayed in the same economic class. It does not take into account a Bill Gates, who at one time was at the low end, or near it, when he dropped out of Harvard and entered the workforce. 10 years later he was one of the guys on the high end. Gates is the most obvious example, but millions of unknown achievers mark capitalism.

One area where Marx maintains some current relevance is the question of Democracy, liberty and equality. The first hint that Jeffersonian Democracy might not be for everyone was the French Revolution, whose battle cry was "fraternite, liberte, equalite." It should have been, "Today France, tomorrow the world." All of Voltaire's aspirations went by the wayside by virtue of the guillotine and Napoleon's armies. Today, despite bumps in the road, Democracy has taken hold all over the world. It is the greatest, most successful method of government ever devised.

It also is not a panacea. It has failed in many places. It has succeeded sometimes only by hook or crook, by virtue of coups, back alley dealings, propped-up governments, and rigged elections. Countries like Guatemala, Chile, Italy, Turkey and Greece are just the more obvious examples of places where Democracy rules, but if the CIA had not manipulated the people in favor of it, it might have been a different story. Most of the places where the hand of the American government played a major role in creating "friendly" Democratic governments surely would have turned away from Communism eventually, but only after much misery.

The "big experiment" does not work perfectly and immediately wherever it is tried. The attempt to Democratize Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by what at this point looks like a failed "Arab spring" (2011), shows that Democracy may not be the wave of the future everywhere. The people of the Middle East way very well not be capable of Democracy. However, this is a short term and maybe even shortsighted view. The long view of history, which encompasses a century or more, may demonstrate that it is inevitable no matter how many mistakes are made in its implementation.

Marx's "ghost"

On the other hand, there is a mind-set that fueled Communism, which threatens to be even more powerful. Call it Marx's "ghost." Communism failed and therefore the use of the word "Communism" has been discredited, but Marx, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the demagogues of history, tapped into a restless human unhappiness that will always be prevalent. The great challenge of the future is whether this unhappiness will prevail as a majority ideology or not.

Optimists look to American history. At one time, it might have seemed unlikely that South Carolina would be integrated and their elected officials would have among them members of the black race. It would have seemed at one time incongruous to imagine Nelson Mandela as President of a post-Apartheid South Africa. But visionaries saw these things. In 1986, a white diplomat from South Africa addressed a Republican group in Orange County, California. The questioners pressed him pretty hard about the Apartheid issue, which at the time was quite intractable. Blacks were in uproar, rioting and "necklacing" traitors in the streets. The idea of letting these people have run of the place was horrifying to the white power structure in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

"You have to give us time," the man said. He wanted to do the right thing. He was not a racist. "We are like America in the 1950s. The freedom demanded for the black population will come to South Africa, but it must happen incrementally."

Based on his timetable, equality and true Democracy would not have come to that country until the mid-2000s. Four years later, in 1990, Nelson Mandela was President and Apartheid was in the dustbin of history. The great tragedy is that the blacks of South Africa are worse off today than they were then, which made the optimists questioning the diplomat appear now to be Pollyannas.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, history seemed to speed up. Events that took generations to take place now occur, it seems, much faster. But still, there are places that are not ready for Democracy. Will be Democracy take root throughout the African Continent, the Third World, and even in Palestine? It cannot just happen overnight. Whether it can happen at all is, unfortunately, a greater threat than it seemed to be only a decade ago.

It is not reasonable to expect the German and Japanese model of modern, industrial nations to be followed in all countries. Africa in particular is a tragic place, riven by AIDS and genocidal dictators. The irony is that the blacks of South Africa, whose plight under Apartheid drew so much attention, had it far better than almost all the blacks living under black governments on the continent. Somalians are some of the most physically beautiful people on the face of the Earth. They have suffered horrendously under a series of tribal warlords, with well over 300,000 dying. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both tried humanitarian missions to bring some kind of peace to this land in 1992-93, but it ended disastrously for the American soldiers and the starving people.

When the Tutsi and Hutu tribes of Rwanda quarreled in 1994, it became all-out genocide. Over a million died by the sword. The Americans did nothing. The Somalia disaster was fresh in their minds and they figured the situation was almost beyond help.

Acknowledging that Democracy in its purest form is not the answer in the Third World, however, does not mean that Communism ever was or will be. Who but a lunatic would actually argue that Castro's Cuba has benefited the people there? After Jimmy Carter was elected President in 1976, and Saigon had fallen to North Vietnam, the Communists became adventurists in the Middle East and, especially, Africa. The Reagan Administration, along with the simple disaster of Communism itself, ended the "adventure" by the 1980s. Communism was shown for what it was in Cambodia, when the Khmer Rouge took over.

Karl Marx probably would agree that the white man was at fault. His theories will never die completely as long as big American companies like Coca-Cola do not pay minimum wage to workers in a bottling plant in the U.S., instead paying $1.50 an hour for workers in Mexico. The end of Marx and the end of social inequality may be beyond our ability to deal with, on its own, using current methods. In Marx's time, the exploited workers were white, but the downgraded whites of the 19th Century - the Irish, the Italians, the émigrés - rose up above their standing in the world. We have seen minorities in the 20th Century - blacks, Hispanics, and Orientals in the West - rise above their standing in the world. Hopefully, the next wave of change will be in the 21st Century, when we see the Third World rise above their current standing.

Certainly, the Third World has been a pawn in the global chess match for too long. Now that the U.S. is the world's sole superpower (with China threatening), maybe the gates will open for them. When the Americans and Soviets were dueling it out for 45 years, we all cared less about food and working conditions in Africa and the Middle East than we did about arming the right guerrilla armies, fixing the right "elections," or propping up the right dictator. The fact that this messy business was necessary does not help those who were left behind. Now, the challenge is to make a difference even in places where it is not in our so-called "national interest."

In the Middle East, oil and the battle against terrorism make this a logical place to help elevate the living standards of the people. The obstacle there is radical Islam, which is where Christianity was 500 years ago. The Muslims have to evaluate their religion the way the Christians did during the Reformation and the Renaissance, when they decided not to be a religion of violence and oppression, and instead to be one of love and spirituality. This is the role of modern Islam, and we have to help them. When this happens, we can help promote the kind of human conditions that the West enjoys.

Africa is a tougher nut to crack. It is a land of boundless natural resource, but the brutal truth is that events can take place there that do not really affect our way of life. When Africa was a pawn in the Soviet-U.S. chess match, we paid attention to it. Would the "Rumble in the Jungle," the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman boxing match of 1974, have been held in Zaire if we were not in the middle of the Cold War at that time? Terrorists impede progress in the Middle East because it is in their interests to do so, just as warlords do the same in Africa.

Yasser Arafat seemed to want Palestine to be poor and in shambles because if peace prevailed and they were allowed to modernize, the people would not "need" him any more. African warlords seem to want their people hungry and crazy. Out of that fatigue for life comes the soldiers who will fight their awful battles out of desperation. In the post-war Iraq of 2003, remnants of Saddam's regime, his Fedayeen and Ba'ath Party loyalists, mixed with Hezbollah and Al Qaeda elements. Some of the terrorists operated in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. Others came over porous borders after it was over. They attacked the U.S., plus U.N. and Iraqi elements. They sabotaged infrastructure built by the U.S. to help the Iraqi people. But why?

These terrorists might say they did it to get the "infidels" out of their country, to remove the hated Americans from Iraq. But does this hold up to logic? The more they sabotaged the U.S. re-building effort, the longer the U.S. stayed and kept re-building. If these terrorists wanted America and the U.N. out of Iraq, the best and fastest way to see that happen would be to lay down their arms, turn themselves in, and allow for the smooth, cooperative transition to Iraqi independence. If, after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, terrorist elements had sabotaged the re-building of Kuwait, the U.S. would have had to stay there for years to root them out and repair the damage from the war. The terrorists did not cross the Kuwaiti border, and in short order the U.S. left Kuwait with the exception of a small detachment for security. This is an example of the "new kind of empire" that America represents. This empire is not the kind that ruled countries, taking them by force, brutally suppressing the people, and creating totalitarian regimes. This is the American Empire. It is an empire of ideas. In Kuwait we freed a country, made it safe to do business, an engendered the thanks of grateful people.

That is what we tried to do in Iraq, too, but the terrorists hate our way of life; our success and our freedom. They hate the possibility that it will spread throughout the Middle East the way it spread through the rest of the world. In this respect, while Islamic terrorists may not even know who Karl Marx was, and would hate his atheism, nevertheless it is his "ghost" that whispers in their ears. It is a ghost advocating for unrest, turmoil, and rebellion, using jealousy and whatever means of easy-to-find hatred that is available.

They sabotaged the post-war effort in Iraq because they did not want to see Iraq become another example of American success. They are afraid of the new American Empire because it is more dangerous to their antiquated philosophies than the old empires. The old empires were easy to hate, like prison guards. This new empire is an empire of ideas, the most powerful in the history of the world. These ideas represent their death knell.

The terrorists of the 21st Century Middle East have much in common with the Communists of the 20th Century. They are the losers of history. Marxist atheist dogma has been replaced by Wahhabi fundamentalism. Both concepts are based on a form of utopia, whether it be a "workers' paradise" or a "virgin's paradise." These kinds of anti-social "revolutions" will always be around as long as there is evil and ignorance. Stamping out evil and ignorance is a tall order.

The rantings of Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela of South Africa were the result of a similar kind of frustration. Both men spent an inordinate amount of time criticizing the United States. Mandela called the U.S. an "atrocious" country. Bishop Tutu said the West, led by President Ronald Reagan, could "go to hell." These kinds of remarks are the result of not being relevant any more. When their countrymen used them as symbols against white oppression, they were important players. Now that the issue of white oppression has been replaced by the day-to-day administration of government, they are not major factors. The increasingly less important international community feels fellowship, and awards meaningless Nobel Peace prizes to Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore and Barack Obama.

Marx felt that as humans evolve, they experience three phases of growth. The first phase was the "animal" phase, which consisted of the need to eat, work and procreate. Hunger and sex were pursued out of our selfish selves. Work was performed out of necessity.

Marx said that the Western society of his era had evolved into an alienated society, with man divided against himself. Exploitation and domination were the result of the new alienation. Marx lived in Europe, but in his era whites were divided by classes. The lower classes could identify with the minorities and Third World natives who were the "exploited class" of the 20th Century. An examination of 19th Century Europe finds parallels among the "exploited workers" to the natives.

Marx felt that the lower classes of Europe would only find equality through Communism. Forgetting whether his model was followed closely enough or not, history tells us that they did not find equality through Communism. Rather, the natural evolution of people through social awareness and modern technology explains their rise better than any revolution. At one time, the Irish and the Italians were on the low rung of the barrel. They came to the U.S. and were members of the roiling class of have-nots Marx felt would foment revolution. But they rose within a free market system.

This same evolution occurred in other countries, some more easily than others. Obviously the "rise" of Jews in Germany resulted in a clash with the worst possible consequences. World War II put all social experimentation and natural progression on hold, but a look at modern Europe and America indicates that the lower classes of Marx's day did rise to the middle class. The lower classes of today are rising to the middle class.

Refuting Marx

This helps explain the popularity of conservatism in America. Marx saw a world in which the lower classes had nothing in common with the upper classes. He saw alienation and strove to make the people more alienated, so as to drive a wedge between classes. This is the oldest trick in the book. Terrorists in the Middle East and warlords in Africa use this method. The last thing these people want is for the dispossessed to feel kinship with the powerful. When this happens, their "leaders" lose power. Marx's ultimate destination was one class, but somebody would have to topple for this to occur. He never foresaw the ambition of people in a free society. The political demagogues must not lose an important part of their constituency. Efforts to divide the classes, instead of bringing them together, result in occasional short-term gains. In the U.S., too many of the so-called "lower classes" traditionally rise above their circumstances for this method to have long-lasting success, but it is a constant struggle to contend with election by election.

People look at the rich, with their tax shelters and their protectors within the political hierarchy. For demagoguery to triumph, people cannot lose their disdain for them. In a successful capitalistic society, many desire to be like them. The more ambitious among them think they have a shot at it. Look at the Silicon Valley, for instance, or the dot-com revolution. Much of the wealth of the go-go '90s was lost and

re-gained, but the spirit of entrepreneurialism that existed then still exists today. The black-Jewish 20-something with computer skills does not look at the corporate elite with envy. He looks at them as a model. The Indian immigrant who comes to America or Europe with the ability to work on microchips does not associate himself with Gandhi's underclass. He is thinking about stock options. The dot-coms did not explode, but the same conditions that allowed them to happen are just waiting to bubble to the surface, better than ever the next time. Mistakes of the past are a learning experience for all.

One area that Marx does not readily address is health care, a major bone of contention in the modern era. Modern medicine is, in some ways, a victim of its own success. The simple explanation is that people get sick and want the latest cure. Medical breakthroughs have been so amazing that there are seemingly cures for everything. Of course, it all costs money. In the past, folks got sick and there were no cures for a lot of diseases. People just accepted that this was the way it was and that was that. Now people get sick with diseases that would have killed them in the past, but we have cures now. They consider it their right to have those cures. Common empathy for the human condition directs us to provide those cures to everybody, regardless of the cost. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama said everybody should pay. Believe it or not, many on the Right really do not have a problem with that if they thought it would work. The problem is that health insurance and medical cures do not necessarily go hand in hand. The other problem is a consideration of the environment that produces great medical breakthroughs.

Why is the best medicine found in the U.S., and after the U.S., in other industrial, capitalist countries? Because of incentives, the profit motive. Great doctors and scientists want to make money just like everybody else. They are inclined to go the extra mile to discover and make their breakthroughs not because of pure altruism or government regulations, but because of a desire to make the most for themselves. All the other benefits - fame and honor - go along with it.

Marx envisioned a "workers' paradise" of happy employees all striving for the common good. He seems to have lost sight of the human desire for excellence. The workers of the world he helped create just slugged along, putting in their hours and producing below-standard products. If what they made was great they were not rewarded, and if what they made was terrible, they were not punished.

The same philosophy has played itself out in medicine. The social engineers cannot get past the idea that excellence comes at a price. A great, custom-made automobile costs more than an ordinary assembly-line job. Health care is now considered a right (whereas driving a car is not). Everybody wants the Bentleys and Shelby Mustang equivalents of medicine.

Providing it for everyone by virtue of national care is not deliverable. Compare it with the idea of a national auto provider who provides each U.S. citizen with a car from the government when they turn 18. The auto-provider plan is even more viable, in some respects. Driving does not have the variables of medical need. Everybody just "needs" a car to get them around. If everybody gets a Ford Taurus, for instance, they have what they need. Various medical conditions are such that some people "need" the "Shelby Mustang" of medicine, i.e., exclusive cancer treatments, high-end AIDS "cocktails," rare liver transplants, etc. Others can get by with a clunker (yearly check-ups).

Marx has an answer for the capitalists who exploit the workers. He said they are "addicted" to money, compelled to consume or accumulate property, and that the more one gets, the greater the addiction becomes. Marx felt that this kind of behavior was as "far removed from our natural needs and state of good health as obesity or bulimia."

One can see a certain nobility to Marx's claims. The man who works hard and accomplishes greatness, but does so only to share it with others, is a man of saintly qualities. He might be viewed as a fool or a "chump," but he is a man of greatness. Former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden might be such a man. Wooden is the greatest college coach of all time, but he never got rich doing what he did. His salary was paltry by today's standards. When he discovered in his early days that a promised retirement fund was going to a student organization, and not to him, he chose not to leave out of a sense of commitment. He never cashed in on the shoe contracts and outside endorsement deals of his successors. He lived until his passing at a good old age by modest means. He could have gone to the NBA and made a great deal of money, but chose not to. His accomplishments were "shared" by millions who cheered his teams and benefited from his example. He is the basketball equivalent of a man who discovers the cure for a rare disease, but chooses not to gain monetarily for his work.

But Coach Wooden is rare. Marx should have understood that it is not in the human nature for men to be like him. That is why Wooden is so revered. If all were like Wooden, Wooden would not stand out. Even Wooden himself has a proletariat outlook on life, as evidenced by the fact that, when interviewed, he said the "person of the century" was, in his view, Mother Theresa.

Mother Theresa was a woman of extraordinary greatness, who forsake all things of worldly value to spend a lifetime comforting the sick in the slums of Calcutta, India. But what is her contribution vs. that of, say, scientists who discovered fabulous drugs curing innumerable diseases? They did so working in a capitalist-friendly environment in which their accomplishments were rewarded with raises in salary, stock options, and awards of merit that gave them fame and, in turn, more fortune. Who did more for Mankind? Mother Theresa bathing the feet of a dying man, or a white-shirted country club doctor in Connecticut or San Francisco or England who made a medicine that saved that man from dying long before he met his final days in the tender hands of Mother Teresa?

There will always be sick people. The human condition mandates sickness and death, and in the end, beautiful souls like Mother Theresa provide comfort and faith that is more valuable than money. The comparison of the country club doctor and Mother Theresa is an uncomfortable one. It reeks of country club snobbishness.

The only problem, of course, is that it is on point. The mere fact that people like John Wooden and Mother Theresa are so revered therefore refutes the Marxist premise, which bases his entire society on reliance of most people to be as altruistic in nature as these two people were.

Marx saw the phases of development as analogous to childhood and adolescence. He compared the "alienation phase" to the teenage years, when life "gets worse before it becomes better." This is an interesting point, actually, and unlike much of Marx's theories, not really something that can be disproved. It requires a look at the future that is impossible to see. That is, of course, unless we say that we are the future. Marx thought society would grow out of its addictions, rebellions and alienations, like the adolescent does, and mature into a healthy "adult." While the world has not reached its maturity, the question is, What is our maturity? Whatever we are, we have come a long way from the Dickensian, colonized, racist world of Marx's day. We are past institutionalized slavery, the Holocaust, world war, and the Jim Crow South. We have matured a lot. We are not what Karl Marx thought a mature world would look like.

Frank Sinatra once said of America, "We're not perfect, but we spend a lot of time trying to fix our mistakes." The United States still plays power games, and exploitation in one form or another still takes place. It is an ongoing experiment, this system of ours. Ol' Blue Eyes was right, though. We do spend a lot of time examining our actions to try and make it better.

Marx had one thing that he could not get around. That was the basic nature of capitalism as a necessary tool. He could not adequately explain it away or give us the model for a better system. He ended up saying that it was a "necessary and desirable" stage in our evolution to Communism. He said it would promote our third and "final state" of evolution. One wonders what Marx would have made of Lenin's statement that, "The West will sell us the rope we will use to hang them," which turned out to be as famous as Nikita Khrushchev's shoe pounding statement, "We will bury you."

Marx felt that sharing and cooperation were not compatible with the capitalist system. He should have spent some time in any small town in mid-America, especially during a time of crisis like a flood or a tornado. If you want to see "sharing and cooperation," check out America. We wrote the book on sharing and cooperation. Other countries do not, generally, share and cooperate like Americans. Foreigners were utterly amazed at the way this nation came together after 9/11 and, along the Gulf Coast in Alabama and Mississippi, following Hurricane Katrina. In many villages far and wide throughout the world, disasters lead to hoarding, Mafia vendettas, arguments over ancient feuds, tribal in fighting, and all the nit-picking things that did not happen after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

Marx addressed the issue of prostitution as a perfect metaphor for capitalist society. He said we view "others" as sex objects rather than loved ones. Both males and females are victims of prostitution because the relationship is based on domination, which deforms both parties. This prevents healthy relationships from forming. Even here Marx is off the mark. Many forms of forced prostitution and "white slavery" do look like what he describes, but not all. Modern prostitution is very often a matter of negotiation not any different from any other business transaction. Prostitutes and strippers succeed or fail based on the merits, just like anybody else in business. A beautiful woman who possesses extraordinary skills is in high demand, and can charge huge sums of money. She is able to define the rules, and is not necessarily "dominated." This is entirely separate from morality, but there is no evidence Marx really used traditional morality – certainly not Christian morality – in his writings.

Marx saw workers as prostitutes, exploited by the employer's "compulsive quest for increasing profit." He said the worker was not the only victim. The alienated employer was a victim of his own compulsions, too. With all due respect, Marx's views must be examined in relation to the times he lived in. Prostitutes in mid-19th Century London were crabby, low-class whores who made their living on the dangerous, fog-shrouded streets, in a desultory back-and-forth with the skulking johns who sought them out. This condition does not vary all that much from the factory conditions of the era.

Today, prostitutes are often gorgeous "escorts," many of them semi-famous porn stars who exploit their own stature as fantasy women. They are dressed up as glamorous, socially acceptable trophy girls who provide the kind of entertainment rich bigwigs consider their just due for their accomplishments.

This picture is not an attempt to belittle the conditions of drug-addled street hookers plying their wares in the back alleys of shady big cities, or the bargirls of Manila and Hong Kong. It is not an attempt to glamorize the human slave trade of the former East Bloc. Prostitution is still associated with drugs and organized crime. But the factory worker and the prostitute in a capitalist society have something in common that Marx did not account for. The most skilled among them, the most entrepreneurial, the most ambitious, have a way out. In fact, they can thrive.

Marx asserted that people were perceived solely by their place on the economic ladder. But the high regard society accorded to John Wooden and even Mother Theresa flies in the face of this concept.

The third phase of Marx's world is one of communal self-consciousness. His ideas are not entirely separate from Socrates and Plato. He hoped that professional "do-gooders," for lack of a better term, could replace corruption. The Hindus esteemed self-conscious actualization. This involves replacing dominating sex with love; making the home self-sufficient; and making work creative and self-esteeming. This sounds like the "family values" plank of the Republican National Convention.

At the heart of Marxism is work. He wanted to elevate work from boredom and tedium, to something joyous. He wanted this to occur, but did not seem to offer a way of increasing the value of the workers' output. For decades, Communism billed itself as a society that provided a free education to all its citizens, who therefore were more valued workers because of it. Eventually, this was determined to be a lie. The most promising youth were chosen for advanced training, in sports, the sciences, or other careers. The average worker just kept on working in menial jobs without advantage of education or training. They never became more beneficial to the state-employer.

Americans visiting or living in Europe discovering this first hand. Many thought the American education system was inferior to the European model. Europeans they met were highly educated, spoke several languages, and seemed superior to average Americans. But when Americans travel to Europe, they discovered that the average European did not speak several languages. They had less education than the average American. The myth of European educational superiority was a combination of propaganda and the fact that their "ambassadors" were those Europeans who could afford to travel, and therefore were cosmopolitan. By the same token, many come to realize that the Americans one meets traveling in Europe are also more likely to be bi-lingual, better-educated, and more cosmopolitan that their compatriots.

It "is just in his work upon the objective world that man really proves himself as a species-being," said Marx. "This production is his active species life. By means of its nature, it appears as his work and his reality." Marx wants each of us to see our own reflections in our work.

"Objectification" in Marx-speak means the presence of a person's activity in the objective world; to see ourselves reflected in our environment. It is the opposite of individuality. Private property must be abolished because it promotes "exclusive enjoyment."

"In a higher phase of Communist society," he wrote, "after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

Marx felt that economic forces determined ideology. If this were true, it would illustrate only a vicious cycle. No societies that are both poor and totalitarian can become free with Communism. Of course, all totalitarian societies are poor. Under Marxist theory, a nation cannot become Democratic before they become economically prosperous. The human desire for the simple freedom that all men want is ultimately the necessary seed of Democracy.

"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property," Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto. ". . . Bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law" are, in his view, ideological rationalizations of economic interests, which he says are "false." All justifications for the status quo of the Western economic and social systems, said Marx, are meant only to mask dominance and exploitation. Marx further said that morality, religion and metaphysics were all just part of a larger ideology, all tied together, all designed to pervert reality.

Manifest Destiny

Therefore shall ye keep the commandments which I command you this day, that ye may be strong, and go in and possess the land, wither ye go to possess it;

\- The Fifth Book of Moses, Called Deuteronomy 11:8 (The Blessings of the Promised Land)

After frontiersmen crossed the Appalachian Mountain range, great land companies had speculated on the value of this land. The Ohio Company secured a grant at the forks of the Ohio, and the Transylvania Company sent Daniel Boone into the bluegrass region of Kentucky. This became known as the Wilderness Road. Settlements began there. These settlements grew so quickly that Kentucky became a state in 1792, followed by Tennessee in 1796 and Ohio in 1803.

The Louisiana Purchase increased the number of states, extending territory from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada, and from the Mississippi River to the Rockies. Jeffersonian Democracy took root everywhere, spreading wherever it was introduced. The Lewis and Clark Expedition crossed the continent by following the Mississippi, Missouri and Columbia Rivers. Zebulon M. Pike was sent north up the Mississippi, west across the prairies, and up the Arkansas River. Pikes Peak above Colorado Springs, Colorado is named after him. This marks the approximate western limit of his exploration.

After a corruption case involving the Louisiana Purchase, westward migration reached flood stage. Louisiana was admitted to the Union in 1812, and a new state was added each succeeding year through 1821. The new Cumberland, or National Road linking the Ohio country with the east, along with steamboat development, pushed the movement.

The War of 1812 marked some halt to westward progress. It was foreshadowed in 1811 by the Battle of Tippecanoe in Indiana against Indians spurred on by British forces. General William Henry Harrison rode his fame from this battle to the Presidency a few years later. President James Madison was unhappy with the British searching American war vessels, impressments of Americans into seamen, paper blockades, and instigation of further Indian conflicts. The British had the greatest navy on Earth, although American ships demonstrated superiority. But the British had more ships and the Americans were forced to flee.

On inland waters, the Americans won more victories on Lake Erie (where Commodore Matthew Perry captured a British fleet, rare in English Naval annals). On Lake Champlain, Commodore Thomas McDonough defeated a flotilla from Canada. At Detroit, General William Hull crossed into Canada, retreated and surrendered. The British also repulsed an American invasion at Niagara. General Henry Dearborn then captured the Canadian capital, York, but the English boldly invaded Washington and burned the White House to the ground. General Andrew Jackson's frontier army then marched on and defeated the British at New Orleans. The British sued for peace via the Treaty of Ghent. America's second military success against the vaunted British led them to believe in a sense of invincibility and destiny in themselves. This created a national confidence like no other nation.

The United States in the early 19th Century consisted of a few states, which were former colonies. Then the territory of Louisiana was bought from the French. What lay west was virgin territory. They knew that across the continent could be found the Pacific Ocean. They knew there were native Indians indigenous to the country. They knew about the Spanish lands that lay in the Far West and in South America. They knew little about what lay in between.

The "era of good feeling" began after the War of 1812. James Madison was elected President in 1816, and re-elected in 1820. He was the fourth Virginian to be elected to the White House. Monroe had fought in the revolution and studied law under Thomas Jefferson. After the U.S. acquired Florida, the U.S. faced a diplomatic crisis because General Andrew Jackson cared little for international law in his prosecution of Indian Wars in the Pensacola region. After 300 years, Spain had lost its foothold in the Americas. She lost all her American colonies except Puerto Rico and Cuba.

Partly in response to the changing dynamics of the Americas, Monroe wrote the famous Monroe Doctrine. This was in response to the Quadruple Alliance, which after crushing revolutions in Spain and Italy planned to do the same in the American territories. But Britain, having learned the lesson of opposing America, left the alliance. Britain suggested that the U.S. join in opposing interference in Latin America. Monroe discussed it with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.

The Cabinet feared a Russian threat in Oregon. Monroe consulted Jefferson and Madison on the issue. Monroe issued his doctrine in the course of three statements to Congress on December 2, 1823.

". . . The American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintained, are henceforth not to be considered by any European powers," it stated. He went on to say that any attempt of Europe to extend their system to any part of America was "dangerous to our peace and safety." He said the U.S. would not interfere with existing European colonies in Latin America or meddle in Europolitics. Britain supported the position, and Russia backed off. Chief Justice John Marshall laid down a series of judicial decisions that reflected this "national spirit."

The Alamo

The first obstacle was Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821. They experienced economic deprivation, and were unable to form a new government. Mexico found itself under emperor's rule, but in 1824, the monarchy was overthrown and a constitutional republic was started. The Centralist, Federalist, Monarchist and Republican parties fought with each other, and divisions were created.

Mexico had won vast northern territories after its independence from Spain. They were underpopulated. Mexico wanted to colonize, but due to Mexican economics self-advancement in the frontier and relocation was more difficult. Mexican colonization was a governmental program. In the U.S. it was a popular movement. The Mexicans were scared of fighting the Native Americans. Their military system was not able to guard them.

The Catholic Church was also unable to exercise authority in the border areas. Since Mexico operated via central government, frontier expansion was virtually impossible to control.

Texas was considered part of the southwest territories (northern from the Mexican geographical standpoint). A mostly uninhabited region, it was claimed first by Spain and then by Mexico after they gained independence. Mexico lacked much of the political and military power and influence of Spain.

With few Mexicans living there, the region had little Mexican governmental or military presence. Solitary farmers tilled the land. Local Indians raided the Mexican farms every year in order to feed themselves over the winter time. The Indians were careful not to kill all the Mexicans. They needed enough of them to stay alive who would till the farms, growing the harvests they would steal in succeeding years.

The Mexican government was unable to protect the farmers, but decided on risky action. A clarion call was made. They began an advertising campaign of sorts in the American South, mostly in Tennessee, calling for "men with guns," adventurers and mountain men, to move to Texas. Among them was Daniel Boone. Urged to bring their guns, they were promised that if they fought the Indians, thus protecting the Mexican farmers, they would be free to profit off their labors. They would be given land, allowed to earn a living off its bounty, hunt and trap game, sell what they caught, and attain whatever wealth their hard work produced. This scenario was the basis for the 1960 classic The Magnificent Seven starring Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen. American "gunslingers" were often commissioned to fight off banditos.

Adventurous Tennesseans and other Southerners came to Texas with guns. The next harvest they defended the farms, preventing invading Indians from stealing the bounty. The Indians retreated and did not attack after that. The Americans, meanwhile, became prosperous. Soon they were marrying, starting families, and creating businesses. Then they became the wealthiest citizens in the region and largest employers of Mexican labor.

The Mexican hierarchy took umbrage with American dominance and the "taking" of their women. They declared the Americans were all Mexican citizens. Their profits were now subject to Mexican taxation and fealty. They could be pressed into service in the Mexican military, and made to do the bidding of the Mexican government.

Already fiercely independent anyway, inspired by the desire to live freely that drove the American Revolution, they rebelled against the Mexicans. They were appalled at the notion that a foreign government could declare they were not Americans. They argued they were in a neutral territory, rendered as American as Mexican by sheer virtue of their overwhelming success, displays of excellence and over time superiority in populated numbers. A Mexican soldier, Santa Anna, seized power in 1833. He overthrew the constitution and ruled by force. He inhabited all Texas and ordered the Texans to give up their guns. In 1836, Texas declared itself independent and Santa Anna invaded. On March 6 of that year he attacked a small fortified mission in San Antonio called the Alamo. Outnumbered 12 to 1, the Texans, led by Davy Crocket, fought until each American was dead. Among the defenders was Jim Bowie, inventor of the Bowie knife. Santa Anna then rounded up 500 Americans and shot 250 of them. His policy of terror backfired. When Americans heard of it, they cried "Remember the Alamo." They exacted revenge in a systematic, efficient manner over the following years. At San Jacinto, Sam Houston's forces stopped the Mexican advance.

The frontier

Manifest Destiny was a phrase used by leaders and politicians in the 1840s to explain continental expansion by the United States. The United States decided that to explore this territory was a mission. They were men of idealism and Democratic beliefs. However, Manifest Destiny as an idea, as a policy and as historical fact remains one of the most controversial parts of this nation's history. American Manifest Destiny does not approach the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, but in many circles is thought to be nothing more than an extension of it. To those who choose to criticize it, Manifest Destiny was just more whites of European ancestry raping, pillaging and plundering the indigenous peoples of America. To be sure, there was in Manifest Destiny evil, greed and racism of the worst kind. But the phrase itself, "Manifest Destiny," is a very telling one. Events of this period were inevitable. There seems to be no realistic alternative to it. The question, then, is not whether it was the right thing to do or not, but whether it was done rightly or wrongly. The gray area in between, where morality and moral equivalence live, is where judgment lies.

The main argument against Manifest Destiny is the fact that white politicians advocated it, but did not view non-Europeans as being capable of self-government. There was virtually no conception of Native Americans as being equal to whites in any way. They were not necessarily viewed as evil or barbaric (although in some quarters they were). Everybody operated on a premise. That premise was that the natives were not intellectually capable of equality.

The natives were seen as human. They were not entirely viewed from an unkindly angle. According to legend, the Indians had taught the Pilgrims how to grow crops using fish as fertilizer. They were guests at the first Thanksgiving. There is some question about this, however. These stories may have been invented or exaggerated to elevate Indians to equality with white settlers. But the point is that in the hearts of whites, there was great hatred for the Indians. Christian charity was a strong concept. This concept drove many to spread Christianity to the hinterlands, offsetting to some extent hatred.

But the main political agenda, as the population of the original 13 colonies and the economy grew, was the need for new land. Land represented potential income, wealth, self-sufficiency and freedom. To the rugged individualists of the new America, the Western frontiers meant self-advancement.

The United States had a high birth rate and an increase in population due to immigration. Agriculture was the main asset of family farms. The population went from more than 5 million in 1800 to more than 23 million by mid-century. Nearly 4 million Americans moved to Western territories between 1820 and 1850.

The United States suffered two economic downturns, in 1818 and in 1839. Frontier land was virtually free. The frontier created new commerce and initiative. Land, which was expensive in the cities, meant self-sufficiency. With that came some political power and independence. Maritime merchants also wanted to create new commerce by building West Coast ports leading to increased trade with countries in the Pacific.

The Americans were happy to expand. Their political system was popular with the people and there was no fear that distance would dilute its effect. In fact, the Americans found that the more individualistic and separated Americans were from the government, the more they supported a system that allowed them to be so free. There were no governmental entities showing up out of nowhere demanding inordinate taxes or collectivist yields. When the frontiersmen wanted government services, they requested it, and then they got it.

Frontier society was too informal, Democratic, self-reliant and egalitarian to satisfy Mexican political aims. Their frontier communities were at odds with the central government, which imposed restrictions that affected them in a negative manner.

American romanticism and European literature, namely by Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, were popular in the United States. Many who went to fight Mexico had read them. The Age of Enlightenment had created the strongly held notion that change was inevitable, and that progress was good. The fact that progress was good was obvious on its face. Recent inventions and breakthroughs in medical science had made this an indisputable fact.

19th Century Americans were unlike anybody in history, except possibly the Egyptians who built the pyramids. They had unbelievable confidence in themselves and were convinced that they were capable of doing anything. In the 1830s and '40s America underwent drastic changes in every way. Industrial and technological advances made life easier than it had ever been before. Steam power and the locomotive railroad became a metaphor for American ingenuity. The rotary press in 1846 made production of newspapers cheaper than ever. It enabled papers to circulate in the national, not just regional, markets. The magnetic telegraph in 1844 was received as nothing less than a miracle. Journalist John L. O'Sullivan called it "Manifest Destiny." The phrase first appeared in print in July of 1845 in the Democratic Review in reference to the Texas issue. O'Sullivan was defending the American claim to Texas.

To extend the boundaries of the U.S. was to extend "freedom." The fact that Democracy is the best form of government was no longer a question. It was now accepted fact. Therefore it was considered "God's plan" for Mankind. The concept that America, and American expansion, was endorsed by God was a totally mainstream idea at this time. People who feel this way do not just sit still, they take action. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about a destiny that guides individuals, states, and nations. The U.S. was destined to become a world leader; in industrial development, commercial activity, the arts and sciences, and intellectual achievements. There were no limits and no boundaries.

When James K. Polk became President there were about 3,500-4,000 Americans living in the Oregon country, clamoring for a reunion with the United States. There were 800 or so Americans who moved into California and they wanted the same thing.

Passage to India and Asia for commercial enterprise was now possible. Oregonians and Californians thought of themselves as American citizens. They wanted laws codifying this.

Had the United States not advanced into the West, any number of other countries would have. Only American military success against the British, the fall of the Napoleonic empire, and Spain's loss of Mexico to independence, prevented these nations from sending armies into the frontier after the Lewis and Clark Expedition provided viable maps.

The Russians established a coastal port in what became Northern California. The English and Spaniards already had claims to certain forts and bays dotting the Pacific Coast. Germany was not yet a single federated nation, but the rise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gave impetus to German-speaking people to expand. The Austrians formed an alliance with Mexico, which Germany attempted to exploit into a military sphere of influence there and in Latin America. As the Industrial Revolution made them powerful, this influenced their global perspective, a large factor in World War I. Had America not consolidated all this territory as they eventually did, any number of these other nations would have expanded. No doubt conflict would have arisen, with the U.S. fighting a large-scale war with a European country, or worse yet European allies, over Texas, California, or some other states.

The model of Spanish expansion, for instance, is already historical fact. It is called the Inquisition. Had Spain advanced into what is now the 50 States, there remains all likelihood the Native Indians would have suffered through such an experience, a worse one than the Indian Wars. While Spain's lack of power by the 19th Century, leading to Mexican independence, probably renders this an unlikely possibility, what probably would have happened is the European powers could have ended up fighting territorial wars with each other.

Scenario: Mexico retains San Diego. L.A. is a Spanish province. San Francisco is British, Oregon held by the French, but other parts of the Pacific Coast are considered Russian. Other states are split up in a hodge-podge manner, with wars being fought and re-fought over these areas, just as wars were fought for Normandy, Alsace-Lorraine, Sicily, Constantinople, and everywhere else in Europe. The consolidation of the West by the United States renders these mere scenarios.

Worse scenario: major conflict, probably all-out war, on the American continent in the 19th or early 20th Century. World War I might have been fought not in Europe between 1914 and 1918, but on American soil, very possibly during or shortly after the Civil War, with both the Union and the Confederacy enlisting the alliance of old enemies France and England to carry on their old hostilities on foreign soil.

U.S.-Mexico War

All of this is the backdrop of the Mexican War, which was called "boundlessness and reform spirit; a quest for a better place for the nation," a test of republican Democracy in a crisis. The die was cast when the United States became a nation. An idea had been born. It was utterly inexorable. Even those who find fault with the expansion and the Mexican War agree that it was unstoppable. To the extent that the expansion can be found at fault is the fact that the ambition for land was insatiable. Walter Lippmann said that it was villainy clad in the armor of a righteous cause, to use an expression.

Walt Whitman stated, "What has miserable, inefficient Mexico - with her superstition, her burlesque upon freedom, her actual tyranny by the few over the many - what has she to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race? Be it ours, to achieve that mission!" Whitman, one of America's greatest poets, glorified equality. "For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you?" he wrote. "Whoever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is done or said returns again to me? I am vast, I contain multitudes."

Mexican intellectuals have admitted that they were a "backward and decaying people." Such thinkers as Mariano Otero and Carlos Maria Bustamante are considered exceptions to the rule. Weakness and underdevelopment marked Mexico in the 19th Century, the product of long and complex historical forces. Some prominent white Americans who were vested in the expansion still found fault with American expansion into Mexican territory.

"I do not think there ever was a more wicked war than that waged by the United States in Mexico," wrote Ulysses S. Grant, one of the most prominent of American military men, and himself a participant in the war, in his memoirs. "I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign." His was a minority opinion, if indeed he actually expressed it publicly.

The U.S.-Mexican War was only one of a series of American expansions that took place in the 19th century. The United States expanded from coast to coast, into Asia, created naval shipping lanes in the Middle East (Asia Minor) and in the Spanish-American War, Cuba and the Philippines. The country became a power in Asia and in the Caribbean without occupying islands there, with the exception of the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Central America was a place where the U.S. exercised phenomenal political, economic and political control. Expansion was no worse than most European North Atlantic countries during that time. Colonies, empires and "spheres of influence" were the way of the 19th-century. If the U.S. had not "kept up," they would have fallen behind. Every European power was colonizing native lands, exploiting them for rubber, iron ore, wood, maritime influence and oil.

The idea of Manifest Destiny was foreshadowed by some of the writings of revolutionary times. Canada was considered a "prize" in the period between the American War for Independence and the War of 1812. It rationalized the Louisiana Purchase and United States' support for Texas independence and annexation. This gives credence to the idealistic elements of the movement. The question is whether Manifest Destiny is an idea in and of itself, or whether the nation simply justified it. What remains as a concrete element of this subject is that if the U.S. had not gone west, either the Mexicans would have, the Indians would have simply stayed there, or other foreign powers would have done it.

This leaves basically four options. Which one is the best option? If Mexico had taken over what became the American West, would the region and the indigenous people's there be better off than they are now?

Europeans did not fear the United States despite all our "dangerous" talking and writing about liberty. They certainly were not about to tell the U.S. they were wrong for doing what they had been doing. The Mexicans, however, were torn. They admired America, but they feared them. The Americans had proven a willingness to fight, and they were very good at it. There were border territories of dispute. They knew the Americans would fight for them. Any army that could defeat the English was formidable. Mexicans wanted prosperity, a good economy, and prosperous agriculture. But they wanted to do so without losing land in the process. The Texans, by revolting against Mexico, were doing practically the same thing that the Mexicans themselves had done when they revolted against Spain. Texans knew this.

Expansion was not 100 percent popular. Henry David Thoreau was an outspoken critic of the Mexican War. But critics had different reasons for opposing the policy. Thoreau was an anarchist. He was uncomfortable with the exercise of mighty power. But others believed the United States could fail in self-government if it grew too large. This became a political position of the Whig Party during the 1840s, when they opposed war with Mexico. Others said a Democracy could succeed only if it were small and close to the people. This was a Jeffersonian ideal. But most saw greatness equated with growth and economic development. This was Alexander Hamilton's vision. Later, the Northeast and East Coast felt they would lose power if the United States admitted more states to the Union. Abolitionists were afraid that the conquest of Mexico would lead to the incorporation of more slave territory into the United States. There was sympathy with the Mexicans and some pacifist opposition to the war itself. President James Polk had to pay attention to these concerns.

Texas, however, was a state of strong American disposition. Their people were of rugged character, hard-charging entrepreneurs, men of legend and myth. Their annexation seemed to be a part of natural American expansion. It was a logical sequel to the Louisiana Purchase. John Quincy Adams, a member of the House of Representatives, however, thought Texas' annexation was a slaveholder's conspiracy.

By the mid-19th century, Mexicans had been living in Mexico for more than a century. Many citizens of the United States could be traced back one or two generations. The old European problems, the ancient hatreds and bones of contention, did not come into play. The Americans had no natural dislike of the Mexicans, although racism must be considered. Mexico's history during the period preceding the war was rife with turmoil and coup d'états. Mexico, therefore, was suffering from the social and political fragmentation resulting from the Spanish Empire, the war for independence, reorganization bankruptcy, and foreign threat.

The United States' conquest of the West had been going on since the time when the 13 Colonies were established. They had set their eyes on the northern territory of New Spain. In the early 1840s, many books appeared on the subject of California, emphasizing its richness, mild climate, beautiful and marvelous ports. This created a utopian vision. The U.S. had always wanted to trade with China. Polk made California a major priority. His election made the expansion a certainty. Mexico stood in the way. The Mexicans still use the term, "the U.S. Invasion." Different perceptions of the conflict are very real. The U.S. Congress authorized war against Mexico in 1846, saying the Mexican government had left no alternative. Americans propagandized and justified. Mexico's internal situation between 1841 and I848 is critical. First, there was the Santa Anna dictatorship between 1841 and 1843. Then came the Centralist Republic, in power until December 1845. This was followed by the Mariano Paredes dictatorship, which lasted eight months. During this time, the possibility of a monarchy was once again discussed. The federal republican government was restored in 1847. Six presidents succeeded one another from June, 1844 to September, 1847. With the exception of Manuel de la Peña y Peña, the rest came to power as a result of popular or military uprisings against their predecessors. Thus, all confronted opposition forces that questioned their legitimacy and wanted to overthrow them. Texas and its annexation to the United States, as well as John Slidell's mission, became part of the debate.

Having defeated the greatest military empire on Earth, the United States desired to become one of the "big boys" on the world stage. After the Revolution, the U.S. again fought, and defeated, the British in the War of 1812. They expanded naval operations and were not afraid to use force, as in the conflict with Barbary pirates off the coast of Tripoli (1801-05).

After President Thomas Jefferson secured the Louisiana Purchase from French Emperor Napoleon in 1803, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition succeeded, there was strong national consent behind the notion of Manifest Destiny, that it was in fact God's will she expand westward until successfully turning America into a trans-continental empire. This, and the issue of Mexican "control" of the southwest territories, remains a controversial subject to this day.

Once Mexico declared independence from Spain, they became much weakened and would have not been able to withstand English or French infiltration into the California/southwest territories, any more than they could resist the United States.

The U.S. and Mexico fought a war between 1846 and 1848, won decisively by the United States. American forces invaded and captured Mexico City. Rather than appropriate the city and possibly much of the entire country as a colony, or extension of the United States, its conquered people enslaved by a victorious enemy as was the fate of most all the conquered for time immemorial, the U.S. withdrew from the city and gave back the defeated Mexicans Mexico City.

While jingoistic support of the American war effort against Mexico was widespread, there was nascent "war protest." Its most prominent critic was the famed author of Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau. He and Ralph Waldo Emerson were two American literary giants of the era. Thoreau engaged in strong civil disobedience in protest of the war which, among other things, helped to expand and give strength to the institution of slavery.

Henry David Thoreau: anarchist?

Henry David Thoreau was a civil disobedient. He influenced Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The study of civil disobedience is an important point, and is especially worth looking at as it relates to the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, and the civil rights struggle.

G.W.E. Hegel said that people are social beings who seek fulfillment through the state. Hegel upheld Machiavelli's rejection of the classical Greek view. The Hindus rejected the connection between ethics and government, which the Greeks did advocate. Thoreau is in line with the Hindus. Thoreau said the state had no moral authority, and felt that their corruptions were dangerous to the public.

Thoreau is the exact opposite of Creon's Antigone. If a law is immoral, it is to be disobeyed. After many debates, even the Uniform Code of Military Justice agrees with Thoreau. The U.C.M.J. actually gives leeway to a soldier who disobeys an order if it is not moral. This is quite a leap of faith for an organization that is based on the strict ladder of authority and the following of orders. But the Nuremberg Trials and the Japanese War Crimes Tribunals were not just the exposition of German and Japanese evil. They made us think about human nature and the role of soldiers. The My Lai massacre forced us to examine ourselves. Disobeying a direct order is risky business, but it has its roots in the civil disobedience of thinkers like Thoreau.

At the heart of the concept is the idea that individual liberty trumps the claim of state authority. In Thoreau's day, his contemporaries were not quite ready to accept it. Thoreau arrived at his conclusions after much self-examination, as described in his book, Walden. His journey is reminiscent of Socrates and Buddha, or of the vanaprastha stage of the Hindu vision of life. Thoreau was dissatisfied with the United States, but instead of leaving the country, he chose to liberate himself through a "state of universality." As an outsider, he objected to the state's abuse of power, and accorded little legitimacy to the political and economic institutions of the country. This manifested itself in his refusal to pay a poll tax, his protest of slavery, and his opposition to the war with Mexico. While his outspoken views regarding war and slavery made him a mere dissident, his refusal to pay taxes makes him an outlaw. Since he did this on purpose with no attempt to evade the consequences, he becomes a civil disobedient. John Locke and John Stuart Mill were British liberal theorists who railed against the abuse of power, but did not make themselves criminals by breaking laws they disagreed with. Locke said that government's duty was to defend private property. Thoreau denounced private property.

A number of leading writers lived in the Walden Pond area of Massachusetts, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thoreau challenged these great minds to follow his lead and disobey unjust laws, but there were no takers. Emerson was aghast at his colleagues' stance.

Thoreau was definitely liberal, but it is unclear whether he advocated "limited government" or no government. Because this distinction is not made clear, his anarchism is called into question. but he did not advocate for the elimination of government. He criticized majority rule and representative Democracy, while denying that law can make humans just individuals. He attacked capitalism because it exalts money and is the engine behind slavery, and went beyond Karl Marx in that he indicted it as immoral. Marx just saw it as the end product of an evolutionary process that needed to be changed.

Thoreau lives on as a significant thinker because his theories of civil disobedience are just and were used by great men. But aside from his call for the end of slavery, one struggles to know what he wanted. Born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, he lived until 1862, making him a contemporary of Marx. He considered Concord to be the center of the "American Renaissance." He graduated from Harvard in 1837, influenced by Emerson's philosophy of transcendentalism. Emerson's views were similar to Hegel's idealism, that a "divine essence inheres in all being; a transcendent spirituality exists and permeates nature." Hegel sanctified the state, though. Thoreau denounced it. Hegel saw divinity in it, but Thoreau called it "half-witted," strong in appearance but rotten at its core. Thoreau did see God as nature's individual conscience. He said the state attempts to quell individual spirituality.

"I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the state, to withdraw and stand afoot from it effectually," he said.

Thoreau is a revered literary figure and a very influential American, but enigmatic. Here is a man living in what was the freest country on Earth at a time when free countries were pretty few and far between. He would have been swept away in two seconds, sent to a gulag in Russia, a re-education camp in China, a concentration camp in Germany, yet he finds so much disillusionment in America, where he was free. That said, Thoreau is part of a long tradition of obstructionists, confrontationalists and contrarians. Thoreau precedes modern writers like Christopher Hitchens, comedians like Bill Maher, and renegade politicos like Ramsey Clark. He lives in the protesters and the shouters. He does not offer a solution.

Thoreau somehow saw in government a systematic undermining of moral development. Up there at Walden's Pond, living a quietly reclusive life, with no governmental hindrance, he reached his conclusions. What he did see, from afar, was institutionalized slavery and a war with Mexico. His opposition to slavery makes him a great man, if for no other reason. In the northern part of the U.S. that Thoreau lived in, abolitionist views were the norm. He did not stand alone in this view.

Plenty of people were abolitionists, but they chose to protest the government's policies within the system, not to all-but-disavow the legitimacy of the institution. Thoreau simply viewed slavery as evil and the government as evil for allowing it. How he would have reacted to the freeing of the slaves is an interesting point of conjecture.

He also opposed the Mexican War of 1846-48. His response to the government was to refuse to pay the poll tax, levied on every male in his state between the ages of 20 and 70. On July 23, 1846, he was arrested at Walden Pond and imprisoned for one year in the Concord jail. He welcomed the experience, using it to write "The Relation of the Individual to the State," which he delivered as a lecture on January 26, 1848. In it, Thoreau embodies a fairly new kind of political animal, the radical. The outsider. He rejects his and his nation's traditions. He was a protester.

He denounced nationalism in the opening paragraph of his essay, but as mentioned before, declared he is not an anarchist. He made the somewhat contrary statement that the best government is the least government, but people are not ready for no government. He declared "war" on the state while "using it" for his purposes. Later anarchists like Emma Goldman would adopt Thoreau. It seems that, at the heart of Thoreau's complaint, is the notion that spiritual forces drive the American government.

The Federalist Papers and other documents are rife with religious references. The Founders repeatedly refer to God and His divine inspirations. That offended Thoreau, who said government is not imbued with such authority, especially not a government that allows for slavery. The nation, quite simply, is suspect.

As for voting, Thoreau said, "All voting is sort of gaming . . . Even voting for the right thing is doing nothing for it . . . There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men . . . It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice." Therefore, when the state becomes intolerable, "then, I say, break the law."

Some tried to say Thoreau was simply carrying on the tradition of the colonists who resisted British rule in 1776. This argument does not hold up because the colonists were not represented and that was what they sought. They advanced laws within the British government, and once those demands were not met, an alternative to the government. Thoreau dissented from a government that gave him every opportunity to give his views and seek redress, to stand on a soapbox or even run for and hold office. No, said Thoreau, the government is illegitimate. In many ways, Thoreau's concepts were more in line with later French existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

At Walden Pond, Thoreau lived a simple life absent from the trappings of wealth. He chided Emerson, who lived in a big house in Concord.

"Things are in the saddle and ride Mankind," said Emerson.

". . . A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without," replied Thoreau.

He would have agreed with Marx when he wrote of capitalism, "Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and human needs" by teaching that life depends on "the more you have" and "my own power is as great as the power of money."

Thoreau differs with Marx, calling luxuries and comforts of life "positive hindrances to the elevation of Mankind," subscribing to voluntary poverty. Marx did not find these luxuries to be evil, but the system that led to their importance blocks man from his true destiny. Marx would agree with Thoreau in exposing business as working hand in hand with slavery. Again, Marx would find the businessmen misguided and Thoreau immoral.

"The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich," wrote Thoreau.

"Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue," Marx wrote.

"His moral ground is taken from under his feet," as he strives for profit, Thoreau wrote of the man of commerce.

Marx might have thought Thoreau a utopian thinker, although, despite Thoreau's less-government concepts, it would seem that Marx's vision is more unrealistic. Thoreau might have advocated breaking up government, but Marx advocated constructing something that relies on an imperfect premise. As the saying goes, it is easier to tear something down than to build it up.

Marx was an inevitablist. Thoreau was a conscientious objector. Marx did not consider individual voluntary poverty, which is interesting. The leaders of Communism and Socialism never did, either. Marx hated the capitalist accumulation of wealth, but what would he have said about the accumulation of wealth and the private dachas of high-ranking Communist Party members? Marx simply saw no merit to being poor. Despite being born into money, he was so poor in his London that the result was personal tragedy, the death of his daughter. Wealth was okay by Marx, as long as it did not come due to exploitation. Under his theory, an actor who becomes wealthy playing idealistic roles is fine. An actor who becomes wealthy "exploiting" sex and violence is not.

Furthermore, Marx would have you join the Communist Party, with all the baggage that entails. Thoreau wanted no political affiliation. In the end, of course, if Walden lived in Russia, Walden Pond would have been turned into a collectivist farm. Walden would have died of starvation whether he joined the party or not. Still, despite Thoreau's recalcitrance, one can certainly give him credit for being true to himself.

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth," he said.

He also saw a future for his ideas; there is a historical inevitability to his future. In a way, he was right. We see it all the time, only the study of Thoreau allows us to pinpoint what it is. Thoreau is the patron saint of complainers and whiners. Nothing will ever be good enough for these people. They will always be with us.

Thoreau criticized people who say there is truth in God. He did not say he has the truth, but is in pursuit of it. Thoreau leaves everything open-ended. Perhaps that is the way it should be, but he gives no credence to other people's beliefs. He knows what he knows, he feels what he feels, he questions what he questions. So, like so many elitists, the idea that somebody else has faith is preposterous!

Admiration for Thoreau is not in his views on government, patriotism or truth, but in his concept of civil disobedience. This does not change the fact that he would have been just another face at Auschwitz if he had chosen the wrong country to be civilly disobedient in. The Israelis have not chosen the Thoreau/Gandhi path for this very realpolitik reason. But in the right society, Thoreau is the right kind of protester.

"If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood," he said. "This is, in fact the definition of a peaceable revolution . . ."

Erie Canal, California Gold Rush, trans-continental railroad

Shortly after victory over Mexico, the California Gold Rush captured the imagination of the young country in 1849, with the state admitted to the union shortly thereafter. Whatever "hold" Mexico or the old Spanish families of California may have still maintained was wiped away when millions of settlers simply out-numbered them in their own land. No army or government invaded and took over. Rather, ordinary citizens freely arrived, settling homesteads until they were the vast majority. It was only later, when Indian raids threatened travelers, which included numerous women and children, that the army was deployed and the Indians Wars fought.

But Manifest Destiny was not yet complete. A series of accomplishments and events needed to take place before 19th Century American hegemony over the entire continent was established. First had been the building of the Erie Canal, extending from New York state on into Pennsylvania, a westward shipping trajectory making it possible to move large numbers of people and equipment over vast distances. Originally the quest for an elusive Northwest Passage animated the explorers. Absent that, the ambitious Americans seemingly created one by dint of their own hands and iron will.

Now there was a connection with the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwest and Canada. While building of the Erie Canal was probably the greatest single engineering accomplishment in human history at the time, it was more than that. It gave Americans a sense of pride and belief in themselves that indeed they were a Chosen People in a new Promised Land. Such nationalist pride, with its racial overtones of white superiority, can and have been proved dangerous when in the hands of somebody like Adolf Hitler. While the future did offer its share of ethnic hatreds in the form of slavery, Indian Wars and Chinese intolerance, there was always enough Christian inclusion to prevent anything approaching a genocide.

The forging of the Erie Canal, followed by the Gold Rush, gave impetus to the most ambitious project yet, the building of the trans-continental railroad. Built by two private enterprises, there were political incentives offered, but it was wholly not a government project. Once connected to Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the river from Omaha, Nebraska, from there the two lines connected America westward, across the rugged Rocky and Sierra Mountain Ranges, into the Sacramento Valley and San Francisco, located on the Pacific Coast. From there, costal lines connected to San Diego and Los Angeles in the south; to Portland and Seattle in the north; to Mexico and Canada.

It was, as Stephen Ambrose's account of it says in the title of his book, Nothing Like It in the World. The Siberian railroad, built on mostly flat lands, took much longer, with numerous casualties, and was riddled with errors and incompetence. The trans-continental railroad was a modern marvel of efficiency. It of course was the pride of a young nation. It represented the consolidation of a hard-earned empire, a technological achievement that was viewed as a validation of Democracy, and for many a way to exorcise the Civil War. But perhaps its greatest impact was internationally.

First, it was the "death knell" of Indian independence. Once the lines were built, troops could be transported anywhere. It discouraged the Indians, who slowly but surely surrendered to the will of the white invaders. It completely ended any ambition of European or Latin American powers that may have eyed with envy the once-virgin lands of the American West. But it also sent a tremendous message to nations riding the whirlwind of the Industrial Revolution. The U.S. was a power every bit as much as any of them. It quickly ascended to the top economic powerhouse of the world.

Germany, consolidated by the 1870s, already politically tied to Mexico, had global military ambitions. But the United States demonstrated in the Civil War they had a world class army with a superior general officer class. This combined with the building or the railroad forced them to consider any future military conflict that could draw the United States in. The Republican Abraham Lincoln had shown a willingness to use the full measure of his army. The Republicans developed a reputation as a muscular party not unafraid of power.

Potential enemies were in awe of American technological might, which they knew would be turned on them if they entered any military conflict. Perhaps these factors played a role in the fact that while invasion plans of Belgium-France were written in 1905 when Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, it was not until 1913 when the Democrat Woodrow Wilson occupied the Oval Office that Germany carried out their attack.

America: where slavery came to die

After the U.S.-Mexico War, the slavery issue took center stage in American politics. Slavery was a thriving institution that existed as far back as one group of men had the ability to defeat another group of men in combat of any kind. The armies and nations that enslaved others knew no particular racial, ethnic or religious identity; it was a widespread practice among all citizens of Mankind. African tribes defeated other African tribes, selling their captives into the hands of slave traders. The Spanish, Dutch and English, in the main, brought Africans to the New World, the Americas and the Caribbean. It was once said so vast was the slave trade that shark migration in the Atlantic Ocean was changed because of the dead bodies of so many slaves tossed overboard. This is not true but represented just how much resentment exists still today over slavery's legacy.

The Puritans arrived in Massachusetts without slaves. Their Christian faith was abhorrent to the practice, but when England came to colonize the Americas, they did import slaves. When the United States declared independence (1776), defeated the British (1783) and ratified the Constitution (1787-88), the young country in essence inherited slavery.

The Founding Fathers originally desired to end slavery, but a bargain needed to be worked out in order to keep the Southern colonies within the Federal system. It was established that importation of slaves would end in 1808. The theory was that after that year, the existing slaves would eventually grow old and pass away, thus ending the practice. Slaveholders throughout history often kept slaves without regard to the maintenance of family units, much less allowing units to form through marriage and the birth of children. This practice was allowed in America.

Even though the plan held insofar as no slaves were imported after 1808, the existence and continued birth of children, combined with the general maintenance of families, obviously meant the slave population did not dwindle away and die; it thrived. It became vital to the Southern agrarian economy, and over time a major bone of contention.

A new party, the Republicans (or the Radical Republicans, as they were called) rose up in opposition to slavery. The Democrats became the party of Southern slavery. Republican Abraham Lincoln won the 1960 election, Civil War broke out, lasting until 1865. The Union prevailed, the Confederacy defeated, and the United States stood bloody but unbowed. In 1863 Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring black slaves free. When the war ended two tears later, blacks technically were "free," although it took another century and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to effectively accomplish this huge task.

The Union infused its effort with symbolism, much of it inspired by the Christian abolitionists who were the driving force behind the main issue of the war. Millions of white men went into battle, marching to an inspiring tune, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," which dared to be on the side of Truth. Its drumbeat line was, "The truth is marching on."

Between 618,000 and 700,000 Americans died in the Civil War, plus those maimed and otherwise hurt. More than twice as many soldiers died of disease and attrition as of combat deaths. Approximately 360,000 Union soldiers died ostensibly to free black slaves. While there were many issues at hand, this was the most important. President Lincoln codified this in his stirring Gettysburg Address (1863).

Slavery has been called America's "Original Sin," and perhaps it was, but the fact it was brought here by Europeans, not started here by Americans, is a worthwhile distinction. While that fact may not be particularly material, what is material is that slavery came to America to die. There was no indication prior to President Lincoln's election that slavery was about to end anywhere in the world. Then the Civil War was fought and won by the Union. Slavery ended on American soil, courtesy of Americans fighting to end it, ratified by American laws written by Americans. "Four score and seven years" after the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, Americans used that document as the legal framework to end slavery. It did not end because some foreign entity, army or empire came to American shores, defeating a resistant America to end the practice, and under the barrel of a gun forced them to do so. Perhaps America came to it kicking and screaming, but ultimately she ended slavery of her own free will. When slavery ended in America, it died once and for all as a legitimate form of trade between nations. It has never returned. America is where slavery came to die.

Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Columbia became the great American angel or woman, floating over the plains of the West. Animals and Indians symbolically fled her. In her wake came farms, villages and homesteads; in the back are cities and railroads. Columbia means the light of civilization dispelling the darkness of ignorance and barbarity.

In the painting, Native Americans have to be removed, symbolic of the thinking of 19th Century Americans. Another interesting symbol shows a railroad train coming out of the East with smoke billowing, bringing technological enlightenment with it. Civilization and technological development are seen as good things. The debate is whether this happened at the cost of spirit or morality. Were Americans of the Old West immoral? Is modern America, shaped by the emergence of the West, immoral? The greater question is not whether immorality marked the whole of the West, but rather whether certain events were immoral. Is immorality and progress mutually exclusive? Is change immoral? Or is it more realistic to simply observe as fact that, when change does occur, rivalries and conflicts are inevitable. When this happens, somebody wins and somebody loses.

Anglo-Saxon institutions were introduced into an area that was devoid of enlightenment with this issue. With this unique experiment in the new world - this nation that prided itself upon its Democratic institutions - Native American people were forced out of their ancestral homes. Is there rationalization for this? The question then comes down to the usurpation of property.

One argument is that these poor Indians had to be moved in order to save them, but this is hypocrisy. Some Indians were relatively "sophisticated" and "civilized." Some intellectuals have written that the literacy rate of the Cherokee nation was higher than in the white South up through the Civil War.

Either way, the tribes were not all barbaric all the time. In the Southeast some Indians were farmers, and "successful." They were moved to Oklahoma. In Indiana, Illinois and Michigan, Native American people were active in trade, were trilingual and very good entrepreneurs. They were forced to the plains of Kansas. Many of the people who went into the West became Native American pioneers. An interesting phenomenon occurred, however. Indian cultures in the East brought many tenants of American "civilization" into the West themselves. This created problems for officials in Mexico.

The second option involves leaving it to the Indians. This of course is specious, since nobody would have done, but for the sake of argument, would this have helped the Indians? Do the Indians ask us to help them build freeways? Do the Indians ask us to help them build hospitals? Is it possible to bring this kind of Western infrastructure into the Indian territories without dominating their society? What if the Americans simply had a "hands off" policy, and all the benefits of modern society occurred east of the Mississippi River? Then the Indians would have kept living in teepees in the West. They would have died of diseases, warred with each other using bows and arrows, starved, froze in the winter, and done all the things that they always did. The Americans would have been excoriated as unfeeling for not going in and helping their red-skinned brothers.

If the whites never contact the Indians, then what happens to the Indians? What do they invent? If Indians had never been in contact with whites, since 1800 on, are they still living in teepees? Do they have houses with running water? Do they have ways of transporting themselves? Do they have phones? Do they have medicine (other than peyote)? Are these questions racist?

Maybe from 1800 to 2013 the American Indians would have invented aqueducts, irrigation systems, electricity, penicillin, airplanes, cars, roads . . . They would have invented some things. They would have made advances in areas critical to their way of life; farming, hunting, warfare, religion and societal evolution. Even absent formal contact, they may well have learned from whites, "stealing" progressive ideas – aqueducts, irrigation, architecture, medicine, even religion - through espionage or other means. The most liberal of guilty whites, or the most radical Chicano or Indian activists, must be willing to look in his own heart. If so, can they say that the Indians, left to their own devices, would have invented or progressed without Manifest Destiny?

Napoleon once said, "History is written by the winners." Winston Churchill once said, "Democracy is the worst form of government known to man, with the exception of all other forms of government known to man." These analogies apply to the American West. Manifest Destiny is the worst form of historical progress that could have happened there, with the exception of all other forms of historical progress that could happen there. This is the established premise.

The Old West narrative is one of the great, mythic tales of legend in all of human history. The cowboy was a figure of enormous romantic appeal. Europeans of the 19th and early 20th Centuries were utterly fascinated by both cowboys and Indians. Each was an entirely mysterious, heretofore never seen creature; utterly exotic and fascinating. Most city dwelling Americans were equally fascinated. So appealing is the cowboy in America that he still lives in our lexicon.

A "cowboy" in politics or military command is seen as a rogue element, the type most feared by the Soviets during times of confrontation. Ronald Reagan was viewed as the ultimate cowboy, an image he was happy to present. In films like The Hunt For Red October, a Soviet submarine commander played by Sean Connery fears the worst dealing with "a cowboy" as his counter-part; a man who "shoots first and asks questions later" rather than reasoning things out.

The films of John Wayne and many Western novels played on the heroic cowboy image. The cowboys always killed the Indians; rescued the white women; and restored order to civilization. The end. Many Americans understood this narrative was not likely to be 100 percent accurate, but were comfortable it represented a larger truth. In 1970 a book shattered this myth. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a tearful, guilt-plagued, tragic, heart breaking rendering of the Indian Wars as it apparently really happened.

The book paints such a dastardly picture of official American governmental and military policy; of such evil racism; and of such a collection of lies and double-crosses constantly committed by the whites against the dispossessed Indians, that many could not then and even to this day do not fully accept it. It is indeed a totally one-sided account. For this reason Brown has been accused of liberal bias, of intentionally making America look bad to sway opinion against the Vietnam War. Perhaps the book exaggerates here and there, leaves out a few facts that would balance the perspective, but overall it is such a collection of atrocities, one after the other, that there really can be no "balancing out." After Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, the most jingoistic, patriotic American must bow his head in shame.

Whereby even slavery had its "white heroes," from Abe Lincoln to the Union soldiers to the framers of a Constitution that ultimately had the legs to free them 76 years after it was written; not so in the Indian Wars. It must remain a stain on the American character, a place for humility.

Brown's book did indeed hit home at precisely the right time. Had it come out 10 or even five years earlier, its effect would have been negated. By 1970 the war in Vietnam had taken a turn for the worse. The public was solidly against it. American patriotism was at an all-time low. That year, the USC football team attended a cowboys 'n' Indians movie while on a road trip. The Trojans were a solidly integrated team that felt they "got it right" under coach John McKay, but that night, white players found themselves cheering when the cowboy shot the Indians, the blacks cheering when the Indians got one on their side. Afterward an argument ensued between the now-divided team, a collection of All-Americans expected to contend for the national championship. Riven by racial tensions that bubbled to the surface all year, they struggled to a 6-4-1 record. This is a microcosm of a divided America during the Vietnam War; of black-white race relations; and of the Indian conflict a century earlier.

Brown's book was not the only vehicle which, in 1970, used an earlier conflict as a metaphor for Vietnam. Two major war movies were produced in 1970. Patton was a gung-ho biopic of the pistol packing, swaggering George Patton, the very symbol of American glory for the ages. M*A*S*H was a comic, biting, sarcastic put-down of the military establishment. Director Robert Altman's film was set in Korea, but he purposefully created imagery evoking Vietnam in a decidedly anti-war manner.

"And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall you free," Jesus Christ said in John 8:32. Indeed even when the truth hurts, as Brown's truthful depiction of the Indian conflict assuredly did, it was a necessary step in understanding American history. It is a great, proud history, more magnificent than any other. It is a history of men, and men are corrupt. All men are capable of great evil.

Time travelers and the Indians

Of course the U.S. wanted the Indians' land. The U.S. wanted to justify their reasons for wanting it. That said, there is an awesome amount of untrammeled land that dots the Western landscape. Human population made up a tiny percentage of the pristine, untouched countryside. Traveling east, west, north or south, throughout states like Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and even California, the great mythically overstuffed desert metropolis, reveals that to this very day most of this land is still untouched. Some telephone poles. A reservoir. Some fire roads. A diner. An occasional prison off in the distance. Up in the sky, maybe some Navy fighter planes or, who knows, a stealth bomber over Nevada. That place is so desolate that aliens might have a city out there, at least according to lore. Air travelers looking out the window are struck by how much of modern America is virtually untouched.

While staying on the theme of aliens, or at least science fiction, picture if you will a time machine. If man could invent a such a machine and transport an entire government of liberals, Indian activists, medical personnel and social workers to Gold Rush era Washington, D.C., with a direct mandate to re-write history and see to it that white settlements of the West be done "peacefully" this time, little likely would change except that more whites would die than actually did. Substantially more Indians would die, too. The problem might not have been resolved until the 20th Century. Marx's vision of social justice, if implemented in the Old West, might have resulted in genocides to rival Eastern Europe.

The first premise is that the U.S. was going to expand, populations were going to spread, and modern progress would occur. America-haters say that Manifest Destiny is a scourge on our history, but it was a completely inexorable, unstoppable movement. Any government that would have attempted to put a break on it, to legislate against it, to imprison would-be settlers and the like, would never have survived the vote. Had the government attempted to stem the tide, a riot, a war perhaps to match the Civil War, would have broken out. There would have been no popular support among the people to support any military action by a U.S. government to stop Westward expansion.

The "time-travelers" would have set forth their rules of engagement. Many of the moderns would have been dispatched west to try and put a break on the actions of the whites when they met the Indians, to give them medical aid, to educate them, and be nice to them.

The question of whether white men had the right to take over the West may be an argument, but it is sophistry. There is no question the Indians were lied to, abused and mistreated, but there was no Indian Nation. Disparate tribes roamed the plains. They were often nomadic in nature. Many were at war with each other. They just existed. It is a huge land, an enormous country. No tribe "owned" all of it, lived on all of it, and controlled all of it. To the Indian way of thinking, a giant spirit bequeathed it to them, in their minds every bit a form of destiny as the American Manifest destiny. A universal quality infused their belief, that it was their rightful heritage for as long as the sun rose and the moon appeared.

Incredible distances could be traveled without a sign of human life. The anti-America crowd pictures hordes of whites bearing down on enormous populated Indian citizenry. They put forth the proposition that industrialization, pollution and population have robbed us of our land; environmental concerns of man encroaching on Mother Nature. A reading of Jack Kerouac roaming the American West dispels this myth.

Kerouac drove the old Route 66, largely replaced by Interstate 10 between Los Angeles and Phoenix. Today, at the apex of the American Empire, the height of our military might, the information age, of environmental degradation, population explosion and modern technology, once you get past the suburban sprawl of San Bernardino and Riverside, you will see some restaurants, gas stations, some windmills to generate electricity, some signs, some telephone poles, a town every so often, and a few rest stops. The resort town of Palm Springs will pass by to your right in the distance, but unless you are paying attention you may not notice. Beyond that, it is pretty much desert until Phoenix. Beyond that is more desert as far as the eye and the gas tank will take you, staying on 10, one of the most heavily traveled, major interstates in the country. In Santa Monica, where the 10 starts, a sign tells drivers they are entering the Christopher Columbus Trans-Continental Highway!

The same thing can be said about the drive between San Diego and Las Vegas, Las Vegas and Reno, Reno and Salt Lake City, Lake Tahoe and Portland, Colorado and Iowa, and on and on. The American West today still contains vast quantities of untrammeled land, as pristine now as it was in Geronimo's day. The concept that the white hordes – some whites slaughtered Indians - descended like Mongols upon the peaceful Injuns is an exaggeration.

But if time travel were possible, consider a delegation selected to right the wrongs of the past. Imagine Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson in charge of a Special U.N. Commission on Time Travel and the Reconstruction of History, armed with "political correctness." A large group of Native American leaders, representing all the various tribes, are sent with the contingent. Time travel allows people to make the trip, but they do not have modern equipment or medicine. They have to make do with what is available in the 19th Century.

Sent back to the Old West of the 1850s, their job it is to see to it that the U.S. settlers treat the Indians with respect when they encounter them. Scenario: when they finally make it over the Rockies, most of the modern men are dead from disease, attrition and hardship. Tired and bedraggled, the survivors could not care less about diplomacy with whatever will meet them "on the other side," but they still want to "do the right thing." Picture Clinton and Jackson crouched behind the wheel of an upturned wagon, two of their cavalry officers lying died with arrows through their necks, while the Indians circle the lot of 'em. Clinton's orders would be the same as any other human beings, which is to "kill them before they kill the rest of us."

Alternative scenario: assume Clinton and Jackson would prepare for this possibility ahead if time, which would be to make sure the American Government provide them overwhelming military support so they would not be encircled. No matter how much support is given them, however, since the railroad has not been built yet, there is no way to provide comfort or safe passage to the West.

The contingent somehow survives, however, and makes contact with the Indians. The Indians they finally see do not understand any of their liberal nostrums, quickly deduce these quasi-Indians are "heap bad medicine," and it is not too long before they break out the old bows and arrows. After that it is every man for himself. About the only thing Clinton would be able to do, in charge of this doomed operation, is send the army out west in huge numbers so that the show of overwhelming force would simply mollify the Indians. Variations of the Little Big Horn and the Trail of Tears follow.

No matter which scenario the time traveling contingent follows, they would probably not be able to "convince" the Indians of their good intentions. The presence of the overwhelming military support, sent to protect them in the first place, would dissuade the Indians from trusting them.

The plight of the Indians is similar to the plight of the Africans, and the Arabs after World War I. The "enemy" of these people is, in an odd way, modernity. In other words, the world changes. Progress takes place, and people who do not keep up with it are not just left behind, but left behind to die. What a conundrum. Who would argue that roads, highways, electricity, hospitals, medicine, phones, air conditioning and a million other things, almost all invented by white males, is not a good thing? Would any one say that American Indians would be better off living in teepees than without modern appliances? The same question applies to Africans in the jungle and Arabs making their way on the shifting sands of the sub-Sahara.

So how can the modern wonders of white invention be a bad thing for non-whites? The answer is complicated. Obviously, modern inventions usually are not bad. Medicine is never bad, is it? It is if sick people need it and armed thugs steal it. Modern methods of making and getting food to people is bad if it gets hijacked and stolen, or diverted to guerrillas, revolutionaries or army troops instead of to the people.

When things were simple, they did not know better. Before white inventions made their way into the Third World, people just got sick and died. Nobody much paid attention. It was considered quite natural, actually.

Then came the guns. The gun is one of the most schizophrenic of inventions. If guns had never been invented, would this have been a good or a bad thing? The gun debate is not part of the present issue of discussion, which is an attempt to deal with the forces of societal evolution as an offshoot of Marxist theory.

What modern life has done is to elevate those who have been able to take advantage of it, but it sheds light on those who do not. For centuries, people in what became known as the Third World existed. If they had a plague, many of them died. If they had a drought, people starved. Very few were educated, and "ignorance" was the norm. Injustice reigned supreme.

Then came the missionaries. The missionaries, if one really wanted to examine this, are the original racists. They came to these places to spread religion, medicine and food. On the face of it, this is a benevolent act, but this was affirmative action at work for the first time. Too "save" the natives by introducing them to Christ is to assume that the way they knew was not as good as the way of the white man. To assume they needed to be fed is to assume that the white man's way, which is to eat nutritious foods, is better than to starve. To assume they needed medical care is to assume that the white man's way, which is to prevent the spread of disease, is better than pestilence.

While facetious, these intellectual exercises hopefully explain, or shed light, on the impossible-to-avoid cultural clash and backlash that occurred when whites and natives met and began to inter-act. The purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the great chasm, and tragedy, that occurs during the proverbial "clash of civilizations" that marks history. The unfortunate fact that very well may emerge from this is that no matter how well intentioned, the outcomes may have been inevitable. The purpose of the time machine is to argue that even if modern men, armed with the knowledge of historical mistakes, were to go back in time to right those mistakes, they very well may have failed, but made them worse. This is a conundrum of human psychology, speaking to the corruptibility of the soul.

Furthermore, this exercise addresses a larger question, with even more disturbing consequence. That question is: are whites by their very nature harmful to non-whites? Many black liberation theologists, black Muslims, Marxists and radicals have argued they are. Martin Luther King, Jr. staked his life on the premise that whites were not inherently harmful to non-whites, but he was assassinated for his efforts.

The reason so much of the non-industrial Third World is a disaster is that progress and modernity outpace human ability. We have seen it in the American West. The tragedy of Native Indians was not just what happened when they went head-to-head with the whites, but that it was inevitable. Would the world's non-whites as a whole, ranging from black Africans to Indians to Arabs to Orientals and others, have been better off had they never known whites, or at least not had them so thoroughly dominate their societies, ranging from missionaries to colonization to wars to genocides?

There is no "answer" to this question. It certainly appears to range greatly, as the Indians of America appear an entirely different group than the Indians of India. The Arabs and the Orientals appear to have completely "switched places" in history over the course of centuries. No group can claim the victimhood of Africa's blacks.

The Chinese, while once an exploited class, are also the inventors of gunpowder, which caused so much death over the years. In this respect they cannot be held as victims of a white society that, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, poisoned their pure society. The Spaniards of Latin America and both the British and French of the South Pacific are blamed with bringing diseases to the natives. The experience of the Native Indians when they met the Americans is similar. In this, at least, the United States can lay no special claim to evil. Alcohol, sexual disease, pestilence and all of other form of misery are said to have destroyed paradises.

Is this truly the case? As mentioned, could America have stayed where they were in the East and left the West to the Indians. Of course had they done that, the British, French, Russians, Dutch, Spanish and probably the Germans would have made life at least as miserable for the Indians as the Americans did; probably more so. There was no alternative to Manifest Destiny. It was a political inexorability.

Also, as mentioned, any white men who simply did not "touch" the dark-skinned natives of the world would have been criticized for not spreading civilization, progress, medicine, Christianity, and all other forms of "advancement" on "backwards" people. The backwards peoples themselves no doubt, at least over time, would have been curious as they heard more and more legends and myths of the far-off whites, indeed invited them into their cultures, and ventured into theirs, a universal aspect of human curiosity as old as Plato's "allegory of the cave."

If by miracle over the past several hundred years this contact had not happened, consider the world. On the one hand Silicon Valley, the Internet, space travel, vast medical advancements; on the other, medicine men chanting to a sun god, a shaman with a bone between his lips. Is this a better world for the natives? Is the alcohol, the disease and the exploitation better or worse than the alternative?

Or, a more hopeful fantasy, in which the natives invent things on their own that are of equal value to the inventions "imposed" upon them by the whites. There is some evidence of this possibility. Orientals for instance, were a highly advanced society, so much so, in fact, that the Japanese were convinced of their racial superiority over the corrupt, immoral white man; a major impetus for their war with Russia (1905) and invasion of Pearl Harbor (1941).

The Arab world remains a major mystery. Much of the great progress of Mankind occurred in the Middle East, or the "mysterious East." Great tinctures, architecture, mathematical constructs, and other discoveries came from this world. The implementation of Islam had a strange slowing effect on all of this, but the religion has created a certain sense of moral superiority, as well. Many Muslims think of non-Muslims as being infidels, therefore not worthy of mercy, which is another dynamic in and of itself.

Then consider Christianity. There are a considerable number of people who think this a mere myth, a series of fairy tales. Even those usually acknowledge that regardless of Christ's divinity, the religion represented civility, humanity, and a role of reason in the Dark Ages. For those who do believe in His divinity, the question has no further relevance. The missionary work of spreading the word of salvation trumps all exploitation, no matter what. Without salvation, no amount of earthly paradise is more than a temporary haven from the maws of Satan.

****

The building of the trans-continental railroad consolidated gains and "civilized" the American West. San Francisco became the first great city of the West. After the Indian Wars, the United States expanded its influence in the Pacific and the Atlantic: the Philippines and Cuba. Winning World War I completed the nation's global outreach.

Charles Dickens and Mark Twain: the first modern media superstars

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.

\- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

There were, of course, great writers and novelists before England's Charles Dickens and America's Mark Twain. Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey shined a light on the Trojan Wars, and subsequently the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, whose influence on English classical education was so tremendous that, at one time, the curriculum simply listed the classes as "Great."

Famed playwrights emerged out of Greek antiquity. The most influential writer of them all was William Shakespeare in England. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra has been the called the "first novel." Twain was not the first literary star from America. He was preceded by Herman Melville's success, Moby Dick. Dickens was the first true media superstar, and Twain the picture of a young country that fascinated the world.

". . . The British and Americans are two people separated by a common language," U.S. General George S. Patton once said, quoting George Bernard Shaw, who added it was "the destiny of America and Great Britain to rule the world." In the 19th and 20th Centuries, they effectively did, allied together in the winning of the two great world wars of history. For this reason, a great deal of the world speaks, reads and understands English. Hollywood unquestionably influences this dynamic, as does the Silicon Valley.

But Dickens and Twain, along with Shakespeare, combined with these events to solidify the hold of the English language as that of diplomacy, the arts, commerce, and internationalism.

"University of Hard Knocks"

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show," Dickens, who lived in Victorian England between 1812-1870, once wrote. "To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously."

His birth, as with all his works, was poetic. Critics included Virginia Woolf and Henry James, but his work is credited not simply with increasing literacy and literature, with educating masses that previously never considered the possibility, and with turning the book business into big business, but also with shining a light on social inadequacies on the lower classes.

George Orwell (1903-1950) was not an unabashed admirer, but was nevertheless influenced by his social relevance and promotion of the "human brotherhood." He was a writer of mass appeal to all classes, from the working people of London to Westminster Abbey. His works were so greatly anticipated that long lines – like those of modern day blockbuster premieres - formed when word came down that a shipment of Dickens's books were to be delivered.

Dickens read Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, and Oliver Goldsmith while attending the school of William Giles. But in 1824 his father was put in debtor's prison. Charles was sent off to work in a shoe factory, living in a squalid boarding house. These events formed the characters in his books and outlook on society. The term "University of Hard Knocks" has been attributed to Dickens. Characters like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Philip Pirrip were his mirror images of the working poor, where child labor was rampant, and many children were abandoned or orphaned.

Dickens may well have lived a hard life, but his father managed to arrange for him to be educated at the Wellington House Academy in London from 1824-1827, but again financial difficulties resulted in his having to leave school. However, he was educated and literate enough to attract a job as a clerk in a law firm. Dickens began writing and soon was published in magazines. When his father was again faced with debtor's prison, Charles had enough money to bail him out.

He married Catherine Hogarth, daughter of the editor of the Evening Chronicle. They had 10 children. The similarities between Dickens and his family, and Dickens's father, can be seen in many characters, particularly Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol.

Oliver Twist certainly appears to have been semi-biographical, the fresh-faced lad suddenly faced with the reality of street life and factory work.

A Christmas Carol (1843) is one of the most influential novels ever written. It depicted the huge disparity among the English classes, and provides a character, Ebenezer Scrooge, who has been caricatured by liberals and labor as a picture of penurious Republican heartlessness for more than 200 years. Cratchit is a happily married man with numerous children who is underpaid by Scrooge. At the heart of the story is Scrooge's refusal to pay Cratchit, a picture of the working man, the labor man, enough to keep his ailing son "Tiny Tim" alive. This remains the nexus of the employer-employee conflict to this day. Is it Scrooge's fault Cratchit has so many kids he cannot afford to care for all of them? Should society force Scrooge to pay for the Cratchit family's health care?

Dickens's work was popularized by a triumphant visit to the United States and Canada in the 1840s, which he wrote about in serial form.

"We had an hour's conversation with him last evening, and found him one of the most frank, sociable, noble-hearted gentlemen we ever met with, perfectly free from any haughtiness or apparent self-importance," wrote the Boston Transcript of January 24, 1842.

"The early maturity of his genius and reputation had but few parallels," effused the Worthington Egis of the 30-year old Dickens. Admirers requested poetry readings, autographs and even locks of his hair.

"Dickens was at once mobbed and generally given the adulation afforded four other young Englishmen <The Beatles> who would invade America more than a century later," according to Dickens's web site. He was not impressed with the coverage of American newspapers, but found the American ideal the hope of the world.

He followed that trip with a visit to Italy, at the time embroiled in social upheaval revolving around the election of Pope Pius IX, and the revolutionary movement led by Giuseppe Garibaldi.

In 1849 he wrote David Copperfield, which had an effect on the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina). David Copperfield depicts a sunny-dispositioned character who remains so despite ups and downs. It truly defined the concept of the character-driven story, exposing family squabbles and secrets long before Eugene O'Neill's Long Days Journey Into Night. The concept of the young man who cannot be kept down despite family and personal trouble, sometimes disaster, was a mirror of Dickens's own life. Horatio Alger picked up on this theme, albeit with a distinctly sunny American style.

Bleak House (1852-1853) and Hard Times (1854), two books with highly descriptive titles, followed. Dickens then left his wife, which Bob Cratchit never would have done. He was rich and famous with numerous temptations.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) told of the French "Terrors" during their revolution. Great Expectations was more stylized, a 19th Century version of a young man who goes to New York or Hollywood to make his way in the entertainment industry but is drawn back by forces in his home town.

Dickens died in 1870. His tomb was inscribed thus: "He was a sympathizer to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world."

"The good, the gentle, high-gifted, ever-friendly, noble Dickens - every inch of him an honest man," wrote Scottish historian and author Thomas Carlyle.

The unique American persona

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. His pen name was Mark Twain. His influence on America and the world remains profound. He railed against bigotry and was something of a contrarian, in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau. America was charging hard towards empire, creating de facto "colonies" in Cuba and the Philippines, cheered on by the British poet Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a poem called "The White Man's Burden." Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders were national heroes after charging up San Juan Hill, cheered on by William Randolph Hearst's newspapers. But Twain's

retort was: " 'The White Man's Burden' has been sung. Who will sing the 'brown man's burden?' "

But Twain's persona, his homely countenance and shaggy moustache, fed a stereotype of the American West/Midwest. Along with the mythic cowboy of the same era, this became a picture of the American, not just among Europeans, but of Americans searching for self-identity. The plain spoken, honest man of the plains, a kind of man's man captured on film by Jimmy Stewart, embodied by Harry Truman.

Twain is most noted for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). These books, most notably the latter, both earned the appellation of "the Great American Novel."

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for both Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. It was a border state, engaged in great rivalry with neighboring Kansas. Slavery was a heavy issue in Missouri. Unlike the true South, where the issue was resolved in the minds of virtually all white citizens, Missouri was deeply divided before, during and even after the Civil War. Its reputation as the "Show Me" state, a true picture of middle America, a strong gauge of the overall socio-political attitudes of the nation, were established in large measure by these times, this man, and his books. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were proto-types of the average American boy; hunting, fishing, getting into mischief. After World War II was finally won, General Dwight Eisenhower, a plainspoken lad of the Texas-Kansas plains, remarked that the struggle between the Nazi "superman" and the American "every man," between the megalomaniacal Hitler and himself, had been "Alexander the Great vs. Huck Finn . . . and Huck Finn won."

Twain was also one of the first noted Americans to go to California and help the Golden State establish an identity. His humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," became very popular and brought nationwide attention, along with "Casey at the Bat," the poem by Ernest Thayer of the "Mudville Nine" set in Stockton. Twain made the famed observation that, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age." William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature." The likes of Will Rogers, Ring Lardner and H.L. Mencken followed in his footsteps in one way or another.

Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River, inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Slavery was a theme in his writing. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, steamboat pilot Horace E. Bixby inspired Twain to become a pilot himself. Twain's observations of life on the Mississippi were primary in his works, as well. It was also this occupation where he got his pen name, as the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms was "mark twain."

Twain wrote of the divided politics of Missouri, which the Confederacy claimed as one of its own during the Civil War, in "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed." After the war he headed west like so many wanderers. The trans-continental railroad was complete and a new mobile nation born. He worked in Nevada politics and visited the mysterious Mormons of Utah.

Twain moved to San Francisco in 1864 to work in journalism. He met writers Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, and Dan DeQuille. The young poet Ina Coolbrith may have romanced him.

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published in a New York weekly, The Saturday Press. He married Olivia Langdon in 1870 and moved back east. She came from a wealthy but liberal family, and through her he met abolitionists, Socialists, principled atheists and activists for women's rights and social equality, including Harriet Beecher Stowe (his next door neighbor in Hartford, Connecticut), Frederick Douglass, and the writer and utopian socialist William Dean Howells.

It was in Hartford where he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Twain toured Europe, a cause célèbre. He was friends with Nikola Tesla, inventor of the radio. He was also involved in early cinema, helping Thomas Edison make The Prince and the Pauper in 1909.

Twain was also a groundbreaker in the area of travel writing, as he brought to life the places he visited in his numerous, colorful wanderings. In 1872, Roughing It was a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey to Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and Western society, a rebuff to critiques of Europe and the Middle East then common in the United States.

Twain met Ann Sullivan, Helen Keller's governess and companion, a "miracle worker." His choice of words later became inspiration for the title of William Gibson's play and film adaptation, The Miracle Worker. Twain was a Freemason.

Twain expanded on the works of Rousseau and Thoreau, picking up on the social conscience of Dickens, in firmly establishing the new paradigm of the writer-as-radical.

"When I finished Carlyle's French Revolution in 1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently – being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment . . . and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat," Twain explained of his kinship with French Revolutionaries.

Before 1899 Twain was a "red hot imperialist" who favored colonizing Hawaii and backed the war in Cuba. In the New York Herald of October 15, 1900, he spoke of the Philippine-American War.

"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific . . ." he exclaimed. "Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? . . . I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [which ended the Spanish-American War], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

Whatever America's intentions were in the Philippines in 1900, and to the extent that they were "subjugated" over the next years (there were atrocities), indeed the United States did "make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way" eventually. When the Japanese invaded the islands during World War II, they thought they, as fellow dark-skinned Asiatics, would be welcomed as liberators of a sort from the white man. This inculcated their propaganda. But the Japanese, unlike the Americans, did conquer and subjugate the Filipino peoples. Then Doug MacArthur argued that Franklin Roosevelt's plan of bypassing the Philippines was wrong and would mirror the Japanese propaganda that the "white man" would not shed blood for dark-skinned people. The Americans attacked, liberating the Philippines, did not subjugate anybody after the war, and indeed were every good thing Mark Twain argued we were not.

From 1901 he completely reversed his old positions. After returning from Europe, he was vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League. After his death, many "claimed" Twain. His folksy image did not fit that of a Left-wing radical, which such views were strongly considered to be at the time. There were many of more moderate persuasion, some in his own family, who loved his writing, felt him a symbol of America, and "hid" some of his diatribes. Many of Twain's controversial writings did not appear in print until the 1920s, and full revelation was not complete until the 1990s.

Imperialism was rampant worldwide during this pre-war era, the height of the Industrial Revolution and American immigration. Natural resources from native lands were now critical to economies. New citizens arriving in America suddenly desired to see their homeland annexed by their new home country.

Cecil Rhodes greatly expanded the British Empire. Leopold II, King of the Belgians, colonized the Congo Free State. Rubber, now in hot demand, was a major resource in the Pacific and Africa. Exploitation was awful, with Leopold echoing the oft-used argument that civilizing and Christianizing natives "outweighs a little starvation."

Twain moved further away from the traditional Christianity of his youth, but never took on outright atheism. He wrote of "humanism." Like many liberals he picked and chose the parts of Christianity that fed his arguments (requiring the existence of judgment be mainly excluded) while arguing that love is incompatible with the conduct of war.

Twain supported the revolutionaries in Russia against the reformists, arguing that the Czar must be got rid of, by violent means, because peaceful ones would not work, which directly contradicted his assessment that Christian principles were incompatible with the conduct of war. In a strange way he seems to have been prescient. The Communist Revolutionaries who eventually did remove the Czar – by violence – were atheists. Using this logic, it seems that Twain thinks violence is okay if non-Christians do the violence, against Christians? This is too simple an argument, tempting as it might be for those who wish to discredit Twain, but it can be argued that the sort of ends-justifies-the-means genocidal excesses of non-Christians ranging from the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge, adopted this philosophy. While there are numerous examples of atrocities and excesses committed by "Christians" against those they oppressed, none even remotely compares to the atrocities committed by atheists (Holocaust, gulags, Cultural Revolution). There are theories as to why this is so. The best one says when Christians commit oppression, their conscience, and a collective conscience existing within their group, puts a halt to it before it gets out of hand. Where atheists commit oppression, no such barrier or roadblock stops them from going "all the way."

It is true there was a "Christian church," of a sort, in Nazi Germany, but Adolf Hitler quickly shut them up as an organ of policy or national conscience long before the whole of his terrors was engaged in. They were not a "collective conscience" operating in any free manner within the peoples of militarized Germany. In the case of Pol Pot's Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution, Rwanda, and other examples (not all), genocide seems to be something non-whites do to each other, which is one of the most pernicious of all evils (not unlike the practice of Africans selling other Africans to slave traders). Perhaps the only reason there are no examples of non-white genocide against whites is that whites consistently had the advantage of better technology, organization and war-making machinery. They would never allow themselves to be destroyed by any group they had a military advantage over.

Even the slave trade cannot reasonably be compared to the wholesale, systematic slaughter and murder of people in the multiple millions found in the most egregious Communist examples of the 20th Century.

Twain was a good man who meant well, but in weaving through the twists and turns of his logic, one sees some of the main problems with liberal thinking, which too often is expedient, justifying their means while condemning those who do the same thing in an opposite cause. Of course, conservatives are capable of this sort of moral quandary.

"I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle," he stated. "I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute."

Twain's support of abolition and emancipation were much purer and righteous, needing no logic twists in order to make sense, and were with him from his early youth and best writings. His belief that the Emancipation Proclamation "set the white man free also" was quite a beautiful sentiment, picked up on 60 years later by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He railed against prejudice towards Chinese, which equaled that of the black plight, and paid the tuition of minorities to attend college. Women's suffrage was a big issue of the day. Twain supported their right to vote. He felt unions were the only answer to the "sins" of capitalism.

He came to the aid of Indians a little late, but certainly sympathized with them, finding fault with author James Fenimore Cooper's depictions in The Last of the Mohicans. Twain wrote that whenever natives met whites, they came up the worse for it. He was very observant in writing that whites were no more moral than non-whites, an absolute Truth of the human condition. By the same token, non-whites are no more moral than whites, a falsehood oft-proposed by the liberal class to promote their agenda.

This is an area that can be properly understood only through belief in God, for God makes all men equal in His eyes, and Original Sin makes all equally guilty. Twain promotes the ideology, strongly advocated by many to great sentiment and passion, with massive political power derived from it, that the huge issues of the world are based on an overriding (un)truth: non-whites are the only innocents, whites are the only guilty. Twain's personal guilt overshadows his opinions at every turn in the later years of his life.

Twain was critical of "faith healing" and found little good in the work of Christian missionaries. His views can be compared to the "big thinker" Henry Luce, the son of missionaries in China who saw the long view Twain may not have seen. While indeed conflict and exploitation often marked missionary work, the affect over 100-plus years – a Christian populace – in the end, Christians at least would argue, is positive.

"Faith is believing what you know ain't so," Twain said. "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be - a Christian."

Twain stated that he believed in an almighty God, but not in any messages, revelations, Holy Scriptures such as the Bible, Providence, or retribution in the afterlife. He stated that "the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works," but also that "the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws," which determine "small matters," such as who dies in a pestilence.

"Sometimes he believed death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a life beyond," his daughter Clara said.

Mark Twain's views on religion appeared in his final Autobiography, which was published 100 years after his death, in November of 2010.

"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money grabbing, and predatory," he wrote. "The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the deity nor his son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled."

In 1909, Twain is quoted saying: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.' "

Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth. Upon hearing of Twain's death, President William Howard Taft said, "Mark Twain gave pleasure – real intellectual enjoyment – to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come . . . His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature."

Many of Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word "n----r," which was in common usage in the pre-Civil War period in which the novel was set. This is a true conundrum since it can be argued that Mark Twain was as much a "friend of the black man" as any white man ever.

". . . Beyond the darkness the West"

Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.

\- Horace Greeley

"I think Jim Murray saw California the way many outsiders do," recalled his longtime friend, Los Angeles City Councilman Tom LaBonge. "Those of us who grow up here take it for granted. Others see this image, and they come out here, and they find it. The Rose Bowl, 90 degrees on New Year's day, snow-capped peaks in the distance. It's like a Frank Capra movie, Shangri-La."

Indeed, this image had been painted to millions long before the great Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray made the trek west. The L.A. Times printed a mid-winter edition, distributed nationally, filled with glorious imagery of January sun-bathers, low-hanging fruit, and all other inducements, but always appealing in that while it was exotic, it was not that exotic. In L.A. the people looked just like the Midwesterners and Southerners they left behind. The promotions were tinged with subtle racism, referring to the Southland as the "white spot," WASP, Christian, All-American. San Francisco, on the other hand, was considered rough-hewn, union-heavy with grubby dockworkers and Socialists, its Barbary Coast bars and brothels a distinctly un-holy environment.

The story of California; its growth and rise as an important state politically, culturally and in all other ways, is inexorably tied to Jim Murray's story. Murray was drawn to the place as were millions of Easterners. They were searching for . . . something. A dream, a vision, a new way.

Over the previous century, people were drawn by many things, some more concrete than others. They were drawn by gold, which was found in the foothills near Sacramento. They were drawn by a peaceful new life after the turbulence of the Civil War, slavery and Reconstruction. They were drawn by warmth and sunshine after desultory Eastern winters. They were drawn by second, third and fourth chances, an opportunity to re-invent themselves. They were drawn by Hollywood, by sports success, and the wild surf. They were drawn by beautiful women and happening nightlife.

Many tried to put into words what this experience meant. Some, like John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, painted a grim picture, disabusing the notion of an egalitarian paradise, preferring instead to say that capitalism was a failure. But most tried to describe the openness of the place, the expanse of the West. Most were attracted to this notion. Perhaps the man who best described it was Jack Kerouac. An East Coast native, he came out west after World War II, describing it in a new free form writing style in his classic On the Road.

"Beyond the glittery street was darkness and beyond the darkness the West," Kerouac wrote of his wanderlust. "I had to go."

The story of California has always been one of myth and lore, from the 1849 Gold Rush to the endless strands described in Beach Boys songs. It was a state where people re-made themselves. On the East Coast, people were identified by their ethnicities, religions, family connections, and place in society. A business failure more often than not meant just that, failure. It could be a stigma never rebounded from. In California, Eastern failure was just "preparation."

San Francisco vs. Los Angeles: post-Civil War images

The nature of California was formed in the 30 years after discovery of gold in the late 1840s. Many people are unaware of the profound influence of the Civil War on the state. Technically, California supported the Union and even sent troops to fight, but for the most part the state was unaffected by its strife. This made it a place to escape to from previous acrimony. But war politics could not be avoided. It started with the trans-continental railroad.

The building of the railroad started before the war and was completed shortly after it ended, but North-South politics had a profound impact on its building. The main advocate of the railroad was a Republican Senator from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. His largest contributors were the railroads. The trans-continental railroad was a great competition to see who would finish first, with great benefits to the winner. However, government cooperation was essential.

A look at the map reveals the easy way to build a nationwide east-to-west line would be through the Southern states, below the rugged Rocky and Sierra Mountain ranges. It would connect through the prairies of Texas, to the deserts of Arizona and Southern California, most of which is flat, easy terrain. Its ultimate destination would be the sleepy pueblo of Los Angeles, which would instantly become a major international hub of commerce.

Senator Lincoln adamantly opposed the idea. Why? If it were built through Southern states, slaves would erect it. For reasons that history has made quite obvious, Lincoln did not allow that to happen. Instead, the railroad was built by . . . the Chinese. The powers that be saw they built the Great Wall of China and determined if they could accomplish that, they could build the railroad. They were right.

The building of the railroad over the Rockies and Sierras, leading not to Los Angeles but to San Francisco, shaped the future of California in ways felt today. Completed shortly after the Civil War, it connected a nation, making it possible to traverse the continent in a matter of days instead of months. Coming on the heels of so much displacement due to war deprivations and Reconstruction, it offered sometimes irresistible opportunity to start a new life.

Northerners, often from Boston and New York, had the ways and means to take the railroad to San Francisco. Their customs and politics became the dominant customs of San Francisco. They tended to be liberal and secular. An "anything goes" mentality pervaded San Francisco, given the moniker Barbary Coast because of its freewheeling immoralities; prostitution, gambling, human sin.

Over time, the railroad lines connected the coastal cites of San Diego and Los Angeles with San Francisco. Later, Southerners and Midwesterners began traversing the country to California. Repulsed by the Union influence and liberalities of San Francisco, they settled on Los Angeles. Its warm climes and mystic scenery gave it a Shangri-La quality they identified as a new Promised Land. Los Angeles was considerably more conservative and Christian.

Before the Giants and Dodgers, or USC and Cal, the two California cities were natural rivals because the people who lived there were considerably different. San Franciscans looked down on Los Angelenos. Los Angelenos thought San Franciscans to be elitists.

At first the "rivalry" more resembled England quashing a colonial uprising, absent real violence. San Francisco became an international port of call. Los Angeles was little more than a Catholic mission, a Spanish pueblo. The first hint of change came in 1880 when the University of Southern California was founded in a mustard field in a fashionable residential neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles, which in those days was just about all there was of Los Angeles. There was no "downtown" beyond a Mexican neighborhood centered on Olvera Street. Beyond the USC campus were orange groves to the sea. To the northeast, canyons, arroyos and mountains. To the east, endless desert.

But USC was the first private university in the West. It was the very first event in Los Angeles meant to say to somebody, "Hey, look at me, I am a city." But the founding of Leland Stanford, Jr. University, built by one of the railroad barons, quickly displaced USC. Football was popularized. A rivalry between the University of California and Stanford assigned imprimatur to both colleges. In 1905 Stanford was called "national champions" by some services. From 1920 to 1923, California's Wonder Teams saw few if any equals in all the annals of grid history.

The aqueduct

But in the 1900s, Los Angeles made another bid for recognition. The railroad did not make it the first destination, not merely to avoid the slave issue, but also because there was little fresh water there. Lakes, rivers and mountain snowmelt surrounded San Francisco. But William Mulholland, the chief engineer in Los Angeles and one of the so-called "city fathers," was determined to make his town a world class one, as well. He determined a plan to bring in fresh water. An ambitious aqueduct was built diverting millions of gallons of drinking water from the Owens River Valley. Controversial, oft vilified as in the film Chinatown, it ranks with the building of the railroad among acts of American ingenuity simply unthinkable in any other country.

Eventually, the aqueduct spawned such projects as the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Thus did the West and the South modernize. It was this modernization that enticed Easterners like Jim Murray to come give it a try. Murray was really ahead of the curve, coming in 1944. The war was not over yet, but two world wars were really early "advertising posters" for California. Soldiers trained in the state during and after World War I. General George S. Patton predicted correctly that war with Germany would first be fought in desert conditions, as in North Africa. He trained tank men in the sands east of Los Angeles.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and nurses traveled through L.A. and San Diego. Many fell in love with it. When World War II ended, they moved there. The automobile was now king. Eventually, a Federal highway system brought an influx of new citizens as the railroad did a century earlier.

The mythology grows

From the earliest beginnings, sports were an integral part of life in the West. The Cal-Stanford rivalry was a big hit with national implications from the earliest times Walter Camp decided such a thing as national implications existed. In 1919, USC decided they, too, wanted to have "national implications." They hired "Gloomy Gus" Henderson. Henderson was the most successful high school coach in Seattle, Washington. The Alaskan gold rush created a population boom in the Pacific Northwest. This resulted in Washington being the so-called "football capitol" of America in the late 1900s and 1910s. Henderson recruited some of the best prospects from Seattle. The result was USC developing into a national power over night.

In the early 1920s, the West Coast dominated college football. Cal's Wonder Teams, Pop Warner's Stanford Indians, and the USC Trojans, were all powerhouses. The rivalries were as intense then as today, maybe more so. The stakes were high. Prestige was attached to collegiate football prowess.

Cal and Stanford built huge stadiums. Stanford tried to lure the Rose Bowl up north. Pasadena responded. The Rose Bowl moved from parade grounds in Pasadena into a new palace. By building the Rose Bowl stadium they kept the game in the Southland. That same year, USC moved into the marvelous Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

In 1926 under new coach Howard Jones, USC separated themselves from the pack by starting a rivalry with Notre Dame. This made USC, not Cal or Stanford, the pre-eminent West Coast power. Later, when UCLA emerged as their biggest rival, Cal and Stanford responded with jealousy and false accusations. In 1932, Los Angeles literally chose not to "participate" in the Great Depression, hosting a successful Olympic Games showcasing USC and the city as an impressive international metropolis.

Southern California became a place that produced great athletes. It was its greatest export. East Coast sports fans rooted for players from the West Coast starring for the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, and other champions. Various theories were offered, all adding to the growing mythology of California. Some said the sunshine and vitamins in the low-hanging fruit literally made for bigger, stronger people. Others put forth the notion that the lure of Hollywood produced great athletes. Physically impressive men and women came out to make it in the movies, met each other, were married, and produced physically impressive offspring.

But perhaps the most important product in California was a sense of Democratic social justice. On the East Coast, neighborhoods were divided by race, ethnicity and religion. The Jews and the blacks lived separately. The Irish and the Italians were rivals. The Protestants were above all of them. But on the West Coast, integration was in place. It was advanced beyond other regions of the country or even the world. The University of Southern California's first All-American football player was a black man named Brice Taylor in 1925. When UCLA opened for business, they immediately welcomed blacks. Capacity crowds at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum watched games between the Bruins, featuring the likes of Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington, against the integrated Trojans. These were manifest social statements.

The Chandlers

Who built Los Angeles? Above and beyond all other "city fathers" and visionaries was the Chandler family and their Los Angeles Times. The patriarch of the family was General Harrison Gray Otis, a Civil War soldier who rose to the rank of general and strongly supported American expansionism via the Spanish-American War. His daughter married a man named Harry Chandler, who succeeded his father-in-law as publisher. When it is said the Otis-Chandler family built or shaped L.A., that they did so in their image, that is not an exaggeration. More than the moviemakers, the railroad men, the engineers and the aerospace executives, it was General Otis, the Chandlers, and their newspaper that did it by dint of pure vision.

"No single family has dominated any major region of the country as the Chandlers have dominated Southern California," historian David Halberstam was quoted saying in Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and the Their Times, a 2009 PBS documentary. "They did not so much foster the growth of Los Angeles as invent it."

They created a brilliant marketing and advertising campaign, boosting the image of an Eden in the West mostly to Midwestern farmers, who they enticed to come to their fair city, where boundless land for the taking at cheap prices was available. They could abandon the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska for the sunny year-round climes of California.
In so doing, the Otis-Chandler family created their own political constituency. They wanted white, Protestant, hard-working, honest men, figuring that such men were, naturally, conservative Republicans. They did not want Jews and Catholics. They did not want con men, grifters and gamblers. They wanted industrious farmers who would build they dream city. They got what they wanted.

The newspaper began in 1881, one year after the University of Southern California opened for business, and was revived after running out of money by General Harrison Gray Otis in 1884. It reflected "strong individualists with idealistic visions shaping a frontier outpost into an urban center," wrote Digby Diehl in Front Page: A Collection of Historical Headlines from the Los Angeles Times. General Otis guided the Times into the 20th Century while establishing a publishing dynasty. The paper supported early development with stories about sub-divisions of the Lankershim tract, which could only happen with the building of a controversial water aqueduct.

Perhaps the first really big front-page story putting the Times "on the map," so to speak, occurred on February 3, 1922. Naturally, it involved Hollywood. Famed movie director William Desmond Taylor had been murdered. He was romantically linked to the beautiful silent film actress Mabel Normand. The headline read, "Sinister Drama Mystery." A manslaughter trial involved actor Fatty Arbuckle, said to be a jealous rival of the director's. The age of sensationalism was on. The L.A. Times detailed the first smog alerts, the opening of Disneyland, debate over transportation issues, and the building of Union Station.

"The growth of the Los Angeles Times reflects a pattern familiar to the development of all newspapers in the United States, " wrote Digby Diehl. "The papers were stirring spoons in the great melting pot: homogenizing, educating, acculturating forces." The American press, Diehl went on, "did not show significant growth until the Westward movement of the mid-19th Century, of which General Harrison Gray Otis was a beneficiary." Between 1850 and 1880, American newspapers doubled to 850.

Social responsibility was slower in growth or, as A.J. Liebling paraphrased, "freedom of the press belonged to those who owned one." The late 19th Century was a period of "shameless proselytizing, partisan politics, circulation-building theatrics, and the prejudices of the day," wrote Diehl. This applied to the Times, whose "colorful prose was striking," but lacked objectivity, and was embodied by similarities to the rival publishing empire owned by William Randolph Hearst.

In particular, racial sensitivities were lacking. The Soviets were viewed as lackluster "allies" before and during World War II, followed by "absolute hysteria" in the years afterward. Always the Times reflected the partisan, Republican proclivities of its owners and publishers, the Chandler family. Harry Chandler took over as publisher in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution. Harry, who signed on as a clerk in the circulation department in the 1880s, was married to Otis's daughter, Marian.

The newspaper reflected tremendous Red Scare fears of the day. Anarchists rioted in the streets. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on sedition charges. "Red Emma" Goldman was jailed on treason charges. J. Edgar Hoover rose as a young lawman riding a white steed to save the glorious union. These were the sentiments of the Chandler Times.

Harry Chandler was not merely a publisher. He was a businessman who used his paper to promote his business interests, which included water projects in the San Fernando Valley, automobile ventures, and aviation. All of these were integral in the growth and success of L.A. Chandler threw lavish fundraisers on behalf of his pet projects.

Harry's son, Norman was born in 1899. He spent 40 years waiting in the wings until taking over in the early 1940s. Like all who preceded him, he was a Republican. The paper undoubtedly remained a supporter of the GOP, but under Norman they softened their political editorials, taking a less personal stance.

In response to the "threat" of television, the parent Times Mirror Company diversified its investments in order to create steady revenue withstanding circulation ups and downs.

Republican Los Angeles

The Otis-Chandler family and the Times got what they wanted because they were staunchly conservative Republicans, Protestant Christians (WASPs), adamantly anti-union, and wealthy. They were at the center of the social order, but lived quiet lives of good health. Drinking and excess were looked down upon. Every aspect of the city's growth could be attributed to, or was largely supported by them: the growth of USC; then the creation of UCLA; the building and growth of the docks and harbors; the building of the aqueduct; the expansion and modernization of downtown; the building of the Rose Bowl and the L.A. Coliseum; the social order of Pasadena, San Marino and Los Angeles; the rise of the movie business; the expansion of the suburbs; the building of roads, highways and train lines; the erection of Union Station; and other civic landmarks. The politics of city hall were controlled by the Otis-Chandler Times. The newspaper was bombed by union anarchists, which General Otis exploited for all he was worth to create not just a staunchly non-union company but hardcore union antipathy among the general population.

The Otis-Chandler Times was all about boosterism. Through the Rose Parade, the Rose Bowl game, football, the Olympics, Hollywood and all attendant activity, they created a vision of a better life. The purpose – whether primary or secondary – was to attract millions of new Los Angelenos. These new citizens would subscribe to their newspaper, but also invest and buy into the land they owned and their many other enterprises they built or invested in. The Otis-Chandlers bought virgin land knowing it would be worth millions with the growth they promoted, which it did. If L.A. was a self-fulfilling prophecy, they were its Prophet Isaiahs. Their boosterism did not end at the Los Angeles city border, the L.A. County line, or anyplace for that matter. They built Southern California, wresting political, social and cultural power away from Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area. General Otis despised San Francisco for its prostitution, drunken ways, gambling and inveterate immorality. He and Governor Hiram Johnson despised each other publicly. The Otis-Chandlers were fiercely protective of America, capitalism and private property rights. The rich who could afford to live at the ocean were, in their view, the only ones deserving of it. It was not to be divided equally.

They promoted a robust, Theodore Roosevelt-vision of America as a major power, a military juggernaut, and a land of immigrants. The Otis-Chandler family and the Los Angeles Times joined with William Randolph Hearst in a jingoistic, adventurous view of the American ideal. They promoted growth and business. When oil dominated the Southern California land boom of the 1920s, they backed it regardless of environmental issues or accusations of greedy capitalism run amok. They wanted to expand outward and build roads to accommodate the car culture they invested in. When two world wars came they supported entry and the building of adjacent military installations in the Southland and on its harbors. They welcomed the workers who backed the war effort and the soldiers who stayed to make a post-war life.

The center of the Los Angeles social order was San Marino, a wealthy enclave of the horse set near Pasadena. The Otis-Chandler family was its titular head. San Marino-Pasadena was the home of General George S. Patton. It was WASP, old money mixed with new, a social construct imitating the salons of Manhattan and Boston with a touch of Charlotte and Atlanta thrown in for good measure. It lacked effete ways. Its people were rugged individualists. Many were military officers – hunters, horsemen - veterans of the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. There was such a strong Southern culture even the children (like George Patton himself) carried the accents of their parents (General Otis, however, was a staunch Lincoln-Union man). The area's geography – rugged canyons, foothills, mountains - gave its young men and women ample opportunity to ride horses, fish, and live off the land. These traits marked almost all the Chandlers.

Harry Chandler's son, Norman Chandler took over as the third publisher of the Los Angeles Times. The current Times retro-baroque-rococo downtown headquarters opened up in 1934. The Chandler dynasty was strengthened by the perfect social marriage of Norman to the Buffum's department store heiress Dorothy Buffum. It was like most of the Chandler marriages, if not arranged, approved. To be a Chandler (once Harry took over the paper and the family, they were Chandlers, not Otis's) was to be at the very top of the list in Los Angeles. Invitations were not extended to just anybody. The family protected its name, its interests, its businesses, and its friends with a fierce pride, using the Times as a bulwark of those protections.

Norman was a quiet, dignified man. Despite the power he wielded, he was enormously fair, lacked racial prejudice, and did not throw his weight around. He used his influence and got his way, but did not run a Tammany Hall-style political machine. Hypocritical or not, the Chandlers looked down their noses at the kind of corrupt machines run by the Democrats: Boss Tweed in New York, Joseph P. Kennedy in Boston, Tom Pendergast in Kansas City, the Mob boys in Hot Springs, Arkansas, or the Jim Crow South.

They believed in an honest, muscular, Christian form of Republicanism unique to the West. They made decisions for the community because they were the community, but they were, at least most felt they were, benevolent . . . not dictators or emperors, not kings, but rather the ruling class ruling out of a sense of noblesse oblige/

The Chandler's were vehemently anti-Communist, determined to use their position and newspaper in the promotion of their city and state as nationally prominent. They were cheerleaders for Los Angeles and the American Way. The L.A. Times was not a great newspaper. It was considered a joke in some quarters. It was blatantly biased in favor of the Republican Party, locally and nationally. It was viewed as a bastion of conservatism fighting the Eastern establishment and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies.

Machine of propaganda

There are two ways to look at the Chandler Times. Their detractors, then and now, would call them greedy, grubby land-grabbers, kingmakers, corrupt, selfish. Probably accurate, but not the whole story. It is true that the Chandlers, in league with William Mulholland and the other "city fathers," all but raped the Owens River Valley in order to create an aqueduct delivering the fresh water Los Angeles needed in order to grow into a metropolis.

It is true they orchestrated shady land deals in the San Fernando Valley, secretly buying thousands of acres, often at cheap prices, the true value unknown by the farmers they bought the land from.

It is true that they fought a violent war against unions, a class battle pitting their vision of freedom and capitalism vs. a "fuzzy" and "Eastern European" (read: Russian, Jewish) version of Socialism and anarchism; a jingoistic, race-baiting, Red baiting struggle fought via complete propaganda in the pages of the newspaper they owned.

It is true that the unionists bombed the Times building, killing some 20 people, and it is equally true that while it was the work of a relative few, General Otis painted the entire nationwide union movement under a single brush, attaching blame to them with coast-to-coast coverage and implications. It is true that the Otis-Chandler family created a rivalry and hatred of San Francisco, the symbol of all they felt was unholy with their unions and Godlessness.

It is true that the Chandlers created sweetheart deals, benefiting all the way from the growth of the airline industry in Los Angeles, via recruitment of the Douglas Aircraft Company, working closely with Howard Hughes, and others who created what would come to be known as the Military Industrial Complex; all with a pay-off in untold billions to those on the inside.

It is true that they used the film industry not only for purposes of boosterism but also for "patriotic propaganda," always benefiting their hand-picked conservative Republican candidates. They were tight with MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, creating sweet scenarios. The movie people showed influential newsreels in their theatres promoting the Chandler's vision of L.A. These newsreels strongly opposed such Leftists as the Socialist Gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair, depicting foreigners with Russian accents supposedly poised at the state border waiting to enter California as soon as Sinclair or some other undesirable was elected.

It is true that while Harry Chandler, and later Norman Chandler, kept their hands clean, avoiding the fray of retail politics, their man Kyle Palmer was as much a kingmaker as any political boss in either party in the history of America. Palmer was a high-living Tennessean who used his Christianity when it served his purposes. He was a segregationist. He was not "just a newspaperman." His titles and promotions were not grandiose, but his influence was immense.

Where a Joe Kennedy or Tom Pendergast made decisions in back rooms, Palmer used his paper to sway public opinion. Ultimately, he used Democracy and created modern political marketing and campaigning tactics. But he did the bidding of the Chandlers. Nothing happened at city hall or Sacramento that the Chandlers did not want to happen. Governors Goodwin Knight and Earl Warren could not make a move without the Palmer-Chandler-Times approval. Ultimately Palmer created Richard Nixon.

David Halberstam, one of the great writer-historians, wrote about all of this in his seminal work The Powers That Be. Halberstam wrote of it in jaundiced manner. His politics swung to the Left. He was amused at these tactics of a by-gone era, but clearly disapproved. When he wrote of it in the late 1970s, after Watergate, he certainly had reason to disapprove. But history in its stretch and scope allows for a greater, longer view.

There is a large constituency that will always read of the excesses of General Otis, the Chandlers and the early Los Angeles Times, determining they were corrupt and it is good riddance they are gone. These are the people who take the simplistic view that in the culture clash between white settlers and native Indians, all moral blame is to be attached to the white settlers. But those settlers built the West with their blood, sweat and tears. They found something and out of nothing made it grand. They did things nobody else could do. Had they not built what they built, the world would be a lesser place.

The Otis-Chandlers understood this because they built L.A. out of nothing. They ruled because they had earned the right. It was not handed them. They had the vision. They built the aqueduct, the roads, did the drilling. It took hard work, money, investment, effort, and they were the ones behind it. They felt they were doing "God's work" in the noblest sense of the concept. Indeed, they did view their role as spiritual, the country they inhabited a virgin land bestowed upon them by a benevolent Lord who deemed them worthy of it, a new Chosen People given dominion over a New Jerusalem, and all the creatures that "creepeth upon the Earth."

They were infused by an evangelical fervor to accomplish their mission. Original Sin being what it is, they were subject to corruption because, as Lord John Dalberg-Acton observed, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." However, they had benevolent desires. They believed in America, her freedoms, her liberty, her Constitution. They believed a man could achieve the American Dream and no place more easily than in their Los Angeles. Their desire for wealth and power did not, at least in their minds, interfere with the idea that all were welcome to this opportunity. Otis and Palmer had their prejudices, but never enacted real roadblocks to this dream against blacks, Jews or Catholics as in the Jim Crow South. Norman Chandler and his offspring were outright liberal in their views in this area. All believed in the concept of a "rising tide that lifts all boats."

So, they used propaganda techniques. They over-stated American greatness and the paradise of Los Angeles. But even today their ways, while outrageous, still resonate with a certain kind of righteousness. First, they knew their enemies: Socialists, anarchists, Communists, the Left, were lying and using far more outrageous propaganda. It was a war between good and evil, literally, and they were willing to over-state their cause because their cause was just.

For decades their excesses and those committed by those on their side of the political aisle were impugned by the Left and the modern media that grew in opposition to them, but over time archives were opened, facts about Communism became available, that told us things even David Halberstam did not really know in the 1970s. There were Communists in Franklin Roosevelt's and Harry Truman's Administrations. There were Communists using their influence in Hollywood. The unions were infiltrated and sponsored by Moscow.

110 million humans were murdered by this ideology, maybe more. In retrospect Harry Chandler and Louis B. Mayer winking at each other while newsreels disparaging Upton Sinclair played in movie theatres appear quite innocent. In fact, one is prompted to shout, "We should have done more. We should have fought them harder. We should have been more ruthless." All is fair in love and war, and it was a war. The Otis-Chandlers, like Henry Luce, knew this and, ultimately when all is examined, fought as soldiers on the right side of these issues. What excess was really not acceptable if it could prevent the slaughter of 110 million?

This does not even count World War II, a tragedy of epic proportions, but the truth is there were beneficiaries. Los Angeles, California, the L.A. Times and the Chandler family were as much winners of this monumental event as anybody. It was a new world, their world. In the Robert Towne-Roman Polanski classic Chinatown, Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) asks Noah Cross (John Huston) what he was ultimately buying with all his money.

"The future, Mr. Gittes! The future," Cross responds.

The Chandlers harnessed the future.

Citizen Hearst

You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.

\- William Randolph Hearst

"But for the awesome contradictions in his character, he might have actually been President of the United States," wrote the Saturday Review of W.A. Swanberg's biography of William Randolph Hearst. "His income was $15 million - and yet he teetered constantly on the brink of financial disaster. On the one hand he was a bigoted reactionary who debauched every standard of American journalism. Yet he was also a radical reformer who battled . . . for women's rights." He "almost single-handedly" pushed America's entrance into the Spanish-American War, and may have been the biggest reason both Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Franklin Roosevelt were nominated for President. He was "enigmatic . . . a strange, complicated man . . ."

Hearst has been called a Right-winger, mainly by those on the Left who broadly paint him with his many faults without consideration of his attributes. In fact he was a Democrat, briefly a Republican, and an independent, although in each affiliation his version of it was not the general modern consensus of what such a thing is today. At all times politics did not shape him, he shaped politics. The only viable party was a Hearst party.

He certainly supported candidacies or politicians of all three stripes, describing the right ideology as Jeffersonian Democracy. He shaped the state of California much the way the Chandlers did. It could be said their politics were similar, but they were rivals and different on numerous levels. For the most part, the Chandlers dominated the Southland, Hearst Northern California. But Hearst's reach spread far beyond the Golden State.

Hearst was born on April 29, 1863, in San Francisco, the only child of George Hearst, a self-made multimillionaire miner and rancher, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. His father was a rough-hewn man, but determined that his son would be educated. Hearst's toughness and refinement were a by-product of both his parents, his mother being rather genteel.

The elder Hearst yearned to gain acceptance through Democrat politics, but his plans at election to both Governor and then U.S. Senator were not initially successful, despite large expenditures of money. He then used his San Francisco Examiner \- which he accepted as payment for a gambling debt - to criticize those he believed deprived him of the positions he felt should have been his.

Young Willie attended prep school and studied journalism at Harvard. Biographers and detractors portrayed him as a poor student who was kicked out of one school after another. The Hearst Castle web site, however, describes him as "excelling," but he apparently was expelled. At the age of 23 in 1887 he inherited the San Francisco Examiner.

"There's only thing that's sure about my boy Bill," exclaimed his father. "I've been watching him and notice that when he wants cake, he wants cake, and he wants it now. And I notice that after a while he gets the cake."

But Hearst understood journalism from a primal standpoint; how it moves people in a Democracy, its motive powers. He studied Joseph Pulitzer's combination of reformist investigative reporting and lurid headlines. Needing actual newspaper experience before taking over the Examiner, he moved to New York in what would have been his senior year at Harvard to take a job as a reporter for Pulitzer's World. George Hearst, meanwhile, "bought" an open Senate seat in Washington. With his parents now in D.C., William became free to run the Examiner as he pleased. He paid well, attracting top talent; Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Richard Harding Davis and Jack London.

He then began acquiring newspapers, often failing ones, and moved back to New York in 1895 to run the New York Morning Journal and launch the Evening Journal in 1896. Hearst was immediately in major financial difficulty, his purchases of oft-flailing papers leading him to the brink of ruin. Also immediately, Hearst was a very controversial figure, this brash young Californian of inherited wealth, spotty academic background and little experience, taking the New York publishing scene by storm. He was seen all over the city, squiring mistresses, and made a very scandalous figure.

"Even . . . when I was seeing him every night," wrote one of his editors, Willie Abbot, "Hearst was to me a puzzle. Conducting the most brazen and blatant newspapers, he was personally almost shy. It was a real ordeal to introduce him to a public man, even when he himself sought the introduction, for he would invariably sit silent, with downcast eyes, leaving me to carry on the conversation."

"The external Hearst was afraid, unintentional and therefore all the more deceiving," wrote W.A. Swanberg. "His inferiority complex manifested itself only in his outward manner. Inwardly he was Caesar, Charlemagne and Napoleon combined. He was the megalomaniac of men, supremely sure of his own greatness."

Spanish-American War

In 1897 the issue that defined Hearst formed a huge question, or chasm, between the public and the media who "serve" them; the cultural divide eventually forming much of Right-Left America. It became his great obsession. It was the "underdog rebels" and the "plight" of the "poor Cuban peoples." This was how Hearst's papers characterized their struggle for independence from Spain.

The Spanish crown had discovered the New World. They had the greatest navy in the world and were a global power. But they ceded independence to Mexico. After the Napoleonic wars, the Austrians and French tried to fill the void of European political influence. Maximilian Ferdinand, an archduke from Austria, was installed as Emperor, but Mexico lost most of their early power, first when Texas defeated them, later in a losing war with the United States (1846-48). When American settlers took over all of the Southwest and California territories, they had almost nothing left.

But Spain still held on to colonies in Cuba and the Philippines, hoping to maintain a last vestige of power and influence in the Western Hemisphere. In the 1890s, American journalists trekked to Cuba and told a tale of repression, creating sympathy for the native Cubans. The American government quickly saw an opportunity to gain territory and military power. When the Spanish jailed a World reporter, it gave Hearst's paper a large platform, advocating his freedom. Hearst then sent two reporters, including Richard Harding Davis, to Cuba. Davis was the great media star of his day, well paid and very handsome. Many Cuban exiles lived in America, having escaped after a previous failed revolt. They told tales of Spanish despotism. Hearst increased coverage of the Spanish crisis with strong partisan support of the Cuban natives. Tales of the Spanish beating prisoners to death or feeding them to the sharks were told.

When Dr. Ricardo Ruiz, a Cuban dentist, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was found dead in his jail cell near Havana, Hearst demanded war as revenge. His headlines blared that an "American citizen" had been found dead, probably murdered, without giving the details of Dr. Ruiz's long history of revolutionary activities in Cuba prior to coming to the U.S.

When William McKinley was elected President in 1896, the Journal immediately began pressuring him to take action on the Spanish issue. Hearst became the darling of the Cuban revolutionistas, who would bombard his office chanting, "Cuba Libra!" If ever there was such a thing as a "warmonger," it was Hearst. Joe Pulitzer aided him in his efforts, as well. Pulitzer initially opposed war, but when he saw how much Hearst's circulation was going up on the back of this issue, he came around to it, as well. In 1897, Pulitzer's two papers had 800,000 daily readers. Hearst's morning and evening Journal was a close second, while the San Francisco Examiner reached 80,000. The influential New York Sun also advocated war to 150,000 readers. The Associated Press and other related news services oft-echoed the Pulitzer-Hearst line. In New York, pro-war newspapers circulated among a total of 1,560,000 readers as opposed to anti-war papers (including the New York Times, "high priced" at $.03) reaching only 225,000. The New York papers had an undue influence on the rest of the nation. Editors at newspapers in smaller American cities lacked sophistication and relied on New York opinion.

Illustrator Frederic Remington requested return from a peaceful Havana.

"Please remain," Hearst responded. "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

While anti-war newspapers printed "reasonable" editorials, Hearst led a chorus of screaming, jingoistic headlines that came to be called "yellow journalism." The Spanish gave access to the "level headed" reporters who advocated against war, but not to the "war" writers. The "war" writers, in turn, printed one-sided pieces, as they never saw the Spanish side of the argument. Their articles were simply more exciting at a time in which the printed word was the source of most of the excitement people had.

The American diplomatic corps also sympathized with the rebels, and quietly advocated an invasion. Boycotts of Spanish products increased. Tremendous negativity towards anything Spanish was the order of the day. In truth, while the Spanish ran the Cuban colony in an autocratic manner, they were not nearly as ruthless as the press depicted them to be. The natural American inclination towards anti-colonialism made them very unpopular. As war fever increased, the U.S. government began to see major opportunities in the expansion of their own empire. Having recently completed the east-west settlement inherent in Manifest Destiny, the Indians finally pacified, the nation quite naturally was looking beyond its borders, to Cuba in the east and to the Philippines in the west.

Hearst then seized upon the case of a "languorous, 18-year old Latin beauty" named Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, whose father was imprisoned by the Spanish. Her cause, to free her father, struck at the heartstrings of the American public. She was dubbed the "Cuban Joan of Arc." Hearst either invented or exaggerated reports that her "purity" was in danger of the advances of a lecherous Spanish officer, and the tale became something out of Don Quixote, Dulcinea and her virtue, which must be protected. American women picked up on the story and began petition campaigns supporting her cause. In fact, her father was switched to a prison where his treatment improved, and reports of Evangelina's 20-year sentence in a harsh cell were untrue.

The Spanish, realizing the propaganda implications, agreed to diplomatic overtures to let Evangelina go, as she was never really in custody in the first place. But Hearst seemed to enter a fantasy world in which he believed his own headlines; huge, glaring words trumpeting how his newspaper, and his personal gallantry, had freed the maiden in distress. The public ate it up. When she arrived in New York, glamorous photos of her in beautiful gowns accentuated her beauty and star appeal. She was then enlisted in the on-going effort to urge war with Spain. Her appeal naturally increased circulation, and as circulation grew, so too did the public sentiment for war.

"Like Caesar and Napoleon, Hearst enjoyed power," wrote Swanberg. "He derived pleasure from controlling masses of people, manipulating them to bring about events of national or international importance." To those who knew him and his methods, he was not considered an honest man. He was, however, feared. He certainly was mis-judged as a youthful playboy.

Despite all the anti-Spanish sentiment, the American government was not eager to commit to war. Spain attempted to mollify the Americans with various diplomatic measures, but rumors of an "anti-American plot" in Matanzas moved the Americans to dispatch the 24-gun battleship Maine from Key West to Havana Bay as a "friendly act of courtesy" on behalf of American nationals on the island. The Maine had launched out of San Francisco eight years earlier, hardly noticed by Hearst and the Examiner, but its arrival in Cuba came with more headlines declaring "OUR FLAG IN HAVANA AT LAST," almost as if the war really was now underway. A private Spanish letter circulating in diplomatic circles criticizing President William McKinley was passed on to Hearst, who in turn called it "THE WORST INSULT TO THE UNITED STATES IN ITS HISTORY."

Then, on February 15, 1898, the Maine exploded, killing 266 men and leaving only 89 survivors. The sinking of the Maine remains a mystery to this day. There is virtually no evidence it was the work of the Spanish government, who knew such a thing would start a war with a foe they could never defeat. Spaniards gallantly fought to save the remaining crew, and the government offered tearful condolences. Even Hearst realized it was almost surely not Spain, but he couched his headlines with inflammatory rhetoric about "the Spanish treachery," an unnamed "enemy," and descriptions of insult from the populace of Havana.

Who sank the Maine? Most believe it was Cuban revolutionary-agent provocateurs who knew it would surely lead to a war of libra from Spain. Others believe its engines exploded by accident or mis-handling. Hearst's papers drummed up the conflict with headlines advocating that "war fever" gripped America.

"Although the Journal knew all along who sank the ship, it offered $50,000 reward for the solution of the mystery," wrote Swanberg in Citizen Hearst. Hearst then rounded up a select group of "jingoistic legislators"; Mississippi Senator Hernando Money, Nebraska Senator John W. Thurston, New Hampshire Senator J.H. Gallinger, Michigan Congressman William Alden Smith, and New York Congressman Amos Cummings. He took them on his own yacht, Anita, to Cuba to survey the situation.

President McKinley did not desire war, but Hearst called those who did not want war "traitors" or "Wall Street profiteers." McKinley believed the Maine sank by an accidental explosion. An investigation as to the explosion's cause was rendered of little use in comparison with the Hearst paper's echo chamber of innuendo-accusation against the Spanish. Andrew Preston's Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith contends that McKinley confessed God guided him to eventually invading the Philippines.

The Senators and Congressmen wrote vivid descriptions of poverty and despair amid the Cuban people. The wife of Senator Thurston wrote a particularly moving piece advocating, "Mothers of the Northland who tenderly clasp your little ones to your loving hearts!" to urge their freedom, no doubt only through an American invasion. Then, to the great bad luck of the Spanish, Mrs. Thurston died of a heart attack, which was described as her reaction to the horrors and destitution of the poor natives forced to live under Spanish rule.

Journalists, including those from the Journal, recommended caution in speculating the cause of the disaster. Hearst had other ideas. When he learned of the explosion, he called the Journal city desk and asked the editor on duty what other stories were to be played on the front page. When the editor replied "just the other big news," Hearst exploded that there was no other big news, and the sinking of the Maine meant war. Two days later the Journal was banging the war drum with such headlines as "War? Sure!"

Pulitzer's papers were now mere sounding boards for Hearst. The Evening Post, with a tiny circulation of 25,000, wrote like John the Baptist shouting in the wilderness. Hearst was engaged in "yellow journalism." But then Theodore Roosevelt, a crusading New York political figure, chimed in with a strong opinion that the Spanish had sunk indeed the Maine. The sources disputing Spain's role in the sinking of the Maine were, according to Roosevelt, neither "patriotic or loyal to the flag of this country."

Then, apparently apprised of new facts, Roosevelt completely repudiated his statement in the "alleged interview," claiming it was all a lie. President McKinley, a kindly, older fellow, was unprepared for the media onslaught and did not know how to handle it. Despite Roosevelt's disavowal, the nation was caught up in "war fever," a truly real phenomenon in which people of normally pacific tendencies seem to drool for blood. It was not unlike the American reaction after Peal Harbor (1941) and 9/11 (2001). The Spanish investigation could not determine a cause, but the report was ignored. Nobody ever claimed Hearst's $50,000 reward.

Every day, the Hearst papers printed lurid headlines and told of dastardly Spanish deeds. Volunteers from all over America were coming forward asking to fight in Cuba. Despite the American government's genuine desire for peace, relations with Spain ground nearly to a halt.

On April 11, 1898, President McKinley relented. He gave the issue over to Congress, knowing that they would vote for invasion. Surprisingly, advocates of peace reduced the Senate vote favoring war to a mere four-man margin, but the House passed the resolution almost unanimously. Hearst was selling newspapers like "hot cakes," but more important to him, he was now a man of immense power and influence. Never in history had the press so completely forced an issue such as this.

"The outbreak of the Spanish-American War found Mr. Hearst in a state of proud ecstasy," recalled James Creelman, who worked with him daily. "He had won his campaign and the McKinley Administration had been forced into war."

"Hearst was accustomed to refer to the war, in company with his staff, as 'our war,' " wrote Willis Abbot.

A four-inch headline declared, "NOW TO AVENGE THE MAINE." His sense of possessiveness even extended to a headline that referred to "THE JOURNAL'S WAR." On the heels of the Cuban conflict, a second front in the Philippines, also a Spanish colony, began. The Americans swiftly defeated the Spanish in a naval battle in Manila Bay behind Commodore George Dewey, elevated to national hero status by Hearst.

Hearst, 34, then offered to personally pay for an infantry regiment in Cuba. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt may have disavowed his earlier remarks about the sinking of the Maine, but that did not deter him from a personal appetite for war and adventure, not unlike another daring young man in England named Winston Churchill, who found his "manhood" in India. Roosevelt resigned to raise the regiment, which Hearst offered to join as an ordinary foot soldier.

McKinley declined Hearst's offer to fight, but did accept, with qualifications, Hearst's supply of munitions. Thus was born the "Rough Riders," one of the most unusual military organizations ever assembled. But Hearst wanted to go to Cuba to "report the war in person." His "ownership" of the entire struggle was quite Napoleonic. Richard Harding Davis quit the journal and endeavored to join the force as a "descriptive writer," dressed in full military garb. He would fight and write. This new kind of warrior-poet would echo a few years later in the works of Ernest Hemingway.

It was like nothing ever seen before, the strange combination of the press and the government's military operation, which was seemingly a private force. At one point Hearst, sitting proudly on his horse, drew the ire of an officer who pointed out that they were drawing fire from a Spanish artillery position.

Teddy Roosevelt, with no previous military training, was given the rank of colonel. Dressed in exquisite uniforms supplied by the finest men's tailor in New York, he led the Rough Riders, consisting of roughnecks, cowboys from out west, mercenaries, adventurers, and the like, to a stirring victory at San Juan Hill in what is still considered one of the most daring American battles ever fought. Few skirmishes have ever been romanticized so totally, and nobody was better equipped to tell the story than Hearst and his papers. Hearst himself was given the rank of ensign in the Navy. After Roosevelt's victory, the U.S. wrapped up the tidy little victory, a glorious and total triumph.

Hearst returned to New York in glory, orchestrating massive fireworks displays to honor himself, his paper, and the troops. With attendant U.S. victory in the Philippines, suddenly America was an empire, a modern global powerhouse to threaten the likes of Germany – with heavy influence and troops in neighboring Mexico and Latin America - and England. The British had been concerned enough by American adventurism to engage in some preliminary talk of another war with its old American rival, which of course never amounted to anything.

In the glorious afterglow, Hearst and his Journal papers engaged in a huge patriotic campaign of banners, headlines and publicity in New York City and beyond. Circulation continued to be very strong. The powers that be now owed Hearst for the help he provided in seeing America to victory. He was as influential as the President, if not more. The lessons learned were obvious: glaring headlines and super patriotism, especially if one promoted the other, truly work. Hearst tapped into the American psyche as few ever have. Since defeating the British in the Revolutionary War, citizens of the United States were extremely proud, considered themselves exceptional above all other nations, and loved to show it off. In many ways, the Spanish-American War "closed the book" on the gaping North-South wound of the 33-year old Civil War.

"The force of the newspaper is the greatest force in civilization," Hearst wrote in an editorial.

"Under the republican government, newspapers form and express public opinion.

"They suggest and control legislation.

"They declare wars.

"They punish criminals, specially the powerful. They reward with approving publicity the good deeds of citizens everywhere.

"The newspapers control the nation because they REPRESENT THE PEOPLE."

This is an interesting statement. Certainly it can be argued with much validity that Hearst told the people what to think, but this is not as obvious as it might seem. He had an innate feel for the pulse of the American public, knowing what they wanted to hear, what motivated and stirred them.

Only 35 years after the killing of President Abraham Lincoln, Hearst actually editorialized that political assassination could be justified in some cases. Shortly thereafter, William McKinley was murdered. The man Hearst championed as his Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, suddenly was the President of the United States.

Hearst went on to praise his former rival Joseph Pulitzer while advocating a consortium of influential newspapers that could use its collective power to attain unimagined heights of power. This idea did not really pick up steam. Hearst continued to chafe under the criticism of "elites" who still despised him for his relative youth, inherited wealth, and blatant ways. Hearst had an inferiority complex and wanted popularity. Naturally, this led him to his next big project: the Presidency.

After the Spanish-American War, Hearst eyed elected political power with the eventual goal of the White House. He served in the United States Congress from 1903-07, but remained too controversial and divisive a figure to build a coalition that could help him ascend to the Presidency. He was, however, always influential, shaping in one way or another the careers of William Jennings Bryan and President Roosevelt, as well as America's entrance in World I. Hearst was a "Progressive," in the tradition of Roosevelt. In 1916 the Republicans nominated Charles Evans Hughes, who Hearst said was too conservative. His business instincts led him to an isolationist stance when it came to war. Colonial skirmishes like Cuba and the Philippines were not major threats to the economy, but World War I was an entirely new, dangerous kind of global conflagration. It certainly made it difficult for a man who did international business, as Hearst did.

"He had come full circle again to what for him was a profound truth: the only party that could really be trusted to steer the nation's course was a Hearst party, led by Hearst and espousing Hearst principles," wrote Swanberg. Hearst considered himself a Democrat, an admirer of William Jennings Bryan, although he certainly elevated the Republican Teddy Roosevelt to great heights via his coverage of the Spanish-American War. Through his friendship with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer honcho Louis B. Mayer he was persuaded to back Herbert Hoover in 1928, but swing back to the Democrats, playing a key role in Franklin D. Roosevelt's historic 1932 election.

The Hearst family engaged in heavy philanthropy, especially in California where he wanted his mark made. Hearst's name and legacy remains strongly tied to the University of California, Berkeley. He was very fair on the race issue, promoting the cause of African-Americans.

In the 1920s he built a castle on a 240,000-acre ranch at San Simeon, near San Luis Obispo, California. At his peak he owned 28 major newspapers and 18 magazines (including the Chicago Examiner, Boston American, Cosmopolitan, and Harper's Bazaar), along with several radio stations and movie companies, until the Great Depression weakened him.

Like John F. Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, he was anti-Communist and supported the Nazi effort to root out Communism in Europe prior to World War II. He interviewed Adolf Hitler, but despite what his detractors say, was not a Nazi or sympathizer. Upon his return he spoke of the evils of both Fascism and Communism, expressing great love for Democracy and the blessings of American liberty. He clearly favored Great Britain's Democratic traditions in comparison to the National Socialism of Germany, the Socialism of France, and the Communism of the Soviet Union.

Hearst had warned for years of the "yellow peril." He seems to have been prescient in that both Japan and China rose up in the 1930s and 1940s as terrible enemies. He "established a template for the next century of how journalists were to cover significant events," wrote Rob Wagner and Robert Leicester in Red Ink, White Lies: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers 1920-1962.

"Mr. Hearst in his long and not laudable career has inflamed Americans against Spaniards, Americans against Japanese, Americans against Filipinos, Americans against Russians, and in the pursuit of his incendiary campaign he has printed downright lies, forged documents, faked atrocity stories, inflammatory editorials, sensational cartoons and photographs and other devices by which he abetted his jingoistic ends," said Ernest L. Meyer.

While Hearst and his family donated to numerous charities for minorities, he was not without prejudice, especially towards Mexicans. Others have argued that he did not so much despise them personally, but like the Spanish-American War used visceral public antipathy towards them to sell newspapers. Hearst papers portrayed Mexicans as lazy, degenerate, violent, as marijuana smokers and job stealers. The real motive behind this prejudice may well have been that Hearst lost 800,000 acres of prime timberland to the rebel Pancho Villa.

Citizen Kane

Hearst's affair with Marion Davies has come to define how many view the man. Born Marion Cecilea Douras on January 3, 1897, she moved to California after already meeting Hearst. They lived together at the Hearst Castle, which stands as a California landmark today. At San Simeon, they threw very elaborate formals and costume parties. Guests included Carole Lombard, Mary Pickford, Sonja Henie, Dolores Del Rio, among many Hollywood glitterati. Other invitees were national political figures and the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh.

"Hearst had an uncommon capacity for championing bourgeois conceptions which he did not recognize as applying to himself," wrote biographer W.A. Swanberg. "He was against sin in the abstract. He favored fidelity in the abstract. Yet he was always able to regard himself as beyond the jurisdiction or rules applying to the herd."

The most enduring rumor is that Hearst caught Marion Davies kissing Charlie Chaplin and shot at him, accidentally hitting and killing movie producer Thomas Ince. Witnesses, including gossip columnist Louella Parsons, were supposedly paid off, according to Hollywood Haunted.

The morning papers headlined, "Movie producer shot on Hearst yacht!" The evening papers would not carry that headline and the rival Hearst paper would print the next day that Ince died of acute indigestion.

But Hearst lost the biggest battle of his career when, in 1941 he engaged in a "clash of titans" with Hollywood "wonder boy" Orson Welles. Welles shocked the world a few years earlier when he orchestrated a radio theatrical called "War of the Worlds," depicting aliens landing in New Jersey. Many felt it a realistic news account and panic set in. Coming on the heels of this cause célèbre, Welles set out to make Citizen Kane for $800,000. While Welles and his crew worked on the film at RKO Pictures, rumors circulated that it was about William Randolph Hearst. Welles went to great lengths to protect himself from a lawsuit. He invited Louella Parsons, a "militant defender," and two of Hearst's attorneys to a screening of it.

"Miss Parsons and the lawyers sat through the picture in silence and left the RKO projection room without bidding good-bye to Welles, " stated one reporter. Hearst had numerous friends in show biz. He was a Californian who was comfortable in Hollywood social circles. One of his good pals was movie mogul Louis Mayer, who offered to pay the $800,000 cost of the production if the movie would be shelved.

RKO president George Shaefer detested Hearst's ways and refused. Hearst threatened a huge editorial attack on the entire film industry, already under much harassment and investigation by the government for Communist subversions. He further threatened to reveal the private affairs of film magnates, which scared many.

Pressure from the powers that be in Hollywood forced RKO to show the movie in independent theatres, but the film was considered an instant classic and could not be denied. Eventually it found a wide distribution and earned 1941 Oscars for Welles, screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, among others.

Citizen Kane was grossly unfair to William Randolph Hearst. While many to this day call it one of if not the best film of all time, it is over-rated. First, it depicted Marion Davies as a no talent alcoholic, whose failed career was propped up by Charles Foster Kane, played brilliantly by Welles as a stand-in for Hearst. He refuses to acknowledge her lack of talent, thus burning bridge after bridge with reviewers forced to lie that she is a good singer.

Kane is shown to be a complete megalomaniac, utterly ruthless in his drive for political power and money, left alone in his giant castle (Xanadu) to ponder his failings. In one of the most famous scenes ever, the audience learns that Kane/Hearst supposedly lacked love because the one thing he loved, a snow sled called "Rosebud," remained the elusive symbol of a youth he could never re-capture.

In a very unfair scene, one of his oldest friends says, "Charlie wanted everybody to love him. He just didn't have any love to give."

In truth, he was "kindliness itself," wrote W.A. Swanberg. But Hearst finally met his match, not only in Orson Welles and RKO, but in the entire opinion machine that is Hollywood. Citizen Kane spurred subsequent reviews of his character that seemed to adhere to the notion that Charles Foster Kane was a wholly accurate portrayal of William Randolph Hearst.

Hedda Hopper, the leading gossip columnist of the day, hated the movie, calling it "a vicious and irresponsible attack on a great man." Welles's film has been dissected back and forth over the decades. Cinematically, in terms of new innovations, camera techniques, use of light and shadow, and subversive symbolism, it was totally groundbreaking. But despite the great applause it continues to receive, the film is in many ways hackneyed, some characters quite cartoonish, situations and emotions over wrought. Welles, one of the greatest actors of all time and a Shakespearean thespian of the first order, is mostly spectacular, but Citizen Kane does not grab the dramatic heartstrings like Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or another 1941 classic, Casablanca. One cannot help but feel that because it skewered a political figure many wanted skewered, it has been given over-ripe applause over the years.

But Welles paid for his youthful hubris. Like Quentin Tarantino, who made Pulp Fiction in his 20s, he seemed to have an unlimited future. However, he angered leading studio people and was not given a follow up to his masterpiece. He acted, on stage and screen, doing wonderful work including what may be the best filmed Macbeth ever (1948), but struggled to control his vision and his projects. He made Touch of Evil independently in 1958, but did not ascend to the great heights predicted of him after Citizen Kane's towering debut.

William Randolph Hearst "changed the face of American journalism," wrote David Nasaw in The Chief. "Hearst was the first publisher to understand the communications media were potentially more powerful than the parties and their politicians." Soon after Citizen Kane, the Japanese attacked and America was in World War II. Hearst had advocated an isolationist policy, but now wrote, "Well, fellow Americans, we are in the war and we have go to win it."

The radicals

From the "fevered swamp" of World War I, the beginning of a century that would result in 150 million casualties, "rose a Beast, one that played upon man's yearning for a utopian solution to its abject misery. A quasi-religious criminal, taking the form of a political messiah. The Beast embodied Nietzsche's will to power, stopping at nothing to achieve its ends. It fed off Mankind's dark side, his fears, his prejudices. His ancient hatred. Reaching out, first to convert, then turning in to destroy. That was the nature of the Beast. It came with many faces, many names: Bolshevism, Fascism, Communism, Nazism, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Tojo, Stalin; but always and everywhere, regardless of the name or face, the goal remained the same: control of the state and power. Power as an end unto itself."

\- In the Face of Evil

"Radicalism" is a term that echoes throughout human history. Socrates was considered a radical, and for his beliefs he was put to death by the state. Jesus Christ was considered a radical, and He met the same fate. Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln; the list of people whose views were viewed as radical is a long one. Many met tragic ends for their beliefs.

But radicalism as it is generally understood in modern times is associated with anti-establishment, often anarchist concepts manifesting itself as a protest movement, often in response to war. Radicalism is often viewed as the dangerous uprisings of the lower classes, the poor and the dispossessed, responding to perceived injustices committed against them by the wealthy and the privileged. It invariably strays away from religious, especially Christian precepts, as spirituality is considered a balm of the soul giving one peace and freedom of conscience even as they suffer in silent dignity.

But radicalism is usually loud, messy and violent. It wants to be heard. Radicals do not like to be told that through prayer to a higher power they can find individual salvation. They are like the Jewish mobs who demanded Christ be executed by the Romans, rather than accept His message that He came not to lead a rebellion against Pontius Pilate, but a rebellion against sin, each believer's soul winning a private, unseen victory over the devil.

Radicalism and its related bedfellows – liberalism, anarchism, Socialism, Communism – are traced in large measure to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's On the Social Contract (1762). This document, more so than the English Magna Carta (1215), had the direct, relatively fast result of spawning revolution. The American Revolution was entirely exceptional from Rousseau, owing itself to John Locke, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and libertarian/agrarian economic thinkers with an entrepreneurial bent. However, it was its success emboldening other nations to revolt, albeit for wholly different reasons with results that could not possibly have been more different.

The term American Exceptionalism traces itself to this reason as much as any other. Of all the revolutions that followed, none were successful in the true sense of the word. Therefore, historians have come to view the American idea as something . . . exceptional. Try as they might, it cannot be duplicated. Even Americans end up making the big mistake of engaging in international adventures meant to make somebody else more like them. To the extent that other nations and peoples do adopt American values of society, government and culture, it is more an organic, even subversive process rather than a heavy handed one that succeeds. Most politicians are not patient enough to see this. Rather, the day inevitably happens, decades later, when one wakes up and sees that some nation, once rejecting a force-fed American way, suddenly starts acting like Americans of ther own free will.

One case in point might be Vietnam. Militarists said that, "Inside every Vietnamese is an American waiting to come out." After the war turned disastrously, with Communism becoming the way of the land, it seemed that America had been rejected. But now, decades later, occasional reports surface that Vietnam engages in trade, a middle class is growing, businesses and entrepreneurialism are allowed to thrive. In other words, if Vietnam had simply become in 1964 what it now is today, absent being forced to do so, the United States never would have felt the need to engage militarily.

Even Germany and Japan, supposedly prime examples of cultures adopting our ways as a "result" of military inter-action – in these cases the only way we could get them to "come around" – nevertheless were influenced as much by organic American culture as the "barrel of a gun," to quote Mao Tse-tung. General Douglas MacArthur once said baseball player Lefty O'Doul's goodwill exhibition tours did as much to enhance friendly relations with the Japanese as any other factor. The popularity of rock music and stylish jeans was said to play a major role in the fall of the Berlin Wall. These were certainly not "government programs."

Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, the New Man and "cult of death"

After the French Revolution and Napoleon's failed attempt to conquer the world, Europe was in turmoil. Germany and Austria stepped in, riding the whirlwind of the Industrial Revolution in what really became global competition with the United States and Great Britain. When the Model T was invented, oil become the commodity of empire, thus modernizing Asia Minor, as it was generally called, into what is now called the Middle East.

England found itself by virtue of its navy, its colonies and its ability to make trade throughout the world, the greatest modern power, but its small size meant it was always operating on a relatively thin margin, requiring acquiescence among its ruled. Any major revolutions against it threatened the empire. Germany and America eyed Great Britain hungrily, waiting to "take its place."

Social upheaval in Europe, the writings of Karl Marx, the new concepts posed by Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, all led inexorably to a 20th Century that would no longer be entirely dominated by Christian authority, with the Roman Catholic Church holding sway over kings and governments.

The very nature of man would be questioned. In Great Britain, "social Darwinism" took root. The English saw themselves as a tiny minority of extremely intelligent, high class whites whose inheritent destiny, as George Bernard Shaw put it, was to rule the world. How else to explain how a tiny group of British upper class, government officials and military outfits could steadfastly control all of the "great unwashed" of India, to use one example?

There was a huge racial component to this. The notion of "white superiority" was proposed, with scientists bound and determined to "prove" such a thing existed as a fact beyond argument.

Darwinism led to frightening medical concepts. World War I completely changed Mankind's outlook on humanity. Could we be "perfected"? Could the "defects" that lead man to war, to slavery, to poverty; could these be eliminated in favor of some kind of New Man? In a strange twist of logic begging the question of Satan's existence, eugenics became something of a new religion.

Abortion, the most unholy of all offenses against God, became the clarion call of sorts within a rising feminist movement. Led by Margaret Sanger, an American "sex educator" and nurse, abortion and eugenics became the "tool" by which racists "justified" the elimination of "undesirables," whether those be Africans, Asiatics, the lame, the feeble-minded, the retarded, homosexuals, or any other form of human deemed to hold back society from achieving its fullest potential. Sanger spoke regularly at Ku Klux Klan rallies, where audiences were eager to hear of her medical "solution" to the "problem" of African-Americans living within their midst. Naturally, the abortion-eugenics movement was opposed by Christians; thus creating the landscape leading to a "war" throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries between secularists and the religious. Charles Darwin never intended for his theories of evolution to be the adopted theme of atheists, but that is what happened. Humanists thought of themselves as smarter, absent "fairy tales" and "superstitions" of a doctrine they said were meant merely to keep man in thrawl to religious authority.

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who Darwin probably would have vehemently opposed had he seen what they did up close, rode to power on the strength of principles espoused as a result of Darwinism. Hitler managed to "convince" those who wanted to believe he was a "Christian," as he was raised a Catholic. In truth he was a humanist who used heroic Norse mythology (Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries") to create in the German mind the superior Norse-German man, or New Man.

The intellect became a new religion, a god to be worshipped. This created a larger movement, quasi-political in nature, picking and choosing from Plato's version of a professional political class, a "perfectible" human nature. The mistakes of average humans could be rectified by the state. They alone had the answers to societal problems. Herein lies the origin of the welfare state, Big Government run amok. Herein lies the origins of abortion-as-religion, a dogmatic, cannot-be-argued concept because to logically refute is to force into the discussion morality and Godly judgment, the enemies of the New Man. Herein lies the origins of the environmental movement, the "global warming" phenomenon which swept the world only after the "global cooling" movement died down in the 1970s. Always, a rejection of God, in particular a rejection of the whole Bible, of judgment, of hell, and of the entirety of Christ's meaning; rather the picking and choosing of a phrase here and there, only to suit a political or social purpose.

None of this would have so swiftly become powerful movements of the 20th Century had World War I not been fought. Never had the world seen such a conflagration, such Total War. It was too big for private citizen-armies, kings, political parties or religions. Only fully mobilized governments could press entire populations into service, on the front and at home, at a cost that only citizens taxed en masse could pay. Out of this, at the Versailles Conference, Paris, 1919, led by a young British economist named John Maynard Keynes, lay the great debate of the future, the role of government. Out of this mindset arose the notion that if only government was big enough to finance and fight a world war, then only government could finance societal "wars": poverty, hunger, joblessness, economies, race relations, reproductive rights, freedom, happiness, war and peace. Off to the side was pushed Christianity, told its age old role in society was done. They were now, to so many adopting this new religion, a mere opiate of the masses.

Darwinism believed that elimination of the "poorly endowed" was thought to advance society. "Great lawgivers, the founders of beneficent religions, great philosophers and discoverers in science, aid the progress of Mankind in a far higher degree by their works than by leaving a numerous progeny," wrote Darwin in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. "In the case of corporeal structures, it is the selection of the slightly better-endowed and the elimination of the slightly less well-endowed individuals, and not the preservation of strongly-marked and rare anomalies, that leads to the advancement of a species. So it will be with the intellectual faculties, since the somewhat abler men in each grade of society succeed rather better than the less able, and consequently increase in number, if not otherwise prevented. When in any nation the standard of intellect and the number of intellectual men have increased, we may expect from the law of the deviation from an average, that prodigies of genius will, as shewn by Mr. Galton, appear somewhat more frequently than before . . .

"If the various checks specified . . . do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world."

Darwin advocated "natural selection" as necessary for man's advancement. "Barbarous tribes," he wrote, were unable to handle the responsibilities of "natural selection," leading to "infanticide and many other evils, and in civilised nations to abject poverty, celibacy, and to the late marriages of the prudent. But as man suffers from the same physical evils as the lower animals, he has no right to expect an immunity from the evils consequent on the struggle for existence. Had he not been subjected during primeval times to natural selection, assuredly he would never have attained to his present rank."

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, warned of the danger of "uncontrolled breeding." "We should not minimize the great outstanding service of eugenics for critical and diagnostic investigations," she said. "It demonstrates . . . that uncontrolled fertility is universally correlated with disease, poverty, overcrowding and the transmission of hereditable traits . . .

"We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all - that the wealth of individuals and of state is being diverted from the development and the progress of human expression and civilization . . .

"Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes."

She praised eugenics, the forced sterilization of undesirables in favor of a scientifically altered baby, manipulated by biologists to possess the desirable traits of humankind: good looks, intelligence, Caucasian purity, heterosexual breeding absent the "animal" qualities of blacks, Jews and Asiatics.

"Degeneration has already begun," she wrote in The Pilot of Civilization. "Eugenists demonstrate that two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit to shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; . . . that the vicious circle of mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged, by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate asylum, hospital and prison. All these things the eugenist sees and points out with a courage entirely admirable."

Sterilization of the insane and feebleminded was encouraged upon those "afflicted with inherited or transmissible diseases, with the understanding that sterilization does not deprive the individual of his or her sex expression, but merely renders him incapable of producing children."

In "The Principles and Aims of the American Birth Control League," Sanger advocated that birth control was the essential ingredient of a new, educated class of women separating them from the Dark Ages, who she called "submerged mothers." The underclass served only the purpose of educating elites, who would study their "prophylaxis, hygiene and infant welfare." She did not see motherhood as a nurturing expression of love between mother and child, but as a form of "self-development and self-realization," the basis of which "may we improve the quality of the race."

Sanger believed only government had the scope and coercive powers to make society do as she advocated; individual citizens were too free-spirited to be "taught" what she knew was right for them. Conversely, she stated that charity was evil, because it lacked the organizational, all-inclusive qualities of government programs. Only government could assure "fairness." Charity too often advocated a Christian view that man must suffer as he follows Christ's path towards what she perceived as a false salvation.

"Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism,' she stated. "It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease."

The worst part of Christian charity was that it advocated the notion that all children were gifts from God. To Sanger, only certain well-bred children were of value. The rest she viewed like horses, too slow to win at the track, too small for plowing, to weak for riding; whose only value was found in a glue factory. This concept certainly found itself in the concentration camps, where the Nazis used the skins of doomed Jews to make lampshades and soap, therefore finding some "value" in them.

"Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the 'failure' of philanthropy, but rather at its success." In this, Sanger expresses frustration that so many believe in God and give to charity out of Christian duty. She advocated greater taxation to foster her cradle-to-grave vision, which of course would be extremely controlling of all aspects of society.

Sanger's vision was not merely fodder for evil movements of world history: Nazism, Communism, Socialism, the one-child policy in China today. She was an American who started some of the most powerful liberal organizations in the United States, resulting in abortion-on-demand, that since Roe v. Wade has killed 39 million unborn. Naturally, she had many admirers on the Left.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wholeheartedly stated, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

"Just as in cancer the best treatment is to eradicate the parasitic growth as quickly as possible, the eugenic defense against the dysgenic social effects of afflicted subpopulations is of necessity limited to equally drastic measures . . ." stated Konrad Lorenz, an Austrian zoologist and strong advocate that men are merely advanced forms of monkey-animals, some "more equal than others," as George Orwell wrote. "When these inferior elements are not effectively eliminated from a [healthy] population, then - just as when the cells of a malignant tumor are allowed to proliferate throughout the human body - they destroy the host body as well as themselves."

"It must be admitted, however, that there are certain dangers," liberal hero Bertrand Russell, a noted intellectual, noted. "Before long the population may actually diminish. This is already happening in the most intelligent sections of the most intelligent nations; government opposition to birth control propaganda gives a biological advantage to stupidity, since it is chiefly stupid people who governments succeed in keeping in ignorance. Before long, birth control may become nearly universal among the white races; it will then not deteriorate their quality, but only diminish their numbers, at a time when uncivilized races are still prolific and are preserved from a high death rate by white science.

"This situation will lead to a tendency - already shown by the French - to employ more prolific races as mercenaries. Governments will oppose the teaching of birth control among Africans, for fear of losing recruits. The result will be an immense numerical inferiority of the white races, leading probably to their extermination in a mutiny of mercenaries."

He observed that in the dark skinned races, there "would be a little genuine care for the race, instead of the present haphazard higgledy-piggledy ways."

In a letter to Alys Pearsall Smith, he hoped people would grow "less superstitious'" and that "government will acquire the right to sterilize those who are not considered desirable as parents. This power will be used, at first, to diminish imbecility, a most desirable object. But probably, in time, opposition to the government will be taken to prove imbecility, so that rebels of all kinds will be sterilized. Epileptics, consumptives, dipsomaniacs and so on will gradually be included; in the end, there will be a tendency to include all who fail to pass the usual school examinations. The result will be to increase the average intelligence; in the long run, it may be greatly increased. But probably the effect upon really exceptional intelligence will be bad."

Eugenics, Russell theorized, had "more ambitious possibilities in a more distant future. It may aim not only at eliminating undesired types, but at increasing desired types. Moral standards may alter so as to make it possible for one man to be the sire of a vast progeny by many different mothers . . . If eugenics reached the point where it could increase desired types, it would not be the types desired by present-day eugenists that would be increased, but rather the type desired by the average official. Prime ministers, bishops, and others whom the state considers desirable might become the fathers of half the next generation. Whether this would be an improvement it is not for me to say, as I have no hope of ever becoming either a bishop or a prime minister.

"If we knew enough about heredity to determine, within limits, what sort of population we would have, the matter would of course be in the hands of state officials, presumably elderly medical men. Whether they would really be preferable to nature I do not feel sure. I suspect that they would breed a subservient population, convenient to rulers but incapable of initiative."

The British science fiction writer H.G. Wells felt that only the "better sort of people should intermarry and have plentiful children," that "inferior" people should not multiply, all the while adhering to Plato's "principle" of a professional political class, and as pre-cursor to the "death panels" proposed by Obamacare, a permanent state to render the hard decisions of life or death, that man is too weak to do for himself.

Francis Galton felt a collection of "noble families" should collect "fine specimens of humanity" around them, employing these fine specimens in "menial occupations of a light and comfortable sort," essentially giving the betters of society more time for sex and, therefore, multiplication of their superior selves.

Wells advocated sterilization. "The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born," he stated. "It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies."

This was the way the elitist Left spoke, referring to humans as "stock," or "the masses." Long before the rise of Stalin and Hitler, Wells saw "dominant men of the new time" presiding over a "naturally segregated" society of "artists in reality, with a passion for simplicity and directness and an impatience of confusion and inefficiency. The determining frame of their ethics . . . will be the elaboration of that future world state to which all things are pointing . . . It is manifest that a reconstructed ethical system . . . will give very different values from those given by the existing system . . . the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge - and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable."

Wells's reference to a New Republic was very popular with the Left, mirroring the Darwinian notion of a New Man that Hitler and others espoused. So popular, in fact, that the leading liberal opinion magazine then and now remains The New Republic. Years later the Christian author of Witness, Whittaker Chambers, felt that Ayn Rand's works echoed these sentiments, even though there is nary a word in Atlas Shrugged advocating anything remotely close to these early 20th Century elitists. Chambers was alarmed enough, however, to say of Atlas Shrugged ". . . a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber – go!' "

Rand, who escaped Communist Russia, was the ultimate individualist, the opposite of these Darwinist and post-Darwinist thinkers and mass exterminationists. The words of Darwin, of Sanger, of Russell, and many more, obviously seem to be not merely opening the door to Hitler's transport trains of masses of undesirables to the camps, but more so: they are intellectuals from free societies with all the imprimatur of academe and intellectuality indeed begging him to do their dirty work.

In the "new vision of death," Wells wrote, there was no "inexplicable horror, no pointless terminal terror to the miseries of life, it is the end of all pain of life, the end of the bitterness of failure, the merciful obliteration of the weak and silly and pointless things. The new ethics will hold life to be a privilege and a responsibility . . . and the alternative in right conduct between living fully, beautifully, and efficiently will be to die."

A "multitude of contemptible and silly creatures," who he felt had no hope of happiness or achievement, and if Christians were hordes who were "fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence."

The New Republic, "will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death, because they will have a fuller sense of the possibilities of life than we possess. They will have an ideal that will make killing worth while."

Sexual questions, he went on, were "of no more importance than the morality of one's deportment at chess, or the general morality of outdoor games . . ." In this, Wells echoes the tools of Communist recruitment, so often the hook that sunk many liberals joining front organizations "because of a girl." This form of non-judgmental immorality is also found in the later works of Upton Sinclair. As for the "black, or yellow, or mean-white squatter on the move . . ." the "men of the New Republic . . . will rout out and illuminate urban rookeries and all places where the base can drift to multiply; they will contrive a land legislation that will keep" the child rearing "hopeful speculation." The lower classes were "the weak and sensual." All of this would be "planned and achieved" by an all-powerful state.

While Wells and other high-minded philosophers of England were making these plans for their fellow man, a young Army officer and conservative politician-in-the-making, Winston Churchill, listened in horror. His Christian sensibilities outraged, Churchill correctly deduced that if the "right" circumstances were to occur – war, famine, revolution, depression – demagogues would be able to mystify a populace seduced into thinking such intellectuality was their obvious master, following it into conflagration and mass gravesites. His plans and philosophies, his manner and way of speechmaking, were being formulated then and there, to someday be used, as if a tool of God Himself, as a bulwark against such evil. He knew, too, that the original high thinkers of these thoughts would not be judged by history; their crimes would be associated with others. Their godly intellects would merely be diverted to other causes which the 20th and 21st Centuries revealed: environmentalism, feminism, homosexual politics, and beyond.

As the views of these English academics made their way to America, echoed by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Margaret Sanger, and the feminists, another man of the 20th Century, a young college student in the Midwest named Ronald Reagan, listened to all of it with alarm. Influenced by his devoutly Christian mother, Reagan came to believe that of all Christ's precepts, his example of compassion toward the poor and the lame, the Biblical admonition that "the meek shall inherit the Earth," was the greatest. Out of this was formed his core philosophy, and ultimately his driving opposition to a view of "the masses" in Communism; that each individual life has meaning and purpose, imbued by a God who wishes all men to seek a personal relationship with Him.

Today, indeed, these men and women are conveniently given a pass. But in a new world of high technology and mass information, no longer were intellectuals crusty old men with granite faces and snow-white hair. Any jock or amateur historian with a library card and basic cable carrying the History Channel now has access to this information, if they are willing to take the time to find it.

One "average Joe," Glenn Beck of Fox News, dared expose the "death cultists" of the late 19th and early 20th Century West. Among the footage he aired on his show was a grainy, but generally good film of George Bernard Shaw, as kindly-looking an old gentleman as can be conceived; a man with the countenance of Santa Claus who, with a perfect upper class English accent said things like, extermination of the "socially compatible" was a fine goal of society.

"The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else," the old gentleman said with a wry smile and, literally, a little hop in his step.

"We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment . . ." Shaw felt killing people before committing crimes was a waste of effort when those likely to be criminals could so easily be identified by the state, then easily be deposited in gas chambers.

"A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.

"The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it . . . If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?"

Perhaps the ultimate statist and fear monger on the issue of world over-crowding was Thomas Malthus. His philosophies probably popularized the idea of "natural selection" even more than the man who created the theory, Charles Darwin. Marx and Engels, toasted among the Left-wing political intelligentsia of pre-World War I England, influenced him. John Maynard Keynes followed many of his economic principles. After the carnage of the Great War Malthus seemed to "make sense" to elites: if millions of potential war-makers could be exterminated before making war, war could be avoided.

"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man," he wrote. "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second. By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal."

Stalin took Malthus seriously when he used food as a weapon via mass starvation.

"This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence," continued Malthus. "This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind. Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms, nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand. She has been comparatively sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that imperious all pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great restrictive law. And the race of man cannot, by any efforts of reason, escape from it."

God, Malthus observed, was an obstacle, ". . . That great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society."

Large families were not blessings, gifts of children from a benevolent God, but rather, "Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his (i.e. man's) career and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world for whom he cannot provide the means of subsistence." All they did was increase the "state of equality."

Man's duty to the state was not to rise and succeed, selfish concerns, but rather "other considerations occur. Will he not lower his rank in life? Will he not subject himself to greater difficulties than he at present feels? Will he not be obliged to labour harder?"

Malthus did not like large families because the father of one would work to his "utmost exertions" in order to support them, likely raising the standard of living for his family instead of to his true master, the state, who he owed all fealty. Malthus preferred that his offspring be "in rags and misery, and clamoring for bread that he cannot give them? And may he not be reduced to the grating necessity of forfeiting his independence, and of being obliged" to the state, the only power capable of handling his needs, if indeed it deemed that he and his offspring should live at all.

His prescription to large families and large populations was famine and euthanasia.

"The redundant population, necessarily occasioned by the prevalence of early marriages, must be repressed by occasional famines, and by the custom of exposing children, which, in times of distress, is probably more frequent than is ever acknowledged to Europeans," he wrote.

"But as from the laws of our nature some check to population must exist, it is better that it should be checked from a foresight of the difficulties attending a family and the fear of dependent poverty than that it should be encouraged, only to be repressed afterwards by want and sickness."

Echoing "global warming," he preferred that a "few people, and a great quantity of fertile land, the power of the earth to afford a yearly increase of food may be compared to a great reservoir of water, supplied by a moderate stream. The faster population increases, the more help will be got to draw off the water, and consequently an increasing quantity will be taken every year. But the sooner, undoubtedly, will the reservoir be exhausted, and the streams only remain."

Charles Darwin has been excoriated for "starting" much of this, but in truth his "theory of evolution" was a scientific study of plants, animals and selection meant, with all good purpose and worth studying today, to broaden man's minds. In this it was a noble purpose.

To the Christian, who believes in good vs. evil, who believes that Satan is loosed upon the Earth and uses man's foibles and vanities to promote his way, there is a cosmic conspiracy at hand. No matter how one views it, the movements and massacres spawned by these notions are atheistic. Man, intellect, knowledge; these are their gods. A strange "cult of death" emanated from the thinking of Sanger, of Shaw, of Malthus, and so many others. It found a happy home in Leninism-Stalinism, in Nazism, and in offshoots of mass psychology. Lenin, who took statism to a whole new level, said that it did not matter if three-quarters of the world perished in a revolutionary war, so long as the remaining one-quarter who survived were Communists.

When Ronald Reagan heard that, it changed his life. He looked around him and saw American citizens, of their own free will, choosing to promote Communism. He was convinced they had to be dupes, they could not possibly, willingly believe three-quarters of the world's population being killed could have any benefit. His sunny disposition and natural nature did not allow for such a thing, but his study of mass thinking over time convinced him otherwise. He chose to fight the Beast. 110 million murdered men and women later, Reagan was proved prescient, the "death cultists" Sanger, Shaw and Wells seen as perverse "original thinkers" of a most monstrous of evil that, had they really been given a vision of it, as with John of Patmos in Revelation, they would have turned from their sins to God. Or so one hopes. As for President Reagan, he could not stop 110 million deaths, but was able to free billions more who, left to the devices of their captors, were bound for the same fate.

Whether they be British elites, American abortionists, Left-wing legal scholars, Fascists, Russian Revolutionaries, or Nazis, the single thread holding all these 20th Century New Men together is a firm disbelief in the divinity of God. We are all alone. We are our own gods, our own saviors. Government, the state, is our father or, as George Orwell called it in 1984, Big Brother. Logically, these notions would by all intent and purpose be so thoroughly discredited by exposed Communism and Nazism nobody would think like this any more. The Christian knows Satan is real, and therefore knows why these ideas simply take new forms, take on new causes, and are mouthed by new generations. They are eternal evils, briefly stopped by George Patton's tanks, by Ronald Reagan's "peace through strength"; never destroyed.

Quasi-religions like "global warming," which hearken back to centuries-old pagan Earth worshipers; the abortionists, the atheists, the new "death cultists"; the statists who see socialized medicine as salvation; the welfare state acting as a false messiah for the masses; the homosexual lobby determined to resist the notion that their lives are sinful; all these and more are the pride and vanity of the New Man, who says his way is better than God's way.

Sigmund Freud: Influential contrarian

It is a testament to the importance of Sigmund Freud that his findings in the field of human psychology find a legitimate place in a book about politics. Freud's findings have had their ups and downs, but for the most part, he remains the pre-eminent figure in his field. His theories help explain the motivations of some of the most important figures in history.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud expresses a pessimistic view of man. This contrasts with what some see as the "optimism" of Rousseau and Marx, who "envisioned" a utopian society of happy workers. If it had existed, it more resembles Heaven than anything a reasonable man could ever foresee on Earth. But he should be held responsible, because surely he could have seen, if not the murderous acts of Soviet Communism, a perverted, twisting of his ideas.

Freud was another German-speaking Jew of enormous intellect. Whereas Rousseau believed that human nature was inherently compassionate, and Marx thought that nature could be channeled into a harmonious society, Freud goes in the opposite direction. He saw people wrought by three irremediable personalities, all battling with each other. These are the id, the ego and the superego. These human traits might be considered metaphors for all of humanity, although this is not necessarily Freud's view. But the battle within every person is like the battle between nations, in that there is a constant struggle for domination.

The id is the most powerful. This is the part of our personality that lusts for aggression over others. The id might be the part of our personality that comes out when we try to get ahead of another car on the road and cut them off. Freud thought man suffered from psychic alienation and victimization from others. All efforts to avoid this predicament lead to more suffering.

Their Judaism influenced neither Freud nor Marx. Marx probably felt it was too stifling. Freud probably disdained it because it did not meet the needs of his high ego intellectualism. He lived before Judaism and politics became fascinations. One theory holds that the ultimate guilt and pessimism of Freud explains why Jews, in may ways natural conservatives, in the U.S. at least vote Democrat. However, in Israel, they vote conservatively, for the Likud Party, which consistently holds power. As a general rule, very religious Jews are conservative, while less-religious Jews are liberal.

But not only do Freud and Marx reject Judaism, they reject all religion. Marx seemed to feel that there is some kind of heaven on Earth. Freud thought concepts of a fatherly God or a martyred son are just plain silly, the work of lesser minds than his! Marx predicted a happy ending, while Freud's view seems particularly prescient in light of Communism and Nazism. Marx's "happy ending" classless society has never happened and never will. To make the allegory of the baseball fan out of these two people, Freud would be the Red Sox fan before 2004 (Babe Ruth's "curse"), Marx an old Brooklyn Dodger guy before 1955 ("wait 'til next year").

Freud's id is the center of our sexual and aggressive instincts. It unconsciously dominates all the other parts, but creates frustration by making demands that are not fulfilled. The ego is rational and cautious, and concerns itself with reality. It is our negotiator to the external world, but is ultimately dominated by the id. Pressured by the id and the superego, the ego generates anxiety. The heart of Freudian therapy is the strengthening of the id against the other two. The superego is our conscience, and this is where our mostly unattainable moral standards come from. It is irrational and the adversary of the id.

These values of our psyche have been described in many ways. Our good side and our bad side. The devil on one shoulder, the angel on the other. The superego is more powerful than the ego, less so than the id. Its main weapon is guilt, instilled by parents. Pain and suffering is found trying to fulfill the superego.

Freud's anti-religious side is an important consideration in addressing these theories. According to him, we do not have "morals" in the sense of "goodness." Goodness is something that comes from God, but there is no God to Freud. Instead of God, Freud sees only guilt, imposed by our parents.

In the song "The Seeker" by The Who, the lyrics are, "I got values, but I don't know how or why." What are values? Why do people have good values in the first place? Freud would postulate all kinds of answers, without ever addressing the possibility that they come from a benevolent God. He disdained the values and substituted only guilt, saying this is where our unhappiness comes from.

The good feeling a man has when he enjoys the simple pleasures of hearth, home and family, often more satisfying than fame and money, are natural feelings that have absolutely nothing to do with guilt. Freud misses this. This is not in him, so he disdains its presence in others. Maybe he was too smart for his own good.

Freud also misses the mark even when he has identified it. Guilt is unquestionably a driving force in our psychology, but he views it only as a negative. However, guilt may well be the saving grace of civilization. Heaped upon Mankind by God for first eating of the Tree of Knowledge, then having killed His only begotten son, guilt keeps people in line. Absent guilt one is likely a psychopath, if not a killer then a person lacking compassion and feeling, forced to put on an act for society's sake. But the guilt a boy feels for disrespecting his mother; a friend for betraying his pal; a businessman for cheating a partner; these are the driving forces that make for confession and honesty. None of this eliminates sin, but it does allow for the most important of Christian principles, atonement. If Freud attached guilt to innocent events then it says more about his character than his patients.

Freud says the superego imposes "unreachable" standards. But he is basing his analysis on people in therapy. Suffering comes from our own bodies, the external world, or personal relationships. All are inevitable. The personal relationships provide the most painful suffering. Freud said we are doomed to suffer, and we desperately want to hurt others. We do not admit this to ourselves because the superego will not allow us to. We cope through intoxication, isolation or sublimation. Isolation is impractical to most, and sublimation is the aggressive impulse we live out through work or sports.

Religion is the mass superego, a collective ethical organization devised to suppress lust and aggression. The id will triumph over civilization. Men are "wolves," inclined to wage war and persecute minorities. Marx's benign view of human nature is hogwash, according to Freud. He sees private property as all the neat little homes that are hiding places for our natural hatreds, and also things that we use to register aggression against others. Freud's view makes the Holocaust seem inevitable. In this many have agreed over the decades.

Differences between Marx and Freud, however, outweigh the similarities. Freud felt that the id not only dominated the self, but did so unconsciously. He said humans are unaware of it. Freud's "ego" is not the same as the way we usually evaluate the term. We think a person with a "big ego" has an inflated view of himself. But in Freud's original definition, the ego is not proud, but rather cautious and rational. The id and the superego master it. The superego is also irrational, but stern and strict. This is the area that Freud calls guilt, and others might call morality, or our Godself. Freud says it is developed out of socialization, but it is manifest within us, that it is the "good" that opposes "evil." The ego, in the Christian view, is the choice that lies at the heart of the constant battle between good and evil. Freud felt that religion was created simply to serve the superego.

Alienation was the common phrase of Marx and Freud, but what are we alienated from? Marx said from our essence, Freud said from our personality. Their remedies differ. Marx felt that we could overcome alienation by becoming one with our communities. Freud said that analysis could give individuals power over their individual id/ego/superego struggles, but his predictions are bleak. Analysis is only available to a select few. The masses, he said, would destroy us all eventually.

While historians have pointed to Communism and Hitler as obvious results of Freud's predictions, he had more mundane thoughts on his mind. Predicting genocide and world destruction is tricky. One finds scant evidence that Freud's theories are meant to do that. Yes, his conceptions of the battle between conflicting human emotions are instructive in the study of individual leaders like Hitler. They do not take into account the precise "moments of history" that must occur in order for a Hitler, a Mao Tse-tung, a Pol Pot - or for that matter an Abe Lincoln or a Dwight Eisenhower - to rise to full power and exact change on the world.

Freud studied individuals. It is in individuals that we can best study his predictions. In this regard, the id seems to have made its presence known. It has done so throughout history, and continues to do so. Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment might be the id part of our personalities asserting itself. The superego may have dominated early man because it operated as a survival mechanism. But as life became easier, the id established itself. The paintings depicting Christ, angels and beautiful women were frowned upon by the church as being heretical. We chose to pursue pleasures of the flesh that manifested itself in art and changes in the social structure.

Since Freud's time, the id has been the dominant force behind drug abuse, the sexual revolution, pornography, music, movies, gay rights, women's rights, and many other forms of "evolution." In this regard, Freud provides us some hope. Analysis and therapy can help people whose id has turned them into addicts of drugs, sex and even violence. Addiction seems to be the id run wild. Moderation, the ego self, is best in all things.

Anarchism and liberalism

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mohandas Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill all represent political philosophies that have had millions of followers. In their own ways, each has been admired and vilified. But there is another kind of philosophy that is worth looking at. It represents a strain of thought that really never does go away. This is the idea of anarchism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry David Thoreau had anarchistic ideas. "Red Emma" Goldman gave it voice and propelled a movement. In it she expressed views that have some limited admirable, albeit not very workable, qualities. Anarchism does not offer answers, but it represents part of human nature that many people relate to. It allows people to complain without taking responsibility. We see this every day. It is very, very seductive.

Anarchism has a benign view of humanity. It stresses compassion, a community of people, but not of state authority. The view of anarchists like Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti is one of "violence-prone sociopaths." But a theorist with the appropriate name of William Godwin said anarchism is the result of a natural order within society, based on voluntary cooperation among equal humans, as opposed to coercive state power. In this concept we see a world that Jesus Himself might have approved of. Christ did acknowledge the validity of the state, saying that we "render unto Caesar that with which is Caesar's," when asked about paying taxes to Rome. Christ advocates a Kingdom of Heaven.

The anarchist conundrum comes when ideals are compared with the way things are. This is a metaphor for God. God reigns over a Kingdom in which our questions are answered. These questions are not meant to be answered in this world.

Anarchism and Marxism have many similarities. Marx and Goldman have much more in common than Marx and Lenin. They were both revolutionary in nature, but anarchism is not as proletarian as Marx's vision. It is similar to Thoreau's and Gandhi's non-violent non-cooperation with supposed "evil." The problem with both of these examples is that neither overcame "evil." Gandhi overcame the English. History has not given the Brits the credit they deserve. They allowed Gandhi and his movement to grow, to gain momentum, and to thrive. Thoreau was frustrated by his lack of martyrdom. He lived in a country that let him say whatever he wanted to say.

The anarchists felt that if the state was not involved, people would cooperate with each other, and in this they have an interesting point. Volunteerism is a very strong thing in society. We see the cooperation, help and compassion of the human family in the wake of terrible disasters like earthquakes, floods, and droughts. The anarchists felt that this pervasive and benign part of human nature could be channeled into something bigger than all of us.

Anarchism has been espoused by a wide variety of practitioners. The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was a Christian anarchist who advocated non-violent change. Michael Bakunin was a violent anarchist. Anarchism has been considered evil by some. Creon and Thucydides were threatened by it because it challenged their authority. Zeno, the founder of stoicism in the third century B.C. (for a portrayal of stoicism applied in the modern world, read Tom Wolfe's A Man In Full), called for a stateless society where people worked in harmony with each other.

Anarchism was kept under wraps for centuries. The alienation of 19th Century industrialism revived it, as it did many of the revolutionary movements of the era. An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) by Godwin, gave voice to the theory that people have the ability to live in harmony. George Woodcock's Anarchism predicted that eventually government would become obsolete. There is an anarchic concept found in the modern Libertarian and even Republican parties, and certainly so in the separatist and militia movements. The Libertarians and highly individualistic Republicans see a world in which there is less government, although not a complete lack of government. They give voice to that rugged individualism embodied by the cowboys of the Old West; the ranchers, farmers and self-sufficients of the modern rural world. The militia wings range from romanticized mountain men to those who espouse violent and too-often racist views.

Despite being kindred spirits, liberalism is a separate entity that advocates government order to the point of over-control, with a schizophrenic personality. It requires the state to regulate the behavior of corporations and mass groups of people. Its schizophrenic side comes in what liberals require of it in their personal lives. "Immoral" activities like sex, homosexuality, drug use, and other "sins" are off limits. While the liberal is happy to turn his or her health over to a pervasive government, she is not willing to let them tell her she cannot have an abortion; indeed she expects it on demand, paid for by the state, with no judgment attached.

"Red Emma" Goldman

Emma Goldman was born in Russia in 1869, and moved to America in 1886. She wrote a book called Living My Life. In it she describes a very authoritarian father. New York City in the post-Boss Tweed era was her staging ground. She was often jailed for advocating free love (as the Russian ambassador in Dr. Strangelove may have said, "an astonishingly good idea . . ."), atheism, conscientious objection and birth control.

The first principle of anarchism is that human nature is benign. Machiavelli and Freud argued that people are the opposite: aggressive and untrustworthy, to be controlled by the state. The early Communists used the malleable and benign nature of people, twisting it into a violent revolution. Fascists viewed people as more gullible than benignly malleable. Anarchists just want government to get out of the way.

The second principle of the anarchists is to stress cooperation over competition. This is an interesting concept but it has flaws. In Mutual Aid, Peter Kropotkin said that our actions would be guided by a sense of "oneness." The animal world indicates that there is evidence for and against the anarchist view. In the animal world, there is cooperation, but there is also competition. The reality of man is somewhat similar. There is a kind of environmental culture existing in which competition and cooperation work together. In the end, we have a blend of both.

Emma Goldman firmly believed that there is a tyranny of the majority, and that this majority works as a destructive force of coercion and evil. The Communists split from the anarchists in that they say the proletariat needs must be consolidated with the state, in order to defeat the bourgeoisie. The anarchists advocate liberty in all its forms, especially social and economic. They reject the Marxist principle that any means are justified to attain the end. Goldman said the means had to be the same as the ends, but anarchists who followed her went too far and became quite violent.

The anarchists actually held some worthy views. They felt that while human nature was benign, individual behavior was shaped by choice. This is a slight variation on the Christian view, which is based also on choice. In Christianity there is a "value" for evil, as well. Somewhere between the Christian/anarchist value of "personal choice" is the concept of "resident evil," which might be found in Freud's analysis.

Anarchism seems to be an idea made for the big cities, where people live together and are, therefore, tied by social circumstance to each other. This leads to a natural cooperation between people, but history has shown numerous deviations from this. The anarchists would argue that gangs in the cities are divided because the evil, divisive levers of government have operated to separate them by class envy.

The Mafia embodies many of the traits of anarchism, with the notable exception of benevolence. They are a series of families, or groups, who cooperate with each other to form one organization. They operate in a world of their own, created because they did not want or trust government intervention in their lives. It is no mere coincidence that many anarchists were Italian. The Mafia grew out of Italy and Sicily. Whether anarchism gave birth to the Mafia or vice versa is debatable. The Mafia most likely traces its roots to Medici's feudal society. The anarchists wanted to foster diversity, but do not think that government can do it.

Goldman and Enrico Malatesta would argue that anarchism did not breed the Mafia because they do not emphasize hierarchical, authoritarian organizations. But somehow they do not account for the natural rise of leaders. Charismatic individuals evolve into positions of leadership. It is the tendency of people to accord respect to elders with experience. There are organizations that were formed within the anarchistic vision. Among these are the Red Cross, the Peace Corps, and Doctors Without Borders.

The anarchists told people not to vote, because it only encourages the state.

The Left was in small measure an offshoot of the anarchy movement; ruffians, protesters, rabble, quasi-criminals, various and sundry individuals of low rent. The problem with anarchism is that the anarchists favored the example of the French Revolution over the American Revolution. They were unable to square the three tenets of liberte, equalite and fraternite. The violence of the French peasants created an anarchist model. For others, it was abhorrent. Mohandas Gandhi may not have been an anarchist, but he used methods of the non-violent anarchists to attain his goals. His success was mixed. He gained freedom, but died a violent end. Furthermore, once his country became free, they were unable to govern themselves without splitting into a war that. For all intents and purposes, that war is still going on. It is not at all inconceivable that India would be better off, certainly more prosperous, if the British had never left. Independence comes with grave responsibility.

The story of anarchism is the story of rebellion. Rebellion must have some kind of end game to be successful. Emma Goldman's rebellion started with her desire to break the bonds of her authoritarian father. She broke free from him, leaving Russia and settling in at 210 East 13th Street in New York's East Village. There, she joined Johann Most and Alexander Berkman to promote better working conditions for women working as seamstresses. She was a gifted orator, and soon gained the reputation of being a dangerous radical. She found herself imprisoned in 1893 for inciting the unemployed to riot. Inciting a riot seems to go against the grain of the so-called anarchistic concept of benign behavior, non-violence and rejection of the Marxist statement that the end justifies the means. Riots become violent and are not benign. Apparently the ends do justify the means . . . sometimes.

She plotted to assassinate President William McKinley in 1901. Another assassin, not associated with her, killed him. She opposed the U.S. entry into World War I in 1917. Apparently the killing of a Republican was okay, but she allowed herself to be used as a witting dupe for the authoritarian Kaiser Wilhelm II and his attempt to inculcate German culture into the rest of Europe by force. She is the mother of the anti-war movement, the goddess of the rabble, the spirit of the foul-mouthed dirty hairs who litter our streets to protest all things. Her ghost urged the Chicago Eight to throw bags of feces at the police, Jesse Jackson shaking down companies with the blackmail threat of racist complaint, or William Ayer's plot to blow up the Pentagon. She is at the heart of a group of people allowed to live in America because it is a free country. They hold no jobs but take money from the disenfranchised and confused. These are professional dissenters.

When Emma was not plotting to kill the President she was opposing red-blooded Yanks fighting to uphold Democracy, all while preaching that free sex "on demand" was a "right" of some kind among the human animal. In a twist of fate that is worthy of further psychological examination, at least until Hollywood actress and ingénues got caught up in the movement in the 1930s and 1940s, most of the women advocating no control sex looked like Emma; haggard, unattractive, more often than not using the issue as an excuse to make lesbianism more accepted.

She wanted to rid America of her Puritan values. She did not even see the joy in sex. She viewed it only as a way of tearing things down. She wanted to see heresy and atheism destroy churches. She wanted soldiers to become pacifists.

"The more opposition I encountered, the more I was in my element," she told Alix Shulman in Red Emma Speaks. Given the Moniker "Red Emma," she was deported to the Soviet Union in 1919. When she saw a country that had adopted many of her policies, she was appalled and felt betrayed. This she states in My Disillusionment in Russia, written in 1924, mirroring the reaction of Paul Robeson when he finally saw the Soviet Union with his own eyes.

Goldman was a hypocrite, the leader of a movement decrying violence, who orchestrated violence. Her elitist concepts made it okay for her to be Machiavellian and Marxist, but not for others. In 1923 she was effectively a woman without a country. Having seen the failure of Communism in Russia first hand, she wanted to return to America. Only then did she acknowledge that the violence she spawned was wrong.

"The one thing I am convinced of as I have never been in my life is that the gun decides nothing at all," she wrote years after McKinley's death did not result in a Democrat in the White House, but instead another Republican, Theodore Roosevelt who liked guns and called them "big sticks." American victory in World War I certainly turned her cause against her.

"Even if it accomplishes what it sets out to do - which it rarely does - it brings so many evils in its wake as to defeat its original aim," she continued. American-style freedom throughout the world was an unworthy prospect in her mind. Emma's confusion continued throughout the Roaring '20s. In 1928 she was back to her old self.

"We must become Bolsheviks, accept terror and all it implies, or become Tolstoyans," she said. "There is no other way." The Chinese Communists were using a lot of violence at this time. "Revolution is indeed a violent process," she observed.

"Though Goldman grew skeptical about the value of individual acts of violence," wrote Shulman, "in her remaining years, she never doubted that necessity of collective revolutionary violence against capitalism and state." She supported the violent Spanish anarchists of 1936.

"The first ethical precept <of anarchistic revolution> is the identity of means used and aims sought," she said. "The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life . . ." Those were strange words from a woman who once plotted to kill President McKinley.

John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World

"Adventure it was, and one of the most marvellous mankind ever embarked upon, sweeping into history at the head of the toiling masses, and staking everything on their vast and simple desires. Already the machinery had been set up by which the land of the great estates could be distributed among the peasants."

Thus begins Ten Days That Shook the World (1919) by American writer John Reed. Reading like a novel about a great undertaking, not unlike a safari in deepest, darkest Africa; or Rudyard Kipling or Mark Twain writing about the youthful endeavors of a lad seeking escape from the ordinary; indeed Reed paints the most flattering imagery of an event which, almost 100 years later as best can be counted, led to the systematic slaughter of some 110 or perhaps 120 million human beings worldwide.

"Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers' of the world," wrote V.I. Lenin in the book's introduction.

The 1920s were a strange time. Many wanted to know why an entire planet could be thrust into war. In an attempt to address that issue, some decided that nationalism, governmental agendas, realpolitik, racism, class warfare, capitalism, Democracy, and corporations in bed with politicians and militarists, were to blame.

Nationalism was part of it. German unification and Balkan national aspirations played a role. Governmental agendas and realpolitik always have played a role in conflict. Since Communism addressed the concept of "one world government" and a "world without borders," some concluded that Communism offered the answer to these problems.

Racism was never an original part of the war, but would emerge as an ugly by-product. The Turks unleashed an open "ethnic cleansing" and genocide pitting Christians against Muslims, Turks against Arabs, secular vs. religious. In Germany, an easy scapegoat began to emerge: the Jews. Lies began to spread that Jewish banking interests profited from the war. In the American South Jewish influence was an affront to their sensibilities. The Ku Klux Klan rose again after a period of dormancy. The KKK's "mandate" pitted them against a "worldwide Jewish conspiracy" somehow in league with Papal domination. They said Catholics pledged allegiance not to the U.S., but to the Vatican. But few Catholics and fewer Jews lived in the South. Many blacks did. They were becoming a more prominent segment of society. Blacks were emerging as professional athletes in the Negro baseball leagues, and as musicians in the jazz world. As they asserted themselves, this infuriated the white underclass.

But the most pernicious thing emerging out of World War I were Westerners who believed that the war occurred because of the failure of capitalism, Democracy, and corporations who were in bed with politicians and militarists. When Reed's book came out, a segment of society allowed themselves to believe that the new political system in Russia should be given a chance. Communism became "the answer" to society's many problems, including racism and poverty. The failure of Communism, already evident by 1920, was not exposed to the world. Reed either chose not to write about the thousands and thousands of famine victims, the secret police, the crackdowns and forced marches, the banishments, assassinations and disappearances; or he was controlled by the hierarchy, not allowed to see it. He probably did not want to see it. He had found his story and he was going to stick to it. The great failure of the free press, of governments and political figures, of humanists and truth-seekers, was the failure to pin down Russia - Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, and the rest of them - before they became too powerful. To expose them for what they were.

John Reed was the most influential and the guiltiest. He came from the elite classes of Left-wing writers and intellectuals plying their trade in America. His friends included the famed playwright Eugene O'Neill and "Red Emma" Goldman. Reed and his friends sat around for hours on end discussing world politics, always to the frustrating conclusion that they were not backing their convictions with real action.

When Russia broke from the Allies, reaching a separate peace on the Eastern Front with Germany, it sent major shockwaves throughout the West. The United States entered the war to support England and France in the west. The English were also fighting the Turks in the Middle East.

Revolutionaries educated on Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had been advocating overthrow of Czarist Russian since 1905, when the Russians lost a naval war with Japan. Further weakened by war with Germany, the government run by Nicholas Romanov was unable to maintain control. A series of battles were fought, with the Bolsheviks, led by V.I. Lenin, emerging as leaders of the new Russia, eventually given the name Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). As all of this was unfolding, Reed decided the time for sitting around intellectualizing about Communism, the name given worldwide revolution by Marx in his Communist Manifesto, was now over. He ventured to this dangerous, hostile land, convinced it was a great adventure.

"The drama of Revolution has two acts; the destruction of the old régime and the creation of the new one," he wrote. Reed wrote up close of the tremendous arguments and political changes engulfing the Russians as they struggled to organize their "workers' paradise."

"Meanwhile the soldiers began to solve the peace question by simply deserting, the peasants burned manor-houses and took over the great estates, the workers sabotaged and struck . . ." he wrote. "Of course, as was natural, the manufacturers, land-owners and army officers exerted all their influence against any democratic compromise . . ." 7

The people rapidly deserted the "moderates," and went over to the Bolsheviki, "who stood for Peace, Land, and Workers' Control of Industry, and a Government of the working-class. In September, 1917, matters reached a crisis. Against the overwhelming sentiment of the country, Kerensky and the 'moderate' Socialists succeeded in establishing a Government of Coalition with the propertied classes; and as a result, the Mensheviki and Socialist Revolutionaries lost the confidence of the people forever."

The Bolsheviks, the most hard-line and radical, consisting of the revolutionaries who had been jailed and were considered the most dangerous, emerged as the power. A civil war ensued. All opposition was quelled, usually in the most violent way possible. Reed continued to only see man's natural human progression for justice. It was just like "the Terrors" of the French Revolution, when thousands of French aristocrats, Catholic priests, and royalists were guillotined.

"But more potent still, they took the crude, simple desires of the workers, soldiers and peasants, and from them built their immediate programme," wrote Reed.

A great Russian capitalist, Stepan Georgevitch Lianozov, known as the "Russian Rockefeller," a Cadet by political faith, said "Revolution is a sickness. Sooner or later the foreign powers must intervene here - as one would intervene to cure a sick child, and teach it how to walk. Of course it would be more or less improper, but the nations must realize the danger of Bolshevism in their own countries - such contagious ideas as 'proletarian dictatorship,' and 'world social revolution' . . . There is a chance that this intervention may not be necessary . . . Starvation and defeat may bring the Russian people to their senses . . ."

John Reed was on an assignment for The Masses, a magazine of Socialist politics, when he was reporting the Russian Revolution. Although Reed states that he had "tried to see events with the eye of a conscientious reporter, interested in setting down the truth," during the time of the event, he stated in the preface that "in the struggle my sympathies were not neutral." He undoubtedly leans toward the Bolsheviks. Reed allowed himself to become part of the story. He was a "useful idiot," a term attributed to Lenin but apparently not found until 1948. Nevertheless, it applied to Reed.

The Communists, who wanted to use the American to promote their cause to the most influential nation in the world, identified Reed. The U.S. took the side of Czar Nicholas, even sending military units to aid the Whites in their civil war with the revolutionists, but after a few years withdrew without having made any difference. Reed somehow did not see how he was given favor and made to see Russia from the point of view of Communism. He was allowed to speak at workers' assemblies even after saying he lacked "credentials." He was told nobody had "credentials."

"In this atmosphere of corruption, of monstrous half-truths, one clear note sounded day after day," Reed wrote. The "deepening chorus of the Bolsheviki" stood out as a pillar, "the direct representatives of millions on millions of common workers, soldiers, peasants," who had taken up a noble cause "of the people all over the world! . . .

"The struggle between the proletariat and the middle class, between the Soviets and the Government, which had begun in the first March days, was about to culminate. Having at one bound leaped from the Middle Ages into the twentieth century, Russia showed the startled world two systems of Revolution - the political and the social - in mortal combat.

"What a revelation of the vitality of the Russian Revolution, after all these months of starvation and disillusionment! The bourgeoisie should have better known its Russia. Not for a long time in Russia will the 'sickness' of Revolution have run its course . . ."

Incredibly, theatre life continued unabated in "dance-loving Russia," with Tamara Karsavina appearing in a new ballet at the Marinsky, and Feodor Chaliapin singing. Alexandrinsky Meyerhold's production of Leo Tolstoy's Death of Ivan the Terrible ran.

The Hermitage museum and other picture galleries were evacuated to Moscow to avoid looting, while "female intelligentzia went to hear lectures on Art, Literature and the Easy Philosophies," Reed continued. The middle classes "wished that the Tsar were back, or that the Germans would come, or anything that would solve the servant problem . . . the daughter of a friend of mine came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car conductor had called her 'Comrade!' "

Unions sprang up among almost every service industry, with prices skyrocketing beyond anybody's ability to pay. Working class newspapers were saying "new and startling things . . ." Hotel servants refused tips. On the wall of one restaurant Reed noticed a sign reading, "Just because a man has to make his living waiting on tables is no reason to insult him by offering him a tip!"

The military was under complete disarray, which Reed portrayed as the Communists gaining "experience and strength and a realisation of their historical mission by combat with the old order." This was a better way than describing assassinations and "fragging."

Russia was "learning to read, and reading - politics, economics, history - because the people wanted to know . . . In every city, in most towns, along the Front, each political faction had its newspaper - sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organisations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts - but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky . . .

"What a marvellous sight to see Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere . . ."

Conferences drew together all nationalities and ethnicities in a melting pot of joyous political expression, according to Reed. Attempts to limit the amount of time speakers engaged in were shouted down, and average men spoke freely in public for as long as they desired. Even soldiers returned from the front, emaciated and broken, eagerly demanded reading material.

A statue of Catharine the Great before the Alexandrinsky Theatre bore a little red flag in its hand. Imperial monograms and eagles were either torn down or covered up. In place of the "fierce gorodovoye (city police) a mild-mannered and unarmed citizen militia patrolled the streets-still, there were many quaint anachronisms . . .

"Along about five o'clock in the afternoon the streets were full of subdued old gentlemen in uniform, with portfolios, going home from work in the huge, barrack-like Ministries of Government institutions, calculating perhaps how great a mortality among their superiors would advance them to the coveted tchin (rank) of Collegiate Assessor, or Privy Councillor, with the prospect of retirement on a comfortable pension, and possibly the Cross of St. Anne."

Reed's book continued on and on with this kind of flowery descriptions of happy Russians working and freely discussing politics; of smilingly putting up with any shortages or hardships for the good of all; while the new police forces benevolently waved them on, in stark contrast to Czarist forces who broke up the slightest form of demonstration of expression with a heavy hand.

In reading Ten Days That Shook the World, it becomes apparent that the many Westerners, at least the early ones (like Whittaker Chambers) who turned to Communism should not be excoriated as completely as they have been by history. It indeed appeared a new workers' paradise was underway, and given a little help, a little encouragement, it would be the hope of the world.

The apologists for Reed correctly point out that his book, written when he returned to the United States over the course of a few sleepless weeks, was published in 1919. Joseph Stalin was not yet in power. V.I. Lenin indeed was already operating a ruthless secret police, but Reed could be excused for not knowing of it. The worst depravities of Communism were not yet revealed.

However, considering how awful Communism really was, how many millions died, how many suffered, starved, lived in depravity, all in the name of the state, it seems impossible that he simply did not see any of it! It is obvious Reed was an idealist, a Westerner of the liberal class, guilty over his own bourgeois background, a man who was comfortable sitting around the salons of intellect with playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, convinced they and they alone saw the world for what it really was. Or, perhaps it could be if only Mankind would be less profit motivated and more enlightened.

Walter Duranty and the New York Times: "useful idiots" for Marxism-Leninism

There were "liberal" newspapers before World War I. Every kind of opinion and argument fomented during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and of course there was opposition, led by the Times, to the Hearst paper's loud chorus in favor of the Spanish-American War. America is a free country that thrived on the First Amendment, and all opinion is allowed.

But America is also a country of rugged individualists, the Founding Fathers rightly or wrongly adopted by conservatism as the great thinkers who must be remembered and obeyed lest the nation go to hell in a hand basket. The country's background as a mostly white, mostly Protestant nation of English-speaking peoples assuredly gave it a center-Right flavor. Alexis deTocqueville's Democracy in America, particularly the parts describing rural communities, paints the picture of an America that is far more than center-Right; more like solidly Right.

The Civil War radicalized many, particularly as it pertained to matters of war and interventionism, but the United States still thought of itself as the winners of history. Immigrants were often more conservative than locals, particularly in the case of the Swedes and Germans, who populated the Midwest. Even the Irish and The Italians were solidly Catholic, which is a traditionally conservative religion. But the Industrial Revolution brought hordes of "unwashed" to America's teaming cities. Working conditions exposed the dark underbelly of capitalism. A radical opposition to the profit motive emerged. World War I showed the folly of war. Even though America emerged as a victor, stronger than ever, she withdrew inward in favor of isolationism.

The Russian Revolution forced many in the U.S. to look at its own dirty factories, asking if there was another way in which poor people could work and rise up to achieve the American Dream. Pulling ones' self up "by the boot straps" was not attributed to Horatio Alger's novels, but could have been. Now it was an anachronism to many. A new level of cynicism was in the air.

Now Left-leaning publications were popular, often in opposition to William Randolph Hearst. The Nation and The Masses were hits with liberals. The Communist Party set up headquarters in America, publishing The Daily Worker, often a front for espionage activity protected by civil rights laws. America was concerned enough by the horrors of Communism, even if not fully revealed by any real measure, to back the Red Scare measures of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

But America did not learn of Communism's true terrors through John Reed. The New York Times and Walter Duranty would not warn them of them, either. Why the Times and Duranty found sympathy with Communism is a question for the psychologists. Perhaps it was merely a political calculation. Palmer and Hoover were conservatives, so their motives, in the Leftist's view, were not pure. A contrarian line needed to be taken. But there was also a utopian streak in America, as there had been since the book by that name first appeared in 1516 describing an island in the Atlantic where society's problems were all solved by clever men. In this view an anti-religious philosophy became prevalent, since the concept of a utopian society runs counter to the Christian notion of corrupt man lacking hope of changing within the confines of this world. As the Founding Fathers espoused, this was the guiding reason for keeping government small, because big government simply meant big corruption. Upton Sinclair took up the mantel of an egalitarian society, with books that were enormous screeds against oil wealth, capitalism and traditional morality. He rooted for Big Government and found much in Communism to admire.

Duranty was a leading journalist of his era, highly admired. He had his detractors on the Right, but in books about the media, Leftists and Communists – Reds by Ted Morgan, The American Left by Loren Baritz, The Powers That Be by David Halberstam – there is nary a mention of him, much less accusations that he was a "fellow traveler." Even Whittaker Chambers's conservative anthem Witness does not list him in the index, while Ann Coulter's Treason, which might be called a Right-wing screed, only mentions him in passing.

The Vietnam War, which according to the Right was not won, in no small measure, due to liberal journalism, did not revive Duranty's name in large measure as any kind of target for conservative ire. It was only the conservative media, which until the 1990s was practically non-existent except for Human Events and National Review; the opening of the Venona Papers, identifying how liberal journalists defended the cause of Communism; the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat; and the Iraq War; that Duranty's name was used to demonstrate a larger point.

In 1994 the Palestinian terrorist Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. Some years later Michael Moore used his Oscar acceptance speech to pontificate against George W. Bush, symbolizing liberal reaction against the Iraq War. This was the "last straw" for conservatives. Over the years, various scoundrels and unimpressives have been awarded the Nobel, the Academy Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. They had one thing in common: they were never conservatives. Conservatives and much of the public at first placed little weight, nor substance, in the awarding of these "honors" amongst each other. But by 2003, it did not matter if David Halberstam or Time magazine conveniently "failed" to examine the case of the Walter Durantys of history. Conservative media was reaching its ascendancy. New Walter Durantys, such as Peter Arnett, gave them plenty of ammunition. In so doing, Duranty's name was revived to demonstrate how long it had been going on.

The old term "useful idiots," attributed to Lenin (although whether he used the term exactly like that is not proven) was trotted out to describe internationalists and apologists for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. One dredged up account concerned the Bolsheviks murdering the Romanov family and abandoning the Allies in World War I. Beatrice and Sydney Webb of the New York Times offered rosy apologies for these atrocities.

"I have seen the future and it works," wrote Lincoln Steffens of early Communism.

The infamous Duranty offered glowing assessments of Lenin and Stalin. The Communists were blackmailing Duranty because they knew he was a homosexual.

When word of Stalin's purges in terror-famines (in which some 10 million were murdered) reached the U.S. in the 1930s, causing Communist Party U.S.A.'s rolls to be drastically reduced, Duranty wrote that the reports were all lies.

While Lenin, Stalin and the Soviets held Duranty and others like him in utter contempt, they also viewed them as tools for dispensing Communist propaganda to other countries. The Communists quickly discovered they were more popular in countries that were not Communist than in their own country, where people actually saw what they were up close.

Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken tells of thousands of American Socialists and Communists who moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to find work and a workers' paradise that did not exist. Adam Hothschild reviewed the book in the London Times.

"From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness, we know about the midnight arrests, the interrogations and forced confessions, the trains hauling packed boxcars of emaciated prisoners to the labour camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere," he wrote." Tzouliadis traces the story of the Americans who got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and documents, and the published memoirs of two men who played on American baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally encountered in the gulag, they survived their imprisonment: Herman in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the American immigrants were caught up by the purges, perishing either in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border. Tzouliadis does not try to estimate the total American dead. He guessed that figure was in the thousands. By adding victims among Britons and other Westerners living in U.S.S.R. at the time, the total would be in the tens of thousands.

"Useful idiots" included Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU; Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who gave atomic secrets to the Soviets; author and playwright Lillian Hellman; and many more. Noted author Ernest Hemingway may have been one but recanted in later years, having been swept up in the romanticism of the fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Most never did, at least not with honest hearts.

Duranty was not as well known as other "useful idiots," but the "power of the pen," particularly the organ of the New York Times when newspapers were king and New York the center of American media, makes him one of the most notorious of all figures.

Duranty was the Moscow bureau chief. He had a talent and a flair for contrarian views. This may well have stemmed from his homosexuality. He was a man who felt it was a sacrament, a sign of superiority to be gay. This view was not popular then or even now, but Duranty was driven by this as a form of psychosis manifesting in his telling lies, almost as a compulsion. His sexuality fueled in him a need to create an alternative sort of world, his own private moral compass.

His great intellect and writing ability, combined with the frustration of not being able to open proclaim to the world that not only was he homosexual, but it was a sign of his superiority, fed his imagination and elitism. He took the minority view on everything as a default position. At a time when Hemingway's short, clipped style was popular, Duranty's writing was embellished with great literary excitement. His stories from international outposts had a very powerful "you are there" quality readers loved.

Duranty covered the Versailles Treaty in Paris, 1919, one of the great "achievements" in the history of Big Government. At that conference, British economist John Maynard Keynes strengthened a new notion. In the wake of such catastrophes as world wars; in a new, scary, inter-connected global world that was mechanized by war and industrialized by work, only governments had the wherewithal to supply the needs of a hungry, needy populace. It was the great argument of liberalism vs. conservatism. Duranty, Keynes and the authors of the Treaty of Versailles definitely fell on the side of Big Government, or liberalism. Conservatism retreated to a post-Woodrow Wilson "Roaring '20s" of Jay Gatsby isolationism.

In 1920, 1921, and 1922, the Soviets under Lenin instituted "five-year plans." Each year was the start of a new failed one. Famine swept the land. The United States, which had stationed troops in the hinterlands in case the Whites ever successfully fought back to restore the royal order, had to ship in supplies helping the peasants survive the harsh winters. The news media made little mention of this, lest it embarrass the Russians. They propped up Lenin at every turn, rooting him on. In 1924 Lenin died and was replaced by Joseph Stalin, a complete thug.

Stalin spent most of the 1920s consolidating power through assassination and terror. In 1932 Duranty "reported" on Stalin's agricultural policies in the Ukraine. Famine again swept the land, but few in the West knew it because it was almost completely unreported. With the Great Depression sweeping the United States amid worldwide economic downturn, and Franklin Roosevelt gaining popularity on the strength of a promise to expand government into every aspect of people's lives, many poor Americans turned to Communism. They were given rosy scenarios of its "success."

When asked to account for the fact that millions were dying of starvation, or outright genocide, Duranty described Stalin as a man who "could not make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." The New York Times promoted Stalin's fatherly visage; the big moustache and the wide smile for the cameras. He came to be called "Uncle Joe." His first five-year plan moved towards industrialization and agro-collectivism. Facing forced state ownership, Soviet agriculture and peasant-manned farming co-ops were destroyed wholesale. 12 million Ukrainians died of malnutrition. Scholars continue to argue the exact cause of the 1932 Holodomor (hunger-plague), but history informs us Stalin's agro-economic "reforms" were responsible. This was a part of the world that for centuries provided great harvests. The people were poor and suffered under the czars, but never starved, certainly not like this. When the Ukrainians tried to fight back, to nationalize in an effort to break from the Soviet state, Stalin further punished them. According to the Soviets, Holodomor never happened. It in fact continued to happen until World War II.

The Soviet Union denied for six decades Ukrainian genocide occurred. Only perestroika and the Venona papers in the early 1990s revealed the full truth, and with it the role of men like Walter Duranty.

In the early 1930s, while the famine was underway, Duranty traveled the Russian countryside witnessing the atrocities with his own eyes. While John Reed could be excused for seeing mostly what the Bolsheviks wanted him to see, Duranty did not have blinders. The human suffering was on a level with the Holocaust, but Duranty was given favors by Stalin in return for good coverage. In return, Stalin gave Duranty access, the age old "deal with the devil" journalists constantly must contend with. In truth, Duranty probably was a man who believed Communism was the future and simply needed time to succeed. He would help it along. In so doing, he did the opposite of what Henry Luce did when he allowed Theodore White's reporting of Chiang Kai-shek's corruptions to be printed in Time magazine. White did not seem interested in the deprivations of Mao Tse-tung, but eagerly reported all of the Kuomintang's failings. Luce allowed it, with disastrous results.

Duranty reported that the Soviets were ruling in the "best interest of the people." Stalin was "the greatest living statesman." His time in the U.S.S.R. represented "a heroic chapter in the life of humanity."

"You have done a good job in your reporting of the U.S.S.R.," Stalin told him.

The American ex-Communist Jay Lovestone suggested Duranty worked for the OGPU. "Duranty was a great KGB agent and lying like a trooper," stated columnist Joseph Alsop. Lev Navrozov, a Russian émigré, wrote a book titled What The New York Times Knows About the World. In it he wrote Duranty's articles and books should be retitled as "A Drunken Sailor's Yarns About a Foreign Country" or "A Crazy Housewife's Chatter About Something She Knows Nothing About."

Duranty also claimed other journalists who reported the truth of the U.S.S.R., such as Malcolm Muggeridge and Gareth Jones, were lying. Muggeridge called Duranty "the greatest liar I have met in journalism." Some of Duranty's most well known lies and falsehoods about Holodomor are:

"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."

\- New York Times, November 15, 1931, page 1.

""Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."

\- New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6.

"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."

\- New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13[7]

"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."

\- New York Times, August 23, 1933

Naturally, Duranty was honored for his work with the Pulitzer Prize, despite protest from Ukrainian advocacy groups, who were brushed off by the Left as mere peasants. They were useful to them as the "poor and dispossessed," when to curry sympathy for their plight was in their cause, but now inconvenient truths. Duranty by this time outlived his usefulness to Joe Stalin.

According to Bruce S. Thornton, Duranty privately admitted the genocide was happening. "Walter Duranty stands as perhaps the quintessential fellow-traveler, killing news reports of famine and writing that Ukrainians were 'healthier and more cheerful' " than he had expected. Markets, Duranty said, were overflowing with food at the height of Stalin's slaughter of the kulaks, adding that he "frequently writes in the enthusiastically propagandistic language of his sources," and that "there is a serious lack of balance in his writing." He recommended, "For the sake of The New York Times' honor, they should take the prize away."

His review was given to the Pulitzer board. Despite this, they allowed Duranty to keep his prize. The struggle is still ongoing. In 1980 the New York Times finally acknowledged his failures. The Times and Pulitzer Prize board did not to revoke his award, citing that a Pulitzer is "awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition."

Duranty under-reported the carnage taking place right under his nose. He and the Times became willing accomplices, complicit to mass murder. It was no different than to witness first hand the horrors of Auschwitz and yet report only, "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work sets you free"). In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt officially recognized the legitimacy of Stalin's murderous regime. The world can in large measure "thank," or more accurately blame, Walter Duranty.

The Great American Novel

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood . . . back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame . . . back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

\- Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was called the Great American Novel. American writers have forever been attempting to duplicate it, or to achieve some stature on par with Twain's great work. Many argue, and are most probably correct, in identifying a group of writers who have indeed made this kind of mark.

However, Twain wrote before radio, before TV; at a time, as with Charles Dickens, when literature was the greatest source of entertainment. The social impact of these two novelists on the world they lived in could not, and has not been, equaled.

The Lost Generation

In many ways, World War I spawned more change than any event in history, with the possible exception of the life of Christ. The war resulted in:

  * Soviet Communism.

  * The German Depression.

  * Nazi Germany.

  * American superpower status.

  * French withdrawal of influence and global prestige.

  * World War II.

French loss of influence, which had eroded since the fall of Napoleon anyway, resulted in the nation taking on the inward qualities of artistic introspection and national tragedy.

America was affected by the war. Political isolationism was juxtaposed with individual internationalism, as thousands of doughboys stayed or returned to Europe, becoming cosmopolitans instead of returning to the farms. The suffrage movement, led by Carrie Nation, brought the vote to American women. Prohibition, in turn brought about by American women with new political power, ushered in organized crime, helping the Kennedy family attain power.

It may not have been a joyous peace, but it ushered in a huge economic boon known as the "Roaring '20s." This period marks the "Lost Generation" of artists and writers who began a new strain of cynicism and reality, replacing the old idealism of American literature. These and others who followed did in fact write new versions of the Great American Novel.

Because the U.S. and Great Britain were the principal victors of World War I, the English language was now unquestionably the language of trade, of business, of politics, of diplomacy. America's new power and influence meant its writers, its social commentators, and the nation they represented, were now important beyond previous measure. Suddenly, all things American were the biggest things in the world. America was not a province in any way, shape or form.

The Lost Generation is a term coined by Ernest Hemingway in contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credited the phrase to Gertrude Stein, his mentor and patron. However, it has meaning beyond this. It can refer to a loss of innocence marked by a new kind of mechanized, global warfare that shocked the world. War was now total, not merely fought by armies on remote battlefields. Civilians were bombarded, refugees forced to flee. Carnage, death, sickness; all widespread beyond previous conception.

Many lost faith in God or in the traditional values they held so dear, all seemingly lost in a miasma of despair. The term also refers to soldiers literally maimed and destroyed, as with characters in Hemingway's works; beautiful, virile young men unable to produce sexually as a result of injuries.

Hemingway and Stein had a falling out and, in A Moveable Feast (published after both were dead), Hemingway claimed the phrase originated with the garage owner who serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car in a way satisfactory to Stein, the garage owner shouted at the boy, "You are all a 'génération perdue.' "

Stein told Hemingway, "That is what you are. That's what you all are . . . all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation." While the term is generally applied to American ex-patriates living in France, it extends beyond that. The generation includes but is not limited to F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Waldo Peirce, Alan Seeger, and Erich Maria Remarque.

Hemingway's 1926 classic The Sun Also Rises symbolized the "lost" post-war expatriate experience. The author complained to his editor, Max Perkins, that the "point of the book" was about a "lost generation," but referred instead to the Biblical phraseology in the title as "the Earth abideth forever." The characters were "battered," metaphors for lost souls in a sinful world, but were not lost, it would seem to follow, because salvation from God remains ever hopeful.

"I tried to balance Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes," Hemingway explained. "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness vs. discipline and I thought 'who is calling who a lost generation?' "

Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe defined the Lost Generation as the cohorts born from 1883 to 1900, who came of age during World War I and the Roaring '20s. The French called them the "génération au feu," the "generation in flames." The British lamented the "'the flower of youth" and the "best of the nation" destroyed, which consisted of a certain amount of class reference. The English more than any nation, perhaps because they are a small country, sent a disproportionate number of their wealthiest sons into the breach, as if in a real-life version of Shakespeare's Henry V. History generally records that even though the façade of greatness still clung to the British after the war, grainy film of the English merrily traipsing about London on the eve of the Great War depict the last breath of the British Empire.

While Stein may have uttered the actual words, she is more well known, at least in her native California, for saying of Oakland, "There is no there there." This line has gotten almost as much play as Mark Twain's cross-bay statement, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco."

Ernest Hemingway was a reporter for the Kansas City Star, a man's man of gruff, Midwestern sentiment. He came from a family of some local prominence. Perhaps because he did not face great hardships growing up, he felt the need to test himself. In this regard, Hemingway, Winston Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt have much in common. Hemingway went looking for his manhood in World War I. He found it. The experience formed him. He saw action fighting alongside the Italian allies and sustained wounds. According to his own account, he had a "life after death" episode. While recovering, he fell in love with a pretty American nurse. When the war ended the romance did not take, in part because Hemingway had a stubborn streak of jealousy. But he used these events to launch a career of great works, writing in a tone of melancholy wistfulness, imbued with American patriotism and the manly need to face danger, romance and adventure with courage and idealism, tinged by ironic cynicism.

A Farewell to Arms was his semi-autobiographical account of World War I, including his lost love with the nurse. Hemingway captured the Lost Generation in The Sun Also Rises, the melancholy story of Americans wiling away their lives in post-war Europe, mentally and physically scarred by the Great War. His main character is unable to consummate a relationship with a beautiful woman who pines for him, because he sustained injuries in the war preventing him from sexual function. The woman goes on to a career of carnal conquest with a variety of men, none of whom fulfill her. Amid much drunkenness and debauchery, the book addresses anti-Semitism, a relatively new theme in the 1920s, although Hemingway is not wholly sympathetic to Jews. When the book was made into a film in the 1950s, Daryl F. Zanuck cast a handsome young Jewish man, Robert Evans, as a Spanish bullfighter. When Evans approached "Papa" Hemingway at Yankee Stadium, the old man rebuffed him. He was furious that an American Jew portrayed one of his beloved characters, a Spaniard.

For Whom the Bell Tolls is based upon Hemingway's support for the anti-Communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. He and many other Americans went over to fight in the war, which some say was a "dress rehearsal" for World War II. It did not materialize into the kind of idealized Spanish government many had sacrificed for. The Fascistic Francisco Franco ended up ruling an isolationist Spain until the 1970s. While the nation is now Democratic, the Franco regime was the final event taking Spain from greatness to mediocrity. Hemingway also wrote a stage play about the Spanish Civil War called The Fifth Column.

Hemingway's themes of manliness and adventure were also outlined in novels about African safaris and Cuban fishermen. He lived in Cuba, where warm breezes, randy drinking partners, fast women and Latino machismo were perfect matches for his personality. The Old Man and the Sea is a short, sweet classic about a Cuban fisherman who makes the catch of a lifetime. In rowing the fish back to shore, sharks take so many bites out of it that it is gone when he arrives, therefore rendering him unable to prove to his detractors and a boy who wants to admire him, of his accomplishment. The novel is filled with metaphor about irony, but real life irony entered Hemingway's life when his beloved Cuba was taken over by Fidel Castro's Communistas. Two years later he committed suicide.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a different breed of cat. He was from a moneyed family, and experienced personal troubles and a strange marriage to a delicate woman named Zelda. He was a bundle of psychoses, and embodied modernism, especially in his exploration of analysis, probably of the Freudian school. Fitzgerald's seminal work was The Great Gatsby, which also involved the theme of post-war angst. Set in the Roaring '20s, the main character is an ordinary man who serves as an officer and decides to re-invent himself, taking on the identity of a fallen comrade. Jay Gatsby makes some brilliant business decisions in the bootlegging industry, becoming a nouveau riche star of Hamptons society. His background is shrouded in mystery, which creates suspicion among the old money, turning to jealousy when the women fall for his charms. Gatsby's unrequited love for the flitting Daisy Buchanan has symbolized man's desire for things he cannot have, for paths not taken, ever since.

The Great Gatsby is a perfect model for the new form of East Coast liberalism emerging after World War I. It is in response to America's meteoric rise as an industrial, economic and military superpower. This troubled some who felt guilt this country could become so much better than all the other nations so fast. Fitzgerald describes the "idle rich," people who either inherited millions and do not have to work, or who own companies that make so much money they do not need to work. The idle rich do not have any real values. They are not religious, brave, patriotic, idealistic, faithful or chaste. They are immoral debauchers, utterly cynical, and have so much of everything that nothing can excite them any more. Is this is Fitzgerald's view of himself? Is he consumed by guilt because of it? Fitzgerald was privileged but by no means a member of such elite society growing up.

His books transfer his insecurities upon America. It is a classic "misery loves company" animus that took hold of an entire political class living today. These are the people who are jealous of those who exhibit greatness through bravery, hard work and struggle. These people do not exhibit these traits. Instead of admiring, they use their wealth and influence to bring them down.

The iconoclasts

Writers have always been iconoclastic, to some degree or another. Charles Dickens was. Mark Twain certainly was. Others, like Rudyard Kipling, were staunchly conservative, often jingoistic cheerleaders of empire. The Lost Generation spawned a new cynicism that found an audience in Depression-era readers.

Henry Miller is generally not considered one of the Lost Generation, in that he was not hob-nobbing in Paris cafes with Hemingway and Stein in the immediate years after the war. He did, however, move to Paris, most likely inspired by them. He was also looking for something from a psychological point of view. A Socialist, he rejected God and found only fault in American traditional values.

Miller's Tropic of Cancer was a biographical novel of his years in Paris. It includes tremendously creative, wonderful writing, but in the light of retrospection much of it is reduced to gratuitous pornography. When it was written in the 1930s, Miller's graphic sexual content was considered avant-garde, shocking and artistic. It was banned for this reason until 1961. This was the best thing that could have happened to Miller and the book, creating a cause célèbre. But it is rather incoherent and, if it came out today, would not hold up to scrutiny the way Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe stand the test of time. Miller's "cancer" appears to be a cancer of the soul. His descriptions of Parisian life in the 1930s - the whore houses, the scum, the thieves, liars and morally corrupt - describe an eating away of goodness, the way real cancer eats away at bone, skin and body. Miller suffered from moral atrophy.

Sinclair Lewis exposed the corruption of Christian ministers in Elmer Gantry. This work was centered on a flawed evangelical in the Midwest who believes in God but still uses His name to better himself. Lewis had a feel for Main Street, a 1920 novel whose title came to symbolize a description of ordinary Americans. Babbitt (1922) satirized the ordinary man, a salesman in a small town who the author makes fun of because he fails to dream big dreams. Lewis, who was avidly Christian in his youth, fell into iconoclasm and died of alcoholism.

Upton Sinclair was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1878, but is associated with the state of California. Until Sinclair, the state was considered rock solid Republican, a conservative bastion reflecting the rugged individualism of the Gold Rush. San Franciscans supported the Republican Abraham Lincoln. Los Angelenos were literally "recruited" by General Harrison Otis and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler; hard-working Midwestern farmers and Southern evangelicals who comprised a WASP citizenry to make their city great.

After World War I, change slowly occurred. The film industry grew, and they brought with them different ideas. Unions gained power in San Francisco. When the Okies arrived during the Dust Bowl, the Left used their plight to advocate for change. Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal and the Great Depression had a profound affect on the state. Enter Upton Sinclair.

His 1906 novel The Jungle was a classic muckraker, exposing terrible conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry. Written after posing undercover for seven weeks as a worker in a Chicago meatpacking plant, the public furor helped pass the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. If Sinclair intended his attack upon capitalism, he was successful. Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half.

"I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach," Sinclair lamented.

Sinclair singularly helped launch the union movement, particularly in California. The unions were pitted against General Harrison Gray Otis. In 1910 union thugs bombed General Otis's L.A. Times building, killing 21. General Otis used his paper to besmirch all of the union movement, claiming the bombings were emblematic of all union activity nationwide. In so doing, he went too far and faced a backlash of sympathy, in large measure caused by Sinclair and his dramatic depictions of non-union factories.

Sinclair ran for Congress as a Socialist. A utopian colony he founded burned down, probably by Right-wing extremists. He worked closely with the Leftist British filmmaker Charlie Chaplin and moved to Southern California in the 1920s.

While The Jungle was a huge hit with immediate social impact, his novel of oil pioneers in California, called simply Oil!, remains a picture, a snapshot of what Left-wing radicalism looked like and how they thought in the 1920s. Communism has been demonized for decades. Today, the Right and the Left are squared off against each other in bare knuckles struggle, played out daily on Fox News, CNN, the blogs and talk radio. To some extent, the two sides are so pat in their opinions, so protective of their bases and interests, that it seems they have always been that way. The history of the two ideologies is lost in the mix. Just as it is eye-opening to look back at the crass language and open hostility of McCarthyism, so to is it instructive to see just what the Left thought, felt and advocated during this vital time.

Sinclair was committed. So was the Right. During and after World War I, arrests, deportations and even executions of radicals/anarchists were commonplace. J. Edgar Hoover minced no words: they were the enemy. Sinclair was one of them, in conscience if not in criminal action. When Sinclair saw his utopian colony burned to the ground, he viewed it as a war, too.

Oil! was written in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal scandalizing Republican President Warren Harding. It is loosely based on Edward L. Doheny, who made mega-millions creating an oil pipeline from Kern County to the Pacific Ocean, and was a major benefactor of the University of Southern California. USC is today thought of as a rich private school, satirized as the University of Spoiled Children. At least until recent years it was considered a conservative Republican institution producing most of the Richard Nixon and a lot of the Ronald Reagan Administrations. A great deal of jealousy, particularly from the liberal public school, the University of California, Berkeley, and the private Stanford University, both in the San Francisco Bay Area, has worked its way into the rivalries, oft-manifesting socio-political imagery during halftime band programs. Much of this animosity stems from the image Sinclair paints of the fictional USC stand-in, Southern Pacific University.

The university stands for everything he hates: elite wealth, arrogance, disdain for the poor, prejudice against minorities, particularly deserving Jews. A series of characters are introduced, much of it set against the background of the Red Scare. It is a no holds barred expose of radical thought, of anarchistic hatreds towards traditional America, of a desire to tear all the institutions down and replace them with revolution. Oil becomes the symbol of complete evil. Belief in God is anachronistic. The environment stands in for it.

For people interested in the "rivalry" between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which dates back to the building of the trans-continental railroad; Northerners/San Franciscans supporting Lincoln vs. Southerners/Los Angelenos from the old Confederacy; Oil! provides the most telling lesson on the differences between the regions and its people. Oil was plentiful from Kern County, in and around Bakersfield, which borders central California with Southern California at the foot of the Tehachapi range, all the way south down the coast and into Mexico. The geography of Northern California is different from Southern California, and while there are stretches of wasteland in the south, there is every bit as much pristine beauty in the form of the coast line, beaches, and mountains, as can be found in the north. But there is little oil in the north.

Oil can be found almost everywhere in the Southland, however. It can be found in the backyards of ordinary homes. It is not merely an amorphous substance found way out in the ocean, or in isolated, unpopulated regions. The city of Signal Hill, near Long Beach, was dotted with oil wells up and down residential streets, on private properties, everywhere, as numerous as homes themselves. Beautiful Huntington Beach is built on a literal ocean of oil. The mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles itself, a bustling downtown corridor of insurance companies and advertising agencies, is also built over a volcano which, in the film Volcano actually erupts. The La Brea Tar Pits preserves a quagmire where once dinosaurs met their fates, right at the foot of high rise office towers.

Men like Edward Doheny, at least in Sinclair's view, preyed on the greed of ordinary people willing to sell their land (their souls?) for oil profits. It is this pursuit of green money that makes Southern Californians less concerned with a green environment, which has always been a much bigger issue among Northern Californians. From the 1950s until the mid-1990s, the difference between the air quality of San Francisco and that of Los Angeles was incomprehensible. From the press box of the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, the downtown skyline, Hollywood sign, and the San Gabriel Mountains were like the Holy Ghost; they knew they were there but could not see it. Today the air is quite clean, but for decades Southland smog marked the price of capitalism. The roots of this way of thinking are clearly found in Sinclair's novel.

While much of this is predictable, the most telling part of the novel is its depictions of Bohemian culture within radical circles. Drugs, vegetarianism, atheism, homosexuality and free sex are not merely pastimes, but part of a holistic political lifestyle meant to unshackle boundaries. In this we see the origins of the Beats, the 1960s drug era, the Summer of Love, the sexual revolution, and its political dynamics. The Communists used "free love" as an inducement to convert people to their cause, a fact that has been all-but forgotten in recent years, perhaps because homosexuality and AIDS made this dangerous.

Ultimately, bribery and greed, inter-changeable with oil itself, tell the reader that capitalism and, in affect America, are corrupt and can only be cleansed by the sweet social reformers who are heroes of the book. It was made into a classic 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day Lewis, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film changes the dates and diverts from much of Sinclair's political message, but still centers on the image of oil as greed and corruption. The movie's sound track and haunting themes, which includes the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter with the Berlin Philharmonic directed by Herbert vob Karajan, seems more than just "sinister" (which Anderson said), but rather depicts the strong sense of demonic sin; not just the main character (Lewis as Daniel Plainview) but Paul Dano, too, as a false prophet-preacher; souls headed down, down, down.

Sinclair founded the state's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He resided near Los Angeles, which in the 1920s was the most conservative, Republican city in America. He was arrested by the L.A. Police Department for speaking at a union rally. The Great Depression, FDR's 1932 election, and institution of the New Deal made him a viable candidate for Governor of California in 1934.

MGM honcho Louis B. Mayer and L.A. Times publisher Harry Chandler orchestrated a full-blown media campaign to discredit and destroy his candidacy. They produced a newsreel to be shown to moviegoers, flocking to theatres of the era, desperate to get away from grinding reality. Fake interviews and scenarios were shown, often with handsome, clean-cut, hard-working citizens expressing support for Republican candidate Frank F. Merriam. Fuzzy, unshaven, dirty foreign-accented "bums" expressed enthusiasm for Sinclair, one telling the camera that Socialism was working very well in Russia and Sinclair could bring the same thing to the States.

Sinclair's platform was known as the End Poverty in California movement, galvanizing the Democrat Party. He gained 879,000 votes but the Mayer-Chandler campaign against him was too powerful, even during the Depression. Merriam prevailed. The influx of migrant farm workers escaping the Dust Bowl agitated conservatives, who saw in Sinclair – a member of the Socialist Party until switching to the Democrat Party in 1934 – as a symbol of Communist tendencies. Ironically the American Communists disassociated themselves from him, ostensibly because his books did well, he was rich and lived like a capitalist. Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence."

"The American People will take Socialism, but they won't take the label," Sinclair remarked in 1951, a very telling remark. "I certainly proved it in the case of EPIC. Running on the Socialist ticket I got 60,000 votes, and running on the slogan to 'End Poverty in California' I got 879,000. I think we simply have to recognize the fact that our enemies have succeeded in spreading the Big Lie. There is no use attacking it by a front attack, it is much better to out-flank them."

Ronald Reagan often pointed this out in his speeches as Governor of California and President of the United States. Sinclair's "confession" now seems relegated to the obscurity of the off-the-air Glenn Beck Program. The Left thoroughly denies being Socialist. Communism is almost as untouchable as Nazism. Only 18-21 percent of Americans in 2012-13 identify themselves as "liberal" (compared to 41 percent who identify themselves as "conservative"). But "progressive," a term often associated with the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, as well as President Woodrow Wilson and to some degree even William Randolph Hearst, has polled well enough to be their modern touch phrase.

Between 1940 and 1953, Sinclair wrote a series of novels featuring a character named Lanny Budd, the son of an American arms manufacturer, who might be viewed as a militaristic muckraker manipulating markets to his financial advantage. Budd came to be known as the "ugly American," a term later associated with rich vacationers, hubristic war hawks, and portrayed in an ironic twist on the term by Marlon Brando as an idealist-turned-hardline-anti-Communist diplomat.

Sinclair is featured in Harry Turtledove's American Empire trilogy, an alternate history in which the American Socialist Party succeeds in becoming a major force in U.S. politics following two military defeats to the Confederate States and the post-1882 collapse of the Republican Party, with Abraham Lincoln leading a large number of Republicans into the Socialist Party. In Turtledove's fantasy, Sinclair wins the 1920 and 1924 Presidential elections as a Socialist, but faced with actually governing turns from the radicalism that made him popular in the first place. The Right has used Sinclair as a symbol of Socialist failings for decades.

While Upton Sinclair followed in the tradition of Jack London and Mark Twain, among the first major voices to emerge from the Golden State, along with Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation putting some distance between the New York-London literary scene and an emerging, popular new one, John Steinbeck was uniquely Californian. Sinclair moved to California. Steinbeck was born and raised in the Salinas Valley. Sinclair's novels sometimes and sometimes did not speak to the California spirit. Oil! is set in California peripherally, really, because that happens to be where the stuff was found (along with Texas). Its theme is universal and, if Sinclair was a Christian, evokes (as with the Paul Thomas Anderson film version) the symbolism of oil being the tool of Satan to lure Mankind towards evil.

But Steinbeck's novels made the reader smell the lettuce fields of Salinas, the fish canneries of Monterey, the salt air of the looming Pacific. He was of the time and the place – whether the place liked it or not – was of him. Born in 1902 to German-Irish stock, his father was involved in local politics and the family was Episcopalian. He attended Stanford University before leaving for an unsuccessful attempt at establishing a publishing career in New York. He returned to the Monterey area, married, and continued to write about his native California. The Dust Bowl and subsequent Okie migration affected him greatly.

Steinbeck co-mingled with Leftists and labor union organizers, joining the League of American Writers, a Communist organization, in 1935. Steinbeck's mentor was radical writer Lincoln Steffens. Through Francis Whitaker, a member of the United States Communist Party's John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers' Industrial Union.

Of Mice and Men was a stage play drama about a pair of migrant agricultural laborers. Its production was a hit, starring Broderick Crawford as the mentally child-like but physically powerful Lennie, and Wallace Ford as his protector, George. Despite its success, Steinbeck did not like his work produced on stage. He viewed his written words as a masterpiece, interpretations by actors and directors a deviation. The play has been adapted into films on various occasions, and is a staple of local playhouses and high school drama classes.

The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on San Francisco newspaper reports Steinbeck wrote about migrant agricultural workers, is a true classic. It also got him in a lot of trouble. Steinbeck was a New Dealer all the way in a state and a region that voted Republican. Salinas was still something of an offshoot of the California Gold Rush of 1849, its citizenry the same ruggedly individualistic stock as the pioneers. They lived off the land, disdained government, fended for themselves just fine, thank you. The famed railroad baron Leland Stanford was very popular in the region, his railroad making transportation between Salinas and the larger cities of San Francisco and San Jose convenient, increasing trade and commerce. What was not to like about capitalism?

Steinbeck did not see capitalistic success, only disenfranchised migrants. He had only sympathy for them, and did not see the value of producing goods and services people needed and wanted, off a land God gave them dominion over, and all the creatures creeping upon it. The backlash was harsh. The Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in 1939. The book was called obscene and a lie.

"The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad," Steinbeck wrote. "The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy."

But the literary elites loved it. The Grapes of Wrath earned the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. Fonda, in perhaps his greatest performance, was nominated for the best actor Academy Award.

The New York Times said it was the bestselling book of 1939, with 430,000 copies printed by February of 1940, when it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.

But The Grapes of Wrath, like a number of brilliant works by Leftists promoting a Social cause, had a mysterious opposite affect. If Steinbeck intended to dissuade people from going west, he did not succeed. While the native Californians were depicted as harsh, police-like, authoritarian, unloving and unreceptive to the needs of the newly arrived, millions and millions of Americans apparently analyzed this, determining that Steinbeck's descriptions were false. Instead, they were mesmerized by the original Okie vision of a paradise with low-hanging fruit. They came by the millions, and there is little if any evidence that the vision Steinbeck painted for them actually occurred in the confines of real life. A mythic other-reality, that of the California Dream, a Beach Boys surf culture, is based in far greater reality than Steinbeck's failed America.

After World War II, Steinbeck became a political symbol. America's all-conquering victory over Japan and Germany completely wiped away Steinbeck's view of a country too immoral, too unworthy, too racist to be accorded greatness. Here was Caesar standing athwart a defeated Gaul. Steinbeck's little problems looked quite petty by comparison. Then came Bud Wilkinson's Oklahoma Sooners.

The Okies despised Steinbeck's depiction of them as dumb, illiterate and victimized, even if the author intended to "help" them. In the late 1940s, Oklahoma University under coach Bud Wilkinson embarked on a decade-long run of college football greatness - including a 47-game winning streak – unparalleled in grid history. In addition, Wilkinson made groundbreaking strides in the integration of black players into his program at a time when such a thing was no easy task. This, combined with the rise of the "Commerce Comet," Oklahoma's Mickey Mantle in New York City, served to wipe away the last vestiges of Okie victimization, to good riddance as far as they were concerned. Oklahoma politicians and university administrators routinely cited the greatness of Wilkinson's Sooners as the proud final nail in The Grapes of Wrath's coffin,

Steinbeck did himself no favors with the Right when in 1947 he made the first of many trips to the Soviet Union, this one with renowned photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, becoming some of the first Westerners to visit many parts of the U.S.S.R. since the Communist Revolution. Coming in the year the HUAC meetings heated up; the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers controversy was in the news; and the Hollywood Ten were Blacklisted; Steinbeck's trip was seen as anything from a sinister act of treachery to allowing himself to be a "useful idiot" reporting, on his return, of the gay Communist experience just as the East Bloc was under complete enslavement.

While many accord The Grapes of Wrath to be his greatest work, Steinbeck believed East of Eden (1952), to be his best book. He was probably correct. While the novel did not excoriate American capitalism in the manner of Wrath, it did hit very close to home in Salinas-Monterey. Numerous real-life characters from Steinbeck's past saw themselves plainly identified, often in morally embarrassing ways, in Eden.

Steinbeck was displeased with questions about his patriotism and Left-wing affiliations. He had suffered shrapnel wounds covering the European landings as a war correspondent, but that was all swept under the rug by his Russian trip, then by the state of Oklahoma's refutation of him in light of athletic successes.

This may have motivated his theme in East of Eden, which was the Caen and Abel parable straight out of the Book of Genesis. The story follows two families: the Hamiltons – based on Steinbeck's own maternal ancestry – and the Trasks, reprising the Biblical Adam and his progeny. Two brothers, one "good," the other "evil," vie for their father's love and attention. Their mother, the bad seed from which all evil spouts, has deserted their decent father to become a prostitute and then madame of a whorehouse.

The "evil" brother seeks her out, desperate to see if she is the reason he cannot be loved. He longingly tries to find love in her without success. Tragedy and pathos fill each page, the writing as grand in scope as any novel ever written. Not burdened by the attempt to convince people of a political position they did not want to be convinced of, Steinbeck produced in East of Eden every possible angle that makes superb writing; narrative, drama, rivalry, lust, longing, despair, and much more. Its spiritual overtones made it palatable to a far wider audience than The Grapes of Wrath. Elia Kazan's film version of it, starring James Dean as the "evil" brother, does it great justice.

Steinbeck was friends with playwright Arthur Miller. In 1959, Steinbeck stood up for him when Miller refused to name names in the House Un-American Activities Committee trials. It was one of the "strangest and most frightening times a government and people have ever faced," he recalled. J. Edgar Hoover was frustrated that he could never nail Steinbeck. The IRS audited him frequently. Steinbeck wrote to government officials he knew asking that they let up on him.

In 1960 Steinbeck published Travels with Charley: In Search of America, a wonderful travelogue of his drive across the Fruited Plain with his poodle, Charley. It was a kind of freeway version of Democracy in America, not without criticism of the country, but in many ways a coming to grips between a nation that loved his talent at arm's length, and a writer who at the end of his life saw that it was indeed the best of all countries.

Steinbeck was troubled by the moral decline of America in the 1960s, which he partially loosed with his diatribes of earlier decades. He was awarded the Nobel Prize, where he was called an "independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad." Unfortunately, the awarding of the Nobel aroused further anger from conservatives, frustrated at the way liberals honored each other with awards they felt were unworthy.

Asked if he thought he deserved the Nobel, he said, "Frankly, no."

Accepting the award in Stockholm, he said, "The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit - for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature."

His "perfectibility of man" comment stands out as the quintessential difference between liberalism and conservatism. Even in East of Eden, with its theme of Original Sin, the ultimate, fatal imperfectability of man, Steinbeck infuses the "evil" brother with a desire, a hope that he can be loved (perfectibility) by another human, when only God truly loves. At Stockholm he voiced the most utopian of concepts. He did not leave it at that, however. By adding that only writers who adhere to his philosophy deserve "membership in literature," he provides the seeds of a million Right-wing screeds against "elitists" and intellectuals.

"Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope," he continued. "So that today, St. John the apostle may well be paraphrased: in the end is the Word, and the Word is Man - and the Word is with Men."

In 1964, Steinbeck was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1967, Newsday magazine sent him to Vietnam to report on the war. His views were completely different from what anybody might have thought they would be. He echoed Ronald Reagan's hawkish belief that Vietnam was a noble cause. Two of his sons served in Vietnam.

The New York Post denounced him. Steinbeck's biographer, Jay Parini, says Steinbeck was influenced by his friendship with President Johnson and he may have worried that his son would be singled out.

After his death in 1968, reviewer Charles Poore wrote in the New York Times: "John Steinbeck's first great book was his last great book. But Good Lord, what a book that was and is: The Grapes of Wrath." Poore saw "preachiness" in Steinbeck's work, "as if half his literary inheritance came from the best of Mark Twain - and the other half from the worst of Cotton Mather," adding "Steinbeck didn't need the Nobel Prize - the Nobel judges needed him."

According to the American Library Association Steinbeck was one of the 10 most frequently banned authors from 1990 to 2004, with Of Mice and Men ranking sixth out of 100 such books in the United States.

Thomas Steinbeck, the author's eldest son, asserted that a true artist is one who "without a thought for self, stands up against the stones of condemnation, and speaks for those who are given no real voice in the halls of justice, or the halls of government. By doing so these people will naturally become the enemies of the political status quo."

The Southern gentlemen

In the 1920s, the model T became popular, and people became car owners. Radio was invented, allowing sports and news to be broadcast. Hollywood emerged as the dominant form of entertainment. The airplane became a common sight in the skies. In 1927 Charles Lindbergh became the first to fly across the Atlantic, piloting his Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris. The Scopes "monkey trial" featuring Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, who appeared as an expert witness interpreting the Bible, had enormous impact on people who "modernized" their view of Christianity. Political corruption reared its ugly head, resulting in President Warren Harding's downfall after the Teapot Dome scandal. Speakeasies dotted the larger cities. Even though alcohol was prohibited, folks drank and partied like never before. Women's fashions changed. Girls began wearing fashionable "flappers" that outraged the conservatives, but gave new vitality to a libidinousness embodied by Fitzgerald's books.

Al Smith became the first Catholic to run for President. Herbert Hoover beat him in 1928. Al Capone and the mob became a dominant economic force in Prohibition America, first taking over the bootlegging industry, but eventually spreading their scourge into prostitution, gambling and, worst of all, drugs. La Casa Nostra was an organized criminal syndicate that came to America's shores from Sicily and Italy. Its origins go all the way back to the post-Roman Empire period, when Machiavellian elements ruled feudal Italy. Each city - Florence, Venice, Milan, etc. - were ruled by powerful families controlling the banking interests. Everything sprang from there. Backstabbing, double-dealing, betrayal, and the delicate art of lying became art forms among the Sicilian and Italian power families. These traits became endemic in the business of the country, which was controlled by the families. Political reformers tried to clean up the country. The families remained as the real power behind the scenes. When Italians and Sicilians moved to the New World, the Mafia came with them, to protect the new immigrants in a land where the laws and courts were mysteries to their sense of justice. The Mafia had been in the U.S. ever since the first wave of Italians emigrated, but Prohibition was the vehicle truly bringing them into prominence. Capone was their first media star.

A class of writers stepped up and opposed the kind of bigotry that reared its ugly head in the 1920s. Robert Frost wrote poems that put readers in New England autumns. Southern writers became a breed unto themselves. Erskine Caldwell described the hardscrabble life of Tobacco Road. William Faulkner wrote about violence and sin in the Old South, although his verbiage is very difficult to follow. Thomas Wolfe infuriated Southerners with his rejection of their ways, but ultimately his work in Look Homeward, Angel pays ironic homage to his roots. H.L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, became a leading voice of crabby intellectual conservatism, ridiculing prejudice and ignorance.

Thomas Wolfe was born on October 3, 1900 in Asheville, North Carolina. Wolfe was closest to his brother Ben, whose early death at age 26 is chronicled in Look Homeward, Angel. Wolfe studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill at age 15; was a member of the Dialectic Society and Pi Kappa Phi fraternity; and predicted his portrait would one day hang in New West near that of celebrated North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance, which it does today.

Originally hoping to pen plays, he took to journalism with the The Daily Tar Heel in college and won the Worth Prize for Philosophy for an essay titled "The Crisis in Industry." After graduation he went on to a master's degree in arts and sciences from Harvard. His father's death in 1922 influenced his work. After Harvard he moved to New York, but meeting frustration, sailed to Europe, where he had a turbulent affair with a married woman. During this period he wrote the autobiographical O Lost, which became Look Homeward, Angel. It fictionalized his Southern youth. He worked with Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's, the most prominent book editor of the time.

Look Homeward, Angel was well reviewed by John Chamberlain, Carl Van Doren, and Stringfellow Barr. Margaret Wallace wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Wolfe produced "as interesting and powerful a book as has ever been made out of the drab circumstances of provincial American life." The view of Asheville as "drab" helped spark the long-held disdain of elites and big city intellectuals who to this day are said not to understand "fly over country."

Scribner's compared Wolfe to Walt Whitman. Many other reviewers and scholars have found similarities in their works since. Reviews in the United Kingdom were also excellent. Richard Aldington wrote the novel was "the product of an immense exuberance, organic in its form, kinetic, and drenched with the love of life . . . I rejoice over Mr. Wolfe."

"He may have a chance to be the greatest American writer . . ." Sinclair Lewis said. "In fact I don't see why he should not be one of the greatest world writers."

Published 11 days prior to the 1929 stock market crash, it created consternation in Asheville. The elite reviews calling the town "drab" were almost attributed to him, for indeed he painted the portrait of the town eliciting that view. Wolfe stayed away for eight years, traveling to Europe as his book became an international bestseller. His sister wrote to him, saying that while some members of his family were upset at their portrayals, they generally felt he had the best of intentions. By the time Wolfe published Of Time and the River, the citizens of Asheville were more upset this time if they hadn't been included.

Both the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune glowed over him. Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker that "for decades we have not had eloquence like his in American writing." Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic called Wolfe "the only contemporary writer who can be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Dostoevsky." Robert Penn Warren thought Wolfe brilliant, continuing, "And meanwhile it may be well to recollect that Shakespeare merely wrote Hamlet; he was not Hamlet." John Donald Wade also loved his work. He was immediately acclaimed along with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner.

In 1936, he witnessed discriminatory incidents towards Jews in Germany, alarming him greatly. Upon his return to the U.S. he tried to warn the world with a short story titled, "I Have a Thing to Tell You" in The New Republic. Popular in Germany prior to that, he was subsequently banned by the Nazis. He returned to North Carolina in 1937 before coming down ill. He died at 37 of tuberculosis of the brain.

"His was one of the most confident young voices in contemporary American literature, a vibrant, full-toned voice which it is hard to believe could be so suddenly stilled," wrote the New York Times. "The stamp of genius was upon him, though it was an undisciplined and unpredictable genius . . . There was within him an unspent energy, an untiring force, an unappeasable hunger for life and for expression which might have carried him to the heights and might equally have torn him down."

"The death last week of Thomas Clayton Wolfe shocked critics with the realization that, of all American novelists of his generation, he was the one from whom most had been expected," Time wrote. "Due to his early death, Wolfe spent the shortest amount of time writing of any major novelist during that time, with a career less than half as long as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Faulkner."

Wolfe wrote a tragic essay called "God's Lonely Man," connecting intense loneliness to the universal aspect of humanity.

"The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence," he wrote. "When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people - not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul . . . we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness."

This essay and its title, like "you can't go home again," became a cultural phenomenon with strong spiritual undertones. It seems to echo all solitary heroes from John the Baptist crying in the wilderness to Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" Callahan going after the scum of the Earth in a world gone mad.

Some of Wolfe's best work was published after his passing, including You Can't Go Home Again, edited posthumously by Edward Aswell of Harper and Row. This was in most respects an answer of sorts to Look Homeward, Angel, also autobiographical, describing the death threats and vitriol of a famed author who writes of the small-town secrets of his youth. The title has become a catchphrase, at once describing how Wolfe actually could not go home until the furor subsided, but also of the vagaries of fame.

Wolfe was edited heavily and, after his passing, much of his unpublished work was released. Its reconstruction was thought to be at least as good as the original material. Political correctness and possibly antipathy towards Southerners in certain circles has subsequently made Wolfe part of the culture war. Many colleges leave him out in favor of more modern, often ethno-centric works, which of course drive conservatives up the wall. Virtually all the books studied by young students in these courses are not comparable with Wolfe's greatest. Faulkner and W.J. Cash listed Wolfe as the ablest writer of their generation, although Faulkner later backed off a bit. Hemingway said he was "over-bloated."

Wolfe inspired the works of Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Robert Morgan (Gap Creek), and Pat Conroy (Prince of Tides), who stated, "My writing career began the instant I finished Look Homeward, Angel." Jack Kerouac loved him. Ray Bradbury included Wolfe as a character in his books.

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams was born in Mississippi. He did write novels and screenplays, but is principally famous for his extraordinary stage plays from the 1930s until the 1980s. Williams received several New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award for best play for The Rose Tattoo (1951), the Pulitzer Prize for drama for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In 1980 President Jimmy Carter honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"There is no more influential 20th Century American playwright than Tennessee Williams . . ." said Charlotte Canning of the University of Texas. "He inspired future generations of writers as diverse as Suzan-Lori Parks, Tony Kushner, David Mamet and John Waters, and his plays remain among the most produced in the world."

He grew up in a female-dominated environment, which influenced his plays. His close relationship with a black nursemaid made him sympathetic to the plight of African-Americans in the Deep South. His father was from Tennessee, and for this reason the son was given that moniker. His father was over-bearing and displeased at his son's effeminate nature. This dynamic was displayed in his work and became a major aspect of Southern literature and music, continuing to Truman Capote, Neil Young and beyond. The image of the prejudiced, hard-drinking, unenlightened Southern man became political, used as a point of ridicule during the Civil Rights era and then as a way of disparaging the region when it turned to the Republicans.

"[Williams] work is a series of variations on the great emotional cycles of his own tortured life," wrote his biographer, Donald Spoto.

After attending the University of Missouri, where his shyness and most likely sexuality made him a loner, he turned to his writing for solace. He failed military training and went to work in a shoe factory, but wrote at night.

"Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house," his mother recalled. "Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes."

Williams had a nervous breakdown, then returned to school, earning a degree at the University of Iowa, where he wrote Spring Storm. He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City.

"The laughter . . . enchanted me," Williams wrote. "Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life." That was when he adopted the professional name "Tennessee Williams." His influences included Hart Crane, Anton Chekhov, D.H. Lawrence, August Strindberg, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Emily Dickinson, William Inge, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway displayed "this fearless expression of brute nature."

He was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and moved to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a Federal program conservatives said was rife with subversive Communism. In 1944–45 his "memory play" The Glass Menagerie was a hit, moving from Chicago to New York. The play tells the story of a young man, Tom, his disabled sister Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda, who tries to make a match between Laura and a gentleman caller. It was based on Williams's personal life. Williams began collaboration with Elia Kazan.

"Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life," recalled Kazan.

Next came A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), one of the great plays of all time. It made him rich and famous. It did not bring happiness.

"Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag," he wrote.

Between 1948 and 1959 seven of his plays were performed on Broadway, including The Rose Tattoo (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959 he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.

The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof were among his plays adapted for the screen, all classics.

Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a teenaged Italian boy. The experience inspired Williams's first novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. His sexuality, combined with alcohol and drug consumption, derailed his career by the 1960s.

"I've been working like a son of a bitch since 1969 to make an artistic comeback . . . there is no release short of death," he said, adding "the critics are out to get me. You'll see how vicious they are. They make comparisons with my earlier work, but I'm writing differently now."

William Faulkner is a Mississippi native who flew combat missions during World War I. He invented a host of decadent Southern characters in epic dramas. The Sound and the Fury (1929) follows the downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters. Requiem For A Nun (1951), centered on the courtroom trial of a Negro woman who had once been a party to debauchery. Faulkner published several volumes covering the Snopes trilogy, including The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion, all examining insidious Southern power and wealth. Faulkner passed away in 1962.

The Beats

Before the hippies were the Beatniks. Their literary heroes were the Beats, among them Allen Ginsburg (Howl, 1956), William S. Burroughs (The Naked Lunch, 1959), and the character based on Neal Cassady. They were influenced by pop music, the San Francisco/New York counter-culture, French surrealism/existentialism, modernism, mind-expanding drug use, and homosexuality. They spawned many, including Gore Vidal, Lennie Bruce and Jim Morrison.

It was not just their writings and lifestyle that changed the world. The Establishment tried to ban them. Legal renderings stemming from some of their court cases greatly expanded civil liberties, much of it brought about courtesy of the ACLU. The world they created became a world of expanded minority rights, permissive behavior, and liberal politics that heretofore would have been completely out of the main stream. Out of this emerged a cultural war between what Richard Nixon called the Silent Majority vs. what many called a mob.

If ever a man prepared himself for a career in literature, it was Norman Mailer. His Jewish mother fawned over him while he grew up in Brooklyn, telling him how great he was. He attended Harvard, but when America entered World War II, Mailer saw two opportunities. He joined the Army not just to become a man, but also to see things that would make for a great first novel.

That is what he did. Even though he saw little in the way of danger or action, he noticed everything. When the war ended, he fashioned his experiences into The Naked and the Dead. It was a ground breaking work with the most realistic military jargon and dialogue every written. It did not cover epic battles and historical victories, but rather the daily grind of military life. Millions of servicemen eager to re-capture their experiences bought the book, an enormous bestseller. It was named one of the "100 best novels in the English language" by the Modern Library.

Mailer's celebrity got to his head. He thought of himself suddenly as the expert on everything. He wrote of the Cold War. By nature and upbringing he was a liberal, but his Army experience and pugnacious desire to prove his masculinity infused his works with a fisticuffs semi-conservatism.

Mailer included raw sexuality in his work, which made him very controversial in the 1950s. In 1980 he wrote The Executioner's Song, the novelization of the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore, who he spent considerable time with prior to the execution Gilmore himself advocated. It earned him a Pulitzer. In 1991 Mailer produced what might have been his magnum opus.

Harlot's Ghost (1,310 pages) was Mailer's longest novel. Based in part upon the CIA's legendary James Jesus Angleton, it was an engrossing saga covering decades of Cold War intrigue, detailing the extraordinary cat 'n' mouse "game" between the Central Intelligence Agency and the KGB. Mailer described "the Company" as the "church of America . . . where the secrets are kept." He compared it with the Catholic Church, infusing the writing with profound emphasis, making the novel read like a sacred text.

It was nothing less than an extraordinary accomplishment. Harlot's Ghost is one of the greatest novels ever written, and should be thought of that way by most, but it is one of those works that for some reason did not resonate with the general public or critics in the manner of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, another long, epic novel. It was said to be too lengthy and too heavy. Perhaps New York critics could not relate to the CIA, which by 1991 was excoriated by the Church Committee hearings. Perhaps it was because the CIA under Ronald Reagan's director, William J. Casey, had so aggressively defeated the Soviet Union, particularly in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, where the Left staked its last "friendly" alliance with Communism. Mailer started the book before the Cold War was won and did not intend it to be a compendium of American victory, but its 1991 publication date came smack dab in the middle of the nation's ascendancy to a position of power previously unheard of. President George H.W. Bush called it the New World Order. One wag said it was "the end of history." The book crowd was not prepared to glorify such a thing with positive reviews of the agency that, as much as any factor, was responsible for this success. Mailer, like Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Rob Reiner, and other brilliant artists, managed to glorify something he really wanted to criticize. Like militarists who cheer the "war mongering" dialogue of Patton and A Few Good Men, or hedge fund managers inspired by Wall Street, Harlot's Ghost is in many ways a recruiting manual for Langley.

Mailer, along with Tom Wolfe (of The Right Stuff fame) engaged in what was called New Journalism in the 1950s and 1960s. This term is difficult to pin down and often describes writers who make themselves part of the drama in narrative non-fiction, or semi-non-fictional settings. Examples include Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and Hunter S. Thompson's books.

Mailer was a great novelist. His New Journalism is not as colorful as Thompson's, but then again neither is anybody elses, even close. Writing for The Village Voice he penned a famous essay, "The White Negro" which "analyzes and partly defends the moral radicalism of the outsider and hipster." This well-anthologized piece gives birth to the 1960s; the Beatniks, and the hippies who followed them. He wrote glowingly of John F. Kennedy, entrenching the young candidate with the imprimatur of hip cultural popularity, for Esquire. Mailer questioned our involvement in Vietnam. In The Armies of the Night (a 1968 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner), he brilliantly reported the raw violence of the Democrat Convention in Chicago. Hugh Hefner often employed Mailer in Playboy.

He loved boxing, writing of Muhammad Ali, and in 1974 penned, and was part of, the crazy pugilism-meets-intellectual scene that was Ali's world heavyweight championship bout with George Foreman in Zaire. It was captured in a brilliant 1996 documentary produced by Taylor Hackford, When We Were Kings, featuring Don King, President Mobutu Sese Seko, Spike Lee, George Plimpton, Bundini Brown, Howard Cosell and Joe Frazier as themselves. The irony is that elites who wail about human rights were in a stadium where they knew political prisoners were being tortured in the catacombs below their feet.

He was arrested at a demonstration at the Pentagon, head-butted the homosexual Gore Vidal, and exchanged on-air insults with Dick Cavett. Mailer was homophobic, at least when he drank, which was often. In 1980, Mailer spearheaded convicted killer Jack Abbott's successful bid for parole with In the Belly of the Beast, but Abbott committed a murder in New York City six weeks after his release, stabbing to death 22-year-old Richard Adan. It was "another episode in my life in which I can find nothing to cheer about or nothing to take pride in," he said in 1992.

At the suggestion of his friend Gloria Steinem, he ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of New York City in 1969 under the slogan, "Throw the rascals in." His huge ego took a beating when he finished fourth in a field of five. His biographical subjects included Pablo Picasso, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Marilyn Monroe. He advocated that agents of the FBI and CIA, who resented her supposed affair with Robert F. Kennedy, murdered Monroe. Arthur Miller wrote that Mailer's sexual lust manifested itself in his seeing Marilyn as "himself in drag, acting out his own Hollywood fantasies of fame and sex unlimited and power."

Mailer was married six times and had nine children. He fathered eight children by his various wives and also raised and informally adopted the son from one of the women. For this reason he called himself a "right-conservative" in the 2000s.

Norman's first marriage was in 1944, to Beatrice Silverman, whom he divorced in 1952. He struck one of his wives, and was committed to Bellevue Hospital. He also stabbed one of his wives, and apparently raped another, causing a miscarriage. Somehow he skated from these incidents. In the comedy Sleeper, Woody Allen remarks that Mailer "donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School."

At the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco (2003), just before the invasion of Iraq, Mailer said: "Fascism is more of a natural state than Democracy. To assume blithely that we can export Democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more Fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it." Mailer claimed to believe in God, but said He was not as powerful and all knowing as people say He is.

Jack Kerouac, like Catcher in the Rye novelist J.D. Salinger, has been misinterpreted and hi-jacked. Talk show host Dr. Michael Savage, for instance, was greatly influenced by both these writers. He often points out that Salinger served at the Normandy landings, that Kerouac was a Christian, a football player at Columbia, and served in the Navy. These facts, he says, are left out of their biographies because to include them would make these men "too American."

Raised in Massachusetts by Catholic French-Canadian parents, Jack was very close to his mother, a woman of great faith, especially when his nine-year old bother Gerard died of rheumatic fever. Jack was four. He became convinced his older brother followed him in life as a guardian angel, which he details in Visions of Gerard.

His father abandoned his faith, however, wallowing in drinking, gambling and smoking. His first language was French, and his early writings of On the Road were in that language.
His brother had a vision of the Virgin Mary at his deathbed, which the attending nuns said was a sign the child was a saint. Kerouac also had a vision during his first Sacrament of Confession, in which God told him he would suffer in his life, die in pain and horror, but attain salvation. He had a lifelong commitment to Christ, but in trying to alleviate the suffering he did indeed experience, incorporated Buddhism into his faith life. These facets of his belief system are found in his work.

A star running back at Lowell High School, Kerouac received scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame and Columbia. An injury at Columbia curtailed his football career, so he wrote for the Columbia Daily Spectator and joined the fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta. After dropping out he lived on New York City's Upper West Side with his girlfriend, Edie Parker. It was the birthplace of the Beats; Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs.

Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1942, then the United States Navy. He was honorably discharged with various maladies. Back in civilian life, he began to explore "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with . . . frustration, and self-inflicted agonies." He turned from capitalistic inequalities, writing without success with Burroughs. When he moved in with his parents in Queens, New York he found focus and was published (The Town and the City). This gave him the impetus for On the Road, the actual trip as well as the book.

Influenced by Thomas Wolfe, his work began to reflect on the generational epic formula, and small town vs. big city life. There was only way to actually experience these multi-dimensions, and he did it by driving across America and Mexico with Neal Cassady. It was nothing less than exhilarating, the ultimate act of freedom. It represented the unshackling of middle class existence dreamed of by millions stuck in the humdrum. They lived off their wits, barely scraping by, meeting every kind of stranger, every kind of adventure and experience, going through girls, staying with friends, each city a new day, a new experience. For a couple of white kids, their experiences with minorities, including a beautiful Mexican girl Kerouac fell in love with, was eye opening. Minorities often were the ones who offered them help with open arms when they found themselves stuck.

Drugs, alcohol, sex, and partying were themes, but the real theme was the vast country itself. Kerouac simply had an ability to convey in the written word the psychology of land, of open space, of sunsets and nightfalls, of long stretches of desert that stretch into the dreamy future "beyond the darkness." It had an enormous impact on California migration, already well underway after World War II. Dwight Eisenhower initiated the Federal Highway Act, making travel west convenient. Kerouac's description of a golden mystery enticed people every bit as much as Harry Chandler's mid-winter brochures sent by the L.A. Times to lure "Republican farmers" to his Golden State. Kerouac's audience were not Republican farmers, but adventure-seekers, youthful dreamers, minorities, and a million others (including Republican farmers). If John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath dissuaded anybody from trekking to California, Kerouac's book changed their minds.

Largely autobiographical, it did use pseudonyms, largely because the publisher was worried about legal implications, a major roadblock to its publication. Cassady and other well known Beat writers and friends are easily identified, however. Upon returning home he wrote the first draft in three weeks. It was largely a Catholic confessional, an out-pouring of guilt and repentance, undoubtedly therapeutic to him.

Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with his wife Joan practically feeding him hand-to-mouth pea soup and coffee. He cut sheets of tracing paper into long strips, wide enough for a typewriter, and taped them together into a 120-foot feed into the machine so he could type continuously without reloading pages.

There were no chapter or paragraph breaks. The original was extremely explicit, far more graphic than what was eventually published. His Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren taught him how to outline his journals. While the book has the feel of spontaneity, it in fact was well planned through the journal outline.

Once completed, the real work began. Kerouac worked on the railroad, and traveled between the East and West Coasts, bumming about in a re-creation of the original road trip, each wilder than the previous. On the Road was brutally rejected, called "experimental," too friendly towards blacks and Mexicans, containing graphic sex, some of which was homosexual (a huge taboo leaving publishers vulnerable to obscenity charges), and too much a story of marginalized social groups, absent the epic social ethos of Steinbeck. (Burroughs's Naked Lunch and Ginsberg's "Howl" did in fact face obscenity charges.)

There are various journals and sub-drafts of On the Road, some of which have turned up in Mexico or other places where Kerouac discarded them during his subsequent travels. Because he was constantly rejected, he constantly re-wrote, trying to capture what somebody was looking to pay him for. Despite the original draft being written in a matter of weeks, the actual book reflects work over the course of the first half of the 1950s.

Traditionalists despised the graphic sex, but in truth it was a very Christian act of faith-confession on the author's part. The book "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God," he stated. "And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about."

According to biographer Douglas Brinkley the book was misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for fun, when Catholicism drove the pages, each "diary" bearing a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven. Kerouac appealed so heavily for forgiveness because he, like so many sinners, had much to be forgiven for. His marriage broke up and his daughter was born afterwards. Kerouac abandoned the child for years.

Kerouac wrote and traveled, dealt with his depression through drugs, alcohol, and experimental sex (possibly homosexual curiosity). He wrote more drafts for the book and others that would later be published after On the Road.

In 1957, after countless rejections, two years after Norman Mailer's groundbreaking essay "The White Negro," Viking Press finally purchased On the Road. They demanded huge changes. Lawyers poured over its controversial content, demanding this, that and this be removed. Much of Kerouac's spontaneous style was lost in these cuttings.

Editor Robert Giroux removed some 400 pages, what screenwriter William Goldman called "beautiful little angels" in describing the agony writers feel when their precious content ends up in the wastebasket.

Kerouac moved to Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Finally, the reviews were in. The New York Times proclaimed Kerouac the voice of a new generation. He went from complete obscurity, little more than a bum and drift about, to a major American writer over night. The reaction was nothing less than astounding, sales through the roof.

His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, represent the Beat generation, a term Kerouac coined during a conversation held with novelist Herbert Huncke. Glory, fame and money did not come without a price. He was lauded as the defining poet of his generation, but he was not at ease with such appellations.

"I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic," Kerouac told a reporter, demonstrating a painting of Pope Paul VI. "You know who painted that? Me." If Kerouac thought his Navy, football and Christian identity would endear him to traditionalists, he was mistaken. To the extent that the avant-garde of his immediate era really took the time to read his work, or pay attention to media coverage of him, they did not identify him as one of their own. He was into drugs and many strange lifestyle choices that, despite being a believer, were anathema to America. He was a conundrum, such as his claim to have rooted for Joseph McCarthy in his hunt for Communists, all the while smoking cannabis while watching the hearings on television.

In Desolation Angels he wrote, "when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared." He openly disdained Marxism and Freud as nefarious concepts without substance. These statements earned him enmity from "free thinkers."

Kerouac both borrowed from and lent inspiration to jazz music and from Buddhist meditation. His talent for writing long sentences over drawn out pages without spaces or breaks was thought to be jazz improvisation. This formed much of the Beat poetry, read in coffee houses in San Francisco's North Beach and New York's Greenwich Village. The use of a drum or bonga to accentuate the spoken points was popular. He helped create the rhythm of words, a direct opposite of Hemingway's short, newspaper-crisp sentences. James Joyce's oft-problematic prose greatly influenced him, too.

Kerouac was close friends with Gary Snyder, whose house he lived in Mill Valley, California in 1956. This traces Marin County's transformation from an average bedroom community of suburban San Francisco to a haven of alternative lifestyles, such as est, New Age religions, drug and sex experimentation, wife swapping, swinging, key parties, hot tubs with peacock feathers, and other oddities associated with the area. The experience resulted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums.

Allen Ginsberg used Kerouac's free flowing prose in composing his masterpiece "Howl." It was called "spontaneous prose."

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh . . . "

Truman Capote disdained Kerouac. He was an inveterate letter writer, thankfully, in the age before the Internet, so much of his writings are preserved as collections from private correspondence. He also wrote a fair amount in his mother's native French.

"I can tell you now as I look back on the flood of language," he wrote to Ginsberg of On the Road. " It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity." His Joyce influence is seen in Old Angel Midnight, called the closest thing to Finnegan's Wake in American literature.

The success of On the Road re-kindled previously rejected manuscripts. Jealousy also made it unsafe to frequent the dive bars and strange haunts of his anonymity. He was badly beaten up outside the San Remo Bar at 189 Bleecker Street in New York City one night. Neal Cassady was set up on a marijuana charge.

Kerouac wrote and narrated the Beat movie Pull My Daisy, directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie in 1959, the height of "beatnik" culture. CBS Television's Route 66 (1960–64) was based on a sanitized version of Kerouac's work. Kerouac thought it a rip-off. Various documentaries and programs detailed Kerouac and his famed novel over the years. Comedian Steve Allen was a big fan who had him on his talk show. Slowly but surely conservatives who grew up with Kerouac in their youth began to favor him. William F. Buckley, a fellow Catholic and literate man of great intellect, invited him on

Firing Line, but Kerouac was very drunk. Many on the Right thought he was destroyed by his association with liberals, anarchists and un-American types, especially Ginsberg, an object of total despizement.

Michael Savage claimed Ginsberg ruined Kerouac by taking advantage of him through mind-altering drugs and having homosexual sex with him. According to one rumor, Ginsberg, Gore Vidal and other gays conspired to "turn" vulnerable straights into homosexuals via nefarious means. Considering the subject came up in his works, it is possible. Kerouac was not gay, but if he was bi-sexual, it tormented him. His background in football and other "manly" pursuits fueled his sense of machismo. His Catholicism left him with tremendous guilt. He confessed to the sins of alcohol, drugs, libidinous ways with women, and if homosexuality was involved, it just fueled his own genetic tendency towards alcohol, ultimately killing him in 1969 at 47.

Literature purists do not like to admit this, but Kerouac is as influential on writers and artists of the 1960s and beyond as Dickens, Twain or Hemingway. He ushered in a new way of thinking that spawned the 1960s and all that stood for.

Topics including Catholicism jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel inspired Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Eddie Vedder, Richard Brautigan, Thomas Pynchon, Lester Bangs, Tom Robbins, Will Clarke, Ben Gibbard, and Haruki Murakami. Kerouac was of a kind of underground culture even when he was antagonistic towards much of it.

In Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek wrote, "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed." Indeed he was a tremendous influence on the life and work of its star singer, Jim Morrison, perhaps the most literate rock star who ever lived.

Actor Matt Dillon did a thoroughly entertaining voiceover for the book-on-tape version of On the Road. In 2007, the 50th anniversary, Viking issued On the Road: The Original Scroll, and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition. Scroll was the original draft typed as one long paragraph, sexually explicit, using the real names. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and allowed an exhibition tour in 2009.

Hunter S. Thompson immersed himself in Hells Angel culture while writing a book about the motorcycle gang from the inside. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, one of the craziest, most brilliant works of all time, featured the writer and his "attorney" covering a dirt bike race held at the same time as a cop convention, completely addled by drugs, freaked out by the lights and action of Vegas. The book contains enough actual events to appear non-fiction, but like most of Thompson's work leaves the reader convinced it simply could not happen; no human could actually ingest the drugs he ingested and live to write of it.

Could they?

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is even more bizarre. Thompson unquestionably did cover the 1972 Presidential Primaries and general election between Richard Nixon (who Thompson hated with incendiary language coming close to going beyond the First Amendment) and George McGovern for Rolling Stone. His reportage of Edmund Muskie's breakdown in the New Hampshire snow was almost as fantasy-like as an "interview" he supposedly conducted with McGovern's campaign manager, the legendary Frank Mankiewicz (whose Uncle Joe directed All About Eve). Mankiewicz is described as violent, schizophrenic, likely drugged out of his mind; it was so incendiary that Mankiewicz could have sued for libel and slander and won big time, unless it actually happened or was simply so outrageous that it was not believable, except that Thompson left it all hanging as an actual, real interview. The mystery apparently remains to this day.

Thompson almost managed a limo interview with President Nixon himself, which also reads as beyond belief. Nixon apparently agreed only to talk about the 1973 Super Bowl between Miami and Washington. Like the Mankiewicz "interview," it reads as so strange it surely was made up, yet Pat Buchanan himself says Nixon did agree and it did happen.

In 1973 Thompson went mano o mano with Al Davis and the Oakland Raiders. Davis's reaction to seeing the crazy-looking Thompson – bald-headed, looking like a motorcycle cop on acid – is classic. Banned from a practice facility guarded like a CIA training center for the Cuban para-military – how he got in at all is a mystery – Thompson had to interview Raiders players in Oakland's dive bars. Most spoke as if in the Witness Protection Program of the semi-Fascistic Davis.

From the Right: Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

The Left faces a constant discomfiting reality. Polls generally suggest that about 18-21 percent of the American public considers itself liberal, while 40-41 percent considers itself conservative. This statistic does not reflect itself in voting patterns, either in Congress or the Presidency. The obvious conclusion extrapolated from this is that Democrats are usually unable to run as outright liberals, even though their party has more and more become dominated by them. Liberals are always influenced by their own media, which has consistently remained more liberal than the country it reports to.

Thus the discomfiting reality, which is that despite having most of the media power, and certainly plenty of influence, that influence does not by and large break through and "change" the American public. Liberals also believe they have a monopoly not only on institutional media control, but dominant intellectual thought, curiosity, indeed education, even intelligence.

The Left monopolizes the mainstream television and press; elite colleges; and public schools. This has undoubtedly played to their advantage, but not nearly as much as one would believe. While these organs often operate as de facto propaganda wings of the Democrat Party, they simply do not dominate intellectual thought the way propaganda arms of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union did.

Most discomfiting of all is that despite these built-in advantages, in the actual marketplace of ideas, where American citizens simply choose in the most unbiased manner of all – their pocketbooks – what they will consume, spend money on, and invest time in, conservatism runs rings around them.

This fact was always something that hid just below the surface. Richard Nixon recognized it when he identified the Silent Majority in 1968. Only in recent years has it blatantly shouted itself in the form of huge ratings for conservative talk radio, and the dominance of Fox News over its competitors. But long before the Silent Majority, it was plainly there.

Louis B. Mayer's family movies were huge hits in the 1930s. Many of the darker, edgier films, while critically acclaimed, did not make as much money as patriotic films. It took years for John Wayne to break through, but his box office smashed the receipts of his counterparts. Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry blockbusters, and to a lesser extent Sylvester Stallone's Rocky franchise, ranged from conservative to Right-wing screeds.

One of the first to identify this phenomenon was William F. Buckley, who wrote God and Man at Yale. In that book, the young intellectual looked upon higher education from a consumer's point of view. If a relatively high percentage of the students were conservative, did the university not have an obligation to provide them proportionate conservatism in their educational fare? Parents were paying high costs to send their children to college, but receiving not education, but indoctrination that went against their values of patriotism, Christian faith, and social values.

Liberals incorrectly identified conservatives as militarists, sports freaks, beer drinkers; whatever pejorative they could associate with lack of curiosity and, by natural connection, unwilling to invest time in reading.

This view flies in the face of the fact conservatives tend towards histories and biographies, many times because these books do describe military campaigns that feed their interest. History plainly described is therefore a positive telling of the American story. Novels were always thought, and even today falsely considered, the province of the intellectual Left. But conservatives also read novels. Today, the Tom Clancy books are huge hits, among other examples. Indeed, conservative fare does have a timeless quality to it. Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom remains to this day an economic Bible of sorts to conservatives. Writers of the post-World War I generation like Ernest Hemingway, whose works have a muscular Americanism about them, continue to be more influential on a larger number of people. Even anti-Establishment novelists like J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac are by no means Left-wingers, try as the Left attempts to portray them as such.

But none ever had the affect of a rather unlikely source, Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged. It most likely is the single most influential novel ever written. Arguments could be made, but its enduring place in the pantheon cannot be mistaken. In 1957, Rand fired the ultimate shot to the liberal bow, a non-practicing Jewish woman from Russia. She came of age during the Russian Revolution and saw first hand the horrors of Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism. She managed to escape to the West, settling in Los Angeles where she endeavored to write screenplays. She struggled, eking out a living and a small following. She had conservative patrons who appreciated her anti-Communism during the New Deal, but was unable to break through. Finally she wrote a novel, The Fountainhead, which was a big hit made into a movie starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.

The novel centered on a big controversy of the era, modernism. Modernism was a creeping new social value finding its way into heretofore-traditional lives, in many different ways. Rand saw it as the natural economic progress of a thriving capitalistic society. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, architecture was a major new source of expression, even artistic conceptualism. The skyscrapers of New York City represented the growth of a new society people equated with the grandeur that was Greece and the glory that was Rome.

Rand was a huge fan of Greek philosophy, but felt modern architecture, which diverted from classical Parthenon-and-pillar styles found in Europe and the United States, was the wave of the future. She envisioned use of the new building product, steel, in the building of high rise office towers, the sun gleaming off their windows, each occupied by businessmen who were "masters of the Universe." She was a complete atheist who invested in man all hopes and dreams. Capitalism, the profit-motive, was her religion, the dollar sign her cross.

The Fountainhead tells the tale of an architect bound and determined to build new buildings in the modern style. Rebuffed at every turn, he is finally inspired by a beautiful, courageous woman to overcome all obstacles placed in his way, eventually building a tower to his own ego and greatness, standing athwart Manhattan, telling the world of his superiority. The final scene in the film demonstrates Gary Cooper standing on top of his accomplishment, a shimmering figure resembling a Nordic god, a Valhalla symbol. Rand saw men as heroic figures, and while she and her female characters were smart and independent, they were man worshipers first and foremost. Ironically, despite being Jewish, the images Rand conveyed were not unlike the supermen of Adolf Hitler's Germany, depicted in the films of Leni Riefenstahl. Gary Cooper inspired a skyscraper photo of Robert Moses, who as much as anybody was responsible for the 20th Century skyscraper and freeway expansion in New York, so idolized by Rand.

Inspired by the success of The Fountainhead, Rand then spent years crafting her magnum opus. Her fan base built as much on her previous work as the all-consuming anticipation, years in the writing, of Atlas Shrugged in 1957. It did not disappoint, despite raising the immediate ire of liberal critics, all washed away in its total sales bonanza.

Atlas Shrugged is not the best-written novel ever. It is not even realistic. It is a fantasy with semi-science fiction qualities to it. It is exceedingly long (over 1,000 pages) featuring pages of verbal diatribes and soap boxing from characters that go on and on. It breaks numerous long-held literary rules, but at its heart is a notion that grabs all conservatives and, indeed, libertarians, a group practically grown out of Rand's philosophy. Rand infuses her male and female characters with extreme nobility, honesty, and commitment to their cause, no matter the price, just as her architect, Howard Roark, refused to back down in The Fountainhead.

It can be argued exactly when the novel is set. Rand remained mostly vague. It appears to describe an America, mired in the Great Depression, heeded by isolationists, which never entered World War II. While world politics is not really at issue, the United States is now a second rate power, as the U.S. most likely would have been had the war been won by Germany and Japan. America has not been invaded and conquered, but she is definitely weak. Capitalism is virtually dead. Big governments, advocated by John Maynard Keynes after World War I, and embodied by the National Socialism of Hitler's Germany, now dominates the body politic. While published in 1957, the novel has a futuristic quality. It could be 1970 or thereabouts.

Dagny Taggart, who Rand undoubtedly sees as a mirror of herself, is the young, glamorous, conservative heiress of a struggling, once-great railroad. Her brother is a Socialist who actively encourages the government to take over the railroad, to run the economy, because business no longer has the capacity to succeed privately. Dagny vehemently disagrees.

Amid a society crumbling, with businesses bankrupt, people out of work, government nationalizing everything in a constant power grab, people ask a question that becomes urban legend: "Who is John Galt?" In discovering the answer to this question, the novel reveals its purpose. Galt was a promising engineer who devised a motor, if effectively modeled, that would completely change the way industry runs. Think of Thomas Edison's light bulb or Bill Gates's computers. However, government forces confiscate his discovery. Again, think of Gates being denied the profits from his discoveries, of Microsoft forced out of privatization into a government functionary.

Rather than allow this to happen, Galt destroys his motor so it cannot be used. He then leaves the scene, finding refuge in a kind of Shangri-la in the Rocky Mountains. But Galt is not alone. He has recruited and brought with him "men of the mind," all the leading scientists, industrialists, intellectuals, businessmen, entrepreneurs, architects; in essence the men who actually build the things that make society run. They are all men of the private sectors. The message is very clear: the government only takes, it never creates. The business of creation, the engine driving capitalism, are men of the private sector driven by the profit motive.

While trying to expand her railroad, Dagny hears of Galt and the legend of his engine. She searches for and finds the one proto-type of it left, found in an abandoned factory that went under after the government tried to seize it. She eventually finds Galt, who explains what he has done. In essence, the great creators of modern society have gone on "strike" against the government until they refuse to tax them, regulate them and control them beyond their ability to make maximum profit while creating maximum excellence.

The idea of a large group of irreplaceable men leaving their comfortable lives to go on strike, hiding out from the world's government, all desperate to find and force them, like Nazi rocket scientists pressed to build bombs for Hitler against their will, is not believable, but the concept rings true with readers. Many were businessmen sick and tired of government sticking their nose into their profits and lives at every turn. At one point, the highest tax rate on the richest American citizens was an astounding 90 percent, a major inspiration of Rand's story.

Eventually the government tries to lure the men back into society. They are desperate, all is crumbling and they cannot do anything. It is a scathing indictment of Socialism, of the ineptitude of government, the immorality of high taxation and regulation. The "men of the mind," led by Galt, refuse to give in to the pleas of worldwide government.

Naturally, the New York Times thought it "strange," heartless, lacking compassion for the poor and the suffering. The novel, however, plainly demonstrates that only the products of a profit-motivated society make things lifting the poor out of poverty. Absent this, government is unable to provide for them. Only by unfairly stealing from the rich is government able to give to the poor, which only creates a vicious cycle of poor rather than letting people lift themselves out of their circumstances.

It came at the height of pre-Barry Goldwater conservatism in America. Indeed, America under President Dwight Eisenhower was super-prosperous. The "business of America is business" was the mantra of the Eisenhower Administration. Europe, mired in Socialism, struggled mightily in an effort to recover from World War II. America was the engine of the world, creating goods and services people worldwide needed and paid for. American business was reaching its height. Communism was absolutely hated by capitalists, who loved Rand's novel. They identified the villains of big government as faces of a pseudo-Communist ideology.

A cult of personality developed around Rand, who hosted popular forums, mostly featuring young people who believed in her Objectivist philosophy. She argued that self-interest, even greed, produced wealth that in the long run was used to benefit society. Even if the individual was not personally benevolent, his success simply "trickled down," creating a "rising tide that lifts all boats," to use two concepts popularized by the Grand Old Party.

Liberals, she said, wanted to "feel good" about themselves. They acted out by stealing the money of the wealthy to feed government programs for general society. Instead of accomplishing this task, they simply created bureaucracies in which individual government workers had and kept power without helping the poor. Social programs were barely more successful in many cases than Soviet "five-year plans." It was simply the starkest example of existing philosophical differences.

For decades conservatives tried to effectively express their opposition to Keynesian economics and FDR's New Deal, but always came off as greedy and heartless, the banker who denies loans in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. Republicans did not really want to fully endorse John Galt and his kind, who were unquestionably capitalist entrepreneurs inspired first and foremost to make money, but they most assuredly saw the wisdom of Rand's argument that only if such people exist, freely inventing products, does society benefit.

The notion that a talented man might work for the government, expend all his energies and passions into making a product that benefits society, inspired only by his good work with no monetary payoff at the end of the journey, was increasingly shown to be a joke in Communist Russia. It had been disproven as early as the first Puritans, who gave up Socialistic principles after their first poor harvest; once advocating a more entrepreneurial approach subsequent harvests yielded a fruitful bounty.

The Republican Party of the early 1960s was splintered, in need of a spokesperson. Rand voted Republican and expressed support for certain conservative political figures, but she never got very far out front in the movement. By 1964, the party was divided between Nelson Rockefeller's East Coast moderates, John Birch ultra-Rightists, and the Randians. Rand's atheism was a huge bone of contention among the social conservatives who make up a big base of the Republican Party. The very Christian Whittaker Chambers was a vocal detractor. Out of this grew the libertarian movement, which is based on economic and social freedom absent divisive religious conflict over such things as abortion.

However, Rand greatly influenced many leading voices of the Right, namely future SEC chairman Alan Greenspan and President Ronald Reagan, a Christian who nevertheless found much to admire in Rand.

In 2009, when President Barack Obama signed a nearly $1 trillion stimulus package, according to critics in one fell swoop putting the United States farther into debt than all the combined years since the birth of Christ, many conservatives felt the country resembled the world Rand described in Atlas Shrugged. The book had a huge resurgence, reaching bestseller lists more than 50 years after its publication.

The gladiators

Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.

\- Grantland Rice, 1924

According to legend, it started in a pasture in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. U.S. Army officer Abner Doubleday (later a Civil War hero), whose specialties were surveying, mapping and planning construction sites, apparently laid out a baseball diamond. The National Pastime was born. Later, the Doubleday story was refuted. Baseball came to America in bits and pieces, mostly emanating from the English sports of rounders and cricket, but the Hall of Fame was erected in Cooperstown anyway.

Union soldiers played baseball during the war. The first professional team was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who went undefeated in 1869. The National League was formed in 1876.

Football started out as rugby, and in the late 19th Century became popularized under the "American rules" at East Coast colleges like Rutgers, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The game was so violent that deaths piled up. The government had to enforce rules to make it safer.

Prior to World War I, professional baseball players were looked down upon by the upper classes. They were uneducated, chewed tobacco, drank heavily, consorted with gamblers and were not to be trusted with women. Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants was the first "role model" hero. An All-American from Bucknell, Matty was handsome, intelligent and upright. He was one of the greatest pitchers in history. He won 373 games for John McGraw's Giants, including three shutouts in the 1905 World Series against Connie Mack's Philadelphia A's. Mathewson was a tragic figure who joined the Army when World War I broke out, was exposed to mustard gas, and died from its effects a few years later.

The National League, known as the "senior circuit," was joined by the American League in 1901. In 1903 the first World Series was played between the Boston Pilgrims (later Red Sox) and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Boston surprised the baseball world by winning, but in 1904 McGraw refused to play his Giants against Mack's A's because the A.L. was a "busher league."

It was only 40 years after the Civil War when Ty Cobb entered the Major Leagues with Detroit in 1906. Cobb was the product of a wealthy Georgia family. His father was a state Senator. The father had gone on a business trip, but suspected Cobb's mother was having an affair. He snuck in through the bedroom window to catch her in the act, and was shot dead. The story was that she thought he was a burglar, but it was theorized that she was with another man, who murdered him, then covered it up with the burglar story. Cobb was devastated by the event. His psychological make-up was forever shaped not just by his idolized father's violent death, but the knowledge or suspicion that his mother had cheated on him, then killed him.

Cobb was met by enmity from the Northerners on the Tigers. He was described as "still fighting the Civil War," coming up from the South with a "chip on his shoulder." He was a violent racist, as was another star player of the late 19th Century, Cap Anson. Cobb was a remarkable player, though. He hit .367 lifetime with over 4,000 hits, revolutionizing the game. His violent temper, racism, and murderous rages, however, forever stained his legacy. Nevertheless, he was a highly complex figure. A devout Baptist, biographers discovered, mostly after his death, that he personally paid for many African-Americans to attend traditional black universities. Cobb may have been an intellectual genius, too. He became a manipulator of the stock market on a par with Joseph P. Kennedy, investing early in Coca-Cola and making millions when the country was in Depression.

He never found happiness or peace, dying alone and unloved.

In 1912, the Boston Red Sox were led by a dashing young super pitcher named "Smoky Joe" Wood, who won over 30 games. Wood bested Mathewson in game seven of the World Series. The Mayor of Boston attached himself to the Red Sox, to his great political benefit. His nickname was "Honey Fitz." John Fitzgerald was John Kennedy's grandfather on his mother's side.

Also in 1912, an American Indian named Jim Thorpe swept the pentathlon (today this would be the decathlon) at the Stockholm Olympics. King Gustav V of Sweden told him he was the greatest athlete in the world.

"Thanks, King," said Thorpe.

At that same Olympics, a young Army officer, George Patton failed to medal in the modern pentathlon, which was a different event involving the firing of guns.

When America entered World War I, many baseball players served in the Army. The game was expected to revitalize morale after the war ended in 1918. Instead, it was embroiled in the worst controversy in its history.

Charles Comiskey was the tight-fisted owner of the World Champion Chicago White Sox. He cheated his players out of bonuses and paid them the minimum, even though the White Sox had a number of star performers. Gamblers associated with a million-dollar bookie named Arnold Rothstein approached eight White Sox players. They agreed to "throw" the 1919 World Series against the underdog Cincinnati Reds. After losing the Series, the "fix" was discovered. The players were charged. In 1920, they were all acquitted, and expected to go back to their team, which was at the time in first place again. But the new Commissioner of Baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, banned them from the game for life on the grounds that the game could not afford a whiff of scandal. One of the banned players was "Shoeless Joe" Jackson, a South Carolina farm boy who got his nickname because as a boy he supposedly played without shoes, but the legend of his lack of intelligence was exaggerated. Jackson knew about the gamblers, but did not report it. He played hard, obviously not trying to lose. His ban from the game is steeped in tragedy and legend. Today many lobby that he should be post-humously admitted to the Hall of Fame.

The palaces

The game was really saved by Babe Ruth, who was traded by the Red Sox to the Yankees prior to the 1920 season. Ruth had grown up in a bar in Baltimore, where his father was the saloonkeeper. He was an incorrigible youth, sent to an orphanage, where he learned to play baseball. He was the best left-handed pitcher in the game with the Red Sox, who he led to two World Championships. Boston owner Harry Frazee, in order to finance a Broadway play called No, No Nanette, sold Ruth, known as the Bambino, along with several stars to the Yankees, who in their previous history had been an average team. Ruth transformed them into the greatest juggernaut in sports history. The Red Sox did not win the World Series again until 2004. This fact was attributed by Beantowners to the "Curse of the Bambino."

Baseball, seeing the excitement created by Ruth's home run hitting, "juiced" the ball prior to 1920 and outlawed spitballs. During the Roaring '20s, Ruth was bigger than life. Ruth set career and single-season home run records. To this day he is arguably considered the greatest baseball player and athlete of all time. His drinking, his overweight physique, the fact he did not compete against black players, and the sleek athleticism of later stars like Willie Mays and Barry Bonds temper this subjective title. But Ruth still holds the "title" for two reasons. For one, his status as a star pitcher before becoming a slugger on the greatest teams in baseball cannot be matched. While others have broken his records, nobody ever stood as far above their contemporary competition as Ruth did. He revolutionized his sport more thoroughly than any athlete.

Perhaps his most lasting legacy was the building of Yankee Stadium. Aptly called the "House That Ruth Built," it was erected in 1923. This stadium, and others like it, represented something grand in America. The Founding Fathers built the young country on the principles of Aristotle's Greece and Cato's Roman Republic. The Greeks began the Olympic Games, and the Romans built the Colosseum, a place of spectacle embodying the leisure class of empire. In all the years since the fall of Rome, nothing was built to rival it. Athletics had very little place in society until the United States was formed, and baseball popularized. Sports in America represented what it represented in Rome. Babe Ruth represented in his home run swats symbolism of America; big, powerful, unstoppable, and never seen before.

America built the Erie Canal, the trans-continental railroad, the Los Angeles and (in 1923) San Francisco water aqueducts, while emerging as a clear winner in the Industrial Revolution. Victory over Kaiser's Germany manifested a new appraisal of her place in history. Architecture of the 1920s reflected this, a return to neo-classical Greek and Roman pillars, court houses resembling the Parthenon, mansions and hotels of the nouveau riche evoking Caesar's palace. It appeared the United States was the winner of history. Democracy was the established way.

Sports were in the 1920s a form of reward, the flappers and suddenly libidinous speakeasy girls of a loosened society now sexually available to the men who won the war. A civilized society no longer raped and pillaged, but to the victor go the spoils. Babe Ruth, the New York Yankees, Yankee Stadium; indeed the city of New York were its symbols and they lived it for all they were worth in the Roaring '20s.

Nobody called the quaint "parks" and "fields" of previous years stadiums, but Yankee Stadium was just that. Huge, gleaming, modern, magnificent; it was a place of spectacle with a dynasty of a team, the almighty and aptly-named Yankees, running roughshod over baseball competition in the manner of the American Army at the Argonne. Everything about the team, the city, the stadium and its star player was larger than life, bathed in American glory, and utterly unlike anything anybody had ever seen before.

Visitors to America went to Yankee Stadium to see this new wonder of the world, a Taj Majal, a Biblical epic, a . . . new Colosseum for a New Rome. The glory, the grandeur of Greece and Rome combined. The thrill of it, the incredible pride attached to it, is difficult to explain today, but the still-young nation puffed up its chest with pride.

The building of Yankee Stadium came at the same time modern sports palaces were erected all over America in the 1920s. In California, the Rose Bowl football game had long been played at makeshift locations in and around Pasadena's California Institute of Technology. After World War I, Doughboys who started college in their 20s took to the game in order to get their aggressions out. Previously relegated to the Ivy League crowd, it became all the rage across the country.

Rivals University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, long established themselves as dominant powerhouses of the Pacific Coast. They both built magnificent stadiums holding upwards of 70,000 to 80,000 fans, who flocked to their games played in glorious Indian summer sunshine. Cal's Wonder Teams of the early 1920s – unbeaten from 1920-24 - remain one of the greatest dynasties in college football history. The California weather was a tremendous political tool, a beautiful day described as "chamber of commerce weather." The University of California's Memorial Stadium, in particular, was tucked into an incredibly beautiful place called Strawberry Canyon, nestled against oaks, flowers, luxurious foliage, surrounded by plateaus and cliffs. Like Yankee Stadium, nobody had ever laid eyes on such a sight.

But when Stanford Stadium opened in 1921, the school made a bid to entice the Rose Bowl Game to Palo Alto. The folks in Pasadena rose to the challenge. They planned and built, for less than $300,000 in about a year, the Rose Bowl stadium in the Arroyo Seco, perhaps even more inspiring to the eye than California's Strawberry Canyon. Lodged into a natural valley surrounded by hills, mountains, a river bed and cliffs on all sides, the topography included wild flowers of every shade, color and hue; towering trees; rock and hillside formations; and in the background the incredible San Gabriel Mountain range which, in the winter, often donned a coat of snow. The Rose Bowl was built in 1922, kept the Rose Bowl Game in Pasadena, featuring on January 1, 1923 the University of Southern California defeating Penn State University by a score of 14-3. Penn State was late for the game due to a peculiarity of Los Angeles; they were stuck in traffic.

The Rose Bowl Game added to the many features of boosterism advocated by the Chandler Los Angeles Times, and has been credited as perhaps the single biggest recruiter of new citizens to the region. Football games were played in 80-degree sunshine in mid-winter. Often a slight mist settled on the Arroyo Seco, combining with the snow-capped distant peaks to create the illusion of Shangri-La.

Not to be outdone by Stanford, Pasadena or the New York Yankees, the city of Los Angeles at the same time erected the L.A. Memorial Coliseum in 1923. It had many features resembling its Roman namesake, including statuary and parastyles. Los Angeles blatantly copied the Roman Colosseum's architecture and overall sense of national glory, plainly identifying itself and the United States as a conqueror. Their grandiose ambitions knew no bounds, manifesting itself in a successful effort at bringing the Olympics to Los Angeles in 1932.

The 1932 Olympics spoke volumes. Held in the middle of the Great Depression, Los Angeles did not cede an inch to hard economic times, seemingly choosing not to participate in the Depression. This provided a sense of identity, confidence and exceptionalism to the city and region, already brimming with confidence and hubris over the spectacle of "talkies" in Hollywood, USC football, and a growing populace.

The Coliseum was built two miles south of downtown Los Angeles, right across the street from the USC campus, making it of course the home of the Trojans (and the cross-town UCLA Bruins). USC was used as an Olympic village. Their campus and surrounding athletic facilities were used to host numerous events. The United States obliterated all world competition in a dazzling display of Gold medals, with USC track and swim stars winning so many that the U.S. team resembled the Trojans draped in red, white and blue. International fans saw numerous black stars competing for the U.S. In addition, USC and UCLA featured integrated sports teams. USC's first All-American football player, Brice Taylor (1925), was black. Football games between the integrated Trojans and Bruins before 70,000 fans were veritable social statements. Whether this reflected reality or not, the boast was that the City of the Angels was ahead of the curve when it came to race relations. It was a fabulous moment for a young city on the move, firmly establishing them as the metropolis of the future.

Beyond Yankee Stadium, Stanford, California, the Rose Bowl and the Coliseum, sports palaces were built all over the United States: Fenway Park in Boston and Chicago's Wrigley Field have stood the test of time. College football was suddenly all the rage, with giant stadiums to showcase spectacles on the green plains below: "the Swamp" at the University of Florida, "the Horseshoe" at Ohio State, "the Big House" at the University of Michigan. In the 1930s, New Year's Day games were featured in Southern cities: Miami's Orange Bowl, New Orleans' Sugar Bowl, and the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. The athletes were heroic figures, the idols of millions.

Europe, reeling from World War I, was too concerned feeding themselves to build huge sports arenas wholesale like the Americans. One exception was Nazi Germany, which built a magnificent stadium for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. A sense of envy began to set in. America was so big, so rich, and maybe even so arrogant. Oil had been discovered in California and Texas, creating untold millionaires. The Ottoman Empire of Turkey collapsed in the losing of World War I, its oil sands now controlled by Western interests. Once the inventors and architects of world empire and creativity, the builder of the pyramids, the Arabs were reduced to abjectly watching while America manifested themselves as a sort of master of the Universe, with its aqueducts, its skyscrapers, its Yale Bowls and Rose Bowls and movie stars. English and American archeologists descended on Middle Eastern antiquity, gathering evidence of Christian divinity, seen by the Muslims as direct refutation of their religion. A peoples seethed, waiting for their chance to knock one of the symbols of Western exuberance from its lofty perch.

Radio days

Notre Dame University, a tiny Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana, put their name on the map in 1913 when their end, Knute Rockne, devised a new play called the forward pass, which was used to defeat the mighty Army Cadets.

A few years later, Rockne became head coach of the Fighting Irish. They immediately installed themselves as the greatest collegiate football program in America. Rockne was not merely a great coach, but a visionary and marketing expert. In 1924 the Irish defeated Army at the Polo Grounds in New York City. Famed sports columnist Grantland Rice referred to Notre Dame's star backfield, consisting of Elmer Layden, Harry Stuhldreher, Jim Crowley, and Don Miller as "the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame," a direct reference to the book of Revelation. The Notre Dame publicity department arranged for the four men to pose on horses. The photo became a universal advertisement for the glories of Notre Dame football.

A few years later, Rockne's team was losing to Army at halftime at Yankee Stadium. Rockne gathered them together and told an apocryphal story of past Irish legend George Gipp, who died of pneumonia, supposedly on his death bed urging the team to some day, when "the boys are up against it," to go out and, "Win one for the Gipper!" Inspired, Notre Dame rallied to win. Some years later Ronald Reagan portrayed "The Gipper" in Knute Rockne: All-American.

In 1925, Notre Dame lost at freezing cold Lincoln, Nebraska. The loss was not what truly upset Rockne. After World War I, in reaction to the carnage in Europe, evangelical Christianity took hold of America, with tent revivals in almost every town. Out of this were strange new concepts with racist and anti-Catholic overtones. The long dormant Ku Klux Klan hi-jacked Christian teachings in a violent way. Rockne and his team were subject to anti-Papal slurs and threats in many of the small Midwestern towns they traveled to.

As fate would have it, Gwynn Wilson, the student manager of the University of Southern California football team, was on that train pulling out of Lincoln. His express purpose was to ask Rockne, on behalf of USC coach Howard Jones, if he would agree to a series of home-and-away games with the Trojans. Rockne thanked Wilson but told him the team traveled too much anyway, and the administration was already on him about missing so many classes.

Wilson left Rockne's compartment figuring he had failed in his mission. But while he and Rockne were having their conversation, Wilson's wife was having a friendly talk with Mrs. Rockne. The previous season, Notre Dame traveled to Pasadena, where they beat Stanford in the Rose Bowl. Mrs. Rockne was enamored by the great weather and shopping on Beverly Hills' fashionable Rodeo drive, which featured all the latest styles from Paris. Mrs. Wilson further painted a glamorous portrait of Los Angeles. When she told Mrs. Rockne her husband was speaking to Coach Rockne about a road trip back to L.A., Mrs. Rockne was enthusiastic. When Coach Rockne informed his wife he turned down the offer to come west, she informed him that they were going to accept the offer and that was that.

Thus was born the greatest college football rivalry of them all, between USC and Notre Dame. Enormous throngs filled the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. At Chicago's Soldier Field, record crowds upwards of 120,000 fans packed the stadium. USC, once a small program unable to compete with West Coast powers like California, Washington, Oregon and Pop Warner's Stanford Indians, were raised up by their national rivalry with Notre Dame above all other collegiate teams. This came in confluence with the growth of their city, the new glamorization of Hollywood, the building of the Rose Bowl, and the Olympics held at the Coliseum.

In 1930, Notre Dame Stadium opened and Notre Dame no longer had to "barnstorm" across America. But it was precisely that barnstorming that popularized the Fighting Irish. Rockne avoided the anti-Catholic sentiment of small college towns in favor of big cities with large Catholic populations. Aside from traveling to play USC in Los Angeles, his team played in Chicago, at Yankee Stadium, against Navy at Annapolis, at Pittsburgh, and numerous other large cities. Catholics flocked to their games and took to the team as their own. They became known as "subway alumni."

But of all the things that grew Notre Dame, the game of football, and American sports as a whole, nothing had the effect of radio. Created over a period of years in the United States and Europe, with contributions from Thomas Edison, Nikolas Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, and others, it saw scientific advancements when militarized during World War I. By the 1920s, it was ready for prime time. A live speech, an opera, Charles Lindbergh's flight, or other events could be broadcast to the entire country. It was astounding. While it was put to use for these and many other occasions, its use for sporting events achieved the most profound impact.

First and foremost was Notre Dame football. Its Catholicism made the little school from South Bend a national program. Radio consolidated that. Games against USC were broadcast to a nation listening with baited breath. The 1931 battle in which Southern California rallied to win at Notre Dame, 16-14, coalesced the nation like no previous single event could. No longer was news filtered in over a period of days, subject to the vagaries of newspaper deadlines and delivery. This was the first reality show.

Seemingly the entire city of Los Angeles heard the 1931 Trojans-Irish game, and seemingly all of them gathered en masse at the downtown L.A. train station to welcome the conquering heroes, soon to be crowned their second national championship in four years, upon their return; then accompanying them two miles to the campus where more speeches and accolades were awarded.

The sound of radio broadcasts and sporting events became synonymous with the 1920s and 1930s. Aside from the big Notre Dame and USC games, the Rose Bowl, the World Series, and heavyweight boxing matches featuring Jack Dempsey vs. Gene Tunney (1927), Joe Louis and Max Schmeling (1936, 1938) drew huge audiences. Once little regarded programs like the University of Alabama became national powerhouses on the strength of radio broadcasts of their Rose Bowl victories. Famed broadcasters Ted Husing and Graham McNamee became household names, their staccato deliveries the signature sound of the medium.

Two athletes dominated headlines and the national consciousness of the 1920s like no others: Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees and University of Illinois running back Harold "Red" Grange. Over-wrought announcers described Ruth's home runs as flowery, elegant, and gargantuan "shots." Millions of fans could not wait to buy a ticket and actually see the "Sultan of Swat" play, in large measure because of radio's drama.

Grange's extraordinary prowess as a collegian led the Chicago Bears to sign him to a huge contract. The National Football League was a struggling business. The college game had all the panache, and baseball was the dominant National Pastime. But Grange's long runs, breathlessly described by announcers who could barely contain themselves over the "Galloping Ghost," kept fans glued to their radios. He filled Chicago's Soldier Field with more than 100,000 fans and established the NFL as a success.

Sports, culture and society

In the 1920s, a rising German politician named Adolf Hitler had grand visions of world domination. He knew that if he were to build the German Army back to its great strength, they would defeat the British and the French. The populations of those two nations were war weary and pacifistic, unwilling in his view to sustain a major military victory. The Soviet Union, mired in famine and failed five-year plans, seemed wholly incapable of defending itself from a major onslaught. But Hitler knew if his global aspirations were to come true, he had to either defeat the United States or join forces with her.

Politically, it did not seem likely that the U.S. would align itself with Germany, but Hitler still engaged in a major diplomatic offensive meant to create symbiosis between the two peoples, who had much in common. Margaret Sanger and the eugenics-abortion movement of the 1920s aroused interest in the scientific concept of a superior man in America. While the Germans considered the Jews a "cancer" on their society, a morally and physically inferior race holding them back from their destiny, similar racism existed for American blacks.

Going on 60 years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction long over with, the nation brought together by World War I, the U.S. was an unqualified Democratic and economic success. Great frustration was exuded, however, over the blacks, who made little societal progress. The era of goodwill, of benevolence for their historic plight, was replaced by disgust at their failure to improve their condition, thus rendering as a waste of lives the hundreds of thousands of white soldiers who died in their cause during the Civil War.

In addition to eugenics, sports created scientific theories of physical superiority. Great football powerhouses at the University of California, Stanford University, and USC, combined with an increasing number of Californians starring in Major League baseball, led to speculation that the environment played a role. The warm weather, it was believed, made for greater vitamin abundance and therefore more strength, vitality. Access to year round fresh fruits and vegetables seemed a good answer. Obviously 12 months of good outdoor weather meant athletes could practice and improve. Social Darwinism played a factor, too. The survivors of the great Westward migration during the Gold Rush were heartier stock than those who died; their offspring more of the same. Hollywood entered the picture. Handsome men and beautiful women came to California to try their luck in the movies, met, and produced superior children.

Hitler observed all of this, hoping that his racial politics would find popularity in the U.S. They did, to some extent. Joseph P. Kennedy was an admirer, but America was too Democratic, too inherently fair a nation to buy into Hitler's ideology in large numbers. It was an egalitarian society. Its military had long been dominated by a sense of family hierarchy. The sons of decorated war heroes and generals were favored in admission to West Point and Annapolis, but prior to World War I, there was a concerted effort to bring in well-qualified children from ordinary families. Thus were men like Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, products of the Great Plains, rising through the ranks along with scions of the U.S. Military Academy like George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur.

Hitler began to change his focus, studying America as a potential threat. He was alarmed at what he found. He kept seeing German and Nordic sir names on the rosters of U.S. sports teams. Lou Gehrig of the Yankees, Harry Heilmann and Herman "Germany" Schaefer of the Tigers were just a few stars with German backgrounds.

The University of Michigan, in particular, seemed to feature a plethora of All-American football players named Adolph "Germany" Schulz, Otto Pommerening, John Malbetsch and Bennie Oosterbahn. Hitler looked further and found more reason for worry. Many of the so-called "best Germans," along with Swedes and other Nordics, left Europe and settled in the American Midwest in the 19th Century. They were strong, individualistic, rugged people, exactly what he needed to populate an army broken by a world war that destroyed so much of its youthful flower. The Germans hoped German-Americans, who were so plentiful that much of Milwaukee, Wisconsin spoke it as a first language, would not fight their homeland in World War I, but there was no lack of patriotism among them. Now a new generation had come of age, fully Americanized by decades in the nation, then by the exuberance and camaraderie of athletic competition.

Hitler placed great stock on athletics, seeing in it the manly, rugged qualities needed to make great warriors. Nobody in the world displayed these qualities with greater élan and courage than the Americans, many of whom were of German ancestry. Had Hitler heeded his initial concerns the world obviously would have been better off. The election of President Franklin Roosevelt, the Great Depression, the moral weakness of Left-wing sentiment, heavy indoctrination of Jews in FDR's Democrat administration, and weakening of the military in the 1930s, led Hitler to believe, incorrectly, that America suddenly lacked the will or ability to defend itself.

Once in power, he used sports to propagandize his nation and the Nazi Party to the world. Taking his cue from the building of American sports palaces like the Rose Bowl, the Coliseum and Yankee Stadium, he built a grand stadium in Berlin, where he hosted the 1936 Olympic Games. Sports and politics mixed like never before. The Germans used the world stage to display the facade of clean streets, a crimeless society, and the myth of Aryan physical supremacy. Hitler's display was almost successful, as German athletes performed remarkably. The image was broken up when African-American track star Jesse Owens of Ohio State dominated the sprint events.

German-U.S. sports rivalry preceded the war in boxing, too, when Max Schmeling defeated the African-American Joe Louis. Many white Americans rooted for the German over Louis, but when they fought a re-match, the Germans had begun aggressive military moves in preparation for invasion of Eastern Europe. Americans now backed Louis, a major turning point in race relations. When Louis knocked Schmeling to the canvas, he became a national hero and a god to his people. In 1938, when Joe DiMaggio, the greatest white athlete in America, made less than $20,000, Louis made around $350,000. Brutal tax rates and bad planning landed him in eventual trouble with the IRS.

The 1936 Olympics and Louis-Schmeling bouts were the first major sporting events highlighting the role of black athletes. Their image suffered a terrible setback around the turn of the century when black boxer Jack Johnson infuriated white America. Unquestionably one of the greatest fighters of all time, he dominated the "Great White Hopes" who went up against him, but taunted them, exchanged barbs with the crowds, flaunted his sexual relations with white women, and displayed arrogance. He paid a steep price for his antics, eventually facing arrest for violation of the Mann Act for transporting white prostitutes across state lines for "immoral purposes."

Blacks were not allowed to play Major League baseball. There were occasional black college football stars and even a few in the early NFL. Baseball's Negro Leagues produced some star performers, namely Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and "Cool Papa" Bell, who was said to be so fast he could "turn the switch and be in bed before the lights went out." Over the years, baseball has attempted to create various "all-time all-star teams" and anoint "greatest player" titles to various players. As Negro League lore became more and more known, it has become commonly understood that some of the Negro League stars were better than their white Major League counterparts. All-time all-star teams that once included catchers like Bill Dickey, Mickey Cochrane and Johnny Bench now replace these players with the likes of Gibson, a home run slugger who, if he had played in the big leagues, would have challenged Ruth's home run records. It is a worthy argument that all-time pitching staffs that include Walter "Big Train" Johnson of the Washington Senators could substitute him for Paige, who gave us homilies like "never eat fried foods, it stirs up the blood."

The Negro League players barnstormed in the winter, occasionally playing Major League all-star teams even up (or better). In the 1930s they traveled to Latin America. Tin pot dictators, eager to distract the masses from their repressive regimes, created baseball teams to entertain the people. The reason baseball is so popular in Latin America is because of the Negro League stars who brought the game to Cuba, the Dominican Republican, and other countries

Baseball star Lefty O'Doul led barnstorming teams to Japan in the 1930s, where crowds of fans who took to the game received him as a star. Crowds yelled "Bonsai!" while watching O'Doul and his mate's display their considerable skills. One player was peculiarly picked to play on O'Doul's team. Moe Berg was no all-star; he was a journeyman, at best, catcher for the Washington Senators. He was on the traveling team not for his baseball skills but his intelligence-gathering acumen.

The War Department believed in a few years the U.S. could be at war with Japan. Berg brought a camera and was told to take photos like any tourist. His photos revealed potential armaments and bombing sights, some of which were used when war began in 1941-42.

Berg was later recruited into the OSS and tasked with going behind enemy lines to bring back Nazi rocket scientists before they fell into the hands of the Russians near the end of the war. He succeeded in this endeavor.

After World War II, O'Doul returned to U.S.-occupied Japan, where the citizenry was depressed by the experience of defeat in the war. His baseball exhibitions were a major part of reviving morale in Japan as the country picked itself up and became a member of the family of nations again. Brooklyn Dodger owner Walter O'Malley and others took teams to Tokyo to play exhibitions. The game became as popular in Japan as it is in America.

When World War II broke out, many Major League stars joined the Armed Forces. The most prominent of these was Ted Williams, a Southern Californian who joined the Red Sox, hit .406 in 1941, and was considered the equal of Ruth as a hitter. Williams joined the Marines and became a fighter plot. After the war, he returned to baseball, winning Triple Crowns and MVP awards. When Korea broke out, he went back to the Marines, where he was John Glenn's wingman. Williams was a conservative Republican who made his opinions known, causing enmity among the liberal Kennedyites in the Boston media. His heroics speak for themselves.

After Pearl Harbor, the Rose Bowl was moved to North Carolina. The Major Leagues debated shutting the game down. President Roosevelt urged them to keep playing for the sake of American morale. Joe DiMaggio was a superstar center fielder for the Yankees. Like Williams, he was a California native, and he became an enormous hero to Italian-Americans, who were perceived as being either mobsters or Mussolini Fascists. The New York media protected DiMaggio's hero status, but unlike the hero Williams he was closer to the Italian stereotype than his fans would have wanted to know. DiMaggio regularly hung out with New York Mafiosi.

Many other Californians achieved success in athletics. Over the years, no other state has produced more athletes. If the University of Southern California and UCLA had been countries, they would have placed high in the medals count at numerous Olympics.

California also was a more tolerant place than the rest of the country. In the late 1930s, a black athlete named Jackie Robinson rose to prominence there. Robinson prepped at Muir High School in Pasadena, where he starred in baseball, basketball, football, track and was L.A. city tennis champion. He moved on to UCLA, a state school that in its short history was dominated by its prestigious cross-town rival, USC. Robinson and another black star, Kenny Washington, put UCLA on the map. Robinson ran track and played baseball, too. When the war broke out, he became an officer. In an event at a Georgia Army base foreshadowing the Rosa Parks incident, Robinson refused to give up his seat on a bus, and was court-martialed. He stood up for himself and was acquitted. After the war, he played professionally in the Negro Leagues when he was chosen by Dodger president Branch Rickey to break the color barrier.

Other Negro Leaguers like Paige and Josh Gibson had been passed up because Rickey was looking for just the right kind of player and person to handle the rigorous challenge ahead. Robinson possessed all the criteria. He was a superior player, but he was also a college man and an Army officer; handsome, articulate and dignified, with a lovely wife and young family. Brooklyn, a true melting pot, was the perfect place for the "experiment" to take place. Robinson was told he had to be "man enough not to fight back" against his combative instincts.

His first few years in the league were grueling and excruciating, but he continued to triumph. Fans booed, called him by the "n-word," and threw black cats on the field. Other teams razzed him, threw at him and spiked him. Robinson refrained from punching his foes, but used other methods; thrown elbows, upturned spikes, bunts down the first base line resulting in body blows to offending pitchers.

When an entire stadium turned on him, Dodger shortstop Pee Wee Reese, who hailed from Louisville, Kentucky, went to Robinson and put his arm around him. It was a beautiful gesture. Robinson was a great player who became the first black in the Hall of Fame. His integrity and leadership qualities on the famed Boys of Summer teams, embodied by Roger Kahn's book, allowed blacks to integrate into baseball and other sports. Had the Robinson experiment "failed," it could have pushed back integration for years.

Robinson was a Connecticut Republican who backed Richard Nixon, although he withdrew his support when Nixon failed to intervene to get Martin Luther King out of jail in 1960. His son had problems coping with the pressure of being an icon's child. Jackie himself succumbed to a heart attack in 1972, long before his time. Following Robinson, black and Hispanic players became not just allowed to play, but dominant among the hierarchy of stars.

The Olympics also were a forum for politics and social change. In 1924, the Games were held in Paris, signaling peace in Europe after World War I. In 1948 London demonstrated peace in Europe, again. In 1960, the U.S. hockey team, comprised of college players, defeated the Soviets, comprised of world-class professionals, at Squaw Valley, California. That same year, UCLA decathlon star Rafer Johnson defeated his Bruin teammate, C.K. Yang, along with a Soviet decathlete, in a thrilling competition in Rome. Tokyo used the 1964 Games to show that they were a trustworthy country again. Germany attempted to do the same in 1972. The Black September wing of the PLO put a crimp in those plans. Jimmy Carter pulled the U.S. out of the 1980 Soviet Olympics after the Russians invaded Afghanistan, and the U.S.S.R. retaliated by not sending a delegation to L.A. in 1984 (the most successful Olympics ever held). In the 1980 Winter Games held at Lake Placid, New York, the Americans, again consisting of untested collegians, defeated the Soviets, considered the best team in the world (professionals, all of NHL caliber) in what was dubbed the "miracle on ice." With the U.S. mired in a brutal economic crisis, it was an enormous shot in the arm. In 2008, Beijing, China put a happy face on their withering Communism. Posters of the murderous Chairman Mao leave the knowledgeable scratching their heads.

Propaganda

"Of all the arts, cinema is the most important."

\- V.I. Lenin, 1920

The period between 1918, the end of World War I, and 1939, the start of World War II, has been one of the most studied in human history. The Greek philosophers studied the Peloponnesian War to learn how to avoid a repeat of it, but ultimately saw the Greek Empire fall to Rome. The lessons emanating from the treaty of Versailles to Neville Chamberlain's capitulation to Adolf Hitler at Munich have been dissected. A certain segment of the political class appears to have a firm grasp on the lesson, which is encapsulated by the term "peace through strength." Another large segment of the intelligentsia believes something else, although what that is remains murky.

Most people see little discrepancy between the two world wars; they are part of a single global struggle with a 21-year break in between, encapsulating a larger battle lasting roughly from the Civil War to Nagasaki, or perhaps from Lexington to the Berlin Wall. This was the battle for world domination of the Industrial Revolution. At the heart of this struggle, which took on many ideological offshoots – slavery, culture, Democracy – was the harnessing of oil, iron ore and natural resources needed to propel armies and economies. Germany, America, Japan, Great Britain and France competed with each other. There was little of the de Tocquevillian goodwill embodied in Democracy in America, where "competing" businesses ultimately propped each other up in a "rising tide that lifts all boats," ostensibly through such unobtrusive organizations as the Lion's Clubs and the Rotary. No, this was more of a death struggle.

The United States retreated into splendid isolation just as they ascended to a period of its greatest power. Many have studied this lesson of history, determining that America's superpower role is not merely one the country wants to promote, but one the world needs. But precisely because the nation relinquished its greatness did other countries seize the chance to take over the world. The consequences were calamitous.

America in the 1920s and 1930s was a conundrum. On the one hand, the nation saw a huge Protestant Christian revival movement. It had both racist and anti-Catholic overtones, not just a little shadowed by the KKK in the South. Aimee Semple McPherson was a tremendously popular and charismatic evangelist, but there were rumors that she was also a highly charged sexual woman. Just as her role of Christian celebrity and possible nymph symbolized the duality of man, so to did her city, Los Angeles. On the one hand, it was the city of the Chandlers: Republican farmers and conservative Christians. On the other it was the city of the movies. Rumors of wild orgies in the mansions of movie stars were rife. One ultimately untrue story concerned "it girl" Clara Bow, said to have invited the entire USC football team to her mansion for gang sex. As recently as 1999 Los Angeles magazine was printing the story as true, but it was not.

Sex was the great tempter of the 1920s. Flappers, jazz music, Hollywood, risqué fashions, and what might be described as cabaret morality, found their way into the American culture. Long a Puritan country, by the 1920s the nation had absorbed a huge influx of foreigners from Europe and elsewhere. World War I shrunk the size of the globe, so to speak. The Lost Generation brought both American literature to Europe, and European sensibilities to America. Hollywood films were hugely popular in Europe, American stars household names on the continent. Athletics, long considered by some to be a kind of immoral waste of time, now dominated sports pages.

In the mean time, the Western Democracies failed to stop Adolf Hitler from building his war machine, or Joseph Stalin from turning Russia into a Communist hell. Winston Churchill, who planned the failed Gallipoli campaign of World War I, was considered old and out of touch in a "modern" England. He wrote a 1938 book called While England Slept, which turned out to be one of the most prescient of all time. Few paid much attention to him, especially after Neville Chamberlain declared he had achieved "peace in our time."

The Nazi sympathizer Joseph P. Kennedy was FDR's Ambassador to the Court of St. James in the late 1930s. His son, John F. Kennedy, disagreed with him over the Nazi issue. Young JFK graduated from Harvard, traveled in Europe, lived for a time with his family in Great Britain, and attended graduate school at Stanford before the war. He wrote a book called Why England Slept (1940), which echoed Churchill's themes that Hitler was on the march and needed to be stopped.

Both the Soviet Union and the National Socialist Party of Germany made it plain through their propaganda what their aims were. Each believed in world domination. Both were totalitarian governments, the ultimate in Socialism, all-encompassing Big Government described in George Orwell's 1984. Both used cinema as tools of their great crucible.

The U.S. never officially involved itself in the private industry of Hollywood. The Hayes Codes were a form of censorship meant to keep movies safe for families without scurrilous sex or immorality, but any nationalistic propaganda was the free choice of movie moguls and directors based on the appetite of the public.

Films depicting World War I bravery were popular. Westerns showing the lonely cowboys of the mythic range were big. Biblical and Napoleonic epics were all the rage. Films, however, were individualistic pursuits. The aim was to make money for the studios, for the actors and directors to get rich, for the industry to thrive. It was generally conservative. The moguls in large measure were offspring of Jewish immigrants escaping the czars. They were incredibly happy to be in America, their art mirroring their patriotism. However, American films were mainly sources of entertainment. They were not propaganda tools. Their power and influence meant they had that power and occasionally served that purpose, but not as tools of the state.

A Potemkin village

According to legend, the Russian minister Gregory Potemkin erected fake villages, called Potemkin villages, on the desolate banks of the Dnieper River. "Happy villagers" were recruited to wave and pretend all was well, in order to fool Empress Catherine II that a military campaign succeeded in enhancing new lands now in Russia's possession, on her visit to Crimea in 1787. In truth, the Crimea was poverty-stricken. The lesson of the story, apocryphal or not, was that propaganda had enormous value.

V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin, no doubt having seen the benefit of "useful idiots" like John Reed and Walter Duranty writing glowing pieces in the American press, understood the power of the cinema. It stood above the written word, even the speech or the stage, as a mesmerizing tool of influence. Used correctly it could move the masses.

Russia cinema reflected pre-Soviet culture, language and history, mixed with Communist dogma. Most notable were the Russian SFSR, Armenian SSR, Georgian SSR, Ukrainian SSR, and, to a lesser degree, Lithuanian SSR, Byelorussian SSR and Moldavian SSR. The nation's film industry was fully nationalized and therefore monopolized by the Soviet Communist Party. In a country that experienced famines, strikes, and failed economic theory resulting in genocide, film remains the one thing they actually did well. The artistic strength of the Russian soul flowered even under these oppressive times; then again, the great writers of Russian history had always flowered under oppression of one kind or another.

Russian film introduced a new view of Socialist realism. Some subjects did not appear on screen, or only in a coded form. Criticism of the Soviet Union was officially prohibited, but complaint is as Russian as apple pie is American. Unofficial Soviet art, promotion of Fascism, or horror films, were censored. The Communists, who used "free love" as a tool of recruitment meant to liberate the mind from old bourgeoisie morality, were still unsure of pornography, which on screen had an effect that they could not control.

No sooner had the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics officially come into existence on December 30, 1922, that film became their ideal propaganda tool. Vladimir Lenin declared it the greatest of mediums. He knew he could reach the masses through film more than any other way. After his death, Joseph Stalin echoed the same sentiment.

Cinema was popular in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but the war put most out of business. Numerous artists fled Russia, particularly Jews who immigrated to Jerusalem after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The first Soviet films were recycled dramas depicting the Russian Empire under the czars, heavily censored to glorify the Russian people but not the monarchy.

A religious film was somewhat popular, but the regime disavowed religion in quick order. After that the government began to make "educational" films, aimed at urging the masses to participate in Soviet activities. Citizens were told they were part of a larger engine, each a cog in the wheel that needed to run smoothly for the betterment of all.

Newsreels and documentaries included Dziga Vertov's series Kino-Pravda (1922-1925), propagandizing "Socialist realism." Filmmakers began to experiment. Lacking the lavish sets and production facilities of Hollywood, they came up with extraordinary artistic expressiveness, requiring emotive actions for performers similar to Shakespearean drama.

By 1923 there were 89 cinemas opened. Tickets were taxed. Filmmakers who objected to the government were weeded out, replaced by conformists. They were given a special place in society, rewarded for their support. New talent created the model of "Soviet film." With each succeeding year the movies distanced themselves from "decadent capitalism." This was a conundrum, since the Communists were on the one hand promoting "free love" as a form of equality, but to "expose" the immoral sex habits of the West seemed incongruous.

Circus was popular. Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) was a fictionalized, propagandistic film promoting the "virtues of the proletariat." However, as more directors made more films, they became more independent and hard to control. Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky was censored before the German invasion of the Soviet Union due to its depiction of a strong Russian leader defying an invading army of German teutonic knights. After the invasion, the film was released for propaganda purposes to considerable acclaim.

In 1926 Sovkino (Soviet cinema) established the first state-filmmaking school. Newsreels about various events accompanied lectures, reports, and political meetings. A documentary film group headed by Vertov created "image centered publicistic film." Kino-Pravda and the film Forward, Soviet! experimented with new styles. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was popular as was Hydropeat. Yuri Zheliabuzhsky made science films. Sergei Eisenstein made use of innovative montage and metaphorical qualities in his revolutionary epics, particularly October. Vsevolopd Pudovkin's Gorky's Mother (1926) developed revolutionary history. The End of St. Petersburg (1927) was well done. The House on Trubnaya and Zvenigora were poetic.

By the 1930s Stalin understood international propaganda. Aside from using Walter Duranty and the New York Times to publish fictionalized good news about his regime, he increased "Socialist realism" in films, which found an increasingly large audience beyond Russia's borders. Chapaev was excellent. Revolutionary history was glorified in Golden Mountains by Sergei Yutkevich, The Outskirts by Boris Barnet, and the Maxim trilogy by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, including The Youth of Maxim, The Return of Maxim, and The Vyborg Side. Stalin at first was very careful not to popularize the deceased Lenin lest he develop a cult following in death, but by the 1930s the dictator was comfortable with films like Mikhail Romm's Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918. Russian society was featured in Courageous Seven and City of Youth (Sergei Gerasimov). Comedies were made by Grigori Aleksandrov (Circus, Volga-Volga, The Shining Path) and The Rich Bride by Ivan Pyryev. By the Bluest of Seas by Boris Barnet was psychological, promoting enthusiasm for work, a huge problem in Soviet society by then. National heroes and literary classics were produced. Mark Donskoy made a trilogy: Maxim Gorky: The Childhood of Maxim Gorky, My Apprenticeship, and My Universities.

The Communist Party increased its central planning economy and advocated a "cultural revolution," increasing their hold on artistic freedom. Cinema was the one moneymaking operation. Stalin wanted to make maximum use of it. The Soyuzkino created autonomous studios and distribution networks under the NEP's market, now consolidated by a single planning agency. Soyuzkin include the national republics such as VUFKU. Bureaucrats formulated plans for distribution and exhibition. Naturally artistic expression suffered. Screenplays needed to go through a series of censors. Many films were terminated before production started.

Alexander Dovzhenko depicted the Ukraine (Zemlya, Earth) but by 1934 only 45 films were made in the U.S.S.R. Directors saw their careers destroyed. Eisenstein made only one movie, Alexander Nevsky (1938) in the 1930s. His Ivan Turgenev was banned. With conservatives questioning Walter Duranty's reports, contact with the West was reduced. They stopped importing films after 1931. Foreign films were exposing audiences to the obvious advantages of capitalism. The U.S.S.R. also created film technologies they previously had to get from the West. Scientists Alexander Shorin and Pavel Tager developed sound systems, cost refitting movie theaters, and audio transition.

In Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa (1931), a documentary on coal mining and heavy industry, Vertov orchestrated industrial noises. In Dezertir (1933) Pudovkin experimented "sound counterpoint" of tensions and dissonances. Alexander Nevsky, Eisenstein and composer Sergei Prokofiev had an "operatic" film style.

The party leaders ordered a "uniform style", and avant-garde pictures were phased out. The equivalent was mandated in other arts, as well. As the days of the czars became more and more a thing of the past, old ideas of style and grace went with them, replaced by peasant class artistic themes meant to appeal to everybody, no matter how illiterate. The Soviets realized that even if the proletariat could not read they could watch images, and be swayed that way.

The director of Soyuzkino and chief policy officer for the film industry, Boris Shumiatsky (1886–1938), served from 1931 to 1938. He did not like montages or aesthetic quality, preferring "linear narration." Hollywood remained an underground model, with cowboys and heroes of freedom replaced by factory workers. Always, as with the Nazis urging camp Jews that "works makes you free," the Communists desperately tried to convince the dragging peasants their factory efforts were "fun' and "exciting." This required more and more censorship and formula movies.

Chapayev (1934), co-directed by Prokofiev and Grigori Vasiliev, was based on the life of a martyred Red Army commander, battling for the revolutionary cause. He was humanized with quirks and even some humor, the single greatest attribute the long-suffering Russian people have, no matter how dark. "Peasant charm" became a cinematic quality. Musicals and comedies were rare, but Grigori Aleksandrov and his wife, the brilliant comic actress and chanteuse Lyubov Orlova managed to make some light fare.

Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will

The Nazis were the greatest propagandists in history. They were adept at technology, far ahead of the Communists. Cinema was used to devastating effect. Slogans aimed at the masses were aimed at the base instincts and emotions of people. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was a master at it. The National Socialist German Workers Party established a film department in 1930.

Goebbels, the "patron of the German film," nationalized cinema. He made use of beautiful German women and handsome man, infusing glamour. Escapism was the main theme of film. Goebbels echoed the theme that World War I could have been won had the spirit of the people been kept up. The propaganda espoused Nazi politics. The NSDAP departments included the film department of the Ministry of Propaganda, the Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer), the Chamber of Film (Reichsfilmkammer), and the film department of the Party Propaganda Department (Reichspropagandaleitung). Self-censorship was awarded, urging directors to promote "cultural value" or "value to the people," with tax breaks for their efforts. The economic systems of reward in Germany were much different and more capitalistic than the Soviets, although everything was nationalized and therefore Socialist. Adolf Hitler was in fact printing money to sustain the economy, meaning it was inevitable he would need to invade his neighbors in order to steal their resources and replenish the debt. Winston Churchill warned of this, but was a veritable John the Baptist crying in the wilderness.

The Deutsche Filmakademie Babelsberg along with a National Film Dramaturgist (Reichsfilmdramaturg) censored screenplays and production. Film criticism was prohibited. Many filmmakers left the country in the mid-1930s. Since the Weimar Republic, a system of film services existed. In 1943, there were 37 regional services and 12,042 city services. In parallel, the Party Propaganda Department (Reichspropagandaleitung) ran its own network including 32 Gaue, 171 district, and 22,357 local services. Film collections and projectors were made available to the Hitler Youth.

Propaganda was aimed at influencing large audiences. Sound technology was devised in such a way as to create an overwhelming emotional impact on big masses of people gathered as one. There was no criticism allowed. They took on a more militaristic theme, drawing on Norse mythology, black cult magic, and warrior-eroticism. It became the new mass media.

After Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo went to Hollywood, refusing to serve the National Socialist film industry as figureheads, new stars such as the Swedish actress Zarah Leander rose to fame. She had charisma as a singer with an exceptionally deep voice. The propaganda ministry carefully detailed every scene she appeared in.

Hitler, Goebbels, and Hermann Göring appeared with popular German film actors, especially female stars. Hitler hosted dinner partners with actresses Olga Tschechowa and Lil Dagover. Hermann Göring married popular actress Emmy Sonnemann. Goebbels had notorious affairs with many of them, causing his wife to leave a screening of Die Reise nach Tilsit, telling of her husband's relationship with Lida Baarova. The actress was deported back to her native Czechoslovakia before it became public.

Film actors were seduced into close proximity with the Nazi power structure, as it ensured career success, but Renate Müller's non-cooperation with her political masters resulted in her being killed. Five categories extended from "to cast at all costs even without a vacancy" (Zarah Leander, Lil Dagover, Heinz Rühmann) to "casting under no circumstances welcome."

Tax breaks for certain stars were very beneficial, but overall the government derived huge income from film production. During World War II German film stars collected money for the German Winter Relief Organization (Winterhilfswerk), but eventually things got so dire even big male stars found themselves on the front lines along with former sports heroes like Max Schmeling.

No star was bigger than Leni Riefenstahl, no film more awe-inspiring than her 1934 propaganda Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), chronicling the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, attended by more than 700,000 supporters. Riefenstahl was a young, attractive, popular German actress. Being a young woman, it is incongruous that she would have the wherewithal to accomplish such a task, but she did.

Her first movie was Das Blaue Licht (The Blue Light) in 1932. It was around this time she heard Hitler speak, and was impressed. Sensing opportunity, she began to correspond with him. Hitler enjoyed Das Blaue Licht. In 1933 he asked her to direct a film about the Nazis' annual Nuremberg rally. The party had recently taken power but there were detractors. Hitler was the fourth Chancellor of Germany in less than a year, and not well known. The world knew nothing about him. Hitler wanted them to.

Riefenstahl demurred but Hitler insisted. Riefenstahl agreed to film the 1933 Nuremberg rally (Der Sieg des Glaubens or Victory of Faith). Riefenstahl had a short time to prepare and Hitler was not comfortable in front of the camera. There were rivalries between Joseph Goebbels and other party officials to contend with, as well.

At first the film had problems, although it did well at the box office. SA Leader Ernst Röhm was prominently featured. The leader of a strange homosexual cult based on Spartan military culture, which had played a leading role in the Nazi rise to power, he was now a liability. Hitler killed him along with all potential enemies and rivals in the infamous "Night of the Long Knives." All references to Röhm were ordered erased from German history, which included the destruction of all known copies of Der Sieg des Glaubens.

In 1934, Riefenstahl recommended fellow director Walter Ruttmann to film the 1934 rally. Ruttmann planned a historical documentary of the Nazi Party from 1923 to 1934, but his vision did not match Hitler, who asked Riefenstahl to try again. She may have been forced into it, a debate that was never resolved. Hitler promised he would control the production and not allow party in-fighting to re-occur.

The film includes spectacular shots of the city of Nuremberg, with the use of close-ups for effect, indicating a sudden force affecting the people, a sense of "wake up." Herbert Windt's musical score creates build-up and momentum. It had a large budget and unlike the previous year, was well prepared.

"The rally was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting, but as a spectacular propaganda film," Susan Sontag recalled. Albert Speer, Hitler's personal architect, designed the set and coordinated much of the film. Pits were dug to create camera angles giving speakers a god-like persona. Shots of the crowd were cuts between party leaders and high-ranking officials, some of whom reenacted their speeches later in a studio.

The crew consisted of 172 people. Cameramen dressed in SA uniforms to blend in. Riefenstahl captured some 61 hours of film, requiring a massive edit job. American reporter William Shirer saw Hitler's rise from the beginning and later became the ultimate chronicler of The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich.

"This morning's opening meeting . . . was more than a gorgeous show, it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervor of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral," he observed.

Shirer hit the nail on the head. Hitler created a false religion. This is the embodiment of mass movements throughout history. While the Nazis did it more effectively, captured larger groups of people, with more devastating results than any other, false political religions are echoed in everything from racism to environmental and civil rights movements.

Triumph of the Will demonstrates the very idea of Germany itself as religion. Christian pastors and priests were alarmed by the nature of its power. Many perished in the Night of the Long Knives, or later. Hitler and Riefenstahl made use of a mythic Norse ideology existing in the German soul for centuries.

Hitler descends god-like, out of the skies, past twin cathedral spires. Church bells ring, and individuals enter a state of religious fervor over this new messiah. A shot of Reich Bishop Ludwig Müller standing in his vestments among high-ranking Nazis is meant to convey the sense the old order giving way to the new. The final parade was held in front of the Nuremberg Frauenkirche. In his fiery closing speech, Hitler compares the Nazis to a holy order. "Consecration" of party flags occurs when Hitler touches the "blood banners." He mesmerizes all, even, at least according to the film, the local domestic pets. He commands hundreds of thousands of followers, all too happy to do his will.

"Hitler is cast as a veritable German messiah who will save the nation, if only the citizenry will put its destiny in his hands," commented Frank P. Tomasulo in Triumph,

Power. "It is our will that this state and this Reich shall endure through the coming millennia."

The film is also the first massive display of German military strength since World War I. Huge troop movements and equipment are displayed, alarming the world, frightening many, and reminding the people of the power at their disposal. Much of the equipment was not real, but the imagery seemed real.

Eagles and Swastikas reference the Roman Legions with party members, soldiers and Hitler Youth in more ominous light, a warning to both Germans and potential enemies of the potential thus wielded. In another scene Hitler arrives in an airplane.

"Flying in an airplane was a luxury known only to a select few in the 1930s, but Hitler had made himself widely associated with the practice, having been the first politician to campaign via air travel," according to Kenneth Poferl.

His image was defined, the movement glamorized. Hitler's speech to the SA also serves as a warning that no more Röhms or "homosexual cults" will be tolerated. He alone is the chief. The key to Nazi propaganda was to completely obliterate the opposition, whatever that was. Not so much as a tiny hint of "right" is accorded their enemies. They are immoral, illegitimate, evil.

The film also unifies Germany, which had only been confederated 64 years earlier. The theme of "one Germany . . . one leader" rings constantly. There is no room for doubt. Unity is seen throughout this film, even in the camps where soldiers live. Nuremberg itself is very uniform and clean. Tents are perfectly aligned. Shirtless, equal, unified men give off a gleaming sense of masculine virility, all for one. The names of towns or old strongholds are all called out for the camera to emphasize they now are part of a single order; not Prussia, not Bavaria, but Germany.

"The concept of labor will no longer be a dividing one but a uniting one, and no longer will there be anybody in Germany who will regard manual labor any less highly than any other form of labor," Hitler tells them.

Children convey a unified future. "We want to be a united nation, and you, my youth, are to become this nation," Hitler says, making special emphasis of the word "my" as in ownership of them. "In the future, we do not wish to see classes and cliques, and you must not allow them to develop among you. One day, we want to see one nation."

The Nazi Party, the state, and the people, many in peasant farmers' costumes and other traditional clothing, greet Hitler as a unified force. Torchlight processions celebrate a medieval Karneval celebration, the Imperial German flag alongside the Swastika, and a ceremony where Hitler pays his respects to the World War I dead. All of this is mystical and implores a new faith to right old wrongs or failings. The party is Hitler. Hitler is Germany. Germany is Hitler!

He advocates they should not be satisfied with the status quo, a reference to the

descent from power since World War I. They must believe in themselves. Pride is the bulwark of this belief. Purification is the key to this belief. They are Aryan. All others are sick, weak, handicapped, unhealthy or impure. While unifying, it also divides, but leaves no room for those left out.

"[T]he elements that have become bad, and therefore do not belong with us!" he tells them. "Inferior" people must have no place. Julius Streicher stressed the importance of purification. Giving examples, once-great Euro powers are now reduced to melting pots of scruffy non-Aryans in over a century of fruitless upheaval. weakening a once great peoples. Germany is the hope of the world. "Racial injustices" have been suffered by Germany at the hands of Jewish Communists and undesirables. Only by believing in him can Germany rise again, because he will rid them of impurities in society, all to their benefit.

Rudolph Hess, in the last scene of Triumph, leads the throng in a chant of "Heil Hitler, hail victory, hail victory!" Everyone supports him in verbal faith to their leader and his trusted advisors.

"Long live the National Socialist Movement! Long live Germany!" Hitler implores them, and the crowd goes wild.

In the closing speech of Triumph of the Will, Hitler enters a room from a pack of people, then implores the people to subordinate themselves to a greater cause. The theme of this sentence and the whole film plays on this. Herein is the grand difference between conservativism/Christianity and other kinds of movements. Conservatism builds on the individual relationship of each person with Christ, the knowledge all lives have a specific purpose. It develops the theme of rugged individualism, only building to a large movement one voice at time. It is the ultimate grassroots theme, embodied by the individual rights of gun owners, to use one example. The Nazis immediately took guns away from citizens, operating on the exact opposite theme. Communism, while substantially different from the Nazis, nevertheless is the same statist, Socialist governmental vision. There is no room for rugged individualism.

In Triumph of the Will, Hitler promises that the "new state" will be a "thousand-year Reich." This references Christ in the book of Revelation, who in a battle with Satan defeats him, then bounds him for 1,000 years. "Hitler is the Party, Hitler," hundreds of thousands chant. The insanely large crowds (over 1 million attended the rallies) are as much a part of the film, actors playing parts, as Hitler and the other pageantry. The camera focuses on Swastikas above Hitler, then ends with the images of this Swastika imposed on Nazis marching in column.

Hitler's speech, the rally and the film created a huge following. It premiered on March 28, 1935. People in theatres watches as did the live crowds, as if rapt with attention to a sermon. Within two months the film earned 815,000 Reichsmark, one of the three most profitable films of that year. Hitler called it an "incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our movement." Riefenstahl was rewarded with the German Film Prize (Deutscher Filmpreis), a gold medal at the 1935 Venice Biennale, and the Grand Prix at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris.

Film historian Richard Taylor said Triumph was not used for propaganda, but he is in the minority. "Triumph of the Will seduced many wise men and women, persuaded them to admire rather than to despise, and undoubtedly won the Nazis friends and allies all over the world," wrote The Independent in 2003.

British documentarian Paul Rotha called it tedious. Others despised its content. By today's standards it does not seem so exciting, but one must place themselves in those perilous times to gauge its true meaning to Germans searching for answers after the carnage of World War I.

During World War II, Frank Capra create a response, a film series called Why We Fight, eight newsreels commissioned by the United States government splicing Triumph of the Will, recontextualized to aid the Allies. Triumph "fired no gun, dropped no bombs. But as a psychological weapon aimed at destroying the will to resist, it was just as lethal," said Capra.

Later clips from Triumph were to make fun of Hitler, the Nazi salute, the "goose stepping" marchers, and other staples of Nazi imagery. Others followed suit, playing off the individualism of the Westerner with the images of German massed automatons.

After the war, Riefenstahl was imprisoned for four years for allegedly being a Nazi sympathizer. She was not allowed to make films again. Nevertheless, her film has been studied as was Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. She has been compared to D. W. Griffith, whose The Birth of a Nation was controversial and racially vitriolic, yet brilliant. It is shown in educational settings, but the Internet and YouTube.com have completely ended that restriction. Riefenstahl said she was used and unaware of the genocide later perpetrated on millions. Triumph, she pointed out, contains "not one single anti-Semitic word," although it does show Julius Streicher saying, "A people that does not protect its racial purity will perish." Roger Ebert said "the very absence of anti-Semitism in Triumph of the Will looks like a calculation," not unlike the lack of outward hatred seen by visitors to the 1936 Olympics. Riefenstahl called it a Gesamtkunstwerk (holistic work of art).

"If you see this film again today you ascertain that it doesn't contain a single reconstructed scene," she said in1964. "Everything in it is true. And it contains no tendentious commentary at all. It is history. A pure historical film . . . it is film-vérité. It reflects the truth that was then in 1934, history. It is therefore a documentary. Not a propaganda film. Oh! I know very well what propaganda is. That consists of recreating events in order to illustrate a thesis, or, in the face of certain events, to let one thing go in order to accentuate another. I found myself, me, at the heart of an event which was the reality of a certain time and a certain place. My film is composed of what stemmed from that."

She claimed she "just observed and tried to film it well. The idea that I helped to plan it is downright absurd." It is "by general consent [one] of the best documentaries ever made," according to Roger Ebert.

It reflects evil while posing the question of "a classic question of the contest between art and morality: is there such a thing as pure art, or does all art make a political statement?" asked Ebert.

Susan Sontag said it was the "most successful, most purely propagandistic film ever made, whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker's having an aesthetic or visual conception independent of propaganda." Sontag said Riefenstahl was involved in the planning and design of the Nuremberg ceremonies. She says this proves she was not just an artist but a propagandist. With some 30 cameras and a crew of 150, it was a highly orchestrated set piece with her as its general. She also made Olympia in 1938, a documentary of the 1936 Games.

"Anyone who defends Riefenstahl's films as documentary," Sontag stated, "if documentary is to be distinguished from propaganda, is being disingenuous. In Triumph of Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; 'reality' has been constructed to serve the image."

Brian Winston in The Movies as History: Visions of the Twentieth Century, an anthology edited by David Ellwood, said Riefenstahl's use of mise en scène was impressive in its use of re-stagings. Nicholas Reeves write "many of the most enduring images of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler derive from Riefenstahl's film." Directors Peter Jackson, and Ridley Scott call Triumph of the Will inspirations from an artistic point of view. Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator satirized it.

Riefenstahl's moving cameras, long focus lenses, distorted perspective, aerial photography, use of music and cinematography, were revolutionary at the time. Regardless of what anybody says of it in modern times, it cannot be discounted for its effect as part of a phenomenon that nobody has ever come close to explaining. The music of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, slowly turning into the Horst-Wessel-Lied, is extraordinary. Her focus on the plane, the thunderous applause and cheering crowds, and the enthusiastic close-ups are truly messianic in nature.

The montage of attendees of the Reich Party Congress, cut to the opening ceremony with Rudolf Hess, demonstrates Nazi hierarchy: Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Fritz Todt, Robert Ley, and Julius Streicher. Cuts of the outdoor Reichsarbeitsdienst (Labor Service) rally, with pseudo-military drills, is amazing. The torchlight SA parade in which Viktor Lutze speaks to the crowds creates the sense of black mysticism that indeed operated within official non-Christian Nazi circles.

The Hitler Youth rally and introduction of Hitler by Baldur von Schirach prepares the crowd for sacrifice. Everything is militaristic. General Werner von Blomberg assembles a military pass and review, featuring Wehrmacht cavalry and armored vehicles, showing how war-like the Germans are. Another torch lit Hitler speech declares unity.

Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Viktor Lutze walk through a long expanse with over 150,000 SA and SS troops standing at attention, an impressive display. Party flags touch the Blutfahne (the same cloth flag said to have been carried by the fallen Nazis during the Beer Hall Putsch). Hitler delivers his closing speech, reaffirming that, "All loyal Germans will become National Socialists. Only the best National Socialists are party comrades!" The entire crowd sings the Horst-Wessel-Lied. Silhouetted men in Nazi party uniforms march in formation as the lyrics "Comrades shot by the Red Front and the reactionaries march in spirit together in our columns" are sung.

It is ironic that when the Allies finally won World War II, the war crimes tribunals were held in the city of their great triumph, Nuremberg.

Hitler, Gandhi and the lie of moral relativism

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.

\- Adolf Hitler

Christians and other religions, at least true fundamental believers, advocate the existence of evil, which is given the name of Satan among many others. Satan is the "great deceiver," the father of all lies. He moves about in our corrupt world. How, exactly, remains a mystery, but the world is his. God has allowed him to be loosed on the world. Again a mystery: why? But the struggle is eternal, generations of man merely players on this chessboard. One form of evil, whether it be slavery, nationalism, Nazism, is seemingly defeated, only to be replaced by another face, another theme, another false prophet. Always, moral relativism.

When Muslim extremists destroyed the World Trade Center, part of the Pentagon, and a plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001, the ghosts of Emma Goldman, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Karl Marx whispered in the ears of those envious of America and told them, "Aha, here it is. Backlash against the success of United States. Tell the world the Americans brought this upon themselves. There is no evil. There is no morality. It is all relative. There is only the here and now. Why should America be so successful while others fail? It's not fair. Let the Americans suffer for once."

In the 20th Century two political contemporaries, Adolf Hitler of Germany and Mohandas Gandhi of India, were polar opposites, yet in studying their methods one sees how evil exists, and that moral relativism is immoral.

Hitler used demagogic psychological powers to liberate the unconscious of the German people and articulate their latent aggressiveness. Freud's evaluation of human nature is the best answer to the unanswerable question, "How could Nazi Germany happen?" In a perverse way, Hitler was the wrong man at the right time and in the right place. This is the way it is in politics and history. Others had their time altered, through Shakespearean drama, simple bad timing or murderous tragedy. Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and William Jennings Bryan help to fill out this list.

But Hitler and Gandhi seem to transcend their time. They were not constrained by electoral cycles or term limits. They were the faces of their countries, for good or bad, and beyond that. They represented the entire moral spectrum of humanity.

In Hitler, we see perhaps the most influential man of the 20th Century. He is not the Man of the Century. Time magazine said Albert Einstein was, but even in identifying Einstein, it can be said that if there were no Hitler, Einstein's role would have been diminished. Einstein exists as a significant historical figure in part because he opposed, or juxtaposed, Hitler. Without Hitler, Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, even Douglas MacArthur, would not have been nearly the giants they were. Franklin Roosevelt's place would be far more controversial.

Without Hitler, Communism probably would not have arisen as an international behemoth. It was in opposing Hitler that the Soviet Union and Stalin reached prominence they never would have known had they just remained in the background. Without the rise of Russia, China would not have gone to Chairman Mao, Korea would not have happened, and neither would Vietnam. President Harry Truman spoke of a domino effect. He applied it to Communism. No domino was bigger and more powerful than Adolf Hitler.

Hitler started the jet program that started the Americans on a race to get there first, thus creating an atomic bomb that probably would not have come along for years. It would have delayed bombs built in Russia and China, and the Russian space program.

Without Hitler there would not have been a Berlin Wall, East Germany, an Iron Curtain and a Soviet Bloc. Without Hitler there might not be an Israel, and the Communist spin-off that led to war in Southeast Asia and Pol Pot's genocides. Without Hitler Gandhi would not have liberated India, and the British Empire would not have crumbled, at least not so precipitously. Without Hitler, England and the U.S. would have existed on relatively equal footing for many years.

Without Hitler, Harry Truman would not have had to drop the atomic bomb and Tom Dewey might have beaten him in 1948. He probably would have been succeeded either by William Howard Taft's son, Robert Taft, or maybe Adlai Stevenson. Without Hitler, countless people who died on the battlefields of World War II would have made names for themselves in politics, the sciences, in sports and on movie screens.

Without Hitler John Kennedy would not have been a war hero. His brother Joe probably would have become President. Without Hitler, local business leaders in Whittier, California would not have asked a young Navy lieutenant to run for Congress in 1946. Richard Nixon would not have had the Communist scourge and Alger Hiss to campaign against. There would not have been a Supreme Commander to ask him to be his running mate, and there probably would never have been a Watergate.

Without Hitler, the dividing line between right and wrong, between good and evil, would have been much blurrier. The fuzzy morality of Emma Goldman and Karl Marx would have more easily assuaged its way into the thinking of a fat and happy populace. We would have been much more willing to be seduced by the Socialistic propaganda of John Steinbeck's descriptions of the Great Depression and an evil business climate to blame for it. Without Hitler America may well have resembled Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a novel that makes no mention of him or World War II. Without Hitler there would not have been something to rally around, and America probably would not have ascended to such superpower status, a level of power and influence unrivaled by Alexander's Greece, Caesar's Rome, Napoleonic France, or the British Empire.

The mind can go many places on a subject like this. Page after page could be filled with wild scenarios and what-could-have-beens. Suffice to say, the point is made, and the point is this. Somebody, probably a Christian minister, once said that, "All things happen for some good reason." There are many reasons to dispute this claim. Certainly the Jewish people might need some convincing. As insane as the concept sounds to some, it may be said that Hitler's existence on this Earth resulted in a change in the course of history that turned the 20th Century. This, quite simply, is a good thing, but it also is a mighty tiger's tail to ride, a whirlwind of Biblical proportions.

Prior to Hitler, racism was endemic. It was so pervasive as to be simply considered the status quo. How else to explain how the most civilized nations on this planet, Christian countries that produced the art of Shakespeare and Beethoven and Mozart and Michelangelo, routinely sold the flesh of slaves to each other like corn, wheat or ivory, at least until, in America, where Americans shed blood in so doing, using laws written by Americans, not forced to do so by any other country; the practice came to an end once and all in the 1860s?

Hitler, the Nazis and World War II, along with Communism but even more than Communism, triggered a worldwide reaction, a revulsion that completely changed the way man looks at each other. Liberalism rode high and heavy out of this. Germany is today an extremely liberal nation, its government generally Socialist, and while there are strains of nationalism within its borders, the average German citizen considers liberal revulsion against its past to be a virtual religion. This scenario has played itself out in most European nations. Spain re-visited its inquisition and Fascistic past, rejecting it and much of the Catholic doctrine behind it. Great Britain became in large measure an apologist for its long history of repressions and invasions. France simply donned a loser's armor, rejecting traditions and greatness. Belgium is today on its knees in abject apology over its racist policies in the Congo. These are merely a few of the European nations, among many of the world's nations, that have turned Left in large measure as reaction to the fact the Nazis existed and were white supremacists.

In a strange way, this liberal turn has come at a cost in Christian faith within many of these nations. Instead of calling this evil the Beast it is, many have taken on the Keynesian theme that man, and therefore government, has the answers and therefore can stop the Hitlers of the future. They have proceeded down this path of folly at their own peril.

Christianity has not diminished, it has simply shifted in populace. It is no longer the religion of choice in large measure among the middle class white European bourgeoisie, but is a force of nature, largely unnoticed by the media, in Asia, in Latin America, in much of the old Third World, and in certain segments of the old East Bloc like Poland. America remains the last great industrial power to host a huge, powerful, vocal, never-say-die Christian poplulation that will not lose faith no matter how marginalized they are by the political intelligentsia. Conservatism remains so powerful a force in America mainly because the country is not burdened by such horrific past events as much of Europe. Even slavery can be viewed through the prism of a white populace that eventually ended the practice. The Indian Wars, while horrific as described in Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, were never the genocide that so many other countries allowed to happen within their borders or colonies.

History and morality

So, again, getting back to Adolf Hitler; both American high power and conservative influence, and also the enormous rise of Left-leaning liberal, social, politically correct groupthink, owes itself to this German mass murderer and the world he wrought.

Does that mean that if we could time travel we should not have sent assassins to Germany in the 1920s with orders to terminate Hitler with extreme prejudice? Yes, we should have eliminated Hitler if we could have. But this is all water under the bridge. Sometimes it takes great evil for great good to fight. No place is this more evident than in the confrontation with Hitler.

History records him to be the most evil man in history. It is often pointed out that Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung did more damage. But Stalin and, in turn Mao, are products of Hitler. It is ironic that Hitler despised Communism as much or more than the U.S. government did in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Stalin and Mao had more time to do their killing. Much of Stalin's territory grabbing resulted from historical opportunity. Hitler was the most blatant land-grabber and warmonger of all time.

There is a sense of chauvinism among the modern class. We tend to look back at history and dehumanize people, especially when studying warfare. Genghis Khan and the Mongol hordes, for example, are viewed as bloodthirsty beyond our current ability to understand. The Romans were a cruel empire. They enslaved, raped, pillaged, took the spoils of war, and terrorized populations through crucifixion. There are conflicting dimensions in studying the warfare and killing methods of the old warriors. On the one hand, war was a much more confined process. Most of the killing was hand-to-hand, or in relatively small numbers. This required a certain kind bravery and savagery. Much of the killing done today is "anti-septic," "push button," "computerized," and "surgical." But we have our modern examples of very personal savagery. Saddam Hussein was the most visible of recent times until the United States decided to put a stop to him. The Taliban in Afghanistan, the torturers of Bangladesh in the early 1970s, and the necklace specialists of South Africa's ANC come to mind.

Furthermore, the study of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle put a much more human face on Mankind long before the birth of Christ. Humanity has always had deep thinkers. Compassion for our fellow human beings is as old as a desire to kill him. Biblical scholars will point to the study of Caen and Abel.

However, the viewpoint of modern vanity is that by the 20th Century, the world had matured. The rise of Hitler's Germany, however, is alarming and confusing. Communism was a long time coming. Many books and movements heralded it. We find Communism in the works of Rousseau, Thoreau, Marx, Engels, Goldman, and many others. Communism was a social movement of the industrial age.

National Socialism may not have been a new idea, per se. Nationalism is as old as nations, and it is not necessarily a bad word. Moses might have been a called a nationalist. Teddy Roosevelt was a nationalist. Certainly, it is a concept that was always popular in Germany. Otto von Bismarck was a highly successful nationalist. In 1870, the year the Germans fought France to the encirclement of Paris, he accomplished the great feat of unifying all the German states and "tribes" into one country. The common language, culture and arrogance of the German people built itself up to what many think was their "natural" militarism, resulting in World War I.

Kaiser Wilhelm's attempt to subjugate Europe into a Greater Germany was not entirely the result of saber rattling. The blunder of nations was in not recognizing the killing machines they had created. The German plan for the invasion of France in 1914 had been sitting in the Kaiser's desk since his chief of staff drew it up in 1905. It said that the troops would march into France through Belgium with the "right sleeve of the last German brushing the Atlantic." It was the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist that drew the Balkans, Russia and eventually Turkey into a world war originally planned as a French-German re-match. The Americans, the Dardanelle campaign, and the Russian Revolution were not considerations.

The point of this is German culture. The Versailles Treaty laid out harsh penalties on Germany for waging war and trying to impose their culture on everybody else. Despite criticisms of the treaty, the bottom line is that Germany got what they deserved. Germany is and was a country of cultured people. The fact that people of such culture could be put under the sway of a Viennese corporal is the great dilemma of history.

Hitler and Napoleon have been compared. They have their similarities. Hitler was a corporal and Napoleon was known as "the little corporal." Napoleon was not actually a corporal, but in one of his early campaigns moved freely amongst the enlisted personnel, a rarity for officers. The nickname stemmed from this incident.

Sometimes mass movement is proletarian in nature. The rise of Napoleon and the rise of Hitler are quite different, however. They both emerged from economic chaos, but Napoleon emerged from the French Revolution, which was in effect a civil war. Hitler emerged from a depression that resulted from Germany's failed war. Napoleon came from a movement that had "won" in their battle with the French monarchy. Hitler came from a standpoint of abject failure. The use of their forces by Napoleon and Hitler were quite different, too. Napoleon utilized foreign mercenaries to man his enlisted forces, a tradition in his country that still is in effect with the French Foreign Legion. Hitler would never have thought of such a thing. His forces were made up of "German supermen."

The greatest similarity between Napoleon and Hitler is the fact that they rose to power over cultured people. There is arrogance, perhaps even a racist arrogance, which allows us to tell ourselves that Arabs, Persians, Africans, Indians, Hispanics, Chinese and islanders could be swayed by such totalitarians. A kind of British Darwinism has always tinted our vision of the Third World. This is the same view that gave the English a sense of destiny in the ruling of dark-skinned peoples. Surely we can be trusted to rule over them! Middle class conservatives despise academic elite classes who pre-suppose the same thing for them, but of course the middle class is mostly white.

But the arrogance plays itself out in a view of modern barbarism or, at the very least, chaos. Whites look at Africa, Latin America, much of the Middle East, and tell themselves that these places have problems ruling themselves because of some kind of endemic inferiority within native populations.

Maybe we are just at that moment in the changing ebb and flow of history where white people are, for the most part, in control. But some important points need to be made. First, some Third World cultures have a lot more history than some elite whites are willing to consider. The Aztecs were not just plains Indians. They were inventors and pyramid builders of the highest order. They were scientists and mathematicians. They also employed some hideously barbaric practices. Some moral relativists have excused these practices as simply being part of their particular culture.

White supremacists and sheet-wearing Ku Klux Klanners would have you believe that Africans have always been little more than "jungle bunnies." That modernization imposed upon them by their white enslavers and colonizers is the only reason they have any foothold at all within the modern world. But these dunderheads do not take into account the brilliant military strategist Hannibal, who led the North African Carthaginians in wars that gave the Romans all they can handle. This included a magnificent surprise Alpine crossing that led them to the gates of Rome. Nor does it give much credence to their offspring, the Moors, who conquered Sicily and much of Italy. They were responsible for a great deal of the culture and racial make-up of the Mediterranean. William Shakespeare's Othello was about a Moor.

The Chinese were mathematicians and linguists. The Egyptians were architects and workaholics. Politics, wars and the tides of history met an Age of Enlightenment in which white Europeans became the inventors of the world, giving a disproportionate concept that they are responsible for all progress.

At some point, the Europeans became the educated class, the rulers, the militarists, the organizers, the inventors and the conquerors. There is no denying they are the majority architects of the world. However, and here is the point, this is not to say that this resulted in straightforward progress for humanity. Hitler, Gandhi, moral relativism, racism and the Third World are tied together with it.

The Christian worldview is really no different than any other moral worldview. At the heart of all good religions - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist - is compassion for humanity. Compassion for humanity has been the conflict of man and governments since time immemorial. It is not relative. It was as much a matter of right and wrong, good and evil when Caen slayed Abel, as it was when the Aztecs sacrificed virgins by cutting out their still-breathing hearts, and when the S.S. sent trainloads of Jews into the gas chambers. There is no excuse for it. It cannot be cloaked under the guise of culture, bravery or retaliation. Refuting the concept of moral relativism lies at the center of great, unifying political moves, when countries and leaders decide to "bury the hatchet" and make real deals for lasting peace with hated enemies. It is for this reason that the Palestinians, oppressed and terrorized as they are, cannot use moral relativism as an excuse for sending suicide bombers into Israel. It is the reason that Arab extremists, frustrated by English-American demarcation lines resulting from the break-up of the Ottoman Empire that put the "infidels" in charge of the oil, must be held responsible for their actions. They cannot excuse their actions as justifiable backlash.

Compassion for humanity is the responsibility of everybody, especially the ones in power. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all emphasized this. Even if we were to accept the racially charged view that white Europeans are in control of the world because they are intellectually superior, one thing is as clear as clear can be.

White Europeans are not morally superior!

By no stretch of the imagination are white Europeans morally inferior. Morality, good and bad, is the single strain that connects all humans throughout history. It supersedes Christianity or any organized religion. It is the basic "free will" that all people have always had, from the cavemen to the scientists. It is inherent in man, a struggle between God and the devil, fought within the breast of all beings.

White accusations of immorality among the dusky peoples, the "great unwashed," and the wild-eyed natives of the Earth, is hypocritical blindness in light of what whites have wrought upon the world. This goes back to the question of German culture. The German-speaking people of Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, Beethoven, Freud, Einstein, Martin Luther and Thomas Mann, embraced Christianity. They were thoughtful enough about it to reform their Catholicism and create one of the strongest of the Protestant offshoots, Lutheranism. They are people renowned for their work ethic, their intelligence, and their physical beauty.

These people elected Hitler, waged war on the world twice in 20 years, leading to the deaths of more about 100 million people. They sent 12 million people to concentration camps, and in the process came close to wiping out European Jewry.

As a result, an entire victim class of minority's points to Hitler as an example of inherent white racism that must always be kept down, checked, exposed and dealt with. Hitler's victims were not just his countrymen, the Jews, the soldiers and the refugees, but generations of good, decent white people who now live in his shadow. This is a wicked shadow. It is a shadow of aspersion that leaves that trace of question on the heads of white people who operate in a world in which the unspoken question is whether they are racists. It has caused many whites to apply guilt to themselves, setting out to bend over backwards proving they are not.

While not advocating affirmative action quotas, white guilt or P.C., there exists today among whites, an increased sensitivity for people, and a compassion for others, that is a very good thing.

Hitler's Germany is not the only example of white people unable to lay claim to a monopoly on morality. Communism was promoted and maintained, in large part, by whites. The KGB was a "white" organization. The excesses of Communism cannot be justified as a backlash against exploitation any more than the Nazi death camps are "understandable" after World War I, Muslim terrorism is a reaction to Lawrence of Arabia, or the KKK was okay because the South lost.

Another point needs to be made, to dispel myths promoted by the Left for too long without being debunked by the right. Ever since the McCarthy Blacklist, liberals have been identified with Communism, and conservatives have been identified with Nazism. Liberals, trying to get the spotlight off of them when their Communist sympathies were exposed, attempted to say there is a far Right, an extreme element of conservatism, and that this is the Nazi equivalent of their Communism.

Eventually, their willing accomplices in the Fifth Column picked up on this. Historical references to the Nazis were flavored with phrases like "far Right" and "Right-wing." The thinkers who inspired Socialism and Communism include Thoreau, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, Emma Goldman, and to a lesser extent, Dostoevsky. These people were all "true believer" liberals. They saw intrinsic flaws in capitalism and felt that workers were exploited victims. They espoused changes in government and/or philosophy, and were part of a worldwide movement operating in France, the United States, Russia, and Germany, among other nations. There is a direct, undeniable link between them and the Sino/Soviet Communist bloc that eventually formed.

Some of these "icons of the Left" are embarrassing to the progressive liberals who have had to try and promote their causes. The question at this juncture is whether or not they are swimming against the tide of history. Ronald Reagan would say they are. Whittaker Chambers might take a more pessimistic view. Unable to make these people into heroic figures, the liberals then turned to the Right and tried to pin an equally horrendous historical movement on them. Hitler's Germany, they decided, was Right-wing!

They tried to find similarities between the "party of Lincoln" and Hitler; between Teddy Roosevelt and National Socialism; between conservative principles of free speech, lower taxation, business promotion, smaller government, rugged individualism, greater liberty, and German totalitarianism; between Christianity and Norse cult mythology; between Dwight Eisenhower and . . . Heinz Guderian? They tried to find all of these similarities. Of course, there are no similarities. Desperately they tried to find some correlation. They could not find it in the matter of African American civil rights, since Democrats ran the Jim Crow South. They only found a few limited places to go. American country clubs, whose members were mostly Republicans, and who discriminated against Jews, were trotted out as examples. McCarthyism was their easiest target, because most of the Communists found were Jewish. So, they grasped for this straw. They decided that not letting Jews play golf, and the fact that most U.S. Communists were Jews, was a direct link to Adolf Hitler. This sophist lie was allowed to grow in part because the dominant media culture - Hollywood and the networks - had the power to orchestrate a backlash against McCarthyism.

At the heart of this Leftist lie is moral relativism. Liberals must try to reconcile their evil, Communism, and say that their "opponents," the conservatives, have an equally evil ideologue hiding in their closet. But the concept does not fly, not only because of the failure to find linkage between the far Right and the Nazis in the 20th Century, but also throughout history. In other words, they are trying to play down their dark side with a concept that "everybody's doing it."

Playing devil's advocate, what "ammunition" do liberals have when looking for historical "evidence" of the link? They try and say that conservatism and despotic dictators and military leaders have something in common. For some reason that has no good explanation, the phrase "further to the right than Attila the Hun" has made itself into popular parlance. Popular Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh even jokes about it. He says he occupies the "Attila the Hun Chair for the Advancement of Conservative Studies at the Excellence in Broadcasting Institute." Because Attila was the leader of a "Germanic tribe," this might explain the so-called historical "connection" between Nazis and conservatives. There seems to be no other good explanation. Attila fought the Romans, but he also was allied with them at times, although he was a notorious double-crosser. Because he was an effective military commander, this is supposed to make him a "conservative." George Patton admired him and was compared to him. Patton was a Republican.

The Left will point to the Ku Klux Klan and try to make that connection, but this falls short. First of all, the KKK rose out of the defeated South. The defeated South was run by the Confederacy. The Confederates were Democrats. The Union elected the Republican President, Abe Lincoln. The KKK was the shadow para-military of the Jim Crow South for 100 years, operating like Al Qaeda's relationship with the Taliban. Of course, the Jim Crow South was run 100 percent by the Democrats. Thinking blacks like Clarence Thomas and Condoleezza Rice, who grew up and recognized this truth, chose the Republicans.

The Left says that after Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights Act, the South abandoned the Democrats and went Republican because the Republicans held the kind of racist views they could live with. This does not pass the "smell test." Without strong Republicans support, the Civil Rights Act never would have seen the light of day. The South went Republican because the GOP offered the right kind of leadership to husband them from Jim Crow to the modern world. Bigoted Democrats like Albert Gore, Sr., Robert Byrd and William Fulbright fought tooth-and-nail against civil rights, but the party has not had the gumption to face these realities.

The Left throws out the name David Duke, a former KKK leader who tried to run for office as a Republican in Louisiana. Unlike the Democrats, who fail to excoriate their Gores, Byrds, and Fulbrights, the GOP never gave Duke the time of day. He was drummed out of the corps in short order without any decent endorsements, lost, was all but disgraced by the Right, at last word lives anonymously another country, and most people only know who he is if they are prompted to do a Google search.

The Left might point out that in the 1930s, a small group of Republican businessmen tried to get a World War I Marine hero to orchestrate a Right-wing coup against Franklin Roosevelt. The Marine, Smedley Butler, was apparently a Republican. He played along just enough to turn them in, and the coup never came close to getting anywhere. It consisted of a tiny handful of people and had no popular support. Had it been exposed, the Republican Party would have quashed it before anybody else would have had to. This did not stop Hollywood from making as much hay of it as they could. The book Seven Days in May was based on these events. In 1963 a John Schlesinger movie, using a Rod Serling screenplay, starred Burt Lancaster, Fredric March, Ava Gardner and Kirk Douglas.

The Left might try and say that anti-Semitism and racism are products of the "elite classes" of the Right. These ideas have fomented for centuries among ruling classes of people who are supposed to be conservatives. This is the so-called "linkage" between the Right and the Nazis. Anti-Semitism and racism are as old as man. They have found homes in a lot of places that might be many things, but are not historical pre-cursors of the Republican Party. Does anybody think the Egyptians are the ideological brethren of Ronald Reagan? Or anybody else in the Arab world, where anti-Semitism has always been a hotbed? Since the Republican Party is also the home of the Christian Coalition, about the only linkage to racism is anti-slavery. It was the "Christian Coalition" (abolitionists), if you will, of the 19th Century who forced the issue of slavery.

The real linkage of the past with Hitler, anti-Semitism and the gas chambers emanates from decades of atheism starting with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which was hi-jacked by Margaret Sanger's abortion movement, then by the eugenics movements of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw; and today might be called the humanists.

Conservatism does not come to somebody the way dark hair, short stature, or athletic ability comes to him or her. They choose this path, usually because they thought a lot about it and wanted to do what was right. The information needed to make informed choices is readily available. One need not learn all this studying for a doctoral thesis at an expensive graduate school. Knowledge need not cede to the elites who occupy the tenured professorships of certain colleges. The daily newspaper, magazines, the Internet, libraries, and bookstores are freely available. Many conservatives arrived at their conclusions because they studied history and found not just facts and figures, but philosophies and answers to eternal questions of good and evil. Many decided history does not excuse moral relativism.

Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf

Adolf Hitler united Germany through division. He did it using methods not uncommon to elite organizations, whether they are fraternities, the Marine Corps, Navy SEALS, or Masons. He did it by putting Germany through a kind of "boot camp," separating what he saw was the "wheat from the chaff." It was a harrowing time of round-ups, violence, reprisals, re-education and test. People knew fear. But when Krystalnacht, the "night of the broken glass" and the other events described in William Shirer's The Nightmare Years were over, Germans felt like the frat guys who were accepted, the Rangers who were still standing. They were in the inner circle that knew what the secret password was. Once this happened, Hitler said they were uber alles. He told them what they wanted to hear. The Jews, he said, were responsible for their downfall. Now that they and their kind - Communists, anarchists, homosexuals, intellectuals, clergy - were eliminated, Germany could rule the world, as was their mystic right.

Hitler's hatred of Communism, of course, is still another peace of "evidence" the Left tries to use as the link between the Right - who hate Communism, too - and the Nazis. The fact that America allied ourselves with Communism to defeat Hitler effectively ends that theory.

One of the great arguments throughout history and psychology is the "nature vs. nurture" concept. This argument has its place in dissecting Nazi Germany. Did Germany turn to Hitler because of some natural tendency within the country? Did Hitler tap into some kind of dormant part of the psyche that is as much a part of all of us as our hearts, our lungs, and our bones? Or was Nazi Germany a product of particular events at a particular time in history? Of course, nobody really knows the answer. Probably a little, or a lot, of both. But there is another theory, and this is one that may pose a partial explanation for the violent, beautiful 20th Century.

This is the theory that says that the devil decided to go on the offensive, and that Hitler was merely his puppet, his mouthpiece, his general. As Mick Jagger once sang, "I rode a tank, in a general's rank, when the blitzkrieg reigned, and the bodies stank." The name of the song? "Sympathy for the Devil."

Humans do not have access to the devil's archives. The psychological answer has many adherents. Julius Strasser's critique is that Hitler unlocked Germany's "mass unconscious." Somehow he found their secret desires. According to Freud's terminology, the German people's mass superego was submerged in their mass id, allowing them to give "full vent" to an "unarticulated desire for aggression."

General Douglas MacArthur once said, "No one hates war more than a soldier." However, there is a psychological desire for aggression. There is a part of us that glory in it. Once we feel that we have freed ourselves to think this way, it is like opening up a psychological valve allowing us to vent this aggression. When John Kennedy was contemplating bombing Cuba during the 1962 Missile Crisis, he reportedly said, "It sure would feel good," and he was not kidding. Right or wrong, at some point it feels good. This is the part of our personality that Hitler tapped into, but it was not something uniquely German. He was reaching into something uniquely human.

This is an important point. If we dismiss Hitler as a creature of Germany, or Europe, or some "other," we fail to safeguard ourselves from the same kind of psychological needs that Freud knew everybody has.

The circumstances of Hitler's rise, however, are particular to a time and place. The Versailles Treaty came on the heels of a crushing, demoralizing military defeat, and what followed was a brutal depression in Germany. Huge inflation came on top of Germany forced to pay war reparations resulting in massive unemployment. In the 1920s, they were led by a weak government, the Weimar Republic.

The U.S. learned the lessons of Versailles, giving Germany and Japan a chance to save face after World War II, preventing a re-occurrence of events that could have let history repeat itself. In the 1990s, the U.S. carefully monitored events in Russia, a country compared to the Weimar Republic because they, too, had lost a war, albeit a cold one. Vladimir Putin, while an autocrat, is not Hitler and nobody really pushed the id buttons too hard in the former U.S.S.R.

Hitler's rise started not with military goals, but in answer to Germany's psychological and economic needs. Tip O'Neill said, "All politics are local." So it was in Germany. Individuals liked Hitler at first because he created jobs. At first, his appeal was

not entirely psychological or economic. It was a combination of leadership, ideology and organization.

All studies of Hitler start with his conversion to anti-Semitism, which is explained in Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which he wrote while serving a prison sentence for fomenting an uprising. Hitler advocated the politics of exclusion, and used his prison term to martyr himself.

The Hitler phenomenon takes on German "characteristics" he drew upon in Mein Kampf and in his oratory. There has always been a strain of anti-Semitism in German culture. Richard Wagner was anti-Semitic. The Nordic characteristics of Germans, who valued blonde hair, blue eyes, physical strength and, in their women, sexual eroticism, is antithetical to the stereotype of Hebrews, who tended to have dusky skin, dark hair, wore beards, dressed "differently," spoke an alien language, were seen as the traitors of Christendom, were non-athletes, and whose women were unappealing.

Despite these negative characteristics, Jews nevertheless excelled intellectually. They ascended to positions far beyond their percentage of the population in the arts, the sciences, the law, and in banking. These are professions average people would normally consider "high brow" anyway. To top it off, the Jews had the "arrogance" to "call themselves" the Chosen People.

However, this set of circumstances is not absolutely unique to Germany. These characteristics were ascribed to Jews wherever they were. Hatred of Jews prior to World War I was just as vehement in France as in Germany, as evident by the despicable treatment shown a Jewish Army officer in the "Dreyfuss affair."

But France "won" World War I. The French did not need any scapegoats. Anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head in modern France because this is a country exhibiting some of the characteristics of post-World War I Germany. France has had a huge influx of immigrants in recent years. Their culture is under siege. Their collaboration with Germany is no longer a secret. Jews are highly successful in France, as they are everywhere they are found. France finds itself a shell of its old self, no longer a dominant member of the world community. This has produced a latent backlash of Jew-baiting that bears watching before it gets out of hand.

Hitler's exclusionary policies were hardly new. In fact, they resemble the dehumanization of the untouchables in the Indian caste system. The excluded are considered unclean, both physically and morally. However, the "brilliance" of Hitler is found in the way he built his enemies up in order to tear them down. He recognized a rebel spirit in the human psyche, the same desire to topple the "high and mighty" that infused the French overthrow of Antoinette and Louis. In this regard, Hitler characterized Jews and Communists as "controlling" everything in German society. Had Hitler simply demonstrated hatred for these groups, he would have taken Germans to a dead end. At some point, the people would have felt sorrow for the objects of their hatred, who would have been seen as dispossessed and homeless.

It is this build-up of the "other" that still fuels movements like the Aryan Nation in America. The white supremacists would not get anywhere if they simply pointed to black failures in school and society; the welfare state, inner city turmoil, black-on-black violence, drug dealing, the irresponsibility of fathers, foul rap music, and under representation in a competitive business environment. Instead, the white supremacists try to point to the same control of societal institutions that Hitler pointed to.

The Catholics are no longer viewed as the enemy. There is no evidence, especially after the Kennedy Presidency, that American Catholics owe allegiance to a Papacy rather than the Constitution. In the case of Jews, the supremacists use the Hitler playbook. They see Jews in control of Hollywood and academia. There is no doubt that Jews make up an extraordinarily high percentage of movers and shakers in the arts and in the intellectual salons of New York and California. However, the kind of worldwide conspiracy theories that involve the so-called Tri-Lateral Commission are either non-existent or, if they do exist, hidden so carefully nobody can truly make the case.

The supremacists of the post-civil rights era, however, have turned their real attention to blacks and other dark-skinned types. Jews, they have found, are difficult to identify. They are likely to "look like" them. Blacks can be spotted and identified easily. The blacks are "built up" by white supremacists like the terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Blacks have become such a victim class that "leaders" like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have turned themselves into millionaires extorting and shaking down money from legitimate business, who prefer to appease them rather than face lawsuits and poisonous accusations of racism.

What infuriates white racists now are not blacks at lunch counters or the fronts of buses. They wonder why it seems like there is a Federal law stating only blacks can be skycaps and only Filipinos can work in military PXs. They are exasperated when they go to the courthouse, the DMV, or some other government building, and instead of getting decent service they find only minorities, languidly and unenthusiastically moving about their jobs, all on the taxpayer's dime. They turn on the television and see episode after episode of Law and Order or (name the show) depicting the perp as a Second Amendment-spouting white Christian bent on murdering minority kids. Or tough but dedicated, honest black police captains who keep the whites from running amok. Or TV commercials making the world look like everybody is a preppy-dressing black consumer who makes the engines of commerce run. They cannot figure out why firefighters, doctors and judges on TV are likely to be black, but when they see their real-life counterparts they are white. They see these images and they see lies. They are not happy about it. Instead of just shrugging their shoulders and accepting it for what it is, however, the white supremacists take it very personally.

They decide that modern minorities have ascended to a special class of affirmative action beneficiaries, responsible for keeping them from reaching their full potential. They see them protected by a liberal media and an evil government. The worst part about it is they know that simply expressing knowledge of these facts will bring down the full force of political correctness on their heads. It infuriates the Aryans who see blacks escape their crimes because they were "profiled," while whites are sought out and targeted by the FBI, the DEA and the ATF.

The modern white supremacists have taken Hitler's idea of building up their adversaries. The difference between Hitler and the Aryans of today is that Hitler had the power to "do something about it." The current racists really do not, so they find outlets for their frustration.

Hitler de-humanized the Jews. Nowadays, we call it demonizing the "other." Hitler also brilliantly "seduced" the German people in the manner of a man making love to a beautiful woman. He portrayed himself as the clean, Aryan alternative to the Jewish seducer. He scared the people into believing "the Jew" was out to befoul them with sick and immoral acts, i.e., sodomy and homosexuality.

Finally, Hitler, who was raised a Catholic but did not believe, nevertheless played on German Christianity by asserting that he was doing God's work, which he said was to exterminate Jews, the "killers" of Christ.

Hitler used militarism and the "spirit" the Greeks said was noble, but secondary, and raised it as the highest principle of German glory. This is an interesting point. Hitler saw major action in the Great War. He smelled death and defeat. He could have learned lessons from this experience. In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev drew on his awful experiences defending Stalingrad during World War II. He wrote to President Kennedy, justifying to himself as much as anybody why he was giving in and removing nukes from Cuba. But Hitler did not just see failure. He saw missed opportunity. His view of war is not as odd as one might think.

Many Americans were frustrated by our only real military "failure," Vietnam. But instead of seeing only the failures, they see the clear mistakes that were made. They say that if we had done certain things, i.e., not fight the war with "our hands tied behind our backs," bombed the dykes, flooded the countryside, then invaded North Vietnam, conquering and occupying Hanoi, we could have ended Communist adventurism in Southeast Asia once and for all. Hitler's love of militarism existed side-by-side with his view of violence as a tool. Plato and Aristotle saw violence as signs of an immoral state. Machiavelli viewed it as legitimate state policy, to be used when necessary. He did not endorse excess or unneeded violence. Marx did not glorify violence, but felt that it was the only way to disrupt the bourgeoisie. Hitler took it further than anybody. He glorified it and made it a state creed.

Hitler feminized the masses, believing that they were like a woman who secretly wishes for a strong, dominant man. Women prefer to bow to a forceful man, and people prefer to bow to a forceful leader. Like women, Hitler believed that the masses are emotional and irrational. It was with this in mind that Nazi propaganda emphasized simple, repetitive messages.

Born in 1889 in Austria, Hitler was the son of a customs official father and a doting mother. His father died in 1903. Hitler attended high school but dropped out. He viewed his life as one of struggle. This was the dominant force of his existence.

In 1907, Hitler set out for the city of Freud, Vienna. He attempted to gain admission to the Academy of Fine Arts, but his rejection brought about bitterness. His mother died shortly thereafter. In his second try at the academy, he was turned away again. His bitterness was now a struggle. For the next six years, Hitler lived as a vagabond and starving artist on the streets of Vienna. He observed the dregs of Viennese society.

"By interpreting men exclusively in the light of that twisted experience and seeing in their motives nothing but hate, ruthlessness, corruption, greed, lust for power, cruelty, or fear, he imagined with provincial complacency, that he had come close to ultimate knowledge, whereas actually he was merely revealing his own desperate and depraved personality," wrote J.C. Fest in Face to the Third Reich. If one is predisposed to belief in such concepts of absoluteness, this is an apt description of a world served up by the devil himself.

Vienna was the "hardest, though most thorough school of my life," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf. He obtained "the foundations for a philosophy in general and a political view in particular which later I only needed to supplement in detail, but which never left me." In the book, Hitler outlines a tri-partite "axis of evil" that includes Marxism, parliamentarians, and Judaism.

In World War I, Hitler felt that he was engaged in a struggle that all the German people wanted. He peppered his memories of the Great War with descriptions of struggle, describing his feelings about participating in it in orgasmic terms. He felt an "ecstasy of overflowing enthusiasm." Hitler fought bravely in the trenches until he was gassed and spent the last days of the war in a hospital.

". . . Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base," he wrote, "will be wavering and uncertain." Hitler said that violence must be more than "naked force"; rather, it must stand for an ideological commitment. However, the truth beyond the ideological commitment is secondary to getting people to believe in it, which is where his views on propaganda, which are frankly brilliant although evil, come in to play. Getting back to the Hitlerian allegory of the masses as female, one could compare his views with the cad who only wishes to talk a woman in to sex. How he gets her into bed is unimportant, only that he gets her into bed. This is similar to the Machiavellian "ends justifying the means."

"Like a woman . . . they have been abandoned," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, describing the Germans like a beautiful woman who has lost her husband, with a grubby Jew trying to get into her pants, only to be saved by the gallant Aryan man.

The "Aryan - unlike the modern pacifist," he wrote, subjugates "lower peoples" and bends them to his will. Through struggle and domination, those among the populace who are deserving of greatness will rise "upward," and in so doing avoid "blood mixtures," which preserves "pure blood." This is not an entirely new idea. Hitler emphasizes race, but this kind of "destiny" is one that higher classes have applied to themselves with regard to intelligence, athletic ability, and other concepts of excellence.

In Norman Mailer's fabulous CIA magnum opus, Harlot's Ghost, a legendary "company man" named Hugh Tremont Montague is the product of an elite class of East Coast Americana that includes the best schools and a complete understanding of every nuance of the espionage arts. He happily understands his essential role in protecting the U.S. from Communism. In so doing he finds no necessity in recognition or grubby politics. He is so self-assured that his own view of himself is all he needs. In speaking to his protégé, Harry Hubbard, he tells Harry that some people are blessed with exceptional ability. Those people deserve to be recognized and placed in positions above the normal, and not held to the same standards. Unexceptional people, he tells Harry, are "fodder for the devil." Apple founder Steve Jobs similarly believed his talent and place in the world so vitally important that normal rules of societal conduct need not apply to him; he had more important business to conduct that the world needed him to succeed at. The indispensable man, the great myth.

This kind of thinking plays itself out in every facet of our society. Gifted athletes are given scholarships to great colleges, and then paid enormous sums to play for professional teams, where they are able to live like modern kings. Brilliance is rewarded in business, academics and in the literary world. People who rise above the masses and distinguish themselves are accorded godlike status.

Where these examples stray from Hitler is that they are color-blind (many athletes, for example, are black), while the law, more or less, applies to everybody. Western society does some strange things to its exalted, who they like to build up, but enjoy tearing down even more. In Hitler's world, those who rise to "godlike status" are immune to any of the laws of normal society.

Hitler was Machiavellian in his view of governmental structure. He despised the ragged failure to reach consensus found in the English Parliament, insisting instead on strong, centralized control. He openly encouraged "fanaticism and intolerance" and to "intolerantly impose its will on all others." Hitler naturally assumed that the state's role was to achieve racial purity. He invoked Providence when he said he "must sacrifice himself for the totality" of the state. Hitler used reference to a god he did not personally believe in; to believe in a Christian God was entirely opposed to his vision of humanity. Christ could never be squared with his actions. But he used god for his purposes.

A "half-naked fakir"

Hitler's views clash with the Greeks, and even his use of violence as a creed breaks from Machiavelli and Marx, who were pragmatists compared to him. There may not be another political figure more different from Hitler than Mohandas Gandhi. This tremendous difference in the end worked in Gandhi's favor. Gandhi said the end never justified the means. Gandhi believed in Thoreau's non-violent cooperation. He despised violence not just because of the harm it did the victim, but the harm caused to the attacker.

Gandhi studied Thoreau's works while practicing law in South Africa. He returned to India and in 1919 organized an independence movement against the British. Gandhi owes much of success to timing and patient British benevolence. As for timing, he made his pitch for independence in the wake of the two great conflagrations of history, when the world was most horrified by war. The independence movement began one year after the Armistice, and reached its successful conclusion two years after Nagasaki.

Gandhi was able to take over an independence movement previously riven with strife between moderates and extremists. The extremists were in full throttle in 1919 in light of the Amritsar massacre. They wanted British blood. However, Gandhi pointed that the Indians were not in a military position to win a bloody battle with Great Britain. But most importantly, he said the English de-humanized themselves by killing so many at Amritsar. Gandhi endeavored to point this out not only to the Indians, but also to the British, and to use their own compassion against them. In this regard, Gandhi was not merely "lucky" that his opponents were compassionate people. He was perceptive first in seeing this despite much evidence to the contrary, and in formulating a long-range plan that would best work against such opponents. Had Gandhi's opponents been bloodthirsty, he most likely would not have succeeded. It is instructive to understand that had Gandhi adhered to the "eye-for-an-eye" principle many Indians wanted, then it would have allowed for "justification" on the part of the English; an "I told you so" attitude" that would have given them carte blanche to break the Indian spirit by force.

Gandhi's contemporary, Jawaharlal Nehru, cogently observed that Gandhi's greatest attribute was in teaching liberation from fear. The Brits had up-to-then relied on institutionalized fear to keep the Indians in line. The English maintained the "jewel in the crown" of the empire despite being outnumbered 4,000 to one. Hitler appealed to aggressive elements of the mass unconscious. Gandhi appealed to man's nobility. This is not just an impressive political tactic, but one that generates a sigh of relief. After studying Machiavelli, Freud, Hitler and Stalin, one might be convinced of the frightful human craving for dominant leaders who tell them what to do because they are too timid to know better, or lack the courage to make their own decisions. The success of America, and the English transformation from a monarchy to parliamentarian power, might have been seen as indicators that the Machiavellian-Hitlerian vision is not entirely true. But the freedom of the U.S. and English people, up until Gandhi's India, was seen from a racial perspective. After all, the Americans and the English were free to make their choices because they were composed of educated whites. In India, many misconceptions about dark-skinned peoples were tossed away. In this Gandhi achieves perhaps his greatest accomplishment. His lasting legacy in India is actually mixed. He was assassinated and the country itself was split along religious lines, thrust into civil war. But he made the world aware that "natives" were capable of compassion, restraint, thoughtfulness and self-rule.

Gandhi's political instincts were honed by his own religious values. He was a Hindu, and therefore an adherent to the Hindu vision of life. At the core of his philosophy was swaraj, meaning self-discipline. While this had been taught to 2,000 years of Hindus, it was not necessarily a political concept. The Hindus believed in one-on-one teaching resulting in self-actualization. Gandhi incorporated these concepts into mass instruction. This was necessary but difficult. Many Indians thought of self-rule as foreign. They preferred to be told what to do. In many ways this might have appeared to be examples of the Hitlerian vision of man. But Gandhi was determined to show this was not so.

Swaraj is about self-mastery and personal understanding of ones' self and others. A person's individual journey is meant to be self-liberating. Indians needed to achieve this before they could hope to achieve political liberation. In this way, Gandhi was not merely a leader or a strategist. More than anything, he was a teacher. Gandhi had to get Indians to liberate themselves from their long-held concept of individual liberation and get them to think about non-exclusivity in their lives. Perhaps the famous term "no man is an island" is more apropos to what Gandhi taught his countrymen.

It is this teaching principle Gandhi wanted to impart, not just to get the Indians liberated from the British, but in getting them to the point where they could rule themselves effectively. Tragically, he was shot and killed just when he was needed the most, as a teacher and a unifying symbol. It is a testament to his greatness that no charismatic replacements have come close to Gandhi since his death, while his nation slipped back into a funk. But he is a powerful force of nature. Hope springs eternal that India will find its way with Gandhi's spirit guiding them, and in recent years has made progress economically.

Gandhi also employed the concept of inclusivity that is called satya, or pursuit of the truth. The language is important here. Gandhi does not call for possession of the truth, but pursuit of it. Truth is not entirely possessed by humans. The highest truth we can know is that we are all part of one another. Note the difference from Hitler. He went by the "boot camp" approach, separating the unclean, the unworthy and the weak from the selected few, calling that few "all of us," directing them not to live in a world still littered with the unworthy, but to conquer it for their rightful selves.

Gandhi unnerved and disarmed the British by including them, not opposing them. He did this using ahimsa, intertwined with satya, which is the practice of non-violence. The highest truth is not the means, but the end. The means and the end are connected. This diverges even from American campaign theory. The Kennedys were strong adherents of the idea that one had to attain power before they could use it wisely. Gandhi would say that how they attain power is just as important as the wise use of power.

Unfortunately, both Gandhi and the Kennedys met a similar fate. Attaching much karmic significance to their diverging philosophies is futile. In the non-violence Gandhi taught, man elicits the greatest force at the disposal of the human race. But his life, especially since it coincides with Hitler's, is a conundrum. When asked how he would have confronted Hitler, Gandhi is vague. Everybody knows he would have been killed in two seconds and his "movement" utterly destroyed. His fate would have been left in the hands of the U.S. and Great Britain, which of course were forced by no other choice to oust the likes of Hitler by using greater violence than Hitler. It is, in the study of this human conundrum, that we see the special strategy of the devil.

Gandhi no doubt would have opposed war to take out Saddam Hussein. So, probably, would Jesus Christ. The phrase the "devil is in the details" and "getting in bed with the devil" are very telling.

Gandhi believed that truth and non-violence generated liberation called satyagraha, which activates our energies for love and compassion, which are (hopefully) stronger than hate. The best way to describe satyagraha is to remind people the way they felt when their children were born, or the day they proposed marriage. It is the way they felt when they were six and had been away at camp for two weeks, and after missing their parents so much saw them again. What satyagraha does is to give people that kind of feeling about everybody, not just friends, relatives and loved ones. It has the power of complete substitution for hate. It is the essence of goodness, and is the most powerful force in the Universe.

Finally Gandhi endorsed sarodaya, meaning equality. Gandhi endorsed a concept that, in the caste system as it evolved in India, was not a state of equality. He felt people voluntarily restricted their wants, and uplifted each other to unify humanity. He was not unlike the Bush family and their sense of noblesse oblige. Gandhi was a member of privileged society. He felt the obligation to extend his wealth, influence and place in a "socially constructive manner." He felt the underprivileged would view the benevolence of the upper class and in turn feel the need to overcome their deprivation. Finally, Gandhi insisted on the Indians being treated as equals by the Brits. This was a tough nut to crack since even Winston Churchill referred to Gandhi himself as a "half-naked fakir."

Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869 in Porbundar, in Gujurat province on India's west coast. He was assassinated in Delhi on January 30, 1948. Gandhi was shaped first by the region of his birth, which was provincial and not highly influenced by the British, as was Bombay or Calcutta. As a member of the vaishya caste, he was third in the Hindu hierarchy, a "lowborn." The Gandhis were a sub-caste of the bania, the small business owners. In their case they ran a grocery. His people were known to be practical. Gandhi's relatively low caste status helps explain why later, when he was the most powerful man in India, he emphasized equality for all.

His family was very religious. Gandhi's mother was one for vows, fasting and self-control. Gandhi had an oppressive view of sex, and identified with the Harijans, or Untouchables. He attended Alfred High School, where he was schooled in English. He gained admiration as well as anxiety for the English. Obviously bright, Gandhi was sent to London where, from 1888-1891, he took law and spent his time "playing with the English gentlemen," as he put it in his simple-titled Autobiography. Returning to India in 1891, Gandhi had high hopes, but did not achieve immediate success as an English-trained attorney. Upon hearing lawyers were needed in South Africa, he left for that English colony in 1893.

This was an important part of his life. He was needed and found himself a man of influence among the Indian minority, as opposed to being just another Indian lawyer in India. There were 66,000 Indians in South Africa, most of whom were laborers. 570,000 British and Dutch ruled over them, and the 2 million Africans.

Gandhi was accorded political status, utilizing a liberal style in forming the moderate National Indian Congress. He petitioned Indian grievances in court, and became a darling of the Indian Opinion newspaper, formed in 1903. Gandhi did everything within the law, using moderate legal and constitutional means at his disposal.

In June of 1906, the Zulus, a renowned warring tribe that fought the British to a standstill in the Transvaal Province a few decades before, rebelled against English rule. Gandhi formed an ambulance corps to assist the British during the rugged Boar War. He saw first hand the English massacre of 3,500 Zulus.

Up until that time, Gandhi was an "emulator," a term used to describe educated Indians who chose to dress like the English, and take on their proper mannerisms. Gandhi broke from his emulative status gradually, first by testing himself with a vow of brachmacharya, which is sexual abstinence. Young English males, separated from home, were encouraged to engage in libidinous adventures in the colonies that would be frowned upon at home. As an educated man of professional means, Gandhi lived in a society in which women were available to him. In denying himself he was making his first break with English ways.

"The experience of witnessing the outrages perpetrated on black bodies by white he-men aroused in Gandhi both a deeper identification with the maltreated, and a stronger aversion of all male sadism, including such sexual sadism as he had probably felt from childhood on to be a part of all exploitation of women by men," wrote Erik Erickson in Gandhi's Truth.

This alerted in Gandhi a deeper, crucial connection between three forms of exploitation: imperialism, racism, and sexism. The Black Act was enacted in 1907. In response Gandhi called a meeting of 3,000 Indians in Johannesburg. The movement took on the name satyagraha, or truth-force, and set forth to passively resist the British by exposing truth. Arrests followed, but after seven years of continued campaigning, the government granted reforms in 1914.

As mentioned before, Gandhi's key moments came in close proximity to events that took up greater English concern. In 1914 the Brits were engaging in the saber rattling and eventual mobilization of forces against Germany that started the Great War. There was a pattern of giving in to Gandhi during times when the country had to focus on larger issues.

In 1909, Gandhi visited England and during a five-month stay, lobbied Parliament. His arrival was not terribly welcome since he came shortly after an Indian terrorist had killed a British official. To put it into context, the English may have viewed Gandhi the way they viewed a member of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, in the 1970s. But Gandhi advocated peaceful measures that put the British at ease. He negotiated with British liberals and Indian terrorists.

Upon his return to South Africa, Gandhi drafted the treatise "Hind Swaraj" ("Indian Independence"). He rejected Western civilization and not only affirmed Hindu tradition, but preached it as superior. After the reforms lessened the harshness of the Black Act (Indians were called blacks), Gandhi was emboldened to move on. In 1915, while the English were fighting bloody battles in Europe, he returned to India. His advocacy of non-violence contrasted against news of the war. Instead of fomenting a coalition, he was seen as disoriented and confounded by the war. He was an uneasy ally of Great Britain. The Germans and the Turks offered no friendship. Gandhi cooperated in India's participation in the war. The performance of Indian soldiers serving the Crown was honorable.

The effects of the war, economic and otherwise, created a sense of disillusionment with the movement and India's place in the Crown, despite England's victory. In 1919, events shaped Gandhi's path. The Rowland Batts' were passed, giving the government jury trial power with no appeal. It was, in effect, martial law. The British gave themselves the right to detain anybody who "threatened public safety," was considered "dangerous," and virtually any offense or document was deemed seditious in nature. To possess such documents resulted in two-year prison sentences, followed by two-year probationary periods.

In March of 1919, Gandhi called for a nationwide satyagraha in resistance to the Rowland law. After fasting for 24 hours, people were instructed to go on a general strike (hartal), with specific instructions to make it civil and non-violent. The following month in Amritsar (a city of 160,000, located in the northern Indian Punjab province), civil agitation led to crackdowns. On April 13, a British Indian Army force of 50 riflemen, under the command of General Reginald Dyer, fired on 10,000 unarmed Indians, killing 400 and wounding 1,500. Dubbed the Amritsar massacre, it was marked first by the shots, then Dyer's "crawling order." Dyer was praised in London, and the event marked the full turnaround in Gandhi's attitude toward the British. Because Indians, not British regulars, carried out the killings it solidified in his mind the idea that emulation of the British, for all their good qualities of honor and tradition, in the end was destructive to India. Gandhi began the practice of dressing in traditional Indian garb, and prepared for the next campaign. From 1919-22, the country engaged in massive non-violence. This was the great consolidation of India, including all castes; Untouchables, Hindus, Muslims, emulators, and the like. Most important, Gandhi gained control of the non-violent movement, which had been in a struggle with those who agitated for English blood after Amritsar. Gandhi now was completely inclusive, even inviting liberal Brits to his cause. He attracted the attention of the press, basing the movement on trust, tolerance and active non-violence.

This was a courageous step for Gandhi and for his followers, who not only abstained from violence, but also put themselves in harm's way by virtue of marches and strikes. This often incurred the wrath of British soldiers who used force to move them off the streets.

In 1930, Gandhi went on his "salt march," perhaps his greatest single achievement. It was dramatized in the Richard Attenborough classic Gandhi, and in Joan Bondurant's Conquest of Violence, in which she states "as for the elements of true satyagraha, all are to be found in the salt satyagraha." The march was widely publicized, drawing into his orbit women and other traditionally non-political Indian groups. Studies of Emma Goldman have ascertained she embodied a strain of society, which exists everywhere but manifests itself among the poor and the radical. These might otherwise be considered "professional protesters." Gandhi's "salt march" effectively ended discussion of his campaign as being of this variety, at least among the mainstream.

The salt march was an entirely symbolic gesture. One of England's most profitable exports was that of salt collected from the Indian Ocean, but the profits went to them as they considered this natural resource to be theirs exclusively. Gandhi said the salt was a product of Indian environment and therefore should belong, along with profits from its sale, to the people of India. The brilliance of his claim in part deflected talk of his being a Communist or a Socialist. Gandhi did not disdain the capitalistic effects of salt sales. Rather, he was trying to get India involved in the trade. It was an inherently good thing, in many people's eyes, that India wanted to participate in the business of India, instead of simply playing the role of the servant, the welfare state, or the ignorant. American Indians, for example, would have done themselves a great service had they learned how to mine for copper and make use of the resource.

Gandhi spoke eloquently of elevating British humanity above imperialism. He found a receptive audience in the United States, thanks to coverage of him by the New York Times. His revolutionary position in opposition to the English struck a cord with Americans, as did his call for equality. Furthermore, the Americans, now a world power after forcing the Great War to a victorious conclusion, were thinking geo-politically. They were engaged in "gunboat diplomacy" in China, where a nascent Communist revolution threatened business trade, and saw India as an important strategic country. In the endgame, the Americans wanted to stay on the good side of Gandhi should he prevail, although in 1930 it was far from a settled issue. But they were also naturally pre-disposed to opposing colonialism. World War I expanded British colonial rule and American influence along with it, though. The Yanks were not about to press the issue.

In the 1930s and '40s, Gandhi drew women and disparate elements into his movement, including American reporters and the English, who he extended olive branches to. His constant mantra was that humanity be elevated above imperialism. As times changed, this resonated even with the English. Again, tragic events worked in Gandhi's favor. World War II took up all the effort and resources of the British Empire as they mounted a desperate, successful struggle to stop Hitler and Hideki Tojo's Japan. Unable to pay much attention to Indian politics, the English had little control over Gandhi. Gandhi did not give the English much help in their war effort. As a pacifist, he let others do the fighting for him and took advantage of them when their guard was down.

By the time the great crusade against the Axis Powers was over, Britain was a shell of its old self. They were unable to stop the tide of Indian independence, which came officially in 1947. Franklin Roosevelt tacitly "demanded' of Winston Churchill that the price of American support would be Great Britain's relinquishing of their colonies. No sooner had this occurred, than fighting erupted between Hindus and Muslims. Gandhi decided to make a symbolic gesture that would make himself a martyr and a hero to his people. He went on a fast in Calcutta, in order to get the religious fighting to stop. Indians were killing themselves, and undoing all the peaceful good Gandhi stood for. The irony is that the British had kept their powder dry, for the most part, since 1919. Now, far more Indians were killing each other than the English ever would have. The "Great Calcutta Killing" was a bloody outburst lasting throughout 1946 and '47. Gandhi's fast had the peaceful effect he desired in August of '47. It was the "greatest miracle of modern times," wrote British historian E.W.R. Lumby.

Unfortunately, Gandhi met the bullet of a Muslim assassin shortly thereafter. The two religions went back to fighting. In almost no time, most of what Gandhi spent his life fighting for became, not relevant, but perverted by the ethnic strife, the civil war, the splitting up of Indian into Muslim Pakistan. 50-plus years of continued bloodshed and hatred followed. Gandhi is a revered figure and a great man, perhaps even too great to be contemplated by humans. But his greatness stands not in contrast with the British, who he fought against, but rather side by side with them. Gandhi needed England, and England needed Gandhi. The two are partners in history. They uplifted each other in ways they could not do on their own. If Gandhi's "nemesis" had been some other country, he likely would have been killed and his movement squashed in infancy. By the same token, England discovered, in losing its empire, its soul. As they say, God works in mysterious ways.

Gandhi's philosophy is best described in the title of his one-volume collection of writings, All Men Are Brothers. Through self-discipline, Gandhi was an example to his people, who exhibited a national self-restraint rarely seen in history. He strove to liberate India from Britain by eliminating from the Indians the fear of the British. His work inspired many of his followers to stand up to English soldiers, sometimes taking physical beatings. He is the descendant of Plato and Rousseau, but took their work to a much higher level. They were mainly writers and teachers, but Gandhi was a "soldier," a politician, and a man who risked everything. He elevated political discourse to the concept of moral freedom. He did it not by attributing morality to the state, but rather instilling morality in individuals, including playing to the conscience of his "enemies."

Gandhi fought not only for Indian freedom from the British, but also for the freedom of Indian women within their own culture. While India remains a paternal society, he did begin a tradition of women's liberation. His legacy includes Indira Gandhi, as well as a small handful of women leaders throughout the Middle East. Women are seen as subservient to men, but some exceptional women have been accorded special status allowing them to transcend gender roles. This is very much a part of Gandhi's legacy.

Gandhi's self-discovery is the self-discovery of an entire people, and in fact his journey is one the whole world took. His contrast to Hitler is so stark as to make him a symbol of conscience. In Gandhi, man sees somebody who makes us take a second look at ourselves and ask questions we never dared ask before. Can the world live in peace? Can conflict be resolved peacefully? The answer to these questions may not be 100 percent yes, but it is more often yes now, because of Gandhi, than it was before him. It is important to note that Gandhi is an important figure whose life is taught in the U.S. All leaders in the most powerful nation on Earth are well aware of who he was and what he stood for. Gandhi may not be the prime influence in all decisions made by modern leaders, but his voice is one that is listened to and respected as part of the process.

Adolf Hitler, for all of his power and the armies at his disposal, has been relegated to a disgraced part of history. Gandhi, the man of the flowing robes who never hurt a fly, influences billions. This is as hopeful a fact as any that comes out of the 20th Century. It gives hope to the Christian concept that the lamb will in the end reign supreme. It is a powerful message of Truth. Man is not an entirely evolved species. Violence is still very much a part of the way we do business, but the power of love has been shown to be more than just a specious phrase.

Gandhi showed that non-violence is superior to violence. The force contained in emotions of love and compassion are stronger than those found in hatred. Gandhi discovered love manifested itself not just in action, but in a gentleness of the soul. That is, when man not only refrains from hatred, but does not feel hatred, the veiled threat is replaced by spiritual satisfaction. While Gandhi was not a Christian, his teachings are very much like those of Jesus. He came to the world as if Heaven-sent, with words to soothe the savage breast of humanity at a time when Christ's message was not getting out. While Christianity is a beautiful religion, Gandhi the non-Christian is great evidence that it is not the only religion. The concept that only Christians can ascend to Heaven is leavened when reflecting on Gandhi's life. Forgiveness by one God of all Mankind is at the heart of his message. No single kind of man is better than another; not the richer more so than the poor, the white over the black, the smart over the dull. All men are equal and all men are worthy of love.

Gandhi freed himself and his adherents from selfishness and narrow interests, replacing that with inclusiveness. He believed in sharing, and his concepts of economic freedom differed from Locke and Rousseau. They felt the dilemma of Democracy implied a tradeoff between freedom and equality. Gandhi said equality could be attained through individual liberation, with all inclusive of one, and vice versa. Exclusivity was the enemy of freedom. Dominance and submission are the concepts Gandhi abhorred. Perhaps in a strange twist, the Gandhi vision is found in such uniquely American organizations as the Rotary or the Lion's Club, where businesses competing also include. By sharing resources they all lift each other. Gandhi's approach is found in American foreign policy, too. The U.S., despite the power to do so, has not taken up the mantel of British colonialism. Instead, they prefer to share power through trade and cooperation. Gandhi might not like the fact that the U.S. occasionally uses force, but this does not change the fact it is sometimes necessary.

Gandhi's teachings were reflected in America's struggles with the Vietnam War. Martin Luther King, Jr. employed Gandhi's methods in the civil rights struggle. King connected the war with civil rights in a way he envisioned Gandhi would have. Connectedness is the legacy of Gandhi.

Noir

The rewrite man was writing the death

Of a miserable Skid Row whore

From the after effects of a drinking bout

Some two or three weeks before.

The facts were simple and dull and brief

And he had it almost done,

When suddenly came the raucous voice

Of James H. Richardson.

"On that murder case," the Great Man said,

"You can give it lots of play.

Go into the mystery angle, too,

For we're short of news today."

The rewrite man gave a startled cry

At the mention of mystery,

And, round-eyed, turned to the desk and said,

"Were you addressing me?"

"Of course," said the Man, and his voice grew thick,

"Some merciless sadist slew

This innocent child of East 55th,

Though he probably loved her, too.

"Get into your lead that ghastly smile

Playing pitifully on her face;

And, in saying how she was slain, hark back

To the torso murder case.

"And somewhere high in your story tell

Of the marijuana ring

That made this maid in the seventh grade

A wretched, besotted thing.

"Oh, yes, in your opening sentence quote

MacArthur on the flag,

Ignoring the coroner calling her

A syphilitic bag.

"Write wistfully of the cocktail glass

That broke as her body fell.

The artist will alter the photograph

Of the gallon of muscatel.

"Mention the wilted, yellow rose

To tincture it with romance,

And refer somewhere to an evening gown,

Forgetting she wore no pants.

"The barroom bum she was living with

We'll call her mystery man.

And try to mention the Japanese

And the Communists, if you can.

"Get excited about the drama here

Of passion and crime and greed,

Write a good objective story, and

Get all of it in your lead.

"Give me the take as soon as you can,

I want to give it a look.

But don't start in till you've got the facts,

Then hold it to half a book."

The rewrite man, with a ghastly leer

That the Great Man didn't see,

Started again, and finished at last

At 25 after three.

The climax came the following week;

He was gratified to get

The prize for the finest writing to

Appear in the overset.

MORAL

It served the bastard right, of course,

As philosophers will note,

For being a rewrite man at all

When he could have cut his throat.

\- "The Rewrite Man," John Reece (1947)

Raymond Chandler (no relation to the Los Angeles Times family) wrote lurid novels about cops, corruption, and murder in the Los Angeles of the late 1940s. His and other like stories were captured in B movies of the era. This created a form of identity in Los Angeles. It was as if Hollywood drama and real life intersected. His genre was dubbed "noir," a sense of darkness both in writing style, cynicism and sexual tension, as well as their film adaptations, oft-black-and-white, stylized and depressing.

Chandler's books included The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940). He wrote the screenplay of the Frederick MacMurray-Barbara Stanwyck classic Double Indemnity, and inspired sophisticated Los Angeles crime novelists and storytellers such as Raymond Carver, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy and Brett Easton Ellis. However, nothing Chandler wrote could approach the real-life horror and on-going mystery surrounding the Black Dahlia.

The Black Dahlia

After World War II, a young woman on the fringes of the Hollywood scene named Elizabeth Short was murdered. She was a marginally attractive brunette who hung out in L.A. bars. A lot of military personnel were in those bars at the time. She was not quite a hooker, but not quite on the up and up, either. She took money for "favors," which might be a dance or two, some companionship, maybe a little more. Like so many, she longed to get into the movies, hoping in her nocturnal wanderings she would meet a director, a producer, an agent; somebody who would take a liking to her, help move her up the ladder.

Most never make that connection. Eventually, they move on, getting married, taking a job, going back home. Elizabeth Short had the bad fortune of running into a psychopath. Not only was she killed, her body was actually sawed in half, left on display in an open field near Crenshaw Boulevard. Naturally, it made for enormous headlines and lurid photos. Between the Chandler novels and the "Black Dahlia murder," as Short was dubbed by the press, this became an enduring symbol of Los Angeles.

L.A. was the land of milk and honey, Shangri-La, Lotus Land, La La Land, even the Promised Land; whatever pejorative many gave it. But it was not Heaven. It had its sunny side, its USC Trojans glory, its movie star hype, its glamour and allure of youth and beauty and sex appeal, but it had a distinctively dark side. The Black Dahlia was its dark side. It was this dark side that in the beginning was the writer Jim Murray's stock in trade. On the train bound for  Los Angeles,  Murray talked his way into a job as a reporter and eventually became a rewrite man for the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Examiner.

"Los Angeles was a wildly exciting place," he recalled, when he first went to work there as a reporter for the Examiner beginning in 1944. "There was seldom a dull moment . . . I fell in love with Los Angeles then, an affair of the heart that I doubt I will ever outgrow and it was the Examiner that brought us together."

This was a very instructive statement. Much of Murray's charm over the years would be his unrequited love for Los Angeles. He would not be provincial. He would write about everybody and everything, no matter the geographical basis of the subject. But he took sides, and L.A. was the winner in his mind. He did not reminisce that the East Coast or, by approximation, New York was better, as many transplants did.

"Those were gory, glory days for  Murray," wrote Sports Illustrated's Rick Reilly.

"There was seldom a dull moment," Murray recalled. "And if there were, the front page of the Examiner never admitted it."

He specialized in murders. He wrote ". . . we slept with our socks on, like firemen waiting for that next alarm." Once he covered a story about a little girl who was run over by a truck and lost a leg. Murray took the $8 he had left from his $38 paycheck and bought her an armful of toys.

The big paper in town was the L.A. Times. Secondary papers like the Examiner had to sensationalize the news in order to compete. Murray's boss was Jim Richardson, a "one-eyed, iron-lunged, prototypical Hearst city editor," he recalled. Richardson was a "tyrant," but recognized Murray's talent right away. He made Murray the youngest re-write man in the Hearst chain.

This irritated Reggie Tavener, a competing Examiner writer. Tavener once was L.A. Christian evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson's press agent. He told Murray she was a "practicing nymphomaniac." This may well have been the inspiration for the book and movie Elmer Gantry, which did not shock the public with graphic descriptions of the young woman's sexual meanderings, but rather used Burt Lancaster as a foil for Original Sin.

Tavener quit when Murray became Richardson's so-called "bobo." Murray and Richardson were able to score a scoop for their paper by identifying Elizabeth Short's body by process of a new technology called wirephotoing, which later developed into fingerprinting. The FBI had a lab in Washington and was able to determine who she was.

Richardson then instructed a reporter named Wain Sutton to telephone Short's mother in Massachusetts. "Don't tell her what happened," Richardson said. "Tell her that her daughter's just won a beauty contest at Camp Roberts. Then get all the information on her."

The mother gaily provided details of her daughter's life to Sutton. When Sutton had all the particulars, he put his hand over the phone and stared at Richardson. "Now what do I do?" he asked.

"Now tell her," Richardson "purred," according to the description Murray gave.

"You miserable son of a bitch," Sutton remarked. Richardson smiled.

They had theirs, a tremendous scoop, and one of the single most lurid tales ever told. Richardson was "such an unholy combination of Attila the Hun and a literary light," wrote Murray, that another rewrite man named Hank Sutherland once dubbed him "Half-Oaf, Half-Elf."

Richardson once handed Murray a note about a routine Skid Row suicide. Murray wrote a straight obituary. Richardson handed it back to him requesting greater "oomph."

Murray gave several stabs at it, all to Richardson's dissatisfaction. Finally Murray wrote, "John Jefferson, 51, tired of it all, stepped off a chair into eternity." Richardson looked at it and realized he had "driven me too far," recalled Murray. He dropped the story in the wastebasket and told Murray to get a cup of coffee. There was a pathos to Murray and writing that did not lend itself to the sort of lurid, scandal sheet style of Jim Richardson and his ilk. Richardson realized then and there Murray's talents would lead him beyond this "ink-stained wretch" style of reporting, to greater things. Certainly Murray's compassion for humanity would shine brightly in his long career as a columnist.

"In many ways, those were my happiest journalistic years," Murray wrote. Despite Richardson's dark side, he had fun at the Examiner, a Hearst paper that the "literati looked down their noses at." Murray said the "world was in flames" from the paper's perspective. He saw the dark side of the City of Angels. It was good preparation for his Hollywood writing, which came a few years later.

"We told it all in dripping red headlines," he recalled.

L.A. was a kind of Camelot, a place every G.I. saw and pined to return to, the city serving up a "sensation a day." Sometimes people in his profession failed to see the larger picture. The day America stormed the beaches of Normandy, a press agent named Milt Stein came into the Examiner's offices. All he cared about was selling Shirley Temple's first screen kiss. When the article came out the next day alongside images of soldiers lying dead on the beaches of France many nasty letters ensued.

A Las Vegas scandal involved an Air Force officer named Cliff Henderson who jilted his wife in favor of a chorus girl. His wife shot him dead. Those were the days of Bugsy Siegel, who founded the Flamingo Hotel, which made Las Vegas the tourist destination it is today. While Siegel is known as the father of Las Vegas, his town was Los Angeles. Siegel hung out at swank Hollywood nightspots with the Countess Dorothy (Taylor) Di Frasso and film sirens. He took himself "too seriously," according to accounts. The Examiner insisted on calling him Bugsy, a term he hated. He protested vehemently. Jim Richardson henceforth referred to him in print as Benjamin (Don't Call Me Bugsy) Siegel.

But Siegel was murdered a year later at the Beverly Hills home of his mistress, Virginia Hill. Why? "Cost overruns," according to press quipsters. The mob thought he was skimming from the top. The Mayerling case involved a young couple committing joint suicide via a pact. It started out, "They tried to tell them they were too young . . ."

"Tin pan alley" referred to the music business at the time. The Overell trial in Orange County involved a furniture heiress and her boyfriend blowing up her parents because they objected to the boyfriend, but slick lawyering acquitted them.

"I became impressed with how fiendishly difficult it is to prove guilt in a capital case well defended," Jim Murray wrote about a case some 50 years before the O.J. Simpson trial. These were just some of the many stories that made up real-life noir in the City of Angels.

Marilyn

In 1948 Time magazine hired Murray to be their Los Angeles correspondent. 40 people were interviewed and considered. Murray was hired. It was not an easy decision. Murray flatly admitted he loved working for the L.A. Examiner, but moved to the stodgier, literate Time for the money. He was signed on for $7,000 a year plus fringe benefits.
"Time didn't linger at what happened," Murray wrote. "They wanted to know why it happened." They did not care about "hibiscus murders," but rather the "globally significant."

Time and Life magazines were at the heart of the huge media corporation run by Henry Luce. Luce was a global thinker, as was his wife, the respected international diplomat Clare Boothe Luce. Everybody wanted to write for them during this era. America was at the center of everything, the impetus of power, diplomacy and intrigue. If the Chandler family saw themselves as "shapers" of the American West, Luce and his ambitious wife saw themselves as molders of a sort in what Luce himself was just beginning to call the American Century.

If Harrison Gray Otis and the Chandlers who followed him viewed themselves as on a mission from God to shape and create a city and a state, to promote a country, to implement a new de Tocquevillian vision, a new way of thinking in which each individual can be a rugged individualist, his own king, unburdened by fealty to the state or monarchy; well, the Otis-Chandlers were small fry in comparison to Henry Luce. To work for Henry Luce was the pinnacle of his profession. Jim Murray took the opportunity.

"Murray longed to be a foreign correspondent – 'and wear a trench coat and carry a Luger' but when Time called with $7,000 a year, he took it," wrote Rick Reilly. "Over the years he worked on a dozen cover stories on such subjects as Mario Lanza, the Duke, Betty Hutton and  Marlon Brando."

Murray was assigned coverage of the comings and goings of the Hollywood film industry. Instead of writing for Hollywood, he wrote about Hollywood. In some ways it was apropos. He always preferred to be a spectator to a player. He liked watching and writing about sports more than actually playing the games. Now he was commenting on movies and movie stars, not subjecting himself to the whim of directors, actor's egos, shooting schedules, and the fickle opinion of the ticket-buying public. He had the security of a paycheck from Time. This fit his desires perfectly. He was not paid as well as a top screenwriter penning blockbusters, but he got a check every first and 15th of the month, whereby the screenwriter might go months or more in between gigs.

Murray arrived in what was still old Hollywood. It was the movie industry first and foremost that put Los Angeles, California on the map. Hollywood was an international construct. Everybody knew the stars of the day. German soldiers discussed the merits of Betty Grable with American POWs. It was the new art form, America's contribution to world culture as surely as Greek plays, Renaissance art, and English literature.

D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), while racist in content, was considered the first truly great film. In the 1920s, Rudolph Valentino, Tom Swift and Clara Bow were icons of the silver screen. When "talkies" came into vogue, the writer became a valuable commodity. Broadway suddenly was interested. The spoken words of the stage were now magnified a thousand-fold. Stars like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper and Katherine Hepburn were larger than life. In 1939, Hollywood reached its apex with Gone With the Wind leading a parade of classics that have long stood the test of time.

The Hollywood Murray found was still solidly the studio system. The age of the independent star, the auteur director and the genius screenwriter were not yet a reality. A boy genius such as Orson Welles, trying to buck this system, found himself ground down by the studios. Slowly but surely directors like Frank Capra, Howard Hawkes and John Ford would emerge as independent visionaries, but the show biz world Murray found was dominated by moguls-producers. The producer was the visionary, the artist. Everybody else was an employee under his thumb. Such men were David O. Selznick and Irving Thalberg, all powerful neo-gods of a refined process, now an assembly-line industry rivaling steel and car production.

The power of moguls such as Cecil B. DeMille and Darryl Zanuck cannot be compared to anybody on the modern scene. A Cary Grant, a Clark Cable or a Humphrey Bogart achieved an illusory fame. They were certainly rich, operating on a high plane, but were completely controlled by the studios under whom they were contracted. Slowly but surely the William Morris Agency eventually began to negotiate contracts that gave them more independence and production control, but it was really not until the late 1960s that the studio system finally lost its great power in favor of artistic control by the actual artistes. Only then did individual actors, writers, and directors attain unimaginable wealth.

Jim Murray was the cinema correspondent for Time magazine. This gave him considerable power. His opinion of an actor's performance, or viability of a film, helped make or break its nationwide box office potential. Murray loved it. He described himself as "movie-struck." Directors were constantly at his office, promoting themselves.

Henry Luce decided that three or four times a year, his magazine cover should be graced by a movie figure, preferably a beautiful woman. It was the age of military heroes and politicians wielding power unseen since the days of Caesar Augustus. Be-ribboned images of Dwight Eisenhower or Douglas MacArthur mixed with statesmen such as Harry Truman and George C. Marshall, photographed from below for maximum impact. Hollywood stars provided a relative human touch.

Murray was tasked with picking out the "next big thing" in show biz. To be selected for a Time cover story was tantamount to instant success and credibility. It was a long, long ways from his Uncle Ed and his gambling habits. Murray found himself mingling with, and courted by, the likes of Cary Grant or Marilyn Monroe. He had aisle seats for the Academy Awards and invites to the hot premieres.

"It was pretty hard to keep your feet on the ground in that rarefied atmosphere and I'm not sure I did," he wrote.

Frank Gifford was an All-American football player at USC at the time. Later a Pro Football Hall of Famer with the New York Giants, then a staple with Monday Night Football, "the Giffer" worked in the movies in the 1950s.

"When I was at USC one of the great recruiting things they had going for them was there were so many people associated with the school within the movie industry," recalled Gifford. "They could get you a guild card and work as extras. There was always extras work. You'd call SAG and they'd bring you out and we'd start at five o'clock in the afternoon. There were a lot of war movies in those days and the more hazardous the stunt or extra work, the higher the pay. What they considered hazardous for instance was rolling in front of a tank. I loved that stuff. I'd get $18.75 a day as an extra, what they'd call a 'bit of business' or a 'bump up,' then up you to as high as $75 or $100 a day depending on the hazard level. By the time I was ready to graduate, I was doing well in the films. If I was not drafted by the Giants or the Rams, I'd have stayed in the movies, I might have done something else. I worked in the studios when I came back from my first year in pro football getting my degree in night school."

Then came television. The impact of TV on America and the world has few rivals. Perhaps not even the Internet affected life as much as television. It certainly created paralyzing fear. At first, movie moguls believed TV would destroy the big screen, as "talkies" ended the silent era. Television created a heavy scythe. Aside from box office receipts, it threatened sports attendance, radio coverage, newspaper subscriptions, and the way politicians did business. It was all seeing, instantaneous, and naked. Eventually, TV came to be a tool working hand in hand with other media, but its immediate affect was elimination of the B movie.

Just as a music concert had lead-up bands, or a big fight was preceded by smaller bouts, people spent entire afternoons and evenings in movie houses watching not merely the feature attraction, but a smaller film showing some hopeful of the future. Hollywood went for blockbusters, such as Cleopatra or Ben Hur. The B movies became Rawhide or Maverick on the small screen. Eventually, TV created more work for actors and writers than before, but at first this ancillary benefit was not understood. Technology was constantly improving. Cinemascope made the theatre experience vastly improved over TV. Three-dimensional films were tried but did not catch on.

Murray's marching orders were to find sex goddesses to grace his magazine's cover. This was difficult. Leading men such as William Holden, Kirk Douglas, Marlon Brando and Paul Newman dominated the era. The top-of-the-line actresses were talents but not "cheesecake" material: Betty Davis, Kate Hepburn. He managed to find a few, among them Ava Gardner and Rosemary Clooney, but it was a struggle. It was in his search for a sex symbol with enough star quality to justify a Time cover, Murray came across Marilyn Monroe.

Norma Jean Mortenson grew up in the San Fernando Valley and attended Hollywood High School. Married and divorced from an L.A. cop, she became the mistress of a shadowy party-giver named Joe Schenck, a big wig of the movies. He kept beautiful women around to decorate his pool parties. Murray attended one of the soirees in the company of sportswriter Vincent X. Flaherty. She was wearing a tight white bathing suit, "Five-feet six inches of whipped cream, a sweet little girl smile," wrote Murray of his first reaction. Schenck whistled and asked Murray if he wanted her. If this description is accurate, she was apparently as available for sex as a porn chick on set, a fluffer.

Marilyn's sex life has been dissected upside and down. She seemed incapable of saying no. She was surrounded by powerful men she believed needed to be satisfied in order to further her career. Jim Murray, a leading movie journalist, was a man who could affect many careers. She well may have thought he could make her a star. In his 1993 book, Jim Murray: An Autobiography, the author tells the tale without specifying what he did about Schenck's offer. He did not write that he turned him down.

Marilyn slept seemingly with everybody; actors, writers, producers, band leaders, critics. She apparently had no real morals, reportedly having numerous abortions. She was something between a nymphomaniac and frustrated, unable to achieve orgasm. Her active sex life was an effort to find one, but she had unsatisfactory physical sensations. This may well have been her ultimate psychological undoing. Once Frank Sinatra invited her to the Cal-Neva Club at Lake Tahoe. A huge orgy-cum-gangbang was rumored to take place, with Marilyn said to take on all the men of the Rat Pack and more, seemingly incapable of saying no while Sinatra directed the "action" like a porn director. This rumor may or may not be true, just as rumors that silent film star Clara Bow taking on the entire USC football team in wild orgies orchestrated by John Wayne were false.

According to legend, director Joe Mankiewicz put her in All About Eve with Bette Davis as a practical joke on Schenck. Nobody thought she had acting talent. She was strictly for eye candy and pleasure. Those talents may well have been what spurred Mankiewicz into casting her. With almost no lines, she dominated a scene with Davis and Anne Baxter merely by sitting on the stairs during a party scene. Thousands of letters poured in asking who the blond bombshell was. The term "bombshell" was all the rage. A war term, it was used to describe the affect of the new French swimsuit, the bikini. The bikini was named after a South Pacific atoll called Bikini Island, obliterated by an atomic bomb test. Men were "blown away" by the sight of women in the new two-piece swimwear.

Murray pitched his boss on a story about her in Time. This would lead to a larger, bigger photo spread in Life. In preparing for the interview, Murray dug around. He discovered Marilyn's background to be dismal. She was virtually abandoned, her mother institutionalized. She was shuffled to foster homes. If she sought love in the bed of powerful men, it was not entirely a matter of immoral behavior. She had severe issues from childhood.

Murray picked her up at a hotel on Olympic Boulevard. He waited while she prepared herself in front of the mirror. He "dated" her enough times to develop a routine. He would tell her dinner was for seven, but make reservations with the restaurant for 8:30. He brought magazines to read while she changed her mind about her hair or her dress. With luck they made the restaurant by 8:45. His first date with her was at an old mob-owned restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, Alan Dale.

His dinner date, really a business meal, an interview with the sex symbol, was "not exactly an AP news flash," wrote Reilly. "Murray was  Time magazine's  Hollywood reporter from 1950 to 1953, and you could throw a bucket of birdseed in any direction at Chasen's and not hit anybody who didn't know him. He has played poker with  John Wayne ('he was lousy'), kibitzed with  Jack Benny (who gave him an inscribed, solid-gold money clip) and golfed with  Bing Crosby (later,  Crosby sent him clippings and column ideas)."

One night Murray noticed out of the corner of his eye a "famous former athlete" enter the restaurant via a side door. Escorted to a private dining area by the owner, a screen was placed around his table. Marilyn started looking around.

"What's wrong?"  Murray asked. Then Marilyn leaned over.

"Do you mind if you don't take me home but I go home with a friend of mine?" she asked.

"Only if you introduce me to Joe DiMaggio first?" he replied.

"O.K." She waved to a man across the room who sheepishly made his way to the table.

"Jim, I would like you to meet  Joe DiMaggio."

Murray noted early on the difference between Hollywood celebrity and sports celebrity. The movie stars and studios courted publicity. It was the lifeblood of their business. Athletes did not. Certainly athletes like DiMaggio and Ted Williams did not need anybody to tout them. Their fame was secure, far and wide. The DiMaggio-Monroe marriage, which lasted about a year, was symbolic of the difference.

Marilyn flaunted herself, craving attention. DiMaggio was private. Marilyn entertained the troops in Korea. Upon her return she exclaimed, "Joe, Joe, you never heard such cheering."

"Yes I have," deadpanned Joe D.

The actors and entertainers were celebrities. Athletes were heroes. Some, like DiMaggio and particularly a select group of real New York icons, were heroes on par with astronauts, warriors and political figures.

Ultimately, Murray's meanderings with Marilyn resulted neither in romance for the writer or a cover story for the celebrity. Murray never found real substance in Marilyn. Eventually she studied her craft under "method" acting teacher Lee Strasberg in New York. There was some talent in her, but it was limited. It was never bigger than her bustline.

Marilyn continued to look for love in the arms of strong men. The marriage with DiMaggio was over in less than a year, although they remained friends. Tired of being cast in "blonde bimbo" roles, she married playwright Arthur Miller, hoping his intellectualism would rub off on her in some manner. They divorced. In a pre-cursor of reality television, the Kardashians and the general premise of fame for fame's sakes, Marilyn ascended to the heights of celebrity status without making great films or achieving real praise as an actress. Her looks and television persona were enough, combined with scandalous behavior and access to power, without ever really having any herself.

She moved on to Presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy, having a fling with him and famously singing "happy birthday, Mr. President" to him in a faux strip tease act that must have greatly pleased Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy. In 1962 she was found dead at her Los Angeles home, sleeping pills at her side. Like James Dean and Jim Morrison, she left a "good-looking corpse."

Upon hearing of her death, DiMaggio uttered a curse word aimed at "the Kennedys," who he was convinced had her killed. She reportedly had an affair with the married Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who was in Los Angeles ostensibly to tell her she could no longer have an affair with his brother, at the time of her death. There is little doubt that Marilyn in death achieved far greater fame and fortune than she would have had she simply lived and grown old.

The Duke

Many film critics failed to recognize the screen presence of John "Duke" Wayne. Wayne grew up Marion Morrison in Glendale. He played football for Howard Jones at USC. After injuring his shoulder in a bodysurfing accident at Newport Beach, Morrison lost his scholarship. He took up acting at Fox Studios.

Morrison arranged for USC football players to be extras in Hollywood screen epics. They were Napoleon's Grand Armee or Biblical legions. Through Morrison Trojan players attended Hollywood parties. It was a tremendous recruiting tool unavailable to any other coach in the nation. According to aforementioned legend, "it girl" Clara Bow had an insatiable sexual desire, inviting the entire USC football squad to "service" her at her Hollywood hills pad. It was all made up. She dated quarterback Morley Drury, who reported "nothing happened." That did not stop the rumors from swirling for decades. The Internet managed to both keep the story alive, but also had the affect of de-bunking it as myth started by a fired secretary.

Morrison changed his name to John Wayne and became a big star, but was not considered an actor of depth along the lines of a Henry Fonda or a Humphrey Bogart. But to those who kept tabs on box office records, they knew Wayne was the most popular actor in the world. The elites of Hollywood and New York favored more stylized artists, but in the "sticks," which were pretty much everywhere else, the Duke was number one. Finally Time gave Wayne his due for The Quiet Man. He was a man's man who lived in a man's world of poker, cronies and Baja pigeon shooting. Wayne in part posed as a rugged macho man in to cover up for his given name of Marion. His size and football background added to the image, but he was an intellectual under his muscles. Wayne never said "ain't" until a movie script made him say it. He was an A student, a high school valedictorian who made excellent marks at USC. Wayne was deeply patriotic and, like another conservative, Ronald Reagan, enmeshed in politics.

The myth of conservative racial prejudice was exemplified by Wayne's penchant for marrying Latino women and taking holidays in Mexico. When he was injured at USC, his black teammate Brice Taylor took his position, but there were no reports of hard feelings on Duke's part, toward Taylor or Coach Jones.

He was as Right-wing as Bank of America during Hollywood's most controversial years. It was the age of the Blacklist. In 1947 Los Angeles-area Congressman Richard M. Political opened wounds that have never really healed, giving rise to McCarthyism, the Blacklist, and investigations into Hollywood's complicity with Communism. Wayne and Reagan led the charge to root out Communist elements from the entertainment industry.

Wayne's most famed director, John Ford was almost as Right-wing, but had a real "sadistic" streak. Ford bullied writers during interviews, then laughed in admiration if the scribe stood up for himself.

Despite Wayne's desire to use movies as a tool of patriotic propaganda favoring America, he was uncomplicated, self-deprecating and funny. Wayne never made more of his movies than what they were, joking that he "won" the war playing heroic figures, but the pinstripers at Foggy Bottom "gave it all back at the peace table." He said Hollywood publicists named him All-American in 1960 after being a second-stringer in 1925. When Harvard lampooned his conservative politics he arrived to pick up his "award" on top of a tank. Wayne always played characters the public rooted for with one exception, when he let Montgomery Clift be the heroic figure of Red River. He was approachable, a trait many stars had in those days only when they needed the press.

It cannot be overstated how tremendous was the impact of the cowboy on the world's psyche. Such a figure was a wholly unique, new character on the world stage. Europeans of the 20th Century especially, were enamored of this romantic image, embodied by the Duke. Living in huddled masses, nameless faces, automatons, merely numbers in mass crowd scenes bowing in fealty to a totalitarian dictator like Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, they saw in the cowboy a master of his own destiny. Rugged, individualistic, living off the land in prairie splendor, answerable to no man, only to God and his willingness to make do; such a concept was unthinkable through 2,000 years of monarchs and militarists forcing farmers to pay homage and tribute to their pagan idols. Such was the most iconic of American characters, and it was in the West where he thrived.

Duke Wayne and the University of Southern California were inter-changeable within the Hollywood zeitgeist. The held their own with mighty Notre Dame in the 1920s and 1930s. In Hollywood, USC men and women dominated the industry. Starting with Wayne, many Trojan football stars were actors, producers and studio workers. Aaron Rosenberg and Jesse Hibbs were successful producers. Wayne constantly fought ex-teammate Ward Bond on screen. Bond was always the friendly Irish priest or saloon-keep who, after a punch-up with the Duke, shared a shot of whiskey with him. It was still an innocent time.

The admiration for Duke was returned. "Lots of fellows don't put in the care and effort that you do yours," Wayne wrote to an interviewer in a letter dated February 28, 1952.

Celebrity

With the increased influence of the William Morris Agency, the studio system slowly began to recede in the 1950s. Top name actors began to negotiate deals for a cut of a film's profits, producer's credits, and other perks previously only Charlie Chaplin and a handful of smart, bankable stars could hope for.

The nature of celebrity evolved. It was the Los Angeles of a different era. The city was growing leaps and bounds, but the Dodgers were not yet in town. It was still slightly "minor league." It was in many respects, despite large size, a small town, at least within film industry circles. Stars would get in trouble but expect their peccadilloes be papered over in the press, favors often serving as trade.

Humphrey Bogart was the opposite of John Wayne. With the Duke, what you saw was what you got. Bogart resented his Park Avenue upbringing. The son of a doctor, he pretended he was a "dead end kid." He was about as tough as a ballroom dancer.

It was not uncommon for the city desk to receive reports of chair swinging, ash tray-throwing fights from some Figueroa Street wine joint between Bogart and his tempestuous wife, Mayo Methot. Writers might meet Bogart at the Georgia Street Receiving Hospital, where he received treatment for head cuts after taking a bar stool to the head by his wife. Bogart apparently only got tough after a few drinks, and then with women at that. The old line was, "A couple of drinks and  Bogart thinks he's  Bogart." Famed L.A. restaurateur Mike Romanoff claimed lineage to the Russian royal family. He was not related but refused to concede despite facts presented to him showing otherwise. The egos and idiosyncrasies of the movie crowd made for great fodder. Marlon Brando was sued by a producer for walking off the set of The Egyptians. Interviewers might spend an hour knocking on Brando's door and staring in his window while Brando sat inside, laughing at their discomfort. Finally the actor would emerge, bent over in comedy.

Brando loved boxing, a subject he tackled as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. Like Wayne, Brando wrote touching, personal letters to the writers who interviewed him, virtually unheard of today. Perhaps his publicist as an act of necessity prodded him, but the words appear heartfelt. For all of Brando's grand standing in the acting game, at the time he was misunderstood. He was a "mumbler," a method man when the likes of Laurence Olivier paid little credence to the style. Brando was a "roughneck," an image he would not break until he performed in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

"I appreciated, more than any other aspects of the experience, two things; one of which is the new perspective he lent me of myself in relation to the world about me and second is your having been as honest and devotetededly thorough as you were," Brando wrote to a writer. "Most of all I think it was your lack of preconception and your insistent openness of mind that made it the most pleasant experience with the press to date."

Most of the movie crowd was sports mad and many studio moguls' inveterate gamblers, which made sense. Hollywood was the biggest gamble of them all. When the Dodgers came west, Dodger Stadium had more stars on the club level than the back lot at MGM.

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were actually questioned over possible Communist affiliation. Arnaz thoroughly destroyed any whiff of Red sympathy when he testified that as a youth in Cuba, the Communists came to confiscate his family's property. He hated them and as a Christian despised their atheism. The press came to his aid, supporting the couple, whose TV program I Love Lucy revolutionized the genre.

Singer Rosemary Clooney made Time magazine's February 19, 1953 cover, launching her career. Time and Life were the leading publications that could make or break an entertainer's popularity.

A jaunty "Hollywood style" of writing, distinctly different from the staccato rat-tat-tat of the New York scribes, began to take shape largely influenced by the noir angles of Raymond Chandler and the sensationalism of William Randolph Hearst. It is difficult to easily pinpoint the East Coast writers, but perhaps the best way is not through written words but spoken ones. First would be the newsreel descriptions of Madison Square Garden boxing matches, or Lowell Thomas's stylized descriptions of American war victories as heard by millions of moviegoers.

Or better yet were the words, on the page and then on TV, of New York gossip columnist and Red-baiter Walter Winchell, who narrated the famous 1960s television program The Untouchables. It was almost as if a new age of people, particularly on the West Coast, thought this style to be a thing of the past. New voices were emerging, on the silver screen, in the broadcast booth, and on the printed page.

Actors like Brando and Jimmy Stewart took time in between sentences to convey emotions and emphasis, a change from the fast pace of a Bogart or Jimmy Cagney, who sometimes seemed to be trying to set a Guinness Book of World Records for most words spoken in succession, which he seemingly achieved in the film One, Two, Three. Stewart represented something so out-dated in Hollywood as to be an allegorical dinosaur: a Republican ex-fighter pilot who many felt should have been President.

The new style was symbolized in particular by the mellifluous tones of Brooklyn Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. In the literary world, Jack Kerouac's On the Road revolutionized the genre in the 1950s. The Los Angeles scribes separated themselves from Walter Winchell, over time morphing into literary versions of Scully, who like Kerouac and Jim Murray before them, took Horace Greeley's advice to, "Go west, young man."

Many newspaper writers and journalists on the West Coast originally desired to write stage plays and screenplays, which gave them a dramatist's edge to their work. Columns became stories, a three-act play. Vin Scully and Jim Murray were poets. One could imagine Brando or Clint Eastwood reading Murray's columns aloud for effect. In coming out West, many artists separated themselves physically and through wordplay from the old ways they grew up with. This was a world of screenplays, premieres, actors and movie jargon. The movie world was far more attuned to sports than the Broadway scene in New York, which tended to be more effete with a heavier British flavor. Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s was distinctly different from today.

Many of its big names had served in the military. Some were roustabouts who fell into acting after traveling in the circus or the merchant marines. Film school and drama schools were almost non-existent. The assembly line of acting hopefuls they now produce did not exist then. They were more likely to be rough-hewn characters, fans of the fight game, the track and the pennant chases. Women were "dames" cut out of the Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett mode; Barbara Stanwyck, strong women who wanted strong men.

The baseball-movie connection was strong until the 1980s. Tom Lasorda's office at Dodger Stadium was often filled with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Don Rickles, and Danny Kaye. Nightlife was tame in Los Angeles of the 1950s. The show biz crowd was insular. Rather than party at clubs like New Yorkers, attending the Stork Club, 21, the Latin Quarter, the Copacabana, Toots Shors, or other hot spots until all hours, Hollywood preferred private homes for dinner and movie screenings. Hollywood was an early-morning town, with film crews on the set at the crack of dawn. Broadway was a nighttime endeavor. L.A. was spread out, making drunk driving perilous. In New York the in crowd was usually a short taxi ride away.

The arrival of the Dodgers changed that. Bo Belinsky of the Angels became the most recognized night denizen in sports. The building of the Forum turned basketball into a star attraction. USC, the Rams and the Raiders always brought in movie people. When Hugh Hefner moved his Playboy mansion to Los Angeles, his legendary parties became a staple of the sporting crowd.

The gulags: Communism's Holocaust

In the '40s when Stalin was burying millions and millions of Soviets in the torture camps of Siberia, there was no word in our press about this. The victims lived in total hopelessness, because there seemed to be no awareness of their plight.

\- Ronald Reagan

There are many names for them: relocation centers, detention centers, labor camps, concentration camps, death camps, re-education camps. They were always cruel, and in the 20th Century they became the de riguer way of totalitarianism. They were found wherever the Nazis, the Soviets and the Red Chinese went. The sycophants of these evil empires, such as Pol Pot, enthusiastically made copies of the mold. In the Soviet Union, the camps were collectively known as the gulag (an acronym in Russian for the Main Directorate of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies).

Many of the true horrors of the U.S.S.R.'s gulags came to public light in the 1970s. It had no effect on America's decision to withdraw funding to prevent the ones that were being built at that time from going into operation in Cambodia. Perhaps the West was just tired of fighting these evils. While America savored post-war victory amidst the spoils of Hollywood hedonism, Madison Avenue creationism, and the sprawl of suburbanization, the Soviet Union descended into hell. Russians, French, and Germans endeavored to find out the truth of the gulags.

Oddly enough, American researchers have not led the charge of gulag research. It is strange but noteworthy that the Holocaust does not fill the imagination. Books, movies and documentaries are constant reminders of the near-extermination of European Jewry. The gulags and the millions of ghosts they produced are almost forgotten. The Jewish memorialists, in fact, do as much to remind the world of the gulags as anybody, since they are in the business not simply of reminding people of their plight, but of similar plights. If ever man has been given a window into the ways of Satan, it is in these near-forgotten genocides and Holocausts.

The Left in America and Great Britain went so far as to justify the gulags. The Right has failed to do the necessary work of real scholarship that these crimes deserve. Henry Wallace, the leader of the Communist wing of the Democrat Party during the Roosevelt/Truman era, visited the brutal Magadan Soviet penal camps. Of the sadistic commander, Ivan Nikishov, Wallace said he was "idyllic."

The reality of the camps sheds light on the vision of Dwight Eisenhower. When German concentration camps were discovered near the end of World War II, many thought they should be bulldozed over. They were rat-infested, dangerously unhealthy, but Ike insisted they stay as is while camera crews be brought in to capture the full horrors being discovered each day. He said that if what happened there was not documented, it would be forgotten and even disbelieved. He could not have been more right.

But there were no conquering American Armies to liberate the gulags. Over time, they were paved under shopping malls and highways. When the Cold War ended, there were no documentarians to capture the crime scenes. There were only the Venona Papers, which were damning but anti-septic compared to the eyewitness accounts of Allied servicemen who saw with their own eyes and smelled with their own noses the death camps of Germany.

"Stalin's crimes today are virtually incomprehensible," intones the narrator in the Ronald Reagan documentary In the Face of Evil, using the imagery of a "Beast" to demonstrate an age-old evil that never goes away, re-appearing under new guises. After purging 15 million "the Beast turned, as always, to those least able to defend themselves; the peasants, the heart and soul of Mother Russia, recipients of age old abuse. They would bear the brunt of Stalin's murderous regime . . . When the census takers reported that nearly 30 million people died under his rule, Stalin had the census takers taken outside and shot."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn alerted much of the world to the horrors of Communism in his masterful Gulag Archipelago.

The gulags were under the control of the secret police (successively, Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and KGB). A fair number of political figures in charge of modern Russia come from the KGB and therefore were part of the gulag administration. This would be the same as leading Hitler henchmen surviving the fall of the Nazis only to re-invent themselves as statesman in a new, Socialist Germany. The founder of the Soviet secret police was Feliks Dzerzhinsky. His policy for the Cheka was expressed in 1918.

"We represent in ourselves organized terror \- this must be said very clearly," he said.

Soviet exile in Siberia was much worse than it had been under the czars. The Soviet Union had hundreds of these camps, far more than the Nazis operated. They had thousands of work camps, and 500 were considered ITL (for "ispravitel'no-trudovoy lager"), which were corrective labor camps and penal colonies. The first opened in 1917. They were geographically spread out from the Arctic to Central Asia.

They spread ". . . from the Cold Pole at Oy-Myakon to the copper mines of Dzhezkazgan," wrote Solzhenitsyn.

It was an integral part of the Soviet economy, responsible for railroad construction, road building, canal building, forestry, mining, agriculture, and construction sites. The conditions were no better than Auschwitz or Dachau. Women shared the work with no social regard. Children, mothers with babies, homosexuals, retarded people, the sick, the deformed and others were put to work, too. Psychiatrically disabled were labeled as "enemies of the people."

When the "Great Patriotic War" began, the Communists introduced "katorga" (hard labor camp) within the ITL system. Prisoners assigned to a katorga were given extra hard work with almost no rations or medical attention. (The word "katorga" is a czarist term). The katorga's were virtually identical in purpose to labor camps run by the Nazis. Slogans were posted in the camps.

"Work is a matter of honor, fame, courage, and heroism . . . Shock work is the fastest way to freedom . . . No work, no food."

The daily ration was 400 to 800 grams of bread. Productive workers received some fish, potatoes, porridge, or vegetables. The U.N. World Health Organization sets the minimum requirements for heavy labor at from 3,100 to 3,900 calories per day.

Inmate were Christians, Muslim clergymen, "kulaks" (or independent farmers), political dissidents, common criminals, "economic criminals," former "elitists," Communists with a following," ethnic minorities, homeless, "unpersons," "hooligans," tardy workers, and others.

Political prisoners or counter-revolutionaries were "58ers" for having violated Article 58 of the criminal code. Common criminals were called "urki" or "blatnyaki." Less violent criminals accused of violating some aspect of the civil code were categorized as "bytoviki." Individuals accused of undermining Soviet economic laws were referred to as subversives or pests - "vrediteli" in Russian. Trustees or "pridurki" in the camps, those most likely to survive their imprisonment, acted as camp service personnel. All inmates were referred to as "zeki," the acronym for the Russian word for prisoner.

Naftaly Aronovich Frenkel was a Jew born in Turkey in 1883. After the Bolshevik revolution he moved to the Soviet Union. In Odessa he was an agent of the State Political Administration, responsible for the acquisition and confiscation of gold from the wealthier classes. Frenkel was arrested in 1927 for skimming gold. He was sent to the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp (SLON) in the Arctic. Frenkel had a talent for work efficiency and explained his ideas to Stalin personally. He linked food rationing to production and concluded that a prisoner was valuable for three months after captivity, but debilitated after that. The most effective thing was to kill them and replace them with fresh inmates. The Soviets did not have to worry about attrition; they always found slaves from among their huge population base.

When prisoners were called to fall into line, the last man to line up would be shot as a laggard ("dokhodyaga"), which created a constant flow of fresh labor, pleasing Stalin. Frenkel was made construction chief of the White Sea Canal project, and later of the BAM railroad project. In 1937 he was named head of the Main Administration of Railroad Construction Camps (GULZhDS), where he provided railroad transport facilities to the Red Army in the 1939-40 "Winter War" against Finland, and during the Second World War. He was awarded the Order of Lenin three times, named a Hero of Socialist Labor, and promoted to the rank of general in the NKVD.

Frenkel's became standard operating procedures in the BAM (Baltic-Amur Magistral) railroad project, the Dalstroy (Far East Construction), Vorkuta, Kolyma, Magadan, and countless other hellholes. Workers noted that the rails were marked "made in Canada," since they were part of aid given by the West. Or, as V.I. Lenin observed, "The capitalists will sell us the very rope, with which we will hang them."

300,000 prisoners were in Soviet labor camps in 1932, 1 million in 1935, and 2 million by 1940. President Roosevelt extended the "hand of friendship" while millions starved in the Ukraine and Russia. 1 million inmates "served" in the Red Army, clearing minefields by walking through them at gunpoint. After the war, the camp population went up. Most soldiers who had fought or were imprisoned by the Germans were imprisoned for being exposed to "Western thought."

The gulags filled with the U.S.S.R.'s enemies: Finns, Poles, Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Japanese. Many of them were held for years after 1945. German prisoners were treated the worst. The death rate of POWs was excessively high. Most German POWs were shot or mutilated. 95,000 German POWs were captured at Stalingrad, but only 5,000 returned home. 40,000 died marching from Stalingrad to the Beketovka camp. 42,000 died there of hunger and disease. S.S. POWs and Vlasov forces imprisoned on Wrangel Island had almost no chance of survival.

(Many Germans captured by the United States were held in Alabama, where they lived comfortably and were allowed many privileges.)

The U.S.S.R. held 3.4 million German POWs at war's end. The Yalta Agreement agreed to the use of German POWs in the Soviet gulags as "reparations-in-kind," instead of repatriation to their homeland. Germans were more productive than the other "workers." In an effort to get the most out of them, Stalin ordered that they be given food rations proportionate to their work. Still, almost a million German POWs died in the camps. The last of 10,000 survivors were released from the Soviet Union in 1955, after 10 years of forced labor. 1.5 million German soldiers are still "missing in action." 875,000 German civilians were abducted and transported to the camps. Half of them died.

After the war, British and U.S. authorities ordered their militaries in Germany to deliver to the Communists former residents of the U.S.S.R. This included men who had taken up arms with the Germans against the Soviets, prisoners of war, forced and voluntary workers in the German wartime economy, and numerous persons who had left. 4.2 million ethnic Russians and 1.6 million Russian POWs from defeated Germany were augmented by German POWs and civilians abducted or deported from Germany and Eastern Europe. Tens of thousands of Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians were sent to Soviet camps, replaced in their homelands by Soviet invaders. Most ethnic Russian women and children were reincorporated into the Soviet system. Russian POWs and the Vlasov men were put under the jurisdiction of SMERSH (Death to Spies), which sentenced about a third of a million to serve from 10 to 20 years in the gulags. In 1947, the gulag's held 9 million souls.

Under the direct supervision of secret police chief Lavrenty Beria, thousands of gulag inmates supported the Soviet nuclear bomb project, mining uranium and preparing test facilities on Novaya Zemlya, Vaygach Island, Semipalatinsk, and dozens of other sites. The Soviet Navy used gulag prisoners to rid de-commissioned nuclear-powered submarines of radioactivity.

In 1953, the gulags held 2.7 million prisoners. Danchik Sergeyevich Baldaev, an MVD major who worked in the gulags from 1951 until his retirement in 1981, published a book depicting the post-Stalin gulags: tortures, cruelties, sex, food and housing, climatic conditions, common and political criminals. The KGB allowed the barracks to be run by common criminals (murderers, rapists, and psychopaths of every variety), abusing the women and the weak. They called themselves "vory v zakone" (thieves within the law, an installed criminal leader deciding disputes and dividing spoils).

Women in the gulags were raped on the transport ship and in the railroad cars, then paraded naked in front of camp officials, who selected "promising" ones for easier work in exchange for sex. The officials preferred German, Latvian, and Estonian women, who would never see home again, over native Russian women, who might. Women not selected by the camp officials were left over for the barracks or lesbians. Starvation, work exhaustion, exposure to the cold, physical abuse, isolation, impalement, genital mutilation, and bullets in the back of the head were other common events in the gulags.

30 million prisoners entered the gulags during the Soviet era. Most who served their time were not allowed to return homes. They lived the remainder of their lives near the camps. Robert Conquest, a Western scholar, estimated that one out of every three new inmates died during the first year of imprisonment. Only half made it through the third year. Conquest estimated that during the "Great Terror" of the late 1930s alone, there were 6 million arrests, 2 million executions, and another 2 million deaths from other causes. By 1953, at least 12 million died there. The figure, according to Andrei Sakharov, is much higher. Unlike the Germans, the Soviets were not as efficient at keeping records.

Wooden markers with the deceased's identification number were affixed to the left leg. Gold teeth or fillings were pried out. To ensure that the death was not feigned, the skull of the inmate was smashed with a hammer, or a metal spike driven into the chest. The corpses were buried in an unmarked grave.

Aleksandr Gutman produced a documentary film in which he interviewed four German women from East Prussia who as young girls had been raped by Red Army troops. They were then sent to Number 517, near Petrozavodsk in Karelia. Of 1,000 girls and women transported to that camp, 522 died within six months of their arrival. These women were deported, with the acquiescence of the Western powers, as part of "reparations-in-kind" language, possibly written by Alger Hiss in the post-war charters.

"While the diary of Anne Frank is known throughout the world, we carry our memories in our hearts," one of the women remarked. When Gutman attempted to show the documentary in New York City, liberals were quoted saying (and this is not made up), "He should be killed for making such a movie."

The U.S. Justice Department maintains the Office of Special Investigations, dedicated to the investigation, prosecution, and deportation of former Axis soldiers and officials. Most of those prosecuted were low ranking guards at wartime German camps. No American office was ever created to hunt out the officials who headed and ran the Communist's camps, even though Aleksey Smirnov's System of Corrective Labor Camps lists more than 500 camps with their administrative officers through the 1960s.

Soviet gulags were mostly destroyed, and attempts to create museums, shrines and memorials have failed.

"People simply do not equate the ethical and moral horrors and shame of Nazism with those of Communism," said Yuri Pivovarov, director of the Institute of Social Science Research at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Many formerly high-ranking Communist officials are still in charge of modern Russia, including Vladimir Putin.

Departing Vorkuta, British travel writer Colin Thubron stumbled on a stone on which a message had been scratched. It read:

"I was exiled in 1949, and my father died here in 1942. Remember us."

Because the American Army never officially conquered the Soviet Union, unearthing the gulags as they did the concentration camps of Nazi Germany; because records were much less efficiently kept by the Communists than by the Nazis; and also because so much time has passed in which the evidence could be covered up, camps and torture centers even bulldozed over as if they never existed; for these and other reasons the incomprehensible crimes of Stalin and Communism are so huge as to be beyond the human ability to conceive. Stalin himself called an individual death a "tragedy," 1 million a statistic.

Nobody truly knows exactly how many died. It is estimated that about 35 million were killed by Soviet Communism under Lenin, Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and others. Amazingly, this "pales" in comparison to the estimated 55 million killed under one monster in Red China, Chairman Mao Tse-tung. These two nations account for some 90 million of what is believed to be between 100 million and 110 million murdered by Communism altogether beginning with the 1917 Russian Revolution, and still carrying over today in Fidel Castro's Cuba, and by one family (the Kims) in North Korea. Every human, a life. Each life attached to it hopes, dreams, aspirations. Each, a family: mother, father, brothers, sisters, children, friends. Add to that the suffering, the tortured, the injured, maimed and lame. The economic deprivation, the starvations.

Somehow, some way, despite all this evidence, there remains in this world a substantial portion of the population that does not believe in the existence of the devil, or that evil is morally relative. Others know differently. They look at the deeds of George Patton, of Douglas MacArthur, of Ronald Reagan, of great heroes. They know that evil does exist, and that in this world, at least, there is no greater entity equipped to combat it than the United States of America!

McCarthyism

"The Beast had always hated the same things: religion, a free press, intellectual inquiry, artistic expression; anything that elevated or empowered the individual. And yet all who called out the Beast, naming it for what it really was, were vilified, considered reactionary, paranoid, war mongers."

- In the Face of Evil

After the Russian Revolution, the leaders of the Soviet Union quickly set as a major goal the internationalization of Communism. Their worldwide anthem was even called "The Internationale." In many ways, they were smart. They understood that the idea of Communism, which they couched under the more "reasonable" term of Socialism, was more popular outside of their own country, where Soviet citizens actually saw how bad it was. In foreign lands it had the ring of romanticism attached to it, which has always made it dangerous. To this day dumb kids wear t-shirts emblazoned with the handsome image of Che Guevara, obviously unaware that he was a torturer and mass killer.

There are two major differences between Communism and Nazism. Both were Socialistic, Big Government ideologies, but the Nazis engaged in certain capitalistic endeavors. For instance, they did not completely nationalize Mercedes-Benz; instead they enriched them while utilizing their production lines to create military vehicles. This was done with most major German companies. Adolf Hitler printed money to stimulate the economy. Only a handful of Nazi insiders really understood once he did this, war was a fait accompli. He would be forced to invade his neighbors, plundering their natural resources in order to pay for his economy and his military build-up.

The Nazis were also ultra-nationalistic, endorsing the singular idea of special German "superman" who were better than any other man from any other nation. While they expressed a certain amount of admiration for other Nordic races, grudging respect for British willpower, and outright admiration for the American work ethic and athletic skills, all these "others" were far below their view of themselves.

They promoted their ideology of Aryan supremacy through propaganda, and less through outright espionage and subversion. The Soviets, on the other hand, began in the 1920s to infiltrate Western culture through the arts, government, and opinion. They set up a newspaper called The Daily Worker, allowed to operate under First Amendment freedoms. From there they used Daily Worker employees and their contacts to create a growing, inch-by-inch network of subversives, spies, fellow travelers, informants and propagandists.

The election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 was a gold mine for Communism in America. Many Democrats were naturally pre-disposed to favoring the Communists at some level or another. The Great Depression made the ideology seem viable in the face of withering capitalism. The New Deal created an alphabet soup of new agencies and government programs, many of which were basically Communist with American attributes; all of which were perfect opportunities for Soviet spies to infiltrate and slowly work their tentacles of influence and power higher into the U.S. government.

Aside from the government, the Communists targeted the arts – literature, stage, cinema – civil rights, academia, and journalism. They were less successful infiltrating the military, the intelligence services or sports.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation under J. Edgar Hoover tracked Soviet infiltration from the very beginning. The radical elements of "Red Emma" Goldman, the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the attempted bombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, and anti-war activities of 1917-18 aroused in Hoover's view the need for eternal vigilance. He investigated Charlie Chaplin's Hollywood, unions, and other hotbeds of Red dissent. By the mid- to late 1930s Communist activity was hot and heavy in America.

World War II created a strange, temporary respite from anti-Communist vigilance insofar as the U.S. entered in an unusual alliance with Joseph Stalin, teaming together to defeat Nazi Germany. However, official investigative sources in the military and FBI were motivated to continue monitoring Communist subversion. It was during this period in which the most alarming facts were discovered, most of which were not publicly revealed for years, in some key cases for decades.

Careers were made and ruined as a result of this activity. The nation split with divisions that have never healed. The entire post-war period became known by a single pejorative called McCarthyism.

The Venona Project

In February of 1943, the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service, a forerunner of the National Security Agency (NSA), initiated a very secret program, later code named Venona. The object of the Venona Project was to decrypt, examine and exploit Soviet diplomatic communications. The Venona papers are the documents from this project. These papers are deciphered, intercepted secret Soviet communiqués between the United States and Moscow.

The motivation for the project stemmed from military concerns that the Soviets and Germans were going to declare ceasefire and a separate peace from the Allies (U.S., Great Britain). The Germans attacked the U.S.S.R. in 1941. In 1943 the Soviets defeated the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, but prior to that the Eastern Front was in grave doubt. But the true reasons the military began the project speak volumes about the Roosevelt Administration.

Any soldier or officer, while under the command of the President (Commander-in-Chief) does not swear allegiance to the President (unlike Nazi soldiers swearing allegiance not to the country of Germany but to Hitler personally). They swear an oath to the U.S. Constitution. Military intelligence – Army and Navy – began to hear high-level members of FDR's White House were providing disturbing reports indicating top-secret information and value to Soviet agents.

This traffic fed their suspicion that American traitors, to the huge detriment of the U.S. and her Armed Forces fighting overseas, were orchestrating a separate peace deal between Russia and Germany. Therefore, the motivation was one of survival and military strategy, not politics or criminal justice. If the Soviets and Germans joined forces and fought the U.S., the tide of the war would turn drastically against American interests.

The Venona documents link Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their Russian spy rings. The cover name for Julius Rosenberg was LIBERAL. Venona is the treasure trove of information that was uncovered in Soviet archives after the U.S. victory in the Cold War. The announcement for the Venona conference was a "scholarly conference on Soviet intelligence efforts to penetrate the United States government during the 1940s and 1950s and U.S. counter-espionage against such efforts."

The Venona papers were given short shrift by the liberal media when they came to light in the 1990s, because they revealed that despite Senator Joseph McCarthy's blunderings, the essence of his argument was true. There were Soviet espionage agents and traitors to the United States infiltrating every aspect of life in the 1940s and '50s. Many were identified and exposed. Many were protected by liberal Democrats and the media. They knew that the truth about them would indicate so many cases of treason against members of their political party that the effect would be even more disastrous than it was.

The Blacklist has been made out to be one of the worst events in American history. High school and college students are taught without question that it was a "witch hunt" with no basis in reality. Hollywood, the industry most affected by it, along with college professors, have engaged in a systematic campaign to discredit the Blacklist. The fact is, the Hollywood Blacklist meant little more than a relative handful of mostly untalented writers and directors, who had failed to renounce Communism even after they found out that Stalin was a butcher (many of whom were spies or knew of spying activity), losing plumb jobs for a couple years. The dominant media culture would have us believe it was an "American Holocaust."

It is true that some lives were destroyed unnecessarily. It is true that not everybody accused was a Communist. But the backlash against the Blacklist has rent this great nation with a media culture swung so far to the Left in retaliation for it that there was, for years, little semblance of reality in the dissemination of information about it. Pure free market forces in recent years have created a balance to these media forces. For this reason truth is no longer the casualty it was for so many years.

For 60 years sympathizers said all the evidence of the infiltration of Communists into the American government was trumped up and fake. Helen Gahagan Douglas, for instance, had been described as a "victim" of the "lies" of Richard Nixon. The textbooks of any public school in the U.S. routinely proclaim that McCarthyism was nothing more than a Right-wing political ploy. As the Left became the dominant voice of education, the universities, television, the print media, and most of all the film industry, this fiction has become accepted "fact" by a population of people who do not care enough about history to identify and expose these lies. If ever a historical lie has been foisted on the world, the Blacklist, McCarthyism and the Red Scare are it. The Venona files, corroborated by Soviet files, help identify these lies.

The papers show that traitors were passing top-secret American information to the Soviet Union as well as American atomic secrets. Lauchlin Currie was the personal aide and advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a proven Soviet espionage agent by both the Venona files and the FBI

Albert Einstein, the famous mathematician who advised FDR of the possibility of building an atomic bomb, was not a Communist, but his personal staff included Communist Party members. They were involved in espionage against the United States. It was all known by Einstein. In 1947 Einstein told the FBI that he had made a mistake coming to the United States! Time magazine named him "Man of the Century."

Harry Hopkins was the most important assistant to FDR and in actual fact the "assistant President" while he lived. Against the advice of the entire American government he personally approved and demanded the shipment of 40 tons of uranium to the Soviets. Atomic bombs are derived from uranium.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the head of the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. He faced terrible personal guilt over his role in the building of the worst weapon ever used.

"I am Vishnu, destroyer of worlds," he said at White Sands, New Mexico in 1945, quoting from The Bhagavad Gita. He is mentioned frequently in the Soviet clandestine wireless transmissions as being a Soviet agent. They had a nickname for him. He was always suspected and his security clearance was removed when he was deemed a security risk. Before the release of the Venona files none of those suspicions were verified. Most of what is known about Oppenheimer leaves some doubt. At the very best, he was a fellow traveler who provided atomic secrets to Soviet scientists because he felt it only "fair," believing it an act of "friendship."

Their espionage, passivity in the face of knowledge of espionage, and the espionage of many others, resulted in the divulging of American secrets directly responsible for 45 years of the Cold War. Without such treason the Cold War might have been won without having to fight in Vietnam. Millions might have been saved in the U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Both Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins influenced the Yalta and Teheran agreements. FDR was sick and dying. Alger Hiss wrote much of the Yalta agreement. Many Americans always said about Yalta, "How could Roosevelt have been so dumb?"

As a result of the Yalta agreement the United States stopped its penetration of Eastern Europe 90 miles away from the Soviet troops. The Soviets filled that 90-mile vacuum to seize the eastern nations.

The accumulated message traffic of Venona comprised a collection of thousands of Soviet diplomatic telegrams that had been sent from Moscow to certain of its diplomatic missions, and from those missions to Moscow. During the first months of the project, Arlington Hall analysts sorted the traffic by diplomatic mission and by cryptographic system or subscriber.

Initial analysis indicated that five cryptographic systems, later determined to be employed by different subscribers, were in use between Moscow and a number of Soviet overseas missions. It also became apparent that one system involved trade matters, especially Lend-Lease. The other four systems appeared to involve the Soviet Foreign Ministry in Moscow in communication with its missions abroad.

Further analysis showed that each one of the five systems was used exclusively by one of the following subscribers (listed in descending order according to the volume of message traffic which had been collected):

1. Trade representatives - Lend-Lease, AMTORG, and the Soviet Government Purchasing Commission.

2. Diplomats - i.e., members of the diplomatic corps in the conduct of legitimate Soviet embassy and consular business.

3. KGB - the Soviet espionage agency, headquarters in Moscow and Residencies (stations) abroad.

4. GRU - the Soviet Army General Staff Intelligence Directorate and attaches abroad.

5. GRU-Naval - Soviet Naval Intelligence Staff.

In October of 1943, Lieutenant Richard Hallock, a Signal Corps Reserve officer who had been a peacetime archaeologist at the University of Chicago, discovered weaknesses in the cryptographic system of the Soviet trade traffic. This discovery provided a tool for further analytic progress on the other four cryptographic systems.

During 1944, the skills of other expert cryptanalysts were brought to bear on this Soviet message traffic to see if any of the encryption systems of the messages could be broken. One of these cryptanalysts, Cecil Phillips, made observations that led to a fundamental break into the cipher system used by the KGB, although he did not know it at the time. The messages were double encrypted and of enormous difficulty. Two years later, KGB messages could be read or even be recognized as KGB rather than standard diplomatic communications.

The secrets of Venona were passed along to J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI, who quietly began investigating sensitive, high-ranking Democrats in the Roosevelt-Truman Administrations. Incontrovertible evidence developed showing several of Roosevelt's top people were Communists and paid spies. When confronted with the facts, FDR swore at the messenger. Either he disregarded it, found nothing wrong with Communist infiltration into the American government, or as with so many, pretended it would not be a big deal. It was a very big deal.

In 1945, in response to Venona amplifications, the FBI carefully questioned Whittaker Chambers, whose earlier efforts to disclose details about Soviet espionage in the U.S. in the 1930s had gone unheeded. Igor Gouzenko, a GRU code clerk, defected in Ottawa. In late 1945 Elizabeth Bentley, a veteran KGB courier and auxiliary agent handler, went to the FBI and named names. Gouzenko's revelations had no bearing on the Venona breakthroughs, but decrypts show the accuracy of Chambers' sand Bentley's disclosures.

In the summer of 1946, Meredith Gardner, an Arlington Hall analyst, began to read portions of KGB messages that had been sent between the KGB Residency in New York and Moscow Center. On July 31, 1946, he extracted a phrase from a KGB New York message sent to Moscow on August 10, 1944. This message proved to be a discussion of clandestine KGB activity in Latin America. On December13 Gardner was able to read a KGB message discussing the U.S. Presidential election campaign of 1944. A week later, on December 20, 1946, he broke into another KGB message that had been sent to Moscow Center two years earlier. It contained a list of names of the leading scientists working on the Manhattan Project.

By 1947, Gardner was able to show that someone inside the War Department General Staff was providing highly classified information to the Soviets. U.S. Army intelligence, G-2, became alarmed at hundreds of cover names, many of KGB agents, including ANTENNA and LIBERAL (later identified as Julius Rosenberg). One message mentioned that LIBERAL's wife was named "Ethel."

General Carter W. Clarke, the assistant G-2, called the FBI liaison officer to G-2 and told him that the Army had begun to break into Soviet intelligence service traffic, and that the traffic indicated a massive Soviet espionage effort in the U.S.

In October, 1948, FBI special agent Robert Lamphere joined the Venona Project full time as the FBI's liaison and case controller for the Venona espionage material. The British joined the effort that same year, and the two agencies cooperated with each other.

The most alarming trend of the Venona amplifications was not that the Soviets were spying on the U.S. This was part of the "great game" of the Cold War. Rather, the most alarming revelation was that American and British citizens were spying for them for pure political reasons. They were people who loved Communism, hated America, or both. Their motivations were not money or blackmail. If they were not members of the government, they tended to come out of the academic world, were writers, artists or filmmakers. They used their positions to subvert the American Way and promote Communism. In America, they tended to be Jewish. All of them emerged from the liberal wings of the British Labor Party or the American Democrat party.

There were many thousands more who were not active Communist spies, and were not members of Communist cells. They were people who loved Communism, hated America, or both. They wrote articles and books, or made movies, glorifying Communism and depicting America as racist and capitalism as evil. Their motivations were not money or blackmail. If they were not members of the government, these people tended to come out of the academic world, were writers, artists or filmmakers. They used their positions to subvert the American Way and promote Communism. In America, they tended to be Jewish. All of them emerged from the liberal wings of the British Labor Party or the American Democrat Party.

These facts infuriate the Left, who are appalled at the fact people possess knowledge of these activities. None of this changes the fact that it is true.

The Venona messages are filled with hundreds of cover names (designations used in place of the real names to hide identities of Soviet intelligence officers and agents - i.e., spies or cooperating sources - as well as organizations, people, or places discussed in the encrypted messages). A number of public figures were also designated by cover names. Others in that category appear in the text of the messages by their true names. The following are examples of cover names recovered from the Venona corpus:

Cover name: True Name.

KAPITAN: President Roosevelt.

ANTENNA, later changed to LIBERAL: Julius Rosenberg.

BABYLON: San Francisco.

THE BANK: U.S. Department of State.

ARSENAL: U.S. War Department.

ENORMOZ: Manhattan Project/A-bomb.

ANTON: Leonid Kvasnikov, KGB Chief of A-bomb espionage in KGB's New York City office.

Arlington Hall and the FBI studied the cover names for leads to identities, grouping them into families of cover names. Some cover names came from mythology. Some were Russian given names, and others were names of fish, etc. KAPITAN was easily identified from the context as a good cover name for President Roosevelt, but his cover name was, nevertheless, outranked by those persons of lower station, including KGB operatives cover named PRINCE, DUKE, and GOD. Other KGB assets were just plain BOB, TOM, and JOHN. Elizabeth Bentley had the cover name GOOD GIRL. Very rarely, the KGB was careless in choosing a cover name. For example, the cover name FROST was used for KGB agent Boris Moros. The Russian word for "frost" is "moroz."

There were about 2,200 Venona messages translated. The Venona translations are now released to the public. Almost all of the KGB messages between Moscow and New York, and Moscow and Washington in 1944 and 1945 that could be broken at all were broken. To a greater or lesser degree, between 1947 and 1952, this led to the uncovering of Communist activity in the U.S. in the 1950s. The serial numbers of the Venona messages indicate that the KGB and GRU sent thousands of messages between Moscow and the overseas recipients. Arlington Hall made the Venona breakthroughs through hard work and analysis. This is a direct reflection of America's superior intelligentsia. The people who performed these tasks are heroes.

Information in the Venona materials reveals KGB tradecraft (i.e., the practical means and methods of espionage and counter-espionage) of the time in great detail. Most Venona messages concern operational/tradecraft matters. The sheer volume of data collected by KGB stations abroad was too great to be reported by telegram. The Venona messages indicate that photocopies of classified documents went to Moscow by courier. In one translation, KGB in New York informed Moscow it had 56 rolls of film from their agent, cover named ROBERT. This trove of classified material was to be sent off by courier to Moscow Center.

Information in Venona translations describes the KGB's modus operandi in arranging meetings with their agents, with much attention given to the security of these secret meetings. Other messages describe KGB counter-measures against the FBI; counter-surveillance, detection of bugging devices, and ensuring the loyalty of Soviet personnel in the United States. A particularly fascinating set of Venona messages described the KGB's efforts to locate Soviet sailors who had deserted from merchant ships in San Francisco and other U.S. ports. Some of the most interesting messages detailed KGB assessment and recruitment of American Communists for espionage work.

Over 200 named or cover named persons found in the Venona translations, persons then present in the U.S., were claimed by the KGB and the GRU in their messages as their clandestine assets or contacts. Many of these persons have been identified. Many have not been. The majority of unidentified cover names in the New York KGB traffic appear three or fewer times. This means that a large number of "heroes" of the Left, "ruined" by McCarthyism only to be rehabilitated by Hollywood, the media or the academic community, may have been bona fide Communist spies. This would not have been known throughout their lives. One now-known spy, Theodore Hall was never prosecuted or implicated because the government could not make their case at the time. In some cases these people are still alive, claiming to be "victims" of the Right; still trotted out by the New York Times or The Nation for sympathetic reminiscences of the "American Holocaust."

These approximately 200 persons are separate from the many KGB and GRU officers who also appear in Venona. ROBERT is found in Venona translations several dozen times. Other cover named persons were found only a few times. Information derived from the Venona translations shows the KGB's extensive contacts with the American Communist Party. Many of the espionage activities by members of the American Communist Party are reflected in the Venona translations.

A number of sources outside of signals intelligence reveal that the KGB learned early on that the U.S. had begun to study Soviet communications. In late 1945, KGB agent Elizabeth Bentley told the FBI that the KGB acquired some limited information about the U.S. effort in 1944. Kim Philby, while assigned to Washington, D.C. from 1949-51, occasionally visited Arlington Hall for discussions about Venona; furthermore, he regularly received copies of summaries of Venona translations as part of his official duties. But if the Soviets knew something about what Arlington Hall was accomplishing, they could not, at any rate, get the messages back.

Venona translations that have been identified as associated with atomic bomb espionage messages are being released first. All but two of this group of 49 messages was KGB traffic; one is a GRU and one a Soviet diplomatic message.

These messages disclose some of the clandestine activities of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs, David and Ruth Greenglass, and others such as the spy known by the cover name MLAD or the equally important, but still unidentified PERS. The role played by the person cover named VEKSEL remains uncertain but troubling. A number of other cover names of persons associated with atomic bomb espionage remain unidentified to this day.

Venona messages show that KGB officer Leonid Kvasnikov, cover name ANTON, headed atomic bomb espionage in the U.S., but that he, like the Rosenbergs, who came under his control, had many other high-tech espionage targets such as the U.S. jet aircraft program, developments in radar and rockets. As with most Venona messages, the Rosenberg messages contain much information relating to KGB net control and tradecraft matters.

The Venona program concerned KGB and GRU messages that were available to Arlington Hall code breakers. Most of the messages which were collected were not successfully decrypted, and, short of a release of the KGB and GRU archives from the period, full disclosure of KGB and GRU activities represented in the Venona corpus of messages may never be known.

The Blacklist

On June 29, 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act, making it illegal for anyone in the U. S. to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government. The law prescribed that alien residents file a comprehensive statement of their personal and occupational status and a record of their political beliefs. 4,741,971 aliens registered in four months.

The act's objective was to expose Communists and Left-wing political groups. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was set up by Congress under Martin Dies in 1938 to investigate unpatriotic behavior. At a time when the world was at war, there was concern that people were trying to overthrow the government.

In 1947 HUAC, chaired by J. Parnell Thomas, began an investigation into the Hollywood Motion Picture Industry. HUAC interviewed 41 people who worked in the industry. The original witnesses attended voluntarily as "friendly witnesses," and in the course of their testimony, 19 Communists were named.

Bertolt Brecht, an emigrant playwright, testified before departing for East Germany. Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie refused to answer questions.

Known as the Hollywood 10, they claimed that under the First Amendment they were not required to answer these questions. The courts disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of Congress, sentenced to between six and 12 months in prison.

Actor Larry Parks, who was not a star but was recognizable to the public, named 19 people. Parks gave evidence to HUAC, admitted that he had joined the Communist Party in 1941, leaving it in 1945. When asked for the names of other members of the Communist Party, Parks said, "I would prefer, if you would allow me, not to mention other people's names. Don't present me with the choice of either being in contempt of this Committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer."

HUAC pressed Parks, and he gave the names of Communists. When this became public, Leo Townsend, Isobel Lennart, Roy Huggins, Richard Collins, Lee J. Cobb, Budd Schulberg and Elia Kazan revealed the names of people they knew to be Communists or members of Left-wing groups suspected of being fronts for Communist or Soviet spy rings.

In 1950, three former FBI agents and Vincent Harnett, a television producer who did not like the rampant Communism he saw in his industry, published Red Channels. This listed 151 writers, directors and performers who they claimed had been members of subversive organizations before World War II but had escaped detection so far. The names had been compiled from FBI files, analysis of The Daily Worker, the Communist newspaper, and information culled from the American Communist Party.

Red Channels was widely read in the entertainment industry. American citizens did not want to spend money seeing movies starring, directed by, or written by Communists, any more than they would want to support the work of Nazis. The studios, recognizing the free market of public opinion, decided to identify and expose Hollywood's Communists. Those who were Communists did not want this fact to be known. A Communist could escape harsh treatment by appearing before HUAC and admitting that Communism was bad ("Stalin is not good," not unlike a Nazi saying something like, "I realize now Hitler was bad for Germany"). They were asked to identify other Communists. Those who did not cooperate lost their jobs for awhile.

Edward Dmytryk had been a Communist, one of the original Hollywood 10. Dmytryk decided that he was not a Communist anymore. On April 25, 1951, Dmytryk appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and identified 26 people he knew to be Communists, or were members of Left-wing groups thought to be fronts for Communism.

Dmytryk revealed that John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott and Albert Maltz, among others, had pressured him to make films glorifying Communism. These facts justified much of the work and original suspicions of HUAC. It put the lie to the defense of most of the original Hollywood 10, who were suing their employers for firing them because of their Communist affiliations. The studios were in a difficult position. The public was aware that these people were Communists, and would boycott movies made by Communists, just as they would likely boycott movies made by child molesters, rapists, or any public figures who rely on their good reputations in the marketplace of expression.

People who refused to identify other Communists were added to a Blacklist drawn up by the Hollywood film studios. Over 320 people on the list did not work for awhile in the entertainment industry. This included Larry Adler, Stella Adler, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Joseph Bromberg, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Hanns Eisler, Carl Foreman, John Garfield, Howard Da Silva, Dashiell Hammett, E. Y. Harburg, Lillian Hellman, Burl Ives, Arthur Miller, Dorothy Parker, Philip Loeb, Joseph Losey, Anne Revere, Pete Seeger, Gale Sondergaard, Louis Untermeyer, Josh White, Clifford Odets, Michael Wilson, Paul Jarrico, Jeff Corey, John Randolph, Canada Lee, Orson Welles, Paul Green, Sidney Kingsley, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright and Abraham Polonsky.

"A conspiracy so immense . . ."

By 1949, after the Berlin Airlift, the formation of Red China, the creation of an Eastern Bloc, international Communist hegemony between Russia and China, and the explosion of the atomic bomb by the Soviets, it was now factually known Communism was as much an enemy of the United States as Nazism had been a decade earlier. It was also factually known that the Soviets had an active program of espionage and propaganda intended to subvert the security of America. Consequently, it was now decided to use the Alien Registration Act against the American Communist Party. Leaders of the party were arrested and in October, 1949, after a nine-month trial, 11 members were convicted of violating the act. Over the next two years another 46 members were arrested and charged with advocating the overthrow of the government. The heart of the cases was the advocacy, overthrow or disruption of the government or other American institutions. To simply be a Communist was not illegal. To be a Communist who actively worked to hurt the U.S. was a chargeable offense. An easy modern correlation is to say that to be a white racist is not illegal, but to be a white racist who plots the bombing of a black church is illegal.

Other high profile spy cases involving Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg confirmed the fear that Communism was not merely a liberal social philosophy popular among Democrats of the far Left. Rather, a Communist conspiracy was under way.

On February 9, 1950, Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy made a speech in which he claimed to have a list of 205 people in the State Department known to be members of the American Communist Party. The term "McCarthyism" emanated from this speech. Hollywood has long associated its "victim" status with McCarthy, conveniently forgetting that the House performed the aforementioned work. McCarthy was a Senator, not a member of the House. Communist espionage and subversion was an established fact long before his speech.

The list of names was not a secret. The Secretary of State had published it in 1946. These people were identified as Communists, Fascists, alcoholics and sexual deviants during a preliminary screening of 3,000 Federal employees. Had McCarthy himself been screened, McCarthy's own drinking problems (and possibly sexual preferences) might have resulted in him being put on the list. However, his drinking did not become exacerbated until later, and questions about his sexuality appear to be pure Leftist smear jobs.

McCarthy had been a local political figure in Wisconsin. When World War II broke out, he decided that it would be politically beneficial to have a war record. This was a common practice with a long tradition. Politicians had accepted various commissions, or enlisted, in the military during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Sometimes the commissions were more honorary in nature and ensured that the recipient would not likely see real action. In other cases men put themselves in harm's way and some died. Military commissions were earned in varying manners up until World War II. Often, an officer's commission was awarded Democratically. Units were often made up of men from specific geographical locations. Thus was the case with Harry Truman, who despite no military training or a college degree, was elected by his fellow Missourians to lead his unit in World War I. Truman did so with great distinction.

Lyndon Johnson was politically connected and managed to "join" the Navy. His term of service consisted of little more than the usual Washington politicking and "fact-finding" morale junkets overseas. Johnson even decorated himself. He flew in a plane that briefly passed above a war zone and arranged for the Silver Star to be awarded to him. It has been described as the "least earned" medal in U.S. history. LBJ prominently displayed it throughout his Senate and Presidential tenure.

McCarthy joined the Marines and went to the South Pacific. He was a tail gunner. His detractors wrote that he saw little or no real combat. The true story is that he sent reports of his exploits, puffed up and exaggerated, to newspapers in Wisconsin. They dutifully nicknamed him "Tail gunner Joe," re-printing the reports with all the embellishments McCarthy included. The embellishments, however, do not change the fact he engaged in real combat and was in real danger.

With the war concluded, McCarthy returned to Wisconsin with the imprimatur of Marine war hero, along with the perfect macho nickname. He rode his popularity into the United States Senate. He was not an intellectual, but he was a bright man. McCarthy lacked the great intelligence, worldview and work ethic of another Republican of his era, Dick Nixon. He needed an issue. Anti-Communism suited him, his political convictions and Midwestern constituency perfectly.

McCarthy was a demagogue. What drove him or was in his mind is still a bit of a mystery. He seems not to be a man of great conscience. The fact that he was a Republican has done as much damage to the GOP as anybody the party has ever had within its ranks. He was an alcoholic, although when this problem became acute is in some dispute. He certainly managed to drink himself to death quickly following his demise, but whether he was a genuine, full-blown drunk during all the years he was in the public eye is debatable. There is little real evidence, but some have suggested that McCarthy might have been homosexual or bi-sexual. This charge is based on the fact that two of his top lieutenants, David Schine and Roy Cohn, were supposed to be homosexual lovers. Cohn was gay, but Schine very likely was not. Others have speculated on McCarthy's sexuality because the anti-Communist FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, is reported (with much legitimate dispute) to be homosexual, too.

On the other hand, McCarthy debuted on the stage of anti-Communist politics at a time when Communism was one of the gravest threats this country has ever faced. Because Communism was eventually defeated, for all practical purposes, without fighting World War III, this threat has been downgraded by elements who benefit from downgrading it. But McCarthy had a real issue that indeed did need a leader, and he assumed that mantel. It was willingly handed to him and he was, for a while, extremely popular; seen as a hero. McCarthy is reputed to have "ruined" the lives of many people, but the truth of this statement is blurred by the facts. There is no doubt that Joe McCarthy hurt many Communists, some of whom hated the U.S. The fact that some of these Communists are considered heroes to a particular constituency is a fact that requires no real commentary beyond what it simply is. McCarthy does not have a long, distinguished record of great humanity, however, and in the end he lacked the reservoir of goodwill that comes with genuine good work, which he would have needed to overcome his critics.

J. Edgar Hoover began feeding McCarthy the names of Communists and suspected Communists.

"We were the ones who made the McCarthy hearings possible," said William Sullivan, one of Hoover's agents. "We fed McCarthy all the material he was using."

In Korea, U.S. troops were taking an early beating. Eastern Europe had all but fallen. China, the most populated country on the planet, had been "lost" by a Democrat administration. After supporting Chiang Kai-shek for so many years, and fighting to liberate their country from brutal Japanese repression, it was inconceivable that our good works and sacrifice had been rewarded with this kind of treachery. Many on the Right wanted heads to roll. However, what drove the Red Scare and McCarthyism more than anything was the public. They felt genuine fear of Communism and internal subversion.

America in the early 1950s was not Heaven on Earth. It was a country with a long way to go. The South was roiling in terrible racial segregation, but Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier a few years before. In so doing he had opened the door for another, incredibly talented black player named Willie Mays, whose debut in New York was pending. Descriptions of 1950s America paint the portrait of a culture of unfulfillment. The Man In the Grey Flannel Suit starring Gregory Peck depicted a World War II veteran who is unable to find happiness despite achieving the outward American Dream of a wife, family, house and career. Women were expected to stay at home and raise children, which according to the "wisdom" left them yearning to do more.

Communications were stilted, real conversations drowned out by the new invention of television. Culture became provincial, and a militaristic jingoism is said to have cast a black-or-white shadow of intolerance over America. Anybody who was "weird," wore their hair long, smoked reefer, enjoyed same sex couplings or expressed a pacifist viewpoint was easily labeled as a "Commie." Promiscuous girls were called "sluts," as opposed to "good girls," and the worst part of it was they would get pregnant and go off to have illegal abortions. Family values and Christianity were in, at the "expense" of Judaism and experimentation. Books like The Catcher in the Rye and Tropic of Cancer were banned from schools by supposedly Right-wing zealots. A new form of music, rock 'n' roll, immediately had the clergy up in arms. They called it the work of the devil, designed to drive boys wild and, worse still, white girls into the arms of gyrating black men.

This is the Hollywood stereotype of 1950s America. This stereotype, like most stereotypes, was rooted in a certain amount of truth but was far from the entire, accurate picture. The fact is that Americans were very proud of themselves in the 1950s, and they had a right to be. American soldiers had fought bravely, stopping Hitler and Tojo. But there was more to it than that. By the 1950s, the "experiment" had shown itself to be successful. Democracy and the Constitution had survived all challenges. Other forms of government had been tried throughout the world. None of them held a candle to the American model. Monarchies, dictatorships and Fascism had all shown themselves to be no match for American Democracy. Now this "new thing" had come along. Communism. It seemed to hold the interest of a few fuzzy headed intellectuals in Hollywood and New York, but for the average American in the Midwest (or upstate New York, or suburban California, for that matter), it looked awful. The Communists had been our Allies, so we had cut them a break, but they had lied to "Give 'em hell Harry" Truman at Potsdam. Now all of their lies and evil intent had been exposed. They had tried to starve the West Berliners, subjugated Eastern Europe, turned China Red, and attacked across the 38th Parallel in Korea. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill identified the demarcation line separating the Communist East Bloc from the Democratic West as the Iron Curtain. They had "the bomb" and were dangerous.

Americans in the post-war years enjoyed unprecedented prestige. Traveling in Europe, they were met by grateful Europeans. Dwight Eisenhower was a hero in every corner of the globe, a man of popularity that cannot be imagined in the modern era, when people think popularity is something attributed to Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber. Ike was a god to billions. No athlete, rock star or actor has ever approached such star quality.

There was another factor. Americans like capitalism. When Adam Smith was describing the new economics of an agrarian society moving into populated city-centers, capitalism still seemed a little bit experimental, like the political system it was being asked to support. But capitalism had fueled a mind-boggling westward expansion. It was the driving force behind utterly insane accomplishments, like the trans-continental railroad, the Industrial Revolution, and the Panama Canal. The astounding sight of not one but two bridges, the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge, that defied prior notions of engineering possibility, met visitors to San Francisco.

Capitalism, more than anything, had survived tests. It had survived, in fact thrived, through a series of wars. Wars in other countries left economies in shambles, created riots, depressions and wholesale revolutions. In America, the engines of commerce were unaffected. Furthermore, capitalism had survived the Great Depression. All the doomsayers were proven wrong. Capitalism, it had been said, was antiquated. Socialism and Keynesian economics were the only true safety nets. This frightened Americans, who saw the triumph of capitalism as justification for everything they held near and dear. Now, the system had produced an educated populace, with the finest colleges and universities in the world. The best medical research and the most innovative technological advances were almost exclusively taking place in America. Jet aircraft had been developed. An American had broken the "sound barrier", and now we were talking about going into space, maybe even landing on the Moon. People thought about these concepts and their first reaction was that it was fanciful. Then, they thought about it for a second, and confidently told themselves that if Americans were put in charge of the effort, it was likely to happen, sooner rather than later. They were right.

So it was that Americans felt that this country was a pretty good place to live, to work and to raise a family. The idea that somewhere "out there" was a plot, a conspiracy, of foreigners who thought we had too much, and wanted to take what we worked hard for and spread it around to a mass of unwashed, undeserving peasants, was abhorrent. Americans had saved the world and were the most giving, charitable people on Earth. They would spread it around, but they would do it their way, not out of class envy or because some Communists told them they were bourgeois imperialists, which really frosted Main Street. Imperialists? Americans had gotten rid of the King. Money did not "get" to the needy in Communism. All of Stalin's collectivist-farm stories were well known by then. The best kind of program was run by the private sector, with the smallest amount of bureaucracy possible.

What McCarthy tapped into, however, went even beyond the fundamental principles of what Americans knew made their system better, or even the threat and the evil deeds of the Communists; their bombs, death camps and political crimes. Foreigners hating America was one thing, but McCarthy was talking about Americans! Red-blooded sons and daughters of America, born and raised in the heartland, recipients of all this great nation has to offer, often more privileged than most. These were people who had access to the information that Communism was evil, and tried to poison America with it anyway. It was the worst kind of treason. It was not even the usual treason. It was a new, insidious kind. Somebody who sells weapons or intelligence to an enemy, or takes up arms against his country, is indeed a traitor, but these Communists presumed to know what was best for us. They were a new form of elite, people who through education and a certain worldview that most of us could not understand, believed we needed to be led like sheep to the trough and made to drink from it.

We were racists, of course, and only by subjugating ourselves to this Communist re-education could we purge ourselves of the old thinking. The blacks were told these new people were their "friends." Like characters in George Orwell's Animal Farm, they only served a purpose because they would be dependent on an endless prescription of what would be doled out to them, piecemeal, by those and only those who knew what they needed. The Communists would tell them whom to worship and who to obey. God was evil, non-existent and little more than a drug for the masses. All things that emanated from Godliness, including respect for parents, family loyalty and traditional patriotism had to be re-taught from an internationalist point of view.

The Communists made two big mistakes in their effort to break into American society. First, it was too close to World War II. The Korean War increased our sensitivity toward the dangers of Communism and totalitarianism. But the biggest obstacle they could never overcome was that Americans are too smart, too well educated, and have too much access to actual facts to fall for the line that had pushed revolution in the streets of Europe.

In the beginning, McCarthy had an issue that resonated with millions. He was made chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, charged with investigating Communist subversion. McCarthy took on this task for two years. He had seen how it had propelled the career of Nixon. The Communist issue was big in the heartland, the Midwest and West, where people tended to be religious and/or ruggedly independent, two traits that do not lead people to Communism. He scored solid support from Joe Kennedy, who despised Jews and was appalled that such a large number of Communists and traitors were Jewish. McCarthy hired Robert F. Kennedy to work for him.

They investigated various government departments and questioned many people about their affiliations. Some lost jobs after admitting they had been Communists. The issue for accused people was clear. People knew that Communism was evil, and to be a Communist was to be, if not evil, part of an evil organization. This meant that Communists had to hide their Communism. Exposure meant that people would judge what they did to be wrong. Communists, like anybody who is involved in bad activity, i.e., child molestation, rape, bigotry, etc., prefer not to be exposed. There were three options for the Communists. One was exposure. It is legal to be a Communist, but the fact that it is bad is known by others, which is not good for Communists in high-profile jobs like the government or the movie industry. The second was to hide, which might work but if exposed, these Communists found themselves in trouble. Either way, folks just did not like those who hated and worked against America.

However, America is a forgiving country. People in the U.S., probably because many have been inculcated with the redemptive message of Christ, tend to forgive the sins of others, but they have to admit the sin and ask for forgiveness. Scorn is heaped upon those whose guilt is known, but they refuse to admit it. This brought up the third option, which was to admit to the fault and come clean. This was what the government wanted, and in pursuing this end they achieved the purpose of exposing espionage and subversion. This was the ultimate aim, since the issue was about national security. The fact that it was also about politics clouds the historical perspective.

Virtually all the people accused from 1947 until the early '50s were involved with Communism in some form. Not all were "card-carrying Communists," or spies, or fellow travelers, or useful idiots, or fit any of the terms used to describe the scourge. Some were just caring people who in the 1930s were concerned about starving peasants in Russia, and went to meetings ostensibly to raise funds for food shipments. Many used aliases. The problem is that this description became the one that everybody used. People forgot names or made mistakes. Innocents were mixed with the guilty. Some were enticed by an attractive girl used as bait. However, an honest assessment of ones' involvement, complete with full cooperation with the committee and a little humility, was all a named individual needed to put it all behind them.

The lie perpetrated by the Left for 60 years is that people who chose not to name others were heroic, loyal, and self-sacrificing. If one was named, they were asked to cooperate and tell the truth. The people who were hurt were Communists who did not tell the truth, and Hollywood has rewarded them by telling a fantasy tale.

What McCarthy wanted was for Communists to renounce their Left-wing views by naming other members of the party. This has been called a "witch hunt" and "anti-Communist hysteria," shortened simply to McCarthyism. At first, McCarthy had many actual Communists to identify. Many were New Deal Democrats. It infuriated Democrats that so many of them were being exposed as Communists, especially by a "yahoo" like McCarthy. McCarthy and the Republicans had a field day showing that many in the other party were un-American. What was required of them, however, was restraint, and the Republicans showed little of it. They had been denied the White House since 1933. The GOP had made some gains in Congress after the war, but overall they were the minority party and were desperate to regain power.

Harry S. Truman was President. Nobody accused him of being a Communist, but China had gone Red on his watch and the feeling was that this occurred because there were subversive factions within his administration. George Marshall and Dean Acheson were accused of being soft on Communism. History has not identified any "smoking guns" on why China was lost. The most consistent answer to this question is that the West miscalculated the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, overlooked the personal faults of Chiang and his "dragon lady" wife, Madame Chang, and gave too much credence to the Nationalist movement in China. Mao's Long March had been operating against Chiang for many years, but U.S. officials either dismissed Mao or thought he could be made part of a coalition. In retrospect, the only thing that would have stopped Mao seems to have been a major military commitment, the purpose of which would have been to wipe him out completely. There was not enough political will to do something that drastic in China, a mysterious, forbidding land where Americans had long been made to feel unwelcome. In the post-war era, an anti-colonial movement was afoot. The U.S. had long pressured England to get out of India, and the kind of support Chiang needed in China to prevail would have had all the earmarks of colonial expansionism with an American face. When Time's Theodore White, to the consternation of publisher Henry Luce, printed articles detailing the failings of Chiang Kai-shek and the successes of Mao, the support the Nationalists needed dried up and all was eventually lost.

Nevertheless, the Venona papers and other documentation revealed that a number of highly placed Roosevelt and Truman Administration Democrats, including but not limited to Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins, and Harry Dexter White, had manipulated events and perceptions in favor of Mao, during and after World War II.

The U.S. was committed to supporting France in Indochina, which was colonial enough. The decision to do this, and to spurn the entreaties of Ho Chi Minh, lay less in practical politics and much in an effort to let France "save face" after its humiliations under Nazi Occupation. With the 1952 Presidential campaign looming, the Republicans played politics and accused Truman of being dangerously liberal. Truman was in a poor position and the Democrats were on the defensive in 1952. Truman, after firing General MacArthur, was so unpopular he chose not to run. The Republicans were holding all the cards. They ran the great Eisenhower, and swept in with a Congressional mandate.

McCarthy's opponents in the 1950 elections were soundly beaten, leaving him with the false feeling of invulnerability that is the worst kind of cancer an American politician can have. His actions in the Senate received little criticism.

"Attacking him in this state is regarded as a certain method of committing suicide," the Boston Post pointed out. One exception was Connecticut Senator William Benton, the owner of Encyclopedia Britannica. McCarthy and his supporters "smeared" Benton, claiming that while Assistant Secretary of State, he had protected known Communists and had been responsible for the purchase and display of "lewd art works." Benton was accused of disloyalty because of his company's work printed in England. In 1952 he was defeated.

McCarthy blamed the fall of China on "a conspiracy so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man." In 1952, he appointed Roy Cohn as the chief counsel to the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate. Cohn came with Hoover's recommendation. Cohn had done impressive work in the prosecution of the Rosenbergs. Cohn brought his best friend, David Schine, on board. Schine became his chief consultant.

McCarthy began making mistakes. Instead of doggedly going after the real subversives - the hardcore Communists and spies - he spread his accusations too wildly about. The result was that he made some non-Communists into sympathetic figures that allowed actual Communists to slip under the cracks. He went after anti-American library and schoolbooks. His researchers looked into the Overseas Library Program and discovered 30,000 books by "Communists, pro-Communists, former Communists and anti anti-Communists." A list was compiled and the books were removed from shelves, a terrible public relations disaster reminding people of Hitler's book burning rallies in the 1930s. A fair number of the 30,000 books were Communist propaganda, but they were mixed in with regular works that were just Left-wing or irregular. Anything having to do with drugs, deviant sex, homosexuality or non-respectful attitudes towards God, family and country was lumped into the "anti-Communist" corner. Many authors and works that otherwise would have died in obscurity found enthusiastic new audiences because of McCarthy.

Instead of "discovering" 30,000 Communist books, McCarthy should have carefully picked out the real ones, then simply exposed them without banning them. Making them unavailable hurt his cause. Having ordinary people actually read them to understand what Communists were trying to accomplish would have had a much more positive effect. Various "hep cats," Beats and others who espoused hypnotic new forms of creative behavior were gaining popularity. The accusers were starting to come off as staid, buttoned-up and uptight. It seemed incongruous to many that the new age modernists, jazz aficionados and rock 'n' rollers, were aligned with such distinctly uncool characters as Stalin.

McCarthy also tried to make the connection between homosexuality and Communism. While homosexuals have always gravitated to the liberal wing of the Democrat party, they were no more welcome in Stalinist Russia than they had been in Hitler's Germany. It was virtually common knowledge that Cohn was gay. Schine was described as his lover. He may very well have not been. Hoover's detractors have painted him as a gay cross-dresser, although this is far less substantiated than Cohn's sexual preference. In trying to connect the dots, some have suggested that Hoover and McCarthy had it goin' on.

The Hoover-McCarthy tryst is not an image most Americans care to fantasize about, but there are worthy psychological theories at play here. Some gays are known to assume a homophobic public stance in order to fend off the whiff of their own homosexuality. However, it goes beyond that. There may be some self-hating involved. Men like Hoover and McCarthy had grown up as "good boys" and "good sons," products of the Judeo-Christian ethic, promoters of patriotism, mom and apple pie. It is true that these traits are not considered to be in sync with the gay lifestyle today, but in McCarthy's and Hoover's days they definitely were not. A man who otherwise buys the whole concept of America, God and family, but is tugged by homosexual tendencies, is likely going to search for a mechanism to dispute those tendencies. This mechanism could be the process of directly demonizing what they hate most about themselves.

On the other hand, liberal claims about Hoover, Clyde Tolson and McCarthy have every conceivable chance of being damnable lies. In the case of McCarthy, they almost surely are. Furthermore, the Left missed something important. A straight McCarthy employed and entrusted gays and Jews on his staff at a time when conservative Republicans were "supposed" to disdain gays and Jews. McCarthy also employed blacks, and supported civil rights in Wisconsin. In many ways, he was progressive, to borrow a Leftist term strongly associated with Wisconsin's own Bob La Follette.

Hank Greenspun published an article in the Las Vegas Sun of October 25, 1952, writing, "It is common talk among homosexuals in Milwaukee who rendezvous in the White Horse Inn that Senator Joe McCarthy has often engaged in homosexual activities."

McCarthy considered suing Greenspun for libel, but his lawyers advised that he would have to take the stand and answer questions about his sexuality. Forced to speak under penalty of perjury, even if McCarthy was straight, he may have had other peccadilloes that he would not have wanted to discuss. Of course, Greenspun knew McCarthy would have to take the stand if he were to prevail in a libel suit, so in some ways he had free reign to say what he wanted with little or no consequence. McCarthy's hiring of Cohn and (by implication) Schine, is offered as evidence of McCarthy's own lifestyle. If this is so, it tells much about his recklessness, since he must have known this would draw the kind of negative attention a conservative Midwestern Republican definitely did not need in 1953.

McCarthy married his secretary, Jeannie Kerr. The couple adopted a five-week old girl from the New York Foundling Home. The homosexuality rumors could have had two effects. The first would have been a "wake-up call" for McCarthy, making him realize he was involved in a dangerous game that was played for keeps. He could have re-grouped, declared victory in his efforts to root out Communists, or just concentrated on the true, hardcore Communist cases that had not been investigated because McCarthy had veered so far from the original purpose.

The second effect is the one that he took. McCarthy decided to attack his enemies more relentlessly. In the process he made and invented enemies who started out as tacit allies. In October, 1953, McCarthy began investigating Communist infiltration into the military. He went after Secretary of the Army Robert Stevens, drawing the ire of President Eisenhower. Ike was very upset, not just because men he knew to be good, decent and honorable were being caught up in McCarthy's accusations, but because the man was drawing terrible publicity for the GOP.

It is instructive to note that in the many Hollywood depictions of McCarthyism, McCarthy himself is almost never shown. The incidents are usually fictionalized accounts and show tight-lipped, screw-faced mean Republicans hammering away at some poor, honest writer caught up in the witch hunt. The reason they are generally fictionalized, instead of showing the "actual" McCarthy, is because these kinds of confrontations did not occur. McCarthy did indeed go after Communists, but Hollywood is loathe to portray the actual people with their actual names, because the historical record can be checked, demonstrating these people really and actually were Communists.

The fact is McCarthy got in trouble not for going after Communists or accusing honest liberals of Communism. He got in trouble when he went after Republicans. It started with the Army-McCarthy hearings. The Army leaked to the press the story of Schine. First, McCarthy and Cohn had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the young man from being drafted, but his number was called anyway. The story of Schine's basic training experience is as bizarre as anything that has ever occurred in the military; a most preposterous set of circumstances.

Schine's "training" took place on a base near New York City. Schine was prominently seen, dressed in his Army uniform, at chic Manhattan nightspots in the company of beautiful showgirls. The first question is how a buck recruit could even get a weekend furlough, which is not a common practice. Apparently, some of his sightings were not even on weekends. Further reports indicated that Schine was staying off base, "commuting" to camp, or sleeping in at his leisure. The whole thing was as preposterous as a Bill Murray movie. Schine's publicized trysts with scantily clad glamour women added to the strange scenario. Could it have been staged to upset or embarrass the Army? Was Schine set up with these women in order to make him look like a heterosexual, off-setting the gay rumors swirling around the McCarthy-Cohn-Schine investigating team? Certainly there are many Army recruits who wish they could have spent weekends with girls who resembled Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Drew Pearson published details of the whole story in December, 1953.

Cohn was a story in and of itself. He was the son of a prominent Jewish New York liberal. His homosexual acts have been depicted in a TV movie called Citizen Cohn starring James Woods as occurring in his parent's house and with their knowledge. The FBI is supposed to have known about his sexuality, too. Supposedly Hoover subpoenaed him for the purposes of having lunch. He was said to be a brilliant attorney, but utterly blinded by crass ambition. He was a complete mercenary, not driven by ideology but willing to promote any cause that promoted his name.

These three men were a rogue's gallery of unrepentant ambition. In the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a man who might have been based on Connecticut Senator William Benton has a conversation with Angela Lansbury. She is married to a drunken fool Senator obviously based on McCarthy, right down to the infamous lines about having in his possession the names of known members of the Communist Party.

The Senator tells Lansbury that "Senator Iselin" and "Iselinism" is not the joke everybody makes it out to be, but rather that if "Johnny were a paid Soviet agent, he could not do worse harm to this country than he is doing right now."

The punditry of the Left thinks that statement is based on the concept that McCarthy was a drunken, homosexual boob who made up the Communist threat in order to make political gains. But the statement has more weight than that, and reflects the threat of Communism that the movie's producer, Frank Sinatra, believed was valid. The harm McCarthy did was in taking a deadly serious threat, managing to deflect so much attention to himself that the threat was discounted. In this respect, while there is absolutely no proof whatsoever to back this up, there is little doubt that in the final two years of McCarthyism, the man did so much good for Communism that he could have been a Russian spy.

The McCarthy-as-spy theory is, of course, an outlandish one. It would have to answer to the fact that when he started out he was identifying real Communists in the name of national security. On the other hand, the real Communists that he did nail were usually small fish, easily sacrificed as part of the big "conspiracy" that was McCarthyism.

Ultimately McCarthy is a cross that the Republican Party has to bear. Eisenhower wanted him excised, like a cancer. He instructed Vice President Nixon to attack him.

"Men who have in the past done effective work exposing Communists in this country have, by reckless talk and questionable methods, made themselves the issue rather than the cause they believe in so deeply," said Nixon on March 4, 1954. It was clear whom he was talking about.

The media had long opposed McCarthy but were frightened to speak out. Writers George Seldes and I. F. Stone (later evidence indicates he probably was a Communist agent), and cartoonists Herb Block and Daniel Fitzpatrick, began a campaign against him. Broadcast pioneer Edward R. Murrow criticized McCarthy on his TV show, See It Now. Newspaper columnists Walter Lippmann and Jack Anderson began vitriolic attacks on McCarthy.

Liberal attacks have become commonplace, but in 1954 the media was not the Fifth Estate that it later developed into. Despite its power, media attacks on conservatives have had mixed results. Many Americans have long recognized media bias and backed Republicans who they felt were unfairly branded. If McCarthy was smart, he might have tried to back off and lump himself in with this group, maybe playing the "victim" like Nixon did with the "Checkers speech." Instead, it was his own actions that were his undoing. The new medium of his day, television, was his enemy. The Senate investigations into the United States Army were televised.

"In this long, degrading travesty of the Democratic process McCarthy has shown himself to be evil and unmatched in malice," wrote the Louisville Courier-Journal. McCarthy has been described as a bumbling demagogue whose political skills were not good. His instincts for the public appetite, it has been said, could not withstand real scrutiny. Unlike men like Nixon and John Kennedy, who had the ability to navigate hazardous political terrain, McCarthy only knew how to attack. His performance on December 2, 1954 earned him a censure motion condemning his conduct by 67 to 22.

None of this takes into account exchanges McCarthy had on the Senate floor in which he comported himself well. Some of the footage that makes McCarthy look the worst is like the Rodney King video describing the L.A.P.D. beating the hell out of a black man. In the King case, the entire video shows King, out of control on PCP, menacing the cops with very real violence and threat. By the some token, viewing the entire McCarthy footage (not just what the media shows) demonstrates a man who had excellent repartee skills and kept his cool despite being unfairly attacked.

Few politicians have risen faster than McCarthy. Few, if any, fell faster. He lost the chairmanship of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, which stripped him of power and access to the media. The Left jumped on him with everything they had, denouncing his "Communist conspiracy" theories as pure theatre.

"Most reporters just refused to file McCarthy stories," wrote Willard Edwards, "and most papers would not have printed them anyway."

Anti-Communist sentiment obviously did not end with McCarthy's demise, but the tide had turned. The McCarthy era (fueled by the Hiss case) produced a backlash that is the formation of the present political squabbles in this country. The divide created by McCarthy has thus far proven to be difficult, if not impossible, to bridge.

In 2003, Senate historian Donald Ritchie provided 4,000 pages of new data on McCarthy. Ritchie's editorial notes slam McCarthy, and the press picked up on them. But within the data are episodes that show how McCarthy was smeared. Annie Lee Moss was a famous "victim" of McCarthy. Mrs. Moss had been identified by FBI undercover operative Mary Markward as a member of the Communist Party in the District of Columbia. She had been a code clerk for the Army, handling sensitive information. Appearing before McCarthy in 1954, Mrs. Moss and others were identified as part of a spy ring. Mrs. Moss appeared frail and bewildered, denying it all. The suggestion played straight out of the Nancy Reagan story, in which she had been confused with a Communist who shared her then maiden name, Nancy Davis.

The Democrats all agreed Moss was the victim of mistaken identity. Edward R. Murow reported on CBS' See It Now that she was a pitiful little woman, smeared by McCarthy. Friendly Democrats asked Moss (who was black) if she knew who Karl Marx was. She scratched her head as if she was a plantation slave, trying to recall anybody she knew named Marks or Carl. She played it ignorant, as scripted.

What history never told us (until now, really), is that she said one of the addresses she lived at was 72 R Street, S.W., in D.C. Four years later, the Subversive Activities Control Board found Communist Party records that described Annie Lee Moss of 72 R Street, S.W., District of Columbia as a member since the 1940s. While there were three Annie Lee Moss's in the D.C. phone book at that time, only one was in the C.P.'s records, describing her accurately and providing her actual address. All Ritchie said about this is that it must be read with "caution" and that the SACB chose not to investigate, but he fails to mention that the SACB did not contemplate further investigation of Moss. They were investigating the veracity of Markward. They reached the conclusion Markward was credible regarding Moss's membership in the Communist Party. There was no evidence to charge her with espionage, but the "mistaken identity" ploy was shown to be a ruse. Simply being a Communist was not a crime. Identifying them was the key to the investigations.

Over time, however, history judged McCarthy as bearing "false witness" and accusing people out of mistaken identity on "flimsy" charges (like finding a person who worked with sensitive Army cables whose name, description and address are found in Communist Party records).

There had been a real name-identity confusion case regarding a Communist spy at a sensitive Army installation named Louis Kaplan. He took the Fifth Amendment rather than incriminate himself as a Red. Another Louis Kaplan was hounded by the FBI in the 1940s in a case that preceded and had nothing to do with McCarthy. When the case came to McCarthy's attention, he held hearings and cleared the innocent Kaplan's name. The Communist Kaplan had been involved in securing intelligence for Moscow that was part of the Rosenberg case. Nevertheless, Ritchie uses the Kaplan case as another example of the McCarthy "mistaken identity" allegations.

Aaron Coleman was a member of the Young Communists who worked with Rosenberg. McCarthy said agents had "raided" Coleman's abode. Coleman's roommate said it was not a "raid," but a "search." Ritchie says this is an example of "use of inappropriate or inflammatory words to characterize <witness'> testimony." Ritchie made no mention that Coleman had 43 documents stolen from the same facility where Kaplan had spied.

Regarding Communist espionage, Ritchie blithely stated that they had been our ally in World War II, which made subsequent espionage "superfluous." Apparently this is his attempt at making it on a par with Israeli espionage of the U.S. The FBI had investigated a number of employees at the Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey Army facility who signed petitions supporting the Communist Party. Ritchie dismissed them as "perplexed witnesses." This would be like Army personnel working at Strategic Air Command signing a petition supporting Al Qaeda, then being "perplexed" that they were being investigated for it.

Harry Hyman was found to be recruiting for the Communists through his union activities. He was involved at the Monmouth telecommunications lab, and was caught making 76 phone calls to another lab in order to get classified information. He took the Fifth repeatedly when questioned by McCarthy. Ritchie simply said that McCarthy unjustly questioned him about "union activities."

The fact is that "McCarthy convinced Middle America that FDR and Truman had been duped by 'Uncle Joe' <Stalin>," wrote Pat Buchanan, "had tolerated treason, and had blundered and lost in five years all the fruits of the victory won by the blood and sacrifice of the Greatest Generation in World War II."

McCarthy questioned witnesses in private before putting them on the stand, a standard Senate strategy designed to weed out the innocent from the guilty, and a tactic used by the likes of Watergate investigator Sam Ervin. He was pilloried for this practice as "secretive." Despite all the true facts we now know about McCarthy and heavy Communist subversion and espionage, the New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote that documents "do not support McCarthy's theories that, in the 1950s, Communist spies were operating in the highest levels of government." This would be like Allied investigators coming across documents relating to the Nazi's Wannsee Conference plotting the Final Solution, writing that the documents "do not support the Allies' theories that, in the 1940s, Nazi authorities were planning the extermination of European Jewry."

In a way, McCarthy was a victim of his own success. Through the Venona Project, in alliance with Hoover's FBI and HUAC, many spies had already been rooted out by the time McCarthy was making much of it public. Among these were Hiss and Lawrence Duggan, high ranking diplomats who were Communist traitors and spies, found to have helped sign away Eastern Europe at Yalta and shape the U.N. in a Communist image.

Harry Dexter White had already written the International Monetary Fund and the "Morgenthau Plan," designed to destroy German industry still standing after the war. It was a Communist plot to de-stabilize the capitalist vestiges of the country, leaving them starving and helpless to Communist "solutions." White House spy Lauchlin Currie had been found out, as had William Remington at Commerce and Judith Coplon at Justice. The Rosenbergs were convicted, and Robert Oppenheimer's brother and wife were found to have been working with them. McCarthy enjoyed 50-29 favorable ratings from the public in January, 1954. He was going after elite liberals who had sided with Communism while Mao Tse-tung was murdering American boys in Korea. A public fed up with his "soft" approach to Communism drove Harry Truman out of office. A Gallup poll in the mid-1950s, the so-called "height" of "anti-Communist hysteria" and McCarthyism, overwhelmingly supported McCarthy.

McCarthy dated John Kennedy's sister before getting married. Joseph P. Kennedy supported McCarthy. Bobby Kennedy worked for him. John Kennedy considered him a friend and a fine patriot. At the 1954 Harvard re-union, somebody stood up and toasted the class for not having produced any Alger Hiss's or Joe McCarthy's. JFK, a member of the re-union class, stood up and said, "How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot <he meant McCarthy> with that of a traitor <Hiss>!?" When he was elected President, JFK was asked about McCarthy. He again remarked that he thought he was a great patriot.

McCarthy's tactic of questioning witnesses in private was used against him. Instead of embarrassing himself and the witnesses in public by engaging in sessions that could lead to places he was unaware of, he rightly wanted to sort out information as best he could ahead of time. The Left just accused him of being "secretive." McCarthy also stated on many occasions that there "may be" Communists in a department or industry, but often did not name names. The Democrats accused him of scurrilous behavior, a "whispering campaign." That was not accurate. McCarthy did not name names until he was sure a suspect was a Communist, so as not to ruin them (as he is so often accused of).

Voices of the Left and not-so-Left

The following are excerpts from interviews, letters and articles written by various people on the subject of the Red Scare, anti-Communism, McCarthyism and the Cold War:

Freda Kirchwey, The Nation (October, 1939).

"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of Democracy. We have not gone to war, and no excuse exists for wartime hysteria. Neither Communists nor even (German-American) Bundists are enemy agents. They deserve to be watched but not be persecuted. The real danger is that general detestation of Communists and Bundists will lead to acts of outright repression supported not only by reactionaries but by disgusted liberals. Democracy was not invented as a luxury to be indulged in only in times of calm and stability. It is a pliable, tough-fibered technique especially useful when times are hard. Only a weak and distrustful American could today advocate measures of repression and coercion, or encourage a mood of panic. Now is the time to demonstrate the resilience of our institutions. Now is the time to deal with dissent calmly and with full respect for its rights."

Freda Kirchwey, The Nation (April, 1940).

"At what moment does it become necessary to limit the freedom of everyone in order to suppress the danger lurking in a disloyal handful. The moment for drastic repression has not arrived, and the task of liberals in America is difficult but clear. They must fight to preserve the Democratic safeguards contained in the Bill of Rights, while applying to Nazis and their supporters the equally Democratic methods of exposure, counter-propaganda, and justified legal attack. Otherwise the Nazi invasion of Norway is likely to end in a victory for Martin Dies in America."

Jessica Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict (1977).

"The soil for the noxious growth of McCarthyism had been well prepared by the Truman Administration, and the anti-Communist crusade was well under way, long before the junior Senator from Wisconsin himself appeared on the scene. Joseph McCarthy was virtually unknown outside his home state until 9 February 1950, when he made his celebrated speech alleging that the State Department was in the hands of Communists, which catapulted him into the national limelight he enjoyed for the next five years.

"Some signposts on the road to McCarthyism: 1947, Truman establishes the Federal loyalty oath, barring alleged subversives from government employment. States and universities follow suit. The Attorney General, under authority of a Presidential executive order, publishes a list of subversive, proscribed organizations. 1948: 10 Hollywood screenwriters sentenced to a year's imprisonment for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about alleged subversion in the film industry. Mundt-Nixon bill introduced in Senate, requiring registration of Communists and members of 'Communist fronts.' Henry Wallace's campaign for the Presidency on the Progressive Party ticket, into which the C.P. had thrown all its energy and forces, ends in disastrous defeat. 1949: 12 top Communist leaders found guilty under the Smith Act of conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. Alger Hiss tried and convicted of perjury. Several of the largest left-led unions expelled from CIO.

"Four months after McCarthy's opening salvo, the Korean War broke out, bringing Truman's foreign policy into harmony with his domestic drive against the Left and furnishing McCarthy with more ammunition for his anti-Communist crusade. In this climate most liberals turned tail. Senator Hubert Humphrey proposed establishing concentration camps for subversives, and declared on the floor of Congress: 'I want them (Communists) removed from the normal scene of American life, and taken into custody.' The American Civil Liberties Union, supposed guardian of First Amendment rights, instituted its own loyalty purge excluding from membership those suspected of harboring subversive ideas."

Archibald MacLeish, letter to Paul H. Buck (January 1, 1953).

"My radio reports that various Congressional Committees plan to investigate colleges and universities to determine whether they are riddled with Communists. Senator McCarthy is reported as including 'Communist thinkers.' Since he has already told us that he regards Benny de Vote and young Arthur Schlesinger as Communist thinkers we have some notion of what that means.

"You will recall that I am to be away the second half year. You will recall also that Senator McCarthy has already attacked me as belonging to more Communist front organizations than any man he has ever mentioned. He - or one of the other committees - can be expected to attack me again when he or they get around to Harvard - should be early in the campaign. If I am away in the British West Indies at the time I should like you to have the facts.

"But before I set them down I should like to ask a question which must be in your mind and in the minds of many others. Has not the time come for the believers in the American tradition of intellectual liberty - above all the believers in positions of responsibility on the faculties of the free universities - to take a firm stand on the fundamental issue? There is no disagreement, I take it, on the issue of Communists in teaching. No man who accepts a prior loyalty to any authority other than his own conscience, his own judgment of the truth, should be permitted to teach in a free society. That view I take it, is held by those responsible for the selection of teachers in all colleges and universities in this country. It is also applied in the case of Communists at least - though it is notoriously not applied in certain cases at the other extreme.

"I have not been told what Communist-front organizations the Senator has in mind but I assume they include the League of American Writers and various other organizations of an anti-Fascist character to which I belonged at the time of the Spanish War and during the rise of the Nazi danger and from which I removed myself when I entered the Government as Librarian of Congress in 1939.

"My own personal position on the issue of Communism has been clear throughout, and the record is a matter of public knowledge. I was, I think I can say without immodesty, one of the first American writers to attack the Marxists. This was, of course, on the literary front since it was on the literary front I met them. In the early '30s the Marxist position was, as you know, a fashionable position among the critics. Attacks on Communism were not the pleasant and profitable exercises they are now when all politicians and most publicists fall all over themselves and each other to demonstrate their detestation of everything Communism is or stands for. In the early '30s, to attack the Communists was to bring the hornets out and the stings could hurt."

Lee J. Cobb was one of those who was originally Blacklisted but eventually agreed to do a deal with the HCUA.

"When the facilities of the government of the United States are drawn on an individual it can be terrifying. The Blacklist is just the opening gambit - being deprived of work. Your passport is confiscated. That's minor. But not being able to move without being tailed is something else. After a certain point it grows to implied as well as articulated threats, and people succumb. My wife did, and she was institutionalized. In 1953 the HCUA did a deal with me. I was pretty much worn down. I had no money. I couldn't borrow. I had the expenses of taking care of the children. Why am I subjecting my loved ones to this? If it's worth dying for, and I am just as idealistic as the next fellow. But I decided it wasn't worth dying for, and if this gesture was the way of getting out of the penitentiary I'd do it. I had to be employable again."

Arthur Miller, in his autobiography, Timebends, wrote about the Blacklisting of Louis Untermeyer (1987).

"Louis Untermeyer, then in his 60s, was a poet and anthologist, a distinguished-looking old New York type with a large aristocratic nose and a passion for conversation, especially about writers and to become a poet. He married four times, had taught and written and published, and with the swift rise of television had become nationally known as one of the original regulars on What's My Line?, a popular early show in which he, along with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, publisher Bennett Cerf, and Arlene Francis, would try to guess the occupation of a studio guest by asking the fewest possible questions in the brief time allowed. All this with wisecracking and banter, at which Louis was a lovable master, what with his instant recall of every joke and pun he had ever heard.

"One day he arrived as usual at the television studio an hour before the program began and was told by the producer that he was no longer on the show. It appeared that as a result of having been listed in Life magazine as a sponsor of the Waldorf Conference (a meeting to discuss cultural and scientific links with the Soviet Union), an organized letter campaign protesting his appearance on What's My Line? had scared the advertisers into getting rid of him.

"Louis went back to his apartment. Normally we ran into each other in the street once or twice a week or kept in touch every month or so, but I no longer saw him in the neighborhood or heard from him. Louis didn't leave his apartment for almost a year and a half. An overwhelming and paralyzing fear had risen him. More than a political fear, it was really that he had witnessed the tenuousness of human connection and it had left him in terror. He had always loved a lot and been loved, especially on the TV program where his quips were vastly appreciated, and suddenly, he had been thrown into the street, abolished."

Lillian Hellman appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1951, willing to talk about her own political past, but refusing to testify against others.

"To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group."

Victor Navasky interviewed Budd Schulberg when he was writing his book, Naming Names (1982).

"These people (those he named), if they had it in them, could have written books and plays. There was not a Blacklist in publishing. There was not a Blacklist in the theatre. They could have written about the forces that drove them into the Communist Party. There was practically nothing written. Nor have I seen these people interested in social problems in the decades since. They're interested in their own problems and in the protection of the party."

Whittaker Chambers was one of those who helped provide evidence to support the idea of a Communist conspiracy. However, in a letter to Henry Regnery on January 14, 1954, he explained why he was having doubts about Joseph McCarthy.

"All of us, to one degree or another, have slowly come to question his judgment and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, his tendency to sacrifice the greater objective for the momentary effect, will lead him and us into trouble. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some irreparable blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come."

Max Eastman, "The Necessity of Red Baiting," The Freeman (1953).

"Red Baiting - in the sense of reasoned, documented exposure of Communist and pro-Communist infiltration of government departments and private agencies of information and communication - is absolutely necessary. We are not dealing with honest fanatics of a new idea, willing to give testimony for their faith straightforwardly, regardless of the cost. We are dealing with conspirators who try to sneak in the Moscow-inspired propaganda by stealth and double talk, who run for shelter to the Fifth Amendment when they are not only permitted but invited and urged by Congressional committee to state what they believe. I myself, after struggling for years to get this fact recognized, give McCarthy the major credit for implanting it in the mind of the whole nation."

Philip Reed, head of General Electric, after a tour of Europe in the summer of 1953, wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower (June 8, 1953).

"I urge you to take issue with McCarthy and make it stick. People in high and low places see in him a potential Hitler, seeking the Presidency of the United States. That he could get away with what he already has in America has made some of them wonder whether our concept of Democratic governments and the rights of individuals is really different from those of the Communists and Fascists.

Walter Lippmann, Washington Post (March 1, 1954).

"McCarthy's influence has grown as the President has appeased him. His power will cease to grow and will diminish when he is resisted, and it has been shown to our people that those to whom we look for leadership and to preserve our institutions are not afraid of him."

Harry S. Truman, New York Times (November 17, 1953).

"It is now evident that the present administration has fully embraced, for political advantage, McCarthyism. I am not referring to the Senator from Wisconsin. He is only important in that his name has taken on the dictionary meaning of the word. It is the corruption of truth, the abandonment of the due process law. It is the use of the Big Lie and the unfounded accusation against any citizen in the name of Americanism or security. It is the rise to power of the demagogue who lives on untruth; it is the spreading of fear and the destruction of faith in every level of society."

Dalton Trumbo, speech to the Screen Writers Guild when accepting the Laurel Award in 1970.

"The Blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.

"When you who are in your 40s or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things that he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us - right, Left, or center - emerged from that long nightmare without sin."

Albert Maltz, one of the Hollywood 10, was interviewed by the New York Times in 1972.

"There is currently in vogue a thesis pronounced by Dalton Trumbo which declares that everyone during the years of Blacklist was equally a victim. This is factual nonsense and represents a bewildering moral position.

"To put the point sharply: if an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand.

"Adrian Scott was the producer of the notable film Crossfire in 1947 and Edward Dmytryk was its director. Crossfire won wide critical acclaim, many awards and commercial success. Both of these men refused to co-operate with the HCUA. Both were held in contempt of the HCUA and went to jail.

"When Dmytryk emerged from his prison term he did so with a new set of principles. He suddenly saw the Heavenly light, testified as a friend of the HCUA, praised its purposes and practices and denounced all who opposed it. Dmytryk immediately found work as a director, and has worked all down the years since. Adrian Scott, who came out of prison with his principles intact, could not produce a film for a studio again until 1970. He was Blacklisted for 21 years. To assert that he and Dmytryk were equally victims is beyond my comprehension."

Archibald MacLeish, The Conquest of America (1949).

"Never in the history of the world was one people as completely dominated, intellectually and morally, by another as the people of the United States by the people of Russia in the four years from 1946 through 1949. American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic politics were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it. American political controversy was controversy sung to the Russian tune; Left-wing movements attacked Right-wing movements not on American issues but on Russian issues, and Right-wing movements replied with the same arguments turned round about.

"All this took place not in a time of national weakness or decay but precisely at the moment when the United States, having engineered a tremendous triumph and fought its way to a brilliant victory in the greatest of all wars, had reached the highest point of world power ever achieved by a single state."

McCarthy's ghost

After being censored by the Senate, Joseph McCarthy went on a personal and professional downhill slide ending in his death by alcoholism in 1957. His was as brutal a fall as any in public life.

The lessons of Senator McCarthy, and other lessons, need to be learned by the GOP. It is not entirely clear that they have learned. The Republican Party has an amazing ability to shoot itself in the foot. They seem to hate prosperity. Whenever it looks like they have "won" the war, attained their goals, and ascended to the mountaintop, they manage to slip up.

In 1865 they were the "party of Lincoln," wearing the angelic halo of emancipation. 12 years later they botched Reconstruction, enslaving the blacks of the South to another 100 years of near-slavery.

In 1912, they presided over a peaceful America, a modern power with an expanding empire, all orchestrated by Teddy Roosevelt. But Roosevelt himself mucked the works by splitting the party into the Bull Moose ticket, giving Woodrow Wilson the White House. With the pacifist Wilson at the helm, Kaiser's Germany started a war in France by marching through Belgium, without fear of American intervention.

In 1928, the Republicans won their third straight Presidential election, but they became isolationists and their laissez faire economics, which led the greatest economic decade in the nation's history, were deemed disastrous by 1932. The result was 20 years of Democrat rule. In '52, the party seemed to have everything in place. They had an icon for President, and the brightest young star of the electoral West, Nixon, waiting in the wings. They presided over Congress for the first time in years. Ike orchestrated peace in Korea, and they had the issue of the day, anti-Communism. McCarthy managed to ruin it for them. Despite Eisenhower's attempts to reign him in, McCarthy and his supporters failed to manage the issue with the proper political perspective. The remaining years of Eisenhower's Presidency saw a decline in party support. If they had handled all the issues skillfully, the Republicans could have turned 1952 into the beginnings of a political dynasty lasting into the 1970s. Instead, Congress went back to the Democrats. In 1960 the heir apparent Nixon was seen as a Red-baiter in the McCarthy mold, and managed to "lose" the election. It is extremely unlikely that Vietnam would have gone the way it went under Nixon's leadership from the start.

In 1972, the Republicans seemed to have taken control of the country again, but the clumsy Watergate affair had all the elements of a college football team full of All-Americans managing to lose to a weaker, undermanned squad because of pure arrogance. The Republicans always use their message to regain power, and the Reagan Revolution was another example of that. Rarely has a party been better positioned than the GOP was heading into 1992. Reagan had established himself as one of the most popular Presidents in history. The Cold War had been won under his watch. His successor, George H.W. Bush, basked in the glory of the Berlin Wall's collapse and victory in the Persian Gulf. There was a point in the Spring of 1991 when the question of the Democrats' future was very real. Somehow, almost by ironic fate, which is a theme that is returned to over and over again, the Republicans managed to blow it in '92.

In 2002 and 2004 the Republicans were in a position of great power. Time after time, the American electorate tired of Democrats and voted the Republicans back in. Time after time the GOP failed to close the deal. The Democrats appeared to be close to splintering into something other than the traditional party they have always been. The Republicans were riding high, winners of impressive military victories in Afghanistan and Iraq, and de facto winners in the War on Terrorism. They turned the tide of history by winning both houses of Congress for the President's party in the 2002 off-year elections. The all-important economy was on the comeback. When George W. Bush won with the most votes of any Presidential winner in history (2004), conservatism had a chance to be the ultimate historical champion. The Democrats were on the verge of finding themselves splintering into various small independent parties, making the U.S. a country ruled, for all practical purposes, by the Republicans. A GOP dynasty, very possibly one "headed" by the Bush family for 25 to 30 years, appeared possible. The country, for the first time over half Republican, was more solidly conservative than ever as the 21st Century developed.

Arrogance – the age old enemy of the Greeks, the Romans, the Russians - and the failure to learn from past mistakes, contributed to the party letting all of it slip from their fingers in a remarkably fast period of time. In 2006-07 the stock market reached all-time highs, unemployment was practically non-existent, the economy was arguably as strong as it has ever been. Somehow, some way, the Republicans allowed the Democrats to sweep the 2006 Congressional mid-terms, then completely annihilate the GOP behind Barack Obama's coattails in 2008.

The complete and total "shellacking" the Republicans administered to the Democrats in the 2010 mid-terms revived talk of the potential splinter of the Democrats, something predicted, occasionally hoped for, but never actually occurring. It could have a bad effect on America, since the effect of a vigorous loyal opposition is something the Founding Fathers favored. Mexico for instance, under virtual one-party rule (the PRI) throughout the 20th Century, became a corrupt, Third World cesspool.

Of all the lessons the Republicans must heed, the lesson of McCarthyism is the most prevalent. McCarthy has distorted the history of America. If one were to go into any school in America and ask students to describe "McCarthyism," a show of hands and responses would be that, "McCarthy accused a lot of innocent people of being Communists, but they weren't Communists and their lives were ruined."

The great danger of Communism has been swept under the rug. McCarthy was destroyed and the Republicans forced to go into a defensive posture, but worse yet, a dangerous ideology has been allowed to foment. By taking the edge off of American Communism, liberalism was allowed to grow into radical liberalism. In the 1960s and '70s, this way of thinking exploded into a counter-culture of drugs, sex and perversion. Out of this, the pacifist anti-Establishment anarchism of Emma Goldman has taken root. At the heart of this movement is a worldwide distrust and suspicion of America that gives hope to terrorists and despots, making it harder for the U.S. to use its enormous power as the last, best hope for a truly peaceful world. Considering where America was after World War II, the effects of McCarthyism cannot be overstated.

The great divide: Chambers vs. Hiss

There is nothing louder than the truth teller's silence in the face of the liar's shouts.

\- Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)

The McCarthy era – symbolized by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy – was rooted in a military intelligence operation beginning in 1943, called the Venona Project. The operation did not find evidence of Soviet complicity with the Nazis, but did discover leading high-ranking Democrats in the Roosevelt Administration were paid Soviet spies tracing its roots to the 1920s.

The military's self-preservation, perhaps the best kind of patriotism, secretly ignored Roosevelt's order to stop gathering facts of Democrat espionage for the Soviets, since their own lives were in danger if they did not. They funneled their findings to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover did not publicize it. He could not afford to let the Russians know he knew what they were doing. Therefore, the Democrat spies continued to spy.

Enter Congressman Richard Nixon and Whittaker Chambers. Nixon represented a suburban Los Angeles district stretching from sections of Orange County into L.A. County, including Artesia and parts of Los Angeles city proper. The Los Angeles Times backed him. Kyle Palmer was his sponsor. His highly conservative anti-Communist views were in lock step with those of Norman Chandler and his newspaper. The Times whole-heartedly supported General MacArthur and Senator McCarthy. Their bias was palpable and beyond journalistic ethics then or now.

Nixon was a freshman, having entered with a class including Massachusetts Representative John F. Kennedy, who was "a brother" to him. Looking for an issue, it arrived in his lap in 1947 when Chambers told him a high-ranking Democrat, Alger Hiss was a Communist spy. It was too much even for Nixon to believe possible, but he looked into it.

Chambers was a rumpled former Time editor. A Baltimore native, he turned to Communism in the 1920s. His turn from it in confluence with a Christianity at least as fervent as Henry Luce's made him a favorite of the boss, but created many enemies among his peers.

He had edited The Daily Worker until his Soviet handlers told him he was to go underground as a spy. He was paired with a "handler." He did not know the man's real name until he was given a position with the Works Projects Administration by FDR. The handler was Alger Hiss. Hiss was a Harvard lawyer from the right family with all the right connections. He was polished to a high gloss. Hiss rose within FDR's administration, helping to shape the infamous Yalta Agreement credited with handing most of Eastern Europe to the tender mercies of Joseph Stalin. He was a top State Department official who formulated many policies favoring the Russians at the United Nations. He was a hero of the Left. As Hiss moved up in Democrat circles, he distanced himself from Chambers.

After the Soviets signed their non-aggression pact with the Nazis, Chambers was shocked. He had a Christian epiphany. When he came to know the truth of Jesus Christ, the manifest evil of Communism became a self-evident truth for Whittaker Chambers. He approached the FBI, telling them what he knew about Hiss. J. Edgar Hoover discovered Chambers told the truth about Hiss from the Venona Project. To Chambers's great frustration, however, the FBI did not pursue a public case against Hiss. They calculated that they could learn and gain more by watching him closely to get higher into the Soviet spy apparatus.

Chambers did not realize this. Neither did anybody else other than Hoover and a few "spooks" at OSS and Naval Intelligence. Venona was not publicly verified until the Soviet Union collapsed and their archives revealed in the 1990s. Then and only then did the New York Times stop calling Chambers a liar and for Hiss's exoneration.

Thinking an evil man was doing dirty deeds at the highest levels of the U.S. government, Chambers took his evidence to Congressman Nixon in 1947. The suspicious Nixon went to Hoover with Hiss's accusations. Hoover told him he could not publicly support an investigation of Hiss. To do so would disrupt on-going high-level operations against the KGB. But Hoover told the Congressman Chamber's accusations were accurate. Nixon was on his own, but on the right track. Nixon then made his accusations known via the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). That was when the "fit hit the shan." McCarthyism, for lack of a better term, was on full bore even though it was three before years the Senator attached himself to the cause.

The period between 1947 and 1949 focused in large measure on Hollywood. With the cooperation of Ronald Reagan and John Wayne, numerous writers, directors and actors were exposed as paid spies, members of the Communist Party, or fellow travelers. It was not until the Rosenberg case, Mao's victory in China, and the Soviets successful exploding of the atomic bomb courtesy of secrets fed them by Berkeley physicist Robert Oppenheimer, that the investigations became overtly political. The Hiss case was at the heart of it, with sides taken. The Democrats and the Left solidly backed Hiss. They hated Nixon and Chambers. Hiss may well have gotten away with his crimes, but Chambers kept ultimate proof of his guilt in a Maryland pumpkin patch. The "pumpkin papers" ultimately convicted Hiss. Chambers's book, Witness was one of the most powerful ever written. It and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand were staples of conservatism, albeit traveling in different social circles, in the 1950s and beyond.

Hiss, Yalta and the United Nations

The first Secretary General of the U.N. at its founding conference in San Francisco, June 26, 1945, was Soviet espionage agent Alger Hiss. Stalin at the Yalta Conference approved his appointment. Hiss had served as an "international organization specialist." Many Communists were among the American delegation. They drew excellent salaries from the U.S. taxpayers.

Hiss drafted the United Nations Charter at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, giving the Soviet Union three votes in the U.N., while every other nation had only one. Poland, the first country to resist Hitler and supposedly the reason why the West entered World War II, was barred from the U.N. until Communists approved by Moscow replaced the legitimate anti-Communist government of Stanislaw Mikolajczyk. As this was not accomplished until the fall of 1945, Poland's seat was empty in San Francisco.

At Yalta Alger Hiss had been the chief aide to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius. In the telephone system set up for the U.S. delegation, Roosevelt was number one, Stettinius number two, and Hiss number three. Photos of Yalta indicate the hovering presence of Hiss.

Harry Dexter White was the assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Laughlin Currie was the Special Assistant to President Franklin Roosevelt. Lawrence Duggan, Noel Field, Harold Glasser, Irving Kaplan, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, Victor Perlo, and Julian Wadleigh were pro-Communist operatives who played major roles in planning the U.N. structure, along with Solomon Adler, Frank Coe, Abraham G. Silverman, William H. Taylor, William L. Ullman, John Carter Vincent and David Weintraub.

It was agreed that the Undersecretary-General for Political and Security Council Affairs, with direct control over military operations, would always be a Soviet. The U.N. was virtually overrun by Communists, according to Senator James O. Eastland's testimony to a Senate Committee in 1952

"I am appalled at the extensive evidence indicating that there is today in the U.N. among the American employees there, the greatest concentration of Communists that this committee has ever encountered," Senator Eastwood told the committee. "These people occupy high positions. They have very high salaries and almost all of these people have, in the past, been employees in the U.S. government in high and sensitive positions."

The U.N. has been described as a "Trojan horse" for Left wing ideology. In 1915, Lenin proposed a "United States of the World." In 1936, the Communist International proclaimed:

"Dictatorship can be established only by a victory of Socialism in different countries after which the proletariat republics would unite on federal lines with those already in existence, and this system of federal unions would expand . . . at length forming the World Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

The conviction

This vision may well have come true if not for the courage of a single man, Whittaker Chambers. "Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others," Winston Churchill said.

"You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world," Chambers told his wife when he decided to break from his handlers in Moscow in the late 1930. "It meant that, in the revolutionary conflict of the 20th Century, I knowingly chose the side of probable defeat. Almost nothing that I have observed, or that happened to me since, has made me think that I was wrong – if only because, in the last instance, men must act on what they believe is right, not on what they believe probable," he wrote in Witness.

When he and Nixon went public, they faced the worst possible hatred from Hiss's influential, powerful backers, a literal "who's who" of the Democrat Party. Every trick, every accusation, every lie, every dirty and foul act was perpetrated on Chambers, his family and his supporters on the Right, who couched their attitude behind the constant threat the man would be discovered a fraud. Armed with the coat of Christian Truth as his sole defense, Chambers stoically withstood the bombardment.

"There is nothing louder than the truth teller's silence in the face of the liar's shouts," he declared, echoing sentiments as old as Plato and Christ; the embodiment of a fact that remains a fact even if only one man knows it to be true and 1 million claim it false.

The best attorneys and public relations specialists in the Democrat Party came forth to offer Hiss their services gratis. Nixon was a young, inexperienced freshman Congressman with little real background as an attorney. He spent part of the war years in the Navy. Nixon and Chambers were alone against the onslaught, but they had Hoover telling them that even though he could not give them what he had, they were right about Hiss.

"Of which I myself, in a part, am a true witness; who not by strength of argument or by a particular disquisition of each doctrine, and convincement of my understanding thereby, came to receive and bear witness to the Truth, but by being secretly reached by that life," Chambers quoted the Quaker Robert Barclay in Witness. "For, when I came into the silent assemblies of God's people, I felt a secret power among them, which touched my heart; and, as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me and good raised up . . ."

Seemingly against all odds, Nixon presented Chambers's case, which made its way through the legal maize of the criminal justice system and Congress until, in 1950, His was convicted; complete vindication for Chambers. Hiss's supporters could not be shamed. They simply refused to acknowledge the conviction. The New York Times for years led a liberal barrage of distortion, placing forth the very proposition that Chambers lied and Hiss was not a criminal.

Whittaker Chambers's Witness

The 1950 conviction of Hiss is a seminal event in American history. The fact that it occurred in the middle year of the century is symbolic. It served to divide the U.S. in a way that few events, if any, ever had. In The Powers That Be, historian David Halberstam wrote the way one feels about Whittaker Chambers represents that person's worldview. Putting it in simplistic terms, if one is a Christian, a conservative, a Republican and anti-Communist, they love Chambers. If they are atheist, a liberal Democrat, and soft on Communism, they think him a liar, Hiss a hero.

Halberstam's seminal book on the American media was published in 1979. The Cold War was still going on, although under President Jimmy Carter that term was passé, replaced by détente. Ronald Reagan's election a year later would re-heat the Cold War big time. But Halberstam did not "benefit" from the Venona papers, released only when the Soviet Union disintegrated more than a decade later. The Left for the most part pretended not to notice. The Right made as much hay of it as they could.

Chambers was dead by then. He never enjoyed the complete public vindication Venona would have provided him. In many ways he was an allegory of Christ Himself, his death a kind of martyrdom, the truths of his life revealed only after his passing, in his memory and in history.

Conservative media, with the exception of William F. Buckley and Regnery Publishing, was long in the future. Chambers was not only disfavored by the liberal media establishment; he was excoriated. The conviction did not seem to matter to the New York Times. He did, of course, have as a major backer Time publisher Henry Luce, but the reaction of the Left's opinion sheets played as big a role in the division of America as any other factor. While the Chambers-Hiss battle grew out of a larger context called McCarthyism, Senator McCarthy's excesses were accepted and acknowledged by the Right; albeit with much pointing out that the general manhunt for Communists was necessary, based on viable threats. But Chambers was completely right, Hiss completely guilty. This was too great a leap for liberals to swallow. An alternative reality needed to be created.

Chambers wrote Witness, published in 1952. While there was no Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, he was elevated to a place of enormous importance in the opinion organs of conservatism. Buckley, his employer (Luce), and other Republican news titans practically made him a saint. Luce and Chambers virtually invented what later became the Christian Right, otherwise called the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition when Reagan was in office. This was unheard of until Witness, as much a religious epiphany as a political book. The Republican Party was a secular, country club, Establishmentarian group before Witness. Even Luce toned down the outright Christianity, but Witness, from its title to its last page, was Christian testimony.

Perhaps the greatest impact of Witness, coming before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, Venona, and the testimony of survivors, was to paint a true portrait of the horrors of Communism. The Soviets were our "allies." Their ideology had at its core the hope of helping the "little guy," of creating a "workers' paradise." The Nazis were the ones with concentration camps. They were the mass murderers. Stalin was not dead yet when Chambers's book came out. Much of the real horror was revealed, beginning with Soviet leaders distancing themselves from his atrocities in a purge of past "mistakes."

But Chambers saw the truth. He witnessed it. He described in chilling detail a monstrous horror, every bit as evil as the Nazis and, as history demonstrated, far more lethal over a longer period of time. It was a seductive political concept sweeping in the poor, the unintelligent and the left out; an atheistic alternative to Jesus Christ, and therefore the work of Satan himself. It was not until Chambers's Christianity worked a miracle in his own heart that this Truth revealed itself to him.

The apparatchiks of the Soviet recruitment and espionage complex were true believers. They would stop at nothing. There was no morality, only the Communist objective. In the film The Manchurian Candidate, this thinking is revealed when a Soviet handler is advised to have a brainwashed assassin kill a member of his own staff in order to verify his effectiveness. He easily agrees that he would without the slightest hesitation or concern for another's life. He does not carry it out; not to save the life of another, but only because he is understaffed and cannot spare a worker. This was what Whittaker Chambers saw.

What flummoxed his detractors was that he identified the erudite, handsome Alger Hiss as being one of these very people. He gave absolutely perfect descriptions of Soviet handlers, times, meeting places, code names, trade craft, aliases, and 1,000 other spot-on verifications, all verified by the American intelligence services, proving beyond a shadow of doubt that the accusations he was a liar were in fact lies themselves. After years of letting his "silence" be "louder than the liar's shouts," he finally could shout from the rooftops all the pent-up frustration built inside him since the first day he approached the FBI with what he knew.

The investigators did not immediately arrest anybody, leaving Chambers to stew in his own doubts while those he knew to be Communists freely operated; in Hiss's case shaping the United Nations. He may have understood J. Edgar's Hoover's desire to keep things secret in order to built the biggest case possible, but it did not ease his worries much. After he and Nixon went public, Hoover still remained silent until, finally, the case was revealed in full bombshell mode. Only after the conviction was Chambers free to air the full story.

Witness, being Christian testimony, painted the most graphic portrait of the Soviets, Communists, spies, fellow travelers and sympathizers not as "nice Jewish folks," as many tried to say of the Rosenbergs among others, but as demons. It was like they had the faces of monsters but only the spiritually pure could see them fully revealed. Ravenous, blood-thirsty, automated and motivated to kill for Communism; to destroy. Men without souls. The very epitome of evil. No Nazi concentration camp sadist was more so.

The heavy Christian "witnessing" did not play well in all GOP circles, especially when Chambers reviewed Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in 1957. He compared it to the Margaret Sanger-Adolf Hitler vision of humanity, seeing in the perfect, straight up characters genetic superiors. Even though the novel never comes close to advocating such a thing, Chambers felt each page was ordering the inferiors – Christ's poor, dispossessed, meek – to the gas chambers. Many Objectivists and Randians created a split, reaching a head in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson creamed Barry Goldwater. Republican support was riven by the John Birch Society, the Rockefeller East Coast wing, the Christians and the Randians.

In some ways, the Hiss case was more divisive even than the Vietnam War. In fact the divisions in Vietnam can be traced to Hiss. Hiss and Nixon are inexorably linked. Nixon and Vietnam are, too. The entire nature of anti-war protest and media manipulation during Vietnam intensified upon Nixon's ascendancy to the White House. The prosecution of Vietnam by a Republican, in particular by Nixon, made the issue unbearable for the American Left. It all starts with Hiss.

The Hiss case changed everything. It preceded the Rosenberg executions and gave impetus to McCarthyism. McCarthyism, in turn, created the greatest backlash this nation has ever experienced. The backlash was so vitriolic because it had to be, in order to paper over the fact that McCarthy, for all his faults, was right. In disproving McCarthy, the biggest albatross around liberalism's neck is Hiss. To further infuriate the Left, the specter of Nixon never went away. The Left was forced to grind its teeth and watch "Tricky Dick" ascend to the Vice Presidency, alongside the greatest hero of the century, if not since the birth of Christ: Eisenhower. Just when they thought they were rid of him after the Kennedy election and his "last press conference" (1962), Nixon reemerged, won an election after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and then to their horror was put in charge of an anti-Communist crusade. The Left had done extraordinary work in discrediting McCarthy and seemed to have succeeded in this effort. In so doing, they put themselves between a rock and a hard place, which was to conclude the fiction that the Communism Nixon and McCarthy opposed was not so bad, after all. LBJ could be excused as an overzealous Texan, but Nixon threatened to explode all their myths. Therefore, it became imperative to discredit Vietnam. Between Hollywood and the press in the 1960s and '70s, they came pretty close. Again, their greatest enemy is the simple, inexorable availability, and ability, of Truth to rise above all lies in America.

Alger Hiss was the Establishment man from Harvard Law School and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He had the looks and erudition of Kennedy, wore perfectly tailored suits. His resume was backed by testimony from the most prominent men in government, academia and diplomacy. His social class heard Jekyll-and-Hyde stories of a double persona of underground treachery. It seemed impossible to believe.

"If Alger could be a Communist, anyone could be," was a typical reaction. As the Kim Philby case and Venona proved, almost anyone could be. Chambers, on the other hand, was rumpled, overweight, disheveled. Burgess Meredith played the type perfectly with a Chambers send-up in Advise and Consent.

The Communists particularly went after people like Hiss precisely because they offered the perfect elegant image. It was in this elegance that the peculiar nature of guilt was found to be an exploitable personality flaw. There are different kinds of guilt. In the West, there is Jewish guilt, Christian guilt, white guilt and American guilt. Together, any one of these hybrids of guilt was benign, and even good. Judeo-Christian guilt, for instance, is one of the foundations of morality and conscience. It manifests itself in different ways. Men refrain from insulting their mothers or cheating on their wives. White guilt is the foundation for racial equality, operating as the voice in the back of men's minds telling them to treat black people as brothers, because racism is a sin. American guilt has its purpose, too. It provides the political framework telling our politicians to use U.S. power to do good in the world, and not as a conquering force.

But combined together, all these guilts could be twisted and turned into something terrible. The right Communist handler could twist it into an argument that the Americans were too fortunate, their history tinged more by luck than accomplishment; a nation of rich white racists who improperly "used" God to convince themselves of their violent Manifest Destiny.

In the years since, many Americans discovered college friends, husbands, lovers, colleagues, and business associates who turned out to be Communists. Nobody ever failed to feel shock. The Whittaker Chambers's of the world - frumpy, inelegant fellows who looked they might just be Red – often were the ones who came to them. They went after men like Hiss.

Many Hollywood Communists were good-looking men and women leading double lives during the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. Most people who succeed in Hollywood are good-looking. After Hiss, when the House Committee on Un-American Activities was exposing the Communist virus, liberals in and out of government, especially in the media, counterattacked against the anti-Communists.

In so doing, liberals placed themselves in jeopardy. Even if they were not Communists, spies or even sympathizers, in defending those who were they became tacit fellow travelers and useful idiots. The chaos of uncovering who was a Communist and who was not created a split in the U.S. that was exactly what the Communists wanted.

The Hiss case, the issue of Communist subversion and espionage, all combined to assign culpability to the Left. The threat of this culpability cannot be understated. If Communism turns out to be what it is suspected to be, and if an easily defined political ideology of the U.S. and the West is readily assigned to it, then that ideology, liberalism, is in grave danger. Therefore, consequently and as a result thereof, the Left put themselves through every possible gyration to prevent this. It required downgrading the threat of Communism, and discrediting the work of the Right.

Martin Dies, the founder and first chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, wrote in Martin Dies' Story, "Without exception, year in and year out, the American liberals have defended, protected, encouraged, and aided the Communists, both in the United States and abroad." Dies said that there is a "sympathetic tie between the ultra-liberals and the Communists. Actually, the ultra-liberals have always been Socialists at heart."

Numerous Rooseveltian liberals were soul mates of Communism. It is only because of World War II that events shaped themselves in such a way that the military came to an appropriate place of leadership. This created a jingoistic, patriotic mindset that worked against the tacit, underhanded alliance between the American Left and Communism. American liberals simply decided that they would influence Communism, to "humanize" it, to bring it into the modern world. All they needed was time.

At the heart of this mindset was Alger Hiss, who was defended year after year, despite Venona even to this day, by political elements desperate to shed doubt on his guilt, because his guilt is their guilt. He exhausted his appeals and spent four years in prison. Subsequent revelations confirmed his guilt, proving that treachery and subversion were real. Still the liberals labor on his behalf.

Many saw parallels between Hiss and Bill Clinton when he faced Impeachment. Democrats invested themselves in these party heroes, and could not recuse themselves from this investment, unlike Republicans who came to Richard Nixon to tell him they could not support him at the end of Watergate.

The twin scandals of McCarthyism and the Chambers-Hiss case, followed by Vietnam, created a chasm, a divide in American political culture that has grown wider ever since. It threatens to be unbridgeable. Moderation has been all but lost in both parties. The Democrats are now dominated by ultra-liberals and radicals and have been for years. The Republicans long ago swept out influential Rockefeller Republicans, replacing them with hardcore conservative, but centrists from both George Bush's to John McCain to Mitt Romney have at least maintained an equilibrium within the GOP.

All of this started with Chambers-Hiss. This was the impetus of McCarthyism, and Vietnam came years later. This case reveals the open door by which Communism snuck into America. It is a cancer on this society that will never be healed. Whether it is called Communism, Socialism, or radicalism, it has infected the Left, spawning protest movements, using civil rights, gay rights, and the environment as pawns, creating a world of Saul Alinskys and ACORNS, of race extortioners and discontents bound to find fault with the United States and Western Civilization. It is in the schools, the colleges, the media, the cinema, and spread everywhere else. Its enemies are Christianity, traditional morals, family values and patriotism. Soldiers, cops, Republicans, people opposed to gay marriage and abortion, Christians who preach judgment; these people must be brought down using the politics of personal destruction, Alinsky tactics of mocking, shouting them down, threats of violence, boycotts; all exacerbated today using social media. Whittaker Chambers warned the world of these very tactics in Witness, made to be allegorical of Christ's own warning to His disciples that they would be mocked, scourged and persecuted for believing on Him.

There appears little opposition to these tactics in Western Europe, Canada or Australia. Only in America has a steadfast, Christian-conservative citizenry been willing to stand up and expose these "community organizers" and their tactics. Only in America has a new conservative media risen to meet this challenge. But Chambers, who warned his wife in 1938 that they were now joining the losing side of history, may have been right. This radicalism, exposed by Chambers but allowed to grow into a monster in the wake of McCarthyism and Vietnam, threatens to win and make Chambers a prophet.

An interview with Alger Hiss

They called him Communist chic long before Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Alger Hiss's death resulted in the New York Times headline, "Alger Hiss, Divisive Icon of Cold War, Dies at 92." He was an icon of the New York Times and the liberals, but an enemy of America.

Allen Weinstein was a liberal who set out to prove his innocence in 1978. Using the Freedom of Information Act, Weinstein exhausted the evidence. He failed in any and all attempts to exonerate Hiss. Hiss's guilt was re-confirmed in 1993 by the release of the files of the Interior Ministry in Budapest, and again in 1996 by the release of the Venona papers.

While Hiss's guilt is not in doubt, he did continue to live in America for many years. It is part of America's tradition of freedom of speech that he was allowed to defend himself. In the spirit of fairness, this Hiss interview, conducted by Judah Graubart and Alice V. Graubart for their book, Decade of Destiny (Contemporary Books, Inc., 1978) is re-printed:

"Few people held as wide a variety of sensitive government positions during the '30s (and '40s) as Alger Hiss. Serving in the Justice Department, on the Nye Committee and in the State Department, he was witness to and participant in much of the formation of America's pre-war foreign and domestic policies. Indeed, it is Mr. Hiss's belief that it was because he was so integral a part of the New Deal era that he became the personification of it for Roosevelt's posthumous enemies.

"I think the extent, the depth, the fury of the Depression caught most people of my generation by surprise and taught us, more than anything else, the importance of politics. When I graduated from college, I paid very little attention to such matters; those who were in politics seemed to me rather grubby and corrupt people. But while at law school, and then immediately after, the Depression began, and it indicated that things were not right with our country. The collapse, the whole economic picture, was widespread devastation.

"In New York, the Hoovervilles were on Riverside Drive, in Central Park, everywhere. One couldn't move around without seeing them. On Wall Street, where I worked, the famous men who were too proud to beg were selling apples for a nickel apiece. Once employed, sometimes running their own businesses, they got steadily more and more threadbare. The soup kitchens were much too inadequate.

"In '33, after Roosevelt became President, I was invited by Jerome Frank, the general counsel to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, to come to Washington. I was not carried away by the idea, because I had only very recently come to the job I had in New York and was in the middle of a case. But a telegram from my former teacher, Felix Frankfurter, who had influenced me in law school, sparked my decision to go. The telegram read: 'On basis national emergency, you must accept Jerome Frank's invitation.'

"Well, it was like a call to arms, being told that the nation was in danger. I think many of us who went down in those first few weeks thought of ourselves as civilian militia going down for the duration of a real emergency, as if we were going to war. Roosevelt, in his Inaugural Address, used the sacrifices of war as an analogy. I think we believed that in a few years the emergency would be met; I know I always expected to go back to civil law. Practically none of us were in the civil service. We were going to be there only a short time and certainly weren't interested in a government career as bureaucrats. Therefore, the furthest thing from our thoughts was retirement benefits at the end of lengthy bureaucratic lives, and all the people in government - the civil servants - recognized that in us.

"We formed a good working relationship with the civil servants, who, we soon realized, were as much in favor of personal self-sacrifice and of working long hours for the public good as we were. Whereas we found them to be invaluable because of their knowledge and experience, many of them regarded us as reinforcements, to use the military analogy, since all their bright ideas, not unlike ours, had been refused by the Republicans. Now came people who would be sympathetic, and they were cheered up.

"When the New Deal came in, we pretty much had a free hand. Things were not working out the way business leaders had been led to believe they would; so we had public support. Roosevelt said he would experiment and if one thing didn't work, he would try another. The whole thing was improvised. We had some success and we had some failures, but certainly the bitterness of the Depression was for millions of people ameliorated by the benefits paid to the small farmers by the Works Progress Administration, by the relief funds and by the Federal Emergency Relief Act. The whole spirit of the New Deal, of such people as [Harry] Hopkins, [Harold] Ickes and Miss [Frances] Perkins, was so idealistic, so humanitarian, I think the public as a whole felt as it has not felt since - that the government cared about its duties and about individual citizens. There was a genuine sense of participation in the farm program where I worked. There were county committees set up for the farmers that not only handled a great deal of the administration - checking the acreage and so on - but also sent recommendations for improvements. It was an extraordinary period of public confidence in the government.

"The incident with Senator 'Cotton Ed' Smith occurred while I was with the Department of Agriculture in an official capacity. I helped draft the cotton contract for reducing cost on acreage, and we had provided that some of the payments made in exchange for reduction of the acreage should go to tenant farmers when the farm involved had tenants as well as an owner. Senator Smith had expected that all those payments would go to him as the owner. He came to see me in my office and was very angry because the payments, as we had drafted them, applied to him as well as to his tenants and were to be made directly to them. He said something to the effect, 'You can't send checks to my n-----s,' as if they were hardly human and sending payments to them would be like sending them to his horses or mules, who wouldn't know how to handle checks. I explained that this was what was required under the statutes and that I assumed that my superiors accepted this view or they wouldn't have approved it in the first place. I was as polite to him as I could be, but I was in no way frightened. It wouldn't have meant much to me if I had been fired; I could have gone somewhere else or back to practicing law, and this was a matter of principle. It just seemed to me to be no big deal. The New Deal was the big deal.

"I should add that a year later, when the purge over the cotton contracts occurred, not only Senator Smith but also the cotton producers and their representatives in Congress changed things. In the second cotton contracts, we insisted not only that the payments go to the tenants but also that the same number of tenants be kept on the farm. It wasn't going to help the country, and it wasn't going to be fair, if the owner, in order to get the payments himself, dismissed some of the tenants. This we lost out on.

"During the purge, Jerome Frank, my boss, was asked to leave, as were Lee Pressman and a number of others, much to their shock, for they thought Secretary Wallace was supporting their position. But, when push came to shove, Wallace felt that there was too much opposition to his position in Congress and, in effect, backed down and jettisoned them. They became not scapegoats but something pretty close to it. Other people didn't resign but were fired only a few days later. Since I was then mostly on loan to the Nye Committee on the Munitions Industry as their counsel, I had no occasion to get involved in the purge. Nevertheless, my interest in the Department of Agriculture lessened from day to day, since the people I had worked with were gone, as were the idealism and innovation they had supplied.

"The reason I had been sent to join the Nye Committee was that at least two of its members were on the Senate Agricultural Committee and so Secretary Wallace tried to do them a favor. The objectives of the former committee were twofold. The first was to limit the actual trade in arms, something that is of interest again today, though on a much broader scale. The arms trade was considered then, as now, immoral. It was also thought that the arms trade maximized the danger of warfare between small countries. We found, for example, that the salesmen for a great arms firm would do their best to convince the officials of, let's say, a Latin American country that a neighboring rival country had military designs against them, and would encourage them to buy. They would then run to the neighboring country and say, 'Look, your rival has just bought this much.'

"I remember a particular letter that came out in the hearings, in which a local representative of one of the American munitions companies complained that the State Department was 'fomenting peace.' We had always thought of the word 'fomenting' as being used for war, not for something desirable, like peace.

"The committee's second objective was to take profit out of war. In that effort, it was supported by the American Legion and other veteran associations, which felt that it was unfair for businessmen to make big profits while the individual soldier should be expected to give up a job, in which he might have been receiving increased pay, to run the risk of being injured or killed.

"We explored that. We found that after every major American war, even the Civil War, there had been Congressional investigations into the wastes, the corruption, etc. We found that war does tend to encourage and promote corruption, and certainly extravagance. After all, when the issue is possible defeat, money doesn't seem so important. On the other hand, a lot of people benefit corruptly and greedily at such a time. But we were unable to figure any way to take the profit out of war, and the reports I helped write said this just wasn't very likely.

"Yes, I was approached by one of the DuPont lawyers who told me that 'whatever you're earning here, you could earn more,' or something like, 'Your talents would be useful.' Certainly it was an indication that I could get a job and I suppose that they preferred that I got the job early, rather than after I'd continued. No, I never doubted that it was an attempt, as you put it, to 'bribe me.'

"Senator Nye? He was a friendly man with Midwestern gusto, vigor and simplicity. Not terribly sophisticated, not very learned, easy to work with, and a man of a good deal of conscience. He came from the Dakotas, where isolationism was strong. Therefore he was a spokesman for what he grew up with. He felt that Europe was less noble, beautiful, and pure than the American middle west. That part of Washington's farewell address that went "Do not get involved with evil designs of foreign powers" must have been inculcated in his own thinking. In that sense, of course, he was oversimplifying the view. I found him to be very pleasant, conscientious and well meaning, though he was not of the stature of Senator Vandenberg, nor did he have the intellectual quickness and charm of Senator Bone or the dignity of Senator Pope.

"The committee came to be known primarily as the Neutrality Committee after the period I was with it - the isolationists believed in neutrality - and it began to recommend that the United States should, particularly if war broke out abroad, refuse to trade with either side. Although when the Spanish Civil War broke out, the terms of that Neutrality Act, which were not meant to apply to a civil war, did seem to apply to Spain, and Nye was willing to revise his own act, because he did not think it was proper to refuse to ship to the Loyalist government, the legal government of Spain. I think the reason was that he came from a region where populism was strong, and most populists are liberals. They cared about the little man, about the underdog and about decency. And Nye had some of this populist tradition himself.

"In '36, I went into the State Department because of Francis Sayre, the assistant secretary in charge of the whole economic aspect of foreign affairs, including trade. I had been working in the Department of Justice to protect the trade agreements from attacks, alleging they were un-Constitutional. When his assistant, John Dickey, left, Mr. Sayre asked me to come and work on trade agreements in the State Department and continue to supervise the litigation aspect, which I did.

"Concerning the Spanish Civil War, I would say that the State Department was short-sighted. It was difficult for them to sense what that war meant to Italy and Germany. They took more seriously than I think was warranted the efforts of the British and French in the nonintervention treaty. And the British, and the French, too, I think, were weak-kneed. They did not foresee that this would be the first victory of the Axis, that this was the beginning of World War II. Now, of course, the State Department had the excuse of simply trying to help the British and French carry out nonintervention. That's why the neutrality approach toward Spain was allowed to continue, even though Senator Nye was so sympathetic to the Loyalists, he was willing to work for removal of the embargo.

"Regarding what was happening in Germany then, the State Department officials did not think that it was their duty to chastise the Germans. Any professional foreign office tends to feel that the domestic procedures of foreign countries are less important than the governmental relationships. From my own point of view, they were not aroused enough. I saw Nazism as a mortal danger. They tended to minimize the reports of what was going on in Germany. Of course, things were not as bad as they became later, but there was a tendency with State Department officials to say that the press was exaggerating what was happening there. The reason for my attitude was that I was more 'New Dealish' than many people in the State Department. The New Dealers used to say that the writ of the New Deal ran everywhere except the State Department, which was more conservative and cautious. For example, if you look at the memoirs of George Kennan, who's almost exactly my twin in age, you'll see that he went immediately into the Foreign Service, and the Depression seems to have made no impact on him. His only complaint about it was his expression of annoyance with Roosevelt that the expense accounts of Foreign Service officers should be reduced as an economy move. Well, this was not the way people of the New Deal felt. We felt that this was a time of great suffering for the American people and everybody should pitch in and try to help. But the State Department was basically conservative; they came from a different medium. They had been protected all their lives.

"There were very few Jewish people in the State Department. Herbert Feis was the only one I can remember. I do not think the State Department favored Hitlerian anti-Semitism. The State Department's anti-Semitism may have been snobbish. That's possible. It was that kind of social fabric. But that's quite different from implying that the State Department as a whole or any official within it condoned the kind of brutality that Hitlerian anti-Semitism meant. Is that the idea of 'While Six Million Died'? I think that idea's very exaggerated.

"I also worked with Mr. Sayre in the Far Eastern Division. The American position was that Japan's aggression against China should not only not be rewarded, but that we should not continue our shipping of scrap iron to Japan, thereby facilitating Japan's access to the oil reserves of the Dutch East Indies, almost all of which were owned by American companies. So in order to free ourselves for discriminatory action - and it would take discriminatory action to say they could not get scrap iron but other countries could - we terminated the trade treaty guaranteeing equal practices.

"I always believed that war with Germany was inevitable, but not at all with Japan. I was conscious early in '35, certainly in '36, that we had reached a pre-war instead of a post-war era. I spoke to my college fraternity in Baltimore, saying that I thought war was coming in Europe. I saw that Hitler lived by expansionism, that this was the only way the Germany economy could keep going, and Hitler's power depended on his being a militarized and militaristic leader. So I thought we would be drawn into a war because Germany was strong and we would have to protect England and France, as we had in World War I.

"I felt quite the contrary about Japan. We never considered them a match for us, and they weren't. I don't think anybody in the State Department had anticipated the attack on Pearl Harbor. It seemed suicidal when it happened. If anybody would have said it would happen, we would have discounted it.

"No, I wouldn't say the New Deal ended abruptly with Pearl Harbor. It was under wraps, minimized in many respects, particularly those where it would come into conflict with business, as in wartime production. But those aspects of the New Deal that would facilitate production, such was the morale of labor, were treated with liberalism. I would say that the New Deal didn't really end until the Cold War began, and this was one of the functions of the Cold War and of McCarthyism - to discredit the New Deal.

"I never had any doubt as to the fact that McCarthyism was to attack Roosevelt indirectly. He was too popular, even when dead, to be attacked directly. If the New Deal could be attacked, if Yalta and his other policies could be attacked, then this was one way of removing the stigmata of Roosevelt from those policies. I've never doubted that one of the accomplishments of McCarthyism was to diminish sympathy for Roosevelt, sympathy for the New Deal, sympathy for the United Nations.

"But the New Deal will be needed when conditions get bad again. It only came to light when the traditional business hierarchy of leadership couldn't function anymore. That time will come again. Another Depression? I wouldn't go so far as to say that. But what I would say is that the serious malformations in the American economic and social structure with which the New Deal tried to deal, when not cured or corrected, were obviated by the war. The New Deal as an improvisation, as an experiment, never succeeded in making the major changes necessary to avoid the disasters of the Depression. Had it been thoroughly successful, we wouldn't have had the kinds of things that went on in the '60s, when the rigidity of American culture came up against the demands for major changes. The New Deal represented the same kind of attempt to break out of the rigidity that had led to the Depression and to the inability to change the format under which American culture had grown. I think the New Deal era and the '60s had some things in common, except that the New Deal was more restrained, had a better sense of history and was more practical. But the time will come again, I think, when those things will have to be combined for major changes, though I'm not sure that many people would agree with me."

"Disbarred from the practice of law, Hiss took a job as a salesman and wrote In the Court of Public Opinion, in which he rebutted the government's case point by point. He and his wife separated in 1959. He continued to assert his innocence, and over the years evidence surfaced to back his claim, including some 40,000 pages of FBI documents released to him in the 1970s. Based on information in the documents which indicated that the FBI hid evidence that would have helped clear him, Hiss filed a petition of coram nobis, asking that the verdict be overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. The petition was turned down in Federal Court. Appeals were unsuccessful. In 1975, however, Hiss was readmitted to the Massachusetts Bar.

"Hiss married his second wife, Isabel Johnson, in 1986. Two years later, he wrote his autobiography, Recollections of a Life. His grandson, Jacob Hiss, was born in 1991. Alger Hiss died at the age of 92 on November 15, 1996, still fighting for vindication. The release of information from Soviet and Hungarian archives disputed his claims, and the release of the Venona Papers, occurring near the time of his death, is the final nail in his proverbial 'coffin.' "

Hiss is a tragic figure. Why he did what he did is not well explained beyond the usual conjecture. It is sad that a man of such talents, education and ability did not make use of the opportunities available to him. One can only speculate the agitation Hiss must have felt when the U.S.S.R. dissolved, and he knew that, inevitably, espionage secrets would be made public. Then, what despair did Hiss experience when, after rehabilitating his image for decades, word came that the Venona papers were discovered in the Soviet archives confirming his guilt?

Hollywood Left, Right and beyond

The Beast understood the power of myth. Entire countries could be moved to riot, or subsist in silence, to follow or revolt, to obey or disobey. The Beast developed an elaborate propaganda machine, an apparatus so powerful it could change the world. Anywhere, any place, any time. The Beast looked to the West, saw the most important instrument, Hollywood, the most powerful crucible on Earth.

\- In the Face of Evil

The Greeks and the Romans introduced statuary, sculpture and classic architecture. The Ottomans made fabulous bowls and household items that were works of art. The Italian Renaissance gave the world magnificent oil paintings elevating the spirit of man and God. The French gave us decorative furniture and impressionism. The Italians, Germans and Austrians led the way in opera and music. The British created magnificent literature: novels, sonnets, poems and plays. But the greatest, most influential and widespread art form of them all is the American cinema. Because its power was recognized so early, it immediately became a tool of propaganda. It was used to try and tear down America and to build her up.

"Political Hollywood started much earlier than most people realize," wrote Steven J. Ross in Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics. "In 1918, FBI leaders William J. Burns and J. Edgar Hoover were so worried about the power of movie stars to affect the political consciousness of a nation they ordered secret agents to maintain close surveillance over suspected Hollywood radicals."

Hollywood Left

The Red Scare was not relegated to the period dominated by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wisconsin) in the 1950s. It was highly prevalent in the late 1910s and early 1920s, in relation to anarchist protest against American involvement in World War I, all events overshadowed by the Russian Revolution.

The first major Hollywood star to involve himself to a large degree in politics was the British-born comedian Charlie Chaplin. Born in England and raised in absolute poverty, he totally believed in a welfare society that took vast wealth from the rich and distributed it to the lowest of the poor. Despite being a very successful businessman who produced his own movies, owned his own studio, and oversaw distribution of films that were wildly popular in a dog-eat-dog competition over audience share, he never seemed to grasp the nature of profit-production. Conservatives have always called liberals hypocrites because every study always shows the Left pays far less in voluntary donations to charity. This dynamic was certainly exhibited in Chaplin, who despite unheard-of wealth, was so scared of being poor again that he was the most notorious cheapskate in Hollywood. There is little record that he contributed much of his personal wealth to the poor. He believed in OPM (Other People's Money).

Chaplin saw in himself a 20th Century Charles Dickens. His films depicted the poor and the dispossessed trampled on by the uncaring rich. Police officers were brutes to be made fun of. Bosses were heartless autocrats to be made to look like fools. Chaplin had a knack for doing it with great humor. The upper classes took some mild exception to his movies, but mainly laughed it off. Everybody else identified with his little waifs and tramps.

Chaplin sold war bonds to endorse the American war effort in 1918, but after the war became associated with Upton Sinclair and Max Eastman, noted Socialists. Chaplin made $5 million in 1922 ($64 million in 2009). Sinclair asked him if he believed in the profit system.

"It was a disarming question, but instinctively I felt it went to the very root of the matter, and from that moment I became interested and saw politics not as history but as an economic problem," recalled Chaplin.

He became radicalized in a trip to post-war Europe. "It is a pity that the Socialist forces of the world were not united, because if they were not split up and quarreling with each other they could accomplish big things," he said while attacking the British class system.

Chaplin's view of "Socialist forces of the world" was very frightening to conservatives as well as Christians. Christians read The Holy Bible, both the Old and New Testaments. They were struck at a very distinct political message in which nations were separated from each other. Rivalries and wars ensued, but at no point in the Jewish history or the Christian testimony is there a call to unite nations as one entity. Indeed, it was the Roman Empire, which did just that, who "legally" killed Christ. Asked whether taxation was morally fair, Jesus replied, "Render to Caesar the things that are to Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." This is as clear and persuasive an argument against the morality of government taxation in favor of donations of charity and good works as exists. The Socialists and Communists not only wanted virtually everything a man earned to go to a government (Caesar), they wanted that government to be some kind of nefarious one-world system (the Roman Empire). At least this was the way the Right began to formulate the question, right or wrong.

By the 1930s, Chaplin was an out-spoken Socialist, directly in the cross-hairs of J. Edgar Hoover. His films began to take on increasingly political messages; some well received, others not. Audiences that loved the "little tramp" did not care when he got too preachy, but some of his work, as with Modern Times (1936) hit home in its depictions of mind-numbing factory work leaving little appetite for the soul.

But Chaplin had enemies. Cecil B. DeMille and Louis B. Mayer did not like him. His personal life, which was scandalous to the point of his being for all practical purposes a pederast, earned him no love from the cultural Right.

When Adolf Hitler rose to great power in Germany, Chaplin made the hilarious spoof The Great Dictator. He was not Jewish but he certainly joined with the many Jews of Hollywood expressing grave concern over Hitler. But Hitler was locked in a direct confrontation with Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union. The opposition to Hitler marked many in Hollywood as sympathetic to Communism, even if they only viewed it as an enemy of the Nazis. There was a tremendous divide over support in Spain, as well; the Communists or the Fascists. The Right felt at least Generalissimo Francisco Franco, like Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in China, was supported by the Christian/Catholic Church, and despite the faults of both regimes, was a better alternative than Communism.

When Chaplin began to collaborate with Harry Bridges, a known San Francisco Communist and head of the powerful Longshoreman's Union, it angered many and was seen as crossing the line.

"Despite mounting public accusations, Charlie never embraced Communism, though he was sympathetic to its more idealist goals," wrote Steven Ross.

As "an ardent champion of the underdog and as an avowed pacifist," said Harry Crocker, Chaplin "was a pushover for the raw trend of Communist thought."

The fact that he never supported state-sponsored Communism, however, was in the era that would become McCarthyism, not a major point. Chaplin clearly defined the term fellow traveler, which along with useful idiots was a terrible pejorative to wear. It suggested that the individual did not have the guts or commitment to actually join the Communist Party, as bad as that was, but they were wishy-washy, weak, appeasing to its "raw trend."

When the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis, Jews and Left-wingers in Hollywood were furious. Conservatives were mostly isolationist but realistic enough to know a war was a distinct possibility. The prospect of fighting a Nazi-Communist monolith controlling all of Europe from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Atlantic to the Caucasus's to the French border . . . and beyond . . . was horrifying. Conservatives were very frustrated with liberals because they felt their concerns with the Hitler-Stalin Pact was narrowly confined to what they viewed as a "sell out" of Communism, not wholesale concern for what America would face if such a war came to pass. Many felt it was too narrow a focus only on Jewish concerns, rather than American strategic considerations.

When Hitler turned and attacked Stalin, the Left cheered because now they could "root" for the Communists again. The Right sneered at this thinking but reluctantly understood if push came to shove, we would have to a "deal with the devil." The sense on all sides was that as bad as the Communists were, the Nazis posed the most immediate threat. Only after they were dealt with could the next challenge be met.

All in all, these were incredibly perilous, challenging times; a period of the gravest potential world danger, amidst terrible uncertainty, all when the United States military had been completely plundered by FDR. He left us ill-prepared for combat, much less a two-front global war. The fact such an ill-prepared nation actually won such a war actually emerges in the religious mind as nothing less than a miracle orchestrated by a righteous God.

The Soviets were even more ill-prepared. In the 1930s Stalin saw conspiracy under every rock, "purging" all his best military officers lest any of them conduct a coup d'état or emerge as a charismatic political challenge to his authority. Consequently, his army was incompetent. It had one thing going for it, however: raw numbers. The sheer volume of humanity the Russians could throw at Hitler, no matter how many were killed, in order to prevail, was a matter of world renown, a challenge invaders as recently as Napoleon Bonaparte failed to overcome.

When World War II finally was fought and ended in 1945, Chaplin was at a low ebb. His movies had lost favor and he was no longer extravagantly wealthy. His flirtations with Communism now attracted the attention of Federal investigators who were following up on undercover reports, innuendo, confidential accusations, and just plain intuition, regarding Communist espionage and infiltration into Hollywood, the government, even the State Department.

Chaplin was caught up in the vortex. Many fans wrote scathing letters to Chaplin, castigating him for never attaining U.S. citizenship; for criticizing the country that welcomed him, providing riches and success beyond his wildest dreams. Chaplin said he was a capitalist, but asked what that meant, he then asked if it meant he "must blind myself to the defects of capitalism?"

"The anti-Red hysteria generated by the HUAC hearing in September 1947 hastened Chaplin's declining popularity," wrote Steven Ross.

"I'd run every one of those rats out of the country and start with Charlie Chaplin," wrote conservative gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. "In no other country in the world would he have been allowed to do what he's done." The American Legion and other conservative organizations lambasted him. His pictures were called "filthy."

But Chaplin's demise was not merely political witch hunting. The advent of "talkies" was the beginning of the end for him. With his physical gifts and mannerisms he was born for silent movies, but he had a whiny, high-pitched voice that sounded awful on screen. He was not the quintessential tough guy.

"Chaplin discovered that audiences did not want their fantasies punctuated by screen idols who took controversial political stands," wrote Ross. "The star, many believed, had betrayed his public, and once betrayed, they proved unforgiving."

****

Edward G. Robinson rose to fame in a 1931 mobster classic, Little Caesar. But in 1938, a far greater villain named Adolf Hitler began the imposition of his will on the world. Two months after signing the infamous Munich pact, leading British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to naively exclaim he had achieved "peace in our time," Robinson led 55 film industry leaders calling upon Congress to institute a boycott of Germany, who recently annexed neighboring Austria. Warning the Nazis were persecuting Jews, Robinson said, "The world is faced with the menace of gangsters who are much more dangerous than any we have ever known."

Seemingly a clarion call for the advance of freedom, Robinson's actions, and those who supported him, were not met with universal American praise. Robinson was Jewish. There were some who still thought Hitler a Christian (he was not; he subscribed to Nordic mythology and even black magic). Furthermore, many on the Right, while not "applauding" Hitler, did support his opposition to European Communism, and even found favor in his business practices. Employment and economic success seemed to have sprung up in Germany while America floundered towards an entire decade of the Great Depression. In 1934, a group of Republican businessmen who did business with Hitler actually organized a military coup against Roosevelt. The cabal was broken up by the Marine leader they recruited to lead it, Smedley Butler, who played along with them just long enough to end the plot before it started. Roosevelt, not wanting to stir up a hornet's nest of accusations, sympathy and outright panic that America was on the verge of a South American-style Right-wing revolt, allowed the event to subside from history with a minimum of fanfare.

While the Right was not made up of Hitler fans, they were made up of isolationists who had no desire to go to war with the ever-more-powerful Wehrmacht. When the Germans attacked Czechoslovakia in 1939, then expanded into France in 1940, there was no further appetite for American involvement. Only Pearl Harbor alarmed Americans to the point of a war footing.

So, Robinson was a man who found controversy. He continued to find it. Robinson was a liberal, a fan of FDR and the New Deal. He was also an American patriot. He, like Chaplin, was caught up in the vortex of anti-Communist hysteria enveloping America over the next two decades. While numerous Hollywood filmmakers were actual paid agents, spies, party members, fellow travelers, or just plan unpatriotic citizens, Robinson was among those who did not fall into these categories. When the story of the Red Scare is told, and it is said that "innocent" men and women were unfairly tarnished, Robinson stands front and center as one of those innocents.

Many argued that his career was "destroyed" by false accusations. That is debatable and probably not wholly accurate. His age, the changing tastes of moviegoers, and other factors played as big a role in Robinson's demise as charges of subversion.

Robinson was a stocky, thick-faced little man who despite being Jewish did not really "look" like one. He had a physical appearance that could be anything, including Italian, which was the ethnicity of Rico Bandello, the gangster he portrayed in Little Caesar. He was a huge star and among the highest paid actor's in the industry, a favorite of Warner Bros. He and Jimmy Cagney personified the screen image of brash toughness.

Off screen he was the total opposite, a sweet, loving man with a huge heart who was willing to use his great good fortune to help those in need, in America and abroad. He had a superb art collection and was an erudite, private fellow who loved his paintings. He would have been happy to lead a private life absent great socializing or politicking. But the Great Depression and the advancement of Fascism alarmed him into public action.

A little known act by Louis B. Mayer had the unforeseen consequence of creating "more Communists than Karl Marx," noted screenwriter Albert Hackett. With the Depression raging (but his studio still reeling in profits as fans escaped to the movies), Mayer ordered a 50 percent pay cut for all MGM employees. This act was the impetus for formation of the Screen Writers Guild, and later SAG. Suddenly Hollywood, marginally Republican until then, became Democrat-heavy. As the Depression worsened and politics more frightening, the town became radically Left-leaning.

"Depression was withering away at America, and there seemed no solution," recalled Robinson. "Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Francisco Franco in Spain; Fascism was spreading." Amidst this Robinson and his wife hosted parties at their Beverly Hills home that included Frederick March, Florence Eldridge, Melvyn and Helen Gahagan Douglas. They were part of a Jewish community in Hollywood opposed to Hitler. In addition, they were joined by German filmmakers and intellectuals, Jewish and non-Jewish, who escaped Hitler. These included Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Arnold Schoenberg.

America was still solidly anti-Semitic, with some two-thirds of the citizenry responding to poll questions that Jews had "objectionable traits." A near majority actually believed Hitler's actions had some justification, although at the time they had no clue the extent of the genocide. Others thought it just a phase.

A Fascistic element even grew in Hollywood, in part a response to the Jewish-Communist movement. Germany involved itself in a full-scale diplomatic "friendship" effort, attempting to get America to swing its sympathies towards them. Hitler himself studied American sports and saw in the rugged individualism of Americans a kindred spirit with his "supermen." He was particularly moved by the fact so many American football and baseball stars were German-American. Lou Gehrig stood out to him, as did many German and Nordic names appearing on the All-American football rolls, particularly at Midwestern colleges likes Michigan and Minnesota.

Robinson's political activism elevated the age old criticism of entertainers being out of their depth. Southerners and evangelicals particularly criticized a Jewish man for having the temerity to advise the American government on their policies. Anti-Semitic letters came in, many blaming the Jews for the problems of world history. He was called a "trouble maker." But more than anything else, it was not just being anti-Nazi so much as it was viewed as being pro-Communist. A very large percentage of the American public was far more disturbed by the Communists than the Nazis. After all, prior to the Holocaust, it was Stalin who engaged in purges, collectivization, and forced starvations that already killed millions. That was just what people knew about (despite Walter Duranty's useful idiot reporting).

Working with the Warner Bros., Harry and Jack (whose parents escaped pogroms in Poland), Robinson began making socially significant films. Nazi Germany began to boycott many of these movies. This was a big part of the international market. Germany had a thriving film industry and a large audience of movie buffs. Movies like Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1937) and Espionage Agent (1939) were pointedly anti-Hitler. When four real-life Nazi spies were actually convicted in a New York Federal Court in 1938, it gave great significance to the message of Robinson's films.

Like so many Jews and anti-Nazis, Robinson and his cause faced a major set-back with the 1939 Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact. Communist sympathizers trying to "apologize" for Stalin, offering up various justifications, approached Robinson. Robinson turned solidly against Communism, which he never endorsed anyway. Robinson turned his sights back on Germany when the war started a short time later. When the Germans broke the pact, invading Russia in 1941, he was active in various Soviet relief agencies. This was where his troubles really began.

Many Americans did this out of natural concern for starving, innocent people, seeing in Russia a new ally against the Germans. However, many of these organizations already were Communist fronts. After the German-Russian conflict began, this trend was expanded greatly. The Soviets were in big trouble fending off the Wehrmacht. Stalin's military, purged of their best and brightest anyway, was woefully inadequate save for their massive numbers of "expendable" human flesh.
But the Soviets knew they needed the U.S. if they were to survive. They wanted to draw America into the war, and at least get their help. The more Americans believed in their cause, whether ideological Communists or just allies, the better. Soviet espionage agencies set out to take full advantage of this dynamic.

After Pearl Harbor, Robinson volunteered to serve in the Office of War Information. He gave up lucrative movie offers to make radio addresses in half a dozen languages – he was multi-lingual – to countries under Nazi domination. He entertained troops at Normandy only 27 days after D-Day, while still under heavy threat and even fire. Robinson worked tirelessly and patriotically on behalf of the American war effort, at great personal expense. He returned to the States in 1944 to campaign in friend Helen Gahagan Douglas's Congressional campaign.

However, a Robinson tribute, sent in honor of the Red Army during a 1943 dinner supporting them, was exceptionally laudatory. This came to the attention of conservatives and even Federal agents, who by 1943 knew about Venona, and therefore were on guard for any kind of Communist espionage or subversion. They knew it was far more rampant than originally suspected. It did not help that Robinson's marriage began to deteriorate, in large measure because he spent so much time in his war work.

His son, Manny, also faced problems with the law. Robinson spent a great deal of his fortune trying to repair his troubled personal life. No sooner had the war been won in 1945 than Robinson found himself, like so many activists, under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hoover was unable to provide exacting details because so many of his investigations were on-going and he could not afford to play his hand openly, letting the Soviets know about Venona and how much the U.S. really knew. He did help "friendly," mostly Republican Congressmen, pointing them to this or that star. While Robinson had never been a spy or even a fellow traveler, his laudatory comments on behalf of the Red Army in 1943; his Jewish background; and his New Deal enthusiasm; all made him a target of the Right.

Lines were being drawn in Hollywood, with conservatives actively demonstrating their patriotism. It was generally felt for a member of the liberal class to "prove" their loyalty, membership in openly patriotic groups was necessary. Many simple chose not to do so out of stubbornness. Conservatives like Walt Disney, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menou, Ward Bond, Hedda Hopper and John "Duke" Wayne were all very out-spoken in their beliefs.

The FBI received reports that Red infiltration of the movie industry started as early as 1933, based on a 1935 directive from Moscow aimed to intensify the effort. World War II was the perfect opportunity for the Soviets to increase influence and operational espionage activities.

Robinson naively believed the fall of Nazi Germany would create a utopian society. He and stars like Danny Kaye, Myrna Loy, and others saw in the new United Nations a hope for the future. Again, they were hurt by what they did not know. The FBI was well aware that Soviet fronts and operations riddled the U.N.; that paid Soviet agents on Franklin Roosevelt's staff were actively shaping U.N. charters, ultimately to help Stalin enslave Eastern Europe.

Therefore, any unknowing Leftist supporting the U.N. was suspect, even though their support was based on genuine humane goodwill. When Winston Churchill warned of an "Iron Curtain" going up in Eastern Europe, it put a huge chill on U.S.-Soviet relations. It immediately showed any liberal demonstrating the slightest support of the U.S.S.R. in a suspect light.

Robinson did himself no favors when he sent a telegram to President Harry Truman urging that he not adopt Churchill's "outmoded viewpoint." The Democrat Truman may have been something of a kindred spirit with the likes of Edward G. Robinson's Hollywood's liberals, but he knew more about Venona than FDR, who at first actively disdained the finding presented him by the FBI. Truman knew Communists had riddled his own administration; that Soviet spies besieged the U.N.; and that Hollywood itself was crawling with Soviet agents. Truman could see this was a problem for his Presidency. Being a Democrat, he was naturally a political target of the Right, no matter how anti-Communist he in fact was.

In the post-war years, Robinson's scope of involvement evolved to civil rights, black rights, fair housing, and that sort of thing. Unbeknownst to him, the Communists were heavily involved in these issues, trying to use blacks and minorities as in-roads of subversive influence. Robinson unwittingly came in more contact with known Communists.

He heavily endorsed the call for the Jewish state of Israel in 1946. During this time, Robinson was becoming frustrated, first at the slow pace of civil justice in the utopian world he thought would follow the war's end, but also with increasing criticism bordering on outright official investigation of his liberal views. He alienated labor leader Roy Brewer, who dealt directly with Communists and, through his associations, was privy to actual Communist infiltration that men like Robinson were not aware of. Hollywood anti-Communists were beginning to ask men like Robinson to sign loyalty oaths. To a patriot who gave up his career to go overseas and support troops during the war, Robinson was affronted.

More and more liberals began to "see the light" and join anti-Communist crusades and organizations, leaving those left behind to twist in the wind, guilty by suspicion. The old Popular Front was exposed by public investigation, leaving many scrambling to explain themselves.

But the worst thing for Leftists like Edward G. Robinson was after Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, when the horrors of Communism were becoming starkly exposed. John Reed and Walter Duranty painted rosy scenarios of the U.S.S.R. The pogroms and famines of the 1930s had the feel of mythology, even though factually known but somehow "unproved" to those who did not wish to believe. But the war exposed much, Venona even more. Even though Venona was a carefully guarded secret and would remain one for decades, its truths were filtering out. Of greater difficulty for the Left, these truths were being filtered by the FBI, often to their Republican friends, who increasingly used the inside knowledge to their political advantage. In 1946 the Republicans, led by a new wave of young, gung-ho veterans fresh from the battles, swept into Congress.

Further questioned on the subject, Robinson did not help his cause when instead of openly denouncing Communism he announced, "One must be militantly anti-Fascist," and seemed to "hide" behind the Bill of Rights, which so many soldiers had died for.

HUAC took on a far more public role in 1947, the year of the famed Hiss-Chambers case. No longer satisfied with minutiae and behind-the-scenes operatives, the committee was going after big names. Robinson was a big name. They were chaired by U.S. Representative J. Parnell Thomas (R.-New Jersey), considered "pompous" and not entirely trusted by the FBI. Various anti-Semitic Southern Democrats also occupied key roles. A recent poll found that 59 percent believed members of the Communist Party, who had operated openly for years, were more loyal to Russia than America. 62 percent wanted the C.P. outlawed.

By 1947, the lines were really drawn over this issue. With Nazi Germany and Tojo's Japan conquered, they were front and center among national security concerns, and a source of true fear. Hysteria was sweeping America. Looking back from the lens of history, there are at least two ways to try and understand what was at stake. While the true horrors of Communism would eventually add up to the killings of over 100 million people in multiple countries, a great portion and probably a majority of those victims had not been murdered by 1947. Millions had been killed, but a few million was not 110 million. Nobody really suspected that Stalin's body count equaled the 12 million killed in Nazi concentration camps. The perspective, or comparison, probably "favored" the Soviets, in that Americans were practically inured to news of such atrocities; just another genocide in a world of Holocaust, two world wars, an Armenian massacre at the hands of the Turks, the Japanese "rape of Nanking," among so many events that, to the religious, seem proof of the devil's existence.

Many have, as history correctly shows, pointed out Communism was every bit as evil as Nazism, but the hammer and sickle, posters of Mao Tse-tung, t-shirts with Che Guevara's image on them, have never, for reasons that mystify but nevertheless exist, elicited the visceral hatred and recrimination of the Nazi swastika of Hitler.

Why? The American and Western useful idiots, a liberal news media, Leftist college professors; the reasons are numerous, but the result the same: Communism has never gotten the same reactionary opposition as Nazism. Perhaps the answer can be found in something Ronald Reagan was telling HUAC in 1947. Asked about the threat, Reagan measured his words carefully. Yes, he said, there was a threat, but there were too many patriots around to let it go all the way. In an odd way, the success of the Right in stopping Communism from playing itself out hurt the Right's cause. Only if Communism had been "allowed" to rise up and create an Auschwitz or a Dachau in Iowa or Minnesota, it seems, would America have woken up to its true evil.

But beyond this, and there is some justification in this notion, Communism operated on people's naïveté. This was the nexus of Stalin's useful idiots. Unless a man or woman was a dedicated, paid agent, bent on seeing to it the Soviets got the atomic bomb and used it on the West, then and only then was that person truly felt to be a really dangerous Commie. The Communists knew this and used these soft spots in the American heart against the U.S. Robinson, no Communist and nobody's fool, was nevertheless one of those naïve people.

Robinson made a movie called All My Sons that did not particularly help his image. A classic Arthur Miller story starring Burt Lancaster, it told the tale of an American weapons manufacturer who in fact was corrupt. The weapons he made were defective, costing the lives of soldiers, including his brother. His son, who worshipped him, was repulsed at the post-war revelations. It was a brilliant picture that holds up well, and in fact was based in some measure on true events, as war profiteering is as old as war. However, many just thought it a way to castigate America as corrupt, not the shining "land of the free and the home of the brave."

But the Hollywood 10 were being exposed and John Howard Lawson, one of the ringleaders of Communist Hollywood, made a disastrous appearance before the committee. After Lawson, there was no sympathy for the accused. Top stars like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall led a parade of big stars to D.C., and other arranged locations. They eagerly testified against Communism, sometimes naming names, much in an effort to maintain their great careers. In turn, conservative studio heads began to formulate the notion of a Blacklist. Columnists like Hedda Hopper were flooded with letters from Americans outlining what actors and actresses they would not pay to see based on Communist affiliations. The list grew every day. Katherine Hepburn, an ardent New Dealer whose wealthy Connecticut family was very, very close to actually being Communist, and surely was Socialist, was "booed off the stage," figuratively at least, when Song of Love played at theatres. A North Carolina audience literally stoned a movie screen with her image on it.

The fact the public was "voting with their feet" did not give the stars testifying much in the way of cover. They were smoked out and accused of trying to save their own skins. Facing severe economic crisis, the studio system in December of 1947 endorsed an official banishment of Communist members in the industry. But Mayer, asked if the move was patriotic or economic, said it was economic.

Edward G. Robinson was not one of the Hollywood 10, all of whom were absolute Communist agents, members and/or subversives, dedicated to using their art in promotion of the Soviet Union, against the better interests of the United States. These were just the most obvious ones, although they were also expendable. They were not necessarily front-line screenwriters or directors. Some big names were protected. This did helped Robinson, a big name.

But the FBI had been tailing Robinson for years. They had an active dossier on him, and compiled strong evidence against him. In the opinion of many questioned, Robinson was a Communist sympathizer at the least, a fellow traveler, considered a leading prize of the Red espionage units. He had been involved in numerous Red organizations, had many Communist affiliations. However, he was not a proven Communist. A liberal, a New Dealer, an activist, yes, but not a Communist and, truth be told, not even a radical. But he was so tied up in the times and knew so many dangerous associates that it was impossible for him to exonerate himself. Conservative political ambition was very strong against him. Robinson was not given fair treatment, at least from the advantage of 20/20 hindsight.

When the Hollywood Reporter flatly called him a fellow traveler, Robinson fought back. His case represented the plight of many. Again, while Robinson was innocent, it was his innocence, like the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, which provided cover for the guilty. They used Robinson, who in fighting back and gaining sympathy, shed sympathy on those who really were Reds.

Fans avoided his films. All My Sons never made the box office a film of its quality otherwise would have made. Religious and patriotic organizations, and average fans, actively boycotted Robinson. This did not stop Robinson. He campaigned actively for Socialist Presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948, but this event did little good for Robinson or liberalism. Wallace's campaign seemed to expose, in the glare of sunshine, the true nature of the Left. When Wallace allowed himself to be used in a "private tour" of Soviet work camps, gussied up like a Potemkin Village, he returned to declare how wonderful it all was. It was almost funny if not so tragic.

When China fell (1949) and the Soviets exploded the atomic bomb (1950), helped by Jews Robert Oppenheimer and the Rosenbergs, the Christian Right went on the offensive. Christian Nationalist Crusade leader Gerald L.K. Smith flat said Robinson was "one of Stalin's main agents" and deserved to be put in a penitentiary.

Robinson represented the so-called "Commie actor's wing," a very dangerous dynamic. Communist writers and directors were one thing, but "After all, people rarely attended a film because of the writer; they went to see Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn, Edward Robinson, or Gene Kelly," wrote Steven Ross. All were suspected of some Communist association.

Louis B. Mayer, the most conservative man in Hollywood, remained fair and loyal to his stars, but his critics maintain he did so for business, not personal reasons. But in 1950 the FBI released a scathing official report detailing beyond any reasonable doubt the role of Communists in radio and the new, influential medium of television. Robinson was accused of being a member of a number of Communist fronts. This is an important distinction, and applies to any number of actors caught up in the scandals. He most likely did not actually know what all the fronts actually were. But Communism was like Original Sin; it spread everywhere, it was a genie out of the bottle, let loosed on the world. It touched everybody.

Robinson spent three years and $100,000 he could ill afford to clear his name. He visited with the men who authored the report, but left at a standstill. He wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, who said he personally was a "fan" and did not believe him to be a Communist, but the investigations had gone beyond his ability to control them. Robinson now stood in the court of public opinion. He was a political figure, fair game.

Robinson made a "Patrick Henry-like appeal," wrote Ross, to HUAC, pledging devotion to America. This led lead investigator Louis Russell to say what Robinson wanted said all along. Russell, moved by Robinson's patriotic appeal, re-visited the facts and concluded after a lengthy investigation, there was no evidence linking Robinson with the C.P. It was still not enough. It did not result in enormous, screaming headlines reading something like, "ROBINSON EXONERATED." He was still thought to be a dupe at worst, a "sucker" at best. This was hard to accept. Robinson was a true intellect, seemingly too smart to be a sucker.

Louella Parsons, no friend of Communism, pleaded that the "whispering" stop. Robinson appealed to the heavyweights of the era – Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Harry and Jack Warner, Darryl Zanuck, Joseph Schenck and Howard Hughes – in an appeal to get back to work. Zanuck enthusiastically endorsed Robinson, stating he was sure the actor had never so much as been "one-thousandth percent Communist."

But the American Legion accused HUAC of giving Robinson the whitewash treatment, causing Republican Congressman Donald Jackson of California to state he indeed did have evidence of Red activities; that he had been allowed to make "self-serving statements," according to the Legion, in order to make it all go away.

Robinson found himself caught up in a new round of investigations, this time linked with John Garfield, Ann Revere, Jose Ferrer, and comedian Abe Burrows. Any plans to hire him as an actor were put on hold at least for another year. The reason, again, was economic. But this time Hollywood did not think him a Red. He was part of the "witch hunt" that grew from real and actual Communist infiltration and subsequent discoveries, but this was the age of McCarthyism, full on. Directors and producers simply were not willing to spend big dough on a movie that could be ruined by Robinson's involvement. His family life deteriorated, his wife institutionalized, his son under psychiatric care, all at further expense to Robinson.

In 1952 he starred in a play, Darkness at Noon, in which he played a Bolshevik who comes to realize, in a manner not unlike Whittaker Chambers - by then exonerated and a conservative icon - how evil Communism was. He finally began to admit to investigators he was "duped and used," that fighting to help "underprivileged or oppressed people," he had been drawn into a Red orbit he did not realize existed until it was too late. He claimed none of the known Communists he associated with ever revealed their true identity at the time. Finally he had a very telling exchange with Congressman Jackson, a man many on the Left painted as an enemy, a "witch hunter." There is no doubt Jackson was a ripe conservative, out to gain politically, but he was investigating a very real threat and took his job, and his constituents, seriously. Robinson apologized, reiterating that he had been played for a dupe.

"I personally do not believe you were a member of the Communist Party," Congressman Jackson told him, but added the "activities in which you have engaged have, to some extent and in some degree in the past lent aid and comfort to the international Communist conspiracy." Committee chair Francis E. Walter added that HUAC felt he was a "sucker."

Herein lies the heart of the Red Scare during the McCarthy era. In a nutshell, Soviet Communism heavily infiltrated the entertainment industry beginning in 1933, increasing year after year after year. The New Deal, the WPA, the alliance with the Soviet Union strengthened its subversive hold on Hollywood. Among those involved were numerous paid Soviet agents, spies, Communist Party members, sympathizers, radicals, and just plain liberals. Many, like Edward G. Robinson, were innocent of any actual wrong-doing or knowing acts of treachery. As with Robinson, many apparently without knowledge were associating with dangerous enemies of America. Investigations revealed these facts. Years of public unearthing of the facts had a very negative effect on the careers of Robinson and others. Only after they were exonerated could they go back to work or gain any semblance of their old life.

But Congressman Jackson was right, because Robinson and others like him did engage in activities, and with organizations, that were out to hurt America. His term "aid and comfort," while a long-time phrase related to official charges of treason, became a catch-phrase, popularized in official attempts to convict Jane Fonda of treason after she visited Hanoi, North Vietnam in 1972; and applied with devastating affect to the actions of many on the Left during the War on Terror (2000s).

The investigators, despite being accused of "witch hunting," were patriots doing the business of America. Had they failed to investigate, they themselves would have lent "aid and comfort" to what Ronald Reagan later called "the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced Mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars," adding perhaps his most telling line ever, "and it has been said that if we lose that war, and in doing so lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening." Reagan's words cut like a knife for they were aimed at the dilettante Left, embodied by Hollywood, that either mocked conservatives for facing the danger, or even joined sides with the enemy.

Calling a smart man like Edward Robinson a sucker, which is ultimately how he was let go and allowed to move on, is a bit disingenuous. While his politics were his and he had a right to believe what he believed, Robinson indeed was too aware to do what he did. He had access to too much knowledge to simply assume it was all in a good liberal cause. Despite men like Congressman Jackson being called a witch hunter, in the end he more or less cut the actor a break.

He ultimately played his "last role" in an October, 1952 American Legion magazine article entitled, "How the Reds Made a Sucker Out of Me." It was easier for everybody all around. He was decent man, a loving man, and in the end the conservatives did not want him destroyed. Real, actually evil men were afoot in a dangerous world and it was these men they needed to concentrate their efforts on. Robinson accepted his clown act, gave some excuses about hoping for "peace . . . decent working conditions," and the like, while concluding, "I am not a Communist, I have never been, I never will be – I am an American."

In Hollywood Left and Right, Steven Ross concludes that Edward G. Robinson's life and career were essentially destroyed by HUAC and the Right. This is arguable but does not hold up to scrutiny.

First, Robinson enjoyed enormous success, fame and glory courtesy of America. He was a Jew from an immigrant family that scraped everything they had to get to the United States. Had they not, they would have perished in the pogroms or lived a life of abject despair. Robinson owed everything to a great nation.

Second, his wife had mental problems, as did his son. It is likely they had these problems regardless of the investigations, although they certainly were not helped, either.

Third, while he spent a great deal of money defending himself, and lost money when film roles dried up, he was rich beyond most people's imaginations thanks to a capitalist system he took full advantage of, yet despite its benefits he found much to fault with.

But it is in viewing his film career after 1952, and comparing him to Ronald Reagan, where Ross's argument fails to hold water. It is true the great roles like Little Caesar stopped coming, but by 1953 he was 62 years old. Hollywood is a world of glamour, sex and youth. It was only natural the great roles would not continue coming to Robinson. Only a handful of greats like Duke Wayne, Clint Eastwood and a few others truly see the best leading man roles beyond age 50 at best. He was never a handsome man anyway. He was a character actor from the beginning.

In 1956 Cecil B. DeMille gave him a plumb role, albeit a slightly ironic one, when he played the Jewish informer Dathan in The Ten Commandments. It was an excellent role in one of the biggest movies ever made, hardly one that goes to a man whose career has been totally destroyed. He also established a friendship with a man, Charlton Heston, who would go on to become one of the most conspicuous Republicans in Hollywood history. Heston's loyalty to Robinson helped keep his career in good shape almost until his death in the 1970s.

When asked why he gave Robinson the part, DeMille coldly said he believed the man had been "done an injustice." The Good Lord giveth, and the Good Lord taketh away. People compared him to Charlie Chaplin, but Chaplin lost his public and fell out of favor when movies went to sound, revealing he had the voice of a pipsqueak. Plus, Cinemascope, color and other new techniques made his tiny size a very unsexy image.

Robinson was cast aside not just by the investigations, but by a new crop of young, sexually charged screen idols like Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, and his Ten Commandments co-star, Heston.

Many argue the best role he ever played was the washed up gambler Lancey Howard in The Cincinnati Kid (1965), co-written by the once-Blacklisted Ring Lardner, Jr. He was in 19 movies between 1960 and 1973, hardly the career of a man who had everything taken from him.

In 1969 the state of California even offered a resolution honoring his life. Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Murphy enthusiastically joined with Heston in presenting him an award for his pioneering work. In 1973 the Academy Awards, following up on an award for Charlie Chaplin, gave him an honorary Oscar. He passed away before the ceremony.

Most of the egregious Communists never faced real retribution. Some were jailed, fined, but nobody was jailed for their life or worse. Many worked in French New Wave cinema until things blew over in America, some calling it the best period of their lives. A lot stayed active – and paid – in "front" operations, penning screenplays under assumed names or giving credit to hacks, taking their salaries under the table. The Blacklist lasted essentially until 1960, was lifted, and that was that. The ones with talent and marketable skills the industry was willing to pay for, generally, came back to work, sometimes bigger and better than ever.

Several factors are worth noting in examining this cautionary tale. First, regardless of whether one was a dedicated Communist or a sucker, no matter what large or small "aid and comfort" they gave to the enemy, it was an ideology that killed over 100 million people, still counting in North Korea and Cuba. Nobody in the U.S. ever went to a gulag or Siberian slave labor camp, as millions of poor Eastern Europeans, many of them the Jews they said they wanted to help, were.

Perhaps the best argument against the notion that the "HUAC mob" was responsible for "destroying" Edward G. Robinson is a side-by-side comparison with Ronald Reagan. Reagan was young and far better looking; much more a leading man type. As a character star Robinson had the chops to stay in the game well into his middle age and beyond. It could be argued Reagan was a more superficial movie star with less shelf life. Nevertheless Reagan, who was very popular, certainly on the winning, or majority side of the political argument in the 1940s and 1950s, did flame out fairly quickly. Perhaps he was not as talented a thespian as Robinson, but if unpopularity and the wrong political opinions hurt Robinson, popularity and the right political opinions did not help Reagan. Long after he was into TV and politics, Robinson was still getting top roles in hit films, starring alongside Charlton Heston in Soylent Green as late as 1973.

But the most ironic twist was like Reagan's admonition that it was guys just like him preventing them from achieving the sorts of deeds that, had they been achieved, were necessary to really rile the nation into seeing, wholesale, what they were and are about. It was the very investigations that make up the reviled McCarthy era which, while hurting a few people, in the end did keep Communism from achieving its unquestionably evil goals in the West. Whether liberals screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Rob Reiner realized it or not, they might as well have been mouthing the entire conservative argument for defending against Communism when they put these words in the mouth of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) in 1992's A Few Good Men: "You both rise and sleep under the very blanket of freedom I provide, then criticize the way I provide it."

But how long can the United States withstand this enemy within? This smiling, handsome, charismatic thing called Hollywood, with its gay couples, cool cats and gorgeous, slutty girls luring the young into their web, all joined at the hip with a Left-wing media complex, union-dominated public schools, and a political party that has lost its way; all creating a mass medium of un-American, unpatriotic pollution sickening the minds of the young with foul language, pornographic images, and unpure messages.

"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious," the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero said. "But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear."

Hollywood Right

It is taken as an article of faith that Hollywood is liberal. The huge majority of major motion pictures, television programs, comics, entertainment/talk programs, reviewers, screenwriters, directors, and movie stars, are anywhere between left-of-center and downright Socialist. Leading movie stars, rock musicians, and rap artists are solidly on the Left. Not only are most of these personalities politically liberal, actively favoring Democrats and often making scathing, cutting public remarks about Republicans, but a good percentage are publicly known for engaging in promiscuous lifestyles: drugs, alcohol, homosexuality, divorce, indiscretion, faithlessness, atheism, crime. Their religion often appears to be the environment and abortion.

Bitter opposition to anything resembling traditional moral values has created a huge chasm with conservative, and even middle-of-the road, Americans. Movie attendance and interest in the industry, such as ratings for the Academy Awards, are way down from the glory years. The liberal attitude and libidinous lifestyles of its stars is one reason, but despite a wave of highly-educated people coming from top-quality film schools, acting schools, screenwriting forums, and an entire industry devoted to preparing the best and the brightest of an entire world for Hollywood excellence, the quality of movies is vastly below that of the 1960s and 1970s, and maybe even the 1950s. There are still conservatives in the industry. Agents, and studio executives, and to some extent producers, all of whom are at least as much businessmen and businesswomen as creative types, might not make for a Republican majority, but among this class the GOP is at least represented. Among industry periphery - stagehands, key grips, camera operators, the nuts and bolts of the biz - there is no evidence that liberalism holds significant sway. Union membership is mandatory and effects politics, of course. If a vote of every single person who works in show biz, from Barbra Streisand to the dolly operators, were taken, a Democrat majority would surely hold sway, but not the 80 or 90 percent that seemingly at least represents the top actors such as George Clooney, Sean Penn, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

There are Christian and conservative organizations that meet in Hollywood. It is joked they meet "in a phone booth," but in fact their numbers are relatively substantial. What is not a joke but an actual fact is that they usually meet in secret, making little public noise about what they do. It is said they are under the "witness protection program." It is considered an article of faith that openly conservative actors and creative types, unless they are such big stars they cannot be touched (Clint Eastwood) must keep their politics either hidden or at least muffled, lest they face a new form of "blacklist." They are without doubt discriminated against by the Hollywood Left.

But as USC professor Steven Ross's book Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics points out, despite the modern dominance of liberalism in Hollywood, which at least goes back to the post-World War II era, Hollywood conservatives and Republicans have been far more powerful and effective in terms of electoral and even cultural success.

Hollywood's roots were essentially conservative. The men who forged the vision of a thriving film industry were for the most part Jewish émigrés from czarist Russia or Eastern Europe who found "paradise" in America through hard work. They loved this country precisely because they knew how poorly their parents and ancestors were treated in old Europe. They considered it an honor and a privilege to promote and even propagandize on behalf of the American Dream they were lucky enough to have achieved.

They gravitated to the Republican Party. Louis B. Mayer was not merely a Republican, he and his studio were a wing of the GOP. No single liberal filmmaker today, or ever, so blatantly used the power of the studio he ran or the industry he controlled on behalf of a political ideology as did Mayer. He was close friends with California Republicans ranging from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon.

Born in the Ukraine, his family escaped and Mayer made his way to Los Angeles via Canada and the East Coast. He made his first big move by securing exclusive New England distribution rights to D.W. Griffith's controversial classic, Birth of a Nation (1915).

Following the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, when the popular comedian was accused of murder, Mayer worked with Will Hays to maintain control over film content. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were already concerned over radicals in the movies. They understood, as did Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler, the power of the big screen, not only in swaying public opinion politically, but culturally through sexual, permissive imagery.

Mayer and Los Angeles were a marriage made in Heaven. The city was totally Republican during the wildly successful Roaring '20s economy. Major studios like MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., Fox, Columbia, Universal, United Artists and RKO sold stock. It was big, big business, and uniquely American as an art form. While the Russians, French and Germans had sometimes thriving film industries, they were co-opted by government politics. Mainly because of the vastness of the British Empire, now expanded in the wake of victory in World War I with an allied America, along with the influence of America's Lost Generation novelists in Europe; no other country could come close to matching the global impact of the English-speaking American film industry. Political unrest in Europe (1930s), eventually leading to war, brought their cinematic efforts to a halt while Hollywood kept rolling along.

Mayer, who ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, helped engineer the successful 1928 Presidential election of Herbert Hoover, who came to California from Iowa to attend Stanford University. He was a wealthy mining engineer before entering politics.

Over the next years, Mayer openly used his studio as a campaign tool for Hoover and the Republican Party. MGM contract stars like Claudette Colbert, Walter Huston and Frank Morgan were routinely put to use making films, newsreels and propaganda on behalf of the Republicans.

After the stock market collapsed in 1929, a rising political consciousness overtook Hollywood. In 1932, Mayer used all the power at his disposal to promote Hoover's re-election against liberal Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. Lionel Barrymore, Buster Keaton, Conrad Bagel, Wallace Beery, Mae Murray, Jimmy Durante, and Collene Moore were all pressed into duty – presumably they were Republicans – by Mayer on behalf of Hoover. But the Great Depression changed everything drastically.

Suddenly the MGM cafeteria was abuzz with political talk. The screenwriters generally sided with FDR and the Left. They gathered at their own table and practically shouted politics at each other. Each table was a consortium of political action, of one kind or another. The political theatre of it all was every bit as dramatic as the films they made.

Try as he might, Mayer could not deliver the election to Hoover. Even Republican-heavy California, the most conservative state in America up until then, voted for Roosevelt 1,324,156 over Hoover's 847,902. Nationally FDR won big, 22.8 million to 15.8 million votes.

The Republican "dirty tricks" campaign of 1934, between Frank Merriam and the Socialist-turned-Democrat Upton Sinclair, rivals anything in Tammany Hall, Kansas City's Pendergast Machine, "Old Man Joe" Kennedy's Boston, Richard Nixon's "plumbers," Bill Clinton's Hot Springs, or the thug politics known as the "Chicago way."

First, Mayer strong-armed employees at MGM to write checks to Merriam, a practice now made common in Democrat unions. He worked closely with Harry Chandler and the L.A. Times to smear Sinclair. Stage-managed photos of "hobos" streaming into California to vote for Sinclair were printed in friendly newspapers. Readers spotted movie stars like Dorothy Wilson and Rankie Darrow among the "bums," revealing that it was in fact a still from the 1933 film Wild Boys of the Road. One Mayer newsreel showed a Mexican man telling the camera we "need a complete rejuvenation of our governmental system," a tacit reference to Socialism. One man praises Sinclair as "the author of the Russian government and it worked out very well there and I think it should do here." A handsome auto mechanic, on the other hand, declares himself "an American" who supports the "principles America has stood for in the past 150 years."

The voice of the "inquiring cameraman" told audiences, "Remember, they're not actors. I don't rehearse them, I'm impartial." In truth Mayer hired actors interspersed with real people, but real people supporting Sinclair ended up on the cutting room floor.

"Sinclair's supporters were disgruntled, dirty riffraff who occasionally stammered or spoke with foreign accents and lauded Communism and Socialism," wrote Ross.

Although the newsreels were in large part propaganda, the fact is in the real world, there were many bums and riffraff meandering about the countryside lauding how great the Russians had it; how much better Sinclair would be than Merriam. Mayer was in truth capturing a very real political dynamic, a sentiment that finds itself oft-promoted in the work of writers from the Algonquin group. Plays like The Petrified Forest by Robert Sherwood (1935) and You Can't Take It With You (1938) remain staples of drama troupes to this day, featuring various characters who openly praise the superiority of Russia at that time.

But Mayer was not leaving anything to chance, either. When all was said and done, Merriam won big over Sinclair. But Mayer's over-the-top efforts may have backfired. Hollywood turned increasingly Democrat. Soviet infiltrators took notice of this during the mid-1930s, actively taking control of the unions.

Mayer turned his attention to the product he was known for the world over: actual movies. As the silent era ended and talkies took over, the industry began to put out edgier, more political fare. Actors who now had a voice on screen increasingly used that voice to express political opinions. After World War II, studios put out darker subject matter, often with a noir side to it.

Mayer resisted this, continuing to make light-hearted, wholesome family fare as in the Andy Hardy series, featuring Mickey Rooney. In the calculus of studio decision-making, Mayer appeared to have made the right choices. His kind of movies drew large audiences. Mayer was criticized for showing America in a glowing light even while much of the nation struggled during the Great Depression..

But the tide turned against him. The old studio system was beginning to fade out. New Left-leaning stars like Edward G. Robinson, Melvyn Douglas, Frederick March, Katherine Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart found they had voices to replace conservatives Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, and Robert Montgomery. Mayer was actually forced out of MGM, a move thought impossible, and replaced by a Democrat, Dore Schary. Mayer became bitter. He cheered the Red Scare, a loud fan of Senator Joseph McCarthy. When the tide turned against Senator McCarthy, Mayer's collaboration with the making of the Blacklist was used against him. Increasingly, liberals and those caught up in the Blacklist outspokenly criticized him, some in very vitriolic terms.

Mayer was left to complain about the liberal nature of Hollywood movies, decrying the lack of sentimentality as in his Andy Hardy pictures. From a business point of view, Mayer seems to have been proved correct. His kind of movies consistently out-sold the darker stuff. It was estimated that some 70 million Americans firmly enjoyed the sentimental movies of the Mayer era, and could not be swayed to see the edgy pictures. Mayer died in 1957. He had helped make Hollywood what it became, and arguably was the king of a golden age in which films played a larger role, earning a greater market share of profits from the movie-going public, than any time since.

There have been many Hollywood movies made depicting the Blacklist. A few, such as Guilty by Suspicion (1991), starring Robert DeNiro as filmmaker David Merrill, tell the story of a real person who was most likely not a Communist, but was caught up in the HUAC investigations, in which people were forced to name names. However, the majority of the movies usually fictionalize the events. These films generally show a likable, idealistic, naïve writer or actor caught up, by mistaken identity or some other innocent means, in McCarthyism. A fictional Republican Congressman, always unattractive, narrow-minded, and mean, unfairly goes after them to destroy their lives for political gain. The reason most of these depictions are fictional is because they rarely actually happened.

Joseph McCarthy, the great bogeyman of the Red Scare, did not go after actors, artists and directors. He went after spies, often in the State Department, the Army or other government agencies. He was motivated by three major events: China falling to Communism (1949), Robert Oppenheimer and the Rosenbergs helping the Soviets explode their first atomic bomb (1950), and the Korean War (1950-53). Most of the Hollywood investigations occurred prior to McCarthy's ascendance on the scene. The reason most of the movies depicting Blacklisted filmmakers as innocent are fictional is because the actual Blacklisted filmmakers actually were Communists. There indeed was rampant espionage, sympathy and membership in and on behalf of the Soviet Union, in and out of Hollywood, in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. It stands to reason that it continued after the 1950s, but by then McCarthyism was so badly tarnished as an ism that the conservatives lacked the stomach to go after domestic enemies. The War on Terror slightly revived the desire to find homegrown enemies, but they ran into the same Left-wing opposition looking at Muslims as they did looking at movie stars.

While schools and much media coverage blankets the public with the notion that Communist infiltration in America was virtually nil, that Blacklisted writers and directors were universally innocent, sympathetic figures railroaded by the Right, the career of Ronald Reagan remains a very inconvenient truth. Reagan rose to popularity precisely because there was Communist infiltration in American institutions, Hollywood probably more than anyplace else. His reaction to it stands in stark contract to the fictionalized depiction of bad guys, unfairly out to destroy the lives of innocents. It was precisely because Reagan was so fair and decent that he rose from being a mere actor to a national hero.

Reagan and George Murphy were two actors who revolutionized politics by bringing enormous electoral success, and with it power, to the Republican Party. Many in the entertainment industry were activists, many influential. Louis B. Mayer and most of the moguls of the studio system were active Republicans, instituted the Blacklist, raised money for the GOP, and played large roles in the elections of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Reagan – Murphy less so - was far more out-front, among powerful reactionary and electoral voices in America.

Ronald Reagan is one of the Rushmore names in world history, but the path he walked was paved in some measure by Murphy, his mentor. A Yale man from Connecticut, Murphy came from a politically connected family. He came to Hollywood and became a song 'n' dance man, famed for performing with Shirley Temple in the 1930s. Murphy came under the wing of Louis B. Mayer. MGM was a hotbed of Right-wingers, promoted and endorsed by Mayer. As his film career faded and politics took center stage with the coming of war, Murphy took an active position in the Screen Actors Guild. At the time, unions were trying to control the industry. These unions were rife with Red infiltration. Murphy fought them. He was threatened with acid in his face, and by Chicago mobsters. Through it all Murphy refused to back down. He was elected to higher and higher positions of importance at SAG. A former Democrat, he turned from President Roosevelt's New Deal. The Republican Party quickly realized what an asset he was. With his good looks and "nice guy" image, he was a very compelling figure. A former boxer, he was also tough and could not be intimidated.

America was more and more convinced Communists dominated Hollywood. Mayer's old family fare, such as the Andy Hardy series, was in the war and post-war years increasingly replaced by dark, noir, depressing tales of American greed and corruption. Mayer sent Murphy to various speaking engagements not to condemn the industry for its Communist infiltration, but to paint a picture of an industry that still loved the country. He was a "troubleshooter for the motion picture industry," trying to get people to come back to the cinema because they were not all "lousy Commies."

Murphy opposed the Popular Front, which emerged in Hollywood in solidarity with the Soviets. When the Popular Front called for America to remain neutral after the Soviets signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis, many conservatives like Murphy were alarmed that the Left was not concerned with Hitler so much as they were advocates for Stalin. Murphy found the "naïveté of some liberals toward Communism" to be appalling at best. He studied Communist tactics, read The Daily Worker, was influenced by Eugene Lyons's The Red Decade (1941), saw "little difference between repressive totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union," according to Steven Ross's Hollywood Left and Right, and saw first hand how the Reds "were able to lure celebrities into nefarious 'front' groups,' " according to Lyons.

Murphy spearheaded opposition to the Popular Front with a group called the conservative front, which became known formally as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA). The biggest incentive behind Right-wing politics of the era was an incredible 90 percent income tax rate imposed on the wealthy – of which most of them were – by Roosevelt. In addition, according to Steven Ross's research, Communists were penetrating the labor unions and inserting "Red propaganda" into American films. The group included Walter Brennan, John Wayne, Mary Pickford, Adolphe Menjou, Cecil B. DeMille, Ward Bond, Hedda Hopper, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck and later Ronald Reagan. The majority of them came out of Mayer's MGM. It was the MPA who actively urged Congress to investigate their very own industry, hoping to root out Communism.

Murphy more than anybody, including Reagan, actively worked with the Republican Party to prepare them for the new television/media age. His acting career sagged as he became more and more politically involved. He arranged for like-minded celebrities to campaign on behalf of Republicans such as California Governor Earl Warren and Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey. Murphy stage-managed the 1952 Republican National Convention, the first big TV event, which nominated the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket. Murphy played a major role in dragging politics out of "smoke-filled rooms." He worked in concert with conservative Henry Luce's Time magazine to promote the Eisenhower ticket.

The rise of Richard Nixon polarized California politics. A tremendous divide occurred after World War II between liberals, dominating Northern California, and conservatives in Southern California. California Governor Goodwin Knight elevated Murphy to chairman of the state Republican Party ostensibly because he was "the only guy in the state that nobody's mad at." One report called Murphy "an early spotter of Communist infiltration in film ranks" who "never became a witch hunter." Indeed, both Murphy and Reagan remained popular because, no matter how heated the Red Scare got, they never engaged in the politics of personal destruction looking for traitors.

"Mass movements require an ideology that attracts people, messengers who can articulate it, and grassroots networks that spread it to communities across the nation," wrote Ross. Murphy was the first big messenger to take the politics of the Chandler family, of Louis B. Mayer and the conservative moguls, making it populist in the TV age.

The rise of Republicans in the film industry was also a direct result of fright among the Left in the wake of the HUAC hearings. Murphy identified "secret Socialism and government interference with private enterprise." He said the Left was interfering with the ability to worship God "in a way of his own choosing."

Murphy worked closely with Desi Arnaz, from I Love Lucy fame. Arnaz was incorrectly identified as a possible Communist. Given the chance to address the committee, he said his father had been Mayor of Santiago, Cuba, vigorously opposed to Fidel Castro. The Communists came to destroy his family home. He hated Communism with a passion. He was eager to work with Murphy and prove his patriotism.

By the 1960s, Reagan was a Republican and rising political star. He and Murphy worked together hand in hand. They addressed conservative and Christian organizations. It was Murphy, not Reagan, who made the first foray into electoral politics. 1964 was a key year in the state of California. It was the last years of Baby Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964. The state had truly grown up. Nixon helped deliver its substantial electoral votes to Ike in 1952 and 1956. Former Governor Earl Warren was now on the United States Supreme Court. The Dodgers and Giants left New York to play on the West Coast. The Minneapolis Lakers were now in L.A.

1964 was also the first year of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. Reactionary forces on the Right were formed in opposition to Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown and President Lyndon Johnson's proposed Great Society. Orange County was now a juggernaut, its population spurred by the building of Disneyland. The space race and the nuclear arms race made Southern California the epicenter of the Military Industrial Complex (largely built by Howard Hughes), which Ike had warned in his 1961 farewell had the potential for taking over the government.

The Republicans were split, especially in California, between the Birchers, the Randians and the Nelson Rockefeller moderates. The L.A. Times changed drastically with the ascendancy of young publisher Otis Chandler in 1960. In 1962 the Times for the first time printed derogatory articles about a Republican, the shocked Richard Nixon. After losing to John Kennedy in 1960 he turned down the opportunity to become Commissioner of Baseball, returning to his hometown of Los Angeles, practicing law for a downtown firm before losing to Brown in the 1962 Gubernatorial campaign.

A bruising national Primary battle between New York's Governor Rockefeller and firebrand conservative Barry Goldwater came down to California, specifically Orange County. The O.C. voted in overwhelming numbers for Goldwater, enough to give him the party nod. However, it was a huge Democrat year. LBJ crushed Goldwater. It appeared the Democrats were tacit "winners of history," at least to some extent.

But there were two bright spots for the Right. Both were in California, foreshadowing a "revolution" to follow with profound global consequence. First, Murphy upset JFK's press secretary, Pierre Salinger, for the U.S. Senate. It was a tremendous win upending all conventional wisdom, especially showing a new independence, a sense of rugged individualism marking Republican ascendance of the next half-century. The split from the Rockefeller moderates to the Goldwater conservatives represented a new muscularity reflecting itself in the party's emerging stands on religion, abortion, national security and taxation.

Salinger was erudite, intelligent, draped with the Kennedy imprimatur in a year in which his sainted image was golden a year after his assassination in Dallas. But Murphy's charm and great communication skills won the day. Somewhat surprisingly Salinger, despite working in the media for the most telegenic of Presidents, made huge on-air personality mistakes in losing to the actor.

"As a debater," observed the columnist team of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, "Salinger demolished Murphy, whose logic and syntax both tend to be elusive. But politicians of both parties agree that Salinger emerges as the brash, almost arrogant young man while Murphy was the comfortable old shoe."

Murphy's win marked a turning point in television politics, leading others in his profession to give it a try. These included Democrats Steve Allen, Gary Merrill, Robert Vaughn, Dan Blocker, and Eddie Albert; and Republicans Chuck Connors and Shirley Temple-Black. Temple-Black was the same adorable little waif who outshone Murphy, happy to be cast in her shadow, during their song 'n' dance act of the 1930s. She eventually became the U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia.

But even more important than the election of George Murphy was the Speech, made by Ronald Reagan.

More than any figure in the 20th Century, Ronald Wilson Reagan defined "communications." He was, in fact, called "the Great Communicator." Before he came along, communications was a technical term, referring to phone lines or the military's ability to convey information on the battlefield. People did not talk about "the media" as any sort of connective tissue. There was the press (newspapers, magazines), books, radio, movies, the stage, then TV. FDR used radio with his "fireside chats," but even into the 1960s great communications skills were thought of as secondary. John F. Kennedy harnessed it, especially when he used his good looks and charisma to out-shine a sweating Richard Nixon in the 1960 debates. Nixon used his famous "Checkers speech" to help secure the Vice Presidential nomination of 1952, but he and President Eisenhower, like most public figures, were rather amateur in their use of communications.

Reagan had professional experience in all the mediums. He was skilled at radio, the big screen, and television. His career would make communications a by-word, so much so that colleges would make the study of communications into a viable major course of study. His good friend, Ambassador Walter Annenberg, poured millions into creation of the Annenberg School for Journalism and Communications at the University of Southern California and other schools.

For Reagan, it all started in radio. After graduation from college in the Midwest, he began doing re-creations of Chicago Cubs baseball games from a studio in Iowa. Using a few crude sound affects (a baseball hitting a bat, simulated crowd noise), he was given the raw statistics of games (the name of the batter; a ball, a strike, a grounder to shortstop, a base hit). Using his imagination, he painted a vivid picture of actual games. The Cubs trained at Catalina Island off the California coast because owner Philip K. Wrigley "owned" much of the island community. While at Catalina Island for Spring Training, Reagan took the time to make his way to Hollywood for a screen test. He was given a contract, and in 1940 starred as Notre Dame football star George "the Gipper" Gipp in Knute Rockne: All-American.

It was an iconic role, featuring Reagan-as-Gipp on his deathbed, telling Coach Rockne (played by Pat O'Brien) to have the Fighting Irish "win one for the Gipper." Already a famed phrase from a speech Rockne delivered at halftime of the legendary Notre Dame comeback win over Army at Yankee Stadium (1928), it became an American touch phrase. It was associated with Reagan's entire political career, an Irish lucky charm of sorts, making Reagan as much a part of Notre Dame lore as Joe Montana or Ara Parseghian.

Married to movie actress Jane Wyman, he achieved for a brief time leading man status. In the early 1940s he was considered the most bankable star in the constellation When the United States entered World War II, Reagan became an officer in the Army Air Corps, but poor eyesight prevented him from shipping overseas for combat. He spent the war making promotional, even propaganda films, as did many Hollywood filmmakers such as Frank Capra's Why We Fight series. Based at the Hal Roach studios, Reagan's unit was nicknamed the "Culver City commandos."

Whether the advent of the war ended Reagan's chance at greater stardom beyond his early 1940s success is speculation. Reagan himself was always self-deprecating in describing his descent from leading man to B movie actor, laughingly referencing his friend George Murphy, saying it was inevitable if one cannot "sing or dance." He achieved a modest success after the war, but according to the documentary of his life, In the Face of Evil, "In the unforgiving calculus of the studio system, he was weighed, measured, and found wanting."

Leading man or not, Reagan was well respected professionally and personally. He was a New Deal Democrat, an ardent admirer of FDR and his policies. His easygoing personality belied an interest in politics. Left-wing writer-director Bernard Vorhous, who worked with Reagan making war-time films, said the young captain "had more knowledge of political history than any other actor I'd ever met."

Reagan has been called simple in his beliefs and approach, in his communication skills, but his love of history was genuine and thorough. Perhaps his ability to use history, often in a story telling method, was his greatest skill. A Reagan speech was often a lesson using past events in the painting of a picture about present day conditions.

Reagan, like many in Hollywood, attended liberal political events during World War II. J. Edgar Hoover had him tailed, and in 1946 his loyalties were under suspicion. It was not until 1947, unaware he had been under surveillance, that Reagan voluntarily came to the FBI warning them of Communist activity. Hoover and his agency absolved him of any further suspicion. He joined with Edward G. Robinson on internationalist issues, advocating a ban on the atomic bomb. He disagreed with the continued support of Chiang Kai-shek in China after the Japanese were defeated. He was a "favorite of the Hollywood Communists," which perhaps was how he came to see so closely, from the inside, exactly how they operated.

Even after warning the FBI of Communist infiltration he was not an "anti-Communist." It was his dealings with unions that changed everything. The Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee on the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP) were a radical group made of many Communists, whose main goal was to support the U.S.S.R. in the fledgling United Nations. Reagan was named a member of their executive council, thinking it a peaceful, albeit Left-wing organization that just wanted to promote good relations with a war time ally. His brother Neil, however, was spying for the FBI. He warned Ron it was a "Left-wing front." Reagan thought that was just "Republican propaganda."

In fact, it was a Communist front. In 1946, Moscow stepped up infiltration into Hollywood. In so doing, mere "liberals" were phased out in favor of actual paid agents. HICCASP had no local autonomy. They were a "militant pro-Soviet" group controlled by the Kremlin, according to Steven Ross's research.

A split occurred in Hollywood. Liberal academic Arthur Schlesinger exposed it in Henry Luce's Life magazine, warning the Reds were trying to turn the movie industry into the "cultural servant of the U.S.S.R.," according to Ross. Influential Democrats suggested HICCASP make a public statement repudiating Communism. The still-naive Reagan thought it a great idea, as if to do so would make the problems go away. Instead, long time liberals like Reagan, Dore Schary and others were denounced as "Fascist . . . capitalist scum," and "Red baiters."

"You can imagine what this did to my naïveté," Reagan recalled. He was in shock. He was a good liberal, a New Dealer, but a capitalist, a patriot who loved America. Suddenly, his eyes were open. Nothing would ever be the same again, for him or the world.

Reagan was then invited to a meeting by some Republicans, like Gone With the Wind star Olivia de Havilland, who previously thought him some kind of radical. Pleased to see how reasonable he was, they agreed to work together, trying to find common ground. A statement was formed and presented to John Lawson of HICCASP. They did not know he was a secret Communist leader. His vehement reaction to a very reasonable pro-American statement further shocked Reagan and his group even more. Lines were drawn.

The Communists were bullies and hard-liners with no desire to do anything by Democratic means. This led Reagan to join Americans for Democratic Action. He was already heavily involved in the Screen Actors Guild, where he came to know George Murphy. He was ardently pro-union. His own experiences with the Warner Bros. studio in the 1930s galvanized his belief that unions were an important function of a Democracy, protecting the little guy from corporate bosses willing to take advantage of them.

In 1946 Reagan and Murphy were re-united. Murphy was already a staunch Republican. This helped Reagan reach a new patriotic resolve, although he had no intention of leaving the Democrats. He wanted to help reform his party from the inside, to give it a cheerful voice. A series of strikes were launched in Hollywood during this period by several unions that may not have been Communist, but were increasingly radical. An array of social and economic demands were made, each less reasonable and more offensive to Reagan's sensibilities. Lines were drawn further.

The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) won hard battles to gain control of most studio work. Anti-Communist Democrat Roy Brewer was convinced the CSU was a Communist front, setting out to prove it. Brewer went to the FBI, who informed him indeed the Reds infiltrated this and other groups to an extent Brewer was unaware. Reagan did not believe Brewer's Communist accusations. Brewer then showed him the evidence Hoover's FBI presented him. Reagan was shocked again, as before, his "naïveté" eroding with each new revelation. His beloved Hollywood was practically a Communist front!

He then crossed a picket where rocks were thrown at him. A riot ensued in which Communists stoked extreme violence, to the point where only good luck prevented Reagan or anybody else from serious injury or worse. Neil Reagan said this was the turning point in Reagan's conversion.

The FBI came to his home to warm him of personal threats. Reagan at first thought it "Red baiting," but the Feds told him of specific threats to his well-being. He was a target now. As with Murphy, union thugs threatened to throw acid in his face. Reagan was issued a gun permit, walking about with a loaded .32 Smith and Wesson holstered under his shoulder like the Westerns he sometimes starred in.

Reagan was elected president of SAG in 1947. A good Christian, he visited a Catholic priest, Father George Dunne at Loyola University, seeking spiritual wisdom. Father Dunne insisted the Communist threat was not what Reagan feared it to be. Seeing Reagan's intelligence, communication skills and intensity, Father Dunne concluded Reagan to be "dangerous" because he was a "true believer," intent on stopping Communism. He possessed rare personal abilities that could be used to lead a mass movement. Father Dunne, a student of history, was afraid such a thing could expand into a kind of American-style "Spanish Inquisition."

But in Hollywood, Reagan was lauded for his steadfast drive, intelligence and leadership. He was already well read when he came across Austrian-born economist Friedrich Hayek's bestseller The Road to Serfdom (1945), which argued Nazism and Communism both led to state planning of disastrous economies, with freedom the ultimate victim. To Reagan, liberals were well meaning, yet misguided, but as the old saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

"Reagan always struck me as being quiet, unassuming and not the two-fisted fighter we needed for the <SAG> position," conservative columnist Hedda Hopper wrote after interviewing Reagan. "I was never more wrong." Hopper was among the first in a long, long line of smart people who underestimated Ronald Reagan.

"Our highest aim should be the cultivation of freedom of the individual, for therein lies the dignity of man," Reagan said. "Tyranny is tyranny and whether it comes from Right, Left or center, it's evil."

This is a remarkable statement viewed in context. It expressly states very clearly the role of the artist in society; that of a free person expressing freedom of expression. If ever people would seemingly be drawn to this philosophy it is actors and writers, yet an astonishing number of them found kinship with Communism. This well explains the term useful idiots, which by 1947-48 was a phrase Joseph Stalin was using to describe the likes of H.G. Wells, Doris Lessing, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty. The statement also expresses Reagan's devout Christianity, perhaps the starkest contrast between the free West and Communist Russia, where the individual had no rights subservient to a massive state.

Reagan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of HUAC's most controversial work, the Alger Hiss case, on October 23, 1947, along with "friendly" witnesses Robert Taylor, Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou. He agreed a "small clique" of guild members associated with "tactics" of the Communist Party, but did not advocate outlawing Communism. He said people had the right to choose their politics, claiming Americans fought and died for that right. He told the committee he did not think the Communists really permeated the industry, ostensibly because there were too many patriots like him to allow such a thing to happen, which was certainly true.

"I hope we are never prompted by either fear or resentment of Communism in compromising our Democratic principles in order to fight it," he said. Reagan was extremely fair, almost liberal, on the issue. He was lauded for his open-mindedness. It is important to note, however, that in October of 1947, the Hiss case had by no means revealed his guilt; the FBI was still holding back what it knew about Communist infiltration almost everywhere within the levers of American power; the sound barrier was only broken that month, so the space race and arms races were not yet underway; China was not Red and the U.S.S.R. had not demonstrated "the bomb"; the Soviets were still thought of as war allies; the Berlin Airlift was a year away; the worst abuses against Eastern Europe were not yet happening; and the wholesale mass murders of Communism, resulting in over 100 million dead, were not yet known. In light of this, Reagan can be excused for his fairness if not naïveté, regardless of how he claimed his innocence was already gone when he saw the union tactics used against him.

But, again, Reagan's appeal to HUAC that Communist infiltration was not quite as terrible as they might think because there were too many patriots like himself to allow such a thing to happen, in many ways is a single blanket shadow statement describing conservatism, which has often been, for lack of a better term, a "victim of its own success."

Looking at the 20th Century, had there been a strong conservative element operating in Russia in 1917, it may very well have stopped the Bolsheviks before they could create a nationwide revolt. Or if "guys like Reagan" existed in ample supply, would Hitler have risen in Germany? Had these movements been stopped early, later alarmists warning of the threats of Communism or Nazism may have been called "alarmists" or "war mongers," frightening the population with wild conspiracy theories.

Communism never took over in America. Influential men like Walter Cronkite later thought the warnings of the Right overblown, claiming he never felt personally threatened by some international Communist menace. Apparently the gulags were less frightening to his sensibilities than the Nazi concentration camps.

But as Tip O'Neill famously said, "All politics are local." The notion of conservatives and Republicans being "victims of their own success" rings true over and over, with Reagan's words to HUAC shadowing events. The conservative Winston Churchill, having helped save the world from 1,000 years of darkness, then warning of an Iron Curtain "from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," was rewarded by losing re-election in 1946.

The Republicans, staunch defenders of freedom from the Communist threat, were called the "witch hunters" of McCarthyism, losing a Presidential election in 1960, Senatorial mid-terms in 1962, and then virtually everything in 1964. Richard Nixon, who kept a paid Soviet spy, Alger Hiss from possibly becoming Secretary-General of the United Nations, was held in the cross-hairs of the Left for more than two decades until he was hunted down and disgraced for doing precisely what Attorney General Robert Kennedy did seven years earlier. The newspaper that made Nixon a crusade (the Washington Post), employers of the two reporters (Robert Woodward, Carl Bernstein) who dogged him like Ahab chasing the great white whale, were the same organization who, 12 years earlier, were like the three monkeys who "see no evil" when right under their own noses John F. Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Mayor Richard Daley, and the Democrat Party stole the 1960 Presidential election from Nixon ("They stole it fair and square," Nixon aide Murray Chotiner famously said).

It does not end there. After taking the decisive action to win the Cold War and overseeing 12 straight years of unprecedented economic expansion, the "peace dividend" meant fewer companies made elaborate weapons systems to fight the Soviets in the early 1990s, causing lay-offs in California resulting in a mild recession, which the Democrats called the "worst economy since the Great Depression," resulting in George H.W. Bush losing re-election in 1992.

Then all those high-tech workers landed on their feet when the Information Superhighway (the World Wide Web) opened for business in 1993, resulting in a windfall economic upturn just in time for Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election, which he won in large part because the Republicans controlled the House and Senate, creating laws and policies Clinton went along with, to the great benefit of the United States of America.

In 2010, once-wildly popular President Barack Obama faced low approval numbers in a sinking economy amidst a health care bill America did not want. The GOP "shellacked" the Democrats with mid-term trouncings that may have no precedent in terms of sheer totality. The strange dynamic played itself out once again. Had President Obama continued with a Democrat Congress giving him all he wanted (as in his first two years), he may well have overseen a disaster of epic proportions. Instead, the Republicans put a major halt to his spending plans, with the strangely ironic, we've-seen-this-before result of Obama taking credit for a few weeks of semi-success resulting from the things he opposed.

These ironies and twists of fate seem uniquely American, at least from a Reaganesque perspective. Nixon was intensely political and would have looked for revenge, for quick political gain from such a set of facts, to make some such enemy pay.

One can almost see Reagan, posed with this scenario and asked to comment on it, turning the other cheek in a non-political act of philosophizing only he could put into such simple words as, "Well, there you go again."

****

Archival sources, much made available only after the Reagan Presidency, revealed many of the groups Reagan opposed were taking orders from Moscow. The Hollywood Communist Party, headed by John Howard Lawson, were actively recruiting writers and union activists to toe the "party line."

Where unfairness enters into the picture is that not everybody who sympathized with Communism, or attended a Communist meeting, was a Communist. The line between hard-line, paid Soviet agents; of dedicated Soviet "mules," with useful idiots and fellow travelers was again confusing. Unquestionably many decent people were caught up in it. Many joined them to oppose Hitler, or to feed kids in famine-starved Russia, a noble enough motivation. Many joined to help minorities, another noble motivation.

As Reagan pointed out, whether self-serving or not, the effectiveness of Communist Hollywood was greatly diluted by the vigilance of conservatives. Sometimes that vigilance took on the form of vigilantism, but "Nobody would have dared go very far to the Left in Hollywood of that day," explained the Communist writer Edward Dmytrek, a member of the Hollywood 10.

In an ironic twist of circumstance, the actions of actual Communists, openly working for a foreign governments in acts of legitimate treason in the 1940s and 1950s, was often not comparable to the despicable things done and said by members of the entertainment industry during the Vietnam War (1964-1973) and the War on Terror (2001-12). It is a strange conundrum that despite Reagan's best efforts, despite the eventual victory of conservativism, the winning of the Cold War, and all the triumphalism of these events, Communism, or whatever ideology it is - based essentially on a hatred of American and traditional values associated with the U.S. and Christianity - somehow were allowed to spread and be uttered more freely, openly and loudly than ever. In the 1960s and again in the 2000s, actual Communist fronts funded protest movements on American soil, but they were often not funded or run by any international enemy. They were homegrown American organizations. Nobody needed to recruit them or dupe them. They, of their own free will, chose to do what Moscow dedicated itself to in the 1930s and '40s. Again, this hearkens back to Whittaker Chambers's eerie warning in Witness that in the long run he was joining the "losing side" of history, a tacit acknowledgement Satan exists and this world is his domain. One theory worth philosophizing over emanates from this: what exactly is the value of victory when the losers of the struggle seemingly have more power after they lose? Or, as Reagan said in 1964, the people who had the most to lose in this eternal struggle would be found to have done the least to prevent their own destruction.

Reagan's anti-Communism was by no means a turning against his own Democrat Party in 1948. The revelations of heavy Communist infiltration in Franklin Roosevelt's White House and State Department were at the very best rumors held by a small few not really allowed to talk about it because of internal FBI investigations. It was not until the "Who lost China?" debate after 1949 that the issue took on its most fierce partisanship.

Reagan was a big supporter of Harry Truman, campaigning for him. Truman, after all, instituted the Truman Doctrine, stating when the Communists tried to capture Greece a line had been drawn in the stand, that any further adventurism into Western Europe would be opposed, militarily if need be. The Berlin Airlift impressed many, even on the Right, of Truman's willingness to stand up to Communism and for freedom.

It is amazing in retrospect, but Reagan even campaigned for the "pink lady," as Congressman Richard Nixon called Helen Gahagan Douglas, in his winning 1950 Senate campaign against her. This is more understandable in light of the fact Reagan worked closely with her husband, the respected actor Melvyn Douglas, with the Americans For Democratic Action.

But Communism was only one issue. High taxation and expansion of the Federal government were undoubtedly areas Reagan was siding more and more with the Republicans. He supported Eisenhower in 1952. In so doing he became more associated with the conservative elements of his adopted California, which was truly the future of American electoral politics. Its growing population, influence and importance would make it a land of kingmakers. Its native son, Richard Nixon, was on the ticket with Ike, as Governor Warren had been on the Dewey ticket of 1948.

Throughout the 1950s, as McCarthyism spread, Reagan warned against going too far. He was, however, influenced by Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952). He identified the ruthless, violent hatred of the Communists, their anything-to-attain-their goals style, stopping at nothing. Chambers saw it close up in the 1920s before turning against it. When union thugs threatened to throw acid in Reagan's face, as they did with George Murphy, Reagan got a taste of this himself. But Chambers's Christianity was what really captured Reagan's heart.

While his father was an alcoholic, his mother was very religious. Reagan grew up Episcopalian, but the pursuit of success in secular Hollywood, the pleasures of youth, fame and cinematic glory, were easy casualties in Tinseltown. Chambers found Truth in the Lord Jesus Christ. Pontius Pilate asking Christ, "What is truth?" just before sentencing Him to the cross, haunted him. Pilate represented more than just a Roman figure of history. He was a symbol of Big Government, of totalitarianism embodied in the 20th Century by the Nazis and the Communists. His question, "What is truth?" was incredibly piercing to Chambers, who found in it the strength to examine his own heart and soul in a desperate effort to do the right thing. That was to reveal what he knew about the Soviets, and in so doing subject himself to a personal horror that could only be survived by a man of intense faith, based on resolute knowledge he was in the right.

Reagan felt he experienced some of that in his dealings with Hollywood Communists, but it was nothing compared to Chambers. He never had all he held dear taken from him. He emerged unscathed, admired really. His belief in God was intensified by the experience in confluence with Chambers's Witness.

But this was also the period in which he married Nancy Davis, probably an even greater influence. She was a young actress who found her name on a Blacklist of Communists not allowed to work. She called Reagan, active in SAG politics, for help. They met for dinner, where she adamantly informed him she was a conservative Republican with zero affiliation with Communism in any way. She was a devout Christian, a free market capitalist . . . listening to her Reagan thought he was listening to a reading from Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

An investigation revealed another Nancy Davis was a Communist. The matter was resolved. Reagan, divorced from Jane Wyman, whose politics differed from his, fell in love and they were married. Nancy was the daughter of a prominent Chicago doctor who warned of the evils of socialized medicine, one of the most contentious future issues of American politics. Whereas Reagan was a poor boy who found idealism in the New Deal, Nancy was from an affluent family, something of a socialite, not a Socialist, a rock-ribbed conservative from day one. Once she became part of his life, Reagan's road to the Right was absolute. While it did not happen overnight, it was a fait accompli.

Reagan's shift continued when he struck up an acquaintance with William F. Buckley, editor of National Review. Nancy also had an affect on the kinds of friends she and "Ronnie" socialized with. While they remained close with a number of old Hollywood people, they moved away from the constant gossip and frenetic pace of celebrity life, which is a high-paced cavalcade of alcohol, sometimes drugs, lots of marital infidelity, and immorality. Instead she preferred the company of business types more like her father. These became the cornerstone of Reagan's eventual "kitchen cabinet," including a who's who of Southern California entrepreneurialism, many with strong ties and donations to the arch-conservative, private University of Southern California. These included tire heir Leonard Firestone, drug magnate Justin Dart, and car dealer Holmes Tuttle.

Reagan was prosperous but not wealthy in the manner of his friends. He owned a home in Pacific Palisades and a 360-acre ranch near Lake Malibu, where he rode horses on weekends, but his film roles dried up considerably. He began to feel the effects of taxes more and more, calling Democrat tax policies a "soak the rich" scheme He entered television, the growing new medium. The Democrats asked him to run for Congress, but he decided against it.

In 1954 General Electric hired him to promote their products, first on its show, General Electric Theatre, but also on tours of GE factories nationwide. GE was "not unlike the John Birch Society" in its corporate conservatism. Appearing on Sunday nights in addition to his tours, Reagan made a handsome $125,000 a year, which certainly made his status-conscious wife happy.

"I am seen by more people in one week than I am in a full year in movie theatres," Reagan said of TV. He did this for eight years, traveling to 135 plants and personally speaking to some 250,000 workers. He promoted GE products but then quickly morphed into sizzling tales of intrigue and espionage, the attempted takeover of Hollywood by the Communists. It was riveting, Reagan a master teller of tales. If ever a man was given the perfect training for stump speaking and campaign talks, it was Ronald Reagan. He delivered speeches without notes. His admiration for the hard work of the GE employees, who made excellent products people needed and were willing to pay for, at reasonable rates within the marketplace, were absolutely perfect metaphors for capitalism. He also spoke to chambers of commerce, religious groups, all manner of conservative and business organizations. Reagan was virtually re-living Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, in which the Frenchman discovers to his amazement the simplicity of American success, rooted in small community groups like Lions and Rotary Clubs, featuring small businesses helping in a larger cause elevating all; the opposite of the vendettas of feudal Italy. Here was the key to what many ascribed as Reagan's "simplistic" approach, yet apparently there was simplicity to a system in a which a "rising tide lifts all boats."

Out of de Tocqueville arose various saws. Conservatives said that left to their own devices, the Left would "become Pol Pot," an intellectual school teacher radicalized by Communism in Paris who, absent any opposition to stop him, became a genocidalist in Cambodia. Left to their own devices, conservatives half-joked, the Right "forms a Rotary Club."

Reagan was a voracious reader. Aside from The Road to Serfdom, Witness and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, he was reading American history with great emphasis on the original intent of the Founding Fathers. The factory workers and those in attendance at Reagan's gatherings were not merely hearing Hollywood tales from a pleasant, handsome actor; they were being schooled on American Exceptionalism. Great quotes from the philosophers of American freedom were freely espoused; not boring classroom civics lessons, but rather history come alive, perhaps Reagan's greatest attribute.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing . . . There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men . . . Those who have been once intoxicated with power and have derived any kind of emolument from it can never willingly abandon it" (Edmund Burke); "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt" (John Philpot Curran); "But you must remember, my fellow citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government" (Andrew Jackson); "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" (Wendell Phillips); "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" (Benjamin Franklin); "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary" (James Madison); "It is weakness rather than wickedness which renders men unfit to be trusted with unlimited power" (John Adams); "Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence. It is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind those we are obliged to trust with power . . . In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution" (Thomas Jefferson); "If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen" (Samuel Adams); these and other classic statements of philosophy were quoted. To the people in attendance, it was like an egalitarian Harvard education, wisdom and knowledge many previously felt available only to the wealthy and privileged, yet like America itself freely dispensed to all who had ears to hear! Factory workers without college backgrounds went out to parking lots, kitchen tables, pubs and playgrounds quoting Burke, Jefferson, Franklin and Adams.

Working with GE advertising executive Earl Dunckel and company vice president Lemuel Boulware, Reagan received his "post-gradate course in political science." It was the essence of the conservative philosophy, the real world vs. the ivory tower, the theory of the professorial and government elites. He was not studying or learning conservative capitalism, he was living it. Like a Christian convert the truth manifested itself before his eyes, emanating as that with which is.

Reagan knew that for every one of those 250,000 GE workers he spoke to over the years, there was a family, children, wives; all supported by this extraordinary effort of hard work, of success, of the production of excellence. In addition, those children were going to schools, having college educations paid for them as a by-product of this company. Millions and millions of people worldwide were benefiting from GE, whose slogan was "we bring good things to life." The company expanded internationally. Everywhere they went economic success followed. They provided a huge chunk of the tax base supporting the American government. Reagan saw they were well run, absent major corruption or illegality, by honest businessmen with good ethics and morals, Christian gentlemen for the most part. To burden them with undue taxes, regulations, government bureaucracy and "red tape" were nothing less than an immorality with bad consequences, inevitably passed down to families and consumers. The entire experience was a microcosm of his emerging philosophy. While perhaps a bit idealistic in the sense of a Norman Rockwell painting, it nevertheless represented the truth.

That said, Reagan found inconsistencies. GE, for instance, did big business with the government-run Tennessee Valley Authority. Reagan's speeches were becoming increasingly strident by 1960, arguing against government interference with almost religious fervor. Boulware was beginning to get attacked for this view when he benefited from a $50 million contract with the TVA. He asked Reagan to cut down the tone of his rhetoric. By now Reagan was on fire. He refused.

That was when he really got political, heading the Democrats for Nixon committee. He remarked that Kennedy – a strident anti-Communist whose father, Joe, was a good pal of Joe McCarthy's – was under the surface of his "tousled boyish haircut" the same "old Karl Marx."

If Reagan truly thought JFK to be a Marxist in any way, shape or form, it indicates at that point he was becoming strident to the point of anger, which is reflected in his televised speeches. This is not the amiable old grandfather of the White House years, or the friendly "guy next door" of his movie persona. The Reagan of the 1960s had a chip on his shoulder, a glare in his stare. He was pissed off. The Left took to calling him a "reactionary." History tells us he was a "radical," and they were right. The narrator of a friendly documentary on him freely called him, "A radical . . . with extreme views on the role of government . . . and how to confront the Beast," a reference to his increasing Christian belief that Communism was an enemy of God and that, just maybe, he was tasked by the deity to do something about it!

Reagan registered as a Republican in January of 1961, after Nixon lost to Kennedy. He turned down an offer to run for Governor of California in 1962. Nixon lost that campaign to Pat Brown, the tide of the election turning when JFK successfully blockaded Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Reagan jumped headlong into the fervent anti-Communist crusades sweeping Southern California in the early 1960s. A potent combination of Christianity and hatred of the Soviet Union fueled rallies organized by Dr. Fred Schwarz, with Orange County its beachhead. Roy Rogers, Pat Boone, Dale Evans, and John Wayne spoke to enormous crowds. 16,000 poured into the new Los Angeles Sports Arena. Most important, the converted were mainly the young, a huge portent of future success, an antidote to the myth that all of America's youth were Peace Corps-serving Kennedyites. Schwarz arranged a TV show as an "answer to Communism." Reagan warned of the dangers of nationalized health care, advocating big defense build-ups; all music to the ears of defense contractors who made up the bulk of the region's Howard Hughes economy. The space race with the Soviets spurred public schools to push science and technology, manifesting itself in the Soviets losing the race to the Moon; then Reagan's defense systems some day forcing them to back down in the missile competition, capitulate in the Cold War, and fuel California's Silicon Valley. It could be argued it was the last success in the history of the public school system, which in the late 1960s was taken over by liberal elements and unions, stifling competition among the youth in a promotion of varied social causes eventually given the name political correctness.

But on October 27, 1964, Reagan entered the pantheon of political greatness. With Senator Goldwater unable to connect with voters, Reagan was asked to make a televised address on his behalf. He agreed provided he could choose his own words.

While Goldwater was mentioned a few times, it was a primer for Reagan's career and philosophy. It remains the gold standard of conservative principles, addressing high taxation, the folly of "elites in a far off capitol," the terrible threat of Communism and the "the bomb," the true nature of freedom vs. security, of peace vs. strength, the essence of the 20th Century debate opposing Adolf Hitler's insistence man desires security more than freedom.

In this single speech Reagan takes all the words of Burke, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson, who he freely espoused in 1,000 speeches to GE workers and Rotarians, and modernizes them into something every bit as important - and personal to his style - as the classic phraseology of the Founding Fathers, the Federalist Papers, or Alexis deTocqueville

His in-studio audience looked awe struck. They were loyal Republicans, libertarians, Birchers and conservatives, crowded into a Los Angeles studio, almost all white, but a lot of women and plenty of young folks. Many wore cowboy hats. To the elites they appeared to be hicks, yokels, but herein was America, the heart of the conservative movement; average citizens who loved their country.

Titled "A Time For Choosing," Reagan said he not been "provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks." Informing the audience he had recently "seen fit" to register with the GOP, he disputed the Democrats' assertion that all was well. This was incredibly prophetic, as 1964 was a dividing line in which the Kennedy murder and subsequent escalation in Vietnam ended the nation's "innocence," with Watergate and corruption to follow in its wake, and according to Republicans at least, only the Reagan Presidency ending this dark period.

His first order of business was to endorse tax breaks, detailing the misuses of the Federal government's handling of income, failure to balance budgets, raising of the debt; all using precise statistics and history as his guidepost.

Next, Reagan speaks of the growing threat in South Vietnam, which escalated from a police action to an undeclared war only two months earlier when President Johnson more than likely orchestrated an event he called a North Vietnamese Naval attack at the Gulf of Tonkin. Reagan then left no doubt as to his opinion of the Communist threat.

"Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace?" he asked. "There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We're at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced Mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it's been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening."

Perhaps of all the words ever uttered by Ronald Reagan, which include jokes, admonitions, history lessons, prayers and a call to tear down the Berlin Wall two years before it actually happened, these may have been the most telling about his philosophy, while proving the most prescient.

By calling the Soviets the "most dangerous enemy that has ever faced Mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars," he clearly tells the world international Communism is even more wicked and potentially threatening than Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. His admonition that to fail to take heed would allow our freedom to wither away in many different ways, and that "those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening," seems a pointed reference to liberals, dilettantes and pacifists bent on accommodation, a clear failure to recognize the folly of Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

From there Reagan told stories about the deprivations in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Castro had recently made a triumphant tour of New York City, feted by showgirls and liberal apologists, the reaction to this being a huge turning point in the conservative movement. A Cuban refugee told a businessman he was lucky because he had America to escape to, but "If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man."

Senator Goldwater believed in "our capacity for self-government" as opposed to abandoning the American Revolution to "a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol" who "can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves." This use of the term "elites" may not have originated in this speech, but it became a linchpin of Republican complaint against Democrats in the 50 years that followed.

Man's "old-aged dream," individual freedom consistent with law and order, was threatened to be placed on the "ant heap of totalitarianism." Years later he would say of totalitarianism that it was destined for the "ash heap of history," which in large measure it was courtesy of his Presidency.

Referencing Hitler, he spoke of "sincerity" and "humanitarian motives" of the Left, warning that "those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course," using lofty terms like the "Great Society," or "as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people."

Confrontation with the U.S.S.R., a huge issue after the Bay of Pigs, Berlin Wall, Cuban Missile Crisis, and featured in movies of the era (The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe), will according to the appeasers "end through our acceptance of a not un-Democratic Socialism." The profit motive, Reagan said liberals were advocating, "has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state." These advocates no longer believed the American system capable of solving "complex problems of the 20th century," citing examples such as U.S. Senator William Fulbright (D.-Arkansas) calling the Constitution "outmoded" and President Johnson the eerily Maoist "moral teacher and our leader," hobbled by two many checks and balances of an "antiquated document" he must be "freed" from so that he can do what he knows "is best."

Reagan goes on to quote another prominent Democrat defining liberalism as "meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government." Reagan took great exception to "free men and women of this country, as 'the masses.' " This term, he said, was one Americans resisted . . . until now. He advocated limited government with power shifted away from Washington and to the States. He used an example of farm economies to illustrate government's coercive power over people, all while mocking its inefficiencies. He again used statistics to make his point. Whenever the government got involved, it caused costs to skyrocket, passed down to consumers and families, absurdly spending "$43 in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we don't grow."

The Democrats answer: "eliminate farmers," an actual quote by Vice Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, another eerie reference to Stalin's decision to do away with the farmers of the Ukraine via forced collectivization and famine.

"The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and re-sell them to other individuals," Reagan explained. "And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the Federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil. At the same time, there's been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There's now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can't tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace . . ."

Meanwhile, prices go up while "urban renewal" threatens private property rights, all decided by "a few government planners" who take "from the needy" and give "to the greedy," demonstrating "spectacles" as in Cleveland, where a "million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a 'more compatible use of the land.' " Reagan outlines from there the government's nefarious use of mortgage foreclosures to steal land they deem necessary from private citizens, which in the film Dr. Zhivago is called "more just."

Reagan goes on to explain why unemployment has never been solved by government planning, mocking Big Government operations resembling the Soviets' laughable on-going "five-year plan," all using details, statistics and real anecdotes. Rice County, Kansas, a prosperous area sitting on 200 oil wells while 14,000 people have over $30 million on deposit in personal savings in their banks, were "informed" by the Area Redevelopment Agency that they are "depressed."

"And when the government tells you you're depressed, lie down and be depressed," Reagan mocks. "We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they're going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer - and they've had almost 30 years of it - shouldn't we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn't they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing? But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we're told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than $3,000 a year."

Reagan herein got to the heart of liberal hypocrisy, his story of the fat man getting that way only by taking advantage of the thin one, illustrating the truth about income "inequality." Example: one man makes $50,000, and another man makes $1 million. The latter man makes $950,000 more than the former. Five years later, the $50,000 man makes $100,000 while the $1 million man makes $10 million. Under the Leftist theory, the "income inequality" between the two has grown because he "stole" $9.9 million from the first fellow, presumably "forcing" the man to go to a bank and cash out credit card advances on a line of credit he would not have in the first place. In other words, absurdity.

The Left would say "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer," apparently using the reasoning that now $9.9 million separate the two men whereas before five years earlier only $950,000 separated them. Of course, the man who made $50,000 may well now make $100,000 because the man who now makes $10 million bought his company and hired more people, creating more opportunity and a "rising tide that lifts all boats." This gives rise to the oft-expressed comment that, "I never got a job from a poor person."

By 1964, the United States was at the heights of a boom period unrivaled by any empire in world history, yet despite having completely and totally wiped out the Great Depression like Bud Wilkinson's OU Sooners eliminating the image of John Steinbeck's "poor Okies," welfare spending was 10 times greater than in the "dark depths of the Depression." From there Reagan used more detailed statistics while making fun of a disgraced Democrat found to have stolen money from the government trough. There were no new programs, just duplicate ones. The various "youth camps" and peace organizations popularized by Kennedy were, according to Reagan, something of a joke. If one would "do some arithmetic," at which time one would discover that the cost of "helping" one young person in these programs was almost twice the tuition of Harvard. The audience then laughs heartily when Reagan counters, "Of course, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency." This may have been the first time a conservative made reference to an elite Ivy League school like Harvard as something less impressive than made out to be.

In later years Reagan joked about a "welfare queen." In his 1964 speech he describes a young woman who had six children, was pregnant with her seventh, and was using the system to get "an "$80 raise" in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. "She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who'd already done that very thing," Reagan explained, adding that to question such "schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we're always 'against' things - we're never 'for' anything. Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so."

More big laughs.

Reagan then told the audience how inefficient Social Security was, another relatively "radical" new concept. After calling the program insurance for decades, the government suddenly called it welfare before the Supreme Court. "They only use the term 'insurance' to sell it to the people," he explained. This was classic Reagan; his use of educating the people by explaining the code words of liberalism. He did this in telling how the Left realized they could not embrace Communism and, as Upton Sinclair discovered, were unable to sell the public on Socialism. However, they picked up on the word progressivism, which was made to be much more palatable but embraced all the same nostrums.

"A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary - his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee $220 a month at age 65," Reagan explained, using common sense free market principles honed in 1,000 speeches at GE plants. "The government promises 127. He could live it up until he's 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can't put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they're due \- that the cupboard isn't bare?"

Reagan described how Europe's welfare states were already bankrupt a mere 13 years after the Marshall Plan, and how the U.N., while useful if used correctly, was corrupt. He warned against de-colonization, as prescient a remark as he has ever made in light of Rhodesia and Johannesburg becoming post-Apartheid murder capitals; the former Belgian Congo holding boxing matches attended by the radical chic while dead and tortured bodies were stacked under the stadium; and the Middle East in turmoil with Apocalyptic implications; all while the Soviets enslaved millions in "satellite nations."

Aid was okay, but not the creation of "bureaucracy, if not Socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a $2 million yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenyan government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought $7 billion worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country . . . No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments' programs, once launched, never disappear."

Then this doozie: "Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth." From there, more anecdotes, as with a Federal agency imposed a fine without a formal hearing or trial by jury, seizing and sell private property at auction, or an Arkansas farmer who "over-planted his rice allotment," thus getting hit with a government-obtained $17,000 judgment, and the sale of his 960-acre farm at auction, which the government said "was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work."

Norman Thomas, six-time candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, "If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of Socialism in the United States." Reagan pointed out that this course was already so prevalent Thomas actually felt it was received as a welcome warning, but Reagan said Senator Goldwater would surely make Thomas's dire prediction come true. Again, prescience: Goldwater lost and LBJ instituted the Great Society, a disaster as epic as any in this nation's history, resulting in the de facto re-enslavement and destruction of the black family 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

The ex-Democrat warned that the once-great party of Al Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and Grover Cleveland was now headed "down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin." The Labor Party of England was headed to the same dismal place. The ways to take the unalienable rights of free people away from them come in 1 million forms of harassment and perversion of justice from the "machinery" of Big Government. Freedom, he said, needs to be fought for and defended, as it is indeed fragile, always a generation away from extinction unless renewed by a committed citizenry.

"Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues," he stated. "They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men - that we're to choose just between two personalities." Reagan was trying to point out that an election was as much about a political premise as individuals, but Goldwater was someone he knew personally and, "I've never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing."

"There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start," Goldwater had said.

"Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory," Reagan continued. "They call their policy 'accommodation.' And they say if we'll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he'll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer - not an easy answer - but simple: if you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.

"We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of 'the bomb' by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, 'Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we're willing to make a deal with your slave masters.' "

He quoted Alexander Hamilton: "A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one." Then Reagan got to the heart of matter, telling America they could have a "guaranteed peace" right now if they would just surrender.

"Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face \- that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand - the ultimatum."

Nikita Khrushchev, he said, told his own people what Whittaker Chambers believed but Reagan did not, that Communism was the winner of history. The Soviet leader said America's "surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for 'peace at any price' or 'better Red than dead,' or as one commentator put it, he'd rather 'live on his knees than die on his feet.' And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us."

Life, no matter how "dear" and "sweet," cannot be "purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin \- just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the 'shot heard 'round the world'? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all.

"You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, 'There is a price we will not pay. There is a point beyond which they must not advance.' And this - this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's 'peace through strength.' Winston Churchill said, 'The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits - not animals.' And he said, 'There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.'

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

"We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny."

The Speech, as it has come to be known, did not vault Senator Goldwater to victory. A week or so later he and the Republicans were crushed, but George Murphy won his Senate campaign in California, and Reagan was launched towards a smashing Gubernatorial victory over Pat Brown two years later. It turned California into the future of America and the Conservative Revolution, the old money power of Rockefeller's East Coast now taking a back seat.

The Speech outlined Reagan's "radical" conservativism, debunking liberal myths about Social Security and welfare heretofore thought the role of a caring government. It became the blueprint for his strategy in dealing with the Soviets, despite rabid opposition the world over. Naturally it was either dismissed or savaged by the liberal media who thought him an angry white reactionary. His face was indeed pinched with, if not anger, genuine passion to the point of a man on a crusade, a mission from God. It was an incredibly prophetic address, describing a future he seemingly alone could see; warnings about genocides resulting from de-colonization, the racist corruptions of the United Nations, a bloated welfare state that could take from private citizens without regard to rights outlined in the Constitution but, as Reagan so brilliantly pointed out, needed to be fought for over and over lest they be ceded by an apathetic populace.

Out of the total losses of 1964, Reagan and his new party rose like the mythic Phoenix bird from the ashes. 1966 was a huge Republican mid-term year. Goldwater's success in Orange County put the region on the political map, playing a role in the county attaining the California Angels baseball franchise. The business friendly atmosphere of Los Angeles was by then given full credit for the success of the Los Angeles Dodgers, allowed to come in and build a gleaming state of the art stadium absent any political yahoo.

The GOP was on the move. In 1964 they were the "losers of history," a permanent minority bowing down to Lyndon Johnson, the Democrats and their 61 percent of the vote, 44 states, filibuster-proof majorities in Congress and the Senate, sweeping local and state elections, all while winning a wide coalition ranging from Jim Crow Southerners to black civil rights marchers to Vietnam War hawks.

But the 1964 election was a cautionary tale for the Democrat Party, or any party for that matter. Similarly, they won seemingly total mandates in 1976, 1992 and 2008.

Each time they were upended, in subsequent mid-terms (1994, 2010) and the 1980 Presidential elections. When LBJ signed the civil rights legislation of 1965 he turned to his aide, Bill Moyers, saying, "Bill, I've just handed the South to the Republican Party for 50 years."

Almost 50 years later, it appears LBJ was wrong. He seems to have handed the South to the Republicans for 70 or 100 years. There is no sign that the region has any intention of swinging back to the party that totally dominated it for a century after the Civil War.

LBJ's Great Society angered much of America. Like President Barack Obama's far-reaching national healthcare of 2010, the nation reacted against him. This combined with the Vietnam War, which was not going the way they thought it should, and a general lack of morality. John Lennon of The Beatles announced their group was more popular than Jesus Christ. Time magazine asked if God was dead? Long hair, welfare, "the pill," protests; all these things stirred the ire of conservative America. The Watts riots of 1965 particularly angered whites in California. A mass "white flight" from border towns like once all-white Inglewood and Hawthorne, L.A. suburbs with a Beach Boys vibe, were now left to the tender mercies of black violence.

College campuses exploded in violence. The media was accused of lacking patriotism. Henry Luce was out of the picture and his magazine, Time, was now liberal. Otis Chandler's L.A. Times was still ostensibly a "Republican paper," but not the mouthpiece of the GOP as in his father's day. Conservative radio voice Paul Harvey observed it all and told the world that if he were the devil, he would unleash precisely what was at that time being unleashed.

Richard Nixon, preparing for a Presidential bid in 1968, won many chits by campaigning for party candidates from one end of America to another in the winning 1966 mid-terms, setting the stage for Johnson's abdication of the White House two years later. Nobody, however, embodies conservative anger better than Reagan. He had a hard edge to him in those days. He was not pleased. His voice was a harsh tone. He was not about to take any guff. He handled hostile crowds with courage and aplomb, learned from his dealings with Communist agitators in late 1940s Hollywood. When he destroyed Brown it was a shot across the bow for the Conservative Revolution. Its post-war roots could be argued: the "Austrian school" of economics producing Ludwig von Mises and Friederick Hayek; the fall of China (1949); William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951) and the launching of the National Review (1955); Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957); JFK stealing the 1960 election from Nixon; or Goldwater's quixotic 1964 loss to LBJ.

Reagan and most real conservatives would say it actually started when the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Constitution adopted 11 years later, but Reagan's speech and subsequent 1966 election are the most galvanizing of all these events, re-invigorating life into the those founding documents, long moribund in the American imagination. Certainly none gave the Republican Party so much confidence. Reagan and his adopted party were on their way.

While much of Hollywood turned liberal after Reagan left the business, the rare conservative tended to be more powerful and effective than 30 Left-wingers. Charlton Heston, one of the most respected actors of all time, certainly earned his civil rights bona fides marching with Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, but he made a Right-leaning turn in response to the radicalism of the late 1960s. His main issue was gun rights, which he advocated as the strong, highly visible president of the National Rifle Association. After the Columbine massacre of 1999, Left-wing documentarian Michael Moore showed up with a live camera crew at Heston's house. Heston may have been suffering from Alzheimer's by then. He graciously invited Moore inside, whereupon Moore essentially blamed Heston for Columbine, asking him if he would like to take the opportunity to apologize to his victims. Heston remained a class act to the end.

While Left-leaning Hollywood activists such as Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand, Matt Damon, Benn Affleck and Sean Pean have been in the spotlight, the influx of actors who actually ran for office in the 1960s dwindled down. As with Reagan, actual electoral success was more prevalent among show biz Republicans, including U.S. Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee and another California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. U.S. Senator Al Franken (D.-Minnesota) is an exception on the Left.

Reagan kept Communists from succeeding in the 1940s. As Governor and as President, he was an activist who put forth successful plans, strategies, policies, budgets and laws that won the Cold War, kept the economy humming along, and improved the prosperity and prospects of millions of Americans, plus 1 billion more worldwide. However, conservatives often are at their most effective when they are in the minority. As with Reagan and his fellow patriots stopping the Communists before they could get a foothold in the entertainment industry, many times Republicans find themselves holding the line when a Democrat President proposes out-of-control spending. It is not always "sexy," and they often do not get much credit, but it is necessary work.

Governor Reagan's ascendance to Sacramento in 1966 was far from his last rodeo. Perhaps he said it best, as in a TV introduction he made around 1964: "In the traditional motion picture story, the villains are usually defeated, the ending is a happy one. I can make no such promise for the picture you are about to watch. The story is not over yet. You and the audience are part of the conflict."

Hollywood blacks

Much of the Communist thrust in the West centered on religious-ethnic minorities. Communist association has always tainted the Jews, going back to Karl Marx; the heavy thrust of non-observant Jews in the Russian Revolution embodied by Leon Trotsky (although Stalin later purged Jews in a manner nearly as vicious as Hitler's Germany); then in Hollywood.

The liberal Jew has been a staple of the American landscape since the Industrial Revolution. An early understanding of this type – what motivates and drives them – is found in the Rachel Menzies character who helps radicalize the rich white boy, Bunny Ross, in Upton Sinclair's Oil!

In Hollywood, there are so many examples that no single Jewish actor or writer really stands out above any other, but the motivations and later plight of Edward G. Robinson serve as good a picture as any.

Still, the motivation of the American Jew is not so easy to really identify or identify with. In the film Gentlemen's Agreement, Gregory Peck plays a Gentile who goes "undercover" as a Jew to find out just how bad the under-the-surface anti-Semitism, found in colleges, fraternal organization, country clubs, and business, really is. Asked why they are liberal, many Jews say it is because they were denied memberships in exclusive country clubs at least until the 1960s. This is not exactly the Holocaust.

Jews found a form of paradise in America, a new Promised Land. They were discriminated against at Harvard and on Wall Street, but they were still in Harvard and on Wall Street. The modern Israeli is a survivor who, in many cases, represents the new face of muscular conservatism in the face of a Muslim enemy as terrifying to them as the Nazis once were in Europe.

Observant, actually religious Jews are by natural inclination as socially conservative as evangelical Christians, who in one of the greatest ironies in human history have emerged as their greatest benefactors, admirers and protectors. It is the believing, devout, evangelical who today loves describing the Old Testament, refers to Christ and His Jewish disciples as their greatest "heroes," and most ardently defends Israel against terror. Solace and reason for everything from opposition to gay marriage to anti-abortion attitudes are part of a shared Judeo-Christian heritage.

Many complain that the Jew is mainly concerned with the Jew. They find hypocrisy in their liberal advocacy of many subjects, but a jealous concern bordering on self-righteousness when it comes to protecting Israel or their community. This may be the sticking point and dividing line separating the conservatives and the Jews of America, but is has also proven the "pebble in the shoe" when it comes to relations between Jews and blacks. In the 1998 film Bulworth, Warren Beatty plays a liberal Senator who "says it like it is," including the airing of the complaint that Jews only put their money where their bread is buttered. Still, in the U.S. they remain a reliable Democrat voting bloc no matter how much it confounds or confuses Christian Republicans.

In addition, there is the poor working class or underclass, first symbolized in Hollywood by Charlie Chaplin, who came from the very class-oriented British society. The Irish and Italians similarly struggled from Ellis Island into the Industrial Revolution, but they have never been "liberals." Depending on how far they ascend in American society, their economic status determines their Republican preferences. Their Democrat allegiances are still largely based on union membership or buyoffs, a tradition based on the doling out of "walking around money" found among the Boston Irish, to give one example. Mostly Catholic, they can be and often are swayed to the Republicans based on social positions. These people are now more commonly referred to as "blue collar." Many of them become entrepreneurs, ascending to the upper classes of wealth, or see their children do so.

The most annoying among the Communist-radical elements throughout American history are the upper class WASPs. They are seen as betraying their class, a rich clique of guilt-ridden psychotics whose strange mental quirks, or so say many conservatives, are the only explanation for their New Yorkers-who-root-for-the-Red Sox attitude.

One is also struck by a pervasive notion applying to most Communists of the West; with some exceptions, a kind of naïveté, a utopian hope, an innocence that in the oddly forgiving calculus of conservatives who, after all feel they are the winners of history; that somehow or other these people really did not know what they were doing . . . they were duped (Edward Robinson) . . . they got a bad break . . . they . . . they . . . they . . .

Yes, Communism has killed over 100 million people. Yes, they tried to take over the world. Yes, they killed as many Jews as Hitler, did more damage than the Nazis, would have used nuclear weapons on the U.S. if they could have gotten away with it; yet, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, there has been a strong effort to discount just how evil they really were. As with Walter Cronkite, many others also just plain said they never felt there was such a thing as a worldwide threat, certainly nothing hanging over their heads. The Communists represented regional threats in East Berlin, Greece, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, El Salvador, Grenada Nicaragua . . . but were the Eastern Europeans really "enslaved"? In the 2006 film The Good Shepherd, the CIA spymaster played by Matt Damon interrogates a Russian. Set in the 1950s, he is given LSD in a badly miscalculated attempt to open him up. The Russian tells the American that the Russian military threat is a "myth," that in fact the tanks are all rusted, machines do not work, the people are lazy. It is an attempt years after the fact to make them look benign, no matter how fierce they actually tried to be. They were, in this view, too incompetent to be fierce.

Again, this easy attitude is belied by the figure of 110 million people killed by this "benign" and "incompetent" bunch, who by this estimation are responsible for some 20 times more than died in the Holocaust. Perhaps if they were not so "benign" and  
"incompetent," and more ruthlessly efficient like the Gestapo, they could have killed 10 times more, if only they were better at it.

Then there are the blacks. For obvious reasons, the blacks are a group of people who need a break, and in so doing it might be said they get a "pass." Even hardcore conservatives tend to agree with this assessment at some level. In looking at their flirtation with Communism, in Hollywood and elsewhere, the same standards simply are not applied to the blacks as the other classes.

If there is indeed a forgiveness the "winning" conservatives calculate when applying hindsight judgment to the liberals of history, it is applied five times more with the blacks. First of all, the Communists went after the blacks hard. Marx saw in his lifetime the effects of the Civil War and failed Reconstruction. Here was a group of people ripe for the movement. Anti-colonialism was aimed in large measure at freeing blacks, since so many of them lived in colonies and former colonies of Great Britain, France and Spain, some of the great oppressors of history.

The Communists found the blacks a stubborn bunch. Slavery and hatred obviously burned a hole of resentment in them, but try as they might, the Communists could not sell themselves to large masses of the American black population. Over time, they found major footholds in Africa. Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was ostensibly a Communist or Communist-supported organization. Even in viewing Mandela's life, his heavy involvement with Communism is never considered a major factor in his history. The blacks, from the colonial Mandela to the American post-slavery era, are consistently given a pass if and when they choose Communism. The reason is because they deserve one.

But despite a few high-profile American black Communists, they remained just a few. Why? As hard as it may be for many to comprehend, blacks for the most part have been patriotic and, more than anything, Christian.

Perhaps it was Abraham Lincoln's stirring words at the Gettysburg Address, but blacks have through it all believed in the promise of America. They were eager to fight, to prove themselves in all of America's wars, from the Revolution to World War II to Vietnam an beyond There remained something within their community giving them hope that somehow, someway, white America would eventually heed the calling of the "better angels of our nature," and when that happened the "self-evident truths" of American freedom would be bestowed upon them. Only Christians steeped in Biblical scripture, understanding the patience of Job, the long-suffering of the martyrs, could remain so loyal so long. This chapter of the "long twi-light struggle," as John Kennedy called the war between freedom and Communism in 1961, has not often been told, but remains as stubborn a bone of contention in the Communist strategy as any.

But there were exceptions.

Harry Belafonte came of age under Paul Robeson. The two of them cannot be separated from each other. Robeson begets Belafonte, who inherited his strident calls for change and radical opinion. Studying black radicalism in Hollywood, which also dovetails into a study of black Communism, one is struck by profound discrepancies. Chief among them with the blacks as with the Jews, and the general liberal-radical class, is the forgiving concept that they were just useful idiots and dupes.

The Communists thought of no group as being more easily duped than the under-educated blacks. The black pioneer baseball star Jackie Robinson, a highly intelligent UCLA man, staunch Connecticut Republican and friend of his one-time Los Angeles area Congressman, Richard Nixon, warned of Communist infiltration in the black community. His view was by far the prevailing one among black Americans.

The blacks were divided going back to the beginning of the 20th Century between the W.E.B. Dubois wing of black intellectualism, and the more Christian-based Booker T. Washington wing. Out of the DuBois wing came Robeson and Belafonte.

Robeson had the potential for true greatness. In the modern era, stripped of the racism he faced and the searing hatred it produced, he may well have been a leading black hero with high political ambitions. He was a great athlete at Rutgers University, offered a chance to play professionally in the National Football League, which had been integrated by the great star Fritz Pollard.

Robeson was a brilliant student who graduated from Columbia Law School, but chose instead of the law to pursue a singing career. He had a boffo bass voice and sang remarkable, heartfelt songs that boomed out about the black condition. Robeson lived in England between 1927 and 1939, where he adopted Socialist causes in the largely pacifist nation, reeling from World War I and unwilling to face the growing threat of Hitler. He also became an African nationalist, advocating colonial revolutions. In 1934 he traveled to Moscow. Whether he became a dedicated Communist then or later, it had a profound affect on his life.

Robeson's years in Europe are part of a larger story of black ex-patriates who lived on the continent in between the two world wars. In many ways this story works to repudiate the very thing many of these blacks argued, which was that America was a racist nation. Most, however, probably did not realize it, as it takes the perspective of time to understand it.

Many black jazz artists of the 1920s and 1930s traveled and sometimes even lived in Europe, mostly as part of the thriving Paris café society that gave life to the nightclubs they performed in. They were well paid, glorified by the public, and treated in a sexual manner by libidinous French mademoiselles. Upon return to the States, where the discriminations of Jim Crow and other indecencies were again heaped upon them, many told wild and wonderful tales of Paris, stating that France was a much better place than America.
In so doing, they missed an obvious point. The opportunity to move to Europe was not available to most African-Americans, but rather to those artistes who achieved fame and fortune in Chicago, the Harlem Renaissance, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Los Angeles; all according to research then as now American cities.

A similar fact disputing the pervasive notion of white racism occurred in the sports world. Joe Louis was cheered when he defeated the German Max Schmeling, but perhaps more to the point, how could it be stated America was so bigoted since, in 1938, Louis was the highest paid athlete in the world ($350,000) while the next highest paid, the white baseball star Joe DiMaggio made around $20,000? In the case of the jazz musicians and the boxer, they did not make their fortunes in foreign lands, but in America; in Louis's case mainly in New York.

From the French perspective, here were a small handful of exotic, talented black entertainers whose talents provided them great pleasure. The French moral code regarding sex is completely different from puritan Americanism, so a few loose French ladies of the night availing themselves to blacks did not shock or offend much.

On the other hand, picture France, England, Belgium, Sweden, Russia, Germany, absorbing into their societies the millions of freed black slaves that America absorbed into its society. There is not a country in the world could have handled this shock better than the United States of America. Certainly the cultured, sexually-charged and artistic lifestyle these black impresarios experienced in the Paris of the 1920s would not have been the experience millions of blacks loosed on such a country would have experienced if for some reason this had occurred. There would have been genocide or near-genocide in reaction to such a thing. This like so many events in world history leaves the religious and spiritual conceiving that America indeed was a Promised Land, chosen by a benevolent God to handle difficult tasks no other nation was remotely capable of. Paul Robeson was highly intelligent, well educated, but an atheist. Perhaps this atheism was the block that did not allow his expansive mind to conceive of this fact. Had he, Robeson and many other blacks would have been far better off.

So it was that the Soviets saw in Robeson not a useful idiot, but something bigger. They were convinced a man of his stature, so successful in contrast to a nation of struggling sharecroppers, at least in the Soviet imagination, could come to the U.S. and lead an African revolution.

Robeson returned to the United States in 1939, immediately taking a very public stance in favor of equality and numerous Left-wing causes. He was probably funded by Moscow. It is not known for sure whether he received orders from them and, if so, he was so confrontational and independent he probably marched to the beat of his own drummer anyway.

Robeson was frustrated with the reception he received from blacks. Many poor African-Americans could not relate to this Columbia lawyer and his European pedigree. Many were not enthused by Communism, which seemed a nefarious, faraway concept not akin to their rural ways. The atheism of the Communists was a total deal breaker for most. Robeson thought many of these blacks "Uncle Toms," frustrated that they still found value in the Declaration of Independence and the American Way, despite their poor treatment.

When World War II broke out, Robeson criticized America. He found fault with President Truman's hard-line policies towards the Soviet Union. He began to publicly praise the U.S.S.R., particular their "progressive" racial equality. J. Edgar Hoover called him the "most dangerous black man in America," revoking his passport. Adolphe Menjou told HUAC anybody who had anything to do with Robeson was a Communist. Nobody excused "guilt by association" or found any leeway whatsoever with people who chose to be part of Robeson's inner circle. So obvious was Robeson in his hatred for America and love of the Soviets that unless a blind drunk stumbled into one of his meetings, he could not be accused of having his eyes closed, as Edward G. Robinson claimed was his situation. If a man was part of Robeson's crew, he was totally tainted. If he had any love for America, it was reasoned, within a minute of hearing Robeson, a patriot would, of his own free will, "vote with his feet" and leave.

Harry Belafonte met Robeson in 1947. Born in Harlem in 1927, Belafonte was the product of mixed race ancestry, but grew up black without question. Harlem was in a renaissance period of literature, intellect, jazz and artistry celebrating the "Negro experience." Out of this cauldron of thought and politics rose a variety of black causes. His mother implored Harry not to join with the "traditional" black activities like bootlegging and petty criminality, but pursue higher callings with a political bent benefiting their people.

In 1935 riots made Harlem dangerous. His mother sent him to live in Kingston, Jamaica, where the black nationalist Marcus Garvey was deported. A colony of Great Britain, it was in the first throes of potential rebellion. Belafonte saw colonialism first hand. He also learned jaunty calypso tunes, developing great singing talent. The songs, while on the surface seemingly happy celebrations of simple Negro life, were at their heart political anthems calling people to arms.

When Hitler attacked Poland in 1939 and England declared war on Germany, Belafonte's mother brought her son back to Harlem, fearing the Germans would invade the British colonies. His Jamaican accent made him the source of mockery. He dropped out to join the Navy. Intelligence tests determined he was near-genius, so the Navy sent him to a special training center in Virginia.

It was there he found a budding black intellectual movement based on DuBois' teachings. He married a well-to-do black woman working on her Ph.D. He was not inspired victory in the war would bring desired change. Belafonte's readings of DuBois led him to believe only anti-colonial revolution could bring, "Democracy and progressive change to 'oppressed colonial people.' " He saw not just an American struggle, but an international struggle, making him a perfect target for the Communists.

Belafonte joined an African theatre group, inspired by his calypso background that art could move people to social change. He became associated with aspiring black performers Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Ironically benefiting from the G.I. Bill, he then studied acting in New York with Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Elaine Styritch and Paddy Chayefsky. It was the beginning of a golden age, and to Belafonte simply exhilarating. His world was expanded, his intellect peaked. That was when he met Robeson.

Robeson, Belafonte and Poitier began hanging out. Robeson actively preached Communism, insisting capitalism would not offer them hope. Apparently Poitier and Belafonte agreed. They did not disagree. This being 1947, when HUAC was going strong, the Chambers-Hiss case was at full bore, and very strong actions were beginning to be taken against dedicated Communists, these three were engaged in dangerous activity. In an odd way, being black gave them cover. They were under the radar. Had they been white movie stars HUAC would have hauled them in and run them through the meat grinder.

Robeson became radioactive. A hot combination of racism and anti-Communism made him too controversial to be useful to the cause, leaving it to younger men of passion and telegenic appeal like Belafonte and Poitier. Again, the old "forgiveness dynamic" seems to envelope the lives of at least Belafonte and certainly Poitier. Poitier at the very least appears to have obviously adopted or at least flirted with Communism. Belafonte never joined the C.P. but in every way was a fellow traveler. Robeson's Communist bona fides were without doubt.

In 1962, Robeson broke from the Communists, claiming they were too corrupt to be of any real value. He passed away in 1977. There are rumors, fairly well spread, that upon his deathbed he renounced the U.S.S.R. as evil, asking for forgiveness for supporting it. Whether or not he made a Christian appeal for saving grace is not known. Rumors that he did may be more hopeful than factual.

Belafonte sang at Henry Wallace rallies in 1948. The leading black actors in New York became radicalized and anti-capitalist, all while pursuing stardom in a very capitalist, socially Darwinian business subject to absolute market forces. But they were, as the saying goes, "down with the struggle."

Belafonte achieved stardom quickly. He was extraordinarily handsome; a chiseled, athletic Adonis in skin-tight pants, dark sunglasses and a matador's shirt open to the waist. This was the first true black sex symbol. His appeal to white women made him an immediate threat to white men.

Despite this, however, his man's man persona and deep, macho voice gave him extraordinary crossover appeal. Since Jackie Robinson's breakthrough to the big leagues in 1947, black baseball stars like Larry Doby, Roy Campanela, Don Newcombe and Willie Mays were paving the way for a tremendous onslaught of black talent soon to arrive in the form of Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Ernie Banks, the Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente, and many, many more. Americans were prepared for a black performer. Belafonte's timing was good.

"Negroes and whites fell under his 'Valentino like' spell," wrote one reviewer, adding the girls were just "wild about Harry." His concerts were true melting pots of steelworkers, symphony patrons, bobby soxers, and kids of all races.

Weaving the calypso tunes of his Jamaican youth into jazz improvisations he honed while working with Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Max Roach and Tommy Potter, his song "Matilda" became a hit in 1953. Politically, he seemed fearless. He did what got white performers thrown in jail and Blacklisted for at the drop of a hat, joining Communist organizations and front groups. But it was his 1956 meeting with a young preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr. in Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church that changed his life.

King was unknown, an intellect with a Ph.D. who studied the non-violence of the Indian peace movement of Mahatma Gandhi. Beyond that he was untested without a following, but he was active in the Montgomery bus boycott in which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person.

When King saw Belafonte it was almost Biblical. Belafonte apparently had little if any Christian background. If he did it certainly had not dissuaded him from adopting Communist ideology, although some found the economic message they were looking for while eschewing the atheism. As with so many things in the black struggle, this aspect of Belafonte's social activism is overlooked under the auspices of the "special nature" of the struggle, in which different rules and standards apply to them, ostensibly the mistreatment they endured was much worse than other groups.

Then there was Dr. King's perspective. His Christianity and use of the religion to reach into the very hearts, minds and souls of white bigots in order to change them as no other force could change them, was without doubt. But King was ready to become the titular head of a movement that needed all the help and support it could receive. His philosophy mirrored most African-American philosophy, which was that if a man was willing to help, questions could be asked later. There is no indication King asked Belafonte if he was a Marxist that 1956 day at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. He did not care. He was called and that was that.

"We are caught up in a struggle that won't leave us . . ." he told the singer. "I have no idea where it's going, and I don't quite know why I've been anointed to play the role I'm playing, but I accept it . . . and I'd like to ask that you will serve in this mission as an ally of my needs." It mighty as well have been Jesus asking him to be a "fisher of men."

"Meeting King was like a bolt of lightning," wrote Steven Ross.

Belafonte was still young but an absolute star by 1956. He was a man with an ego who easily could have looked at the unknown King, still a child of sorts, and dismissed him as a wanna be looking to latch onto his celebrity. Instead, he saw past that and bought into King's vision of a "mountain top" then and there.

For the next 12 years Belafonte worked with King, Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Rustin, and Stokely Carmichael in the great Civil Rights Movement defining America of the 1960s.

Belafonte was "the worst S.O.B. that God created," said Poitier, but added if he was with you, "he's there for you all the way." Indeed, Belafonte like King was a man who accepted a mission and did not care whose toes he stepped on in accomplishing it.

The awards piled up in the 1950s. He won a Tony for his Broadway work, and made the first black films with direct social messages. He was nobody's fool, an exceptionally bright man, which fueled his anger even more in a racist world in which people of his color were put down as dumb. But many whites truly feared the kind of black Belafonte represented. He could not be coddled or fooled. He thought of America as a repressed nation. McCarthyism radically affected him. When he saw a movie called Sahara, he was amazed to see a white audience cheer when a black soldier kills a white German. Just as whites cheered for Joe Louis over Max Schmeling, he understood performing had a power to affect the emotions of audiences. He endeavored to make this his pulpit every bit as much as Dr. King used his.

Dore Schary, who took over for the conservative Louis B. Mayer at MGM, wanted to make progressive pictures, but he like other studio honchos was concerned with the South, which made up 20 percent of the audience share. Two world wars consolidated white America into a single unifying force defeating the greatest militaries ever assembled on the Earth. Southern sensibilities – honed in large part by the extraordinary number of Southern officers in the military, especially the Marines – were American sensibilities.

Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge did star turns in an all-black version of George Bizet's Carmen, set to Oscar Hammerstein's music. Seeing him in non-stereotypical roles increased his crossover appeal. Hedda Hopper gave it a rip-roaring good review. After the Brown v. Board of Education decision de-segregated Southern schools, its citizenry was wary of Northern interference.

Belafonte's emergence as a star, however, brought him the attention. Previously, when he was unknown, he was allowed to openly plot Communist ideas with Poitier and Robeson. Now anti-Communist groups made hay of his association with Robeson. Belafonte asked Robeson for advice. He and Poitier were told to back away from Communism in order to establish their careers and make a lot of money, a strange request by a Communist and in many ways a point the Right always exploited in finding hypocrisy with the ideology.

As smart as a tack, suddenly he played dumb, saying he was involved in the fronts he was accused of associating with, but did not know they were Communists. His name was removed from a temporary Blacklist, allowing him to appear on a coveted slot of The Ed Sullivan Show. His "see no evil" routine is disturbing in several ways. First, he was too intelligent not to "know" about any group he associated with. Also, if he could get away with it by just saying he did not realize, he was "duped," then it sheds some suspicion on Edward G. Robinson's "I was duped" claim. That said, Belafonte was undoubtedly more radical than Robeson. Like Charlie Chaplin before him, he knew all about poverty and had no desire to repeat the experience.

Belafonte made a risky stage tour of Southern cities with Three for Tonight, where he endured segregated bathrooms because he felt he could bring some enlightenment and good credit for his race, which runs a little counter to his original anti-colonial, revolutionary thesis, based on the theory blacks and whites could not get along, blacks needed to make their own way, and not even try. But he was caught up in a white world of entertainment success. Success depended on working with them, indeed even trying to impress his detractors. Then there was the influence of Dr. King, a true uniter of races who unquestionably soothed Belafonte's heart more than Robeson's rhetoric.

In the late 1950s Belafonte skyrocketed to heights of great success. He sold out the Waldorf Astoria Empire Room in New York and broke the color barrier at the famed Coconut Grove of L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel. It was the age of the Rat Pack in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra paved the way for black entertainers like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Belafonte, who cleaned up at the New Frontier to the tune of $12,000-$15,000 a week (upwards of $120,000 in 2009).

He broke color barriers in Chicago, at Miami's Eden Roc, and was given special treatment in segregated cities where regular blacks were subject to curfews. It was the golden era of TV. He starred on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Jackie Gleason Show, with Nat King Cole and many others, including an appearance with Ronald Reagan on General Electric Theatre.

In 1957 he sold more records than Sinatra or Elvis Presley. His "Banana Boat Song (Day O)," a signature sound to this day, remains one of the greatest hits of all time. A superficial listen reveals a "glimpse into a fanciful little tale of charms and delights," said Belafonte, but closer attention to the lyrics tells of a "a human condition that was very real to me, very painful and extremely oppressive." Indeed, the song, culled from his youth in Jamaica, is about field workers slaving way under colonial oppression, singing and dreaming only of how "I want to go home."

Naturally, Belafonte was the toast of the Democrat Party, who apparently saw no concern with his Communist past. However, his de-radicalization, coming on the heels of Robeson's advice, leading to an appearance with the stridently anti-Communist Ed Sullivan, allayed much of that concern. He sang at the Democrat National Convention.

In Darryl Zanuck's Island in the Sun, Belafonte plays a tough labor leader who does not back down in negotiations with whites, something rarely seen before. He also has a romance with Joan Fontaine, a big taboo. The movie was boycotted in the South, but considered a big breakthrough. Production codes were slowly loosening up after years of tough restrictions.

Belafonte began to openly talk about the race issue as the single, most difficult obstacle America needed to overcome. This was something of a bone of contention with conservatives, who were concerned with the race issue, too, but as with Jews who made Israel their only real concern, they said these were several areas that needed to be dealt with, but none of it would matter if the U.S. lay under a mushroom cloud or had 1 million Chinese hordes to fight, as happened when they crossed the Yalu River in Korea.

Just as stardom, such as the kind Poitier was about to experience with a string of blockbusters over the next decade-plus, was about to come to Belafonte, the actor took a step back. He was not in control of his films, and felt frustrated at the way studio executives could ultimately cut or change content.

Whites were frustrated with him. He was a star and they wanted to shower him with greater stardom, and money beyond his wildest dreams. He was, however, considered too difficult. His wealth from music gave him independence from Hollywood others, like Poitier, did not have. He openly complained of the restrictions laid on him as a black performer. He began turning down "black roles," but over the years this proved a terrible mistake. Such seminal black movies as Lilies of the Field (1963), Guess Whose Coming to Dinner (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and To Sir, with Love (1967), went to Poitier. These were films that did almost as much to bring whites and blacks together as music, sports or Christianity. Poitier, who once discussed radical Communist revolution with Robeson and Belafonte, was now a beloved crossover figure, a transformative actor for the generations.

"I have no politics," Poitier said when asked at the time.

Meanwhile, Belafonte did not merely engender controversy, he courted it. He divorced his PhD.–educated African-American wife and mother of his children to marry a Jewish woman, Julie Robinson, a graduate of New York's infamous Little Red Schoolhouse, a hotbed of radical Communism. She was among that class of white women, utilized by Lenin and the Reds going back to the early part of the 20th Century, portrayed in Upton Sinclair's novels, who use sex as an enticement to bring men into the party. Many accused Communists echoed the same sentiment when queried as to their involvement: "I was there because of a girl." It was a perverse opposite of Christ's admonition that he would make his disciples "fishers of men." Belafonte, however, went in with his eyes wide open. He was not a curious political neophyte. His politics were honed in the anti-colonial atmosphere of the Jamaican slums of his youth. Some liberal white women, going back at least to the Civil War in America, racked with guilt over the mistreatment of slaves, gave their bodies to black men as a strange sort of reparation. Whether this was Julie Robinson's motivation beyond love is mere speculation here.

It certainly caused a story for Belafonte. Criticism came from both Ebony and Life magazines, for opposing reasons. But his marriage was part of Belafonte's turning away from mainstream Hollywood. He opened his own production company. Lew Wasserman had recently negotiated the first contract giving a star, Jimmy Stewart, a percentage of a film's returns. This was the first real chink in the studio system. After that independent production companies began to rise up. Prior to this, Charlie Chaplin was among a rare group of entertainers who had any real autonomy, and even his politics made it impossible to simply do what he wanted forever.

Belafonte developed stories, both modern and historical, centered on civil rights and black history. This included a tale of a black Russian poet and Hannibal the Great, a North African general who challenged Roman authority. His movies featured blacks talking to white men in ways never seen before. He made a movie, The World, The Flesh, and the Devil, a provocative and evocative title seeming to suggest the nature of man's sin, but focusing as the ultimate evil the threat of nuclear weapons.

A large chasm developed over this issue. Harvard professor Henry Kissinger was among the Right-leaning academics arguing the validity of nuclear weapons as a way of containing the Soviet threat. The idea of viable "battlefield nuclear weapons," used in a limited war, had been urged as recently as 1954 by Vice President Richard Nixon during the Communist struggle with French forces at Dien Bien Phu. By 1957 this strategy was becoming disabused as not viable. Barry Goldwater continued to argue this strategy to some extent, a big reason he was marginalized by 1964 as a warmonger.

But Belafonte's films mainly flopped, despite powerful performances by the star. His singing success did not translate into movie stardom. Belafonte shifted back to activism, working alongside his wife, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, and performers Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and Lena Horne, to fight racism.

But the criticism, much of it centered on his marriage to a white woman, nagged at Belafonte. He confided to Davis he was ready to drift away, just sing songs and leave the struggle to others. Davis wrote a blistering letter, echoing Dr. King's 1956 admonition that he was in affect among the "chosen" people selected, apparently by God, to fight this fight. Davis appealed to Belafonte's aggressive nature using feisty words. Belafonte decided to stick with it.

After a trip to Europe he returned, taking up the cause against Arkansas' Democrat Governor Orval Faubus, who was fighting back against President Eisenhower's use of troops to enforce integration at Central High School in Little Rock. He began to work with Jackie Robinson, who other than being a performer, celebrity and black civil rights advocate, was the polar opposite of him politically.

By the 1960s, his movie career was nowhere, but he was rich from record sales and touring success. Dr. King was by then a national figure. Organizations such as King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), along with the traditional NAACP, became very active. The groups did not trust each other, but Belafonte worked seamlessly with all of them.

Belafonte personally funded much of the activity. Conservative groups, who formed the money behind the politics of George Murphy and Ronald Reagan, were funded by wealthy donors and corporations. The civil rights groups of the early 1960s existed in large measure on the strength of money handed them by Belafonte.

The Civil Rights Movement had its big moment in 1960. It was this event that traces back to the dividing line in racial politics. Dr. King was indicted by an Alabama grand jury on trumped up tax falsification charges. Placed in jail, he wrote "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," his first great pronouncement. But it was Belafonte who spearheaded the financial drive to organize his legal team. Belafonte's singing influenced King, understanding the power of music. He began using the old anthem "We Shall Overcome" as music of the struggle.

Coretta Scott King approached the Presidential candidates of 1960, Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat John F. Kennedy, in an effort to help get her husband out of jail. At that time, a near majority of African-Americans identified with the GOP. When Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, given the vote after the Civil War, blacks voted overwhelmingly Republican. President Roosevelt's institution of handouts, called "relief" during the Great Depression, was aimed in large measure at blacks. Many swung to the Democrats, favoring a "welfare state," but by 1960 they were fairly split, more or less 50-50.

Nixon, ironically, was far more sympathetic to the plight of blacks than JFK. He came from nothing, pulled himself up from a hardscrabble beginning by sheer determination, and identified with the poor. When the young Californian attended Duke University Law School in North Carolina, he held long "bull sessions" with his Southern classmates, a lonely voice arguing on behalf of civil rights. He had a large constituency of black voters in his sprawling Los Angeles Congressional district, and was friends with the Pasadena native Jackie Robinson, an admirer.

Kennedy came from wealth. He claimed to have been so removed from poverty that the Great Depression came and went without his really noticing. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was famously anti-Semitic and, while less abrasive towards blacks, found little use for them beyond their roles as porters and valets.

A playboy with no record, JFK was a lightweight who never tackled any big issues. Black activists had absolutely no confidence in him. But when Nixon was approached to help Dr. King, his advisors told him if he did anything it would anger Southern voters. After almost a century of Democrat lock in the Jim Crow South, Dwight Eisenhower's popularity (with Nixon riding his coattails) made the region viable for his party. A border state could be picked off here or there. Texas in particular seemed ripe for the picking. In an election that looked too close to call, every vote counted. Nixon did nothing.

Coretta Scott King approached JFK with trepidation, expecting little. The young Massachusetts Senator was afraid to alienate anybody, but his younger brother, Robert, saw political opportunity. JFK used his influence, which between his father and his family money was considerable, to free King.

For Martin Luther King, Jr., Harry Belafonte, and the leaders of the fledgling Civil Rights Movement, it was a revelation. But perhaps most influential of all was Jackie Robinson, by far the most respected of all black Americans. He was a dedicated Nixon man who found new favor in Kennedy. The tide turned electorally. With it the Civil Rights Movement had new steam. This event remains the impetus that today sees some 90 percent of the African-American vote directed to the Democrat Party.

Kennedy's election was considered a huge boon for the Civil Rights Movement, but again they fretted. Belafonte in particular was very wary of the man, an ardent anti-Communist whose father was close pals with Senator Joseph McCarthy. Robert Kennedy worked with McCarthy. At first JFK disappointed them, as he dealt with three huge Cold War crises: the Bay of Pigs, the erection of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Belafonte began working with Stokely Carmichael, whose firebrand activism was the direct opposite of Dr. King's Gandhi-inspired non-violence. But events forced Kennedy's hand. In 1962 he opposed Democrat Governor Ross Barnett, sending troops into Mississippi, just as Eisenhower did in Arkansas, to enforce the entrance of James Meredith, the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

After Democrat Governor George Wallace announced his policy was "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in 1963, JFK aide Nicholas Katzenbach negotiated the complicated entrance of Vivian Malone and James Hood past Wallace's infamous "stand at the schoolhouse door" at the University of Alabama. Dr. King's March on Washington that same year attracted strong white crossover appeal, including the influential actor Charlton Heston, no radical. Heston was recruited by Belafonte to reach "middle America." His appearance alongside Belafonte and Sidney Poitier at the Lincoln Memorial was a big boost to the cause, just as his support of the accused Communist Edward G. Robinson, who was given a key role in The Ten Commandments, helped revive his career. King made his seminal "I have a Dream" speech.

Robert F. Kennedy pushed his brother to do more and more. In truth little legislation or real official action came from the Kennedy Administration, which ended with his assassination on November 22, 1963, but great hope was invested in the young President, that given a second term, by the mid-to-late 1960s he would fulfill the promise they had in him.

But for all the efforts of the movement; of actors like Belafonte, Poitier and Heston; of the Kennedy Administration; even of Dr. King; the greatest "ally" of the Civil Right Movement, ironically enough, were their enemies. Birmingham, Alabama Sheriff Eugene "Bull" Connor brazenly arrested protesters, broke up rallies using fire hoses and police dogs, all while actively endorsing violence against blacks. A church was bombed, killing black children. Across the South, there were killings, lynchings, and other abominations.

It was Dr. King who most skillfully "handled" the crisis. King was from Atlanta, a media center. He understood the power of television. While terrible acts of retribution often took place on rural country roads and little towns where secrets could be kept – it was the FBI who did the real work in these areas – Dr. King concentrated his marches on places with larger populations where television cameras captured the scene. Thus did he center his activities on "Bombingham," the name given Birmingham after the firebombing of the black church there. Birmingham was the central city of Alabama, the home of Legion Field where the fabled Alabama Crimson Tide of coach Paul "Bear" Bryant played their biggest football games, and it had the largest population of poor, vulnerable black citizens. King made sure the handsome faces of Belafonte, Poitier and Heston, among others, were given prominent TV time. Human suffering had come to the TV age. With it, the age of the celebrity-activist.

"Charlton Heston was a big player for middle America," explained Belafonte. "We had lots of other celebrities, but his participation was critical to the constituency he represented. These people would have to take a second look." Marlon Brando and other celebrities lent their time and efforts, but with minimal effect. Many Americans considered actors of Brando's ilk to be uneducated immoralists. Heston was a college man, a veteran, and of course his religious image was that of Moses. Nobody in show biz had his cache.

But Belafonte was a courageous man, too. It was one thing to march on Washington, but he traveled to Mississippi, helping bail out volunteers jailed after the killing of three civil rights workers in 1964. The power of song was never more apparent when Belafonte's "Banana Boat Song (Day O)" not only bucked up the activists, but incredibly induced Klansmen outside to sing along.

Belafonte's work with Dr. King, Jackie Robinson and Charlton Heston was oddly a compromise for him. His original philosophies were based on the most virulent anti-colonialist rants of the "back to Africa" movement and black liberation theology. Marcus Garvey's movement was big prior to World War II. The war galvanized the nation as nothing else could. Slowly, year by year, prejudice eased. Belafonte was now working with devout Christians, which King, Robinson and Heston all were. There does not appear to be any evidence that Belafonte was ever a Christian. He was drawn to Communism. One of its strongest pillars of was atheism, the thing that turned off a majority of blacks but certainly did not offend him, or Sidney Poitier, at least in the late 1940s. But in 1962, when their mentor Paul Robeson denounced the Communist Soviet Union, it was a big blow for American Communism. It seemed dead in the water, having failed to take over the Civil Rights Movement, which instead accepted the Biblical phraseology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It might have been dead altogether had it not found a de facto staging grounds in Berkeley and other college campuses when the Vietnam War started up. But in 1962 the nation was firmly opposed to Nikita Khrushchev's planting of nuclear missiles in Cuba, siding with Kennedy, as anti-Communist a President as this nation has ever had.

Between 1965 and 1968, while Belafonte maintained a very close personal relationship with Dr. King, he also worked with more radical elements of the movement who felt King was not doing enough, that Christian non-violence was too passive. Dr. King asked him to mediate. Deep rifts developed between Carmichael, the emerging Black Panthers, and the SCLC. The Nation of Islam had a violent shift, resulting in their murdering Malcolm X when he decided to work with King.

Dr. King was also confronted by the fact Communists infiltrated his group. The FBI identified Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist. Hoover despised Dr. King. He and Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered wiretaps of King (later used as "justification" for bugging Watergate by the Nixon people). Hoover sat listening in disgust while King grunted and groaned away in sexual intercourse with a succession of women he picked up on the road. This, along with the Vietnam War now the focus of media outlets like Time, threatened to take all the steam out of the Civil Rights Movement. However, Moscow and Beijing decided to reduce espionage and activism within the Civil Rights Movement, putting their money and operatives into the Anti-War Movement centered on college campuses.

King then decided to take a major chance, aligning himself with the Anti-War Movement. Considering that his group had been penetrated by Reds, and in fact all the civil rights organizations were in one way or another infiltrated by Communist money, espionage, and in some cases even active handling, it was a very risky move indeed.

"The 'enemy' is not Communism, but those who refuse to deal on a human level because they have greed all over their faces," he stated.

Backlash was harsh. Mao Tse-tung was beginning the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long reign of terror rivaling and likely overshadowing even the gulags and the Holocaust. While full scale knowledge of these atrocities was not fully known, most of Joseph Stalin's murderous regime, combined with the enslavement of Eastern Europe, and the threat of Cuba 90 miles off the Florida coast, made Communism issue number one among Republicans.

The Left was exposing atrocities - torture, illegal interrogations – committed by Americans. Most people did not believe them, and even if true, it seemed naïve to most that in a battle with the most evil enemy we faced "from the swamp to stars," as Reagan called them in 1964, the U.S. should not be allowed to win because they were in a "dirty war." But France turned, spurning alliance with America, for all practices in "favor" of the Communists. Entire generations of bourgeoisie French – the same people who collaborated with the Nazis and shot at the U.S. Navy landing in North Africa - were taught by their media American involvement Vietnam was the moral equivalent of the Holocaust. While Vietnam was sucking energy out of the Civil Rights Movement, on the other hand it was fueling wholesale anti-Americanism, at home and abroad, that aided it. America was an "immoral nation," so the song went. Her racism was a symptom of that. The media piled on.

Many draftees were poor blacks, a major bone of contention, although not particularly emphasized by the actual drafted black soldiers themselves. One famed scene showed President Johnson touring a military hospital, where an upright, injured black soldier, tears streaming down his face, declared his patriotic love for LBJ, urging the fight against Communism not be stopped no matter how much pressure was exerted.

When boxer Cassius Clay, now a black Muslim in the process of changing his name to Muhammad Ali, refused to enter the draft, the reaction was swift and nasty. He did not do the civil rights struggle any good with "Heston's America." In fact this event played a role in the actor turning from a "liberal" into a hardcore conservative Republican. The shift focused from the legitimate deprivations suffered by poor Southern blacks, to a pampered, rich athlete, the beneficiary of American largesse, who on top of everything rejected the Lord Jesus Christ.

The riots in Watts (1965), a black ghetto in Los Angeles, were a sign that the struggle was turning violent. Worse yet, riots in L.A., a city and state that thought they "got it right" with race relations, with their integrated USC and UCLA sports teams and happy mixed race movie star gatherings, showed that prejudice was not relegated to the Deep South. Governor Wallace led the charge, asking why the press focused all their attention on his little state when the media capitol of the world could not get its act together. It was pointed out that Otis Chandler's Los Angeles Times, major critics of segregation, had virtually no black representation on their staff.

Middle America, for lack of a better term, could relate to non-violence and Christianity, not to arsonists. Carmichael was advocating "Black power!" Whites were frightened. Hoover thought Belafonte one of the major instigators of the violent turn. He always sided with radicalism, from his early youth influenced by Marcus Garvey, the anti-colonialism of Jamaica, his association with the Communist Robeson, his turning away from mainstream movies, and despite his friendship with King, a desire to make the movement more strident, if not worse. Hoover felt Belafonte a bad influence on King. This was one of his motivations for bugging him. By 1967 King was as much an anti-war protestor as a civil rights pioneer. Still in his 30s, he represented a powerful figure in American society. After passage of the Voting Rights Act giving Southern blacks greater franchise, he had a strong political future.

The idea of a "black revolution" was a threat in the minds of many whites since slavery. It was the impetus, ill conceived as it was, for the Manson family murders in 1969. Later groups like the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Zebra killers, built upon the Black Panther's cause, advocating just such a thing. While these movements never gained steam, in 1967 nobody really knew they would not. The world had changed so much so fast that anything seemed possible, from both hopeful and fearful points of view.

Belafonte organized further expansion of the movement to include solidarity with the anti-Apartheid cause in South Africa, as well as nascent kinship with "revolutions" in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Native Americans and even poor folks in the Appalachia. Bobby Kennedy, now a New York Senator, campaigned in Appalachia, pointing out a section of America seemingly unable to rise beyond the Great Depression.

In early 1968, with Vietnam in an uproar over the Tet Offensive, LBJ on the verge of announcing he would not seek re-election, and chaos swirling everywhere, Belafonte hosted The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson, a conservative from Nebraska, took a big chance in letting him substitute for him during a vacation. Belafonte brought in a coterie of black activists and white liberals, from Lena Horne to Nipsey Russell, from Pete Seeger to the Smothers Brothers. He interviewed U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy (D.-New York), whose younger brother, Edward "Ted" Kennedy, was a U.S. Senator representing Massachusetts. He also interviewed Dr. King himself.

Kennedy was still in the last vestiges of support for Vietnam, a war essentially started by his brother, brought to escalation by an assassination and coup d'état of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Ding Diem JFK not only allowed to happen a month before his own 1963 assassination, but something he literally listened to in a real time phone conversation with Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge; like a perverse play-by-play of a violent ballgame. Not long after being "grilled" by Belafonte on The Tonight Show, RFK famously changed his stance on Vietnam. In March LBJ announced he was not running for re-election. That was Kennedy's cue to flip the switch.

On April 4, everybody in the movement had their world turned upside down by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis. Riots ensued in a chaotic series of coast-to-coast scenes. Only in Indianapolis, where Senator Kennedy calmed the crowd by reminding them his own brother had been killed by "a white man," was chaos and in most cases bloodshed, averted. Coretta Scott King personally asked Belafonte to sit next to her at the funeral because "of what Harry had meant to Martin and to me all these years."

Belafonte cryptically warned of a "new wave of Red revolt." But Bobby Kennedy's June murder at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Belafonte joyously integrated the Coconut Grove just a few years earlier, seemed to take all the wind out of his sails. 1968 seared a hole in the soul of America. He faded away because the "price was too severe," he said, while threatening to leave politics and move to Africa. He was like a real life Cool Hand Luke, the character played by Paul Newman in 1967, fueling the hopes and aspirations of desperate prison hands until, exhausted, he just tells them to "stop feeding on me." Belafonte wanted to "stop answering questions," adding "I hate marching."

To many on the Left, 1968 represented a turning point in which the "Right won," ascribing racism to their cause in the tacit accusation they endorsed the murders of Democrats and black leaders. In truth it topped off a violent decade in which a CIA-inspired coup killed South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem; a Communist (Lee Harvey Oswald) killed President Kennedy; and un-caught black Muslim hit man killed Malcolm X; a Jim Crow Democrat assassinated Dr. King; and a Palestinian terrorist killed RFK. There was plenty of blame to go around.

But the reactionaries of the Right definitely benefited. Ronald Reagan rose in popularity largely because he opposed the campus protests. Most analysts believe Robert Kennedy would have been elected President in 1968, but Richard Nixon, who did win, benefited from his killing no matter how the pie is cut. The Left and the Democrat Party became leaderless and lost direction, while the Republicans consolidated the gains of the Silent Majority, a term Nixon brilliantly ascribed to middle America. Eventually there was backlash in the form of Watergate.

Never again would Belafonte be so "involved" in the 1960s struggle for civil rights and peace. He did not quite retreat into total privacy like J.D. Salinger, caricatured by James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams, when asked about his past declaring he was the "East Coast distributor of 'involved.' " But his songs and his movies did not carry the heavy politics of the 1950s and early 1960s. He made comedies and mostly light fare with Poitier and Bill Cosby. He despised the "blaxploitation" cinema of the 1970s, turning down the seminal role of Shaft. The movement "sucked up most of my life," he declared.

He attacked capitalism, which seemed reasonable enough in the 1970s, perhaps the worst decade in American history, but when Ronald Reagan took America to the heights of glory in the 1980s, it seemed a refutation of all activists like Belafonte once stood for. Outlined against Reagan's sunny patriotism, the snipes and complaints of old Lefties like Harry Belafonte appeared nothing more than the complaints of a losing team.

The causes were few and far between. In the aftermath of King's death, once the militants drifted from the scene, the South made a remarkable, almost overnight change. Suddenly Southern college football teams featured great black stars, its cities became economic engines, the Olympics coming to Atlanta and, when recession ravaged America in the late 2000s, it was the only region of America thriving. In the face of these types of events, Belafonte's endless litany of complaint and petition looked even more removed from the mainstream. When Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa and Barack Obama elected President of the United States, Apartheid was off the table, and seemingly all Belafonte urged came to fruition. When he kept complaining, it did not help his cause.

Belafonte, Danny Glover and their ilk always seemed to need to criticize something. Belafonte called General Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, and his successor, Condoleezza Rice, "plantation slaves who accepted the pleasures of the master's house" during the Iraq War. It was an absurd statement rightfully met with scorn and derision. Rice, who grew up in Birmingham and knew one of the little girls killed in the 1963 church bombing, said of Belafonte she did not need anybody to tell her what it was like to be black in America.

Harry Belafonte's lifetime of success and adulation offers a peak at what ultimately can be called the most pernicious nature of Communism. The U.S. defeated the Nazis. Their enmity with us was made very clear. Their true purpose was not hidden or shadowed by anything. They were about killing Jews, racial superiority, the Darwinian-eugenics-inspired notion of a new breed of superman; Aryan, blonde, blue eyes. The Left tried to tie conservatives to them, a lie that is de-bunked almost from the first shot since most of the boys who stormed beaches and pillboxes to beat them could be called conservative in a heartland kind of way. Upon their return they did not start revolutions, join cells, or spy against America; rather they joined the Lion's Club, the Rotary, started a hardware store.

We never fought and defeated the Soviets or Red Chinese in World War III. We had to settle for Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising and John Milius's Red Dawn. Watching the Berlin Wall come down stirred melancholy in the American Christian heart, which is forgiving by nature; more so than all the vendetta-revenge societies of history.

But that does not change the fact Communism was every bit as evil as Nazism; Communists every bit as evil as Nazis. To be a Communist was no "better" than to be a Nazi. It meant supporting something just as lethal, just as genocidal.

"Communism is a form of insanity, a temporary aberration which one day will disappear from the Earth because it is contrary to human nature," said Ronald Reagan, encapsulating perhaps the greatest debate in history, one in which either Reagan is right or Whittaker Chambers – and ultimately Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev - are right.

Insanity or "temporary aberrations" aside, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier stilled joined Paul Robeson on long walks in New York City to discuss Communist revolution on our shores. This is no different than if Charlton Heston joined forces with the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell; if John Wayne secretly wore a swastika; if Tom Selleck was in the Ku Klux Klan. Frankly, there is little difference between these scenarios and a young Barack Obama associating himself with the Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorn, or spending 20 years with the black liberation theologist Jeremiah Wright, whose mantra was "not God bless America, but Godd—n America!"

Had Heston, Wayne, Selleck or any conservatives associated with Nazis or white supremacists, they would have been excoriated, rightly so. Their own conservative brethren also would have drummed them out of the core before the Left even had their first shot at 'em. One looks for "examples" of this. The search is a far, wide one, resulting in no examples.

Yet liberals could flirt with Communism and be given a "pass." There are endless examples of liberals and Leftists not merely flirting with but associating, adopting, even trying to make the policy of Communists, radicals, and anarchists of a century's worth of revolution. One of them, Alger Hiss, helped form the actual United Nations charter. Blacks especially are given extra leeway on this issue because of their history, but it is moral relativism to do so.

The only explanation for this seems to be because World War III was never fought, nuclear weapons never exchanged, the gulags never liberated by the 101st Airborne Division bearing photographers. But if World War II had never been fought, the admiration of men like Joseph P. Kennedy for Adolf Hitler would have been papered over, too. Thus we see the evil of moral relativism, and in this phrase the reason Communism is worse than the Nazis.

It is worse because Belafonte and Poitier, and maybe even Robeson, were really not "bad" guys. They were misguided by history, as Whittaker Chambers was for more than a decade. Something so murderous could be served up in a devil's brew of moral temptation and social seduction. Communism is an Earthly version of the devil showing all the world's kingdoms to Christ, offering him the chance to be a benevolent dictator. Thus, all the little "benevolent dictators" of the Communism apparatus, many of them shot in the back of the head at four in the morning during a Vodka-fest in Stalin's Kremlin, made to wear a dunce hat in Mao's "little Red schoolhouse" . . . or lying in a pile of skulls in a Cambodian ditch.

Harry Belafonte, capitalist, served up a strange kind of conundrum. Here was a man vilified for his race, hated for his outspokenness, passionate in his desire to see change happen. He certainly became a beloved figure of the Left. In 1992s's The Player, he appears as himself, an incredible picture of good looks and elegant elder grace, at a swank Hollywood party. A young female studio executive practically genuflects before his eminence as if he were a god. He was honored by the Kennedy Center with a lifetime achievement award. President Obama's election was in essence, or close to the essence, of all Harry Belafonte wanted to happen in the 1950s and 1960s, which by the late 1970s and beyond actually came to fruition, more and more, year by year. The strange conundrum is that it did not satisfy him. As he announced how proud he was, he could not bring himself to say he was proud to be an American. Even President Obama's wife, Michelle, called herself a proud American, albeit only after the country demonstrated its righteousness by making the election of her husband a possibility. But everything was a splinter group with Belafonte. He was "proud of being progressives, proud of being gay, proud of being black, proud of being women, proud of being workers, proud of being young, and know that we can shape the future." It is also well worth noting that Belafonte is a wealthy man who could live anywhere in the world. Why, if America was such a "terrible" country, did he live here all his life? Why did all those jazz artists who extolled the great virtues of Paris in the 1930s always end up coming back to America to stay? The question answers itself.

Steven Ross wrote in Hollywood Left and Right, "his friend Martin could not have said it better," but he could have and did. King infused his rhetoric with classic Christian scripture, claiming "mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord," and that he had "been to the mountain top," a clear reference to God, Moses and the Promised Land. Millions of white Southerners were now seeing the same thing Martin saw, side-by-side with millions of black Christians, clearly a greater reflection of why the movement won than gays or women. When King was killed the parallel with Moses was unmistakable, the Hebrew leader passing before actually setting foot in Israel. The world, however, had split into a definite Left and Right. It started with the Chambers-Hiss case, was exacerbated by McCarthyism and Vietnam, and fractured by a thousand little slights; Watergate, Bill Clinton's Impeachment, the 2000 Bush-Gore struggle in Florida; and Iraq. Belafonte in many ways represented the wide chasm. He and the Left hate the Right. The Right has no respect for the Left. They hear men like Belafonte call patriots like General Powell "house slaves," attaching neither weight nor substance to such words. Belafonte was and always had been of the Left, and was not going to relinquish that position.

Hollywood Jews

Why is Hollywood so liberal? The story of the Hollywood Jews is wholly unique. America represents an entirely new chapter in modern Jewish history with absolutely no precedent.

Only the Old Testament offers stories of muscular Jewish strength. From hard bondage the Jews rose, with the helping hand of God splitting the Red Sea to swallow the Egyptian horsemen, and after 40 years found the Promised Land of Israel, only after their leader, Moses, passed away.

The Holy Bible tells story after story of the Israelites defending their land, winning and losing battles, always coming out ahead in the end as the Chosen People, to the great consternation of their numerous, endless enemies. But God's plan for people and nations is finite in this world. He used national Israel to teach Mankind how to live and worship. When they served their purpose, he brought His only begotten son, Jesus Christ, to this Earth to teach them how to be saved.

For 2,000 years the historical Jews roamed the Earth in a state of perpetual persecution. Their entire civilization met an Earthly Armageddon in the Holocaust of World War II, a Biblical epic in scope not even seen in the Old Testament, yet seemingly the only event that could give cause to re-institution of the state of Israel. This event is clearly stated several places in The Holy Bible as being among the things that absolutely must come to pass before the Lord Jesus Christ returns to judge the living and the dead. Therefore, it serves notice upon Mankind that we are very, very likely living in the End Times, a profound notion that to many explains much about why the United States of America rose to such great heights of power, just in time and at this particular point in world history.

The creation of America gave a new home to the displaced Jews of the 2,000-year Diaspora. Here they found the second Promised Land. Understanding the consequence of all this is necessary when studying the Hollywood Jews. The Hollywood Jews mark an odd chapter in the American West, but they are every bit as much a part of its mythology as the cowboy, the trans-continental railroad or Manifest Destiny.

Without the West, America would not be the Promised Land the Jews were looking for. They came to Ellis Island with all the other immigrants, of course, settling in the hovels of New York and New England. For the first time since Hadrian destroyed the Temple Mount in 362 A.D., they were given the chance to demonstrate their considerable brilliance. America, the land of opportunity and higher education, afforded them entrance into the professions, but Wall Street and the Ivy League still discriminated against them.

So, they came west. There they found a new, uniquely American art form called cinema with absolutely no history, no tradition, no lineage, no hierarchy; like the open plains of this rugged, clean land it was there for the taking, to be shaped in their image. They did just that.

It did not matter a man's name or religion, his family or station in life. His vision and willingness to out-work his competition, the essence of America, was all it took. Like so many who came West since the 1849 Gold Rush, they could re-invent themselves. Failures in New York, successes in Los Angeles. Even the terrain suited them, after two millennia living in cold Europe, these desert-dwellers found the sand 'n' sea of Southern California, hot and arid like Tel Aviv, the burning sun tanning their skin dark brown as they had not looked like since Biblical times.

There were no old families that needed to be ousted. No corporations that needed to be taken over. No previous business plans that needed to be changed. They invented it all. Virtually from the very beginning, the Jews were an integral part of Hollywood. They were writers and directors, but mainly they were moguls who formed a studio system that reflected their past.

Always bossed around and told what to do, at the mercy of various kings, rulers, emperors and governors, they created an ironclad industry in which they had final say, no questions asked. Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, the Warner Bros. (Jack and Harry), Cecil B. DeMille, Irving Thalberg, and David O. Selznick were among the first wave. Most were from immigrant Russian and Eastern European families who escaped the czars and the Communists to find a life in America. Their tremendous gratitude manifested itself in total patriotism, expressed in waves during World Wars I and II when their adopted nation defeated the age old enemies of their tenuous historical existence.

After the war, as the studio system broke up, a new crop of Jewish movers 'n' shakers, filmmakers, executives and talents, emerged. Lew Wasserman's business acumen changed the nature of the business, and his liberal politics helped change the town from Mayer's Republicans to reliable Democrats. Robert Evans made it sexy to be Jewish, and his vision husbanded the industry from stodgy middle-aged fare to the Age of Aquarius. Steven Spielberg became perhaps the greatest director, and Harvey Weinstein gave the independent film movement as much power as the studios. Then there was Darryl and Richard Zanuck, neither of whom were Jewish although many assumed they were, simply because they were so successful it seemed almost a prerequisite that to achieve such status, a Jew is what one had to be.

This thinking had its dark side, too.

Jewish conspiracy theories have existed since the Crucifixion. At some point, around the Industrial Revolution, people began talking about a cabal of "Jewish bankers" who "run the world." This seems to be connected to the Rothschilds, an old European family that is equal parts wealthy, powerful and secretive.

"Jewish banking interests" supposedly "sold out" Kaiser's Germany in World War II, which does not particularly square with the opposite theory that "Jewish Communists" siding with Russia sold out Germany. Either way, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis scapegoated them in the worst way imaginable. If the "the Jews" really were part of a "cabal" spurring the Communist Revolution, and if their disproportionate numbers among Western traitors of the Red Scare was part of a "conspiracy," it certainly did not help when Joseph Stalin committed genocide against them, particularly physicians, in the U.S.S.R.

There is supposedly an organization called the Tri-Lateral Commission, which many say is dominated by Jews, apparently led by Henry Kissinger, but also includes George H.W. Bush (but not George W. Bush?), Margaret Thatcher (but not Ronald Reagan?), and wealthy Jews, but is not Skull 'n' Bones or the Bohemian Club, and apparently decides when and where wars are fought; what world interest rates, gold prices and stock indexes are; what the price of oil is; what countries are lent how much money for reasons they control; and so on.

Supposedly the Goldman Sachs Wall Street brokerage firm, which sounds a lot more Jewish than Merrill Lynch or Dean Witter Reynolds or Morgan Stanley; or Bank of America, Citi Bank, J.P. Morgan or Wells Fargo, for that matter, has a lot of important Jews who tell Washington what to do and operates as an inter-changeable government-banking complex with not merely access to the White House, but the ability to dictate to Presidents.

There is no such thing as an "international Jewish conspiracy," per se. Jews, however, are extremely intelligent people. Whether they are intelligent because they are the Chosen People, or they are the Chosen People because they are intelligent, is for God to say. They make up a small portion of the world's population (about 0.10 percent), but a relatively large percentage of successful people in positions of power, authority and influence. The biggest reason for this is because of their intelligence and work ethic, which is also called drive. They are driven, often by guilt, persecution, superiority complexes, or inferiority complexes. Their culture, from their families to their communities, strives education and professional advancement. While they are about two percent or less of the U.S. population (probably getting smaller with inter-marriage, conversion and secular/atheistic choices), one statistic says they make up a whopping 48 percent of American billionaires. The 2008 Bernard Madoff scandal, in which the perpetrator and most of his victims were Jews, mostly New York liberals, added to the conspiracy theories.

While a single cabal is not existent, it is unquestionable that they help each other. There is a "network," a loose affiliation, but this is no different than University of Michigan grads looking out for each other; women helping women; black athletes signing with black agents; or even white Christians preferring Christians. It is human nature.

But Hollywood represents this dynamic times 100. First of all, Jews tend to live in New York City and Los Angeles, the two power centers of the entertainment industry, anyway. They make up a large segment of Santa Monica, Woodland Hills, Encino and Beverly Hills, among the preferred homes and meeting places of the film crowd. Many of them prefer UCLA, which they think of as more egalitarian than the private USC, which for years was nothing less than Right-wing.

Jews are also naturally artistic. Whatever genetic trait makes somebody a violinist, a pianist, a composer, a painter, Jews have it. This is also part of their culture. It is part of a familial desire to push children to succeed. Oriental children are prodded to pick up these instruments, too. The Jews and the Orientals would not seem to have much in common, but they do. Both were shunned by society in the 19th Century, worked very hard to forge a niche in America whether through the railroads or the garment industry, and determined to prove their excellence by producing it.

So, with all of these factors in place, it is no surprise they came to Los Angeles. They found the usual prejudice there, but the population was not as great, there were no longtime institutions imbued by a century or more of discrimination against them; it was wild and open for the taking, a little grumbling aside.

The early ones, like Louis B. Mayer, figured out how to make money, through distribution. With money came the power. With power their natural artistry was allowed to produce great movies. The art form became the envy of the world. It grew from there.

The first Jewish moguls were probably too busy moving and shaking to notice the better golf clubs did not invite them. They just started their own, the Los Angeles Country Club, and made it better. They were so hard working and proud to have made it in America they just loved the place, no hold's barred. They did not have time to notice social inequities, and voted Republican.

It was their sons and daughters, probably after being shunned by some fraternity at USC or UCLA, who began to notice the slights, determine most of the slighters were the progeny of Republican captains of industry, and determined they would vote Democrat. Irony of irony, the Democrat they loved the most, the man who married Hollywood to politics, was John F. Kennedy. They conveniently paid no attention to the fact his old man was in Hollywood making money hand over fist long before JFK came around, and that he hated Jews.

Joseph P. Kennedy backed Senator McCarthy. McCarthy dated his daughter. Bobby Kennedy worked for him. JFK refused to condemn him even after he was President, calling him a great American.

It would be nice to blame Hollywood's liberalism on Joseph P. Kennedy, who seems to be to blame for many other ills of the 20th Century. He made a big splash in Hollywood and squired plenty of actresses around. When his kids grew up they gravitated toward California, which became a home away from home. With their moneyed good looks, they fit right in among the Hollywood set. But Joe Kennedy cannot be blamed for Hollywood liberalism.

JFK's PT 109 legend was built by John Hersey, who married one of Kennedy's former girlfriends, in the New Yorker. It was further embellished in a film financed by his father in 1962, starring Cliff Robertson.

JFK's life, from prep school graduation to his Congressional debut; his health, his women, his Naval career; his Pulitzer, years in the Senate, the 1960 campaign fraud; his mob ties, friendship with Frank Sinatra, affairs with Marilyn Monroe, the death of Monroe; everything in his life and the life of his family has been dissected and is known. Much of it, certainly the shady parts, was not known when he and Robert Kennedy were alive and courting votes.

The reason for this is because Kennedy was a hero of the Left. The Left controlled the media. The "job" of the Left is not to reveal truthful accounts of events that shed a bad light on heroes of the Left. Its "job" is to reveal truthful accounts of events that shed a bad light on heroes of the Right. Of all organs of the media, none is more dedicated to this task, or better at it, than Hollywood.

Had they revealed 20 percent of the truth about John Kennedy, he would not have defeated Richard Nixon in 1960. He would never have been elected President. Neither would any other Kennedy, assassinations or no assassinations. JFK likely never would have beaten Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. for Massachusetts Senator in 1952.

The Kennedy myth is only one example of the way the media has long dominated what America thinks. There is good news, however. In this beautiful nation, truth is available. There are numerous people who seek and discover the truth, and it sets them free.

Joseph P. Kennedy was a financier and industrialist who saw money-making opportunities in the movie business. So too was Howard Hughes, America's richest man. Riches denote success and hard work, the American Dream. It is the opposite of Communism, and therefore related to conservatism. Such people are more likely to be members of the Republican Party. Hughes was a Republican and a supporter of Richard Nixon. For all the aforementioned reasons, the press attacked him. His biographer, Charles Higham, claims he was anti-Semitic because a poet who once was supposed to have written something anti-Semitic was on his payroll at one time. The problem with this charge is that, unlike the true anti-Semitic charges leveled on Joe Kennedy, or the anti-Semitic charges that the mainstream press did not report about Hillary Clinton, Hughes was mostly sympathetic toward Jews. He had some "run-ins" with Jewish film executives, but this describes anybody who rose to any kind of prominence in Hollywood.

Anti-Semitism may be the root of the liberal media in America. Film critic Michael Medved reported that over the years, he has received ". . . mail from viewers and readers in all regions of the country who suspect that the disproportionate number of Jews in Hollywood leadership positions might somehow account for the alienation of the industry elite from the American mainstream. Some of these letters . . ." Medved writes, ". . . appear to be sincere attempts by basically well meaning people to understand what's gone wrong with the popular culture. Others reflect anti-Semitic attitudes of the most poisonous and pernicious variety."

Since Hollywood became a place where Jews could succeed, it became a place where they could "fight back" against the anti-Semitism they faced. Early prejudice against Jews in America helps explain why many American Communists were Jewish. When the Jews became liberal and influential in Hollywood and the media, in turn the media became liberal.

No "business in the world is so firmly associated in the public mind with the Jewish people as the American entertainment industry," said Medved. Kennedy, the son of one of the most virulent anti-Semites in the country, became associated with the Civil Rights Movement, which was populated by Jewish liberals, many in the film industry. Kennedy campaigned regularly in California, where he raised funds and lent himself to the glamour and glitz of the industry. He absolutely loved it.

Kennedy also came after McCarthy. It was the rise of Kennedy that coincided with the final ending of the Blacklist preventing Hollywood screenwriters and directors from working for a few years. Through the power of film, Hollywood painted a picture of an American Gestapo, peeking into bedrooms and trampling on the civil rights of poor liberals, some of whom happened to be millionaire Jewish Hollywood big shots. There have been more oppressed people.

Checkers

It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he'd sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl Tricia, the six-year old-named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.

\- Richard M. Nixon, 1952

The first nationally televised baseball game was the famed 1951 "shot heard 'round the world" play-off in which Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants' home run beat the Brooklyn Dodgers to secure the pennant. TV quickly became a staple of American life in the 1950s, mainly through comedy sketches and variety shows featuring funnymen and pitchmen.

Politicos at first disdained the medium as being too light, too catchy for the hard realities of national decision-making. Republican Presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower made little effort at public relations during World War II. He was an old school guy who was not much impressed with TV as a political tool. However, an event occurred during his 1952 campaign that demonstrated for the first time the great power of TV.

The Californians

Ever since the city of San Francisco decided to show off by re-building from the 1906 Great Earthquake, hosting the 1913 Panama-Pacific Exposition, California was an important state politically. World War I brought thousands of soldiers to its warm climes, many of whom stayed. By the 1920s it was the college football capitol of America. The 1932 Los Angeles Olympics demonstrated the state's "unwillingness" to "participate" in the Great Depression. Integrated USC-UCLA football games were social statements demonstrating they were ahead of the curve, while the Rose Bowl drew Midwesterners and Southerners in ways unseen since the 1849 Gold Rush.

But after World War II, the state became a juggernaut. The Arabs sided with Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, a bulwark against Israel's creation, but by 1943 the writing, as in the Book of Daniel, was on the wall: America was winning and would call the shots. An oil deal reached between President Franklin Roosevelt and Saudi King Abdel Aziz assured the flow of cheap oil to the U.S. in return for protection of the status quo with British and French de-colonization soon to come.

America was already awash in oil, huge quantities discovered mainly in Southern California and the Southwest. Highways were being built, and the car was king. A newly mobilized post-war nation, further freed by jet travel after Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the skies over California (1947), was moving to the Golden State.

In 1948 New York Governor Thomas Dewey chose California Governor Earl Warren as his Vice Presidential running mate. His election appeared a shoe-in, so much so that the Chicago Tribune announced, "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN" in a famously inaccurate headline.

By 1952 Truman was so unpopular after firing General Douglas MacArthur for escalating the Korean War when the Chinese crossed the Yalu River, that he decided not to run for re-election. The Democrats nominated Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson against the popular General Eisenhower.

"I LIKE IKE" bumper stickers were all the rage, his election seemingly in the bag. Therefore, his Vice President would be in a tremendous position to succeed him eight years later, not to mention ascend to the Oval Office if Eisenhower, a heavy smoker, had health issues. The Republicans were moving out of the "smoke-filled rooms" that previously determined candidates. The man they picked as Ike's running mate needed to represent the future of the party. After two decades of New Deal Democrats, they could not afford to blow it. With Senator McCarthy enjoying huge popularity, the Democrats unpopular, rife with Communist subversion, and the Republicans seen as patriotic defenders of freedom, the GOP appeared to have it made. But they thought that in 1948, only to be upset.

Again they looked to the West for a Vice President, only this time it was not the stodgy Governor Warren, but the 39-year old junior Senator from California, Richard M. Nixon. Senator Nixon was wildly popular in the wake of Alger Hiss's prosecution, and the publication that year of Witness by the man he operated as a majordomo for, Whittaker Chambers. But that same popularity, and particularly the divisive nature of the Hiss case, made him a giant target of outright hatred by the Democrats. Nominating him was a risk.

But California represented electoral votes. Whoever captured the Golden State and made it a lock would have a near-lock on the Presidency for several election cycles. The entire West and Southwest was growing. The region represented the spirit of rugged individualism, oil entrepreneurs, cattle ranchers, mavericks; people attuned to the "stay off my back" message of freedom espoused by the GOP.

Jim Murray was always referred to as a "literate man," an educated fellow, a guy who knew about history and politics. Part of this came from his natural desire to read about these subjects, starting at a young age and lasting all his life. But his years at Time magazine added to his frame of reference on current events, too. He was a man who would become synonymous with great sports writing, but his career in Los Angeles mirrored the entire post-war history of America, and with it the growth of Los Angeles into a "big league city."

Hollywood coverage naturally bled into politics, since the McCarthy era encompassed the Blacklist. Many members of the entertainment industry were caught up in it, whether they liked it or not. But Murray was often tasked with assignments beyond the film industry, sometimes straying into politics or other issues.

The Christian Murray was impressed by the phenomenon of the Reverend Billy Graham. In 1949, he was all the rage, touring the nation via tent revivals. The Hearst newspapers were touting Graham. Time, despite Henry Luce's conservatism, had liberal editors who disdained the country Christianity of Graham and his followers. If the rival Hearst organization favored Graham, by God they did not.

Murray saw with his own eyes how powerful Graham's message of salvation was. He reached the apex of his popularity in Los Angeles, a telling fact. Many were unable to pin a label on L.A. Its role as a movie town glamorized it, but among the citizenry it was a conservative, Christian city that tended to vote Republican. Many have argued they were swayed in this manner by the biased, right wing Los Angeles Times, but the evidence suggests the populace liked the Chandler approach, rather than being mesmerized by it.

In 1949, L.A. was filled with migrants from the South and the Midwest. Army veterans, who tended to the Right and were more likely to believe in God, were moving there in droves. Murray understood this dynamic before almost anybody.

A British man named Eldon Griffiths was an editor at the magazine. A liberal at the time (he later became a leading Tory in his home country), Griffiths satirized Graham. Elmer Gantry was a popular book and later film of the era. Graham was characterized as a real-life Gantry. Murray argued that Graham was the real thing, but lamented, "Editors would have rejected John the Baptist."

The liberalism of the magazine, however, did not make it all the way upstairs. To men like Henry Luce, the fall of a great peoples to atheistic Communism was a Biblical tragedy, one of the "signs and wonders" of the forthcoming Armageddon on top of the creation of Israel, unquestionably prophesied in The Holy Bible as a necessary precursor to the End Times.

Murray directed his pleas to the headman. It worked. He spent two weeks with Graham, who was so open he even let the scribe peruse his accounting books to verify he was not skimming the public. The resulting story was very fair to the preacher. Luce fell in love with him, making him a recurring phenomenon over many years. Murray received all of $20 for doing the Lord's work.

In 1952, Murray was given a total break from the movie scene. Some of Murray's colleagues over the years have said Murray was a "liberal" because he took the right side of the integration issue in the 1960s. Not wanting to alienate half his readership, understandably Murray played his politics close to the vest. Based on his memories of Graham, John Wayne and Richard Nixon in his autobiography, one gleans that Murray was at the very least conservative by nature, a Christian, and probably a Republican, albeit a moderate unwilling to swing too far one way or another. He may have switched parties later, but this is conjecture.

The question was posed to his widow, Linda McCoy-Murray. Whereby many who knew him well over many years were unsure, guessing he was a moderate Republican, Linda was quite sure.

"He always said he was a Democrat until he made his first $40,000, then he became a Republican," she said, laughing. "Yes, he was a 'Los Angeles Republican' of the era, in sync with the politics of Otis Chandler and the Times."

The 1952 Presidential election was a watershed in U.S. history. Had Dewey won in 1948, Warren would have become a leading national figure, very likely his successor. Nixon would have been shuffled into the second tier. Instead, Nixon was elevated to the front of the class. History would not be the same.

The original San Francisco-liberal, L.A.-conservative dynamic going back to the trans-continental railroad and subsequent migratory choices of Northerners, Southerners and Midwesterners, was essentially unchanged in the 1950s. San Francisco's role as an important port of call made it a dockworkers' union city. The spread out nature of Los Angeles was a microcosm of Westward expansion; dreamers who trended to vote GOP. Even the movie moguls of the era were self-made conservatives who achieved the American Dream against long odds. The descendants of Jewish schtetls who escaped from czarist and Communist Russia considered it their religious duty to protect and promote the American Way in their films.

The dominant American political party ranging from the age of Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to the Roaring '20s, the Republicans were dealt a hammer blow by the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt was viewed as an iconic figure, leading us in World War II. The Republicans were desperate to get back in power. A perfect storm took place in 1952.

The public turned on Truman, who was on the defensive for "losing" China to the Communists and Mao Tse-tung in 1949, and now handing half the Korean peninsula to the enemy. "Who lost China?" was an accusing Republican mantra.

The head of the Republican Party was their Senate leader, Robert Taft of Ohio, whose father, William Howard Taft, was President from 1909-13. General Dwight Eisenhower disrupted his destiny, in large measure due to the efforts of Henry Luce.

The choice of Nixon for Vice President was a sop to the Right and McCarthy's supporters. McCarthy himself had more power in the Senate than he would have riding Ike's coattails. Presidents generally came from New York, Ohio or the South. The post-war suburbanization of California meant Richard Nixon began to ride the whirlwind. Jim Murray was assigned to witness it.

The slush fund

Since Nixon was a West Coast guy, Time wanted somebody with West Coast sensibilities to cover him. There were already wholesale accusations of liberal bias in the East Coast media. Murray saw it immediately. Murray contacted a writer named Ernie Brashear, who did a two-part series on the candidate for The Nation. Brashear told Murray he wanted out of the third part of the series.

"I have asked <editor> Frieda Kirchway to take my name off of it," he told Murray. "They say some things about Nixon I didn't find to be true and I don't want my name on fabricated news."

Brashear was ashamed to admit that he knew the Los Angeles Daily News, the New York Post, and Frontier magazine were planning a big smear piece on Nixon to hit for maximum East-West effect. That night on a whistle-stop train tour, Murray had "a Bourbon or two" and warned Nixon's people, William Rogers and Jim Bassett, of the pending scandal story. They were prepared for it.

"It's going to backfire," they told Murray.

The scandal was the infamous 1952 "slush fund" story. A group of Pasadena Rotarians supposedly maintained a fund to keep Nixon "in style." Richard M. Nixon was a poor man. He came from nothing. He was dirt poor growing up. He worked his way through Whittier College and Duke University Law School, where he attended on a scholarship. He was a struggling attorney who entered the Navy during the war before he could establish a solid practice. Before he could build one after the war he was recruited by these same businessmen to run for Congress in 1946. He was a "slayer" of liberal icons; New Deal Representative Jerry Voorhis, Alger Hiss, "pink lady" Senate candidate Helen Gahagan Douglas. Now he was almost a heartbeat from the Presidency, since Ike's victory seemed a sure thing.

Rogers and Bassett under-estimated the scandal. The Washington Post and the New York Times both urged Eisenhower to drop Nixon. Murray understood the media and the public well. It was his job through years of analyzing movie likes and dislikes. Apparently a supporter of Nixon, Murray pleaded with Rogers (later the U.S. Attorney General and Secretary of State) to "meet the contretemps head on." The Nixon people kept thinking it would blow over. It never did.

Murray was along for the ride while Nixon made stops in front of heckling crowds. Nixon tried to convince the crowds how poor he was, but it did not work. The train was scheduled to go all the way to Seattle, but at two o'clock in the morning at the Benson Hotel in Portland, Nixon came downstairs. He told the assembled press boys (probably dragged from the bar and the beds of campaign groupies) that he was flying back to Los Angeles to address the issue on nationwide television.

Eisenhower waffled on whether to stick with Nixon. He was famous for making last-second decisions, as with his D-Day orders only after every scrap of information was made available. It was frustrating to Nixon.

The Nixon campaign and press contingent was scheduled to fly from Portland to L.A. on a Monday morning. His speech was scheduled the next day at five P.M. Time went to press on Monday night. If they waited until Friday, Nixon's speech would be a week old by the time it hit the streets. Murray was called by a taciturn national affairs editor named Max Weeks, "a very forbidding character, one of the lions of the company," according to Murray.

Weeks was beside himself. The slush fund was the biggest story of the year, and the most important national magazine in the country assigned not an experienced political reporter to it, but a green West Coast movie reviewer! Weeks's orders were explicit: find out whether the candidate was taking himself off the ticket . . . before the candidate announced whether he was taking himself off the ticket!

"How am I supposed to find that out?" Murray screamed at Weeks.

"Just do it." It was not a Nike commercial. It very well could mean Murray's job.

The whole way back to L.A., Murray was in misery. Nixon was boxed off from the press, in lockdown. Bill Rogers, TV producer Ted Rogers and his wife, Patricia Nixon, "protected" him from invaders. Murray figured the candidate would eventually have to use the rest room. He planted himself outside the door. Sure enough, Nixon came by.

Nixon liked Murray. He probably sensed that the writer was a supporter, and at the least a fair man who would not print lies as The Nation had done. Murray was a Los Angeleno now, making him somebody Nixon was comfortable with as opposed to the "elites" from Harvard he always despised. But their shared love of sports was the tie that binds, especially a mutual fondness for the USC Trojans. Nixon courted his wife, Patricia, a USC student of the 1930s, during football games at the Coliseum. He knew Murray to be a huge sports fan. This may have been the reason he gave the young writer a big break.

"Richard Nixon was a big USC fan," recalled Frank Gifford. "Once he called me up. My wife at the time answered the phone and said it was Richard Nixon. He came on and said, 'I think we've met, do you remember me?' He was campaigning with Eisenhower. He wanted me to campaign for him and I took him to Yankee Stadium, got him tickets. He loved sports and would use athletes, particular with California backgrounds or affiliations, to campaign with him."

"Dick," Murray pleaded of the 39-year old junior Senator, "the magazine wants me to find out what you're going to do tomorrow night." He explained the deadline dilemma. Nixon gave him due consideration, then told him to check with Jim Bassett. Bassett later came to Murray's seat, kneeling next to him.

"What would you do if your family had obligations, debts to pay, but you never took any bribes and struggled along, if your wife and your mother wore cloth coats, and you had a big mortgage?" Bassett asked. He did not tell Murray Nixon was planning to fight for the ticket or step down. At first Murray wondered why he was getting this story from the campaign aide, until it dawned on him. Bassett was "giving me the speech." It was the same speech Nixon gave during the train stops. It was the "fighting Nixon," an image the young Congressman and Senator cultivated since coming home from Naval service at Bougainville in the South Pacific.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles, Murray found a phone to call Time, assuring his editors that Nixon was staying on the ticket. The press contingent was at the Ambassador Hotel that evening. Murray repaired to the Press Club for some libations. Bill Best of United Press International found him there. Best told him UPI was coming out with a "rocket," announcing Nixon's resignation from the ticket. Murray knew that at this very moment million of copies of Time were rolling off the presses with the opposite announcement. He determined that he was the "Fred Merkle of journalism," a reference to a New York Giants rookie who failed to touch second base after a supposed game-winning hit, costing his team the 1908 pennant while earning a name still living in infamy.

Murray called Bill Rogers, explaining his predicament. Rodgers went to check with the candidate. Four minutes passed, with Murray envisioning a career as a cab driver or hamburger cook. Rogers came back. He sounding annoyed. "The candidate says, quote, Murray's got the story, what's he worried about?"

It turned out UPI's "source" was a baggage handler who told them the Nixon campaign luggage had not been checked on the train. The theory was that the campaign, if there was still a campaign, would continue as a whistle-stop. It was to continue, but not by train. They were planning to fly to Montana after the speech. It is also possible Nixon felt some affinity for Murray and wanted to give him a break. He probably felt a certain kinship with Henry Luce in the days before Time turned really Leftward. He also may have felt the UPI was an "enemy" media organization.

Whatever his motives, Nixon made his speech, one of the most famous in history. It has come to be known as the "Checkers speech." With Pat Nixon sitting to his side wearing a "respectable Republican cloth coat," Nixon provided embarrassing details of his personal finances and debts. He was not wealthy by any means. But Nixon was an "attack dog." He used the national TV time to go on the offensive.

"Now, let me say this: I know that this is not the last of the smears," he stated. "In spite of my explanation tonight other smears will be made; others have been made in the past. And the purpose of the smears, I know, is this - to silence me, to make me let up . . .

"Well, they just don't know who they're dealing with. I'm going l tell you this: I remember in the dark days of the Hiss case some of the same columnists, some of the same radio commentators who are attacking me now and misrepresenting my position were violently opposing me at the time I was after Alger Hiss . . .

"But I continued the fight because I knew I was right. And I can say to this great television and radio audience that I have no apologies to the American people for my part in putting Alger Hiss where he is today.

"And as far as this is concerned, I intend to continue the fight."

Nixon pursued the theme of "who lost China?"

"And I say to all of you that a policy that results in a loss of 600 million people to the Communists and a war which costs us 117,000 American casualties isn't good enough for America."

Then he attacked Governor Stevenson. "And I say that any man who called the Alger Hiss case a 'red herring' isn't fit to be President of the United States. I say that a man who like Mr. Stevenson has pooh-poohed and ridiculed the Communist threat in the United States - he said that they are phantoms among ourselves; he's accused us that have attempted to expose the Communists of looking for Communists in the Bureau of Fisheries and Wildlife - I say that a man who says that isn't qualified to be President of the United States."

Finally the candidate explained that his supporters did give him one thing, a dog named Checkers. It was a cocker spaniel. His small daughters, Julie and Tricia, "love the dog." Nixon said that no matter what, he was not going to give it back. It was brilliant, pulling at the heartstrings of America.

General Eisenhower wavered over whether to keep the young Senator on the ticket until Nixon finally reached him in Wheeling, West Virginia, telling the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces it was time to "(deleted) or get off the pot." After the Checkers speech, Ike gave Nixon his endorsement. He was on his way. Relieved to have the pressure off him, Nixon broke down on the plane to Montana. He started to weep on the shoulder of Copley papers writer Frank Kuest. Then Nixon eyed Murray. He turned on him, calling him a "stinking intellectual," and therefore one of the enemy. This made little sense in light of everything that happened. Murray just shrugged it off as campaign pressure.

In the aftermath of the Checkers speech, Bill Rogers credited Murray with understanding the gravity of the accusations against Nixon before anybody else did. "We should have listened to him," he stated.

"I think my years at Time solidified whatever style I came to use and be known for," Murray opined. The magazine was often lampooned for its unique style. Wolcott Gibbs of the New Yorker wrote a spoof, saying, "Backward reeled the sentences till reeled the mind." The Luce brand, pioneered by an iconoclastic co-founder of the magazine, Briton Hadden, was unorthodox and staccato, a written version of Walter Winchell, of Lowell Thomas, or Graham McNamee's radio broadcasts. It was not Murray's ultimate style.

Murray compared going from the Hearst Examiner to Time with moving from a honky-tonk to Park Avenue. It opened doors to his career, without question. At the time it was a Republican publication, but a fair one. After 1952, both he and Richard Nixon went on to their waiting destinies.

Castro

Now the trumpet summons us again - not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are - but a call to bear the burden of a long twi-light struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation' - a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

\- President John F. Kennedy, 1961 Presidential Inauguration

The Cuban Revolution and the island's subsequent alliance with Communism and the Soviet Union offer a perplexing conundrum of the Cold War. It offers a glimpse at why the movement has not been as readily identified for what it truly is as would seem obvious to so many. Communism has many stories and sub-plots. In reviewing all of them it becomes more difficult to "cartoonize" its effect, and its personalities, with the kind of blanket evil that is easily draped over Hitler and Nazi Germany. What Communism is and was is somehow separated in the minds of some, therefore distancing it from Joe Stalin.

The best way to describe the phenomenon of Communist apology would be to imagine that World War II had ended differently. The scenarios are too many to try and compartmentalize here. The Joseph P. Kennedy appeasement strategy is certainly one logical possibility. The point is, that war could have ended, or stalemated, without the U.S. and the Allies as clear victors. If Germany and the U.S. had developed the atomic bomb at roughly the same time, the two countries might have called it quits and settled into a different kind of Cold War. Perhaps the Germans might have obliterated London and the Americans returned the favor on, say, Dresden, or Munich, or even Berlin, and the result could have been a cease-fire.

Germany might have held Europe or most of it. Call it Germania. Some years ago a TV movie explored this scenario, with "Old Man Joe" Kennedy elected President. At some point, the West, or what was remaining of it, would have had to deal with Hitler, and the result might have been similar to the dealings with Stalin. This uneasy "peace" might have held, under the suspension of atomic, hydrogen and nuclear threat, for 50 years. Eventually Hitler would have retired or died. People in the U.S. would have advocated "peace," "understanding," "détente," "normalization," and all the other things the Left wanted during the Cold War with the Communists.

Liberals might view this scenario and say that under these circumstances they would have been the hard-liners fighting the good fight against Fascism, while Hitler's apologists would have been "Right-wing businessmen" vying to do business with the Germans. They would have "secretly and not-so-secretly" agreed that the Fuhrer was a bit extreme but basically "right" in his views about minorities.

This is utter hogwash.

First, there would be no reservoir of goodwill or admiration for a country we had fought a war with, with all the horrors that are associated with war. The Left might point to extremist organizations in the United States such as the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan, and say that from within these ranks would have emerged a groundswell of support for Hitler. This is incongruous. First, the American Nazi Party was a tiny, tiny group. George Lincoln Rockwell ran it out of his mother's house. It received attention because the press chose to spotlight it, but it was never a large movement. As for the KKK, the Left would have a hard time explaining these guys, who in the South were all members of the Democrat Party. West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, a longtime Democrat spokesman of major repute within party circles, was a Klansman, as was Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, an FDR appointee. It is not a coincidence that the decline of the KKK in the South took place alongside the rise of the GOP in the region. The old segregationist Dixiecrats were just spin-offs of the Democrats.

Southerners who made up the Confederacy and would be the presumed Hitlerites of this alternative Cold War would have been the highest percentage of those fighting against Hitler. That section of the nation always produces the most military personnel. Such circumstances would not produce friendship or kinship. The old Confederacy was still a Democracy, which revered the Founding Fathers, not just a few of whom were Virginians and other "sons of the South." These are not the kinds of people pre-disposed to accept and excuse totalitarianism, dictatorship or Fascism. The liberal analogy that conservatives are aligned with this kind of thought is simply that with which is false. When Pat Buchanan advocates law 'n' order, some liberal columnist will surely say something like, "It sounded better in the original German."

No, the "party of Lincoln," freedom and peace through strength would have emerged as the last line of defense against Nazism in such a Cold War. One false argument is that the Nazis would have been opposed by the liberals more because a larger number of liberals are Jewish. Over time, however, thoughtful Jews would have transferred to the conservatives, which is what happened to some extent when the so-called "neo-cons" opposed radical Islam during the War on Terror.

The Left would have been taken over by the anarchist wing and they would be the ones appeasing instead of fighting. The Middle East situation is the best example, where strong American defense is the only thing protecting Israel. If the traditional Jewish wing of liberalism still held sway, the Left would not be appeasing Middle East terror. The bottom line is conservatives always have been the protectors of American values by protecting the world through a show of strength. Liberals always have been the blame America crowd who would just as soon internationalize us.

The point of this Hitler/Cold War scenario, however, is to show that instead of the blanket condemnation of Nazism that is easily delivered from all, under different circumstances the view of Nazism would have been fuzzier. This explains why the view of Communism is fuzzier (on the Left; the Right never wavered).

Hitler would have been portrayed by some as a "liberator." For instance, the survivors of Siberia, the gulags, and the collectivist farms had it so bad under Stalin that Hitler could have been made to look better. If you "do the math," it actually ends up this way, since in the "score" of murder, Stalin beat Hitler (Mao beat them both). Many tyrants, Communist and otherwise, might have been "replaced" by Hitler. Some Western pundits would have pointed out how Hitler and Fascism restored schools and health care. This leads to the next point of discussion, Fidel Castro and Cuba.

Cuban revolution

Nowhere is this example more obvious in the Communist world than Cuba. Cuba was a country of vast inequality and squalor, where a small segment of wealthy elites ignored the needs of the massive poor. It was corrupt and run by the mob. Havana was a virtual porn shop. Live sex shows were all the rage in Havana nightclubs.

Fidel Castro changed all of this. For these reasons he has been sensationalized by the Left, who for over half a century have tried to apologize for him. The only "explanation" of Castro is that he is a monster and an immensely evil human being. The people of Cuba, despite being in a very bad situation prior to Castro, were vastly better off then than they have been during his long dictatorship. That is not in any way an endorsement of Fulgencio Batista or the Mafia, but simply describes how brutal Communism is.

To an American who cannot comprehend such a thing, the poorest black person living in the worst, most violence-prone slums of Watts or Harlem, or in the most decrepit rural hovels of the old segregationist South, had it better than average people living in Communist Cuba. Drive through the slums of Los Angeles and other big American cities. These ghettos are "paradise" in comparison to the old East Germany or modern Havana.

The horrid slums of Latin America, where children prostitute themselves and are subject to the worst abuses, crimes, diseases and despair, approach but do not exceed Communism. In Chile, for instance, many live in squalor. In Cuba, everybody (except the Marxist elite) lives in squalor. The liberals somehow like the fact that all live in squalor instead of just some. In some perverse way it is more . . . just.

The Cuban Revolution did not just "happen." The U.S. is not an innocent by-stander of it. America propped up distasteful dictators there, just as they did in other countries. This was the result of a dangerous, imperfect world situation that we found ourselves engaged in. The balance between hegemony and justice, freedom and safety, political alliance and insecurity, can be difficult to maintain. There is a standard that the United States always strives for, every time. This standard is one in which people are free, politically and economically. Circumstances very often dilute our ability to uphold this standard. The result is that many people have found themselves to be pawns in an elaborate chess game. The line between intrusion and help is blurred. The Cold War combined with American military and economic power has made it easy to blame much of the world's woes on the U.S. In so doing, the "alternate Universe" is not seen. That is the Universe in which there is no United States. There are just these places, left to fend for themselves, subject to the whims of their own indigenous peoples, the "leaders" that emerge from whatever Darwinian systems they devise. They are at the mercy of whatever larger entities decide to take advantage of them, and must deal with issues like disease and overpopulation using whatever homegrown prescriptions they invent.

Is there some set of circumstances in which this alternate Universe, the one in which America is not a country, a system, an ideal, is a better place than the one in which America does exist? The "alternate Universe scenario" is one that conjures up the continuing image of America sanctioned by God.

Doing "God's work" is not easy. The mistakes made are subject to plenty of criticism, some of it rightfully so. U.S. involvement in Cuba has seen its share of mistakes and successes. The struggle began against Spanish colonialism in the late 19th Century. According to some, "victory" was deprived from the people by a U.S. expeditionary force in 1898.

Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti visited the U.S. and wrote, "I have lived inside the monster and I know its entrails . . . Shall we bring the country dear to our hearts, virgin and fruitful, to this frenzied pack of rich against poor . . . white against black . . . Shall we deliver it into this oven of wrath, into these sharp-toothed jaws, into this smoking crater?"

At the time of the Spanish-American War, colonialism was viewed much like Manifest Destiny had been; justification for expansion. The English poet Rudyard Kipling celebrated the event in a poem inviting the U.S. to "Take up the white man's burden." This is such a controversial concept, so easy to vilify today and yet, underneath its veil of racism and oppression, there is the nagging question, "What was the alternative?"

William Randolph Hearst led the jingoistic cheering for the Cuban war, but the free press did not fall in lock step with that way of thinking. Mark Twain wrote that the expedition's U.S. flags' stripes should be painted over in black and the stars replaced by a skull and crossbones.

Cuba became an economic colony of America. U.S. troops returned on several occasions to put down revolts. By 1920, U.S. business interests owned two-thirds of the arable land. In the 1930s, the Mafia moved in. Cuba became a playground, its beautiful women made available to fulfill the lustful fantasies of rich men. Prior to Las Vegas, Havana's gambling and tourist businesses were second to none. After World War II, Cuba became a way station for heroin shipments between Europe and the U.S., the infamous "French Connection."

In response to the economic inequities, Communism always had a foothold among the poor and the disenfranchised. Communists attacked the private homes of capitalists living in the country, away from the protection of the police and military.

Also, in the 1930s, Negro League baseball made its way into Latin America. Few people know that beisbol, which has gained wild popularity throughout the region, was started by black Americans who traveled south at the behest of Latin dictators. The Negro Leaguers, who needed to play year-round in order to make a living, took advantage of good offers and warm winter weather. Dominican strongman Rafael Trujillo recruited Negro League all-stars, warning them if they lost any games executions would ensue. His team went undefeated. The teams often played for American companies operating in the region. Baseball found its way to Cuba, was a huge success, and soon excellent players emerged from the dusty fields of play.

Fidel Castro was a left-handed pitcher, reputed to have decent ability. According to some reports, the Washington Senators (an ironic twist) offered him a contract, but Castro was too involved in his law studies and radical politics to sign. What an interesting twist of fate this offers. If he had come to America and succeeded, his view of everything might have changed. Does former Senator southpaw Castro eventually attain American citizenship and get involved in the U.S. political scene? One can just picture Castro as a Democrat Congressman.

Castro did use beisbol to attract attention to his cause. As a young radical in Havana, he interrupted a game. Dressed in street clothes, he went to the mound, took the ball from the pitcher, and motioned the batter to step up to the plate. The hitter was Don Hoak, who was a top third baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates during the regular season. The legend has it that Castro threw one right at Hoak's head.

On July 26, 1953, 160 young militants attacked the Moncada barracks in Santiago. Half of them died, most after being tortured. Many went to prison.

"It was not a putsch designed to score an easy victory without the masses," explained Raul Castro, Fidel's brother. "It was a surprise action to disarm the enemy and arm the people, with the aim of beginning armed revolutionary action it marked the start of an action to transform Cuba's political, economic and social system and put an end to the foreign oppression, poverty, unemployment, ill health and ignorance that weighed upon our country and our people."

Fidel himself was captured and imprisoned.

"History will absolve me," was his defense speech. Castro saw injustice in Cuba, and determined to change it with violence. Six years after the ultimate triumph of Mohandas Gandhi, it seems that this educated man had learned little. Although he later held his Communist cards close to the vest, it seems clear even then that his role model was not the pacifist Gandhi, but the Stalinist Stalin. His goal was not equality for the masses, but power for himself. His early tenets were right out of the party line.

"The big landowners, reactionary clergy and trans-national corporations represented by Batista," were the enemy in his eyes. "The national bourgeoisie, capitalists in contradiction with imperialism, but among whom only the most progressive would support a revolution." This statement indicates Castro advocated class warfare against the successful; hoped to dilute faith in God; wanted to reduce international business; correlated making money with immorality; and tellingly implored the useful idiots, or as he describes them "only the most progressive," to cheerlead for him.

The masses Castro hoped to reach were, "The 600,000 Cubans without work. The 500,000 farm laborers who live in miserable shacks, the 100,000 small farmers who live and die working land that is not theirs, the 30,000 teachers and professors, so badly treated and paid; the 20,000 small businessmen weighed down by debts; the 10,000 young professional people who find themselves at a dead end. These are the people, the ones who know misfortune, and are therefore capable of fighting with limitless courage."

The problem, as with all problems, is that while Castro effectively identified the problem, he never offered a solution. Were the "20,000 small businessmen weighed down by debt" better off when their small businesses were nationalized by Castro?

A former Army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista ran Cuba. Batista was a terrible ruler who was an open partner of the Mafia, who in turn co-existed with large corporations from the U.S. banking, telephone and agricultural industries. Batista saw that Castro had a following, and tried to evoke some "legitimacy" by releasing him, along with other Moncada survivors in May, 1955. Castro was more or less "exiled" to Mexico amid rising repression. In Mexico he met the Argentinean doctor, Che Guevara.

In November of 1956, Castro set sail by yacht for Cuba, proclaiming to his followers that, "We will be free, or we will be martyrs." 82 men waded ashore, where Batista's planes strafed them. Pursued by U.S.-supplied troops, there was betrayal within their ranks and they faced ambush.

12 partisans escaped and began guerrilla warfare in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra. On August 21, 1958, Castro ordered Che and Camilo Cienfuegos to lead two columns down from the Sierra Maestra. The story of Castro and Che, their close calls with planes, pursuit by American-equipped forces, betrayal by a guide, eventual escape and revolutionary existence in the mountains, began to take on legendary status. They were like ghosts, rebel images in the minds of a repressed people. The revolucion grew among the poor and the peasants. Castro's fighters took the town of Santa Clara, and word of his successes created a frenzy of excitement among the Havana citizenry.

On New Year's Eve, 1958, while Havana partied, Castro's forces made their play, catching Batista's army off guard. It was brilliant, executed perfectly, took a lot of guts, and was popularly supported. Few major events have taken place so quickly.

Batista fled Havana at two A.M., on New Year's Day, 1959, replaced by a military junta. Camilo and Che continued to lead guerrilla columns into Havana. Workers and peasants heeded Castro's call for a general strike, and he was able to seize power.

20,000 died in the revolution. On January 8, 32-year-old Castro entered Havana. He ordered 50,000 rifles and machine guns to be imported to defend the revolution. The rural Cuban population had an average annual income of $91.25 per person. 11 percent of Cubans drank milk, four percent ate meat, two percent had running water, and 9.1 percent had electricity. Three percent had intestinal parasites, 14 percent had tuberculosis, and 43 percent were illiterate. These figures indicate that in Cuba, capitalism had not succeeded, and the long-term goals the U.S. had for the island when they fought the Spanish had failed.
Of course, the conditions in Cuba at its lowest point were considerably better than the conditions of Stalin's collectivist farm population in the 1930s, when millions died. Nevertheless, Fidel Castro and his supporters were willing to embrace that political system with the hopes that it would succeed. In the beginning, they masked their intent just enough to raise the question as to whether they really were Marxists. Castro "went Communist" under the Republicans less than a decade after China had gone down the road to hell under the Democrats (albeit, Castro did not "officially" go to the Marxists until after the Bay of Pigs, a little over two years later).

The decision was made, to back Batista. Considering what history tells us about Castro's political jails, torture chambers and willingness to allow global military instability in order to gather attention for his ego, it appears unquestionable that Batista was the better choice. To use the old saw, he was the "lesser of two evils." Make no mistake, Batista was a bad guy, but if he had stayed there might have been hope on the island. Money, which was the corrupting force in Batista's life, also has the power to do good. Cuba was not a foregone conclusion. In fact, with all the rich Americans who were going there, the chances are very good that over time the poverty of Havana's streets would have become a major outrage. The forces of good that drive America would have demanded a change on those streets.

The Philippines is a country that liberals might point to as one "exploited" by America. It has been exploited to the tune of billions and billions of dollars transferred by us to them. A lot of servicemen have had a lot of uncommitted sex with a lot of Manila bargirls, which has made a lot of Filipino men mad at American men. Poverty is still rampant on their streets. The U.S. propped up a dictator named Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe-buying wife. But America also fought alongside the Filipinos like blood brothers against the Japanese. The Filipino people had ample opportunity to see examples of other countries' "exploitation." Our Naval base was a major boon to their economy, and when for political reasons we were asked to leave, we did just that. The relationship is not perfect, but there is no other major power on Earth that would have made a better partner for the Philippines than the U.S. The bottom line is that the Filipino people have resisted Communism, and now they are resisting terrorism. When all is said and done they are happy that America has been with them, not against them.

Other Latin countries have had legitimate complaints with the U.S. The nature of our relationships with Latin America would be all but impossible to avoid complaint, but they have had the common sense to resist the alternative. Castro did not resist the alternative. His political message was not based on a desire to help the people of Cuba. He thirsted for power like a drug. He lacked morals, and at the heart of his revolution was pure class envy. He wanted to put the "high and mighty" in their place. He hated wealth and American success. He saw in the poverty of Cuba's indigenous population suffering, and determined that such a thing had to be blamed on somebody. Disease and economic deprivation, in his view, simply had to be the sole responsibility of Fulgencio Batista and criminal gambling interests, as if such quirks in the structure of society had never been seen in the history of Mankind. More than 50 years later, he and his utopian vision have managed to create the equality he so desired. Now everybody has nothin'.

The first announcement of the new government was that the casino profits would be directed to welfare programs, which must have made Meyer Lansky's day. "Land reform" was scheduled for May. That term had been the great bogeyman term in Guatemala, where the CIA mistakenly thought it was blatant Stalinist-type redistribution from the wealthy to the people (which in Communism means some apparatchik). The Leftists, who after Guatemala (and were beginning to hate the CIA more and more) said "land reform" was just sound economic policy. This time, "land reform" really did mean stealing.

Large estates were expropriated and turned into state farms. The American-owned

United Fruit Company was taken over with no compensation. As if no lessons had been learned from the Soviet gruppe, farms were immediately collectivized. The new government offered to let the Americans buy back the property that was stolen from them. The Eisenhower Administration told Castro to take a hike.

Castro was immediately hailed as a hero of the Left. He was invited to New York to address the United Nations, where he made a scathing speech excoriating American "imperialism." He was then taken to a soiree in Manhattan, where a coterie of fawning political Leftists, theatre types and actual showgirls dressed in full costume bathed him with adoration.

Bay of Pigs

As in China, the big question was, How could this have happened? How could the CIA have allowed it? Who was this bearded Marxist, anyway? Recriminations aside, the Company knew that that their hardest work was now ahead of them. In 1959, they began monitoring telephone conversations of Cuban leaders, and transmitted subversive radio messages to Cuba from Miami, the Bahamas and Central America. Thousands of Cubans escaped the island, and immediately formed up to take it back. The face of Miami changed immediately, from a Southern backwater to a salsa town filled with the most anti-Communist people this side of Budapest. By 1960, saboteurs were operating inside Cuba.

My mid-1960, the U.S. sugar quota from Cuba was cut off. Castro nationalized the mills. In response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended that President Eisenhower launch a military invasion. Visions of the Normandy beaches danced in their heads. Richard Nixon, thinking he would be President when the invasion took place, backed it 100 percent. The CIA and the military went into full-scale operation, training dedicated Cuban exile forces. During the first Nixon-Kennedy debate, having been briefed on the plan but knowing Nixon could not comment on it publicly, JFK charged the administration with negligence in failing to do anything about Castro. Nixon chose not to violate national security, and "lost" the debate (although those listening on radio thought he had won, as opposed to TV viewers mesmerized by Kennedy's looks vs. Nixon's "five o'clock shadow"). This was the exact opposite of what President Barack Obama did when he violated national security in order to enhance his image during the 2012 Presidential campaign.

When Kennedy "won" the election, he was presented with the invasion plan. He was skeptical of it, and in fact already had healthy doubts about the military rooted all the way back to his Naval career. His Presidential experience would increase his doubts about the armed forces, particularly the top leadership. Negative feelings about the military and CIA would become a Kennedy and Democrat doctrine. It all started with the Bay of Pigs.

As the invasion approached the Cuban coast on April 16, Fidel Castro announced that in fact Cuba was a Communist satellite. At two A.M. on April 17, 1,500 Cuban counter-revolutionaries landed at the Bay of Pigs. Castro directed a counter-attack, using Soviet-supplied weapons. The Committee for the Defense of the Revolution rounded up thousands of anti-Communists.

The invading force suffered from bad planning, compromised intelligence and poor leadership. Some day documents may surface showing what Americans were spying for the Communists. Discredited McCarthyism probably saved the traitors from an aggressive investigation at the time. Landing craft found themselves on the wrong beaches. Forces were stranded in the water, facing strafing fire while they slowly disembarked. In the end, however, the operation failed because President Kennedy refused to provide air cover, which would have demonstrated what everybody knew anyway, which is that it was an American operation. It was not thought through. The force was destroyed in less than 72 hours, and the U.S. suffered a major defeat in the Cold War.

Kennedy took responsibility, which is fair since he was the President. After all, he wanted the job. Since it was not his plan, and he was only in office three months when it was put into action, it is fair to say the blame should not be put entirely on his shoulders. However, it was too important an event, with such wide-reaching consequences, to not assess responsibility. It went so badly for so many people (in particular millions of Cubans imprisoned to this day), because of his failure to use the jets that would have turned the tide and allowed the force to succeed, that he must be blamed.

"The anti-imperialist, Socialist revolution could only be one single revolution, because there is only one revolution," Castro explained, confirming conservative suspicion of Communism as being a truly international war, each proxy tied to the other rather than individual acts of aggression against "poor agrarian farmers." "That is the great dialectic truth of humanity: imperialism, and, standing against it, Socialism. I am a Marxist-Leninist and I shall be a Marxist-Leninist until the last days of my life." Castro then thumped the table in front, imitating Nikita Khrushchev, who took his shoe off to pound for emphasis when he told the U.S. (at the U.N.), "We will bury you."

Some look at the "mistake" of the Bay of Pigs and proffer the fiction that we "turned Castro into a Communist," as if he was not one until we ruffled his feathers. This is ridiculous, and is instructive towards the modern argument that militarists in the U.S. "brought on" terrorism. Just as Castro was a Communist all throughout the revolution, a fact confirmed by thousands of witnesses, terrorists were terrorists before and after 9/11.

It has never been successfully explained why Communists call the U.S. "imperialist," other than it sounds like a good put-down. This, of course, like 99 percent of things Communists ever say, is simply that with which is a lie. The fact that it is a lie is knowledge possessed by millions. They still use the term. Imperialism is another word for monarchism, which the U.S. fought against to become a country. Its framework, which rewards hard work with success regardless of title, name or ancestry, is a major reason why monarchism has all but disappeared as a political entity. England, influenced wholly by America, first abandoned its colonial ambitions and thus its empire, while reducing its monarchy to a mere formality. The single greatest influence in this turn of events was the United States. Certainly the Mafia influence that so infuriated Castro was anything but imperialistic.

With the Bay of Pigs a failure, the Company then stepped its operations into higher gear. Plans for economic sabotage, bacteriological warfare, economic blockade and repeated attempts to assassinate Castro were put into place, some carried further than others.

Cuban Missile Crisis

In 1961, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev met with President Kennedy in a "summit meeting" in Vienna, Austria. The veteran Soviet politician determined JFK was a "rookie," badly shaken by the Bay of Pigs, inexperienced and maybe even too incompetent to handle the pressures of his office. He decided to engage in a major escalation of "adventurism," unthinkable when President Eisenhower was in office, and equally unthinkable had Richard Nixon succeeded Ike instead of JFK. Instead America had a boyish playboy with no past accomplishments under his belt at the helm.

Khrushchev decided to place intermediate-range missiles in Cuba, doubling the Soviet strategic arsenal. Fidel Castro calculated this to be the best way to make a major statement against the West. He approved the Soviet installation of nuclear missiles, some 90 miles from the Florida coast.

On October 15, 1962 reconnaissance photos revealed missiles under construction. President Kennedy organized the EX-COMM, a group of 12 leading advisors, who debated over a week's time. A Naval quarantine was ordered around Cuba. He wished to prevent the arrival of more Soviet offensive weapons on the island.

"We're eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked," Secretary of State Dean Rusk said when the Soviets turned from the blockade.

One week later, Kennedy told the nation of the discovery of missile installations and the quarantine of the island. Any launched from Cuba would be regarded as an attack on the United States by the Soviet Union, he stated, demanding their removal. Tensions escalated amidst more low-level reconnaissance missions. On October 25 the U.S. pulled the quarantine line back, raising military readiness to DEFCON 2. On the 26th EX-COMM heard from Khrushchev via a letter, in which the Soviet Premier emotionally described the horrors of war, and how he did not wish to subject the Russian people to it any more.

On October 27 an American U-2 spy plane was shot down, and a second letter raised doubts over the first; was Khrushchev in charge or had he been deposed by a coup? A new demand that the U.S. remove their missiles in Turkey in exchange for Soviet missiles in Cuba was issued. This was a breakthrough, a way for the Soviets to save face and extricate themselves from the crisis, since the missiles were scheduled from removal in Turkey anyway.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy suggested ignoring the second letter. He contacted Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to tell him of the U.S. agreement with the first. On October 28 Khrushchev announced dismantling of the installations and the hope re-enactment of the Bay of Pigs could be averted. The United States demanded that Soviet light bombers be removed from Cuba.

"Nuclear catastrophe was hanging by a thread . . . and we weren't counting days or hours, but minutes," recalled Soviet General and Army Chief of Operations Anatoly Gribkov.

The missile crisis was so grave in its consequence that both sides were willing to compromise. America's end of the bargain, along with removing Jupiter missiles from Turkey (as planned) was to promise not to invade again. This fact of history has been overlooked by too many.

America's promise not to invade was accepted. We kept that promise. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there existed no entity to stop the U.S. from invading and conquering Cuba. The only thing preventing this was the decision by America not to do it, based on the principle that they gave their word not to. Had the Communists made such a promise, it only would have been kept by the vigilance of the U.S. military seeing to it that breaking the promise would not be worthwhile. Otherwise, any promises they made were no more believable than Stalin's assurances that Eastern Europe would have free elections.

Res ipsa loquiter.

Che

Of all images and icons of Communism, perhaps none is more infuriating to conservatives than Ernesto "Che" Guevara. He is a conundrum, a reminder that somehow, despite a century's worth of slaughter, despite so much history and so much horror, somehow Communism does not register on the template of evil the way Nazism or perhaps even slavery and racism do, even though it is just as bad if not far worse.

Known by history by his first name like Marilyn or Michael or Madonna, Che was born in 1928. An Argentine Marxist revolutionary, he became a physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist. Castro brought him in as a leading Cuban revolutionary. His good looks and intellectualism captivated the revolutionary Left. He was the ultimate in radical chic. His stylized, ubiquitous image is today a counter-cultural symbol of global rebellion on t-shirts worldwide. Many a partygoer enters a happening nightclub where a poster of Che peers out at hot girls and hard-charging revelers who have not the slightest clue a murderer and torturer is so featured. Dr. Guevara's popularity with the young and the liberal is as disgusting as t-shirts featuring Dr. Josef Mengele would be.

Guevara traveled throughout Latin America, where he was radicalized by poverty. He determined the reason economic inequalities and the failed result of capitalism, monopolism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. He advocated Communist-style world revolution.

After working for the Guatemalan Socialist President Jacobo Arbenz, who was assassinated in a CIA-assisted coup d'état, he moved to Mexico where he met Raúl and Fidel Castro. He joined the 26th of July Movement, sailed to Cuba, and entered the revolution against Fulgencio Batista.

Guevara was made second-in-command, playing a major role in the revolution. During and after the Cuban Revolution, Guevara used his medical skills to torture thousands of prisoners and oversaw the murder of many thousands of "war criminals" via firing squad or other methods. While he probably was not responsible for killing and maiming as many humans, by sheer numbers, as Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the "angel of death" at Auschwitz, to discount the comparison is to engage in moral relativism.

He helped Castro consolidate his power in Cuba as Stalin had in the U.S.S.R., by liquidating and imprisoning enemies. It is interesting to note that he engaged in a bloodthirsty campaign instead of instituting the so called "national health care" that remains the great lie of Castro's Socialist "paradise," not to mention refutation of the famed Hippocratic Oath taken by all physicians. He wrote diaries, falling in love with himself like the Greek figure of mythology, Narcissus. Apparently thinking himself a god who could not be killed, Che left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution throughout the world. After failing to turn Congo-Kinshasa into a Communist nation (four years after the CIA-backed assassination of Patrice Lumumba), he attempted Communize Latin America. Frustrated at how he could not turn local populations away from Christianity and Catholicism, he failed again. In 1967 the Central Intelligence Agency caught up to Che, executing him in Bolivia.

He remains a revered martyr of the worldwide Left. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century. The Alberto Korda photograph of him entitled "Guerrillero Heroico," was declared by the Maryland Institute College of Art as "the most famous photograph in the world."

The last bastion

Backed by Russia, Cuba was able to stay solvent during the Cold War. There is no doubt that Castro proved to be a charismatic leader in the face of tremendous pressure. However, he remains an example of how difficult it is to find great men in politics. A study of Castro cannot help but increase the admiration of other leaders who overcame adversity, like Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Unfortunately for the beautiful island nation of Cuba, Castro was in the end just another tin pot dictator.

In 1999, about 1,000 of Cuba's ruling elite, foreign diplomats and cultural personalities gathered amid massive security to view Castro's return to the scene of the crime. The event was extremely telling. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs saved Castro. Those two conflagrations between Communism and freedom, occurring in Kennedy's first two years in office, were the best things that could have happened to Fidel.

The invasion failed, hurting American prestige and making Castro a sympathetic figure; the lonely beacon of "Socialist humanity" fending off the imperialists. Regardless of the lack of truth behind this premise, it is a wildly intoxicating image. Many in and out of the U.S. are uncomfortable enough with American displays of power to buy into it.

When the Berlin Wall came down, some thought Castro would go down with it. His survival in the intervening years is an accomplishment. Castro's "popularity" comes from that wing of liberalism identified earlier as "Emma Goldman anarchism." There remains in America and the world a strain of anti-Establishment thought that chooses to protest everything.

In 2000, Kevin Costner starred in a film called 13 Days, about the Cuban Missile Crisis. While Fidel is not a subject of the movie, a showing of it was aired in Havana. Costner, supposedly a fairly conservative fellow from the Republican enclave of Orange County, California, came away raving about Castro. During the period prior to September 11, 2001, a coterie of Hollywood big shots ranging from Steven Spielberg to Jack Nicholson paid homage in the form of personal visits to Castro, as if he were a liberal potentate, a godfather of their "cause." Each came away filled with admiration over his intellect, his leadership qualities, and health care system.

Castro hung all of his Socialist prestige on Cuba's national health care system. It probably would be rated in the upper 20 percent of health care systems in Latin America, which is not a lot to brag about, but it has some merits. Michael Moore made a documentary in which he visited Cuba, attempting to portray the lie that it is better than America's health care system, a statement so absurd as to be beyond belief, except liberals actually believe it! At least they try to believe it. Deep down nobody can actually believe it, but the idea, the hope, the dream, the fallacy and the myth remains a tantalizing goal of the Left that perhaps, if wished upon long enough and hard enough, some day could happen. Or not.

When America went to war with Iraq in 2003, large demonstrations were organized. The mainstream press simply chose not to tell the public this, but the Workers' World Party, a Communist organization, organized the great majority of the protests. This organization is a relic of the old Communist Party U.S.A. They no longer espouse the straight Communist line, which is simply been proven too false even for them. But the radicals who loved Communism, or thought it was just some kind of normal human grasp for freedom and quality that went too far, were driven not so much by an ideology but by hate for America. The hatred for America stems from simply feeling that America is just too strong, too powerful, and too successful. These kinds of accomplishments are glaring examples of why they were wrong and the Right was right. They are not yet at the stage where they can freely admit they were wrong, so they search for things to get mad about.

In 1999, this sentiment manifested itself when protests were organized against globalization in Seattle, Washington. The patron saint of these people is Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who protested progress and technology. It re-enacts itself whenever the World Trade Organization meets, usually manifesting in crime and violence. Its ghost lives in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Some anti-war protesters are average citizens who wish to avoid war, and in this respect their opinion is worthwhile and even admirable, regardless of whether one agrees with them or not. But the majority of the protesters are of the "professional" variety, motivated solely by envy. To describe them succinctly is to identify people who are offended by success, because success makes their failures more obvious. There is nothing admirable about that. Barack Obama, using the methods of Saul Alinsky and working with ACORN, rose to power as a community organizer amid this world. This is an extension of the race extortion methods of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.

These people are the ones who deify Castro and hang up posters of Che. If they lived in Cuba, their unorthodox lifestyles and desire to make their feelings loudly, publicly known, would make them the first to land in political jails. To this day, Castro imprisons anybody who attempts even the slightest criticism of him, or tries to achieve any political power. Why people still admire Castro and the thinking behind it is so irrational nobody can really explain it.

Talk show host Michael Savage goes so far as to say it is a mental defect, an actual sickness. This at first seems to be typical Right-wing bluster, but if one were to take away the names, personalities and politics, he might just have something. If a scenario were presented, in which a man leads a revolution and then becomes so corrupted by it that he becomes a mass murderer and prison warden, the average person would quickly identify his evil. Castro's Cuba was George Orwell's Animal House after the fact. People who admire him should be viewed as oddities, like women who pine for imprisoned serial killers. Yet some of these people include major figures of the art world, such as Nobel laureates Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia and Jose Saramogo of Portugal. Oliver Stone went to visit Castro and make a documentary. He determined Castro is one of the wisest men on Earth. His portrayal was so flattering the rabidly liberal HBO refused to produce it, since it in essence glorified a mass murderer. There is obviously something hypnotic about Castro, a la Hitler, which makes one think maybe the devil is involved in this whole thing. While Leni Riefenstahl has been reviled her whole life for making propaganda films for the Nazis, a guy like Stone goes right out and makes something far more blatantly political than her purely symbolic, quasi-innocent works of the mid-1930s.

Castro's 1999 celebration of the 40th anniversary of the revolution had the odd appearance of a rogue's gallery of Mafioso celebrating the Appalachia conference in prison, or a bunch of murderers celebrating their tradecraft. Wearing his olive-green military uniform, Castro described his victory on January 1, 1959.

"I felt for a moment a strange sense of emptiness," he said, to leave behind the "hard, pure and healthy" life of a guerrilla to take over Cuba, ignoring the fact he left the citizenry to a life of harshness while he lived like a king with mistresses prostituted for his needs, and all the other special benefits he gets that the people do not.

"I am not interested in power nor do I envisage assuming it at any time," Castro lied to the crowds in 1959. 40 years later, he held as firm a grip of power on his country as any despot on Earth. In the early 2000s, some private dissent was allowed in Cuba, but in 2003 Castro decided to end it. He rounded up political prisoners, and as those words were spoken they languished in jails, just as Stalin's prisoners did. There was no opposition.

For 50 years, the U.S. imposed an economic embargo on Cuba. There are many demands to lift it. Every administration has wisely chosen not to. Castro is evil, his ideology is evil and defeated, and he deserves to fall, not be propped up by the United States. There is little evidence his Communist economic policies would allow for foreign money to be used effectively for the benefit of his people anyway.

Castro's admirers point out that in addition to Cuba's "excellent physicians," illiteracy has been wiped out in Cuba and it is a baseball power. These may be admirable things, but with all due respect this information should be taken with a grain of salt. Reports of literacy, health care and such have the potential of being lies. Maids in hotels that cater to wealthy foreigners make far more money than doctors, so how can it make any sense that the "health care system" is any good? Liberals want to believe a shack with sign that reads "hospital" on it is available for all, meaning they have good health care. If the medicine is scarce, the tools archaic, the doctors poorly trained and the Hippocratic Oath an empty promise, then it is not good health care. As for its baseball powers, numerous great baseball players from Cuba have been willing to brave shark-infested waters to come to America and play there. The fact that the populace is close to perpetual starvation is a fact that even Castro's PR people have not hidden. Literacy and "national health care" in Cuba would be 800 percent better off under free market capitalism, as they have been throughout the world.

Right now, the country, despite excellent natural resources, produces little and relies on the tourist trade. Castro, who dressed women in fatigues and propped them up as symbols of Western exploitation, "saved" by his revolution, now oversees a country where tourists can get any kind of action they want at the drop of a hat. In certain hotels, gorgeous Cuban women (and this country is famous for them) dress in sexy outfits and, for the price of a beer and a hot dog, readily perform hardcore sex acts worthy of the most extreme porn movies for these men. The aforementioned "maids" at hotels all happen to be in their 20s and are mouth-watering. The "services" they provide go well beyond cleaning the bathroom. Those who have been there and done that describe it as being like a "kid in a candy store." Is this part of Castro's "success story"?

If Fidel Castro had any decency, he would step down and allow an economic system to take over in which an attractive woman could be educated and use her brains to succeed as an entrepreneur or valuable contributor to a company, instead of a Latina sex fantasy.

In 2000, a young child named Elian Gonzalez was with his mother, who wanted to escape the island, getting on a boat to come to America. The boat went down in the Atlantic, the mother died, but Elian was saved. Castro carted out his father and demanded the boy back, as if living in a Communist hovel was better than staying with successful relatives in Miami. President Bill Clinton decided to do Fidel's bidding. He sent Federal forces in to retrieve Elian. The photo of the frightened boy staring into the barrel of a weapon pointed at his eyes remains a fitting symbol of Bill Clinton's legacy.

Cuban exile leaders in Florida have come to despise Castro with an intensity rarely seen this side of Shiite Muslim Mosques. Recognizing the Democrats were Castro's toadies while the Republicans held the line, the Miami Cuban community became one of the most solid Republican bases in the country. During the 1999 Castro "love fest" in Havana, exiles scorned the anniversary of "blood and tears," while reminding the world to remember nearly 400 prisoners of conscience who were in Cuban prisons at that time. Reportedly, Castro has greatly added to that number.

The Third World still supports Fidel, as do Russia, North Korea, China and Venezuela. He is a hero in France. The French apparently love dictators as long as they hold their boots to the necks of someone other than them. Portugal and the Vatican sent messages to the 40th anniversary.

In the early 1980s, Castro embarrassed Jimmy Carter, who was pleased when Castro agreed to release all his prisoners. After Carter agreed to take them Castro sent his worst drug dealers, rapists, child molesters and various other charmers in what was called the Mariel Boat Lift. In 1994 tens of thousands of Cubans crossed shark-infested seas to Florida in flimsy boats. Four years later, Pope Paul II came to pay his respects, which in light of recent Catholic Church revelations should raise serious questions about that organization's leadership. Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien arrived to kiss Castro's ring. The King of Spain, still smarting apparently from Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, gave Castro whatever little credibility his throne bestows, along with other Spanish-speaking heads of state who think their nation's peasants will give them some points for it. Occasionally something like the Ibero-American Summit in Havana takes place and Castro is carted out to speak to people who have decided that the only reason there is pollution and disease in the world is because of America.

What many forget is that the people who backed Castro in the revolution wanted Democracy. Instead, they got the motto, "Socialism or death," which does not sound very Democratic. Many got their share of death. Castro actually was a believer in Truman's "Domino Theory." He thought Cuban Communism would influence the rest of Latin America.

Some years ago, the Cuban coast guard attacked a group of women and their young kids because they were against Socialism. The women begged for the lives of their children. The coast guard took a high powered hose and washed the people off the deck of the boat and into the water to drown.

College, technical school and specialized education is all free in Cuba. The problem is that these skills cannot be used by citizens to make worthwhile careers for themselves under their system. Public libraries are available in Cuba, but thousands of great books by Western authors are unavailable because they promote ideas that do not square with the Communist ideal. Castro claims nobody living in Cuba is living in poverty, and only five percent of Cubans are unemployed. However, since virtually everybody lives in poverty by Western standards, but the poverty is spread equally, he calls this "no poverty." "Employment" is a title, but there is no money and little future in most Cuban occupations.

Cubans do not have the right to travel in and out of the country, without special permission from the government. They do not have freedom of speech, freedom of expression, or the right to own electronic or print media. Industries are run or owned by the government. Outside of a few old school Leftists, they are an international pariah. The choice to make the United States an enemy has cost this country and its people beyond the stated value of money. Castro's horrid atheism, officially imposed on this once-Catholic nation, caused even more deprivation. Cuba is almost without a soul, robbed of traditional family values. Its people live day-to-day, starving for food, opportunity, money, respect and freedom. They are told that because they can get a shot for their venereal diseases at some free clinic, they live in paradise. Fidel Castro is everything America has always stood against, and because of that the world, thankfully, has very few Fidel Castros. But for the people of Cuba, this is an ironic joke played on them every day.

The Kennedys: American Royalty

Joe Kennedy is one of the biggest crooks who ever lived.

\- Sam Giancana

I helped Joe Kennedy get rich.

\- Frank Costello

Joe always found great favor in Hitler. He would have loved to see him succeed.

- Morton Downey, Jr.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy is generally considered one of the greatest Presidents in American history. He consistently ranks with Ronald Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt in polling. His international standing is extremely high, too, especially in France and Germany. He is nothing less than an icon of the Democrat Party. While it is understandable that average Americans are not familiar enough with Theodore Roosevelt, or consider Abraham Lincoln and George Washington to be "ancient history," it is nevertheless impressive that Kennedy ranks as highly as he does. Depending on the poll or who you ask, he is likely to compare with Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, who are relatively recent Presidents and heroes to many.

However, it is difficult if not impossible to judge Kennedy without judging his family. This applies to every member of the most famous clan in American history. All of them are inextricably linked to each other. Being a Kennedy has special responsibilities that come with enormous privileges. To be a member of this family and even the extended family of in-laws, inside friends and advisors, is to be privy to wealth, prestige, political influence and notoriety on a scale that no other family approaches. Some have used this privilege wisely. Others have abused it brutally. Many people have benefited from the Kennedy family. Many have had their lives ruined. They are nothing if not scandal-ridden fodder for the tabloids, yet they have done much noble work.

There other dynasties in American history. There were the Adams's, the Roosevelts, and now the Bush family shows the potential to supplant the Kennedys in the 21st Century. But none ever has nor ever will capture the imagination - for good or ill - of the glamorous Kennedys.

"Old Man Joe" shorts the Great Depression

The Kennedy family does not start with Joseph P. Kennedy, but everything before flowed to him. Everything since emanates from him. The further a Kennedy can distance him or herself from "Old Man Joe" Kennedy, the better off they are. Joe Kennedy is very possibly the single worst American of the 20th Century. The question of "worst American" is a subjective one, counting only people of prominence who were in a position of power, influence and were supposed to make use of their position in a legal manner beneficial to society.

Therefore, mob figures and serial killers are not "eligible." But corporate tycoons, military men, religious figures, entertainers and politicians are eligible. Kennedy was a corporate tycoon, a politician, an entertainment executive who had de facto religious influence, and was also intricately involved in military affairs. He advocated keeping America military out of World War II. Two of his sons were military heroes. He orchestrated a public relations campaign that blew John's Naval experience so far out of proportion it propelled him to the White House. Finally, unbelievably, a Navy destroyer was named after him. In addition, Kennedy was for all practical purposes a mob figure for decades, although his participation in Mafia activities was more carefully chosen than the Sicilian families who chose to do their business less publicly than Kennedy. When American boys were dying in World War I, Joe was enriching himself through deceptive business practices. He never served a day in the military. Americans lost everything in the Great Depression, while Joe enriched himself further through deceptive business practices that directly "benefited" from the losses of others.

The Kennedys have experienced tremendous tragedy, some intensely personal, some part of the national experience. Many have labeled this the "Kennedy curse." If there is such a thing as a "curse," or "bad Karma," it can be attributed first to Joe Kennedy. In the end he was rendered helpless by stroke and forced to watch two of his sons felled by assassin's bullets. As it says in Luke 6:37, "Do not judge, and you will not be judged." But human beings are not judges. Knowing what judgment is and to be wary of it is different than judging. A human being may consider that God renders Earthly judgment for public consumption upon evil men. Joe Kennedy was an evil man. While many historians might be accused of rendering judgment on Joe Kennedy, the simple truthful description of his life is to describe evil acts, which is different from judgment. What is speculative is the considered possibility that the 20th Century "success" of the Kennedys resulted from Joe Kennedy calling forth Satan and making a deal with the devil. This is entirely unproven, but Christians fundamentally believe it is within all possibility. Then again, he appears to have been punished in this life when he watched in mute agony while both John and Robert were assassinated. This seems a hope of salvation for him. It is better to be punished in this life than the next. If punished in the next, there is no hope.

When Joe Kennedy graduated from Harvard in 1912, his father got him a job as a state bank examiner. With access to useful information about the confidential affairs of companies and individuals who had credit lines with major Boston banks, he knew who was in trouble and which had extra cash, who was planning new products or acquisitions, and who was about to be liquidated.

A former classmate named Ralph Lowell recalled that Joe's strategy was to obtain inside information about troubled banks, then drive their stock down to purchase them on the cheap. While still on the state payroll as a bank examiner, he acquired inside information that allowed him to buy the Boston investment company Old Colony Realty Associates, Inc. He made them into a company that made money on the misery of others.

They specialized in taking over defaulted home mortgages, re-painting the houses, and re-selling them at far higher prices. When he dissolved the company, Joe's $1,000 investment was worth $75,000.

He made alliances with members of the press, including William Randolph Hearst. Glowing Kennedy successes stories were printed. He was elected president of Columbia Trust, which was owned by Joe's father and his friends.

He assumed control of Columbia Trust, borrowing money from other family members who were never repaid. Kerry McCarthy, Joe's grandniece who interviewed some of those people for a research paper, said, "I found money was loaned to him by family members and not repaid. Since it was family, he didn't feel there was a need to."

In 1914, Joe married Rose Fitzgerald, daughter of Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald. In 1917, with World War I already in progress, most of Joe's friends from Harvard already volunteered to serve. Joe had no intention of fighting.

"Joe was accommodated to skip the draft during World War I because of a lot of pressure from his father-in-law," said Daniel Strohmeier, vice president of Bethlehem Steel, who "employed" him as part of a deal to avoid military service.

After the war, Kennedy went to work for the venerable Boston stock brokerage firm Hayden, Stone and Company, when Mayor Fitzgerald promised to swing business to the firm if they hired his son-in-law.

Galen Stone, a friend of Joe's father-in-law, taught his protégé how to make huge sums of money off unsuspecting investors by trading on inside information, which was not illegal but was unethical. Joe made money because of his privileged position at Hayden, Stone.

"It's so easy to make money in the market we'd better get in before they pass a law against it," Kennedy told friends. "It was easy, as long as one was willing to breach trust," one of his friends said.

Joe made large sums through stock pools, manipulating the market by forming syndicates and arranging for members to trade with each other. By bidding the price of the stock higher, the pool members created the appearance that the public was bidding up the price. In fact, the syndicate members retained the profits. The public bit by joining the action, at such time the syndicate members sold out, leaving the public with losses. Joe called this "advertising the stock."

On January 29, 1919, the 18th Amendment was ratified, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, transportation, or importation of "intoxicating liquors" for "beverage purposes."

Kennedy formed alliances with crime bosses in major markets, among them Boston, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. These came in handy years later when his son was running for national office. Among his mob associates was Frank Costello, former boss of the Luciano crime family, who bragged, "I helped Joe Kennedy get rich." Sam Giancana, who later figured prominently in Jack's Presidency, called Joe "one of the biggest crooks who ever lived."

Joe bought alcohol from overseas distillers, supplying it to organized crime syndicates. Frank Costello confirmed he approached him in smuggling liquor. Joe paid the police to look the other way. The liquor was distributed at fixed prices and established quotas, with law enforcement and politicians all paid by the Boston Democrat machine run by "Honey Fitz." The "law" was enforced with machine guns manned by "experts" who did bloody contract hits.

"The way Costello talked about Joe, you had the sense that they were very close during Prohibition," columnist John Miller wrote.

Fortune estimated Joe's wealth at $2 million with no visible "job." He made hundreds of thousands manipulating the market and "bootlegging." Joe used the profits to fuel his stock market speculating, and finance his efforts in the film industry.

Having seen the Great Depression coming, and as Black Tuesday approached, Kennedy liquidated his longer-term investments while continuing to make money on the declining market by selling short. He made his greatest lifetime gains on the misery of a nation.

Usually an investor purchases stock and later sells it, earning a profit if the stock has gone up. Selling short reverses the process. The investor who believes the price of a stock will go down borrows stock - say at $10 a share - from a broker for a fee. If the price falls to $8, he buys new shares at the lower price of $8 and gives them back to the broker to replace the shares he borrowed at $10. He then gets to keep the $2 difference as his profit.

By selling short, Joe made sums estimated at more than $1 million and contributed to the eventual market crash by forcing prices down. The market was unregulated. Stock pools such as those perfected by Joe Kennedy defrauded legitimate investors. Reporters and columnists acted as shills for companies peddling stocks in return for payoffs.

Joseph P. Kennedy more than likely was the single biggest reason for the Great Depression, which set off a worldwide financial panic lasting years. By 1932, 12 million Americans were jobless. Governments responded with strict tariff restrictions that dried up world trade. Kennedy – whose wealth was now estimated at over $100 million - gleefully told friends he had sold off his Wall Street holdings before the bottom dropped out of the stock market. He said he was now waiting to pick up the pieces left by "dumb people."

In 1933 he again manipulated the market to his advantage. The crash and resulting panic led to the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Kennedy's good pal Franklin D. Roosevelt joked that since Joe Kennedy was responsible for the crash, he knew more than anybody how to regulate it, so he named him head of the new SEC, which it could be argued might have been liking putting John Gotti in charge of a task force on organized crime.

By 1933, with Prohibition about to be repealed Kennedy used his connections in Washington to obtain permits to import ridiculously large quantities of Haig & Haig and Dewar's as "medicine." Stockpiling the liquor in warehouses until Prohibition ended, he had more high-quality liquor than anybody else. He cornered the market in Scotch and invited the President's son, James Roosevelt, on a trip to England. He used young Roosevelt to get access to those who controlled Scotland's distilleries, obtaining distribution rights to brands such as Haig & Haig, Dewar's scotch, and Gordon's gin. Returning he started Somerset Importers, so when Prohibition was repealed Kennedy took steps to protect his family fortune, establishing a series of trust funds eventually making all his children financially independent. These trust funds eventually guaranteed each of his children, and their mother, over $20 million apiece, with a share of every bottle of Canadian Club whiskey earmarked for the Kennedy family to this day.

Joseph P. Kennedy and Hollywood

Joseph Kennedy next set his sights on Hollywood, which by the mid-1920s was turning out 800 films a year, employing as many people as the auto industry. He called it "a gold mine," according to several friends. After buying a chain of 31 small movie houses, he became a producer. He was attracted to the glamour of Hollywood, moving out there to meet dazzling young women.

While Rose Kennedy was in Boston, pregnant with their eighth child, Joe was in Hollywood engaged in a notorious liaison with the superstar Gloria Swanson. She was not his first extramarital adventure, but she was his first real affair. He considered her a "trophy" of worldly success.

"In 1926, using insider information he received as a broker at Hayden, Stone, Joe bought the Film Booking Offices of America (FBO). He received a commission of $75,000 from the trading company for the deal. The studio began making cheap Westerns and dog pictures that could be turned out in a week for $30,000 to $50,000 each. FBO profits ballooned.

Kennedy used the profits to purchase the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), who had a new system for making motion pictures with sound. Then he bought a theater chain to distribute his pictures, leading to the infamous "Pantages scandal."

Kennedy purchased the 700-chain Keith-Albee-Orpheum Theaters Corporation in the U.S. and Canada, serving more than 2 million patrons daily. Edward Albee, the founder of KAO, refused to sell out. Joe promised he would remain in control of the chain. Albee agreed. When the papers were signed, Joe was chairman.

"Didn't you know, Ed?" "Old Man Joe" told Albee. "You're washed up. Through."

In 1928, he was made special advisor of Pathe Exchange Inc., a production company producing a weekly newsreel. He became chairman of Pathe, slashed the salaries of the employees, cutting everybody but himself. His $100,000 salary remained in place.

Joe merged FBO with his chain of theaters (KAO) to form the famous RKO. Joe then had RCA trade its FBO stock for stock in the new company, bringing him $2 million.

So entranced was he by Gloria Swanson that when his father P.J. Kennedy died in May of 1929, Joe refused to leave California for the funeral, which was attended by Boston's elite.

"You son of a bitch, you didn't even go to your father's funeral," cousin Joseph Kane said to him. "You were too busy on the West Coast chasing Gloria Swanson around."

"I couldn't leave," he replied. "If I left for two days, the Jews would rob me blind."

"'Joe Kennedy didn't attend his father's funeral," a friend, Kane Simonian, remarked. "When someone doesn't go to his father's funeral, you can believe he would do anything."

Now that he no longer needed his father's help, he discarded him. Kennedy took advantage of privileged information from the files of major stockholders in the movie companies who were clients of Guy Currier, his partner at RKO, while Currier was on vacation in Italy. Kennedy pillaged his files for inside information such as the size of holdings of other stockholders and their financial condition, using this to enrich himself.

Then Currier discovered RKO's value plummeted, that he had been betrayed. Joe Kennedy "did not behave in an honorable way," said Anne Anable, Currier's granddaughter. "Unfortunately, my grandfather didn't realize how corrupt Kennedy was."

When Wisconsin Congressman John Schafer denounced Kennedy as the "chief racketeer in the RKO swindle," Congressman William Sirovich of New York said the "inside group at RKO had committed fraud by unloading their stock, making millions." An investigation of the movie industry ensued. Joe used favors to Congressmen and President Roosevelt to avoid any further probe.

Doris Kearns Goodwin found letters from anguished stockholders of Pathe. Anne Lawler of Jamaica Plain in Boston said she lost her life savings. "This seems hardly Christian-like, fair or just for a man of your character," she wrote. "I wish you would think of the poor working woman who had so much faith in you as to give all their money to your Pathe."

Meanwhile, Joe made an estimated $5 million through the assorted swindles.

The immoral Kennedys

His oldest daughter, Rosemary, was considered shy and mentally limited, symptoms of what many suspect was dyslexia. Then she deteriorated into violent behavior. Rosemary was beginning to understand that she would never measure up to her closest siblings, and the resulting frustration led to physical fights and, worse, long absences at night when she would be wandering the streets.

A liability to the Kennedy's political ambitions, in 1942, without telling anyone, he arranged for her to have a prefrontal lobotomy at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. It left her permanently disabled, paralyzed on one side, incontinent and unable to speak coherently. She was never allowed to return home, spirited to St. Coletta's School in Wisconsin. Joe told the public she became a nun. Eventually she died alone.

In February of 1929, Joe Kennedy made an offer to buy the Pantages theater chain, the second biggest in California, from its owner Alexander Pantages, a Greek immigrant who had built the chain from scratch into a multi-million dollar business.

Pantages said no. Kennedy used his influence to deny first-run blockbuster features from major studios. On August 9, 1929 in Pantages's flagship theater, the Beaux Arts in downtown Los Angeles, an hysterical lady in red emerged from the janitor's broom closet on the mezzanine screaming: "There he is, the beast! Don't let him get at me!" She pointed to the silver-haired Alexander Pantages in the office next to the broom closet.

The girl told police she was a dancer and Pantages raped her. He was convicted and sentenced to 50 years. The verdict was overturned on appeal when a review of the woman's morals revealed she did not have any. The alleged rape could not have occurred in the small broom closet the way she described it. She was athletic, Pantanges elderly. The notoriety forced Pantages to sell to Kennedy. It was discovered Kennedy put the girl up to the "rape." She told her lawyer she wanted to come clean. Kennedy had her killed using cyanide

Before dying, however, on her deathbed she told her mother and a friend Joe Kennedy set up Pantages, paying her $10,000. Joe also promised to make her a movie star. He lied.

The anti-Semitic and racist Kennedys

Nightclub singer and radio idol Morton Downey was a close friend of Kennedy's. Mort did him favors, setting him up with chorus girls and introducing him to mobsters, including Frank Costello.

Downey and Kennedy hated Jews. Kennedy's goal in Hollywood was to "wipe out" Jewish rule over the industry. His plan was to swindle one Jew per day in business deals, according to Morton Downey, Jr., quoting what his father had told him.

Kennedy immediately thought Adolf Hitler to be a European panacea. Hoping to help Hitler succeed, Joe Kennedy arranged through FDR to become Ambassador to England. He said the Jews "brought on themselves" all their problems. In a 1938 meeting at the German Embassy in London, Kennedy assured the German Ambassador to America he only wanted friendly relations with Hitler, saying the Nazis did "great things." The situation in Germany was, according to Kennedy, "good living conditions." Joe said reports of limited food in Germany being reserved for the army was untrue because the professor who had made the report "was a Jew."

Kennedy and William Randolph Hearst improved Hitler's image, producing headlines stating Hitler "restored character and courage. Hitler gave hope and confidence. He established order and unity of purpose."

"I think if Joe had his way, Hitler would have succeeded in his annihilation of the Jews . . ." said Morton Downey, Jr. "He always found great favor in Hitler. He would have loved to see him succeed."

Joe Kennedy also admired Brooks Adams, who tried to use science to prove the inferiority of the Jews using Charles Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory. The "energy" of a "race" is exhausted, it was argued, and must be replaced by the infusion of "barbarian blood."

In The Theory of Social Revolutions Adams maintained American Democracy had inherent defects. He and Kennedy agreed the nation needed near-dictatorial powers. Joe Kennedy saw himself as the beneficiary of such a system, as he would become "dominant in society." Morality and ethics were of no value because, "Men do not differ from the other animals, but survive, according to their aptitudes, by adapting themselves to exterior conditions which prevail at the moment of their birth."

Joe Kennedy's oldest son, Joe, Jr. and hope of America's "royal family," absorbed his father's virulent anti-Semitism. During a break from school in 1934, Joe, Jr. traveled to Germany. By then, public eating facilities, theaters, and shops in Germany displayed signs saying "Jews Not Welcome." Jewish mothers could not buy milk for their infants. Jews who were sick could not obtain prescriptions.

Joe, Jr. wrote to his father Hitler had taken advantage of a widespread dislike of the Jews, a dislike he called "well-founded," further adding Hitler was "building a spirit in his men that could be envied in any country." Brutality, bloodshed, and marching were necessary, he said, and the sterilization law was a "good thing."

"I don't know how the Church feels about it but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens of men who inhabit this Earth," Joe, Jr. wrote.

Anti-Semitism among the heavily Democrat Boston Irish was rampant, but Joe suggested to his son the Jews needed to be attacked, that when he run for office he make it a part of his political platform.

George Jacobs and William Stadiem wrote Sinatra and the Dark Side of Camelot. Jacobs was the personal valet of Frank Sinatra from 1953 to 1968. In the book, Jacobs writes that when Joe Kennedy visited Sinatra in Palm Springs, Sinatra "rolled out the red carpet for him," inviting fabulous and beautiful hookers. Sinatra called Joe "Mr. Ambassador." Kennedy "told n----r jokes throughout meals, he'd call Indians savages and blacks Sambos and curse the hell out of anyone who served him from the wrong side or put one ice cube too many in his Jack Daniels. 'Can't you get any white help?' he needled Mr. S. 'Aren't they paying you enough?' "

Jacobs, who is African-American, said Joe was "cruder about Jews than he was about blacks." He called them "sheeny rag traders." Louis B. Mayer was referred to as a "kike junkman."

"What's the difference between a Jew and a pizza?" Joe asked. "The pizza doesn't cry on its way to the oven."

These comments were made during the time his son was campaigning for the Presidency. Jacobs wrote that poor Sinatra, a fair man who fought for civil rights, cringed but held his tongue because he needed the Kennedys for his own purposes. Jacobs was appalled at the man known for his "craven appeasement of Adolf Hitler when he was Franklin Roosevelt's Ambassador to the Court of St. James."

Kennedys, the "rat pack" and the Mafia

Jacobs goes on to write that Kennedy's reputation as a "Boston Brahmin" patriarch was as far off the mark as saying "JFK was faithful to Jackie." "Joe was mobbed up to his collar pins," he writes, "with Sam Giancana at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago . . . with Meyer Lansky in Miami; with the one-armed bandit Wingy Grober in Tahoe. If anyone's fortune was tainted, it was Mr. Ambassador . . . His money was f--k you money. Old Joe said f--k you to everyone."

Sinatra, who was connected to organized crime, too, wanted political power and thought the Kennedy's were his ticket. JFK dangled an Ambassadorship to Italy, and spoke of his running for the Senate in Nevada. Sinatra was at first wary of the Kennedys, who were associated with Joe McCarthy. Robert Kennedy had worked for him, and then gone after his friends in the Mafia with the McClellan Committee.

Sinatra's first connection to the Kennedys was through his fellow "rat packer," Peter Lawford, who was married to one of Joe Kennedy's daughters. Peter was "whips-and-chains kinky and not the slightest bit ashamed of it," preferring hookers to the slutty groupies who made themselves to Sinatra and Kennedy. According to Jacobs, Lawford's wife, Pat, had sex with Sinatra.

Lawford and John Kennedy shared a love for prostitutes and cocaine. Jacobs also claims that Judith Campbell Exner was a prostitute who met Joe Kennedy first, before becoming the concubine of President Kennedy and Giancana. She would be the go-between that connected the Kennedy Presidency with the Mafia. Jacobs wrote that he could not understand why Joe Kennedy would favor hookers after having movie stars like Gloria Swanson. His son liked them despite the fact that he had affairs with sex stars of his era, like Marilyn Monroe.

Jacobs liked JFK.

"I want to f--k every woman in Hollywood," the Democrats' leading man told Jacobs "with a big leering grin." Kennedy asked Jacobs if Shirley MacLaine had a "red p---y," and confessed that Joe had arranged for Marlene Dietrich to masturbate him when he was a kid. He arranged to have Sinatra set him up with numerous Las Vegas showgirls, and was enthralled with women who shaved their private areas. He called it "naked lunch." Kennedy claimed to Sinatra, who hated drugs, that he only snorted blow because his back hurt.

Giancana preferred a Nixon Presidency, because actual law-and-order from the Republicans was better than actual criminals like the Kennedys. He hated Bobby Kennedy, but Sinatra talked him into backing JFK, helping with the vote fraud scheme.

The song "High Hopes," sung by Sinatra and used as JFK's campaign anthem, was Joe's idea. When Sinatra tried to produce The Execution of Private Slovik, screen written by a Blacklisted writer named Albert Maltz, Joe went crazy.

"What's this Commie Jew s--t?" he screamed at Sinatra. "You stupid guinea." Sinatra dropped the project. When Kennedy was elected, Joe did not allow Sammy Davis, Jr. to perform at the Inaugural, even though Davis campaigned heavily to help deliver the black vote at a time when it was still split fairly evenly between the Republicans and Democrats. Joe hated Davis for being a black who succeeded against all odds. He considered him a "pushy n----r." Sinatra begged Joe to let Davis be part of the party, but the old man said no. He allowed Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte, Mahalia Jackson and Nat King Cole to perform because they were "n----r n-----s" who knew their place, but Joe called Sammy "the n----r bastard with the German whore," a reference to his white wife.

With his man in the White House, Sinatra waited for his hard work to pay off. He planned to host the new President in Palm Springs. Kennedy rebuffed him and stayed at Bing Crosby's instead. He had used Sinatra, and now was finished with him. Sinatra learned his lesson, cleaned up his own act, and became a Republican the rest of his life.

John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1957, was researched and mostly of the written was done by a young speechwriter, Theodore Sorenson, who was paid by Joe Kennedy. Joe then bribed the Pulitzer people into awarding his son.

Kennedys and McCarthyism

Perhaps the very worst thing that can be said of United States Senator Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wisconsin) was that he was a close friend of Joseph P. Kennedy. They were both bullies who traded on suspicion and rumors. Kennedy contributed to McCarthy's Senate campaigns and invited him a number of times to Hyannis Port. McCarthy attended the wedding of Joe's daughter Eunice Kennedy. He was Joe's guest at numerous other affairs. Kennedy called him my "valued friend."

In November of 1950, Joe Kennedy spoke at the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, where he professed he "knew McCarthy pretty well, and he may have something."

Senator McCarthy became chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. referred to his activities as "jihad," but Joe Kennedy admired him. He arranged for his son Robert to become assistant counsel on the committee.

Bobby worked for him all through McCarthyism, never raising objections. "Joe McCarthy's methods may be a little rough," he told the press, "but, after all, his goal is to expose Communists in government, and that's a worthy goal. So why are you reporters so critical of his methods?"

U.S. Senator John Kennedy (D.-Massachusetts) was the only member of his party not to vote against McCarthy. It cost him the Vice Presidential nomination in 1956. McCarthy dated two of the Kennedy sisters. Bobby Kennedy attended McCarthy's funeral in May of 1957.

Democrat Kennedys

Joe Kennedy had a chip on his shoulder because he was Irish. As an Irishman he could only ascend to certain heights, but that was it. Having conquered Wall Street, Hollywood and the booze rackets, he set his sights on politics. His goal was the Presidency. Even he realized his own immoralities and crooked past would prevent him from attaining the White House, so he rested his hopes and dreams on his children.

A mutual friend arranged a meeting between Kennedy and then-Governor of New York Franklin Roosevelt, a contender for President. FDR decided to use Kennedy's major campaign contributions with Wall Street connections.

An agreement was reached, a quid pro quo: contributions in return for access and maybe more. Joe raised large sums for Roosevelt. He became known as his "money collector" or "bag man," laundering cash from contributors who chose to hide their identities or were criminals inclined to favor the Democrat Party.

Joe used his influence with William Randolph Hearst, who owned 33 newspapers with a circulation of 11 million, to steer good coverage of the Democrats. He controlled 86 delegates to the Democrat nominating convention, nearly all from the critical states of California and Texas. Joe claimed he won the nomination for Roosevelt, who promised him a cabinet post. His appointment to the SEC drew strong criticism from those who knew every law the SEC was about to create was to prevent crimes committed by Joe Kennedy. Roosevelt said it "took a thief to catch a thief."

Having achieved his wealth, Kennedy outlawed most of the practices used to attain riches in the first place. Joe claimed he never did anything wrong while prosecuting Wall Street financiers he did nefarious deals with.

In I'm for Roosevelt, Joe wrote the tycoons testifying before the SEC presented "highly unethical" business practices he pretended to be shocked over. "I don't know why Joe Kennedy turned on me - I never did anything to help him," one former Wall Street colleague said.

It was said he was the most disloyal of all men, except for his sons. His daughters were expendable to him, his wife mere "window dressing." Of his work at the SEC he said it was "forcing their mouths open and going in with a pair of pincers and just taking all the gold out of their teeth." He resigned from the SEC in September of 1935. Talk began of Joe running for President against FDR. The possibility remained that he could create a huge bloc of Irish Catholic votes, based in part on the fact he favored Hitler's Germany. Catholics in Ireland sided with the Nazis ostensibly because the English, mainly Winston Churchill, took a belligerent stance against them.

FDR appointed him Ambassador to the Court of St. James, a position he held for three years. He argued against American and British involvement in the war, even as the Nazis rolled into France. He expressed open support for Hitler, maintaining appeasement toward Germany.

In May of 1940, Winston Churchill was elected British Prime Minister, hastening Kennedy's decline while proclaiming, "Democracy is finished in England." Roosevelt forced him to resign.

Harvey Klemmer later revealed most of Kennedy's time in England was spent securing inordinate amounts of government cargo space for whisky shipments' space that was needed for the war effort. He also provided Joe with young women, including a French model known as "Foxy."

PT-109

The Kennedy men got all the looks. They were handsome beyond words, like matinee idol movie darlings. The girls all suffered from "map of Ireland" faces with thin lips and straight-up-and-down figures. The boys were the apple of every girl's eye in Boston and West Palm.

Jack Kennedy attended Choate, then entered Harvard, where Joe was ahead of him. In his senior year he wrote a "book" called Why England Slept, which Joe arranged to be published. He was given $1 million by his father upon graduation. Handsome and adorably promiscuous, he tanned himself in the hot sun, partied heavily and lived it up while attending graduate school at Stanford. Then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Jack was made lieutenant and assigned to the South Pacific as commander of a patrol torpedo boat, the PT-109. The crew of 12 was tasked with stopping Japanese ships from delivering supplies to the islands they held. On August 2, 1943, the PT-109 was patrolling the waters when they saw a Japanese destroyer traveling at full speed straight at them. Lieutenant Kennedy tried to swerve out of the way, but the warship rammed the PT-109, splitting it in half and killing men. Everybody jumped off the flaming boat. Kennedy injured his weak back. Others had terrible burns. Some were ready to give up. In the darkness, Kennedy managed to find Patrick McMahon, who otherwise would have died. He hauled him back to where the other survivors were clinging to a piece of the boat that was still afloat. At sunrise, Kennedy led his men toward a small island several miles away. Despite his own injuries, he towed McMahon ashore, a strap from McMahon's life jacket clenched between his teeth. Six days later two native islanders found them and went for help, delivering a message Jack had written on a piece of coconut shell. The next day, the PT-109 crew was rescued.

In later years, some have analyzed the PT-109 and determined that it was not all that it seemed to be. Lieutenant Kennedy was very inexperienced and perhaps should not have been given command of a PT boat. He apparently failed to adhere to established Navy procedures and training in his failure to steer away from and be hit by the destroyer. Many felt that only negligence could explain being put in such a position. When he returned home, Jack was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. Joe, Sr. assigned publicists to embellish the story, a huge part of the Kennedy mystique, prodding his career from the Congress to the Senate to the White House. In 1962, Kennedy's friends in Hollywood made a movie about it. JFK himself handpicked Cliff Robertson to play him. The film, while entertaining and co-starring a number of excellent young stars, was basically a campaign commercial. Kennedy himself never tried to make more of it than it was. He joked that he won the Navy Cross for getting his boat run over. He readily admitted he could have avoided the accident, and was lucky it turned out the way that it did.

How Joe bought Jack's offices

Brother Joe was killed flying a mission for the Army Air Corps. His father never forgave FDR for "killing" his first born son. Jack came home a war hero. Joe's tragic death elevated Jack. He was now made the "hope" of the family for the White House. Having tried and failed, after Hitler's defeat Joseph P. Kennedy knew he could never become President, but his sons could. He quenched his thirst for power through them.

"It was like being drafted," Jack told a reporter in 1957. "My father wanted his eldest son in politics. 'Wanted' isn't the right word. He demanded it."

"I got Jack into politics," Joe bragged. "I told him that Joe, Jr. was deceased and that it was therefore his responsibility to run for Congress."

The path to the Presidency began in the 1946 campaign for Massachusetts' 11th Congressional District. Joe, Sr. spent enormous sums of money to assure victory for his youthful, inexperienced son.

While the 11th District was the perfect launching pad for Jack's political career, former Boston Mayor James Michael Curley occupied the seat. He was in danger of being indicted for mail fraud.

"Curley knew he was in trouble with the Feds over the mail fraud rap," recalled Kennedy's friend, Joe Kane. "The Ambassador paid him to get out of his Congressional seat . . . Curley figured that he might need the money."

Joe paid Curley $12,000 through his bag man Joe Timilty, promising additional campaign help if Curley chose to run again for Mayor of Boston in the 1946 election. After being elected, however, the Democrat Curley was sent to prison for mail fraud. He continued to serve from prison.

"To Joe, this was standard operating procedure," recalled Kane. "Everything he got, he bought and paid for. And politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money."

The Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. Foundation furiously pumped money into Catholic institutions in Jack's adopted district. One Massachusetts Congressman described the gifts as "political currency." To conceal his own role and the extent of Jack's financing, Joe paid for everything clandestinely and in cash.

David Powers ran Jack's Charlestown headquarters. He described how Joe's aide would meet him "at the campaign's central headquarters, and then lead me into the men's room, where, putting a dime into the slot, he would take me into a closed toilet stall. Then, with no one able to watch us, he would hand me the cash, saying, 'You can never be too careful in politics about handing over money.' "

Joe also arranged for Jack to receive a salary from the Maine and New Hampshire Theaters Company, which he owned. Joe could deduct it as a business expense. In addition, two of Joe's theater employees took care of all the campaign expenses. If Jack needed a rental car, he simply charged it to Joe's theater company.

Jack's primary opponent was a legitimate politician named Joe Russo. Joe Kennedy paid Joseph Russo, a janitor, to also enter the race. This confused the voters, splitting the votes for Joe Russo.

"They offered me favors," recalled Russo the janitor. "Whatever I wanted."

"Even the aunt of the real candidate voted for the janitor," recalled Joseph A. Russo, the real candidate's son. "They didn't leave anything unturned." His father claimed Kennedy's people arranged for other bogus candidates to "run in other areas to break up the Irish vote, or some other vote. They played for keeps."

After Jack won the Democratic primary, Joe sold Somerset Importers Inc., freeing $8 million to help Jack campaign and insuring his liquor holdings would not be an issue. Joe paid cash for Jack's advertising.

"It was handled so that very few people knew . . ." said John T. Galvin, who was in charge of the advertising. "There was a campaign law that limited campaign contributions. It didn't affect us very much."

William Randolph Hearst's Boston American assured good media while ignoring Republican Cambridge Mayor Michael Neville. They refused his advertising, taking the money from Joe under the table.

Joe spent $300,000, according to House Speaker Tip O'Neill, and equivalent to about $2.5 million today. O'Neill said the sum was six times what he himself spent in the same district during a tough race six years later. Joe was the "real force" behind the Kennedys, he said.

"Joe Kennedy was an ongoing factor in Massachusetts politics," O'Neill said. "Every time a Democrat ran for Governor, he would go down to see Joe, who would always send him home with a briefcase full of cash."

Jack, while not totally comfortable campaigning, demonstrated intelligence and easy rapport. The women voters were crazy about him. He won easily. Seven days later, he filed a report with the Massachusetts Secretary of State certifying that no money had been collected for, or had been spent on his campaign.

He was elected to Congress three terms before running for the United States Senate in 1952, seeking the seat held by the venerable Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

Joe Kennedy learned that John Fox, owner of the powerful Boston Post, was in desperate need of money. With circulation of over 300,000, it had been credited with helping defeat Michael Curley in his last campaign in 1949, and with being responsible for getting Maurice Tobin elected Governor of Massachusetts. Under Fox, the Boston Post favored Republicans. The newspaper endorsed Eisenhower for President. They favored Lodge. Fox "hated JFK." But Fox owed about $4 million to the IRS. Joe Kennedy paid it and Fox gave a front-page endorsement for JFK.

Former Massachusetts state Senator Robert L Lee said the Post endorsement of JFK was the "turning point" in the campaign, adding if Lodge received the paper's endorsement, it "would have been sufficient to put him back in the Senate."

Fox admitted that Joe Kennedy had given him the loan. Raymond Faxon, Fox's friend and vice president of the publisher's investment business, revealed the truth about the transaction for the first time years later.

"The whole thing was a payoff," he stated. With the Boston Post's endorsement, Jack won the Senate race, beating Lodge by less than six percent of the vote.

Jack reported expenses for the campaign of $349,646, an amount that would not have covered even the cost of the billboard advertisements alone. Joe actually financed it to the tune of several million dollars.

Joe then told his son to find a wife. In May 1952, Jack Kennedy was introduced to Jacqueline Lee Bouvier. When Jack brought Jackie to Hyannis Port, Joe decided she would be Jack's wife.

"Jackie had all the social ingredients that Joe Kennedy thought would help Jack achieve the Presidency," wrote C. David Heymann in A Woman Named Jackie. Jack did what his father told him. They were wed a short while later.

"Joe Kennedy not only condoned the marriage, he ordained it," recalled Jack's friend Lem Billings.

The Kennedys steal the 1960 Presidential election from Nixon

When Jack Kennedy decided to run for President in 1960, his father declared, "We're going to sell Jack like soap flakes."

Joe routinely paid off publishers as well as public officials to get what he wanted. Thomas Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, said Joe "gave cases of Haig & Haig Pinch Bottle Scotch to press people - to people at the Globe, to political writers, and to a lot of people in Washington."

He sent expensive jewelry to female columnists, or just gave cash. "He distributed a substantial amount to journalists," one confidant said. "Reporters took consulting assignments. Some of these guys were pretty amenable to consulting fees and gifts." Columnists, especially, were "for sale," as were politicians. Joe always kept large stashes of cash for such things.

Confidant Frank Morrissey recalled Joe called him to Hyannis Port to help him move $1 million in cash from the basement of his home. "A big northeast storm was coming up, and the old man was afraid a lot of the cash would get wet," Morrissey said.

"He was consumed by the fact that TV would make the difference in the Presidential election," one TV executive said of Joe.

"The old politicians relied on their experience, but Joe and his boys left nothing to chance," one aide recalled. Joe "learned a lot of tricks from the movies during his Hollywood days."

In November 1957, Fortune magazine listed Joe Kennedy as one of the 16 wealthiest people in the country, with a net worth of $200 to $400 million. George Smathers, a family friend and Senator from Florida, claimed "Jack had not made any great record as a Congressman or Senator. It was nothing outstanding in terms of what others were doing. Lots of Congressmen had more legislative accomplishments than Jack."

Cardinal Francis Spellman recalled Joe was "very proud of the fact that he had spent $75,000" to buy his son a magazine cover story, which saved on advertising expenses. When evangelist Billy Graham came out for the 1960 Republican candidate Richard Nixon, Jack had the story squelched by most of the media. This is just one of many examples first why "conservative" media later rose, and then was so very successful. These things no longer happen, at least not at such wholesale rate.

"Senator Kennedy's father has been spending oodles of money all over the country, and probably has a paid representative in every state by now," said Eleanor Roosevelt. She was told Joe would spend "any money" to make his son the first Catholic President. "Building an organization is permissible," she said in one of the all-time great understatements, "but giving too lavishly may seem to indicate a desire to influence through money."

Joe had author William Bradford Huie distribute cash to politicians to help Jack, according to what Huie later told a Time reporter. Huie said he routinely made payoffs of $1,000. He promised to reveal more details but died before he could.

In October of 1959, Look began running a series of articles about Jack. Prepared with the family's cooperation, they may as well have been written by Joe himself. It was declared that Jack was in excellent health, when in fact he had been diagnosed in 1947 as having Addison's disease, a failure of the adrenal glands. When a Boston reporter suggested that Jack should disclose his health history, a Kennedy aide replied, "No, old Joe doesn't want that to be done. We can't do it now."

Another article fictitiously reported Joe had "little influence" over his son and had no interest in spending money on political campaigns. "In political circles," the article claimed, "the Kennedys are not regarded as big spenders."

On January 2, 1960, Jack Kennedy formally announced his Presidential candidacy, declaring the White House must be "the center of moral leadership."

Two months later he began his affair with a former "actress" named Judith Exner. While seeing Jack, Exner was also seeing Sam Giancana, who was the head of the Chicago Mafia and a former partner in Joe's bootlegging business. Giancana, who was credited with at least 200 killings, was considered one of the most powerful men in organized crime. He controlled betting, prostitution, loan sharking, and owned interests in three Las Vegas hotels.

Jack and Bobby identified the West Virginia Primary as key to winning the nomination. The state's nomination was 95 percent Protestant and a win there would convince convention delegates Jack's Catholicism would not be an issue in the Presidential election.

At Jack's request, Exner arranged a meeting for him with Sam Giancana, who agreed to use his influence with West Virginia officials to ensure victory there. Giancana sent his lieutenant, Paul "Skinny" D'Amato, into West Virginia to get out the vote. D'Amato met with sheriffs controlling the state's political machine. He forgave debts many of them ran up at his 500 Club in Atlantic City, handing cash payments to others.

FBI wiretaps revealed Frank Sinatra also distributed large mob donations to pay off election officials. Exner later told People how she had introduced Sam Giancana to Jack, who asked for the mob's help in financing the campaign. While it is not documented, it is clear Giancana gave money to the campaign. After the election, an FBI wiretap picked up Giancana talking with Johnny Roselli, a mob associate. He said his donation was "accepted," adding he expected that "one of these days, the guy will do me a favor . . ."

Giancana felt he was gaining a friend in the White House and protection from future prosecution by the government. Meanwhile, Joe funneled money to politicians to swing the West Virginia primary.

Tip O'Neill recalled that Eddie Ford, a Boston real estate man, "went out there with a pocket full of money." O'Neill said Ford would "see the sheriff, and he'd say to the sheriff, 'Sheriff, I'm from Chicago. I'm on my way south. I love this young Kennedy boy. He can help this nation, by God. He'll do things for West Virginians. I'll tell you what. Here's $5,000. You carry your village for him or your county for him, and I'll give you a little reward when I'm on my way back,' " adding "They passed money around like it was never seen."

Ken-Air Corporation leased a $385,000 Corvair twin-engine turboprop airplane to the candidate for the ridiculous sum of $1.75 a mile. Joe got a large tax deduction, while the plane gave Jack a tremendous advantage over Hubert Humphrey in the Democratic Primary. Joe Kennedy used the Catholic Church and, in particular, Cardinal Richard Cushing. One of the couriers told author Peter Maas how it worked:

"For example, if Boston area churches had collected $950,000 on a particular Sunday from collections, Joe would write a check for $1 million to the diocese, deduct it as a charitable contribution, and receive the $950,000 in cash. Thus, in this example, the church got a contribution of $50,000, Joe could deduct the entire amount on his income tax, and he could use the money to pay off politicians without fear that it would be traced."

"The cash is untraceable," Maas said. "Part of the money goes to the diocese. He gets a contribution from Joe Kennedy for more than what the cash is. It's brilliant. Nobody can trace the money."

Cushing admitted that he had played a role in making payoffs to ministers. He told Hubert Humphrey, "I'll tell you who elected Jack Kennedy. It was his father, Joe, and me, right here in this room." Cushing explained that he and Joe decided which Protestant ministers should receive "contributions" of $100 to $500. As Cushing described the tactic, "It's good for the church, it's good for the preacher, and it's good for the candidate."

Maas also recalled that as a writer for the Saturday Evening Post he interviewed a political operative in one dirt-poor town in West Virginia who told him his county was for Humphrey. "A few weeks later, I interviewed him again, and he said the county was for Jack. I asked what had changed, and he said with a smile, 'My workers each got $20, and I got $150. We're for Kennedy.' "

When Kennedy narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey in the West Virginia Primary, Humphrey withdrew from the Presidential race. It was the most important victory of Jack's campaign.

Some Democrat leaders were leery of Jack, however. Ex-President Truman opposed him, telling reporters, "I'm not against the Pope, I'm against the pop." Eleanor Roosevelt regarded Jack as one of "the new managerial elite that has neither principles nor character."

When Jackie Kennedy learned about Jack's philandering she developed a visceral hatred of politics. "She was ready to divorce Jack, and Joe offered her $1 million to stay until Jack entered the White House," said her friend, fashion designer Igor Cassini. "He paid $1 million for her to stay with Jack until he was elected. He didn't tell me, but my brother and I learned about it."

In 1972, two intrepid Washington Post investigative reporters, Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly pursued the Watergate story until they "got" Republican President Richard M. Nixon. In 1974, largely based on the scandal the Post uncovered, Nixon resigned from office. Aside from Woodward and Bernstein, it was considered a triumph of journalism and a major boost to the newspaper's editor, Benjamin Bradlee and publisher, Katherine Graham.

In 1960, Bernstein was only 16, Woodward just 17. The liberal Democrat Bernstein was already working in the business. He joined the Post in 1966. The more patrician Woodward, a Republican, would go on to a Yale ROTC scholarship followed by a five-year tour as a Naval officer, before joining the paper in 1970.

Ben Bradlee served in the Navy during World War II, then went to work as a propagandist of sorts for the U.S. government in the 1950s. He was privy to many trade secrets of the CIA and other agencies during the height of the Cold War. One of his neighbors was U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy. The two Navy veterans became very close friends. JFK was a notorious gossip and loved hearing Bradlee spill the beans with stories of "cultural dissemination" and CIA ops. In 1960 he was the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, which was owned by the Washington Post. Like both Newsweek and the Post, he was a liberal Democrat with a visceral dislike of Vice President Nixon, the man who nailed Alger Hiss. Hiss was the hero to all the good government liberals like Ben Bradlee, a Boston Brahmin and product of St. Mark's School. The grudge was held.

The publisher of the Post was Phil Graham. He inherited the paper from multi-millionaire media magnate Eugene Meyer, whose daughter Katharine Graham he married. Phil Graham was part of the East Coast Democrat Establishment, like Hiss a product of Harvard Law School. Like Bradlee he loved Hiss, quickly took to Jack Kennedy, and felt no love if not antipathy for Nixon.

His wife, Katharine, struggled to find her way in the shadow of powerful men such as her father and her husband. Despite coming from great wealth and privilege, her politics represented the Democrat leanings of the East Coast press, which since World War II shifted further and further to the Left. In 1960, with President Eisenhower facing retirement and the glamorous JFK carrying the mantel of the "new frontier," the American press made a conscious shift beyond fairness to outright partisanship. Even the Republican Los Angeles Times began its shift that year, when the young Otis Chandler took over as publisher from his father.

In 1963, Phil Graham committed suicide. It shocked political Washington and elite circles around the globe. Why did he do it? Did he know something then he did not say? Had he been made aware of a terrible political crime, and had he used his official power to cover it up?

Indeed a crime had been committed, and it remains the single worst political act in the history of the United States. Woodward and Bernstein, both in high school at the time, could be excused for not knowing of it; Ben Bradlee and Phil Graham could not. As the wife of the publisher of the Washington Post, Katharine Graham could not claim innocence either, a little wallflower not privy to the inside politics of the "smoke filled room." Bradlee in particular had to know each detail of it in real time, if not close to real time. But they all stayed silent, let it happen, and covered it up until it could not be reversed. The bald-faced enthusiasm they demonstrated 12 years later in going after a Republican President for doing something not one-fifth as bad, in fact for doing the same thing Attorney General Bobby Kennedy did under Democrat President Lyndon Johnson (wiretapping) may be the single most obvious, egregious example of liberal media bias in American history.

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected President, defeating Richard Nixon 34,226,731 votes to 34,108,157. The popular vote margin, 118,574, was the equivalent of a win by one vote in every precinct in America.

Kennedy's Electoral College majority was 303 to 219. The winning margin was provided by the state of Illinois, where in the 11th hour, the votes that came in from Cook County's mob-dominated west side put Jack over the top.

"Actually, and this goes without saying, the Presidency was really stolen in Chicago, without a question, by the Democratic machine," recalled mobster Mickey Cohen. 'I know that certain people in the Chicago organization knew that they had to get John Kennedy in."

In the weeks before his Inauguration, Jack interviewed candidates for key posts in the new administration. Finally he complained to his father, "Jesus Christ, this one wants that, that one wants this . . . you can't satisfy any of these people. I don't know what I'm going to do about it all."

"Jack, if you don't want the job, you don't have to take it," Joe Kennedy replied. "They're still counting votes up in Cook County."

The fix was in.

The night of the election, Nixon stewed over the unfairness of it all. He knew every detail of Joe Kennedy's shenanigans, how he stole elections, paid off key people, and corrupted the system; not just on this night, but over the course of his son's 14-year Congressional career. Now he was on the dirty end of the stick. That evening he plotted his revenge, the day he would get back at the Kennedys and the whole Democrat Party, which on this evening exacted their revenge for Alger Hiss. He began to talk about challenging the vote, asking for a re-count. One of his aides, an old school operative named Murray Chotiner, told him he was still young and would not want to ruin his future by appearing a sore loser.

"They stole it fair and square," Chotiner told him.

Democrats have tried to say over the years Nixon did not challenge the vote because the GOP's hands were not clean, either; that an investigation would reveal they too tampered with votes. This appears nothing more than something they say to dissuade people from the truth. No evidence exists to prove that.

After the exceedingly close election, the New York Herald Tribune published the start of a series suggesting voter fraud in Texas and Illinois might have tipped the Presidency from Vice President Nixon to Senator Kennedy. When the first four stories were published, Nixon summoned reporter Earl Mazo to his office.

"Earl, those are interesting articles you are writing," Nixon said. "But no one steals the Presidency of the United States."

The Herald Tribune killed the rest of the series. It was the final act in a Presidential election almost as close as the 2000 race between Texas Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore. Just as there were allegations of voter irregularities in Florida, reports swirled in 1960 that fraud in key states could have cost Nixon a majority in the Electoral College.

Nixon met Kennedy one week after the election. Instead of doing what Albert Gore did, he made it clear he would not demand a recount nor contest the election in court. Nixon's admirers consider his decision as one of his finest moments. He certainly took heed in Chotiner's advice. He was not yet 50 and wanted to fight another day on his terms. By making the choice he did, a divisive Constitutional crisis was avoided during the height of the Cold War.

"Whatever Nixon's inner feelings about his just due, whatever his motives for not challenging the election returns, his decision was both personally unselfish and profoundly in the interests of the country and of the President-elect," wrote former New York Times columnist Tom Wicker in his biography of Nixon, One of Us.

In his 1978 autobiography, Nixon claimed a recount would have taken more than a year-and-a-half "during which time the legitimacy of Kennedy's election would be in question," which would have been "devastating to America's foreign relations."

Republicans charged that that there was voter fraud in Texas and Cook County, Illinois, where Mayor Richard Daley, ironically the father of Gore's 2000 campaign manager, Bill Daley, controlled the political machine.

A shift of 4,480 votes in Illinois and 25,000 in Texas would have given Nixon the Presidency. U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen (R.-Illinois), campaign manager Len Hall, Republican National Chairman Thurston Morton, and longtime adviser Bryce Harlow pleaded with Nixon to challenge the result.

"Bryce, it'd tear the country to pieces," Nixon told Harlow.

Former Republican President Herbert Hoover telephoned Nixon in Florida after the election, suggesting a meeting with Kennedy. "I think we're in enough trouble in the world today," Nixon recalled Hoover telling him. Kennedy worried that Nixon would demand a recount, because he knew that an honest tally would show he lost. JFK flew from Palm Beach to Key Biscayne. While Kennedy relaxed on the porch of one of the hotels, Nixon went inside and fetched Cokes for both.

"How the hell did you carry Ohio?" Kennedy joked, referring to Nixon's narrow victory in a state Democrats expected to carry.

The two never discussed a potential recount. Instead, they discussed bringing Republicans into JFK's administration and whether to recognize Communist China. To waiting reporters, Kennedy quipped, "I asked him how he took Ohio, but he did not tell me. He's saving it for 1964."

Joseph P. Kennedy's money and hands were all over the stolen election. It was his greatest "accomplishment," to election fraud what Arnold Rothstein's getting the "Black Sox" to throw the 1919 World Series is to gambling. For a man who used every lie and dirty truck in the book to steal races for Congress, Mayor and a dozen or more elections over the years, the notion that he could help himself, that he could "steer clear" of helping his son win the Presidency when it was so close he could taste it, is simply not a possibility.

But "Old Man Joe" was not alone in this conspiracy. Mayor Daley and the mob surely delivered the last minute votes that exemplify the "Chicago way." That "way" still existed when U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama was spared opposition after his strong 2004 GOP opponent, Jack Ryan's divorce papers were illegally unsealed and illegally exposed by the Obama campaign, revealing an embarrassing sexual history causing him to drop out. Daley's machine delivered the mob-controlled precincts that gave JFK Illinois by a razor thin margin.

However, it was not all Joe Kennedy and Mayor Daley. Lyndon Johnson was a surprise pick for Vice President. It is very likely he was chosen because he promised to do for Kennedy in Texas what he did for himself in 1948. Robert Caro's Master of the Senate (2003) explicitly detailed how LBJ's Democrat machine was able to swing thousands and thousands of dead people onto the rolls, all voting for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. As in Illinois, it was just enough to swing a state with huge Electoral delegates. Between Illinois and Texas, two of the largest states in the country, it was enough to give the Electoral College to John Kennedy.

Richard Nixon himself told an old joke when interviewed by David Frost years later. The joke says a little boy sits on the stoop of his house in Texas, crying. Asked what was wrong the child says, "My granddaddy came to visit but didn't say hello to me." Told his grandfather had been dead for years, the child replies, "But he came back to vote for Lyndon Johnson."

What has not been reported is how many other states were tampered with by Joe Kennedy, the man who left no stone unturned. He needed Illinois and Texas, so he de-frauded the tallies in those states. Had he needed more, no doubt he would have de-frauded more states no matter the cost.

Over the years, the evidence of JFK's stolen 1960 election has grown. It is today not a matter of conjecture or opinion, like his assassination is. Even friendly journalists like Seymour Hersh, the man who uncovered the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, found Kennedy to be in many ways a fraud. In The Dark Side of Camelot Hersh shows us a Kennedy never seen before, insulated from the normal consequences of behavior by Joe; arrogance and cunning ingrained in him as a family ethic.

Kennedys could do exactly what they wanted, evade all charges, trusted only Kennedys, and appoint brothers to keep secrets. They were in bed with the Mafia, Jack's health if known would have made him ineligible for the White House, orgies were held (using the Secret service as "beards" who broke their silence to tell what they know, so immoral was it), elections were stolen, plots to murder foreign leaders carried out without regard for blowback history has still not sorted out in entirety. President Kennedy started the Vietnam War, but his apologists point to a meaningless memorandum as evidence he wanted to pull out just as he orchestrated the assassination of South Vietnamese leader Nho Dinh Diem, an act escalating the war as much as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The brothers prided themselves on traits inherited from their father, including a voracious appetite for women. Marilyn Monroe's ex-husband Joe DiMaggio firmly believed the Kennedys murdered her to keep her quiet. Women were left to drown or be raped by Kennedys while Kennedys watched without offering help. Assassinations and strokes, among other personal disasters, offer the Karmic notion of a "Kennedy curse" many consider justified. Others find justice in Shakespeare or God, ironic twists of fate offering cautionary tales for Mankind drunk on the sins of pride and vanity.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

But in 1960, all was still well in the world of the Kennedys, Ben Bradlee, and the Washington Post.

Kennedy, Vietnam and the fall of Camelot

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote people go to war over "honor, fear and self-interest."

"He might also have considered accident, political fog and deceit," wrote Francis G. McGuire in How The First Helicopter War Began, which details the 10-year war in Southeast Asia that really started at the end of World War II. It was a "continuation" of Korea, picked up where the French dropped out, fulfilled (or so many thought) the Truman doctrine and the "domino theory," and was a continuation of a disturbing trend: white Americans fighting to the death against Orientals.

After saving the world, a technological and economic powerhouse, led for eight years by the most popular man of the century, at the peak of world power, goodwill and prestige, found itself squaring off against a primitive force from a place few Americans had ever heard of.

The United States did not lose the Vietnam War, but they did not win it, either. This begs one of the most perplexing questions in our history: how could it have happened?

The "all men are created equal" theory was put to the test in Vietnam. America did not fair well in this test. The men who ran the war, politicians and soldiers alike, did not believe the Vietnamese were their equals. Not the ones from the north, the south, the Communist regulars, the Viet Cong, the ARVN, the politicians or the peasants, Catholic aristocrats or Buddhist monks. 100 years earlier, Chinese coolies built the railroad that turned the U.S. into a continent and were then told they were unwelcome anywhere. The U.S. tried to convince itself that they were operating out of pure benevolence for Orientals who had barely advanced in a century from the Chinese immigrants of the Old West.

This kind nation, fractured by its own guilt - enslaved blacks, conquered Indians, Mexicans turned into foreigners on their homeland - dealt with all of these prejudices. By the 1950s, they had kicked in the doors of the camps. Many of our fractures were slowly healing. In going to war, first in Korea and then in Southeast Asia, to help Asians achieve freedom, America thought they had overcome their own fault lines. But they still did not think the Vietnamese were their equals. This applied especially to the North Vietnamese. While this does not entirely answer the question - how did this happen? \- one part of that answer is that the North Vietnamese, for reasons that today are still not fathomable, were in some ways the equal to the Americans. They were just as committed and just as brave as the Americans were. This says more than can be imagined.

The Vietnamese call it the American War, just as the Soviets called World War II the Great Patriotic War, and the South still give lip service to the War Between the States (some, humorous considering they started the thing, call it the War of Northern Aggression).

Some historians argue that senior U.S. military officials consistently lied to President Kennedy because of his reluctance in sending ground troops to Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson wanted the war.

Vietnam ushered in the era of technology, airpower, the helicopter and new Special Forces. Jaunty green beret-wearing airborne soldiers embodied the new CIA/secret agent mystique of American status. They were employed in Southeast Asia and had a significant effect on political decisions and developments in Saigon, Hanoi, Washington, Beijing and Moscow.

"One raid each week" should do it, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara assessed. McNamara was in his 30s, a man with no military experience who for reasons that escape many rose to great heights at the Ford Motor Company despite the fact that he was the "father" of the Edsel, the worst auto disaster in the history of the American car industry. He was called a "whiz kid," the new breed of MBA-types who came to Washington with the Kennedy Administration. He brought with him a corporate mindset that seemed to think a war could be run like a company, a new line of automobiles, an advertising campaign. Everything came down to crunching the numbers and arriving at a pre-determined answer. "Gaming" all the plans was based on this "outcome." The question with these people was never the outcome, but what it would take to arrive at that outcome. Thus, when their estimates proved wrong, there was no real fallback position.

When Lyndon Johnson became President, he met with all these "best and the brightest." They were Ivy League, West Point, Madison Avenue, Wall Street and corporate superstars. They had all the polish and arrogance that these American pedigrees produce. They were in charge of the awesome might of the U.S. political, governmental, military and intelligence institutions. There was a sense that after the graft and patronage of Roosevelt, the Pendergast machine-sponsored Truman, and the grandfatherly Eisenhower, one of their own, the Harvard-educated Kennedy, was finally in. Now, these ultimate elitists were going to remake the world in their image. They were "smarter" than everybody, "qualified" to make decisions for everybody else. They had the morality, the vision and the idealism, and if they did not, they had the accounting skills, the technology and the power to make up the difference.

They dazzled Johnson, who had grown up poor in the Texas hill country, gone to a college nobody ever heard of, and started out as a teacher at a mostly Mexican-American school. Johnson told his pal, Speaker Sam Rayburn, just how impressive they all were with their slicked-back hair, the rows of medals on their chests, and their Ph.D.s.

"I'd feel a whole lot better about 'em," Rayburn told LBJ, "if just one of 'em had run for county sheriff."

Air power was the new mantra of this group. Nobody put more stock on it than McNamara, whose classic approach was efficiency of numbers. He explained to journalists the status of U.S. military aircraft inventory, capabilities with production numbers, time between sorties, budget dollars, payload fractions and other quantifiers.

Policy was set aside in favor of improved numbers, the new god of war. All discussions of policy rationale always came back to numbers. McNamara has been described as an "undeniable genius," which may be true, but the lesson of Vietnam and elitist politics is that genius does not make for great government.

Richard Nixon was one of the smartest men ever to occupy the White House. There are probably not more than three other Presidents who came to the job with better qualifications. George Herbert Walker Bush is one of them. Neither of these men had successful Presidencies.

Kennedy's mind was in Bill Clinton's class. He mastered speed reading and voraciously absorbed everything. His three short years in office were tragically cut short before his legacy can be judged in its entirety. But there is evidence in his handling of the South Vietnamese government he "inherited" and the coup d'état he allowed to bring it down, that like Clinton he may have been too smart for his own good.

Johnson did not follow Rayburn's country wisdom. He was an able but not intellectual man. Had he followed Rayburn's instincts instead of letting himself be used by all the brass, his Presidency and the United States would have been spared much agony.

Intangibles were not factored into the McNamara plan. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy advised his staff to read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August so they would know how Europe blundered into war.

"I don't ever want to be in that position," Kennedy said. "We are not going to bungle into war."

American involvement in what was then called Indochina did not begin in 1960, nor even 1945. It began on June 18, 1919, when a young nationalist named Ho Chi Minh (using a pseudonym) wrote to U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing to seek help in freeing his people from French colonial domination after the First World War.

"We count on your great kindness to honor our appeal by your support whenever the opportunity arises," wrote Ho.

It was not realistic of Ho Chi Minh to expect the United States to oppose France after fighting side by side with them in World War I. Ho's use of language gleaned from our own history of independence did not dissuade us.

On October 17, 1945, Ho Chi Minh cabled President Truman, seeking American support for Vietnam "to take part in the Advisory Commission for the Far East." Ho's appeal was again ill timed, coming on the heels of another war in and on behalf of our French allies. However, Roosevelt had urged an end to colonialism, at least the 19th Century kind. He pressured Churchill to get out of England's possessive territories. This had a major effect on India eventually breaking from the British yoke.

Seven months earlier, President Roosevelt told a senior State Department advisor he was "much concerned about the brown people in the East," noting that "there are 1,100,000,000 brown people. In many Eastern countries they are ruled by a handful of whites and they resent it. Our goal must be to help them achieve independence - 1,100,000,000 potential enemies are dangerous."

Roosevelt added that "Indochina and New Caledonia should be taken from France and put under a trusteeship."

FDR told friends that France ruled Indochina for 50 years and conditions for them had never improved. However, the State Department took no official action because the bureaucracy favored French colonial continuation. Then Roosevelt died. The State and Defense Departments were also concerned the U.S. had its own semi-colonial "possessions" in the Pacific and Caribbean.

President Truman was unprepared by training, ideology or immediate circumstance to pay any real attention to Vietnam. Instead, by 1950 it was decided to finance the French military. Eisenhower had the tools to deal effectively with the situation, but Korea changed the dynamic. If he appeared "weak" regarding Asian nationalism, which was code for Communism, then the repercussions could be devastating. The French were exhausted and lacked the will to see the issue through one way or another. The last thing they were ready to do was to take a leadership role in moral diplomacy.

Advisors and money replaced diplomacy. Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist until rebuffed by the Americans in 1919, after which he went to Moscow and joined the newly founded Third International Conference of the Communist Party, also known as the Comintern. Until then, Ho had not even read any of Lenin's works. Judging him is less black-and-white than judgment of other Communists, like Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

Stalin and Mao, in particular, were devils in human skin. Ho is not so easily painted. First, he became a Communist after being rebuffed in his efforts to get U.S. support. There is evidence that he admired American ideals of freedom.

Eventually, he employed the worst kind of tactics in support of his cause. He allowed torture and pure evil to be done in his name. For this history must cast dark aspersions upon him. But it can also be said that he is a victim of Communism. While Stalin, Mao and Fidel Castro are men who would have taken the low road no matter what their circumstances, because that is the nature of their personalities, Ho could have been something else.

Eisenhower did not share FDR's fear of "brown people." Instead, he advised the French on how to suppress Vietnamese armed rebellion in 1946. He resisted direct military support to the French, however. Communism was a problem in Korea and Europe, in his view. In this regard, he did not advocate the "domino theory."

The French appealed to Roosevelt regarding Indochina. Charles DeGaulle proposed a "with us or against us" philosophy, saying that to not help colonialists would help the Communists. DeGaulle's argument managed to get Eisenhower's attention. General Philippe LeClerc and his top political advisor, Paul Mus, sent urgent messages to Paris that half a million men could not hold Indochina for France. Their prescient request fell barely short of the largest number of Americans ever in Vietnam - 543,000 - in 1969.

For some reason, career intelligence experts in Washington and Paris did not hold sway with their respective governments. There was an element of sympathy in the U.S. towards the Viet Minh as early as 1946. Opposition to them was a matter of loyalty to France more than disagreement with them prior to their becoming full-fledged Communist clients. Despite Ho's membership in the Communist party, he still had appealed to the U.S. for support, indicating he was not a "hard liner." He was fighting to get foreigners out of his land, a notion appealing to Americans. This differed from Castro, a Cuban trying to overcome other Cubans for selfish reasons draped around false independence.

The Battle of Dien Bien-phu in May of 1954 was a disaster for the French. Their forces were overrun in that northern Vietnam fortress after a 55-day siege. U.S. General Matthew Ridgway convinced Eisenhower to stay out of Indochina, which at various times flared in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos . . . or all three. There were reports Vice President Nixon urged consideration of "tactical" atomic weapons in his advice to Eisenhower. Eisenhower had clearly frightened the Chinese during Korea by not discounting the possibility they would be used. There is no evidence that such a consideration was ever given serious credibility beyond using them as deterrence in creating fear.

General Ridgway calculated what it would take to enter and win in the region.

It convinced Eisenhower to stay out of Indochina. Policy became subsequently muddled in Washington. Prior to his inauguration, Kennedy said he would not send military aid to Laos, where activity was heavy in 1960-61.

"Extrication would not be easy," he told White House aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Two weeks before his inauguration, however, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made a speech supporting "wars of national liberation," naming Vietnam as an example. Eisenhower told Kennedy one day before the Inauguration that military intervention in Laos might be unavoidable. This had not penetrated JFK's consciousness before, but combined with Khrushchev's speech it created a whole new dynamic.

Ike was "offering his support from his farm in Gettysburg," wrote David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam war correspondent and author of The Best and the Brightest. "But go to war over Laos? This from Eisenhower, that fumbling, placid man [with] lack of will and lack of national purpose . . ."

Ridgway and Kennedy met. JFK then named General Maxwell Taylor as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Taylor did an about-face from Ridgeway, recommending that the U.S. commit 8,000 ground combat troops to Vietnam. General Taylor later denied this figure, but declassified documents show that he did. Taylor called them a "flood relief task force."

JFK refused, preferring a "show of force" instead. Marine Corps helicopters were moved to Laos in a CIA-directed operation code-named "White Star" for employment by U.S. Army Special Forces advisory operations. Marines manned some of these aircraft, the rest by Army and Navy personnel. 300 Marines were assigned to Udorn, Thailand, for maintenance.

Instead of being cowed, the Communists went on the offensive. The White House, State Department and the Joint Chiefs found themselves dealing with a situation that had consistently not played out according to their prognostications. The recommendations of military men like Ridgway had been swept aside by the New Men of the Kennedy Administration, as if somebody like Ridgway was "old school." Regardless of any lack of coherent plan, these "whiz kids" felt they could "game out" a "computer simulation" that would achieve the desired effect.

To be fair, Vietnam built up under the radar because big things were happening elsewhere: World War II post-war reconstruction, Korea, Latin America, Cuba, and then the Berlin Crisis. The President still had to deal with the economy, civil rights, labor strife, agriculture and nuclear proliferation.

The State Department's Chester Bowles said the policy seemed to be "trying to turn Laotians into Turks." He fought intervention plans for Indochina. On May 10, 1961, the JCS went on record favoring the use of U.S. combat troops in Vietnam. Two years of policy planning ensued. According to declassified documents via the Freedom of Information Act, JCS Chairman General Taylor and the Commander of U.S. Military Advisory Command in Vietnam, General Paul D. Harkins, tried to falsify reports about U.S. success (and potential for success) in Vietnam. It appears that President Kennedy was duped on this issue. Still, JFK's inauguration speech, in which he had promised to "pay any price" and "oppose any foe" in the cause of liberty indicates that, unless these words were just great rhetoric from speechwriter Theodore Sorenson, he was prepared to take bold action. Vietnam required bold action. The debate of history is whether that bold action should have been military or diplomatic. In 1961, the revisionists would assert, diplomacy was still an option. However, Dien Bien-phu seems to be a Rubicon the Communists crossed. Once that happened the wheels were set in motion for violent further conflict.

JFK was like his father in that he was a pragmatist. The "liberalism" associated with his name is more the result of martyred sainthood, his brother Robert's 1968 Presidential campaign, and mainly youngest brother Teddy's huge Leftward shift. Like Ike, he desired consensus, but this seemingly good characteristic can also lead to indecision. Eisenhower's desire for consensus worked in the relatively narrow framework of committed, all-out war. D-Day, for instance, was going to happen. Ike could get all the opinions within a timetable laid out in advance, and then heap all the responsibility upon his shoulders. In going to war in "pieces," as the U.S. did, Kennedy's insistence on popular support was something of an albatross. In the early 1960s, the public supported the war. Americans hated Communism, knew what it was, and wanted no part of it. But the administration was unwilling to jingoistically build support for this line. The charismatic war hero Kennedy, with the wind in his sails and history on his side, could have created the alliance, domestically and internationally, to take on Communism in Southeast Asia. Had he done so, he would have created a commitment of friends who would not have given life to the war's opposition, or been in position to be naysayers when the rubber hit the road.

America failed miserably at the Bay of Pigs. In Vienna, Khrushchev schooled Kennedy like he was a . . . schoolboy caught cheating at Groton. Some have called this the "the education of John Kennedy." The Presidency, and Democracy in general, require an amazing leap of faith. Kennedy had indeed been in Congress since 1946, and in the Senate since 1954. But he was a relative youth with virtually no record of legislative accomplishment. The point is not Kennedy, however. Anybody can be elected President. We have heretofore elected these people from the ranks of the Congress, the Governors or the military. In actuality a movie star (Reagan, for instance, although he was California's Governor for eight years), a singer, an athlete, a corporate executive, a religious leader, a leading literary figure, a community organizer, or a very rich guy who does a deal with Satan could, in theory, be elected.

The President and elected officials, oddly, go through no real vetting process that can overcome overwhelming popularity at the polls. The media is given this inconsistent assignment. The Secret Service and the FBI check out prospective judges, Cabinet members, aides, and people who get the plum jobs of patronage. Rising through the ranks of the State Department, the Pentagon or the CIA require years of painstaking accomplishment and expertise. Obtaining security clearance to classified documents is tedious and time-consuming, subject to numerous checks and balances.

Then we put it all in the hands of somebody who might be elected because he is handsome, popular, has a pretty wife, is black, or is extremely wealthy. The fact that many of these factors all describe John Kennedy is not an attempt to smear him as unprepared for the job. He was an able man, highly intelligent, and he chose a staff of advisors considered unparalleled in American history. The point is about the nature of the office, not Kennedy's time in it. It is a matter of faith, then, that this country has enough safeguards to "save" it even if a nincompoop ascends to the White House.

But JFK, who was no nincompoop, did have to learn on the job. His first year was a brutal classroom. By December of 1961, he had absorbed the lessons of Vienna, the Bay of Pigs, and the force feedings of an aggressive military class led by Taylor and Air Force General Curtis LeMay. It was in that month that two helicopter companies arrived in Vietnam, followed by more. It was all done as secretly as a Notre Dame football rally.

Deaths followed, and with each incident it seeped into the public consciousness that stakes were getting higher. The government reassured the public in 1962, but today we view that as the last year of innocence. Two main problems had emerged by mid-1962. First, the North Vietnamese had demonstrated that they were an invasion force. Had they simply chosen Communism and let it be, the situation might have been stabilized. This might be wishful thinking. The U.S., being the way it is, probably would have felt the need to do something about that eventually. A country, no matter how small or rural that it is, that chooses an ideology responsible for 110 million dead people cannot expect to just be left alone. If a nation one day comes out and says that they are starting up again under National Socialism using the Hitler model, its neighbors will fret and the U.S. will get called in. Maybe because they knew this, mostly because their Soviet and Chinese sponsors backed them, the North Vietnamese attempted to subjugate South Vietnam into one Communist Vietnam. Cambodia and Laos were all part of the same goal. The road to Pol Pot, Hun Sen and the "killing fields" was being paved. The Kennedy Administration sensed it. The second problem is that the South Vietnamese were not good fighters.

"This is a new kind of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin . . . war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of combat, by infiltration instead of aggression, seeking victory by exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him," said Kennedy.

"One guerrilla can pin down 12 conventional soldiers and we have nothing to counter that," Kennedy told Ben Bradlee and several others during a dinner party. This "new math" varied from one-to-eight to one-to-twelve, depending upon the source. This was the genesis of Kennedy's brainchild, the Special Forces, developed as a countermeasure and skilled in jungle fighting

By the summer of 1963, President Kennedy was in a commanding position. He had handled the Cuban Missile Crisis brilliantly, and the 1962 mid-terms had gone relatively well. He advocated tax cuts that had the economy rolling. His popularity was secure except for the Deep South. A new class of weapons was now available. Tests were conducted at New Mexico's White Sands Missile Range, California's China Lake Naval Ordnance Test Station and in the Pacific Ocean.

"No man is happy without a delusion of some kind," wrote Christian Nestell Bovee, a 19th century American author. "Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities." Francis McGuire used that quote to describe what he called the "fatal delusion" of Vietnam.

"I have a great deal of love for the Army; not its bureaucracy," McGuire quoted former AH-1 Cobra helicopter pilot Jerome Boyle after his tour in Southeast Asia.

Helicopters in Southeast Asia rescued 673,000 people during the war, former Sikorsky president Gerald Tobias told the American Helicopter Society Forum in Washington, D.C. This nation entered the conflict with the bravest, most skilled fighters, with the best equipment in the world.

Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) posited the notion that had Kennedy not been assassinated, he would have withdrawn U.S. troops. This is a nice memory of the fallen President by many of his loving supporters, most of whom are converted doves.

"I think it is highly probable that, had President Kennedy lived, he would have pulled us out of Vietnam . . ." wrote former Defense Secretary McNamara In Retrospect. "I think he would have come to that conclusion even if he reasoned . . . that South Vietnam and, ultimately, Southeast Asia would then be lost to Communism . . . Kennedy would have agreed that withdrawal would cause a fall of the 'dominoes' but that staying in would ultimately lead to the same result, while exacting a terrible price in blood."

According to McNamara, at a "very important" National Security Council meeting on October 2, 1963, President Kennedy made three decisions: (1) to completely withdraw all U.S. forces from Vietnam by December 31, 1965; (2) to withdraw 1,000 U.S. troops by the end of 1963 to begin the process; and (3) to make a public announcement of this decision.

Kennedy told McNamara to prepare the orders for withdrawal and make a public announcement of the decision. ". . . and tell them that means all of the helicopter pilots, too."

McGuire is not the only historian to question McNamara's account. McNamara was an absolute advocacy of the war and its ever-growing build-up. It seems incongruous that JFK just called a meeting and made an announcement that everything they had built up was to be torn down; that all the policies advocated by his staff and the military were now obsolete. That his Inauguration speech suddenly counted for nothing. That all of it was to be announced at a press conference, and oh, by the way, the helicopter pilots (and presumably his pet Special Forces) were just to be withdrawn.

As Shakespeare wrote, "There are more things on Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than can be dreamt of in your philosophy." Now, it is possible that Kennedy had an "epiphany," that he "saw the light," and that the "better angels of our nature" spoke to him. It is possible these "spirits" convinced him that the world was not endangered enough by the spread of Communism to justify the greatest military on Earth, entrusted by the world with protecting it from just that, to just pack it up and go home. Using the Shakespeare quote, and considering acts of God and miracles, McNamara's assertion is actually possible. It is just that, within the framework of the practical world, this is so far from being possible that it is, for all intents and purposes, impossible.

The available evidence is conflicted, which gives the "withdrawal theorists" the wriggle room they conveniently use. On October 4, 1963, a memo was written to the uniformed leaders of the four military services. The U.S. had 16,300 advisers in South Vietnam at that point.

"All planning will be directed towards preparing RVN (Republic of Vietnam) forces for the withdrawal of all U.S. special assistance units and personnel by the end of calendar year 1965," said the memo.

The memo also ordered the service chiefs to "withdraw 1,000 U.S. military personnel by the end of 1963."

It was signed by General Taylor, and was declassified in 1998. The reality is that instead of carrying out the "order," units were re-assigned, re-designating personnel, other measures took its place, and Kennedy's order was rendered meaningless. No change occurred.

Now why did this happen? The same President had stood up to LeMay and the military hawks during the missile crisis. He was riding a crest of popularity and had found his stride. Now a memo, advocating his desire and putting it in order form, to withdraw forces from Vietnam, had for all practical purposes been ignored.

Consider a few things. This is the same man who had written Why England Slept advocating American involvement in Europe while his ambassador father insisted on isolationism. This same father had been one of Joseph McCarthy's biggest financial supporters. His son Bobby worked for McCarthy. Yet, we would no longer "oppose any foe" or "pay any price" to oppose the Communist menace that obsessed this country a few years earlier? This President's brother had made his career out of going after the mob, yet the President himself palled with Mafia types, shared girlfriends and hookers with them, and did deals with them.

The point of all this? Just as Vito Corleone told Michael Corleone to "keep your friends close and your enemies closer," Joe Kennedy had many such talks with his children, giving them sage advice based on his years of successful insider trading, illegal booze smuggling, nefarious business transactions and manipulations of Hollywood. Is it possible he told his son to write Why England Slept to "cover our ass" so no matter how World War II turned out, the family would be "protected"? There is schizophrenia in the Presidential-friend-of-the-mob with the crusading-against-the-mob-brother. There is more evidence of it when a Democrat gives money, makes friends with, arranges a job for his son with, the most conservative Republican in the country. But there is a method to the Kennedy method.

The "memo," the "order," the big piece of evidence that the Left has tried to attribute to the Kennedys all these years could be a sham. Perhaps it was designed to give them a way out, a piece of evidence to use in case things went horribly wrong in Vietnam. The big wink, the knowing look.

Don't worry, it's handled.

Generals do not re-shuffle, re-assign, cover up and ignore Presidential orders. To suggest that Taylor and a few of his cohorts just kept the brilliant John Kennedy in the dark is ludicrous. It plays for the conspiracy theorists, but does not pass the smell test. What does rate as possible is that Kennedy just followed the lessons of his old man, and was doing the old "C.Y.A."

On November 1, 1963, the President of Vietnam and his brother were assassinated during a coup. David Halberstam and others uncovered the now-acknowledged fact that Kennedy encouraged the coup. Sloppy, ambiguous secret cables were sent over a weekend coordinating the assassination. Kennedy reportedly sat in his office getting a play-by-play of the assassination as it was happening, like a baseball fan listening to the World Series.

These activities, and the "sloppy" cables that did not directly link the President to the act, vis a vis a "smoking gun," simply reek of the cover-up, play-both-sides-of-the-fence mentality that the Kennedys learned from their father. The act and its aftermath do not coincide with any plan Kennedy actually had to withdraw troops. It certainly had the opposite effect.

Some historians contend Kennedy's intention was to simply remove a very difficult President Ngo Dinh Diem, and that it got out of hand. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had a birds-eye view of the whole event. Even if it had not been intended to kill Diem, once it was obvious that the President's life was in danger neither Lodge nor our military did a thing to prevent it. This was certainly not based on a decision by Lodge. He was in constant communication with Kennedy and operating under his instructions.

It has been written that Diem was "blackmailing" the U.S. into not withdrawing. What kind of blackmail was he using? Reminding Kennedy of the speech Sorenson wrote in January, 1961?

The assassination immediately empowered the Vietnamese military that took over the country. Their first act was to create a closer military alliance between South Vietnam and the U.S. This certainly does not seem to be the "Vietnamization" of the conflict that is inferred by the memos. These generals would have been consulted during the planning stages of the coup, if not by diplomatic means certainly through intelligence and probably military channels. If they were to be part and parcel of a plan to strengthen their own military while the U.S. decelerated, then it does not to stand to reason that the exact opposite is what actually happened.

Kennedy aide Kenneth O'Donnell, an old Boston friend who no doubt knew every trick in the Joe Kennedy playbook, said that he asked how Kennedy planned to pull out of Vietnam.

"Easy," Kennedy is supposed to have said, "we'll install a government in Saigon which will ask us to leave."

If this were true, Kennedy would have installed a Buddhist government in Saigon after the coup d'état. A Buddhist monk had immolated himself in protest of the war. The Buddhist majority in Vietnam did not like the aristocratic, Catholic, French-influenced government that was kicked out. If O'Donnell's assertion that Kennedy had the "easy" answer is to be believed, which it is not, then JFK would have "installed" somebody other than the South Vietnamese generals. These people were not very Buddhist. Many attended advanced training at American war colleges. They shared an esprit d'corp with their West Point colleagues, and were the last people in Vietnam to "ask us to leave." That is precisely the opposite of what they did ask us to do.

By November, 1963, John F. Kennedy knew darn well that if the U.S. pulled out of the south, the Communists, backed by China and the U.S.S.R., would rush right in. He knew the South Vietnamese did not have the military means to prevent it, and that it would be a Holocaust. He may not have had nightmares that resembled the Cambodian killing fields, but he knew it would be something like that. He did not want that to be his legacy. The odd thing is that the revisionists of the Left somehow want that to be his legacy. If they are honest with themselves and think realistically about it, then the natural line of events lead to that. If the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam during the period 1963-65, then is there some reason to believe the events of 1975-79 would not simply have occurred 10 years earlier than they did? Those events, of course, are the toppling of Saigon, civil war in Laos, Holocaust in Cambodia, and total chaos in the region. Had this happened in the 1960s instead of the 1970s, it would have combined with the utter loss of American prestige, acknowledgement that America does not keep its commitments, and a possible Soviet attack leading to World War III.

Many of the historical revisionists who want to promote the notion JFK would have kept the U.S. out of a major Vietnam "quagmire" did not arrive at that conclusion until 1968 at the earliest, when his brother advocated a unilateral withdrawal. His advisors certainly were silent on the subject during his Presidency. What is possible is that "passing remarks" in the hallway have been interpreted as "wishful" official propositions. Bobby himself tried to get appointed as Ambassador to South Vietnam in 1964, which certainly would have attached a Kennedy-Johnson approval to the war. Kennedy's approval of Ngo Dinh Diem's assassination because he may have sought an alternative peace with Ho Chi Minh behind America's back goes against the "withdrawal" theory. If Kennedy wanted out, what better way than for South Vietnam to do it for them? There is no logic behind the idea that Kennedy would support the Ngo coup, then abandon the successors to political and military instability. The coup was a fait acompli regarding the war, which John Kennedy signed on to.

Kennedy pulling out goes against all we know about his political character. He was a middle-of-the-road strategist. He was a Cold Warrior who did not back off confrontation, but took it on with moderation. His middle way approach failed at the Bay of Pigs but succeeded during the missile crisis. He also liked to buy time, such as in Laos, who he allowed to be neutralized. At the Berlin Wall he lined up troops to simply observe the Russians build the structure.

Kennedy likely would have rejected a Reserve call-up and heavy bombing in favor of limited bombing of the north with limited build-up in the south. There is little to suggest the Kennedy approach would have been much different from the Johnson

approach. Kennedy, however, might have made better use of the Marines and the Green Berets, and relied less on the "Vietnamization" policy of Johnson. He might have succeeded where Johnson failed.

If one buys the "JFK was going to pull us out of Southeast Asia" scenario, then you had better buy the disastrous results this scenario would have caused. The fact is, Kennedy might have wanted to pull out of Vietnam, which is much different and more likely than truly planning to do it. The revisionists say that Kennedy "planned" the withdrawal for after the 1964 election, so the Republicans could not attack him for being soft on Communism.

"I can do it after I'm re-elected," he is supposed to have said, "So we had better make damned sure I AM re-elected."

This creates another intriguing concept. Just for the sake of argument, if JFK was planning to get the U.S. out of Vietnam following the 1964 campaign, it still leaves events between November, 1963 and November, 1964 to deal with. The Communists continued to build their forces, and were creating a situation that every day made it more difficult to extricate American forces. It is not fair to Kennedy would have orchestrated the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which Johnson did in August, 1964. But it is fair to say that the same forces that drove the Tonkin incident would have driven JFK if he was still President. It is not fair to say that Oliver Stone's premise that it was all part of a vast Right-wing/conservative/military/Republican/Military Industrial Complex/ CIA/ Cuban/"black ops"/Mafia/Communist plot. Stone's vision is, quite simply, garbage.

On November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The preparation of a document called National Security Action Memorandum 273 was then in progress. It spelled out the U.S. intention to gradually withdraw from the war. When President Lyndon Johnson got the draft, he reversed the direction of NSAM 273, which was issued a few days later.

This document is further evidence, some say, that the U.S. was going to pull out of Vietnam. It is possible that such documents are the natural result of an eventual desire to get troops out of that country. It is difficult to believe such a thing was contemplated before that country was deemed secure. The escalation of Communist and Viet Cong insurgency that was occurring every day during this period simply makes it contrary to American tradition that this nation would have abandoned the Saigon government to the tender mercies of Ho Chi Minh's evil forces.

While this may sound simplistic, a possible "alternative" to the escalation vs. de-escalation debate is a "Korea option." Perhaps if Eisenhower had been President, or even Nixon, his protégé and a man who the Communists feared, a deal could have been worked out like the one Ike negotiated in 1953. The United States could have promised not to attack the Communists. They could have put a "police force" in Saigon to create and protect a "demilitarized zone" like the 38th parallel in Korea. We already were protecting Berlin, which was surrounded on all sides by the Soviets. This might not have been a perfect solution, and it certainly would have required more, not less, troops, but it theoretically could have worked and not produced the body bags, the "body counts," the tragedy and heartache that followed.

****

Regardless of John Kennedy's intentions for Vietnam in the fall of 1963 - intentions subject to the wild gyrations of events and history – his death and the subsequent escalation of the war under President Johnson mark an "end of innocence" for America. Protests, immorality, Watergate, mistrust, corruption; these were not new scandals and problems, but they never seemed so large as they did after Kennedy was gone.

For the family, it just got worse. Attorney General Robert Kennedy despised the man he worked for (Lyndon Johnson) and the man theoretically working directly under him (J. Edgar Hoover). He got caught up in the hunt for Communists, one of the great quests of family. When Communists were found to have infiltrated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s organization, Kennedy and Hoover ordered wiretaps of the civil rights leader. In 1971, when President Nixon contemplated taping political enemies, it was Kennedy's action that gave him "justification."

Bobby Kennedy chose to leave the Justice Department. He was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from New York in his party's 1964 sweeps. He backed the Vietnam War, but as it got worse and worse, his support softened more and more. Finally, when President Johnson announced in 1968 he would not seek re-election, Kennedy reversed course, took up the mantel of anti-war "dove," and ran for the Democrat nomination for President.

Events in June of 1968 fuel the strange notion of a "Kennedy curse," not simply because he was killed but the absolutely flabbergasting, most unlikely events that led to the tragedy. In 1962, Hollywood film director John Frankenheimer made his classic The Manchurian Candidate. Starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey, it depicted the scion of an American political family who, while serving in Korea, is captured and "brainwashed" by the Communists into becoming an assassin. After the war he is "programmed" by his handlers, his final orders the killing of a Presidential candidate at the nominating convention.

When JFK was killed, the producers felt the film was too eerily similar to real events. It was pulled from distribution, released later and eventually became a hit when video came into being, then re-made starring Denzel Washington in 2004. But Frankenheimer was a Kennedy admirer. He and Bobby Kennedy became close friends.

On the warm June, 1968 Southern California day Kennedy won the California Primary, putting himself in the lead heading towards the convention in Chicago, the Senator and his family were guests at Frankenheimer's Malibu home. That night, as the tallies came in, a crowd gathered at Kennedy's headquarters, located in the famed Ambassador Hotel in the mid-Wilshire District.

Tired from campaigning, Kennedy decided to stay at Frankenheimer's home. But the crowd was getting worked up at the Ambassador. A campaign official called to tell him that with the victory and the big rally, he needed to come to the hotel to make a speech. Kennedy reluctantly agreed, making the drive, 30 or 40 minutes, up the Pacific Coast Highway, then the Santa Monica Freeway, to near downtown L.A.

He arrived to a frenzied crowd. Winning in California meant he was almost surely the Democrat nominee. It looked to be a replay of 1960: Kennedy vs. Nixon, a political battle royale. He addressed the crowd in the same city his brother had been nominated in eight years earlier. Using his hand to fix his moppish hair, he told his supporters it's "on to Chicago and let's win there." He had two African-American former athletes, football player Rosemary Grier and Olympic champion Rafer Johnson, flanking him as bodyguards. Then Sirhan Sirhan emerged from the shadows, somehow breaching security into the kitchen's pantry area, where he brandished a gun and shot Kennedy dead.

Everything about the event was eerie to the point of unexplainable. Conspiracy theorists abound to this day. Since Kennedy was not planning to be at the Ambassador in the first place, how did Sirhan Sirhan know when and where to be? One explanation is that news reports surely announced the candidate's pending appearance after he decided to leave Frankenheimer's home, but this does not appear to be a meticulously planned political assassination.

Sirhan Sirhan was a Palestinian immigrant who reportedly opposed Kennedy's support of Israel, which in 1967 won a short war with its Arab neighbors expanding its territory. However, virtually all major American politicians sided with Israel. Robert Kennedy was not unusual, there was no particular legislation or action pending, no huge "game changing" event being debated at the time.

Finally, Sirhan Sirhan maintains to this day that he does not recall what happened. This is the scariest aspect of the tragedy, which coinciding with the fact Kennedy was at the home of Frankenheimer, who directed The Manchurian Candidate, on the day a man did something so similar to the Laurence Harvey character; the coincidence is frightening.

But of all strange misfortunes that befell the star-crossed Kennedy family, feeding the notion of a "Kennedy curse," or in the minds of others the belief that God used them as a cautionary tale of pride, vanity, lust and power that must be curbed, none is more provocative than what happened to Joe Kennedy.

In January of 1961 all his hopes and dreams, a lifetime of struggle to achieve a singular goal, came to fruition when John Kennedy was inaugurated President. But in December of that very year, at the age of 73 Joe Kennedy was felled by a debilitating stroke. It rendered him completely helpless. He was confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak. However, he knew what was happening around him, "the most unkindest cut of all." He was forced to sit in mute silence first when JFK was assassinated at Dallas in 1963, then to his silent horror when Bobby met a similar fate in Los Angeles in 1968. This added to the death during World War II of the apple of his eye, eldest son Joseph Kennedy, Jr., and the lobotomized vegetative state of a daughter he personally made that way.

It was all too much for Jacqueline Kennedy. After Bobby's murder she feared for the lives of her children, taking up the offer of a Greek shipping tycoon to protect and enrich her beyond her wildest dreams in exchange for a sham marriage doing great damage to her delicate, wistful image; now she was a just money-grubbing "contract wife," her husband old, frail, images of their "intimacy" nauseating to all.

But that was not all. The next son in succession was Edward "Teddy" Kennedy. He was elected to the Senate on the strength of his family name. Handsome, Harvard-educated, he now appeared to be the fulfillment of Kennedy hopes and dreams, the last icon and future Presidential hopeful, carrying all the weight of expectations on his shoulders.

In the summer of 1969, he attended a party of Kennedy workers and volunteers on Martha's Vineyard. Like his brothers and his father, he was a notorious philanderer who was married only for political image. He picked up a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne. Driving drunk, he failed to negotiate a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. The car plunged into the murky waters. Senator Kennedy managed to extricate himself from the vehicle and swim to shore.

Instead of diving back in to save his passenger, or at the least running to a nearby home to call for help, he high-tailed it away from the scene, waiting until his insobriety could no longer be proved, and after many hours finally calling the accident in. Kopechne drowned. It was possible the car had an air hole long enough for her to have stayed alive for awhile until she could be rescued, but by saving only his own skin, Kennedy assured her doom.

His "story" did not hold up. Kennedy was excoriated unmercifully. The worst part was not his cowardice, but the fact he used his power and influence to bribe officials in order to avoid criminal prosecution and imprisonment, skating with a "slap on the wrist" allowing him to maintain his Senatorial privileges. He wore a neck brace he probably did not need in order to make it look like he suffered injuries. The arrogance and unfairness of the entire episode symbolized the entire Kennedy family. It completely destroyed any chance he would ever be elected President. Had the Chappaquiddick drowning not occurred, Ted Kennedy very easily could have been elected President in 1976 or 1980. Joseph P. Kennedy was forced to watch each of these excruciating events, muted as if by a vengeful God, his entire empire de-constructed before his eyes.

The entire "fall of Camelot," a phrase and an idea stemming from Jacqueline Kennedy's famed interview with Theodore White after John Kennedy's assassination, is embodied by this series of misfortunes; JFK's and Bob Kennedy's killings, Ted's Chappaquiddick tragedy, but also by further awful events. There were strange diseases befalling Kennedy children; a drug overdose resulting in death; scrapes with the law; Ted's drunken, public divorce from a wife who took to dressing in public like a street walker; a family member of Bobby's wife murdering a neighbor in Greenwich, Connecticut; John's son John, Jr., dying in a plane crash; and many more incidents.

Teddy Kennedy became a symbol of all conservatives despise. Heavily Democrat Massachusetts did not seem to care one iota, leading to the pervasive Republican charge that Democrats "cannot be shamed." The more outrageous their behavior, which would get them a one-way ticket to Palookaville if they were Republicans, made them heroes of the Left. A colleague of Kennedy, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, allowed his gay lover to run a homosexual prostitution business out of his home. He could not be shamed and stayed in office for decades, one of the most powerful, influential members of his party, and without doubt the man most responsible for the Fannie Mae/sub-prime housing crisis destroying the economy in 2009.

Kennedy's outrageous behavior indicated he made no attempt to clean up his act after Kopechne's death. It was as if by not being assassinated, fate accorded the most embarrassment and shame on the family, a century's worth of ill-gotten gains and thievery embodied on one rotund liberal. The tabloids took to taking long-range photos of him, fat and grotesque, his long hair unkempt, in trysts with this or that women. U.S. Senator Howell Heflin (D.-Alabama) was shown National Enquirer photos of Senator Kennedy getting it on with some floozy aboard a yacht off of the Martha's Vineyard coast, the "scene of the crime" in 1969.

"It would appear that the Senator has changed his position on off-shore drillin'," drawled Heflin.

Once Senator Kennedy's nephew picked up some chick from a nightclub and brought her to the family compound in West Palm Beach, Florida. At some point he got rough with her, prompting the girl to ask that he cease and desist. The nephew went ahead and raped her. Hearing her pleas for help, Teddy Kennedy checked it out. Seeing the girl in a sexually compromising situation, he appeared wearing a shirt and nothing else hopin' for "sloppy seconds." When these details were made public, he could "not be shamed," continuing to be elected every six years, called the "voice of conscience" by adoring Democrats.

Senator Kennedy's support of Barack Obama played a major role in his 2008 election. The forces of cosmic justice appeared again, many surmised, when after Kennedy died of a brain tumor, the so-called "Kennedy seat" was won by a Republican, Scott Brown, one of the earliest and the greatest harbingers of potential doom for President Obama's 2012 re-election chances.

Perhaps the best example of Karma comes in the fact that other than Ted Kennedy, since the death of Joseph Kennedy in 1969, no member of this most political "royal family" has emerged as a national figure of any importance. At the same time, the conservative Republican Bush family of Texas, stretching from U.S. Senator Prescott Bush (R.-Connecticut) to his son, President George H.W. Bush, to his son, President George W. Bush, to his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and to young, attractive Bush's coming up through the ranks; all that Joseph P. Kennedy failed to achieve has been achieved by this family of ideological opposites.

What if Richard Nixon won in 1960?

The twists and turns of irony, from the heights of glory to abject depression, that have marked the Kennedy family for a century, from Mayor "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald to Senator Edward "Teddy" Kennedy, are nothing less than pure Shakespearean drama, or Greek tragedy. It does leave the amateur philosopher scratching his head in wonderment; could this be coincidence, or is there a caution a higher power is conveying to stiff necked Mankind?

But the Kennedy story is not the whole story. Many enemies and friends are intertwined with them, and out of this fascinating "what if?" scenarios. These scenarios are reminiscent in some respects to the notion of Adolf Hitler's impact on the 20th Century. As with Hitler, had he not risen to power in Germany, so much of history would have been different. We may not ever have known who Dwight Eisenhower was. The vigilant struggle between Democracy and Communism would have looked significantly different, certainly not convoluted by a four-year period of military alliance, with much subsequent potential change of direction over such things as the Korean and Vietnam Wars, or the creation of the Israeli state. Without Vietnam and the great reactionary elements opposed to the 1960s and all that decade stood for, the Reagan Revolution and conservative movement may never have really gotten off the ground (America instead resembling Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged). Without Israel in alliance with a superpower America, militant jihadists might not get be motivated to off the ground, or it might be the dominant military-political force on the planet.

None of this even accounts for some 60 million human beings who would have lived. Who among this significant number would have done something that would have changed the course of events in drastic manner, for good or ill? The fact Hitler survived the trenches of World War II when almost everybody in his unit was killed again opens the mind to conjecture over the true meaning of destiny.

The 1960 Presidential campaign and tainted election leaves some equally tantalizing "what ifs?" to ponder. Some might advocate that since Vice President Nixon argued in 1954 that "tactical nuclear weapons" could be used in Indo-China, in a toe-to-to-toe confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro in 1962, he might have embarked on a global conflagration equaling the dead of World War II.

Rife within these question are Shakespearean, maybe even Biblical, possibilities that beg to be philosophized over while examining such eternal questions as good vs. evil; God and Satan; and how divine intervention plays its hand in the affairs of Mankind. The fact it involves such disparate figures as Nixon and the Kennedys adds to the fascination.

Other Presidential elections were close and rife with such possibility. The 2000 George W. Bush-Al Gore race, for instance, offers a similar tantalizing possibility, but had 9/11 occurred under Gore's watch, he likely would have invaded Afghanistan as Bush chose to do. The Iraq question may be different, but so far the multiple millions of dead that evolved out of the differing Richard M. Nixon-John F. Kennedy equation has not materialized. Even the fascinating "what if John Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963?" or "what if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1968?" questions only emanate from the genesis that was 1960.

The first, obvious answers \- the difference between a Nixon Administration between 1961 and 1965 (and 1969), the murder of JFK that would not have happened, and the differing responses to the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam – are grist for conjecture, but it goes well beyond that. Possibilities include the legacies and different lives that would have been led by Nixon and all three Kennedy brothers, John, Robert and Edward.

Conspiracy theorists, historians, Nixon lovers and haters, Kennedyites; all find the endless possibilities to be fascinating in its brilliant, original intent. There may be no greater contrast in the history of American politics than Nixon, seemingly alone against a whole political dynasty, yet inherent in their differences are keys to America's greatness. In the United States, a man from the most humble of backgrounds (Nixon) can rise up, competing toe-to-toe with the product of America's "royal family" (JFK).

Nixon was poor and had to work for all he ever attained. Kennedy was rich and skated through life with seeming ease. The first ironic twist is that while Nixon came from nothing, he came to be known as a politician representing a Republican ideology favoring wealth and status. The Kennedy name, on the other hand, would come to be synonymous with its Democrat leanings in favor of the poor and underrepresented.

Yet the differences morph with similarities. Both were Navy men, of approximately the same age, elected to the "veteran's class" as 1946 freshmen. Both were fiercely anti-Communist, and in the beginning at least found great kinship with each other. They were "like brothers," Nixon later lamented when he felt he had been stabbed in the back by the hardball politics of JFK's father, "Old Man Joe" Kennedy.

History slowly but surely inched their ultimate confrontation closer and closer throughout the 1950s. With the world changing dramatically in 1960 they faced each other in the mother of all Presidential elections. It is now rendered common knowledge that "Old Man Joe" orchestrated the stealing of the 1960 election for his son. Multiple, fraudulent votes in Democrat-heavy Cook County, Illinois (Mayor Richard Daley's Chicago) and "tombstone ballots" in Texas, just like the one Kennedy's Vice Presidential running mate, Lyndon Johnson, used to win the 1948 Senate campaign, made the difference.

The first great question is raised out of the 1960 election. Benjamin Bradlee was a high-ranking member of the Washington press corps. Philip Graham was publisher of the influential Washington Post. Despite the obvious fraud, neither Bradlee, Graham - both personal friends of Kennedy - nor anybody else at the Post or the D.C. press corps, chose to investigate the greatest political crime in American history. 13 years later, when Watergate hit and the shoe was on the other foot, they went after Nixon with partisan fervor above and beyond previous conception, therefore re-writing the way politics is covered and handled by all parties. The rabid efforts by Republicans at "getting" Bill Clinton in the 1990s can in many ways be traced to Watergate. Clinton's ability to evade ultimate removal from office can be traced to lessons he and his wife, a Watergate-era Democrat aide, learned from it.

Despite all the shenanigans, Nixon still might have won in 1960 but-for a fatal error that went against his best political instincts; the failure to help Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. obtain release from a Birmingham, Alabama jail cell. This was the first major shift in racial politics; when the black vote, which only favored the Democrats with 55 percent at the time, grew to become a 90 percent voting bloc.

After several intense debates, Kennedy did win in November of 1960, the closest election help up until that time. In April of 1961 he authorized the Bay of Pigs. It was a CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba, aimed at deposing the new Communist dictator Fidel Castro. During the campaign, JFK was briefed on the plan, which had been in the works for years. He was told not to reveal or even advocate it, for to do so was to violate national security. Seeing opportunity, he made veiled accusations that the Dwight Eisenhower-Richard Nixon White House had failed to protect the region because they had not done precisely that with which they were planning to do! Nixon, committed to maintaining the plan's secrecy, was forced to fumble over his answer. Kennedy won important national security points, especially vital since his party was battling a "soft on Communism" image still resonating from the McCarthy era.

Despite Kennedy's bluster, his heart was not in the plan. Since Operation Mongoose had a life of its own, the Central Intelligence Agency was filled with "sacred cows" from World War II, and the young President was not confident enough to buck the Establishment. The Bay of Pigs operation was launched. The key was air cover. When the Cuban exiles that made up the invasion met resistance, all was lost when Kennedy refused to let U.S. pilots annihilate the Communist opposition. His fear was that the operation would be revealed as an American one, which it was anyway, within a matter of days.

Had Nixon been President, the planes would have been allowed to provide vital cover, and in so doing the operation very well might have succeeded despite a number of blunders and even leaks bordering on treachery. Nixon was a virulent anti-Communist at the height of his Red-baiting vitriol. He was an ardent advocate of American military power, not afraid to use it (as he demonstrated in his later Presidency). Had Castro been removed in 1961 and Cuba freed, the entire dynamic of the Cold War and the fate of Latin America would have been drastically different.

The Communists would have been set back on their heels, much less willing to engage in adventure in Latin America, Africa . . . and Southeast Asia. Instead, the Third World became a battlefield of proxy wars. Soviet Premier Khrushchev immediately sized up the young playboy Kennedy, decided he was a "rookie," and hatched plans for just such adventures. Having launched Sputnik, at the time winning the space race, having found the United Nations to be a forum in which he could advocate his position and even find a fawning Western media, he was ecstatic.

He met Kennedy at a summit in Vienna and found JFK to be badly shaken by the Cuban fiasco. Khrushchev dominated the meeting and saw a grandiose future for Communism. Over the next two years this manifested itself in the building of the Berlin Wall (1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). Had Nixon been in office, not only would Cuba likely have been freed, Khrushchev would have been set back by that event and not tried to wall off Berlin, much less plant nukes in Cuba. Khrushchev knew of Nixon's "battlefield nuclear weapons" advocacy in Vietnam. If he was willing to go to such extremes over a tiny place like that, what would he do to protect his own hemisphere or Europe? Nixon had backed General Douglas MacArthur's call for nuclear weapons in Korea. Khrushchev did not simply respect Nixon, he feared him, a well-cultivated reputation Nixon, especially in his later years with Henry Kissinger, used as an effective form of foreign policy.

But with Nixon out of the way, Khrushchev felt free to poke sticks at young JFK. While Kennedy's performance during the Cuban Missile Crisis was tremendous, had Nixon been in the White House there would not have been a crisis. Had he been in office and the weapons were discovered as they were, then a very different scenario may well have played out; that with which was advocated by Air Force General and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff "bombs away with" Curt LeMay. LeMay's aggressive plan for a Cuban invasion may well have launched World War III, but in reality the Soviets probably would not have felt such a risk was worth it, especially over tiny Cuba. They may well have sacrificed Castro and the Bay of Pigs disaster might have been rectified, just as many felt the failure to march on Baghdad in 1991 was finalized by President George H.W. Bush's son, George W. Bush, in 2003.

Had a Nixon-LeMay invasion plan been launched with a resultant victory, then the world would have looked much different. Would it have been a decisive blow that the Communists could not recover from? Would it have dissuaded them from pursuing further aggression in Vietnam? Or, would it have, as Robert Kennedy warned, remove the mantel of moral superiority worn by the United States when it came to world opinion? What of Castro? Would he have been killed, exiled, jailed? Would he have become a martyr of Third World Leftists, or just a face on T-shirts like Che Guevara?

These are just the first, most obvious scenarios that beg to be explored in the "what if Richard Nixon won In 1960?" scenario. Beyond that the question revolves around the following issues:

  * John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination.

  * Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War.

  * The Civil Rights Acts of 1964-65.

  * Barry Goldwater and the Conservative Revolution.

  * The anti-war, free speech, civil rights, women's liberation, gay liberation, "sexual revolution," and environmental movements that emanated mainly from Vietnam angst in the 1960s.

  * The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968.

  * Ronald Reagan and how his future would have been altered by a successful Nixon strategy; by either winning the Vietnam War, or if the war had never really gotten off the ground; and the lack of campus protest that emanated from it, thus giving him his law 'n' order image in fighting it.

  * The 1964, 1968, 1972, 1976 and 1980 Presidential elections, and the roles of John, Robert and Edward Kennedy in them.

  * Other prominent Democrat standard-bearers who would have emerged had JFK lost.

  * Chappaquiddick: the scandal that might not have happened.

  * Watergate: the scandal that never would have occurred.

  * Southern politics and the Christian Right.

  * World War III and the Cold War.

Beyond Nixon's winning is the question of a complete Kennedy Presidency. There is little doubt he would have been re-elected in 1964. There is, despite much Hollywood hoopla over the memorandum he signed supposedly intending to drawdown troop escalation in Vietnam, the question of whether a policy of "cut and run" from Southeast Asia could have survive the fall-out over the Diem assassination, the obvious desire of the Soviets, the Chinese and international Communism to draw the U.S. into a proxy war, not to mention fierce hawkish criticism from the Right.

Considering that LBJ strong-armed a lot of "good 'ol boys" into backing civil rights legislation, it is no "slam dunk" JFK could have gotten the Great Society passed, even if he wanted to. It is definitely not out of the realm of potential that Robert Kennedy could have succeeded his brother, serving two terms (1969-77). Edward Kennedy, the younger brother of two Presidents, might have been in the Cabinet in D.C. and not squiring a girl around Chappaquiddick in the summer of '69. He could have been elected President in 1976, or 1980, or later.

Obviously, all of these possibilities have serious effect on the careers of Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party. Then there is Robert Kennedy's assassination. Most pundits believe that, while no "slam dunk," he would have beaten Nixon in 1968. But no matter how protective the press was of the Kennedys, they were not nearly so compliant by the 1970s as they were in the early 1960s. These were reckless people perfectly capable of making mistakes – sexual, political or otherwise – that could have created a scandal every bit as hurtful as Watergate. Then there is the Central Intelligence Agency, weakened in large measure by the Church Committee hearings emanating from the Kennedy assassination which, absent that event, might never have happened to weaken them. With a strong CIA, Communism might not become so "adventurous" in Africa, Latin America, and Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. It was this very adventurism that emboldened President Reagan to confront them, ultimately winning the Cold War.

But fantasies aside, history played itself out the way it did, and Joseph P. Kennedy was forced to watch the last decade of it, with all he built torn down, in silent, mute agony.

Spartacus rising

Did you truly believe that 500 years of Rome could so easily be delivered to the clutches of a mob?

\- Marcus Licinius Crassus (played by Sir Laurence Olivier), Spartacus (1960)

The American film industry indeed did start and has always been a capitalistic enterprise run by gamblers of the most entrepreneurial bent. This stands in stark contrast with Russian cinema, which almost from its beginnings operated as an organ of Communist propaganda. The German film scene of the 1920s was not a government entity and indeed produced great talent, performing before an intelligent, cultured fan base. But when Adolf Hitler came to power, many leading intellectuals fled to Los Angeles, while those who stayed became Hitler's glorifiers.

Nevertheless, despite being free to operate within America's longest standing tradition of free speech – free to criticize the President, to find fault with the country – the movie industry chose on their own to make films even more propagandistic in nature than the Soviets or the Nazis. They did so because they wanted to. They loved America and wanted to extol her virtues. They did so because the movie-viewing public was equally patriotic, and wanted to see her virtues extolled. It was pure market capitalism; giving the public what the public wanted. They ate it up and everybody went home smiling after a happy ending.

Patriotic filmmaking took on many forms. The simple depiction of small town life and loving families, as seen in Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, provides little outward rah-rah on behalf of the nation. It does not show men charging up a hill, or brave defenders of the Constitution. While unquestionably people living in small towns in England, France, Holland and many other nations love their families and engage in a similar kind of quaint innocence of spirit, for reasons that have never truly been explained but, when understood by filmmakers make for classics, these kinds of movies are considered uniquely American. Therefore, they represent patriotism as much as any Audie Murphy picture.

The cowboy may be the most unique of American personas. Aside from the Spanish gauchos, he is something never seen before, entirely exotic and appealing as a figure of rugged independence embodying the nation. The story of the American West truly represents a romanticism without precedent. Most if not all mass migrations since the Pleistocene Age involve cruel armies destroying all in their path, forcing religious conversion at the tip of a sword, extracting punishments, stealing natural resources with little regard for humanity.

The Hollywood version of a certain time undoubtedly papers over the realities found in Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, but resonated with audiences because the essential story actually is true. That is the one in which the settlers came on their own. Large armies did not clear the West; it was the other way around. Individuals, often families, came and forged their way past the hardships of mountains, rugged terrain, hostile Indians, in search of gold, freedom and a better life. Only when so many freely chose by natural migration, unforced by government fiat or order, to forge this path, did they out-number the Spanish and the Indians. Only then did the military come to protect what these settlers built; what the natives of the land were incapable of building.

Hollywood loved not just the cowboy, but the law 'n' order man, the embodiment of the brave individualist, up against the odds, who "wins the West." After World War II, people identified this as a picture of America, isolated and poorly armed, forced against its will to fight the Nazis and the Japanese, with "Black Bart" and the "bad guys" convenient stand-ins for Hitler and Tojo. My Darling Clementine (1946) was a John Ford classic starring Henry Fonda as the reluctant hero, demonstrating that "freedom is a fragile thing, that evil is powerless if the good are unafraid," according to the narrator of In the Face of Evil. Films like this inspired Ronald Reagan, a simple man it was said with simple ideas, yet it was this very sense of simplicity – right vs. wrong, good vs. evil – that ultimately breaks through all nuance and moral relativism.

Historians agree that Hollywood, while it always contained radical-liberal elements,

leaned to the Right. Led by Samuel B. Mayer, and to a lesser extent the Warner Bros., Darryl Zanuck, Cecil B. DeMille, and other honchos of the studio system, the industry was reliably patriotic. Many of these men were Jews whose families escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe. They were thrilled to be in America, the land of opportunity. Their movies, from tales of immigrant success to the landings at D-Day, promoted America. No CIA propagandist ever mythologized America with greater panache.

Directors and actors like John Huston, Elia Kazan, John Wayne and Reagan were among hundreds of true blue American patriots, outspoken in their conservative politics, willing to take public stands, and in most cases more than willing to use their art to promote their country.

But after the Blacklist, a spate of celebrities used their talents, passions and place in society to promote progressive and Left-wing causes. The movies made after the Blacklist largely reflect this, certainly to a far greater extent than any films made before the Blacklist ended. At least, while there may have been "liberal" movies made before 1960, they were generally not very good and did little in the way of box office.

The phenomenon of the "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll generation," the sub-title of a classic book about how the "1960s generation saved Hollywood" by Peter Biskind, is that the Left-wing movies of this era were often great, in many cases absolute classics. The fact this was a phenomenon is that after 1980, with some exceptions, liberal movies again began to resemble the liberal movies before 1960: overwrought, whiny, hackneyed, cartoon Socialism. As a result, again with exceptions, they were generally not successful. An even greater phenomenon describes five or six of the greatest, most successful films ever made. These are movies made by liberals intending to make conservatives look bad. In the case of these movies, the filmmakers and actors were so talented that they "accidentally" did the opposite; made conservatives look good, promoting causes they originally intended to criticize.

Liberalism, however, has become such a dominant force in Hollywood that there was nobody to tell the emperor he had no clothes. Liberal filmmakers seemed unable to stop themselves. A Robert Redford, for example, would continue to make anti-war movies like Lions for Lambs (2007), reaching little audience. Nobody like Louis B. Mayer or Darryl F. Zanuck is there to stop him for his own good. A small group of conservative filmmakers make their kind of movies, but usually for a limited cable TV audience. At least one conservative (John Milius) emerged from the 1960s as arguably a greater talent than Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas or Steven Spielberg, but his politics have not allowed him to rise to the full height of his potential.

For two decades, the 1960s and 1970s, liberals were the passion and the talent behind a golden era in movies. This seems to be a confluence of events, a "perfect storm," if you will. The Blacklist officially ended; the World War II generation created a leisure class in an affluent society never seen before; the studio system broke up and the industry became bigger and wealthier than ever before; the Baby Boomers came of movie age; the film schools created a new crop of visionaries; the Hayes Code came to an end; two world wars and two centuries of American stories found a voice; the "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll generation" of the anti-Vietnam 1960s, stilled by decades of societal and religious repression, was finally released in an aura of creative freedom unheard of in history.

Finally, in one of the oddest oddities of all, the drugs they took, mainly before cocaine became "crack," were relatively mild compared to the hard stuff of later decades, and for a brief time at least can be "credited" with expanding the consciousness of storytellers in a productive way.

Breaking the Blacklist

Harry Belafonte is credited with breaking the Blacklist, but his contribution was only the first chink in the armor. In the late 1950s, tired of playing studio politics, hiding his Communist sympathies, and freed financially by his music royalties, Belafonte formed an independent production company. Indie films had little impact. The studio system was still in place. They largely controlled distribution and theatre availability. There was no video, DVD, cable television, or other way of distributing product. The international market was growing but still small.

Belafonte made a handful of passionate, artistically good films that did not resonate with a large audiences. Whites in particular were not excited by his message, which was mostly to bash them over the head with racism. Black audiences often did not frequent the artsy neighborhoods they played. They hired a few Blacklisted writers, but not A-list talents. The real breaking of the Blacklist would have to wait a few years until really big names broke it in the making of a really big movie.

Even during the period of its strictest enforcement, the late 1940s through the late 1950s, the Blacklist was something of an underground development. Neither conservatives nor Hollywood wanted to make a big public deal of it, lest it make Republicans look like censors, while it was bad for business.

On November 25, 1947, the day after 10 writers and directors were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to give testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a group of studio executives, working with the Motion Picture Association of America, announced the banning of the 10 filmmakers via the Waldorf Statement.

In 1950, Red Channels shed more light on 151 "Red Fascists and their sympathizers" in the entertainment industry. Conservatives including Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild, helped find and shed light on Communist activities. Some were more adamant than others. Actor Adolphe Menjou declared, "I am a witch hunter if the witches are Communists. I am a Red-baiter. I would like to see them all back in Russia."

Others felt the First Amendment was in jeopardy. The general attitude on the Right was that Communism was a threat as real as the Nazis had been. If a few freedoms were abridged to root out a real threat, then so be it. For decades after this, the nature of this threat has been usurped largely by liberals. Either to hide their own guilt, or to score political points, they have used their art largely to place forth the lie that there was nothing to be guilty about in the first place, a devastating untruth that goes beyond evil.

History tells us that we overcame them, and overcame Communism. Something, perhaps just as pernicious, emanates from Communism: anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, anti-military, anti-police, anti-authority, anti-traditionalism, disdain of the family structure. It has found a voice in the environmental movement, gay rights, civil rights, and a thousand other special interest groups, largely given cover if not boosterism by a Hollywood industry that, instead of admitting guilt over Communist activities, tries like the atheist to say there is no such thing as sin. It is the attitude of moral relativism, the same attitude that says a couple of Amy guards making a few Muslim terrorists kneel before barking dog is comparable to the Holocaust; that some Catholic militarists trying to take Jerusalem back from Saladin 1,000 years ago makes 9/11 "justifiable."

But the Hollywood Ten were unmistakably, proven, admitted members of the American Communist Party. Of 43 people put on the witness list, 19 said they would not give evidence. 11 of these were called before the committee. These "unfriendly witnesses" included émigré and playwright Bertolt Brecht, who relented and answered questions, but the others refused.

Instead of testimony or answering questions, many tried to read statements and give political opinions. Eric Johnston, who headed the MPAA, said he would never "employ any proven or admitted Communist because they are just a disruptive force and I don't want them around." The Screen Actors Guild voted to make its officers swear to a non-Communist pledge. The House of Representatives voted 346-17 to approve citations against the Hollywood Ten for contempt. That was when the MPAA issued the Waldorf Statement.

Between 1948 and 1950, the HUAC list grew. Floyd Odlum, the primary owner of RKO Pictures, left the business because of the fallout. Howard Hughes took it over, then fired most of the employees. This led to a series of events "credited" with ending the studio system. After the Hollywood Ten were all convicted of contempt, appeals were made to the Supreme Court. In September of 1950, director Edward Dmytryk publicly admitted he was a Communist. Released from jail he named names.

The others had checkered careers. Some moved to France, working in splendid exile in the film industry there. Others recovered to work again after the Blacklist ended. Others were paid in "front" set-ups, penning scripts under false names or giving "credit" to another "writer." In truth most were not great talents, their careers on the downslide anyway, but some lost the chance to do something great in the 1950s.

Humphrey Bogart wrote an article for Photoplay magazine denying he was a Communist sympathizer. Others were compelled to do similar deeds in order to assure skeptical publics. A double or even triple whammy was coming down on movie stars at this time. The debilitation of the studio system meant some loss of steady income for many, unless they were at the very top, like Jimmy Stewart or William Holden. In addition, TV was making huge strides. It was a different medium and left many jittery, whether they were actors or executives. It was a very difficult time even for non-Communists and the competition in a shrinking market made it worse.

Many patriotic organizations entered the picture, exerting pressure on the system. In 1949, the Americanism Division of the Legion issued its own "blacklist" – 128 liberals, Leftists, radicals, anarchists, and some real Communists. Many of the conservative group combed stage plays and movies looking for subversion, and found a lot. Playwright Lillian Hellman was caught up in this effort.

The American Business Consultants Inc. published the weekly Counterattack, "The Newsletter of Facts to Combat Communism." Run by "a group of former FBI men," it was assumed J. Edgar Hoover was feeding them names and inside dope. They came up with 151 people in entertainment and broadcast journalism, along with records of their involvement in what the pamphlet meant to be taken as Communist or pro-Communist activities. CBS instituted a loyalty oath.

In 1952, the Screen Writers Guild authorized omitting from screen credit known Communists. Dalton Trumbo and Albert Maltz were among the named. Many turned on each other, naming names and spilling the beans. The American Legion "disapproved" of Moulin Rouge, starring José Ferrer, who was not very political. That was when some began to question the Blacklist. It was an election year and it was being wielded as a political sword. Screenwriter Louis Pollock was all but ruined when the American Legion confused him with Louis Pollack, a California clothier, who refused to cooperate with HUAC. Unlike Nancy Davis, he was unable to charm Ronald Reagan into going to bat for him in the case of mistaken identity.

Conservative gossip columnists including Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Victor Riesel, Jack O'Brian, and George Sokolsky had enormous clout. A mention or whisper the wrong way in their columns was a disaster. Winchell was viewed as particularly nasty, but Hollywood got him back. Burt Lancaster depicted him in fictional form in Sweet Smell of Success, showing him up not merely as a mean Red-baiter and orchestrator of "whispering campaigns," but as a sexual deviant with a thing for his sister. Ironically he rebounded by moving to Hollywood, where he had his last hurrah promoting the "career" of playboy baseball star Bo Belinsky.

By 1954 opinion shifted. McCarthy got in deep trouble for going after the Army, even making accusations of President Eisenhower, former Secretary of State George C. Marshall, and others. Variety described "the first industry admission of what has for some time been an open secret - that the threat of being labeled a political non-conformist, or worse, has been used against show business personalities and that a screening system is at work determining these [actors'] availabilities for roles."

In 1956 Bette Davis starred in Storm Center as a small-town librarian who refuses to remove a book called The Communist Dream after the local council deems it unpatriotic. Others had their phones tapped. While the Venona Project was not publicly revealed, much of the information used to find Communists came from its papers and had by the late 1950s been used in political manner; information funneled to Republican Congressmen and HUAC members, as J. Edgar Hoover did with Richard Nixon when he represented Whittaker Chambers. But that pipeline was drying up. The KGB learned how to keep its secrets much better in the years after the war, so the spy services needed to create new lines of inside knowledge. But the lines between legitimate tradecraft and Red-baiting were being crossed.

Lawyer Bartley Crum, a staunch opponent of HUAC, found himself targeted by continuous surveillance. He lost clients and committed suicide in 1959. Many Christians and conservatives, however, pointed out that a righteous man fought on, girded by Christ's strength; the guilty just gave up. As Whittaker Chambers, who faced the most unrelenting pressure of them all had said, "There is nothing louder than the truth teller's silence in the face of the liar's shouts."

Film historian James Chapman wrote, "Carl Foreman, who had refused to testify before the committee, wrote the Western High Noon (1952), in which a town marshal (ironically played by friendly witness Gary Cooper . . . ) finds himself deserted by the good citizens of Hadleyville (for which read Hollywood) when a gang of outlaws who had terrorized the town several years earlier (for which read HUAC) returns." Cooper's lawman cleaned up Hadleyville, but Foreman went to Europe.

Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg both named names before collaborating on On the Waterfront (1954), one of the greatest films ever made. Schulberg's screenplay gave magnificent voice to Lee J. Cobb, another great actor who named names. Kazan was hated for years for turning on Communists he knew about, but there is no evidence he was ever un-American. He made a film about his own grandfather's impossible effort to reach America from under despotic rule, kissing the ground upon his arrival, which was as much an American love story as any ever made. It mirrored the path to freedom of the grandfathers of numerous Hollywood moguls, which certainly did not hurt Kazan.

After prison, Hollywood Ten director Herbert Biberman directed Salt of the Earth, working independently in New Mexico with fellow Blacklisted Hollywood professionals Paul Jarrico, Michael Wilson, Rosaura Revueltas and Will Geer. The film, about a mine workers strike, was viewed as Communist propaganda in 1953. It was boycotted. Decades later a movie glorifying it was produced starring Jeff Goldblum, but it was no better than the original.

CBS Radio fired John Henry Faulk, a comedy radio host active in Leftist union politics. Faulk decided to sue AWARE, the organization that spotlighted his tendencies. The case took years to resolve itself, but revealed cracks in the system that helped end the Blacklist. Blacklisted actor Norman Lloyd was hired by Alfred Hitchcock fort Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1958, a live CBS production of Wonderful Town by the Communist Ruth McKenney credited her.

Edward Chodorov, Joseph Fields, actress Betty Hutton, and composer Jerry Fielding were hired and credited. John Henry Faulk finally won his lawsuit in 1962. With this court decision, the private Blacklisters were legally liable. Counterattack went out of business. Kazan and Schulberg said they made ethically proper decisions, but suddenly faced backlash. Lee J. Cobb and director Michael Gordon apologized. Actor Sterling Hayden called himself "a rat, a stoolie, and the names I named of those close friends were Blacklisted and deprived of their livelihood."

Hayden was said to have drunk and drugged himself to death living in the Bohemian Sausalito houseboat colonies, home to many a famed rock star in the 1960s. The Writers Guild corrected screen credits. Bertolt Brecht apparently was a Communist, at least if his decision to leave for East Germany makes any sense. The Hollywood Ten - Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson and Alvah Bessie - refused to answer any questions, claimed that the First Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The House Un-American Activities Committee and the courts said they only had this right when facing criminal charges; that the investigations were a matter of national security. Much of the activity of Blacklisted and suspected artists came from the pages of the Communist newspaper The Daily Worker, which may have seen a certain "advantage" in exposing Communist subversives, figuring useful idiots and liberals would criticize conservatives so harshly it would provide "aid and comfort" to their cause. They may well have seen the future, one in which conservatives would move on to bigger causes (like the Vietnam War), and the Republican studio heads would retire or pass on. Meanwhile the former Communists and fellow travelers would ease their way back into positions of influence in the movie business, bent on making films that sought revenge against their old tormentors. If ever the Communists were visionaries, this was such a case.

Edward Dmytryk's testimony was particularly helpful to the FBI. He answered all of HUAC's questions, revealing 26 Communists and fellow travelers. Dmytryk revealed the true nature of John Howard Lawson, Adrian Scott and Albert Maltz, all of whom pressured him to make Communist propaganda. This was damaging to the Hollywood Ten, since it showed they were not merely members of the C.P., or sympathetic to the Soviet Union, but actively followed orders in the making of films giving "aid and comfort" to an American enemy killing millions. They were traitors. Lawson in particular was a paid spy/subversive, and official "handler" of film subversives. His tremendous vitriol was one of the things exposing the whole group by opposing George Murphy and Ronald Reagan. He used union threats that included throwing acid in their faces, as ways of forcing their way in. Had he not been so heavy-handed, in combination with the Chambers-Hiss revelations, the Hollywood Ten might have skated along. While the Feds had Venona and knew they were all guilty, along with numerous others, their national security limitations (not wanting the KGB to know what they knew) made it hard to prosecute under American freedoms. As it stands, none of the Hollywood Ten really was punished as fully as their activities warranted. While they cannot be compared to the Rosenbergs, who helped the U.S.S.R. obtain the atomic bomb, they can be compared to Ezra Pound, paid by Benito Mussolini's Fascistic Italian government to make propagandistic radio addresses, just like the infamous "Tokyo Rose." Over 320 people were effected in different ways by the Blacklist, from official banishment to criminal prosecution to falling out of favor.

Dmytryk's Tender Comrade (1944) was pure Communist propaganda about war widows setting up a commune along Socialist lines. "Written" by Dalton Trumbo, it was really written by the Kremlin, or the KGB, with orders given Trumbo by Lawson. Exposition of this was a major factor in cornering Lawson, Dmytryk, Trumbo and eventually the others.

Cornered (1945) was a sinister movie about a Canadian pilot traveling to Argentina in search of the Nazi who killed his wife during the war. Written by the "radical" John Wexley, Dmytryk revealed that it followed the Communist Party line. It was arranged that everybody on the picture be a Communist, to avoid any American values seeping through.

"I was surprised to see the meeting was of Communists and the whole meeting was along Communist lines," Dmytryk recalled. The Communists then directed Dmytryk to address the area of civil rights and homosexuality, huge targets after World War II. The novel Gentlemen's Agreement was about homophobia, but the Communists wanted to divert attention from the fact most of the exposed agents and fellow travelers were Jews, so they had Scott change the movie to anti-Semitism.

Ring Lardner, Jr., the last surviving member of the Hollywood Ten, was born in Chicago, the son of Ring Lardner, one of America's greatest sportswriters and author of the famed "Four Horsemen of Notre Dame." He joined a Socialist cell at Princeton, traveled to the Soviet Union, and fell in love with the place. This propelled him to join the Communist Party in Hollywood (1937).

"I've never regretted my association with Communism," he said in 1987. "I still think that some form of Socialism is a more rational way to organize a society, but I recognize it hasn't worked anywhere yet."

His work on Woman Of The Year (1942), starring the Socialist Katherine Hepburn, emphasized women's rights. After the war he attempted to sexualize Hollywood, but the Hayes Code prevented him from attaining that goal to his liking. When HUAC asked if he was or ever had been a Communist, Lardner replied: "I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning."
After getting out of prison, he found work in Europe but also wrote for American films using the "front." He was "rehabilitated" in 1965 when Norman Jewison teamed Lardner and Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove) to write The Cincinnati Kid, starring Steve McQueen. Lardner's anti-war satire M*A*S*H (1970), directed by Robert Altman, was a scathing indictment of American traditionalism and military officers that might as well have been written by Moscow. It was his way of getting back at the United States. Its popularity pushed anti-Vietnam sentiment but also helped create the "malaise" of the 1970s and the Jimmy Carter years. The Greatest (1977), in which Muhammad Ali played himself, included the charming line, "A white man is a blue-eyed devil," while glorifying Ali's dodging of the draft.

The slave rebellion

Then there was Spartacus (1960), directed by Stanley Kubrick, produced by its star, Kirk Douglas, and screen written by the Blacklisted Communist, Dalton Trumbo. When it comes to the Blacklist, McCarthyism, the studio system, and liberalism in Hollywood, this is the dividing line. There is everything that came before Spartacus, and all that came after it. Nothing was ever the same again.

Trumbo was unquestionably the most talented of the Hollywood Ten, a truly gifted writer. Some of them were hacks whose careers were derailed as much for lack of quality as Communist membership. This also applies to many of those who might not have been among the Ten, but were brushed by the times. Trumbo, however, was among the great screenwriters of all time. His ability to write classics that also carried Leftist messages is the biggest reason the industry was able to enter a golden age that also included liberal themes. Prior to the 1960s, most successful pictures were relatively patriotic, or at least did not hit audiences over the head with the virtues of Communism.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957) expressed disdain for the "whisper campaign" of Walter Winchell, but this was based on reality, not a Moscow fairy tale. Heavy-handed films depicting brave Russian "freedom fighters" with beautiful Socialist women spouting Lenin and Marx while knocking back Nazi soldiers were scoffed at. Pictures attempting to "explain" to audiences why Mexican Socialism was superior to American capitalism were received by laughter by the few who paid to see them. But Spartacus was a timeless classic; one of many timeless classics with liberal messages to follow.

Dalton Trumbo continued to write under an assumed name after he was Blacklisted. Even the Republican studio heads did not want to lose his talents. Between whispers of Communist infiltration and the new medium of TV, movies were not doing good business. The quality of motion pictures was drastically reduced from its pre-war golden year of 1939, when Gone With the Wind headed a list of absolutely wonderful movies. The noir pictures, the detective movies, even over-simplified war films did not capture audience attention. Trumbo wrote Roman Holiday (1953) and The Brave One (1956) under a fake name, although everybody just winked and nodded, knowing he wrote them. The David Lean classic Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), won Academy Awards for screenplay, but it was not Trumbo who accepted the Oscar.

The Bridge on the River Kwai was a much different film from previous war pictures. It was certainly not Socialistic, but it was iconoclastic. The Japanese were painted not as animals but as human beings with regular quirks and traits. The motivation of the characters (William Holden, Alec Guinness, Sessue Hayakawa) ranged from selfishness to pride to blind order-taking, without a lot of patriotism or national purpose involved.

Stanley Kubrick would go on to fame as one of the most celebrated, albeit quirkiest, film directors in history. He was a young American who directed Kirk Douglas in the acclaimed Paths of Glory (1957), an anti-war film depicting how three French soldiers are railroaded into a firing squad for refusing to obey suicidal orders to charge into a German machine gun nest after the battle was essentially lost during World War I.

Douglas was at the height of his career by the late 1950s. With his chiseled features and superb talent he was a huge sex symbol, a "movie star" who dominated the camera, and an actor's actor. He was also Jewish, a fact he easily could have hid. Neither his name nor physical appearance belied this, but he was a Jew and a liberal. Douglas was a patriot but he also favored the little guy, a trait found in many successful films, particularly Frank Capra movies.

When he decided not only to star in Spartacus but also produce it, he was taking a chance and breaking new ground. It was one thing for Harry Belafonte to produce low budget "Negro films" that few ever saw, or for a writer who also could act, like Orson Welles, to direct Citizen Kane and A Touch of Evil, but this was a huge project, an epic costing multiple millions with a giant studio behind it (Universal).

Douglas settled on Trumbo as the screenwriter. At first it was assumed he would write it under a fake name or the credit would go to another. Kubrick "volunteered" to accept the credit himself, but Douglas was such a powerful figure he just decided to do it openly. Trumbo was in.

While the screenplay was adapted from a novel, it was all Dalton Trumbo. It was Trumbo's politics, an incredible series of allegories and metaphors for America, the Cold War, homosexuality and the Blacklist. The true genius of the writing and Kubrick's direction is that much of the message was so subliminal – the essence of what HUAC was against in the first place – that it flowed seamlessly. It took film schools and political analysis over the course of years, and some restored scenes, to truly shed light on the overall meaning of Spartacus.

Based on true events but highly fictionalized for effect, it was the story of a Thracian slave named Spartacus, played by Douglas, who is captured by the Roman Empire. He is pulled from the mines because of his physicality, trained to be a gladiator. Gladiators were slaves, often captured from defeated armies, who had warrior skills. They were matched with each other in duels to the death before crowds of Roman citizens; first in the "minor leagues" (the provinces) and, if they survived and were good enough, at the Roman Colosseum. Gladiators were given special privileges, such as food, sex and other inducements, in order to keep them strong for the matches. Those who survived a long time, and pleased their masters, were given "freedom," as trainers.

Spartacus is matched early in a fight to the death with Draba, played by the former UCLA football star Woody Strode (most of the gladiators were USC and UCLA players, including Marv Goux, later a legendary Trojans assistant coach). Strode is black, a former teammate of Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington on integrated Bruins teams whose games with the integrated Trojans played a large role in setting the stage for Robinson's breaking of baseball's color barrier a decade later. The fact he is black was a conscious choice of Trumbo's agreed to by Kubrick and Douglas.

The match is requested by Marcus Licinius Crassus (Sir Laurence Olivier), an esteemed Roman general and political figure passing by in the course of his travels. His two female consorts insist on seeing a fight to the death. The slave trader Gracchus (Charles Laughton) is upset because to have a slave killed before he can be sold into a major gladiatorial "career" costs him a lot of money, but Crassus and the women insist. This symbolizes American greed and the callousness of officers who send soldiers to their deaths. It resonated with Kubrick and Douglas, who portrayed this as the theme in Paths of Glory, but in the war was less an American tragedy (Dwight Eisenhower jealously guarded troop safety), more resembling the Russians, Germans and Japanese. Trumbo had no trouble ascribing this war crime to the U.S., the nation that had first defeated Germany and Japan, then had the temerity to discover his treachery against her in consort with Russia. Audiences, however, were not yet able to discern any resemblance between Rome and Washington.

After several deadly minutes of fighting, Draba realizes – a symbol of African-American suffering – he will never be free, and allows Spartacus to kill him so he can. In the course of this, the other gladiators become highly agitated at the way they are being abused, and attack an opening in the guard. They overtake their captors and escape into the countryside. Crassus and his party also make haste, back to Rome.

Spartacus becomes the leader of a rag-tag group of gladiators. They organize and attack Roman outposts, building strength with each victory. They live off the land, have the fighting skills to win, and recruit from villages "freed" from Roman captivity until they are an army, a "slave rebellion" capable of threatening Rome. They do a deal with a naval enemy of Rome that makes them a greater threat to the empire. Spartacus has fallen in love with a slave girl from Britannia named Varinia (Jean Simmons), who was purchased by Crassus. This is a big motivation for him to fight the Romans.

Tony Curtis plays Antoninus. Handsome and talented, the role did draw a chuckle or two as his Brooklyn accent was not easily hidden. In a scene deemed so controversial it was cut from the original but restored to video, Antoninus plays Crassus's man-servant. He bathes the general in a luxurious tub. Olivier's character (many said the actor was bi-sexual) engages Antoninus in strange wordplay about his preference for snails or oysters. Even had it stayed in the original cut, audiences would likely not have understood the subtext, so its confusing nature was as much a reason for its removal as the fact the oysters-snails references were actually questions about homosexuality.

Crassus makes it clear preference for snails or oysters is equally valid, neither lacking nor possessing morality; rather, they are simply choices. It also portrays a manly man, a general and warrior, as bi-sexual. The gay lobby has "claimed" Alexander the Great for years, as well. Antoninus, apparently realizing the general is about to have his way with him, wants no part of it and escapes into the countryside, where he joins Spartacus's rebellion.

Marching from victory to victory, the slaves can be viewed as the proletariat revolting against the established authority. The Russian czars were long gone by 1960, so the real-life established authority is undoubtedly the United States, a modern portrait of the Roman Empire. The slaves divide everything equally, a Socialist utopia of a sort, an "all for one, one for all" attitude. Their agrarian subsistence mirrors the "workers' paradise" of Communist fantasy.

Crassus is enraged that Varinia has given birth to Spartacus's child. His efforts to buy her love fail. "The infant; it thrives?" he inquires, hoping to sound like he cares. Her rejection makes him hate Spartacus even more. The Roman Senate, hearing of Spartacus, even considers giving him political power. The inevitable confrontation finally occurs. Crassus represents the great civil war question of Julius Caesar, who chose dictatorship instead of a Roman Republic based on Greek Democracy. If this was what Trumbo thought of America, he must have been pretty mixed up, but he saw all of U.S. history through the narrow lens of the Blacklist. Crassus explodes at the prospect, blustering "Did you truly believe that 500 years of Rome could so easily be delivered to the clutches of a mob?"

The battle lines drawn, he organizes the Roman Legion into numbers no military can overcome. They march out to destroy Spartacus, who is betrayed in a key battle sequence, a Trumbo allegory for those who named names. Again, he sees a few writers forced to work in the French Riviera a few years as analogous to, say, the treachery of Benedict Arnold.

Captured, they face Crassus, who call out that he wants Spartacus, inferring he will spare the others. But nobody gives up Spartacus's identity, this time symbolizing the writers who refused to cooperate with HUAC. Crassus, angry for revenge after his homosexual advances were rebuffed, confronts Antoninus. Facing sure death and torture in his last day on Earth, he endures Crassus mock, "The night passes slowly . . . doesn't it Antoninus?"

Their gladiators' loyalty extends all the way to the cross, as thousands are crucified along the Appian Way, apparently a fate they could have avoided if only they had "named names." In something of a stretch, asked what it all meant, Spartacus on the cross says he envisions some future savior who will free Mankind from its ways. Trumbo was raised a Christian Scientist by a family that did not believe in medical care for the sick, a religion he likely rejected as part of his conversion to Communism, so this seems a sop to Christians and even Jews, making Spartacus something of an Old Testament prophet who sees a Messiah giving his life meaning.

The word epic does not do justice to Spartacus. It was the age of epics: The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur, Cleopatra, Laurence of Arabia, How the West Was Won, but this was beyond all others in scope. New film, lighting and color techniques made it even more massive and magnificent on the big screen. Audiences thrilled to the action. Trumbo's messages might have been "inside baseball" within Hollywood circles, but he masterfully camouflaged it enough to avoid any protests from the American Legion. Nothing succeeds like success.

Trumbo was actually hired by director Otto Preminger to write Exodus, which set the stage for his announced credit in Spartacus. Exodus was a masterpiece, too, but not remembered with the same breathtaking exuberance as Spartacus. Much of Spartacus was filmed on land owned by William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers backed McCarthy.

"The Blacklist was a time of evil, and that no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil," Dalton Trumbo said in a speech to the Screen Writers Guild when accepting the Laurel Award in 1970. "Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions, and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides.

"When you who are in your 40s or younger look back with curiosity on that dark time, as I think occasionally you should, it will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew and some diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things that he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us - Right, Left, or center - emerged from that long nightmare without sin."

"There is currently in vogue a thesis pronounced by Dalton Trumbo which declares that everyone during the years of Blacklist was equally a victim," Albert Maltz told the New York Times in 1972. "This is factual nonsense and represents a bewildering moral position.

"To put the point sharply: if an informer in the French underground who sent a friend to the torture chambers of the Gestapo was equally a victim, then there can be no right or wrong in life that I understand . . .

"When Dmytryk emerged from his prison term he did so with a new set of principles. He suddenly saw the heavenly light, testified as a friend of the HCUA, praised its purposes and practices and denounced all who opposed it. Dmytryk immediately found work as a director, and has worked all down the years since. Adrian Scott, who came out of prison with his principles intact, could not produce a film for a studio again until 1970. He was Blacklisted for 21 years. To assert that he and Dmytryk were equally victims is beyond my comprehension."

This attitude is unquestionably based on an assertion that Communism was "better" than Nazism. If the word "Nazi" is substituted for "Communist," then these moral relativisms would never be uttered. This goes back to Ronald Reagan's assertion in 1947 that "patriots" like himself would stop Communist subversives on the their own before the government, or the Army, would need to step in. He was largely correct, and in so doing provides one of the examples of conservatism being a "victim of its own success."

Basically castrated by public opinion and the marketplace, the Hollywood Communists could never actively promote the revolution they unquestionably wanted; one that if it even slightly resembled what Communism looked like in Russia, East Germany, the East Bloc, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, or Red China, would by logical extension have resulted in millions of dead Americans. Albert Smaltz and Dalton Trumbo would have been the Maximillien Robespierres and Francois Voltaires of America, arguing even if they had not been rounded up by new Pol Pots, Chairman Maos and "Uncle Joe" Stalins, that they did not mean for it to go down like that. But because the Ronald Reagans, John Waynes and Richard Nixons stopped them before this could happen, they can play the "victim card."

"These people, if they had it in them, could have written books and plays," Budd Schulberg told Victor Navasky. "There was not a Blacklist in publishing. There was not a Blacklist in the theatre. They could have written about the forces that drove them into the Communist Party. There was practically nothing written. Nor have I seen these people interested in social problems in the decades since. They're interested in their own problems and in the protection of the party."

"In most cases the informers picked a route that seemed to them an easy solution to a difficult problem; in other words, they could handle their own friends, whom they testified against, better than they could handle the U.S. government harassing them," Abraham Polonsky said.

"Schulberg just has to explain one thing: why did he become an informer when they forced him to? And why didn't he become an informer before they forced him to? The reason was that before, he thought it wasn't a good thing to do. The Nazis pointed a gun up against his head and said, 'Look, give us some names,' and he says, 'Yeah, I hate those guys anyway.'

"I wish they had acted better, but they're not all Adolf Hitlers. That's all. I myself don't want to have anything to do with them. After all, I was on the ship and they got off and let us go down. In fact, the only way they could get off was by putting us down. That's the peculiar feeling: it wasn't only that they took the lifeboats from the Titanic, you know; they pulled the plugs."

Again, the "Hitler analogy" holds no water. Mainly Polonsky was talking about the forces that saved him from Adolf Hitler.

"I don't want to dwell on the past, but for a few moments to speak of the future," Michael Wilson said in speech of the Writers Guild of America (1976). "And I address my remarks particularly to you younger men and women who had perhaps not established yourself in this industry at the time of the great witch hunt. I feel that unless you remember this dark epoch and understand it, you may be doomed to replay it. Not with the same cast of characters, of course, or on the same issues. But I see a day perhaps coming in your lifetime, if not in mine, when a new crisis of belief will grip this republic; when diversity of opinion will be labeled disloyalty; and when extraordinary pressures will be put on writers in the mass media to conform to administration policy on the key issues of the time, whatever they may be. If this gloomy scenario should come to pass, I trust that you younger men and women will shelter the mavericks and dissenters in your ranks, and protect their right to work. The guild will have the use and need of rebels if it is to survive as a union of free writers. This nation will have need of them if it is to survive as an open society."

"Based on the growing threat of Communism at that time; the era was a full-scale assault on individuals and groups who had promoted political change and social reform in America since the start of the Great Depression in 1929," said Larry Ceplair of the Screen Actors Guild, who was Blacklisted. "This attack on personal freedom was led by the Congress of the United States. It was strongly supported by an alarmingly diverse band of helpers ranging from our government's executive branch to the AFL-CIO to church groups, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and employers in America's media, information, and educational industries."

He was correct when he observed "a pall of mediocrity settled over cultural and artistic production in America.

"The quality of American movies produced during the Blacklist era did not suffer simply because several hundred screen artists were denied work in their chosen professions for well over a decade. The Blacklisted were not necessarily the leading or most proficient practitioners of their individual crafts. There were hundreds of other artists just as capable of doing their work, and, as always, many younger artists eager to take work wherever it could be found. Nor did the content of domestic films decline because of the absence of the Blacklisted. The quality of movies suffered because studios and producers were simply afraid to make movies that appeared in any way critical of the United States, and artists, mainly writers, began censoring themselves. To regain the favor of HUAC and Congress, the studios started turning out dozens of manipulative anti-Communist movies and films celebrating American military power like B-52 Bombers."

Spartacus became a term for any kind of "rebellion" or egalitarian change in which the common man gains power or access to things previously reserved for the wealthy and the elite. The name became associated, to use one good example, with the Democracy of technology or social media. One "friends" a member of the royal family on Facebook, or sees a celebrity texting, and is struck by the fact these new devices of convenience are no more available to them than to regular folks. It happened not because of Communism or Socialism, but because of capitalism.

Even though Trumbo was not officially the first Blacklisted writer to get a credit, he was the first to openly pen such a blockbuster. The Blacklist, and with the election of John Kennedy (ironically a McCarthy supporter) shortly thereafter, McCarthyism along with it, was now over. Everything came together at once: the defeat of Hiss's tormentor Nixon in favor of a Democrat; Castro and Khrushchev's belligerence; "the terrors" of McCarthyism over; the old Republican moguls mostly retired or dead. It was the dawn of a new era in Hollywood.

Hollywood's golden age

Just as the Greeks had their theatre, the Romans their gladiatorial games, America – the New Rome – celebrated its empire status by doing precisely what all the Communists apparently thought they could not do; create a leisure class not simply out of the rich, but out of an entire, newly affluent society. In the United States, really for the first time in all of human history, average people could live as kings had lived. It is ironic indeed that the industry that came to represent a form of anti-Americanism, a rejection of its capitalistic morals, also symbolized its fruits. Indeed, the great movies of Hollywood were part of a refined, production line assembly of talents brought together to form something artistically great in a way only a free market could accomplish.

While the year 1960 ushered a new golden age, it built on talents honed despite of the Blacklist. After a spate of quick combat pictures after the war, film noir became stock in trade. Movies of dark psychological character study, social conflict and post-war angst hit the scene. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, starring Gregory Peck, exploited the "failure" of the American Dream. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, audiences began to see something different, but they could not quite put their finger on what it was. It was subliminal, except when it was obvious.

Some people have tried to say the last "Republican movie" was The Right Man (1949), directed by Frank Capra. The problem is that a search of IMDb.com reveals no such film, in 1949 or by Frank Capra, leaving one to wonder whether Hollywood ever made Republicans look good. They have made movies that make conservatives look good, but to make an official Republican the hero has never been their style. The Democrats, however, are accorded heroic status, often beyond comedy. John Kennedy, according to the movies, when not using the Secret Service to warn that Jackie was not around the corner during sex parties at the White House pool with his hard-working bros, is a god on the silver screen.

In a country in which some 40 percent of the nation call itself conservative and 18-21 percent call themselves liberal; where the vote for all elected officials at all levels of government in all parts of America is pretty close to 50-50, based on Hollywood's calculations, somewhere between 50 and 82 percent of all citizens are evil, or misguided, or wrong, or dumb, or immoral, or . . .

While Capra apparently never made a movie about a "good Republican" called The Right Man, he was a conservative. It would be hard not to call Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring Jimmy Stewart (1939) conservative, or at the least patriotic. That said it did base the corrupt political machine Stewart's Jefferson Smith was up against on Kansas City's notorious Democrat Pendergast machine, and Senator Joseph Harrison Paine (Claude Raines) on its most famous "puppet," Harry Truman, who bears a striking resemblance to Rains's appearance in the movie. The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston (1956) was as conservative as it gets. Heston's Ben-Hur (1959) was another Biblical epic, but more action oriented. It does contain classic scenes depicting the Lord Jesus Christ healing lepers. Near the end, as he is being dragged to the cross, Christ makes eye contact with Heston's stunned character, now given God's strength.

"I know that man," Ben-Hur exclaims, a classic double-entendre of faith.

Classics of the 1950s also included A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant.

The Magnificent Seven (1960) reached back to the time when the Mexicans asked "men with guns" (see: Davy Crockett) to come save their undefended pueblos from marauding Indians, but changed it from the Mexican government to Mexican farmers, and the Indians were now banditos. It has probably never been re-made because to do so would remind too many people that the Americans took over the Southwest not because of a military invasion, but because Mexico could not defend itself against "hostiles."

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Elmer Gantry, and Exodus were all produced in 1960, too.

One, Two, Three (1961) seemingly tried to get Jimmy Cagney to set the Guinness Book of World Records for most words in movie. A few snide swipes at free enterprise aside, it was one of the all-time boosters of capitalism in history, to the point of being almost cartoonish. Also released that year: West Side Story, The Hustler, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Judgment at Nuremberg, Splendor in the Grass, The Guns of the Navarone, and El Cid.

How the West Was Won (1962) was, like The Magnificent Seven a traditional Western, absolutely epic in scope, music, color and theme. Starring an all-star cast, it was the saga of the American West told through the story of three families who leave the East filled with Christian yearning for the Promised Land, forging the destiny of the greatest nation on Earth. The Civil War, the Indian wars, the building of the railroad, and finally overcoming the lawlessness of the "gunslinger" era is depicted. It gives no apologies for Manifest Destiny. Tough railroad man Mike King (Richard Widmark), observing a child wailing for her mother lost in the inexorable forward advance against "hostiles," nature and discouragement, tells Zeb Rawlings (George Pepard), "That's not crying; that's progress."

Based on a great novel by Allen Drury, Advise & Consent was a 1962 film that holds up today as one of the best political movies ever. It revolves around the nomination of Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda) to be Secretary of State. The fictional account portrays Fonda based on Alger Hiss. His nomination raises a huge hullabaloo. In Hollywood's perfect world, Hiss/Fonda is not convicted. A bungling Burgess Meredith plays the Whittaker Chambers character, Herbert Gelman. Instead of using his Christian resolve to uncover the truth via his "pumpkin papers," he is discredited as a liar. It also offers an insidious plot to blackmail a bi-curious Republican Senator. It is good stuff, but definitely political revisionism. Hollywood was going to get their licks in. Big time.

Hollywood still had a decidedly patriotic feel to it in 1962. Darryl F. Zanuck was an American legend, and his 1962 classic The Longest Day, featuring an all-star cast led by Duke Wayne, holds up to this day as an accurate portrayal of D-Day. There are some rather light aspects of the film that probably are not realistic (like a proper "beefeater" type English beach master in Scottish attire with a dog named Winston). For a truer, bloodier depiction, see Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998), but a comparison between the two does not simply render judgment that the latter is better than the former.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was directed by David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago) and stars Peter O'Toole as the legendary Englishman who organized the "Arab revolt" against the Ottoman Turks, aligned with Kaiser's Germany during World War I. Historians glean much information that allows us see how the Middle East turned into the powder keg it became, but this is by no means the main point of the movie. It is possible there is not a single woman in the film; a thorough watching of the epic could determine such a thing. If so, they are just background. There is no sex, yet it is one of the most romantic pictures of all time. The theme music is intoxicating, switching from the robustness of the British Empire in its glory to the very winds of the endless Arabian nights. O'Toole is impossibly great, a movie star who fills the huge screen like a giant; Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins and Omar Sharif are just props, and that is saying something, for each was magnificent in his own right. There is a hint that Lawrence was homosexual, as he acts fey in a few scenes at the officer's club and had sycophant Arab boys tending to his every need. There is no historical confirmation of this, but Hollywood loves to tar anybody they can with gay heroism. There are reports that he was sado-masochistic, which is expressed in a scene in which the Turkish Bey (Jose Ferrer) orders his soldiers to, "Beat him."

To Kill a Mockingbird starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in Harper Lee's classic tale of righteousness standing up against evil in the racist South. Lolita, based on Vladimir Nabokov's lurid novel, was highly controversial for it dealt with the sexual affair of a middle aged man and a teenage girl, as directed to perfection by Stanley Kubrick. Sean Connery made his debut as James Bond in Dr. No. The movie and the Ian Fleming novels were favorites of JFK, and perfect for the Cold War times.

Marlon Brando starred as Ambassador Harrison Carter MacWhite in The Ugly American, which despite its title was not liberal, but proved to be prescient. It was loosely based on the friendship developed between an American fighter pilot, shot down and fighting with guerillas, and Ho Chi Minh, who was fighting the Japanese during World War II. Marlon, the former pilot-turned-PR-executive, is named ambassador to a small Southeast Asian nation modeled on Indo-China. The reason he is appointed is because of his friendship with a populist leader there (Deong) who the U.S. fears may be a Communist. Brando assures them the man is not, but when he gets there discovers the man is holding "the party line." Their friendship turns into mortal enmity. America's largesse, goodwill and social conscience are thrown back at us by savage mobs roiled by Marxist ideology. The final scene shows a press conference detailing the crisis, with a businessman changing the channel on his TV to show American indifference to the world's crises. Considering what happened in Vietnam over the next years, it proved to be a real cautionary tale.

The Birds was another Hitchcock classic; Tom Jones a ribald tale of merry old England; Hud a star turn by Paul Newman as an amoral cattleman; and The Great Escape assembled an all-star cast, including several Magnificent Seven alumni, in a daring true story of Allied POWs escaping a Nazi prison camp.

In 1962, John Frankenheimer made The Manchurian Candidate, which starred and was produced by Frank Sinatra. The film has alternately been described as anti-Communist by some, not so by others, including Frankenheimer, a good friend of Bobby Kennedy's. Based on a 1950s novel by Richard Condon, the film shows an Army unit in Korea, captured by the Communists, made to endure "brainwashing" techniques, which they cannot remember except in their sleep. Laurence Harvey is Raymond Shaw, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient for actions that in reality never happened, but were programmed into the mind of the unit. He is the son of a Hillary Clinton-type dragon lady (Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin), played to perfection by Angela Lansbury. Her husband, his stepfather, is Senator Johnny Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a McCarthy figure. The political affiliation is a little fuzzy, but it can be assumed he is a Republican, although another Senator, Thomas Jordan (John McGiver) is viewed as an ACLU liberal, yet still a member of Iselin's party (?). Jordan appears to be based on U.S. Senator William Benton (D.-Connecticut), who defeated President George H.W. Bush's father, Prescott Bush, in a 1950 election before becoming one of Senator McCarthy's fiercest critics.

The Iselin (McCarthy) character is depicted as a buffoon and a drunkard with no redeeming qualities. He makes scurrilous accusations about Communists in the government with no proof, and when asked to name how many, arrives at the random number "57" because of an available bottle of Heinz 57 catsup. It is without a doubt a classic film, and to its credit the Communists are shown to be bloodthirsty animals.

There is some confusion because Lansbury and her husband are Right-wing ideologues, except that it turns out Lansbury is a Communist spy, using the cover of the Right to plan the assassination of a Presidential candidate. The idea is for Iselin (who is unaware of his wife's espionage?) to become President. Presumably somebody like McCarthy in the White House is the worst possible scenario for America, and plays into Moscow's hands. A conversation between Mrs. Iselin and Senator Jordan states this plainly. The shooting is to be carried out by her son (Harvey as Rarmond Shaw), but Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra) gums up the works by figuring out how he was brainwashed. Catastrophe is averted in the end, but not before Shaw kills himself in a final act of heroism.

Two years later, Frankenheimer was back at it with Seven Days in May, screen written by Twi-Light Zone creator Rod Serling. Serling's Zone's were a masterpiece of semi-liberal social conscience. Frankenheimer seized on another 1950s novel by Fletcher Knebel, based on the real events of 1934, in which Republican industrialists recruited Marine hero Smedley Butler to orchestrate a coup d'état against FDR. The novel and Frankenheimer's film fictionalize the event. It was, again, one of the best movies ever made, but completely liberal. Made a year after Washington Post publisher Phil Graham committed suicide following his paper's complete whitewashing of JFK's stealing of the 1960 election, it begs the question why a film was made examining a political conspiracy from 1934, when the worst political crime in U.S. history occurred just four years prior. The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.

Colonel Martin "Jiggs" Casey (Kirk Douglas) is the Butler character in Seven Days In May, an upright Marine whose politics are explained early by a fellow officer saying to him, "I though you'd be an ACLU lawyer by now, protecting the great unwashed." Colonel Casey describes this officer as the kind who would be better suited for an army that goosesteps. Good dialogue, though. General James Mattoon Scott (Burt Lancaster) is the Right-wing Air Force General, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and supposedly the type of officer the Republican businessmen of 1934 thought they recruited to get rid of Roosevelt. He is also modeled after General Curtis LeMay, although the Lancaster swagger and charisma make him far more appealing.

Frederick March is President Jordan Lyman, an ardent liberal who has just signed a peace treaty with the Soviets that presumably dismantles much of our nuclear arsenal. General Scott does not trust the Soviet will honor their end of the bargain. Therefore he is convinced they will strike and America will be lost. U.S. Senator Frederick Prentice is in on Lancaster's plot to take over the Presidency. They make him from California just to make sure he is affiliated with Dick Nixon. Nice touch. The public is solidly against the President, fueled by a Right-wing radio host in a prescient script device. In the end, the "protector of the great unwashed," Douglas, foils the plot and President Lyman's speech to the D.C. press corps is met by a standing ovation. The evil militarists and Republicans are foiled again.

In 1964 the first of "the bomb" movies came out. Kubrick further earned his place in the pantheon of film greats with his all-time classic "black comedy," Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Explaining how a movie ending in the world obliterated by nuclear (actually hydrogen) Holocaust is a comedy leads only to suggest watching it. Only then you will know. The iconoclastic Kubrick made an iconoclastic film starring the extraordinary Peter Sellers in three roles. He plays the President, a lily-livered liberal in the mold of Adlai Stevenson (Merkin Muffley). He plays Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a British Royal Air Force officer, and he plays Dr. Strangelove, an ex-Nazi scientist based on Werner von Braun, although some of have suggested that they see in the madman Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was not well known when the script by Terry Southern (who later wrote Easy Rider but died destitute) was turned in.

The premise is that Air Force Brigadier General Jack Ripper (most of the characters are given descriptive names), played by the Communist bohemian and Sausalito weed smoker Sterling Hayden, goes mad. He is convinced because water is fluoridated the Communists have conspired to deprive red-blooded Americans of their "essence," their "vital bodily fluids" . . . their semen. For this obviously stupid (believed only by Right-wing wackos) reason, Ripper overrides Air Force protocol, ordering his nuclear attack wing to bomb Russia back to the stone age. Of course this is meant to show the military is filled with lunatic fringe elements with their hands on the button. In an interesting bit of terminology, the words Soviet Union are never uttered, only Russia, presumably to "humanize" all those agrarian reformers. Real life pacifist George C. Scott, playing General Buck Turgidson, discovers Ripper's plan. He is another Curt LeMay take-off, bombastic and filled to the brim with sexual testosterone that seemingly can only be released by his bikini-clad girl Friday, or by bombing the Russkies to smithereens.

A plan is hatched to inform the Communists how to shoot down the wing, in order to prevent nuclear Holocaust. Turgidson thinks that is a terrible idea and as long as the boys are on their way, they should drop their payload on the bastards. The Russian Ambassador, however, puts a crimp in those plans by informing the President this would set off a "doomsday machine," guaranteed to destroy all life on Earth. Turgidson laments the fact that there is a "gap" between the Soviet possession of such a device, which the Americans lack, no doubt in Right-wing minds due to liberal malfeasance. Forced by the doomsday scenario to avoid Holocaust, the Americans and Russians work together to shoot down all the U.S. planes, save one. Meanwhile, Ripper kills himself and his aide de camp, Mandrake/Sellers, discovers the recall code. But the last plane, piloted by good ol' boy Major King Kong (Slim Pickens) is as Turgidson/Scott describes, wily enough to evade radar, while damage from a heat-seeking missile has rendered it unable to receive the recall. They make their run. Pickens makes his cowboy speech about going "toe to toe, nuclear combat with the Russkies" and emphasizes the crew, including a young James Earl Jones, is due commendations "regardless of race, color or creed." With Pickens personally releasing and riding his bomb into a Valhallic destiny, the deed is done, leaving the doomsday shroud to envelop the Earth. All is not lost, however, because Dr. Strangelove/Sellers, messianically saluting the President as "mein Fuhrer," describes how mineshafts can be converted into underground government societies for the next 100 years. The boys all smile when Strangelove says that in order to further the human race through procreation, many more attractive women than men would have to be recruited to do prodigious "verk of a highly sexual nature." Unfortunately, monogamy would have to be a thing of the past. The end.

Dr. Strangelove may be one of the 10 greatest movies ever made, but its comic message was clear: the military is not to be trusted, nuclear weapons serve no good purpose, and the Soviets are likely to be victims of our aggression. Like a number of movies, however, its political message is stilted. Reagan said it was his favorite.

A Fistful of Dollars was the first of the Sergio Leone "Spaghetti Westerns" that launched the career of Clint Eastwood in 1964.

In 1965, a serious nuclear movie called Fail Safe was released. Henry Fonda is the President. A computer glitch launches "the bomb" for the U.S.S.R. Fonda cannot recall it, and apologizes to the Soviet Premier. His wife is visiting New York City, and in one of the worst political decisions in Hollywood history, Fonda tells the Soviets that in order to prove to them it was an accident, he will drop a 30-megaton nuclear bomb on the Big Apple! He carries through with his decision, despite his wife's presence there. The Soviets are portrayed as suffering their fate with dignified resolve.

Doctor Zhivago (1965) was David Lean's epic tale of the Russian saga, based on the Boris Pasternak novel. As with Lawrence of Arabia, Lean specialized on the humanity of the specific characters without losing grasp of the epic scope of the historical drama. Omar Sharif stars as Yuri, Julie Christie as Lara, and Rod Steiger as Komarovsky. The grandeur of Russia is lost to the inhumanity of Communism, but Yuri struggles to maintain his soul. The scenes of the snowy countryside are equally comparable to Lean's Arabian landscapes. Returned from the war, Uri discovers his beautiful Moscow home filled with peasants. An apparatchik scolds him on his "greed," and Yuri wearily agrees the new arrangement to be "more just."

The Battle of Algiers should be watched by every military man tasked with stopping jihadist guerrillas. The Sound of Music starred Julie Andrews. In 1966 Leone and Eastwood were back with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A Man For All Seasons was a tale of English royal history. Born Free, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, The Sand Pebbles, and The Bible were notable 1966 films.

To Sir With Love was a beautiful story about a black teacher, Mark Thackeray. Sidney Poitier, already a superstar after star turns in The Defiant Ones, A Raisin in the Sun, and Lilies in the Field, overcomes racial barriers to teach east London toughs and toughettes the meaning of life. It was, literally, banned in Alabama, which was ruled entirely by the Democrat Party in 1967. The film is not liberal; conservatives might even argue it carries their message of "tough love," making a black man not a handout case of the Great Society but somebody who through education and good work is a respected, transformative figure. Seeing Poitier perform during this, the apex of his brilliant career, it is hard to believe that two decades earlier he was walking around New York City absorbing everything from black liberation theology to outright Marxism from Paul Robeson. It was also during this time he told the press he had no politics. Most likely two things happened over those 20 years: Poitier matured, and he came in contact with many white people of good conscience, relieving his mind that all of them were not "blue eyed devils."

Poitier again stirred the "red-necks" with In the Heat of the Night, where he plays Virgil Tibbs, a competent Philadelphia cop stuck overnight in a Mississippi town. It must be 110 degrees at night. The white boys sweat like stuck pigs while Virgil is as cool as a cucumber in a Savoy Row suit. Sheriff Gillespie (Rod Steiger) is discomfited by circumstances in which Tibbs is "lent" to him to solve a murder that happens to occur when he is there. In working together, layer after layer of characterization is stripped away in marvelous fashion, through the skill of director Norman Jewison (who tells everybody he is not a Jew, he is Methodist), until understanding between the two men becomes a metaphor for the healing of a divided America. Very good stuff.

In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Poitier is Dr. John Prentice, a doctor who falls in love with a lovely white girl. Invited to dinner at her parent's home (the Draytons, played by Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn), the film tries too hard. It is like a fantasy conversation a white might imagine having with a black in which all the world's problems can be explained away with reason and love. The acting is superb and it is a not a bad film, but Poitier is so perfect that it is laughable, as if Hollywood can create a black man impervious to fault.

1967's The Graduate starred Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross in a film of sexual awakening that hit a chord with the '60s generation. Hoffman is Ben Braddock, track star, recent graduate of a tony Eastern college, and a man with the future by the tail. He has no idea what to do with himself and has an affair with Mrs. Robinson (a sexy Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father's law partner. Set in the enclaves of Republican Pasadena-San Marino society, based on a novel by Charles Webb, a Pasadena resident who fantasized about one of his parent's friends, and directed by comic Mike Nichols based on a funny screenplay by comic Buck Henry, it savages middle class immorality and corrupt capitalism. Thousands of Americans, protesting the war, dug it for all it was worth.

A funny story is suddenly turned into a red hot one when Mr. and Mrs. Robinson's unbelievably sexy daughter Elaine (Katharine Ross) comes home on vacation from the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Robinson (Murray Hamilton), a hard-drinking man who no longer satisfies his straying wife, but has no idea of the affair, insists Ben date Elaine. He takes her to the Sunset Strip, a scene alone worth watching in its dead-on depiction of the car-hopping scene of this nostalgic time and place. Ben does all he can to make Elaine hate him, because he hates himself, but the attraction is too great and they fall for each other. Mrs. Robinson is infuriated, half out of jealousy of her own daughter. The issue is forced, and Elaine finds out Ben slept with her mother.

Then the movie really gets good. The scene shifts to the city of Berkeley, California and the Cal campus at the apex of the protest years, although USC alumni are happy to point out some of the college depictions are actually there, not Cal. The ambience, however, is all Berkeley.

Ben tells a boarding house owner (Norman Fell), "I always wanted to see Berkeley." Fell is infuriated with "those outside agitators," and only after being convinced Ben is not Jerry Rubin lets him stay. He stalks Elaine, who seeks him out at the boarding house, screaming when he explains how her mother seduced him, not the other way around. All the college boys crowd around to get an eyeful and a young Richard Dreyfuss, in his first speaking part, offers to "call the cops."

Elaine calms down and again falls in love with Ben, elated. Then Mr. Robinson shows up like a scepter in the night to warm him off with bad tidings, but little Nichols touches infuse all the scenes with comic genius. Ben learns Elaine is to marry a frat boy going to dental school, no doubt doomed to a dreary, unhappy life like her mother – this being the anti-capitalist, anti-traditionalist theme – so he crashes the wedding. Against all odds he rescues Elaine before the vows are complete, and amidst total chaos, carnage and swearing whisks Elaine off to an unforgettable, completely mysterious ending. The music of Simon & Garfunkel was as much a part of the film's appeal as the beautiful actors and comedic angst. "The Sound of Silence" and "Mrs. Robinson" were whimsical, melodramatic tunes that were modern yet nostalgic at the same time.

If ever a film begged for a sequel, it was The Graduate. In 1992's The Player Buck Henry plays himself as a screenwriter pitching just such a sequel to Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), describing Ben and Elaine married, now living in a "big old spooky house in Northern California" with Mrs. Robinson, who has a malady of some kind. This time the love interest is Ben and Elaine's daughter. The sequel never happened in The Player or real life.

1967 was one of the best years in movie history. Cool Hand Luke starred Paul Newman as an inveterate, lovable, charismatic petty criminal who ends up in a Southern chain gang, where his good looks, ribald stories, and willingness to challenge authority make him a messianic figure to his bored fellow inmates, a target of the authorities, with full reflection of the Christ-Pilate-Pharisees story. After absorbing severe punishment from the "bosses," he cannot eat afterward. The inmates all take from his plate, a symbolic "last supper" in which they eat of his saving flesh. After winning a bet he could not eat 50 eggs, he stretches out, distended and unable to move, arms spread like Christ on the cross. The film was not about white-black civil rights in the South, but it served the same purpose. It showed the white power structure, led by Strother Martin ("What we have heah . . . is a fail-yer . . . to communicate") to be corrupt and brutal.

Bonnie and Clyde, still another classic of that same year, broke the mold in terms of the anti-hero and violence. Directed by Arthur Penn, it starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the famed bank robbers of the Great Depression, who were viewed by many as glamorous "Robin Hoods" stealing from the wealthy at a time when so many did without. Beatty in particular took a huge risk, allowing himself to be depicted not as the handsome lothario, but as a de-emasculated male unable to satisfy Bonnie sexually, so he resorts to a gun as his phallic weapon.

In Cold Blood was based on the Truman Capote classic. The Taming of the Shrew was Franco Zeffirelli's take on a Shakespeare classic.

John "Duke" Wayne infuriated the Left with The Green Berets, a film that made no apologies in its all-out support of America's effort in Vietnam. It was lambasted by critics, but in a very interesting sign, sold out at the box office. It plays today and while it is heavy-handed, there is little about it that rings untrue. The soldiers do not swear, complain or bastardize their uniforms like the actual guys did, but their patriotism and military professionalism was the real deal. The Communists they fight in the film are shifty little pizzants. This does not deviate from the essential facts.

Kubrick made perhaps his oddest picture in 1968. 2001: A Space Odyssey certainly seems to have been made strictly for kids dropping acid just before entering the theatre, timing the mind-bending final scenes with LSD's desired kick. Franklin Schaffner's Planet of the Apes starred Charlton Heston in a film with profound religious, social and Cold War sensibilities. It certainly seemed Darwinian in reverse order of the Margaret Sanger-eugenics theology, demonstrating at the end that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. did not resolve their differences; they blew it all up, prompting Heston's astronaut to "damn you all to hell," adding further religious verve to a cautionary story. Bullitt, Oliver!, Romeo and Juliet, and The Lion in Winter were other 1968 classics.

If the old order thought the slave rebellion of Spartacus, the liberalism of Dr. Strangelove, the violence of Bonnie and Clyde, the sexuality of The Graduate, or the modernism of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had, along with the end of the old studio system, changed the nature of Hollywood they, in the words of Ronald Reagan, "Ain't seen nothin' yet."

Midnight Cowboy (1969), directed by John Schlesinger, starring Dustin Hoffman and a brand new Jon Voigt, explored themes of homosexuality, male prostitution and street hustling, and was rated X. Conservatives criticized it, but it won an Oscar. Many on the Right point to this as a turning point in which the Academy Awards represented a liberal shift. Over time, the awards have become outrageously political and undeserving, unimpressives honoring each other with fake trophies for acts of "heroism" and "courage" of a more and more nauseating nature. Christians have come to see the Oscar statue as a modern golden calf, the pagan idol worshipped by the Jews incurring the wrath of God. Certainly honoring a film partly about homosexuality and male prostitution seemed anti-Christian, but in 1969-70, the world was turning. Ironically Voigt since became a staunch conservative. As for Hoffman, his role as Ratso Rizzo, while brilliantly acted, marked a shift in the way movie stars allowed themselves to be portrayed.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starred Newman as Butch and Robert Redford in his breakout role as the Sundance Kid. Directed by George Roy Hill, written by William Goldman, it broke previous movie convention, certainly veering from the My Darling Clementine-Duke Wayne model of "good triumphing over evil." The "heroes," like Newman's Cool Hand Luke, were both anti-heroes, criminals on the run. Katharine Ross was even more spectacularly lovely as the Kid's love interest, Etta Place, than she had been in The Graduate. Aside from casting bank robbers as heroes, as in Bonnie and Clyde, the film featured comedic lines with very modern twists, uttered to perfection by Newman with Redford as his wry sounding board. It also featured music by Burt Bacharach and B.J. Thomas ("Rain Drops Keep Falling On My Head") with no Western theme whatsoever. The first time Redford heard the score he walked out, astonished at such bad choices, but like Simon & Garfunkel's catchy tunes in The Graduate, the modern sound completely resonated with audiences.

William Goldman, who got to know Robert Redford when he wrote Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, noted that Redford guarded his image as a heroic leading man who gets the girl. Even Newman took a chance by sharing screen time with such a handsome fellow actor. Newman and Redford were "movie stars," a wholly separate entity from "actors." Hoffman's casting as Ben Braddock in The Graduate seemed incongruous at the time. It was destined to go to somebody like Redford, as the novel described an athletic Southern California jock. Hoffman was short, Jewish and not a "matinee idol," yet somehow memory tells us nobody could have made that role like he did. However, it also made him, like Redford and Newman, a movie star. Instead of pursuing that image, however, he turned it around with Ratso, a pathetic street urchin. His performance, regardless of Christian/conservative criticism of the subject matter, was superb. Goldman explained in his fascinating Adventures in the Screen Trade that Redford never would have sullied his screen image in that way.

Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch picked up on the violent themes of Bonnie and Clyde, creating an entirely new genre that has continued unabated ever since. It was, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, anti-heroic, and reversed the old Western from "cowboys 'n' Indians" or "law 'n' order" to grit and greed. .

Easy Rider was an independent film that completely turned the movie industry on its head, not just because it was low budget without grandiose cinematic touches, used non-professionals, and turned nobodies and druggies into stars (Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper), but because it blatantly showed drug use and other "un-American" activity, which the Left and the young ate up with a fork and spoon.

Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice shocked audiences with its exploration of the "swing scene." Paint Your Wagon was an overblown Western musical from Paramount, which was dying on the vine after a string of failures. It has come to symbolize the end of the studio era, which would be replaced by a hip new generation of filmmakers responding to the youthful audiences of the 1960s and 1970s.

Just as Easy Rider was the anti-Patton, another 1970 "military" movie came out and it, too, was intended to engender opposite feelings. Robert Altman's M*A*S*H found an audience, and truth be told many who enjoyed Patton enjoyed M*A*S*H. It was just plain funny, and the anti-military theme was subtle. Altman walked a brilliant tightrope between a pro-American and unpatriotic premise. There is no doubt Altman intended it as an anti-Vietnam movie. Former Blacklisted Communist Ring Lardner, Jr, wrote it. This fact featured prominently in the politics of the film's aura. It was based on a sexy paperback novel about surgeons in Korea. The film was set in Korea, yet made every possible attempt to convey the image it was actually Vietnam. Many of the movie's set pieces were deliberately Vietnamese in nature and costume, for that very purpose. To the extent that it was unpatriotic, it subtly described "regular Army" officers as unyielding, intolerant Christians, utterly blinded by stupid jingoism. The draftees, however, are funny and attractive as they drink and love their way through a bevy of good-looking nurses, all while saving lives in the style of comic Galahads. Altman showed genius as a filmmaker, establishing his well known style of different conversations overlapping each other. The movie avoided real controversy because it was just so darn good.

M*A*S*H spurred a television show that ran for years. In the 1970s it played for its time and audience. Re-runs, however, strain its credibility beyond Altman's original themes. Two doctors played the "bad guy." The first was a complete buffoon. Frank Burns (Larry Linville) was prominently identified as a Republican. He is given zero good qualities. He is ugly, a bad doctor, a coward, a racist and all-around mean SOB who cheats on his wife with Major Margaret Hoolihan (Loretta Swit), who at least is given some character. She is half-vixen, half-Fascist, naturally Republican, a patriotic American in the "worst way," who worships the idols of war. Over the years the writers gave Margaret a little development. Very little. Burns was replaced by Major Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers), a Boston Brahmin, naturally a Republican whose father "knows Truman. He doesn't like him, but he knows him." Winchester, like Hoolihan, is allowed a touch of humanity when the liberal writers felt charitable, but generally was available for all possible bashing. Two hero-doctors, Captain Benjamin Pierce (Alan Alda) and Captain B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farell, who replaced Wayne Rogers) anchor the show by showing their intelligence, medical skills and tolerance as direct contrasts to the war effort. The CIA is lampooned, and a military effort that in reality featured MacArthur's Inchon campaign, perhaps the most brilliant invasion in history, is also played as foolish. In the end, the TV show and the film avoid being really and actually unpatriotic because they do feature an emphasis on the basic goodness of the American spirit under stress.

TV shows began to veer into social territory in the 1970s, especially All In the Family. Carroll O'Connor played Archie Bunker, the epitome of everything liberals despise. In turning him into a cartoon character, and also because O'Connor's acting skills were extraordinary, they came close to overshooting their mark and making Bunker more popular than creator Norman Lear, a liberal's liberal, wanted him to be. Since that meant success and riches, however, Bunker was allowed to develop his own little cult of personality. Bunker liked nobody except the Republicans and Nixon. He was a New York construction hardhat, like the ones who cheered Nixon. His venom was directed at blacks, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Orientals, Europeans, Catholics, gays, Democrats, liberals, Communists, and everybody. The assumption was that he was a Protestant of English or Irish origin, but the writers wrote in his complaints for "drunken Irishmen" and "fag Englishmen." His view of God was that if you did not believe in Him you were a Communist, but beyond that little was explained. His son-in-law, "Meathead" (Rob Reiner), ate him out of house and home, exasperating Bunker with liberal nostrums. His wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton), was a dunce who did not stand up to him unless the writers decided that night's episode would feature women's rights, but the next time out she was back to her mousy self.

Bunker's "castle" was constantly invaded by a host of blacks, women, Hispanics and other minority-types from the New York "melting pot," all of them smarter than Arch and able to run rings around him intellectually. The only characters outside of Edith who stooped to his low IQ were his dumbass white bowling and lodge pals. The show worked, for one thing, because after years of racial intolerance, white America was ready to loosen up, laugh at themselves, and accept a little affirmative action comedy at their expense. It also worked because Bunker developed a cult status that Lear had not predicted. There were those who agreed with his views. Sitting at home these Joe Six-Packs spent the 1970s yelling, "You tell 'em, Arch."

Catch-22 was based on Joseph Heller's hilarious novel, the name describing an Army Air Corps "regulation" whereby pilots who fly a certain number of missions without being shot down or killed are therefore rotated back into the schedule. The only way to avoid continued missions is to be shot down, this being a "catch-22." Directed by The Graduate director Mike Nichols, it introduced Alan Arkin as Captain John Yossarian, a dry-witted comic performance if ever there was one. An all-star cast included Martin Balsam, Jack Gifford, Buck Henry, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voigt, Orson Welles, and luscious Playboy model Susanne Benton in one of the funniest scenes ever filmed.

The pilots are all assembled when the blowhard Brigadier General Dreedle (Welles) arrives amid incredible pomp and pageantry, his dingbat son-in-law as his drooling aide, and Benton as his WAC. The pilots, who have been flying non-stop and not seen any women, are sex-starved out of their minds. Benton promiscuously crosses her legs, licks her lips, gives lascivious glances and winks, driving the fellows batty; they fall all over each other and make increasingly funny whines and moans of ecstatic horniness, which the general never really gets a full handle on as he drones on and on. It was of course comedy, probably considered light anti-war fare, but touched on serious issues that real pilots actually faced.

Tora! Tora! Tora! was an accurate portrayal of the attack at Pearl Harbor. Oddly, the famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was hired to film the Japanese scenes, and give it the Japanese point of view, but was fired mid-way through shooting.

The French Connection (1971) was a classic telling of the true story of New York law enforcement officers who leave no stone unturned in chasing heroin dealers smuggling drugs between France and the U.S. It made Gene Hackman a big star.

Gordon Parks's Shaft began the so-called "blackspoitation" films of the early 1970s. Mike Nichols made the ultra-sexy Carnal Knowledge (Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret). John Boorman's Deliverance has been caricatured as a good reason to hate Southerners, especially when the region went Republican. Slaughterhouse-Five was based on Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s novel. Robert Redford played the mountain man Jeremiah Johnson.

Redford was behind the entertaining political movie The Candidate (1972), which goes a long way towards explaining how the game works. This film is really not a liberal one, which is what makes it worthwhile even after 40 years. It was supposed to be based on Edmund "Jerry" Brown, former California Governor Pat Brown's son. Jerry Brown at the time was a youthful Secretary of State who would go on to two terms as Governor. He was a new kind of pol, attractive, a bit of a swinger who dated rock star Linda Ronstadt, and representative of the Golden State image of the 1970s. They called him "Governor Moonbeam."

Redford plays Bill McKay, the son of former Governor of California John McKay, played by Melvyn Douglas. The old man is old school all the way, having schmoozed his way up the slippery slope through implied corrupt deals with labor unions and other Democrat special interests. McKay is a young man who played football at Stanford and is now a social issues lawyer of the pro bono variety, helping Mexicans in central California. Marvin Lucas (Peter Boyle) knew him at Stanford and is now a Democrat political consultant who recruits young McKay to run for the U.S. Senate against Senator Crocker Jarman (Don Porter), an entrenched conservative Orange County Republican. Jarman could be Reagan, but he is as much a composite of the traditional Republican: strong on defense, down on affirmative action and welfare, pro life all the way, a real "up by the bootstraps" guy who emerged from the Depression and World War II to make up our "greatest generation."

The film does an about-face on perceptions that, in many cases, turn out to be true. Redford is the rich kid with connections. Jarman beat the Depression like the rest of the U.S., without a social worker.

"How did we do it?" he mocks.

Redford's film wife Nancy is played by Karen Carlson, pure eye candy (but what happened to her career?). She has ambitions of her own, and pushes him to do it because he has the "power," an undefined sexual charisma of the JFK variety. Redford plays a caricature of himself, handsome but considered an "empty suit." His deal is he can say any outrageous thing because he cannot win anyway, and in so doing shows he has the brains. When he creeps up in the polls, the idealism gives way to standard politicking, complete with deals with his old man's crooked labor buddies. He wins, demonstrating the power of looks and TV advertising. In the end he expresses that he is not prepared for the task, a political reality not without its examples.

A Bridge Too Far (1977) featured an all-star cast in the fashion of The Longest Day. In many ways it represents the end of a film age not seen since. There have been few true epics featuring numerous high-profile (and high-priced) movie stars. Movies like Saving Private Ryan, for instance, would feature one or two big name stars backed up by a cast of unknowns.

Evans

The golden age of Hollywood, which came to such fruition in the 1960s and 1970s, has many symbols and adherents. Certainly the four great film schools – USC, UCLA, NYU, Columbia – changed the art form for the better. Independent films, propelled by John Cassavetes and Easy Rider, ushered the end of the studio monopolies. But one man more than any other represented what this new age was, and what the American art form meant.

His name was Robert Evans. He was an upper middle class Jewish kid, the son of a doctor from Manhattan. As a youth he fell in love with movies, spending hours watching double features. He acted on stage, but at a very young age, he and his brother Charles developed a clothing line, Evan Picone. It was wildly successful, featuring sleek, modern clothes worn by the women coming of age during the sexual revolution. Still in his early 20s, the young clothing tycoon was on a business trip in Los Angeles, staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The day America re-elected Dwight Eisenhower to his second term as President in 1956, the famed actress Norma Shearer spotted Evans sunning himself poolside. He was as gorgeous a physical creature as has ever been found in the male species; tanned to a dark brown, jet-black hair, bedroom eyes, pure sex appeal.

Shearer approached the "young man" and asked if he was an actor. He said he had been as a kid but was now a clothing executive. She said she was involved in an upcoming film about her late husband, the famed movie mogul Irving Thalberg, and felt Evans was just right to play the role. Thus was he discovered and starred in Man of A Thousand Faces (1957). He figured he would go back to the clothing business and was in New York when Darryl Zanuck saw him in a club. Zanuck did not know he was playing Thalberg; he just saw a "star" as Norma Shearer did. He decided then and there Evans would play Pedro Romero in the upcoming 20th Century Fox epic The Sun Also Rises, perhaps Ernest Hemingway's greatest novel.

Filming in Spain with an all-star cast (Tyrone Power, Ava Gardner, Mel Ferrer, Errol Flynn, Eddie Albert), Evans was greeted coolly by Hemingway, who did not like a New York Jew playing his favorite matador. The entire cast (except for Flynn, too busy drinking and chasing women) drew up a letter to Zanuck demanding Evans's removal. Zanuck flew to the location and watched Evans perform some matadorial work, pulled a bullhorn to his mouth, and announced, "The kid stays in the picture." Obviously meaning he would continue to play Romero, it became the catch-phrase of Evans's life, career, 1994 autobiography, and 2002 documentary.

Evans was a serviceable, not great actor. His pretty boy looks were not enough. But Zanuck, a real "boss, impressed him He wanted to be on his side of the camera, not shaking over the decisions made by others about his fate. He began to option novels and did some low level producing. In 1966, Paramount Pictures was on the verge of bankruptcy. Evans was hired as head of production. It was immediately hailed as a joke. This pretty boy actor had little experience. He obviously was hired to be the "face" of a sinking ship, to take the blame for the "fall of the mountain," as Paramount was referred to.

But Evans immediately changed the culture at Paramount. Instead of stodgy Westerns and musicals, he would make hip features starring attractive chicks in mini-skirts, modern comedies, and edgy thrillers. Barefoot in the Park (1967) starred Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, attracting praise. The Odd Couple (1968) was a wildly successful adaptation of Neil Simon's Broadway hit starring Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau. Evans's handling of the difficult Frank Sinatra in The Detective (1968) attracted attention. Peter Bart wrote a glowing piece about his management style in the New York Times, which caused the mercurial Austrian head of Gulf+Western (Paramount's conglomerate owner), Charles Bluhdorn, to hire him to head the studio at the age of 38.

Immediately faced with studio liquidation by the corporate board members in New York, Evans realized he was again chosen as a "fall guy." Undaunted, he met with them, wowing them with his drive and youthful appeal. They agreed to let him try and resurrect "the mountain."

He was a boy wonder. Rosemary's Baby, directed by Roman Polanski, inspired much Christian angst over its depiction of a young woman (Mia Farrow) giving birth to Satan's off-spring. Regardless of that, it marked Polanski as brilliant and was the hit Paramount needed. After that Evans was on his way.

True Grit (1969) was a complete reversal from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a traditional Western based on a Charles Portis novel and screenplay starring Duke Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, Glenn Campbell as a Texas Ranger, and Kim Darby as "little Mattie" Ross. The music, like The Magnificent Seven and How the West Was Won, was stirring, speaking to the "big sky country" of the Old West with heavy romantically melancholy overtones. Audiences could feel themselves transported not just to the 19th Century, but to a slice of Americana seemingly, with Vietnam ranging and the kids sexualized by "the pill," apparently long gone. Wayne won his first and only Academy Award, a deserving anti-dote it seemed to Midnight Cowboy. Old footage of the event reveals tremendous love and admiration for the Duke, with such liberals as Barbra Streisand and Jane Fonda genuflecting before him, despite the fact he went after all their Communist pals and firmly backed a war they all hated. It was further reinforcement of Evans's excellent leadership.

Love Story (1970) is still considered one of the most romantic films in history. Starring Ryan O'Neal as Harvard golden boy Oliver Barrett IV, the scion of great wealth and privilege, and Ali MacGraw as Jennifer Cavalleri, the smart Radcliffe girl who hails from a blue collar Italian family, it tells the story of their great romance with modern Romeo and Juliet overtones. Barrett's family adamantly opposes their marriage, cutting him off from his inheritance. He struggles as a young attorney, with "Love meaning you never have to say you're sorry," until Jennifer is felled by an incurable disease and dies. Based on Erich Segal's blockbuster, Tommy Lee Jones appears in a small role. Jones was Albert Gore's roommate at Harvard. Somehow Gore decided his Harvard classmate Segal based the novel on his relationship with Tipper Gore, who was very much still alive when he made the assertion. Perhaps he was also inventing the World Wide Web at the same time. The snowy Cambridge scenes give no hint of "global warming," either.

The beautiful couple, the sensuous music, and the melancholy story of unrequited love, were nothing less than a "turn on" to the younger generation. According to Evans, guys were going to multiple showings of Love Story, taking different girls each time. The movie was said to stimulate the sale of prophylactics like no other event. Evans, the hottest name in Hollywood, squired the beautiful Ali, who agreed to marry him in storybook fashion.

That "love story" did not have a happy ending, either. Ali fell in love with Steve McQueen on the set of The Getaway. She divorced Evans and took his son Josh, away from him. Evans then went on a "run" of Hollywood starlets, models, and beauties that is unmatched by all but a small number of Romeos. In a famed scene from his documentary, an interviewer asks about all the beautiful women he is seen taking to premiers and parties. Evans smiles, saying he works seven days a week, late into the night, and has no time for such frivolities. While the audience hears this in voiceover, they are shown photo after photo of a tuxedo-clad Evans with delicious models and hotties in tow.

Then came Francis.

The feud between Robert Evans and Francis Ford Coppola on the set of The Godfather is one of the great legends in show biz annals. It is one of several long, dragged out sagas involving Coppola, who made some of the best, most difficult films ever.

The Godfather (1969) was a runaway bestseller by Mario Puzo, filled with lurid sex, over the top violence, and an inside look at mob life unlike anything written before. Hollywood approached the subject tepidly, for two reasons. First, the mob did not want light shed on their activities. Robert Kennedy was dead, the McClellan Committee on organized crime (run by Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan in the 1950s) was a decade in the rear view mirror, and they did not need attention. But mob movies were not big hits.

Evans, the Jewish man, said the reason was because they always featured Jews. He wanted Italian-American actors and an Italian director. He wanted to "smell the spaghetti." There were not a lot of Italian-American directors, and not all that many Italian-American actors with star quality. He faced a challenge.

Evans resisted Coppola. He knew he was brilliant, but hard to work with. He had never directed a hit. His films were esoteric art films. He was practically thrown off Patton, despite his Oscar-level screenwriting. But he was Italian. Evans okayed Coppola, only to learn to his consternation the great artiste did not want to make the film. He was from Long Island, a middle class kid whose father was a film professor, and had little identification with the gumba Mafiosi of the story. Furthermore, he did not wish to glorify organized crime, or besmirch his Italian-American heritage. Evans could not believe it; he was offering this unknown (he had not yet won the Oscar for Patton) the opportunity of a lifetime, but he was unimpressed, preferring to make little indies in San Francisco for nothing, that nobody would see.

Evans finally begged Coppola into saying yes, getting off to a bad start. Then Coppola said he saw the story as a "metaphor for capitalism in America," in which the corruption of the mob would be a stand-in for the corruption of the U.S. Evans, a Republican, a conservative and a patriot who was close friends with Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, almost had to be restrained, but figured as producer he could steer the direction of the film away from such Leftist ideology.

Finally, they cast the film. Most of the character roles went to hardcore Italians with thick Bronx accents. It was the first of the genre that Martin Scorsese would perfect in later films, an entire cottage industry of character types. Some of the roles went to actual Mafia members, adding to the realism. The role of Sonny Corleone, the eldest son, went to the handsome, strapping James Caan. Robert Duvall was given the role of Tom Hagen, the family's consigliere, which in the novel is the reason the Corleones are called the "Irish gang." Sterling Hayden, virtually unseen since Dr. Strangelove, was lured away from his pot and Sausalito houseboat to play a small but important role, the corrupt police Captain McCluskey (where he utters the classic line, "I thought I got all you guinea hoods locked up"). Diane Keaton became a big star as the naïve Kay Adams, who marries the youngest son, Michael Corleone.

The choice of Michael, the key to the whole film and eventually the entire saga, was fraught with peril when Al Pacino was chosen. He was totally unknown, mainly a stage actor, and in person seemed mousy, not the commanding presence his character grows into. But they saw his brilliance and cast him.

Finally came Don Vito Corleone, The Godfather himself. Marlon Brando was washed up. He made a string of losers and had not been a star of a big movie in a long time. He was not even Italian or Catholic, both central to who the Don was. But Coppola idolized him and was willing to work around the fact he never memorized lines.

Every attention to detail was adhered. Indeed, there is an early scene at sister Connie's wedding (Coppola's sister Talia Shire) in which Michael asks Kay if she enjoys her lasagna. This fulfilled, essentially, Evans's admonition that he wanted audiences to "smell the spaghetti," or in this case the lasagna. The costumes, the ambience, the scenery are so perfect that the scene really does make people hungry for homemade lasagna. It evokes in the mind the realization that a true Italian expert made that lasagna, which unquestionably is superb and far better than ordinary lasagna available to ordinary people. These kinds of touches infuse every tiny detail of the film, along with superb lighting, shadow, color, noir moodiness, in which the place – the Bronx, Hollywood in the '40s, little Italian restaurants with checkerboard table cloths, with dark red vino served by closed-mouth waiters who know their place– are as much characters as the actors.

So, The Godfather was filmed. It had huge build-up and expectations for a Christmas, 1971 opening. Coppola regaled Evans with boffo descriptions of marvelous performances. It was going great, until Coppola showed Evans the "final cut." Most of the time, arguments are between the producer who wants to cut a picture to save costs, vs. a director who wants his entire vision played out in full. Not this time. Coppola edited his masterpiece to death. Evans ordered him to go back and re-instate many scenes, no matter the length. This was a saga, an epic, a story that deserved to be told without hurrying.

Coppola held his ground, forcing Evans to come to the Napa wine country, where Coppola lived, hat in hand, practically begging the prima donna to do his job. Accounts differ on how it came together. Evans claimed he forced Coppola to restore his classic; Coppola said he never followed the producer's advice and knew all along what the film should be. Regardless, it was pushed back to March, 1972, but premiered in New York with Kissinger, literally taking time off from the mining of Haiphong Harbor, to be there.

It was an instant classic, many argue the greatest film ever made. There are those who say Patton was better. Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, The Graduate, Apocalypse Now . . . even The Godfather II are among the short list of films mentioned in this eternal competition. Regardless, it was glorious.

As for Coppola's "metaphor for capitalism," while The Godfather and its sequel two years later cannot be described as correlating the Mafia in a fit of moral relativism as being no more corrupt than the U.S. government, there are at least two scenes Coppola got off. In the first film, as Michael explains how his father is just like any other powerful man, a Senator or a President, Kay Adams tells him that Senators and Presidents are not in the business of killing people. Michael asks her who is being naïve now?

In the sequel, Senator Pat Geary (G.D. Spradlin, supposedly based on Senator Pat McCarron, a staunch anti-Communist Nevada Democrat) tries to extort corruption money from Michael in the famed Tahoe scene. Michael then speaks to the subject in the way Coppola truly wanted to address from the beginning, by having Corleone reply that the Senator is part of the "same hypocrisy" as he is, that his role as a public official does not make him any more honest than a gangster. Geary hates Corleone and all he stands for; the "wops" in "silk suits" who pollute his "clean land." Corleone gets him back in an ingenious way later when the Senator visits a brothel owned by older brother Fredo (John Cazale). Apparently while playing a "game," the popular act of "choking" a woman to the point of losing consciousness, supposedly a sexual thrill if done in conjunction with orgasm, the prostitute dies. Unexplained in the film (for many full details on how all of it is done - tradecraft and so forth - the novel is an excellent companion), the girl most likely was killed by Corleone's henchmen, the Senator drugged to induce forgetfulness, at such time as he becomes beholden to Tom Hagen to keep him out of trouble. He therefore recuses himself from a later hearing on organized crime (like the McClellan Committee). Without Senator Geary, the committee loses a powerful voice against organized crime. Michael escapes consequence amid elaborate deals, side deals and betrayals that, if one-quarter true, would make a real investigation of the McClellan hearings most interesting indeed.

The Godfather and his storybook marriage (before McQueen stole her away) to Ali MacGraw made Robert Evans a legend above all other Hollywood legends. His dashing good looks, incredibly deep, meaningful voice, and wild stories about him, going beyond myth and lore to acts of legend on par with anything Hunter S. Thompson ever did in terms of believability, all added to his mystique.

In 1973 he oversaw the production of Serpico, a Pacino film about corruption in the N.Y.P.D. These kinds of films – Dirty Harry, The French Connection, Marathon Man – painted the portrait of two of America's glamour cities, New York and San Francisco, as having fallen into disrepair and film amidst local governments now controlled by the Democrat Party. Most big cities were now Democrat-dominated, and facing similar disrepair. Southern California was still Republican friendly – first Nixon, later Reagan, always with an Orange County vibe – and in the 1970s reversed the course most of the nation was on, enjoying a new era of power and prestige. Movies in the 1970 may have been even better than in the 1960s, if that is possible.

While Evans will forever be linked to The Godfather, that film is stamped with Francis Ford Coppola's imprimatur. But in 1974 Evans produced his magnum opus. Chinatown was indeed a parable – for corruption, for any kind of situation in which the forces of evil are too powerful to be overcome, a veritable tale of Original Sin – that uses the Chinatown section of downtown Los Angeles as its 1930s stand-in. This was not based on anybody's novel. It was an original screenplay, which some call the best ever crafted, written with Jack Nicholson in mind by a Los Angeleno, Robert Towne. Towne, Nicholson and Evans were all close pals, at the height of their womanizing days with the pre-AIDS sexual revolution and the "swing scene" in full flower. There was none of the rancor as with Coppola. Evans picked Roman Polanski to direct. At first the choice of the little European to direct a tale of water and incest in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power seemed incongruous, but Polanski lost his wife, Sharon Tate, to the Manson killers five years earlier. He did not merely understand L.A. noir, he lived it!

From a strict point of view, Chinatown can be viewed as a liberal film. Forces of power and wealth are beyond corrupt, they are pure evil in the form of Noah Cross (John Huston). If Towne was trying to get his digs in at Judeo-Christianity, his choice of a name featuring both Judaism's great hero of the ark and the symbol of Christ's saving sacrifice could not be clearer.

A historical look at 1930s Los Angeles, it actually condensed events from the 1900s with events that never happened but made for good drama. Jack Nicholson played detective J.J. Gittes, Faye Dunnaway Cross's estranged daughter, Evelyn Mulwray. It told the story of how Los Angeles became a metropolis. In Towne's version, Cross "owns" the L.A. Department of Water & Power with a character based on actual L.A. city engineer William Mulholland (Hollis Mulwray played by Darrel Zwerling). Mulholland orchestrated the political deal which built the aqueduct bringing water from the Owens Valley into the L.A. Basin, allowing millions of Southern Californians to keep their lawns green to this day.

The Mulholland character is "sacrificed" at the altar of greed, embodied by Cross, who secretly buys the San Fernando Valley, knowing that once the water deal is set, it will be incorporated into the city, making him a gazillionaire. It is rather cynical, although nobody suggests the L.A. "city fathers" were boy scouts. The same old theme is that capitalism and American political power are corrupt. To make sure the audience is convinced the corruption is beyond redemption, Cross is in the end found out be an insatiable, incestuous monster. He plays the role so well it brings up minds-eye imagery of his real daughter, Angelica. The film is utterly beyond any criticism, regardless of political colorization. For decades, film students and screenwriters have studied it. It spawned an artistic quest to lace the screen with symbols, metaphors, back story, and twists.

It was not the end for Evans. In 1976 he teamed with his good pal, Dustin Hoffman, on Marathon Man. Hoffman followed The Graduate with Midnight Cowboy (1969), Little Big Man (1970), Straw Dogs (1971), Papillion (1973), Lenny (1974), and also in 1976, All the President's Men. Each of the films after The Graduate, and before 1976, were solid and his performance excellent, but it was as if Hoffman was turning his back on the sort of big screen stardom first accorded him with The Graduate. He did not want to be the leading man, the Redford-type jock, the ladies' man riding down the Pacific Coast Highway with Katharine Ross.

Marathon Man was directed by John Schlesinger and written by the great William Goldman (based on his novel). Goldman, along with Towne, is considered one of the best screenwriters of all time. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (also an original screenplay) gets as much film school study as Chinatown, and his book Adventures in the Screen Trade is a must-read for industry insiders. Marathon Man stars Hoffman as Babe, a Columbia doctoral student, obsessed with his thesis about his father, who committed suicide when he was "victimized" by McCarthyism. His brother Doc (Roy Scheider) is a super-secret agent for an organization that handles, apparently, what the FBI cannot and the CIA will not. His pal Janeway (William Devane) is in league with the devil, a former Nazi dentist named Christian Czell (played to perfection by Laurence Olivier), based on Josef Mengele. Szell is also known as the "White Angel" (der Weiss Angel).

The plot revolves around millions of dollars worth of diamonds, smuggled to the U.S. by Szell with Janeway's (and Doc's) help. Babe accidentally gets involved and foils the plot. It is brilliant stuff in every way, shape and form, but coming on the heels of the Church hearings, the film plays on the public's belief that the CIA is corrupt, bent more on money and power than protecting the interests of freedom. The anti-hero is Babe. The back story of his persecuted Jewish father strengthens the myth that fine liberals of conscience were the victims of the McCarthy witch hunt. Like all films depicting McCarthyism, the victim is fictional and there are no scenes based on real events. This is because actual scenes of actual victims, if they hold to the truth, will show actual Communists being caught in lies by public officials using perfectly normally and legal techniques of American justice.

Evans continued to make films, but never reached such heights of glory. In the 1980s he became involved in The Cotton Club murders, nefarious killings involving people involved on the periphery with the tale of the Harlem renaissance and mob Evans originally thought would be his "black Godfather." The entire truth of what Evans did and did not do has never really been resolved. He was busted for cocaine possession and fell from grace. He never faded away, however. After launching a comeback he celebrated it with his rollicking autobiography, The Kid Stays In the Picture, which may be the most phenomenal book ever written about the industry. His repeated comebacks and ability to withstand adversity, to be the last man standing, made Darryl Zanuck's words on the set of The Sun Also Rises prophetic. Evans's voice on the taped version became urban legend among Hollywood insiders. The 2002 documentary is more entertaining than 90 percent of actual Hollywood movies over the past 25 years.

The film schools

Chinatown seems to be the apex of the American film period, the mid-1970s. The era from 1960 to 1980 is unparalleled, but the back story of the people who created these classics is a telling tale of why the genre leans to the Left. In the 1960s, film schools became popular. Four schools emerged, and have held their place as the place to learn the craft. In Los Angeles there was the USC School of Cinema-Television. Their first big alumnus was Star Wars director George Lucas in 1966. UCLA combined their film school with their drama program, so as to bring actors, writers, directors and producers together. Coppola went to UCLA along with a future rock star named Jim Morrison, who would form The Doors with another UCLA film alumnus, keyboardist Ray Manzarek.

In New York, Martin Scorsese was cutting his teeth making student films starring Harvey Keitel at NYU. Columbia rounded out the "big four."

Steven Spielberg wanted to study film at USC, but when he was turned down he had to go to Cal State, Long Beach. He spent so much time hanging around USC with Lucas (and Milius) that he is a de facto Trojan.

Before Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Evans hooked horns on The Godfather, there was Patton. Without Patton, Coppola's career probably never happens. He probably is fired from The Godfather, does not make The Godfather II, and never has the cachet to finance Apocalypse Now. He probably makes independent movies for Zoetrope in San Francisco.

The pacifist George C. Scott for all practical purposes took his Buck Turgidson character (Dr. Strangelove) and refined him into the real-life Patton. In interviews, Scott said he found his research of Patton revealed an unbalanced man, but on screen Scott nailed him as the vainglorious, brilliant, driven warmonger he was. Rod Steiger was offered the role first but turned it down because it glorified war. Vietnam was absolutely at its apex. It was very surprising that Hollywood would make such a film at that time. But director Franklin Schaffner had served under Patton, and after making The Planet of the Apes had the clout to call his shots. The film did not get America behind the war, but it did cause Richard Nixon to start bombing Cambodia because the Patton story convinced him to get tough.

The screenwriter, oddly enough, was Coppola, who may have done himself a turn. Coppola was no war lover, and wrote Patton as a man obsessed with war ("God help me, I love it so"), deluded by visions of Napoleonic grandeur mixed with Episcopalian Christianity and Karmic reincarnation. The intent may have been to show a psychotic military man, to de-mask his heroism, and this may have been what prompted Scott to play it. From page to screen there are virtually no changes, but if Coppola was trying to put down the military by showing Patton's human warts, the result was a brilliant work that now is one of, if not the most, conservative pictures ever made. Watching Patton stirs wonderful pride in two countries (Great Britain is prominent in the film) that were tough enough to stand up to the Nazis when the rest of the world cowered in victimhood. Karl Malden's Omar Bradley is Patton's perfect foil, as is the Bernard Law Montgomery character (Michael Bates). Instead of being the anti-war screed Coppola intended, it is a movie every military officer virtually memorizes. Jerry Smith's score is generally thought to be the most stirring, patriotic movie theme ever.

There is further great back story to Coppola's role in the movie. Having come from the UCLA film school, he was considered one of the most brilliant rising filmmakers of the late 1960s, but his first couple films did no business. Most likely because he was anti-war and thought the actual George Patton to be a warmonger, he and director Franklin Schaffner, who had been part of the North African landings when the U.S. entered the war with Germany, did not see eye to eye. Coppola was not actually fired, but once his script was finished he was not invited on the set or made part of the production. Frustrated with Hollywood, he moved to San Francisco to start his independent studio, Zoetrope, hoping to pick up on the success of Easy Rider (considered to be the all-time opposite of Patton in cinema history).

But Coppola had created some kind of new machine that made editing and colorization easier to mix. It was being used in the editing of Patton. When the machine broke down, the editors did not know how to fix it, so they called Coppola, asking him to fly to Los Angeles and fix it. Coppola showed up at 20th Century Fox, where he fixed the machine. Meanwhile, the dailies from Patton were being shown on screens. Coppola had no idea the script he wrote was even under production, but he recognized the material as his words and screenplay. That was how he found out Patton was even being made.

In 1971, Coppola was fired as director of The Godfather. Right around that very time, however, he was nominated for and won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Patton, which swept the Oscars and was thought one of the greatest movies ever made. The producers of The Godfather were unable to fire a man who just won an Oscar, so he was kept on and the rest is history.

But there is further back story. Darryl F. Zanuck was a patriot who wanted to make Patton's story since the 1950s. However, the Pattons, a highly conservative, Old Money San Marino family on his side and an equally Boston Brahmin clan on his widow's side, adamantly refused to give their rights to the Left-wingers of Hollywood. Zanuck increased his conservative credentials with the making of The Longest Day and interest in the general increased with the favorable publication of Ladislas Farago's Patton: Ordeal and Triumph. General Omar Bradley, who was married to a screenwriter, backed the project and became involved in its production, but the Patton family held steady. Finally the Zanucks, which now included Darryl's son Richard, decided to go ahead with the movie and hold their breath over the threat of a lawsuit.

The Pattons never contacted the Zanucks, but it was well known that a lawsuit was prepared, ready for filing virtually the day after its 1970 release. The film opened to bravura reviews and huge box office. Veterans and patriots immediately hailed its greatness. Very quietly, without fanfare of any kind, the Pattons simply dropped the lawsuit. They could not believe Hollywood got it right. Coppola, who tried to make a hero look like a psychotic (he did, partly), just let it ride; the first big success of his long career.

By the late 1960s, a small society of film geniuses began to assemble on weekends at the Malibu crash pad of actress Margot Kidder. Things usually got out of hand. There were a lot of loose girls, loose drugs and alcohol. As amazing as it is to say, substance abuse actually seems to have been the fuel for the genius of that film era. Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, Dennis Hopper, Nicholson and others were regulars. The partying was out of control. A slightly "classier" version of the same thing was going on at the Beverly Hills estate of Bob Evans, which was known to the "in crowd" as Woodland.

When the drugs started getting out of hand out at Kidder's place, an impressive young Los Angeleno would quietly walk out the door, go to his car, grab his shotgun and bullets, and head out to the beach. There, he would lock and load, then fire his weapon to relieve stress out at the Pacific Ocean. The man's name was John Milius. Milius went to the USC film school with Lucas. He and Coppola formed a friendship, then a creative partnership.

Everybody who knew these "young Turks" of the new Hollywood, which included writer/directors like Spielberg, Lucas, Schrader, Towne, Polanski and Coppola, producers like Evans and Dan Brown, and actors like Hopper, Nicholson and Clint Eastwood, concluded that the most talented of them all was Milius. Milius was a conservative Republican.

Everybody excused him for that. At Kidder's, he drank beer but did not imbibe in the heavy drug use, choosing instead to satisfy his gun fancy outside. Milius was seen as a little bit ripe. Hollywood studios were not sure what to make of this conservative war buff. The big directing gigs did not come his way, but his talent as a writer - with a conservative bent - was apparent in his 1971 classic Dirty Harry. Milius, like Eastwood's San Francisco cop, had little patience for Left-wing judges, bleeding heart social workers, incompetent police captains, untrustworthy mayors, and especially child-killing, torturous serial murderers. Milius would make a fine career writing in this genre.

Dirty Harry changed Hollywood dramatically. Starring Clint Eastwood in his signature role. It carried on the themes of violence seen in Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch. It also dramatized the decline of urban centers. In the wake of the Great Society, cities like New York and San Francisco went from swank Frank Sinatra scenes of Old World elegance to pits of racial hatred, union strike intransigence, and skyrocketing criminality. All that was wrong with the 1960s was plainly on display, its failures raw and obvious.

Dirty Harry was not patriotic like Patton, but was conservative to the point of Right-wingism. At one time this sort of picture, while less violent, would have been made, probably by John Wayne (considered for the part, rejected as too old), but Hollywood thought by 1971 they had turned the corner and were reliably liberal. While a number of liberal themes of the past decade made good money, Dirty Harry was one of a number of films telling a disturbing story, at least for the Left; America is a conservative country, and to a very large extent the movies that really sell are conservative in one way or another. "Conservativism" is a pretty big tent, and can mean religious/Christian (The Ten Commandments), patriotic (The Longest Day), war-glorifying (Patton), family (It's a Wonderful Life), Manifest Destiny (How the West Was Won), capitalistic (One, Two, Three), or any number of things.

But Dirty Harry was a direct refutation of liberal U.S. Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger, which went well past de-segregation to forced bussing; found numerous criminal rights nobody knew they had before (Miranda v. Arizona, 1966); and was on the verge of legalizing abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973).

The Bay Area native Eastwood plays "Dirty Harry" Callahan, a tough-as-nails San Francisco cop, "God's lonely man" all by himself facing unimpressives, liberals, bureaucrats, gays, pornographers, all of whom he sneers at with catchy put-down phrases like, "Marvelous," which in his under-the-breath voice says it all. He is apparently a big racist – but not really – because when paired with a Chicano partner, he gives him full credit when "Chico" pulls his own weight. His character is not a cartoon figure; he has faults, is real, and is believable, but always righteous no matter how he gets the job done.

The film turns on a crazed psycho killer modeled on the Zodiac, terrorizing the Bay Area at that time. Callahan catches up to Scorpio (Andy Robinson) at Kezar Stadium. He knows he has kidnapped a young girl, who is buried somewhere with just a little air left to breathe. There is no time for search warrants, lawyers, station house questioning, or criminal rights; only time to find out, "Where's the girl?" Having shot Scorpio, Callahan tortures him by pushing his foot into his wound, trying to get him to tell him where the girl is. Scorpio never does.

Callahan is called into District Attorney William Rothko's office (played by Josef Sommer), where he is reamed out for failing to read Scorpio his Miranda rights, not giving him a lawyer, not getting a search warrant, and blatantly breaking the U.S. Constitution. Appellate Judge Bannerman (William Patterson), who of course teaches Constitutional law "at Berkeley," informs Callahan Scorpio cannot be held much less tried and convicted. The killer must be set free. It is a direct conservative harangue against "activist judges" with overtones carrying all the way to water boarding of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Told Scorpio had "rights," Clint gives one of his most-remembered lines: "Well, I'm just all broken up over that man's rights."

Callahan follows Scorpio against orders on his own time. Scorpio hires a black thug to beat him to a pulp, then elicits sympathy from the media by blaming it on Callahan. When questioned, Callahan tells his superiors he obviously did not do it because, "He looks too damn good, that's why." Finally Scorpio kidnaps a school bus full of cheery little Asian and white boys and girls, a perfect mix, and has the driver cross the Golden Gate Bridge. Callahan is waiting at Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, where he jumps on the roof and, after a scuffle and chase, finds Scorpio, holding a young boy he found fishing on the bay.

Dirty Harry produces more great movie quotes than 20 years of other films combined, with many, many more to follow as the franchise kept going, but none more memorable than what Callahan says next. It is the same thing he told a black criminal (Dirty Harry never bows to political correctness and is not afraid to show blacks as criminals, gays as fey gender-benders, or slay other "sacred cows") in an earlier scene.

"I know what you're thinking. 'Did he fire six shots or only five?' Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"

Scorpio decides Callahan has fired six shots in the preceding minutes, meaning he is out of bullets. He goes for his gun a few feet away. Callahan blows him away, then throws his badge in San Francisco Bay, sick and tired of the system he is upheld to defend. Obviously, he returned time and time again with his badge in tow.

The Left went ballistic. Criminal rights defenders, ACLU lawyers, the anti-gun lobby and everybody else excoriated Clint, who was equally glorified by Republicans who thought it was right on! Eastwood himself was a moderate Republican who served in the Army. Even though Don Siegel directed the film, it was an Eastwood vehicle, reflecting his politics with a touch of extra juice. Like John Wayne in the 1950s, he was the most popular movie star on the planet, with a host of lightweight "actors" seething that their great artistry was so overshadowed by another gun-toting American "Neanderthal." But it was every bit as much a John Milius signature. Unlike Coppola's Patton script, this reflected Milius's worldview and had been carried out on screen precisely as he intended it on paper.

After writing the screenplay of the very entertaining Jeremiah Johnson (1972), he formulated the story and original screenplay for the second Dirty Harry Callahan vehicle, Magnum Force (1973). The Wind and the Lion was a beautiful Milius film and story, with a pulse-pounding sound track. Brian Keith plays President Teddy Roosevelt, who orders U.S. troops to Morocco to protect U.S. interests, as well he should have. Candice Bergen is an American socialite (Eden Pedecaris), kidnapped by the roguish Arab sand pirate Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, played by Sean Connery. The film is much more story, character rivalry and romance than history, but it does not hand us any of the usual garbage portraying the U.S. as racist exploiters. Instead, America under Roosevelt is portrayed as a modern power, unafraid to flex its muscles, but not willing to go overboard.

Creatively, Milius's career was hung up on a "crazy" idea he had. Away from the Hollywood crowd, Milius knew a lot of Vietnam vets. He hung out with Green Berets, Rangers, Delta guys. He never served himself, but was fascinated by the military and soaked their stories in. They had a lot of stories to tell.

In the late 1960s, Lucas and Coppola bought into Milius's plan to actually go to Vietnam with a camera and film crazy stuff. They would bring actors, and tailor a storyline around what they saw. It was based on a movie called Medium Cool, which had sent actors to the Democrat National Convention in Chicago, where riots broke out, then fashioned it into a feature film.

Predictably, the U.S. government was not keen to the idea of a bunch of Hollywood wannabes prancing around the 'Nam "lookin' for the s--t." It never came about. Coppola's ship came in with The Godfather. Lucas made American Graffiti (1973) and Star Wars (1977). Spielberg hit it big with Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

After a few years Milius, Lucas and Coppola decided to do something once and for all about their "Vietnam movie." Milius sat down and wrote Apocalypse Now. The film began shooting in the Philippine jungles in 1975, and experienced more legendary problems than any film this side of Heaven's Gate. For four years, it rained. Harvey Keitel was fired and replaced by Martin Sheen, who had a heart attack. Marlon Brando was overweight, overpaid and only would work for a few weeks. Fernando Marcos's government had to rescind their promise of loaning helicopters because they needed them to fight those pesky Communist guerillas.

When the film was released in 1979, it bore only slight resemblance to Milius's original script. Years later, some of his personal vision was restored in a redux version, but the film morphed into something other than what Milius hoped it to be. In Hearts of Darkness, a documentary about the making of Apocalypse, Milius laughed at how Coppola almost lost his mind in the jungle. He compared him to Hitler, sending armies into Russia without enough gas, as if will alone would win the day. Slowly Milius's script was cut, pasted and changed around. His original described highly professional American intelligence and Special Forces operations, spelling out his vision of how the U.S. could have won the Vietnam War if they had been allowed to fight it all-out. Coppola's version became a dark look into the soul of madness. While the Brando character (Colonel Walter Kurtz, based on Joseph Conrad's missionary Kurtz character, who "becomes god" among native Africans in Heart of Darkness) spells out his strategy on how the U.S. could have won in the 'Nam, it is distinctly different from Milius's. Milius described legitimate warfare, while Brando/Kurtz said the only way we could have won would have been to commit the same kind of war crimes and acts of genocidal terror as the Communists.

Apocalypse Now is a great film, one of the classics of all time, but nobody studies it at West Point (although the helicopter invasion scene is shown to fire up recruits). The Milius version might just have been given such a look-see.

The pivotal Presidential re-election year of 1984 saw Milius's classic Red Dawn. Like Dirty Harry, Red Dawn was very political and angered the Left with its blatant depictions of Communism and gun ownership. It was a huge box office hit that has enjoyed a long life of popularity on TV, one of those films that WTBS liked to call "movies for guys who like movies." Its consistent re-showing to enthusiastic audiences who watch it over and over can be compared to Reds, which bores people with its length and attempts to glamorize Communist murderers of, rarely getting aired.

Red Dawn starred Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen as Colorado brothers raised to hunt, fish and fend for themselves in survivalist mode by their dad. The Soviets and the Cubans combine forces to invade the U.S., occupying most of the eastern half of the nation as World War III is waged. The brothers, along with a few hardy kids raised in like manner, take to the mountains where they form a rag-tag squad of resisters named after the high school football team: Wolverines. They form a guerilla unit, attacking Communist occupiers in a series of daring raids.

The brothers learn from a downed fighter pilot (Powers Boothe) that they nuked Red China, that Europe is "sittin' this one out," and they are alone. They disrupt the occupying Communists and keep hope alive; mythological, ghostlike figures to the enslaved Americans. In the end, the Communists are defeated and World War III is won. The high school boys are memorialized for their courage and daring in the early, dark days of the fight for freedom.

The film was called blatant Red-baiting at the height of the Cold War. President Reagan called the Soviets an "evil empire" only a year before. The Soviets shot down a Korean jet liner, and several of their premiers died in succession before the ascendance of Mikhail Gorbachev. But the depiction of guns infuriated liberals the most. In an early scene, a pick-up truck has a bumper sticker reading, "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers." A Communist soldier then pries a gun from the hands of a dead Colorado resident.

The film's message was that a free citizenry with weapons can protect itself, a lesson of history going back to the American Revolution (the first thing the Nazis did was outlaw guns). The image of rural Americans surviving in the mountains fed a stereotype that has existed ever since; of Republican "survivalists," white country folk who will "give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands." This image was further propelled by the militia movement in response to Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Timothy McVeigh, and the GOP consolidation of "red states" under President George W. Bush.

He also created an interesting plot device. The Communists are led by a charismatic commander named Colonel Ernesto Bella (his name of Ernesto probably supposed to reflect Ernesto "Che" Guevara), played by Ron O'Neal. Bella tells his evil Soviet counter-part that in the past he was always part of insurgencies, not occupations. He disagrees with reprisals against civilians, preferring to try and win over the "hearts and minds" of the Americans. His advice is not taken and the tide turns against his cause. At the end, Jed (Swayze) and his brother Matt (Sheen) are fatally injured after a raid. Bella does not capture them. Even though he is from Castro's atheist Cuba, he has a conscience and in the end realizes he is on the wrong side. "Vaya con Dios" ("Go with God") he says to the brothers, letting them free with a Papal-style wave.

A re-make of Red Dawn set for 2011 was canceled because the enemies were the Chinese. So politically correct had the world become (and so powerful the Asian film market and distribution system) that the filmmakers agreed to scrap the idea and find other bad guys, a nebulous "People's Liberation Army," due for a 2012 release that Milius apparently has nothing to do with.

Milius came up with George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola; a USC film school prodigy, Apocalypse Now screenwriter and possibly the most talented of his era. He was never elevated to the status of his compatriots.

Milius writes and directs to this day. He has a tremendous love of history, a conservative trait. The reason for this is simple. History is the accurate description of great things done by America. No wonder we love history. He produced the HBO show Rome that ran in the late 2000s. He is not the household name that Spielberg, Coppola or Lucas are. He says he is comfortable with the decisions he made, which were to be up-front about his politics regardless of whether it cost him. He freely admits that his conservatism indeed did prevent him from the kind of greatness that he was capable of, stating the really big projects were not offered him because he was openly conservative.

Milius's University of Southern California classmate, George Lucas (they were in school with Tom Seaver, Bill "Spaceman" Lee, O.J. Simpson and Tom Selleck) did not possess his creative talent as a writer or even director, but he did have the prerequisite liberal politics necessary to be given keys to the kingdom. A product of California's vast San Joaquin Valley, his 1973 classic of cars, girls and pop culture, American Graffiti, got him noticed. In 1977 he changed Hollywood forever with Star Wars. The industry already took a major turn when their good friend, Steven Spielberg, made Jaws in 1975. Jaws re-defined the idea of the summer blockbuster, inculcating the movie biz, by now run by 1960s counter-culturalists, with the revolutionary idea that filmmaking was a profit motive above previous notions of big business. The studio system made some moguls wealthy and provided riches for big stars. There was a lot of money in it, but it was never thought of the way people think of oil, or Wall Street, or the Military Industrial Complex. Beginning with Jaws, then Star Wars, that all changed. It was a profound shift, because for the first time a really big-time American capitalist industry was in the hands of liberals.

Lucas and Spielberg teamed up on a long, rich series of ventures (the Star Wars franchise-sequels, the Indiana Jones franchise-sequels), mainly centered on two money-making franchises that totally re-defined film, creating what is called the "pop corn movie," which are huge, blockbuster profit machines de-emphasizing emphasizing great writing, great storytelling and great character development, in favor of great action-adventure, huge special effects, and the giant volumes of dough they can make.

Spielberg developed into a director of greater substance than Lucas. After The Sugarland Express (among others) he made Jaws, a production filled with errors and problems that somehow came off, obviously in large measure due to Spielberg's genius, but not without a lot of luck. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was followed by Poltergeist (1982), E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982), and spin-offs of these franchises. They were science fiction, big budget, special effects films, using Lucas's Marin County company, which specialized in cutting edge film technology.

Empire of the Sun (1987) may be Steven Spielberg's best work. Young Christian Bale is Jim, separated from his parents when the Japanese conquered the British outpost of Shanghai. Like The Bridge on the River Kwai, it did not paint the Japanese as total monsters, partially even viewing the complexities of the war from their perspective. Patriotism is confusing, with Jim – the longer he is separated from his parents and his known way of life – even starting to admire some aspects of the Japanese. Eventually an American P-51 Mustang, which Jim ecstatically calls the "Cadillac of the sky," zooms in and the rout is on. Allied forces snuff out Japanese resistance, victory is won, and order restored. But Jim and his parents barely recognize each other. The film ends on this note; glory is fleeting, the aftermath of the conflict to offer more obstacles. It was well received but not the blockbuster of his other works. It was a great effort; a haunting story focusing not on World War II but the personal catastrophes faced by disparate people.

Spielberg directed and produced the Back to the Future, Jurassic Park and Men In Black franchises, all more of the same old same old, but in 1993 he entered the pantheon of true film genius with Schindler's List. It was a personal story to Spielberg, a Jew, detailing how Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), an industrialist working with the Germans during the Holocaust, slowly comes to see the tragedy before his eyes. He creates a system in which he saves numerous Jews from extermination until the war finally ends. Like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Empire of the Sun, it dared to personalize the enemy, namely through the character of Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), the commandant of the concentration camp who is tortured by his own humanity, or lack thereof. Picking up on themes explored by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, Goethe begins to see himself as a "god" who has the power to choose life or death over many people. Goethe briefly "chooses" benevolence, sparing lives, but is overcome by the competing need for power, representing the entire German Reich, who "justified" what they did by saying they alone had the "strength" to handle such power.

Psychologists have long tried to figure out what turn of the screw was necessary, and how it happened en masse. Even liberalism seems to be a mindset allowing people to believe they are superior, and therefore morally superior, to those they oppose politically. The ends must justify the means. How else did the Nazis do what they did in such large numbers? How else did a school teacher-intellectual like Pol Pot order genocide?

Goethe is given total command, the dynamic explored by Conrad, no doubt the subject of many a collegiate "bull session" between Milius, Lucas and Spielberg. Goethe drinks too much and even questions his role, but he represents the heartlessness of all the Nazi tragedy when he is unable to be merciful, circumstances, even duty, not allowing for it. Other films, such as The Debt (2011) have tried to "explain" what the Nazis were "thinking." They seem to have been people, pushed by their own history (going back to warring resistance against the Romans) and Adolf Hitler, into believing they alone had the ability to handle what they convinced themselves was a perverse responsibility. It is, however, by no means uniquely German, reflecting itself in the work of Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Margaret Sanger and George Bernard Shaw, all members in good standing of nations that twice stood up to Germany in the 20th Century.

Harnessing power, in politics and world influence, is an important trait and should not be taken lightly. The Kennedys, for example, spoke often of power and how unless one has it, they cannot achieve great goals. Achieving it is paramount, because no good thing can be accomplished without it. Using it for the greater good, which the Nazis convinced themselves they were doing, is very difficult. People are hamstrung by their own inadequacy, guilt, prejudice, shame; a million things holding them back.

John Milius addressed this in his screenplay version of Apocalypse Now. Victory, and with victory a "better world," could only be obtained if one had the moral certitude to do what it takes, which could be engaging in "moral terror." The Nazis convinced themselves the world had committed such atrocities against them only worse atrocities against the world would result in the victory they needed to change the world in their image. Hitler told them they were the only ones who could handle the power they possessed, proof of which, he argued, was that the power was in their hands. So, they used it. What the Nazis, Pol Pot, Napoleon and most despots of history failed to realize (or were blocked from realizing it by the devil), was that no humans are capable of such power. Only humility towards Jesus Christ is permissible. On occasion, Christ will find a man like Abraham Lincoln, a general like Dwight Eisenhower, and a country like America and, for a short period of time, make them the vessels of power to do His will until His will has been done. Then they relinquish the power.

A picture of this was Neeson's Schindler, given similar power to Geothe. He was not particularly moral, given to high living (drinking, womanizing). He was a businessman driven by profits doing business with the German Wehrmacht. He be-friended high-ranking Nazis who he identified with. His factory used Jewish slave labor, but he saw that workers produced better if kept fed, clothed, were hygienic and able to perform near the peak of their productive powers. Being tortured and starved, much less threatened with death from minute to minute, did not produce the workers he needed to produce his armaments.

From there he slowly turned, seeing the Jews as human beings and, eventually, doing what he could to slow the German war machine. He actively maintained a "list," produced with the help of the accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) that kept his workforce at a certain level, determining workers as indispensable to his company and, therefore, keeping the Nazis from shipping them off to their deaths until the war finally ended. Schindler's List saved many. It elevated Spielberg to the top tier of all-time great Hollywood directors. He made more classics in later years, but sadly never made an anti-Communist film, which could have been more powerful than any of his movies. It was wonderful of Spielberg to glorify a flawed Polish businessman who saved a few thousand Jews, but the fact is that it was the United States who saved European Jewry by defeating the Nazis, and then by creating Israel.

Spielberg said he made the film to honor his heritage. It sparked Jewish remembrance projects, memorializing victims of the Holocaust. All of that is great, but points to the strange conundrum, unexplainable really, which is Hollywood's guilt in failing to tell the story of the Communist gulags and the 100 million-plus human beings murdered by this ideology. Even Spielberg himself, a highly intelligent man, went to Cuba and returned with great praise for Fidel Castro. This seems to be a matter beyond intelligence. Whatever psychosis allows a man of intellect and knowledge, living in a world in which information about the murderous aspects of Communism is freely available, to somehow not see this for what it is; is there a brain disorder? The Christian believer will offer that it is Satan, somehow effecting the thinking of many men and women. Whatever is going on, it is quite baffling.

Spielberg's Amistad (1997) may have been driven by some liberal guilt on his part, but like a few other movies that set out to tell a "shameful" story of America - in this case, slavery - the film reveals one of this nation's greatest triumphs. Granted, it requires a little thinking to arrive there, but it is there. The Amistad slaves were on trial for murder in America and they were acquitted. The triumph was the system of American justice. They were recognized as humans who had the right to fight for their freedom in an effort to return to their homeland, a huge first step in ending slavery. The film, whether it means to or not (Spielberg probably meant to) demonstrates that the injustice of slavery was brought to the shores of colonial America before the country was born. It was an inherited evil. The system was brought down, piece by piece, by American citizens, using American laws written by Americans, all under the coda of an American ethic: freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It would be nice to say the Founders just put this in place in 1787. It took almost 80 years, but slavery had been around for thousands. It ended here. It did not end, as Amistad demonstrates, by a foreign power defeating us and ending it, or even by virtue of a big international lobbying effort, or through sanctions. It ended because we used the laws we created to end it. The film demonstrates the first strike of justice in an American courtroom regarding this terrible "institution."

In 1998 Spielberg made the classic Saving Private Ryan, which unlike The Longest Day focused on specific characters during and after D-Day. It revolutionized the way war films are shot, using shaky, hand-held cameras to create the intensity of "being there." Veteran's groups honored Spielberg and the film's star, Tom Hanks. Many conservatives, however, say the ensuing Academy Awards were the "last straw." Coming a few years after the terrorist Yasser Arafat "won" the Nobel Peace Prize, the Best Picture Oscar went not to Saving Private Ryan, but to a funny, reasonably decent, rather forgettable film called Shakespeare in Love. After that, with very few exceptions, a host of lesser lights and unimpressives have won the "golden calf," the pagan idol of "honors" doled out by liberals to other liberals in Hollywood and international politics; Oscars, Pulitzers, Nobel Prizes, each successively less deserved than the other.

Spielberg and Hanks, both liberals, were nevertheless very patriotic. Spielberg in particular seemed to appreciate the sacrifices made by so many so a Jewish man could attain heights of success, fame and adoration completely unreachable by someone of his faith throughout all the years man has trod the Earth, prior to the birth of America.

He and Hanks co-produced the acclaimed HBO series Band of Brothers, based on historian Stephen Ambrose's bestseller, following the 101st Airborne from training to D-Day, the fight into Germany, and victory over the Nazis.

Catch Me If You Can (2002) was an engaging story of an identity thief played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Munich (2005) was similar to Empire of the Sun and Schindler's List insofar as it gave some perspective to the enemy mindset. Set in the mid-1970s after the Nobel Peace Prize-winner Yasser Arafat's Black September murderers blew up the Israeli Olympic team, this taut thriller followed a secret Mossad assassination squad tasked by Golda Meir to systematically kill each of those responsible for the Munich massacre. Over time, however, members of the elite team experience regrets over "collateral damage," questioning their own humanity, wondering if indeed by killing they were becoming like those they despised.

Some found fault with this premise, prefer a black-and-white world. However, their humanity shines through and contrasts with the apparent lack of humanity commonly found in Muslim terrorists, who believe all non-Muslims are apostates, that they are tasked by a Koranic god to kill them, because they are not fully human. This general attitude towards non-Muslims explains why Muslim sheiks hire blonde prostitutes to perform every possible sexual act for them without regard to the degradation against women. After all, these women are not fully human and, according to their religion, they are merely on Earth to service the superior Muslims.

While the University of Southern California established itself as the leading film school, with its sports rival UCLA a close second, New York was also a hotbed of film. Coming on the strength of the great talent produced by Broadway, and by the Actors Studio where Lee Strasberg trained so many thespians in his famed "method" approach, the Big Apple had two top-notch film schools emerge out of the 1960s and 1970s, New York University and Columbia.

Martin Scorsese was an NYU man raised in New York's Little Italy, the center of Mafia culture. He was an Italian-American completely consumed by the competing ideologies of organized crime and Catholicism. The two were juxtaposed, the theme heavily inculcated into The Godfather movies, especially a famed montage in which Michael Corleone goes through the Baptismal ceremony of becoming Godfather to sister Connie's child, renouncing Satan all while the family's enemies are killed, each scene more gruesome than the previous one. Unlike Coppola, who grew up sheltered on Long Island, this world, and this contradiction, was Marty Scorsese's life. He escaped via the movies.

At New York University he met a young actor, Harvey Keitel, For the better part of the next decade, they made what can best be described as "student films" together until Mean Streets (1973) became the film introducing the world to the new genre of gangsterism. While Coppola's sagas were the gold standard of Mafia movies, it was Scorsese's gritty realism and "threat of violence" that ultimately defined the experience. Mean Streets was a completely biographical story from Scorsese's Little Italy upbringing, bringing together Keitel and Robert DeNiro.

In 1976, Scorsese directed Taxi Driver, starring Robert DeNiro with Keitel in a small, but important role, his long hair making him barely recognizable. Calling this a "conservative" movie is a stretch, but it is a prescient look at New York attitudes preceding the age of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Paul Schrader wrote it. His story is a hoot in and of itself. He and his brother were raised in a strict Calvinist Pennsylvania family, emphasizing fundamentalist tenets of scripture and absolutism. The Calvinists are big on pre-ordained destiny. Released from this environment, he came to Hollywood and tried everything. Naturally, he was a mess; a drug addict, an alcoholic and a heterosexual so confused he tried homosexuality just . . . to try it. Given the assignment to write a screenplay, he was holed up in a downtown L.A. hotel for weeks, then months. He had little social contact except occasional taxi rides to restaurants in and around L.A.'s skid row. He began to see the world from inside the taxi, and came up with a character and a plot revolving around the concept.

DeNiro's Travis Bickle is a Vietnam Marine vet, off kilter but moral, who is sickened by the crime, drugs and unrighteousness of 1970s New York City, seen from the taxi he drives night and day. He has an ill-fated fling with a pretty campaign worker played by Cybil Shephard, goes off the deep end and portrays himself as a possible assassination threat to a Presidential candidate, although this is never fleshed out. In the end, he commits an act of vigilantism to save the life of a teenage prostitute with potential, Iris (Jodie Foster), and like in Death Wish (Charles Bronson), is made a hero.

The message of Taxi Driver is that peace comes from strength. It was a popular theme in a number of flicks. Hollywood seemed to fail to grasp some important realities about its marketplace. Time after time, movies that veered away from "touchy feely" liberalism and gave teeth to conservative characters (Eastwood's Dirty Harry, Bronson, DeNiro, and others) made boffo box office, yet the industry has never come to grips with itself. They return time after time to premises that insult conservative audiences, and wonder why the lines get shorter.

Scorsese and DeNiro teamed up again in one of the all-time classics, Raging Bull (1980). Like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, it was set in New York and, while not as autobiographical to either man, it represented the gangster sensibilities that both men came from, with the city as much a character as the actors. The story of Jake LaMotta, a champion who allowed himself to be beholden to the Mafia and its gambling interests, it was the first big role for Joe Pesci (LaMotta's brother Joey), a real-life homage to the brothers played by Marlon Brando and Rod Steiger in On the Waterfront. Raging Bull marked the end of an era, the two-decade "golden age" of Hollywood (1960s-1970s). Since that time, the industry changed for the worse. Many blame the blockbusters, the action flicks and the formula movies, tracing this back first to Spielberg's Jaws; attaching virtual criminal charges to Lucas's Star Wars franchise; then the Spielberg-Lucas Indiana Jones series; finding fault not with Sylvester Stallone's Rocky but with the formula that spawned its multiple re-makes; the cartoonish Rambo and Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicles; and in later years the "end of the world" movies about meteors, plagues and the like (Armageddon, War of the Worlds, et al). Occasionally an action-adventure flick made it into the realm of a great film, as with Bruce Willis's Die Hard (1988).

But Raging Bull was the end of an era. Scorsese continued to make fabulous movies for decades after that (Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, The Departed), but they were stand alones, for the most part exceptions to a bad rule. The 1960s and 1970s saw an influx of talented writers, directors, producers, actors and visionaries, released from the binds of the Hayes Codes and society, who like the musicians of the same era did something unique that did not last.

Despite critical acclaim over the black-and-white, highly-stylized Raging Bull, he was not necessarily viewed as a highly "commercial" director. His movies were very often period pieces or Hell's Kitchen reminiscences. His work did not make the really big money, as like Lucas, Spielberg, and Coppola. Scorsese slumped like the rest of Hollywood after the disaster of Heaven's Gate (1980). His successes in later years must not be faulted but somehow, something changed. Hollywood in general was like rock music, which in the 1960s and early 1970s not only produced great sounds and party beats, but spoke to and for a generation, lending voice to war protest, sexual liberation, and youthful freedom. 1980s rock music is wonderful to listen to, but after Who's Next, The Who's 1971 classic, with few exceptions (Bruce Springsteen, U-2), most of what followed was just party music emphasizing chicks, drinking and fun times absent social issues.

After half a decade of disappointment, in 1986 Scorsese began to break into new territory with The Color of Money, a Tom Cruise-Paul Newman homage of Newman's The Hustler. While Scorsese is not conservative and generally stays away from political, it is worth further mentioning that he is obsessed with Christianity. He is a Catholic, or a lapsed Catholic, and his New York youth apparently put the zap on his head in a big way. He went to church and believed in God, asked for his sins to be washed away in confession, but like the characters in Mean Streets (1973), he lived in Little Italy, where murder, extortion and immorality were a way of life.

Scorsese came up with some funky ideas, and laid it all out for the world to see in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). It is actually based on a book by Nikos Kazantzakis, but like all of Scorsese's work the screen version must be attributed to him. It is hard to say what he is trying to accomplish. Some call the film "Bronx Jesus" because he populates it with New York actors (Harvey Keitel as Judas, Willem Dafoe as Jesus), except for evil, which Hollywood always says has an upper crust English accent (a very telling psycho-trait regarding class envy perhaps). On the one hand, Scorsese loves his Jesus. He is obviously very personal to him. He has a vision for who Jesus was, and it is a human vision. This is the crux of the story, because if Jesus is "human," then His suffering and trials are not just for show. In order for Jesus to die for our sins, He has to feel our pain and be tempted just as any mortal would be.

The finale is confusing, especially if only seen once, but Satan, disguised as a little girl, apparently fools Christ. Apparently, he did not die for our sins, and Scorsese's message is muddled, possibly leading us to believe that the screwed-up world we live in is because of this. But in this version, Judas appears to Christ, telling him what his real destiny is – not to live a comfortable life and be happy because God is "pleased" with Him – but to die for Mankind's sins. Christ then cries out, "Let me be Your Son!" Apparently his tempting from the "angel," who is really Satan, was a dream. Back on the cross, Christ smiles, cries out, "It is accomplished!" and in a blinding white light indeed does die for humanity. If Scorsese thought this would mollify his critics, he was mistaken.

The Catholics and other Christian groups were outraged. It is not quite the "risen Christ on Easter Sunday" message of hope that we have all been taught. Others did not see Scorsese as anti-Christian for making it. It was an expenditure of theology, believing there are just things we will never know until we die, and we had best live good lives until then!

In 1990 Scorsese made arguably his greatest film, Goodfellas. It was a classic mob tale based on real events surrounding three wise guys operating in the Queens area, near La Guardia Airport, in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. Starring Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, and Lorraine Bracco, it revitalized and modernized the crime genre, portraying not old time 1940s goombas, but the new Mafiosi of Irish and Jewish descent, likely to be addicted to drugs, with rock music playing in the background. The film also features an iconic, oft-imitated scene probably describing the illegality, corruption and immorality of unions better than any example. Karen (Bracco) and Henry Hill (Liotta) avoid a long line to get into the legendary Copacabana nightclub. They enter through the kitchen and are whisked to a table in ahead of everybody else. They are met by kudos, welcome and fanfare by a host of fawning Copa personnel and mob guys at nearby tables. It is an ostentatious show of wealth and power by a very young Hill, still in his early 20s. Karen is amazed, stares at him, and for the first time asks what he does for a living.

"I'm a union delegate," he suggests, thus saying all that need be said. He does not work, is corrupt, a criminal, immoral, violent; therefore, ipso facto, he is a union leader.

In Cape Fear (1991), Scorsese introduces a Fourth of July parade scene rife with sluggish Americana. The scene is slowed down, given morbid music, and depicts patriotic icons with bland expressions, going through the motions while an unenthusiastic crowd masks a black-and-white cancer. It also chooses to make DeNiro a really dangerous Christian who quotes scripture, speaks in tongues and preaches while he commits his acts of violence. Christians-as-psycho-killers have been a recurring theme going back at least to Carrie. Outside of one episode of The X Files in which a sect of Hasidic Jews included some ghost-Jew character who kills in the name of same ancient Hebrew tenet, there are few Jewish killers on screen.

Casino (1995) re-united De Niro and Pesci in their third film together. It had many of the same themes as Goodfellas, featuring more rock music and modern touches set in Las Vegas before the casino industry went corporate. The Departed (2006) was a classic starring Jack Nicholson in one of his best roles ever. Based on Boston mob boss James "Whitey" Bulger, Nicholson's Frank Costello specialized in what Scorsese referred to as "the threat of violence." He was an utterly terrifying, yet an incredibly charismatic, almost comic character. The possibility he would kill somebody in the most horrible manner constantly hung over each scene, making the performance of Leonardo DiCaprio as Billy fraught with tension. It was an ensemble cast par excellence that included Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, and Alec Baldwin. The film had touches of No Way Out, as it featured "moles" burrowed into both the police force and organized crime since childhood. DiCaprio's character is selected by the cops as a youth growing up in Costello's neighborhood with an axe to grind against Costello, to go deep undercover, actually serving jail time, then emerging as a ruffian looking to join his crew.

The film becomes a cat-and-mouse game of detection with Damon's Colin Sullivan similarly undercover, only serving Costello. Chosen as a kid by the mob boss, he is sponsored as he enters the police force, rising up to detective, where he warns Costello of actions taken against him. The film, like Goodfellas and Casino, is swift, sexy and rocks with modern tunes, but offers no happy ending.

In many ways, the cumulative effect of the film schools and their progeny is reflected in the 2006 film The Good Shepherd, which turns away from the shoot-'em-up, action-blockbusters that "ruined" the industry, returning to a thoughtful style of film reminiscent of a golden age gifting us The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, All The President's Men, and The Marathon Man. It would be nice to say it was the biggest box office hit of the year, returning Hollywood to sanity. Alas, it trailed the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, X-Men: The Last Stand, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and Mission: Impossible III in total gross profits.

The Good Shepherd did, however, bring forth the cumulative talents of decades of Hollywood greatness in the form of Francis Ford Coppola and Robert DeNiro, with Matt Damon and screenwriter Eric Roth. While Spielberg, Milius and Scorsese were not officially part of the film, they are found easily using the so-called "six degrees of separation." DeNiro has come to be seen as inter-changeable with Scorsese and to a lesser extent Coppola, long associated with Spielberg, Milius and George Lucas.

The Good Shepherd was long in the making. Coppola originally came up with the idea of a CIA epic covering many generations, not unlike his Godfather saga. For various reasons it did not get off the ground. Norman Mailer's epic novel Harlot's Ghost might have been made into a film, and indeed The Good Shepherd might have been adapted from it, but apparently that was not the case. Eventually Coppola joined forces with DeNiro, who directed the movie.

The film was based on the life of legendary Chief of Counter-Intelligence James Jesus Angleton during the height of the Cold War (Mailer's Hugh Montague was loosely based on him, too). Angleton's reign effectively ended with the Church hearings of the 1970s, when Langley was emasculated. The Good Shepherd also inspired a TV show about the Central Intelligence Agency with Michael Keaton apparently playing Angleton, who had an affinity for the cultivation of flowers, which can be viewed as a metaphor for his cultivation of intelligence assets and spy craft. In the 1995 film Nixon, Oliver Stone apparently drew on the Angleton character as a composite of sorts (he was still on the job during Nixon's Presidency), but attributed Angleton's floral habits to Richard Helms.

Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson. We see him at first as a grown man in 1961, the year of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Then we flashback to his days as a bright young Yale student being tutored in poetry by Dr. Fredericks, an Englishman played by Michael Gambon (who played Lyndon Johnson in the HBO program Path to War). Damon infuses his character with some various interesting personal traits and characteristics, all of which explain what motivates him and gives him a unique perspective necessary to do a job very few could handle, especially over a long time.

The story is told in various flashbacks between World War II, post-war Germany, the Belgian Congo (where the CIA was involved in the overthrow of the Communist Patrice Lumumba), interrogations of Soviet moles, and the Bay of Pigs.

Wilson is initiated into Skull and Bones, the most exclusive collegiate fraternity in the world, not part of any Greek system, only for Yalies like both George H.W. and George W. Bush. This is an organization that also produced many other leading Americans of business, government and law. It was from the beginning the richest source of recruitment for the OSS and then the CIA. Its members were intelligent, well educated, came from good families, and were adept at keeping secrets.

To be invited in is to be considered the highest class of citizen, but the fraternity is extremely cult like to the extent of appearing to place loyalty to themselves above country and even God. In the course of his initiation, Wilson is asked to reveal to his fellow Bonesmen his deepest secret. He tells them that his father, who committed suicide, apparently when accused of treachery against the United States, wrote a suicide note, which Wilson hid from everybody else. Skull and Bones accept Wilson, but one of his fraternity brothers privately questions his father's loyalty and also his.

An FBI man played by Alec Baldwin approaches Wilson. He tells him Dr. Fredericks is spying for the Nazis and promoted German-American cooperation in the years prior to America's entrance into World War II. Wilson is asked to spy on his professor. In so doing he discovers that Dr. Fredericks had been plagiarizing some of his poetry work.

Wilson has a fling with a pretty woman named Laura who has a foreign accent and a hearing impediment, but at a party meets the sister of his fraternity brother, the son of a U.S. Senator. His sister, Clover (Angelina Jolie) apparently decides she wants Wilson. What Clover wants, Clover gets. She seduces him and becomes pregnant, forcing Wilson to abandon the other girl and marry Senator Russell's daughter.

On his wedding day, Wilson is informed that "Wild Bill" Sullivan (Robert DeNiro) requests his service to the country. Sullivan was the real-life founder of the OSS, the pre-cursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the film he is confined to a wheelchair, apparently a diabetic whose feet are necrotic. Much about the OSS/CIA is learned in a conversation between Sullivan and Wilson. The older man informs the younger one that the United States, at the time officially "neutral," will at some point be at war in Europe and they need to prepare (while Sullivan may have prepared, President Roosevelt failed miserably in that the Armed Forces were treasonously inadequate in terms of training, funding, strength, and weaponry; a fact history has not done its job shedding light on).

Sullivan tells Wilson he is recruiting bright young men from top Ivy League colleges like Yale. Skull and Bones was the perfect breeding grounds for these fellows, combining intelligence, education, loyalty, secrecy, and good families all in one package. Sullivan reveals something important when he states he is looking for men from "good families," generally Old Money "blue bloods," and even though he is Catholic, he is not anxious to fill the ranks with Catholics, Jews or others.

While this may be viewed as prejudice, and in part probably was, there was a stronger national security element at play. Old Money families, Sullivan explains, have the most to lose if the American way of life is compromised. Therefore, they are the least likely to commit treason. Self-interest trumps ideology.

The controversy also reveals an important truth. Sullivan says he believes in a "just God," and indicates in his conversation that while the intelligence business may be dirty, violent and secretive, the U.S. at its heart is on the side of good, or to infer, God!

Young Wilson is sent to London where, to his surprise, he comes under the tutelage of his old professor, Dr. Fredericks (apparently not a traitor after all), along with one of his fellow Bonesmen from Yale and a British contact played by Billy Crudup. In a strange twist, Dr. Fredericks then turns out to have been a traitor all along, blackmailed via his homosexuality. While not explored in detail, this was a major reason for the so-called "prejudice" against gays that held sway for so long in official national security circles.

The film follows Wilson's rise up the ranks of the OSS and the CIA, through flashbacks and flash forwards to a grainy audio-visual of a man and woman telling each other secrets. Wilson's marriage to Clover is loveless, but a son (Edward, Jr. played by Eddie Redmayne) is born from their first union together. Wilson and Clover quarrel. She embarrasses him at a secret Skull and Bones retreat; tells their neighbors he works for the CIA (not permitted); hates his secretive life; and desperately tries, without success, to keep their son from going in the same path as his father.

Intrigue follows Wilson each step of the way. Like The Departed, the Scorsese film of the same year, The Good Shepherd is very convoluted and hard to follow. It is one of those films best watched several times, on DVD, pay cable or on-demand, in order to get all of its fine points.

We see CIA trade craft, such as a disinformation campaign in the form of an "official" British broadcast "revealing" Adolf Hitler's embarrassing sexually transmitted disease. In post-war Berlin, Wilson brings in an enlisted man named Ray Brocco (John Turturro) to work in his office. This is an interesting choice. Turturro is an Everyman and ethnic, at that. His character is not a Bonesman or an Ivy Leaguer. He might even be Catholic, although he does not seem to have any religious qualities. He is the military/intelligence equivalent of Mafia "muscle," an enforcer, but also emblematic of how the OSS/CIA had to grow beyond the cloistered little world of Skull and Bones into a larger, and more ruthless, organization.

Brocco shows little deference to Wilson, emanating class envy, but he is good at what he does, which apparently is to administer pain through techniques ranging from near torture to "enhanced interrogation" to outright abuse. He is good at it because he likes doing it. While the film does not explain this, the fact that an Italian-American enlisted man, probably a New York street guy, rises in the CIA, indicates that he was chosen after lengthy psychological testing, looking for a man (not unlike the Warren Beatty character in The Parallax View) who has the "profile" to handle the stress of abusing prisoners, and worse.
Wilson meets "Ulysses," his Soviet counter-part (Oleg Shtefanko), who informs him his Soviet code name is "Mother." Thus are we shown the great "game" played between intelligence services, which as it plays out are meant by both sides to minimize the chance of a full scale world war in favor of small proxy wars and espionage cat-and-mouse.

After the war, Wilson meets Laura again and has a brief affair with her. Pictures of it are taken and sent to Clover. He has been compromised by the Soviets, who are demonstrating to him that he can be blackmailed. Ulysses begins a strange relationship, playing a "friend" in order that someday he may do the Soviet bidding. When the CIA becomes official, replacing the OSS, Sullivan tells Wilson they will be subject to Congressional oversight. Wilson is amazed at this possibility. Sullivan tells him Hitler's power came from clerks and bureaucrats, apparently his way of agreeing with oversight.

Wilson questions a Russian dissident named Mironov (Mark Ivanir) in a telling scene. The CIA does not believe Mironov is who he has been claiming to be and, in an effort to get the truth, gives him LSD (an infamous, revealed fact about the agency in the 1950s). Mironov does react to the drug by speaking the truth. The filmmakers most likely were eager to show the scene in which Mironov tells his interrogators Soviet power is a "myth," describing rusted equipment, out-dated weapons, and a general apathy that should not be feared by the United States. This falls in line with the liberal point of view, expressed by the likes of Walter Cronkite who once said he never had any inordinate fear of Soviet threat. It also is meant to show that the Republican paranoia of Communism in the 1950s – McCarthyism – was not legitimate. The film shows people who spy or do the bidding of the Soviets not out of ideology, but embarrassment and blackmail. While this certainly was true, the movie goes out of its way in failing to show the likes of Alger Hiss, Kim Philby, the varied Democrats in FDR's administration working for them, the Rosenbergs, or any of the many Left-wing and liberal people who actually, in real life, turned against the United States in favor of the U.S.S.R. The Venona Project, probably the most important in the history of Cold War intelligence gathering, gets no mention, no doubt because Coppola, DeNiro, Damon and the other Democrats who made it have no intention of demonstrating anything that could make their party look bad. None of this means it is not an excellent film, albeit convoluted and hard to follow. Eric Roth's (Munich) screenplay is a web of intrigue just like Edward Wilson's life.

Edward meets mobster Joseph Palmi (Joe Pesci) in one of the classic scenes ever. Palmi is supposed to help with the Cuban situation, which in the late 1950s is dominated by Fidel Castro. Palmi looks at Wilson and says "you guys" are the ones who scare him, because while he might kill a few mobsters, blue bloods like Wilson start "big wars." Wilson replies that he makes sure they are small ones. Palmi then says that all the ethnic groups have their own niche; the Italians have their families and the church, the Jews their traditions, "even the n-----s" have their music; but what is it that Old Money WASPS like Edward Wilson have? His answer is perfect: "the United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting."

Wilson's son joins the CIA. He overhears some obscure language about a Cuban operation. Stationed in the Belgian Congo as part of the CIA operation upending Lumumba, he falls in love with a beautiful black girl. Here we finally discover the original grainy audio-visual that has been played throughout the film, dissected bit by bit by CIA technical experts, after it was sent anonymously (by the Soviets) to Wilson. It is his son telling the girl, in the course of lovemaking, about the overheard conversation about Cuba. Edward silently assents and lets the Russians have the girl killed. She is thrown out of a plane on her way to marry his son. Edward Wilson is now forced to do the bidding of the Soviets, who manipulated him by forcing him to choose between his country and his son, who he protects despite his having told the girl secrets.

The Bay of Pigs fiasco, partially the result of Edward's son revealing what he overheard to the girl, results in a housecleaning at Langley with Wilson asked to take over the agency. In a great scene, he arrives at the new building only to find inscribed on the wall Christ's admonition that, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make ye free." He asks his old adversary from Skull and Bones, Richard Hayes (Lee Pace) whose idea that was, and is told, "It's classified."

Post-Watergate: political conspiracies and movies as PR wing of the Democrats

On June 17, 1972, Richard Nixon's "plumbers" entered the Watergate Hotel to plant bugs in the headquarters of the Democrat National Committee. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post quickly investigated the story after Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs and CIA operatives with ties to the White House were arrested, but were unable to gain headway in time to stop President Nixon from rolling to an absolute landslide 49-state victory over U.S. Senator George McGovern (D.-South Dakota) in November.

The entire liberal media, encompassing the major newspapers, the network news outlets, academia, and of course Hollywood, was outraged. Living in their cloistered world, talking only to each other, they could not conceive that middle America lacked their outrage. Pauline Kael, the film critic of the New York Times, symbolized this disconnect the day after Nixon captured 61 percent of the vote: "I can't believe Nixon won. I don't know anybody who voted for him." Many Americans figured Nixon was owed one after "Old Man Joe" Kennedy stole the election from him in 1960.

In January of 1973, President Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger were on top of the world. Using what was called "triangulated diplomacy," they managed to play the Soviets against their rivals, Red China, and vice versa, all to the advantage of the United States. This resulted in the end of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War, and began a strange chapter in the Cold War called détente. The prisoners of war came home, and at that moment America stood near the all-time top of world historical power, certainly comparable with Alexander the Great's Greece, Caesar Augustus's Rome, Napoleon Bonaparte's France, early 20th Century Great Britain, and America's own high points: 1919, 1945, 1962, 1991, and 2003. But like many of those years, there was a fall from grace. In Nixon's case it came very swiftly, lending further drama to the Shakespearean nature of his career, so intertwined with the star-crossed Kennedys.

He was a target of the Left like few ever have been, before or since. Perhaps no other Republican has ever been so completely hated, demonized and made the great white whale of the Ahabs of liberalism. As he himself said, he gave them the very sword they used to knife him, then twist out his insides.

The first hint of his downfall came in March of 1973, when the revelations of Watergate made it past the revelations of the Washington Post into the hearing rooms of a special committee formed by Democrat House members to investigate the allegations. The liberal media was kicking themselves for not going after the Post's accusations harder, thus giving Nixon his landslide win over McGovern. They were determined never to let it happen again. This became a huge turning point in American history, and it was all tied to each other.

First there was the Chambers-Hiss case that made Congressman Nixon a hero, then the V.P. This begot McCarthyism, which gave cover to a virulent anti-Communism Nixon and his party specialized in. From there the Vietnam War divided the nation, the very nature and threat of Communism (international genocide vs. agrarian reformers who wanted to be left alone) in dispute. Now came the great reckoning, Watergate. The media seized on the hearings and went crazy, convicting Nixon in the court of public opinion long before he resigned in August of 1974. Hollywood made sure to do their part.

The mid-1970s saw a spate of "government conspiracy" films, all with liberal themes emanating from Watergate. Each was Orwellian in nature, warning the populace that a government-corporate complex of greedy Republicans was out to get them. None of them were about Kennedy stealing the 1960 election.

The Parallax View (1974) was big liberal Warren Beatty's attempt to describe a similar conspiracy involving shadowy government agencies. It is entertaining and worth watching, but misses the mark. Beatty seems to be trying to piece together an explanation on how, or even who, killed Kennedy, probably inspired by The Manchurian Candidate. Beatty plays small-time reporter Joe Frady, who goes undercover, allowing himself to be recruited by the Parallax Corporation, presumably a CIA front training assassins. His psychological profile is determined in part by watching a disturbing montage of scenes, ranging from love, sex and patriotism to war, gore and devil worship, mixed with the juxtaposition of wealth vs. need. The point seems to be that people go hungry while rich America has sex and kills people?

The Conversation (1974) is one of the forgotten films, yet it was directed by Francis Ford Coppola at the height of his career, earned Oscar consideration, and starred Gene Hackman as private investigator Harry Caul. It was directly related to Watergate, as Caul specializes in bugging conversations of people, even while sitting in an open public square. The idea is to scare the public into believing they are under constant surveillance by an all-seeing government; in truth, something that has come to pass. Between security cameras in public places like shopping malls and crowded city neighborhoods; cameras catching cars speeding through red lights; mechanized toll booths tracking automobiles; enhanced listening devices; not to mention Google, Google Earth, Facebook, Mapquest, cell phones and specialized tracking equipment once available only to Harry Caul, now available on the Internet; it appears that people should be afraid, very afraid.

All the President's Men (1976) was Robert Redford's breakthrough from pretty boy star to filmmaker with clout. Redford, a former baseball player at L.A.'s Van Nuys High School whose classmates were Dodger Hall of Fame pitcher Don Drysdale and the sex angel Natalie Wood, had been typecast by his looks and blonde hair into Malibu beach boy roles early on (he also played ball at the University of Colorado before dropping out to pursue the New York stage). This offended his sensibilities as an artist. Redford is in some ways the patron saint of liberal movie stars, and his story is a common one. He is no dumbellionite. Like so many, he was drawn like a bee to honey to the theatre after growing up in the Mexican section of Santa Monica and seeing racism up close (at least, that is the story he tells). His lack of a college degree in no way speaks to a lack of political knowledge, but his success and looks speak to a certain amount of good luck while others his age were in Southeast Asia. This very likely created a guilt complex that Redford, a star with an ego, could not manifest upon himself, so he found a culprit in this country, which provided him a forum to achieve so much.

After Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid he made Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Jeremiah Johnson and a clunker called The Way We Were with Barbra Streisand that desperately tried to explain, apologize for, justify, glorify and approve of being an American Communist during McCarthyism, but just plain fails. He starred in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, but as Robert Evans warned ahead of time, the subject matter was too esoteric for a movie.

In 1975 Redford starred as Joseph Turner in Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor, with Cliff Robertson and Faye Dunnaway. He plays a CIA reader, a kind of pre-Tom Clancy research guy, a benign fellow among other benign CIA fellows, all of whom are murdered in a fuzzily explained hit by bad CIA fellows. After escaping, Redford tries to get to the bottom of it. Since he is a genius he has the intellectual tools to outwit his chasers. This is the film's highlight, revolving around the sexual tension between Redford and the redoubtable Faye, who plays Kathy Hale, the girl he "kidnaps" in order to have a place to hide out, her apartment. The movie goes off the deep end when the whole conspiracy turns out to be about the CIA's covert operations in the Middle East, where the U.S. apparently is planning the invasion (that never actually occurred) to take over OPEC. The message is that the Company murders innocents, the U.S. is a warmongering empire, and tool of capitalist greed. It is Redford's answer to Guatemala, Iran and Chile, where the people killed were generally Communists. Redford would rather show the CIA killing Chinese- and African-American case officers, and other non-threats.

All the President's Men, based on the book by Woodward and Bernstein, was impossible to resist for Redford. Nixon! Oh boy! Again, Hollywood passed up the Kennedy-stole-the-election story. What a shock! But they did have talent. All the President's Men was masterful, thanks in large part to screenwriter William Goldman and director Alan Pakula, who knew how to condense the story. Redford tried to play it close to the vest, and comes close to making it come off as straight and narrow. The actual truth portrayed betrays the lack of objectivity, however, at the Washington Post. Redford is Bob Woodward, a former Navy officer and a Republican. This is revealed to Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) who gives him a furtive look upon learning this shocking truth. Jason Robards is Ben Bradlee, the Post's editor. We all know the story: the DNC is broken into by Cubans with White House phone numbers in their address books, and in investigating the burglary Woodward and Bernstein suspect a larger plot, which they uncover through dogged journalism that cannot be denied. The two writers are shown to be complete heroes. Hal Holbrooke plays "Deep Throat" (revealed in 2005 to be FBI agent Mark Felt), the insider who gives Woodward the leads he needs to keep investigating. Many Felt he was invented out of whole cloth until Felt's identity was made known. There is little doubt the Watergate case never would have been leaked had J. Edgar Hoover not passed away one month prior to the June, 1972 break-in.

The story is the story, and there is no room for liberal bias in that. To Redford's credit, he does not demonize the Republicans or sermonize. Implicit threat against the pair are made, but not expanded into anything. G. Gordon Liddy did volunteer to "off" Jack Anderson for revealing CIA assets in the U.S.S.R., but there is no evidence that Nixon's Republicans ever thought about blowing Woodward and Bernstein away. Domestic political murders appear to be the province of the Left (the Communist Lee Harvey Oswald). Even in Oliver Stone's JFK, it is Lyndon Johnson who supposedly was in on the plan to kill the President.

The bias in All the President's Men is subliminal, but it is there. First, there is the acronym CREEP, which stands for Committee to Re-elect the President. There have been numerous such committees over the years, and they always go by the acronym CRP. But Woodward and Bernstein turned it into CREEP. Somehow when Republicans are in office, their re-election committees are called CREEP; when the Democrats are trying for another term they are run by the CRP. There is also a scene in which Bradlee, who in real life was a drinking buddy (and God knows what else) of Kennedy's, getting the news that the story is progressing and has real legs.

"You run that baby," he tells Woodward and Bernstein, then does a little jig as he leaves the office. This is telling. Redford and Alan Pakula allowed it, probably because it let them impart their own happiness over Nixon's downfall through the character. In another scene, Robards/Bradlee tells the reporters, "There's not much riding on this. Just the First Amendment and the Constitution of the United States."

Was Watergate really about the Constitution? Was that august document threatened? This begs the continuing question, Where was Bradlee and Post publisher Katherine Graham when the Constitution really was threatened by their pal JFK, who stole the 1960 election? Where were they when their pal Bobby Kennedy was wiretapping Martin Luther King? Democrat operatives had to break into homes, hotels and offices to wiretap Dr. King just as the "plumbers" had to break into Dr. Lewis Fielding's office, and DNC chairman Larry O'Brien's. A free press is undoubtedly the cornerstone of Democracy, but it functions best when it is not populated by over-inflated egos who think they are the soul arbiter of freedom of expression.

The ex-editor of the San Francisco Examiner, a die-hard, old school liberal named Dave Burgin, once stated that in his opinion he would rather have a free press than the right to vote, which is the very heart and essence of the liberal elite agenda. Of course he feels that way; he has all the power. He had risen to the top of a profession dominated by liberals, which gave liberalism all its power. Voting? Who needs voting when you have smart, educated liberals like him to tell the masses what to think? Such perfidy.

When push came to shove, the tradition of Common Sense by Thomas Paine, pamphlets and knowledge passed from town to town during the Revolution, spread the intoxicating power of freedom. Free press? Free to lie about conservatives.

"The End"

The story of Hollywood's golden age, the two vital decades of the 1960s and 1970s, is an oxymoron of sorts; logic and reason go out the window. The usual rules do not apply. These were probably the two worst decades in American history. Twice – in 1962 and again in 1973 – the United States won victories over Communism, and both times squandered their riches. The 1960s gave us a protest generation unmatched in terms of unpatriotic behavior, sexual immorality, and drug abuse. As bad as it was, at least the kids had passion. In the 1970s the passion was gone; all the same unimpressiveness remained. It probably is a very telling fact about Hollywood that these negatives were somehow the fuel that lit the film industry's hottest fires. Exactly what this says about show biz is up for debate. Perhaps the fact Hollywood was at its best when Democrats were in power and the country was liberal, then fell precipitously almost in confluence with the election and long ascendance of a Republican, even if Ronald Reagan was an actor, is telling, although the how and why of this equation is a mystery.

The other rule-breaker in this scenario is the fact the greatness of Hollywood did come to an end. Most great products continue to be great products, in one way or another. High tech, for instance, will always be with us. While one carmaker may become better than another, somebody generally fills the void, and cars tend to get better. Improvements are the natural product of time, of progress, and apply to most consumer items. Televisions, for instance, are better today than they were 20 years ago, and promise to be better 20 years from now.

But movies and, to a lesser extent, rock music, both reached their creative peaks in the 1970s. Neither has come remotely close to regaining the glory, the stature, of creating great art as they did back in the day. Art, it seems, is different. History tells us that. Each of the unique periods – of the Greeks and Romans, of the Italian Renaissance, of French modernism, of sculpture and literature – had its day. Whether the great American art form of film will, 100 or 200 years from now, look back and focus on the 1960s and '70s, or a longer mosaic, only time will tell.

Slowly but surely, year by year in the 1970s, the expenditure of terrific films dipped. Cost probably played as big a role as art. The unions got their grubby hands on everything, making it harder and harder to do business until it dried things up. Drugs, seemingly innocent at first, took its toll.

In 1973, The Exorcist totally blew audiences away. Based on the William Peter Blatty novel which, scariest of all, was about a real case of possession and in the minds of believers represented not just a horror movie but a real possibility, it was directed by William Friedkin and starred Ellyn Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, a movie star living temporarily in Washington, D.C. Her daughter Regan (Linda Blair), is an adolescent reaching puberty. She becomes possessed by the devil. Father Damian Karras, battling terrible personal anguish and guilt himself over the recent death of his own mother, is called in to help. He is unable to do so. The Catholic Church brings in Father Merrin (Max von Sydow), a veteran exorcist who has dealt with the deceiver before. Together they drive Satan out of the girl, but only after Merrin dies of an apparent heart attack and Father Karras makes the ultimate sacrifice, asking Satan to "take me" instead of the girl, which he apparently does in a very depressing conclusion.

The symbolisms of The Exorcist are many. The fact it was set in Washington may have been based on a real case occurring there some 24 years earlier with an adolescent boy, but D.C.'s reputation as a den of thieves and liars, of government run amok, of power that corrupts the soul, makes it very appropriate indeed.

Chris MacNeil is a movie star, a profession of vainglory filled with the sin of pride. She is a professed atheist in the film who at first turns to medical science for answers. The doctors are helpless. Father Karras is a highly educated psychologist who spurned the riches of a lucrative career in favor of the priesthood, only to see his Greek immigrant mother die alone, presumably because he does not have the money to pay for the medical help she needed. The film is infused by unbelievably powerful psychological images, such as his mother "going down" into the subway while Father Karras calls to her (a metaphor of hell). The devil uses his guilt against him, telling the priest his dead mother is in hell forced to perform the most vile acts, assuming her image and accented voice, asking why he "did this to me," trying to get him to first believe his mother is unsaved, and that his own failure is the reason why.

The Exorcist created tremendous reaction. The Catholic Church and Christians in general did not really like it, since it was filled with filthy language and sexuality, yet it could be argued it was a great Catholic film. It showed dedicated priests on the frontline of a very real evil that cannot be ignored away.

The Sting (1973) re-united Redford and Newman. Live and Let Die introduced Roger Moore as Agent 007 James Bond a decade after Sean Connery first popularized the role. The Missiles of October starred William Devane as JFK and Martin Sheen as RFK. Both of these actors portrayed the Kennedys better than any ever have. This is a patriotic film depicting how close we came to nuclear combat toe to toe with the Russkies, and how the Kennedys saw us through the crisis.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), based on Ken Kesey's novel, solidified Jack Nicholson's place in the hierarchy. In 1976 Network satirized the news business and introduced the well worn Peter Finch phrase, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore." Rocky was a long shot that paid off. Starring Sylvester Stallone in a script he wrote over a few days, supposedly living in his car, he insisted that he star in it. Fame and fortune followed.

Annie Hall (1977) is probably Woody Allen's best work. Allen's stock in trade is the weak, neurotic Jew. Of all lies told by liberal filmmakers, none may be greater than the one consistently placed forth in Woody Allen movies. Despite being as unattractive a male as exists, he always plays himself as the love interest of beautiful young women. In later years he was accused of being a pederast.

The Onion Field (1979), based on former L.A. cop Joseph Wambaugh's novel, made a star out of James Woods. The Shining (1980) combined the talents of Stephen King's storytelling, Stanley Kubrick's directing, and Jack Nicholson's manic acting style.

Two of the best books ever written about the movies, Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) by William Goldman, and Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'n' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (1998) by Peter Biskind, both shared a similar theme. Biskind's book said it in the title, the "raging bulls" inferring Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) was the last great film of an era; that what came after was part of a new, inferior time in the industry. At the time Goldman was finishing his book, he presciently said that the industry was at a low ebb. He was right.

There are many reasons why Hollywood's golden age did not go on forever. Chief among them, as both Biskind and Goldman pointed out, was a film called Heaven's Gate. This was a movie that combined all the worst elements, trends and mistakes of the previous five years into one. Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind were less film and more blockbusters. The business of these movies, and their sequels, was at least as elemental to their success and legacy as the art. Out of this came the flawed notion that there was such a thing as a "model" kind of film, which built on a big budget, big excitement and lots of special effects to create hype and buzz resulting in big box office.

Then there were films like The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now that broke the rules of convention. Both about Vietnam, an unconventional war, these two movies were too long, highly pretentious, and bloated, yet both were works of great genius that, probably combined with luck, ended up being classics. Both Michael Cimino and Francis Ford Coppola came out of the experiences believing the hype; that they could do it like nobody else ever had done it before. In Coppola's case, he never came at all close to approaching his work in the 1970s. In Cimino's case, he more or less wrote himself a ticket out of the movie business.

In 1978 Michael Cimino made what probably should be called a patriotic, maybe even conservative film. The Deer Hunter, starring DeNiro, breaks numerous rules in terms of length of time and attention to detail. It can truly be called art. Small town values of American patriotism, loyalty and religious faith told a sad story of native sons ruined in the 'Nam. The Communists are shown for what they were, savage beasts with no redeeming value. The film is an enduring monument in film history and made huge coin, but its "failure" to hue to the liberal line, especially on the nasty subject of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, made enemies for director Cimino.

The Deer Hunter remains one of the greatest films ever made, but one of its famous early scenes lays the groundwork for the downfall of Heaven's Gate. The wedding ceremony, then the celebration, in The Deer Hunter, is interminably long, going on and on; first the Greek Orthodox rites; the spilling of wine (bad luck) on the bride's white dress; then the drawn out party, filled with sexual tension between DeNiro's Michael and Meryl Streep's Linda; drunken bravado among Michael, Christopher Walken's Nick and John Savage's Steven; Nick's crazy naked run; and finally the trip into the mountains to hunt deer.

It is a three-hour epic that never slows any of the story down. It is compelling enough to get away with it. The actors are superb, the audience cares deeply about them, and therefore nobody looks at their watch. Cimino was hailed with the kind of laudatory praise only Hollywood can give out. He figured he was that good. In 1980 he made another bid for artistic greatness with Heaven's Gate. It was the story of a war over land in the Old West, the magnificent mountains a backdrop like naturalistic cathedrals, filmed in brilliant color, the wide open "big sky" country seemingly making God Himself part of the cast. The top-flight cast included Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Isabella Huppert, Joseph Cotton, and Jeff Bridges.

But the film immediately falls all over itself in a long, drawn-out wedding celebration. Whatever worked in The Deer Hunter did not work in Heaven's Gate. Audiences began walking out half an hour into the one hour, 49-minute film. In truth it had artistic merit, but after all its hype, and its then-crazy $44 million budget, it was as disappointing as any movie could be.

Hollywood turned on Cimino in a way they never would have if his failures were liberal failures, but The Deer Hunter previously dared to show patriotic Americans up against savage Communists; a template not allowed during those years. Directors like Woody Allen are allowed to make boner after boner because they all are peppered with charming potshots at conservatism, Republicans, McCarthy and Christianity. But regardless of any political hot water Cimino found himself in, what cooked his goose was the fact Heaven's Gate forced United Artists out of business, which occurred just as Goldman was finishing Adventures in the Screen Trade. He correctly saw this as the bad omen it was.

There were great movies made after Heaven's Gate. Many were made by the famed film school graduates Coppola, Spielberg, Milius, Scorsese/DeNiro, and others like Oliver Stone and Quentin Tarantino, but the golden age came to an end. It would never return.

While the greatness of Hollywood movies, starting with Spartacus in 1960s, saw a reduction in quality and theme after Heaven's Gate in 1980, it did not end the liberalism Dalton Trumbo's "slave rebellion" began. It would just get worse after that. Perhaps the words of the most seminal song of any movie ever said it best, "The End" by The Doors from Apocalypse Now:

"This is the end

Beautiful friend

This is the end

My only friend, the end

But you'll never follow me

The end of laughter and soft lies

The end of nights we tried to die

This is the end."

"Hanoi Jane"

If Hollywood once leaned to the Right, it now definitely leans to the Left. There is little question Hollywood Republicans had more power, generated more popular change, and held more substantive elected positions, than liberals. For lack of a better way of putting it, industry liberals talked a good game, made plenty of noise, and organized protests, but nobody swayed the electorate like Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston and others, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

While the Blacklist created a huge backlash against the Right, resulting in a plethora of liberal movies and outspoken acts espousing liberal causes, the fact Americans, when they think of Hollywood, most often think first and foremost that the place is . . . liberal . . . is because of Jane Fonda.

She is the poster child for liberal Hollywood. In the 1970s, a decade in which she may have thought the world was turning her way, she was inflaming conservative America into a second backlash. It was Ronald Reagan, who more than any Republican first benefited from the reaction against college campus protests, who for a second time benefited from backlash against Jane Fonda. Fonda became a symbol of vapid Hollywood celebrity, of looks over substance, of a new sort of absurd radical chic.

There were others before Fonda, many of them. Chaplin, Robeson, Belafonte, among so many others. Warren Beatty was of her vintage, like her a pretty young thing. Whereas Belafonte had walked the walk of the Harlem renaissance, the anti-colonial Jamaica of his calypso youth, and seen genuine prejudice trying to keep him down at every turn, Beatty was just a post-war product of the good life whose sister, Shirley MacLaine, was similarly given the keys to the kingdom. Beatty had talent and drive to spare. He put everything on the line in order to make Bonnie and Clyde (1967), a groundbreaker of violence and cinema splash, but had he failed he just would have continued to get good movie roles.

He had the long hair and was a womanizer par excellence who catted around town with two others of the type, Robert Evans and Jack Nicholson, literally comparing the respective size of their manhoods. Their movies were virtually just that, comparisons of box office take and praise a kind of phallic symbol.

Beatty played a major role in George McGovern's 1972 Presidential campaign, while befriending another mod, campaign manager Gary Hart. They represented the new Democrats. Gone were LBJ and soon Hubert Humphrey. These guys wore their hair long, wore bellbottoms, and probably smoked a little grass. Womanizing was now part of their resume, not something to be hidden away. Shampoo starred Warren Beatty . . . as himself, for the most part . . . a vain womanizer. The film was set against the 1968 Richard Nixon-Hubert Humphrey election, and attempted to portray rich Republicans as uncaring, corrupt tools of capitalism. Beatty, the multi-millionaire, was presumably an exception to this rule. Beatty's George has his way with various Republican wives and girlfriends.

Beatty continued to stay active in politics and make political movies. The Parallax View was a super-paranoid flick playing on post-Watergate fears, and Bulworth (1998) was his upset reaction to Bill Clinton's failure to govern as a liberal. But Beatty, for the most part, played it safe. Other Democrats occasionally let slip from their tongues acid screeds showing bald hatred of anything and everything Republican. Not so Warren Beatty.

But Jane Fonda was another story. She was Hollywood royalty, the daughter of the legendary Henry Fonda, a New Dealer who played Tom Joad in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Her mother was a socialite who could not handle the whole scene, committing suicide. Her brother Peter became a counter-culture hero when he starred in Easy Rider (1969). But Jane Fonda was obsessed with pleasing her father (ironically once named "father of the year"), especially after her mother's demise. She went into a state of bulimia from age 12 to age 35, entered Vassar, joining the French New Wave when she met director Roger Vadim in Paris. Back in the States, in 1959 she was featured on posters as "Miss Army Recruiter." She took acting classes in New York at Lee Strasberg's famed studio, where young liberals Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Ann Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman and Sally Field influenced her.

In the 1960s she made a string of reasonably successful movies and Broadway plays, earning praise as a "gifted and appealing young actress." Indeed, she was extraordinarily beautiful, featuring a sexiness beyond previous screen vixens like Ava Gardner. It was the age of Playboy. The Hayes Code was being repealed with each layer by layer of clothing revealing the tanned, bronzed bodies of Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch and Brigitte Bardot.

She returned to France, becoming the lover of the French radical-intellectual and womanizer Vadim. She spent hours in the company of Jean-Paul Sartre, Catherine Deneuve, Simion de Beauvoir, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, and the Algerian-born radical anti-colonial philosopher Albert Camus. France had recently lost Algeria in a bitter civil war. It was the last vestige of their old empire, their great history just a thing of the past. The losers of history, French intellectuals spent all their passions and energy into figuring out how they could make the rest of the world look as bad as they had become.

Vadim took her to Moscow in 1964, where the two celebrities were given royal treatment, which they apparently accepted without questioning whether it reflected the general way of life. She attended anti-Vietnam rallies in France held by the French Communist Party. French children were being taught that America's war in Vietnam was the morally relative equal of Hitler's concentration camps. This was an attempt to dissuade people from focusing on their own Vichy past, which General Charles de Gaulle refused to even acknowledge. Fonda was influenced by Signoret's radically feminist ideas, as well. France's hatred of America's war in Vietnam was further accentuated by its own colonial past. Having lost to the Communists at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, they were essentially kicked out of Vietnam, leaving protection of the South Vietnamese allies to the U.S. Of all countries in the West, none supported the American cause in their former colony less.

"I had grown up with this Second World War father-fighting-in-the-Pacific notion that we were on the right side and that it was just inconceivable that we were doing this," she lamented. Paris was filled with American deserters, who she sought out. They told her America was "torturing" and "murdering," probably a reference to the infamous Phoenix program, in which American Armed Forces and intelligence services, tired of dealing with Communist atrocities while they fought with their "hands tied behind their backs," decided to dole out some of the same medicine. She was given books to read which "turned my life around. I didn't know how to process this."

She was pregnant with Vadim's child and, with time on her hands, watched slanted French news reports from Vietnam while reading Left-wing books. Most of the footage were repeated scenes of American bombs landing on schools and churches.

In 1968 10,000 students battled French police in union uprisings. English actress Vanessa Redgrave, a staunch liberal, advised Fonda to support the unions, which she did. In the aftermath of the King and Kennedy assassinations, she watched news footage of riots at the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. She was living in the lap of French luxury, a "hedonistic movie star," in her own words, and began to question herself along with everything else.

She returned to the States and made a groundbreaking film, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which was based on what Albert Camus called the "first existential novel coming out of America," by Horace McCoy in 1935.

The film, directed by Sydney Pollack, was a scathing attack against capitalism under the guise of popular 1930s seaside marathon dance contests. She became interested in the civil rights struggle, and spoke to American liberals who up-dated her on doings in the U.S. when she was in Europe. The violent Black Panthers now dominated the Civil Rights Movement. Lines were being drawn. King's dream was in danger of going down in flames. Conservatives compared its "failure" with the fallout from Mahatma Gandhi's non-violence in India, which did nothing to stop Hitler but weakened the British while they fought him. The subsequent Indian civil war bordered on genocide over the creation of Pakistan.

She moved to Los Angeles, taking on a hodge-podge of causes, with no real core. She was there for the Indians, the African-Americans, the war protestors, the feminists. She did not need to work and could go anywhere, give her money away, lending time and her name to anybody who wanted her attached. While she was criticized, in fact public opinion, which had opposed the war by only 12 percent in 1965, by the early 1970s was drastically in favor of total withdrawal.

Despite the hatred attached to her by GIs, her opposition to the war in truth was to "protect" the soldiers, both the ones left to fight, die and be imprisoned by the Communists, but also to help with their considerable needs once back home.

Richard Nixon invaded Cambodia in 1970, a major turning point. Elected with a "secret plan" to bring "peace with honor" in Vietnam, he and then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger strategized over the best way to accomplish this task. Kissinger was engaged in undisclosed peace talks with North Vietnamese leaders in Paris, which meant nobody knew about them. The invasion of Cambodia, which predicated the Kent State shootings, was a huge controversy. The media excoriated bringing the war to the "peaceful" Cambodians. Kissinger's various memoirs insist that the move was made only after the Nixon Administration was convinced the NVA and Viet Cong, who were using Cambodia as a sanctuary from American bombs, already killed, imprisoned, forced into their army, or made refugees out of virtually the entire Cambodian population living near the contested border areas. This argument was made at the time. The Left either did not believe it or did want to believe it. Fonda then made cross-country trip, speaking at anti-war rallies.

"I took off on that trip a liberal, and I ended up a radical," she explained.

She received enormous attention for the obvious reasons: her Fonda heritage, her celebrity status, and her fabulous looks. Audiences were star-struck, but none of these factors really gave her credibility on the issue. This became a template the Right has used ever since to mock actresses who "played" a farmer's wife or some other character, then went before Congress to testify on farm-related issues as if they were a credible expert. The Hollywood studio establishment gave her no support.

Jane Fonda had natural intelligence and a flair for public speaking. She was a trained line-giver, of course. But her "education" was very faulty, spotty at best. She was one of those people that common sense types like to say "knows just enough to be dangerous." She had, of course, grown up in a rather intellectual household, but it was a stilted one. Her parents did not get along. She was a pretty girl at a time, especially, when pretty girls were not expected to be serious. She attended private schools, where presumably she was taught well, and she attended Vassar, but how truly educated she was from these experiences is debatable.

Her experience with French intellectuals, in retrospect, was terrible. They were elitists, high-minded literary masters and artistes, but lacked any sort of common touch, or common sense. She certainly was not subject to the moral teachings of Christ, who her French betters surely thought a joke of history. Now she found herself on national TV, doing media events and interviews. She gave "black power" salutes that, coming from a white bread girl looked silly. She made numerous gaffes. Probably because she believed everything Vadim and his French friends told her, she made semi-arrogant statements of "fact" that were historically inaccurate, which conservatives pounced on. The people she was trying to help complained that she "unintentionally" blew important issues because she did not understand the problem. She was vapid and vague, but acted sure of herself, which just made her look stupid. She held a press conference at her posh Manhattan penthouse for Black Panther leader Huey Newton. With camera angles whirring, Newton gave a blistering diatribe of American capitalism while sitting on an expensive antique French chair.

The press laughed at the charade, calling it radical chic. Henry Fonda was aghast, publicly pleading for her to fade way, make movies, get married, do something. She was dealing with committed radicals, many of whom had been on the hustings for years, paying for their place in the hierarchy with jail time, reading books as Malcolm X did in prison, and right or wrong were not vapid. But they used her. Her looks and celebrity status drew crowds they needed. Others derided her as "Cause Celeb."

She took up the cause of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which had certain credibility since it consisted of soldiers returned from combat who had not deserted. A number of young Hollywood intellectuals joined her, lending further controversy to the radical chic description, hosting lavish parties for ghetto blacks from the Oakland and L.A. Black Panther parties.

But Ronald Brownstein of the L.A. Times pointed out that John Wayne had no more "moral authority" to speak out on Vietnam, which he most certainly did, than Fonda. He had not fought in any wars, only played them on screen. Her past roles were not helpful to her, either. Wayne at least played officers and heroes. She had played prostitutes, adulteresses, mistresses and ingénues. She was terribly haunted by her 1968 sex turn in Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy, which in those pre-Deep Throat days was thought the closest thing to porn there was. In the flick she was a sex kitten dressed in a skintight "love suit" who makes love to every man she meets in the course of the film. Even reconciling it as a movie, regular people understood she was still nude on camera, with various other presumably nude men. It was not the makings of a political scientist.

Not just the FBI but the CIA, NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, even the Secret Service, had files on her. J. Edgar Hoover officially called her a "Marxist," a designation allowing the bureau to label her an actual threat. Many government officials were embarrassed when McCarthyism went bad, and actual Communists were taken off the Blacklist, only to get the last laugh at America. It made the Right look like fools. They wanted some payback and saw Fonda as a way to get some.

She joined the Winter Soldier effort, which had grown from the My Lai massacre. Their claim was that Lieutenant William Calley did not acted alone, but was scapegoated as a rogue. Led by future U.S. Senator and Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry of Massachusetts, they made claims of torture and terrible atrocities, indicating My Lai was part of a systematic set of orders. There is little evidence that Kerry and the Winter Soldier allegations were true on their face, but they were reacting to the same rumors emanating from the secret Phoenix program that deserters in Paris apparently told Fonda about. People found it very difficult to reconcile any of this with American values.

The Winter Soldier claims are still argued to this day. When Kerry ran for President, numerous comrades came forth to claim his testimony was filled with lies. They provided enough proof to convince much of the voting public, who voted for George W. Bush's re-election over him. The Phoenix Program did indeed include torture and acts that can be viewed as "atrocities," although the circumstances surrounding them had an "ends justifies the means" quality to them, at least in the minds of those who carried out the orders. However, the Phoenix Program was classified. Much of what was discussed in 1970-72 could not have been based on any kind of full disclosure of the program, leaving most of the rather haggard ex-soldiers, given no support by the Pentagon, the appearance of renegades. To the Right, they were. To the Left, they were heroes. Such was the setting.

Just as Paul Robson advised Harry Belafonte to de-radicalize and make money and fame a priority, in the long run helping the movement, Fonda was given the same advice. She won an Oscar playing a prostitute in Klute, which led her further into the women's movement. She and co-star Donald Sutherland, a dedicated Leftist, entertained troops as an "alternative" to Bob Hope's USO tours at locations not on, but near, various military installations. 64,000 soldiers saw her over nine months.

She returned to Los Angeles and met Tom Hayden. More than Vadim and the French intellectuals she met in Paris, this event changed her life and is part of American history. Hayden was an average-looking (at best) radical from Michigan, a middle class kid who got involved in anti-war politics. He conspired with seven others (the Chicago Eight) to riot at the 1968 DNC in Chicago. When Time magazine reported that Hayden and his people filled plastic bags with human feces, which they used to hurl at the police, their fate was sealed. They were bad actors.

He had no money, was not terribly employable, and was a hated figure who found no welcome in most middle American cities. He found refuge at Venice Beach, a run down, funky beach community of hippies, druggies, transients, transvestites, ne'r-do-wells, and everything in between, located on the Los Angeles strand between Santa Monica and Marina Del Rey. Santa Monica, once a conservative little retirement community, was being radicalized in the wake of the Anti-War Movement to the point where it was derided as the "People's Republic of Santa Monica."

Fonda had her fill of beautiful men and father figures, ranging from Barefoot in the Park co-star Robert Redford to Roger Vadim. She found in Hayden a project, slightly younger, a pugnacious radical unimpressed by her celebrity, but probably well aware of what she could do for his "career." What she saw in him romantically remains a mystery, but she fell in love, got pregnant, and they married in their living room.

When she received an invite from the North Vietnamese to visit Hayden urged her to go. Since 1965, over 200 Americans traveled to North Vietnam in "peace" and "fact finding" missions. Hayden had been there twice, even bringing some POWS home with him. Fonda was not the first liberal to go. In fact, it was by then almost a yawner. The war was winding down. Nixon had visited Chairman Mao and was recognizing Red China. Rumors of a peace agreement in Paris prior to the November Presidential election were making their way around.

By 1972, the Vietnam conflict was not nearly what it had been during the Tet Offensive (1968) or the release of the Pentagon Papers (1971). Nixon's increased bombing campaign of Cambodia, beginning in 1970, allowed the U.S. to increasingly bring soldiers home in larger numbers.

In fact, Kissinger would announce "peace is at hand" at just the right time, before Nixon destroyed McGovern with 49 states and 61 percent of the vote. After the election, the Communists reneged. Nixon ordered the infamous "Christmas bombing" campaign of 1972, forcing Hanoi back to the bargaining table. One month later it was official, the POWs sent home, and American combat operations ceased.

When Fonda went to North Vietnam, passions were not nearly as inflamed as two, three and four years earlier. It seemed a much "safer" move for her reputation than if she had gone during Tet or the battle of Khe Sanh. So off she went. At issue was a dike system in place in North Vietnam. In his Memoirs of Richard Nixon he specifically wrote that had he bombed the dikes, it would have flooded out the population and allowed the U.S. to conquer North Vietnam in the manner of previous hard-won military victories. He did not do it, he wrote, because the loss of peasant lives would have been too awful.

But the NVA claimed he was bombing the dikes. They wanted to give Fonda photos showing damage to them, which she would in turn show the American press. The Swedish Ambassador, Jean-Christophe Oberg, insisted the damage was real. For two weeks she was given star treatment, but not without danger. American bombers flew over head. She was forced to find cover in ditches by the side of the road. She met with POWs, a very controversial event. Most of the POWS despised her and would not meet her, or had only vitriol for her. Left-wingers visited the Hanoi Hilton in the past. It was always a photo-op or propaganda exercise designed to fool prisoners into making public statements against their country. While she would be remembered for what later happened, the greatest hatred for Fonda stems for the most part from this effort to manipulate prisoners to do Communist bidding.

She made radio appearances, claiming American bombers flew at such high altitudes they could not know they were really hitting civilian targets, and was shown damage done. This may well have been manipulated, or partially manipulated, but she did not question it at all. She compared peasants being bombed to "farmers in the Midwest" who resembled "your grandmothers and grandfathers."

She met with more imprisoned pilots, feeding their lack of knowledge over real events with tales spoon fed by her handlers of the devastating effects from the napalm they dropped. Some of it may have been true, but for the men, imprisoned, shaken, their faith at the breaking point, to have Jane Fonda lay such a "guilt trip" on them in this place at that time, was considered a terrible act of betrayal.

She told them it was all Nixon's fault, but the American military officer is a unique being. He swears an oath to the Constitution just like an elected official, and is given an "office," like a politician in a way. He is taught he is a "soldier of Democracy," that independent thinking by free men willing to choose for themselves was at the heart of American successes at Valley Forge, Belleau Wood, and Normandy; that their automaton opponents cannot function without officers while U.S. privates, given "battlefield commissions," lead and make vital decisions.

Therefore, the notion that the President was a liar, that they were dupes, did not work in their minds. They saw not a beautiful, compassionate woman trying to save them, but a temptress leading them down a primrose path. She spoke to a group of POWs and reported they said they were "shocked" to discover they were bombing civilian targets. Many disputed this later. Further, it made no sense. Civilian targets, while holding some military purpose in the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden in World War II, were of no value whatsoever in Vietnam. To do so would only open them up to the things . . . Jane Fonda was now saying.

Then came the last day of the trip. All had gone reasonably well. The people who hated her hated her still, and the people who supported her still did. But the North Vietnamese had special plans for Jane Fonda. She was brought to an anti-aircraft military installation, where soldiers and singers joined her in songs about freedom. Photographers asked her to don a hard hat and get on the emplacement. She laughingly did so. Pictures were snapped. NVA soldiers smiled at her in the background while she appears to be giggling or singing. Suddenly she realized what was happening.

"Oh my God," she thought to herself, realizing that the photos would look like she was "trying to shoot down U.S. planes," which was the precise purpose of the weapon which had, in fact, effectively been used to kill and capture a fair number of pilots.

She begged her hosts not to print the photos. They promised her they would not. They did. When they hit the newswires all hell broke loose in the U.S. She was immediately referred to as "Hanoi Jane," the ultimate nickname for liberal lack of patriotism. She was the new version of "Tokyo Rose," worse than Ezra Pound or "Red Emma" Goldman.

"That two-minute lapse of sanity will haunt me until I die," she said.

The Left, of course, gave her a hero's welcome. Even U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim said the photo of damaged dikes should convince President Nixon to stop the bombing. America's U.N. Ambassador George H.W. Bush apparently agreed with Waldheim. Resolutions followed in the U.S. Senate demanding a reduction or halt to bombing of this region.

But the Right had a field day. Kissinger was making big progress at the Paris peace talks. America finally had a slight advantage in the way they could end the war. "Hanoi Jane" was seen as setting back legitimate peace aims that ultimately would lengthen the war and kill more people. She was put on Nixon's infamous "enemies list." Attorney General Richard Kleindeinst was urged to charge her with treason. The House Internal Security Council opened investigations of her for giving "aid and comfort to the enemy." Ultimately she was not prosecuted in large measure because she would have been given "martyr status." But she was vilified, faced various state resolutions condemning her, and one Maryland official suggested she should be executed for her action. Death threats poured in, some serious. J. Edgar Hoover, who despised her, passed away in May. The FBI chose not to pursue her case.

Encouraged by the international Left, she then set about building a "movement" with Tom Hayden. She wanted revolution, but Hayden urged participation in the political process. Together they engaged in a big outreach to ordinary Americans instead of just talking "only to ourselves."

The two played an integral role in Senator George McGovern's fall campaign for President. Ultimately, they probably hurt the South Dakota Senator more than any other factor. He was undoubtedly a dove who wanted the war to end, albeit with little or no concession from the other side, but McGovern had been a fighter pilot in World War II, a man of respect. The support of the Fonda-Hayden movement made him look weak and, in some minds, treasonous.

Nixon's enormous victory was a huge setback for the Left. When he ended the war and brought the POWs home in January of 1973, America was, briefly, at one of its all-time peaks of power. There was a sense that the Republicans were invincible, liberalism left for what Ronald Reagan would call the "ash heap of history." But Watergate hit, and everything was turned on its head. Fonda and Hayden actively continued to spread every radical cause, which in 1973 were numerous. As Watergate grew, lines were divided. Roe v. Wade came down, making abortion on demand available, in June of that year. The Civil Rights Movement now seemed hi-jacked by radicals like the SLO, the Weather Underground, and others. Feminism, gay rights, environmental causes; all were loudly advocated. Fonda was involved with most of these issues.

Their first child was actually named after North Vietnamese hero Nguyen Van Troi, which infuriated conservatives more. Attacked as a hypocrite for living in a luxurious Laurel Canyon home, she and Hayden moved into a rundown Santa Monica "shack."

By this point she had forgone the trappings of celebrity, something most of her radical chic friends never did, handling day-to-day operations like answering the phone, the mail, and other chores. They slept on a mattress on the floor. Even Henry Fonda began to come around. He made a television ad claiming, "I used to be proud of this country. Not anymore." His daughter was both the "most admired" and "most hated" woman in the country, according to Gallup polling.

Watergate unraveled. Many secrets of the Nixon Administration were revealed, including numerous wiretaps and un-Constitutional intrusions into the private lives of citizens, including Fonda. She sued. The Senate investigation widened into the Church Committee, a broad, expansive investigation of the CIA, headed by U.S. Senator Frank Church (D.-Idaho). It led to a tremendous de-fanging of its considerable powers. The Kennedy assassination was re-explored, the Left hoping to find Nixon or the Republicans responsible; anybody but the fellow traveler Oswald.

The efforts to restrict American power had disastrous effects. Aside from the general lack of faith in the government, and in America's traditional institutions, the country now believed a wide array of things. The concept of the CIA or Right-wingers killing JFK, while unproven, entered the zeitgeist. With Nixon gone and President Gerald Ford hamstrung by Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy and a Democrat Congress, America was forced to evacuate Saigon. With America gone, the war spread into the south, to Cambodia and Laos. Some 1 million Vietnamese were killed, 1.5 million Cambodians. The perspective on this varied tremendously. In the minds of the conservative Right, the atrocities committed by Communists in Southeast Asia between 1975-79 were proof positive America's role in the war was indeed a "noble" effort, to quote Reagan. Opposing an ideology that killed 55 million in China; 25-35 million in Russia; 1.5 million in Cambodia; more than 100 million worldwide; this was thought an obvious reason for us to have been there in the first place.

The Left, led by the New York Times, insisted none of it would have happened had the U.S. not "meddled." The Right countered. This "logic" was like saying had America not entered World War II in 1941, "forcing Germany's hand," the Final Solution would not have followed in 1944.

Without a strong CIA or American military to contend with, the Soviets increased their "adventurous" activities in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and especially Africa. All of these threats played a major role in the eventual Rightward shift leading to Ronald Reagan, the second time he benefited from reaction to over-arching liberal political trends.

Jane Fonda's career went nowhere fast in the mid-1970s. In 1976 Hayden ran for the U.S. Senate. He was not believable suddenly wearing a suit and tie, losing in the Democrat primary to incumbent John Tunney. He in turn was beaten by Republican college president S.I. Hayakawa (who infamously slept through Senate sessions during his six years in Washington).

Having given her husband half a million dollars for his wistful political career, Fonda then set out to resurrect her movie career. It turned out to be one of the greatest comebacks ever. Not only did she re-establish herself as an actress of substance, she completely reinvented her image, largely from a capitalistic perspective. Saved by the pure benevolence of American goodwill from a treason trial, she was allowed to pursue her craft (she was excellent at it). Only in America.

After starring in a couple of modest successes, she helmed the 1978 blockbuster Coming Home, with Bruce Dern and Jon Voigt. As if to counter-balance The Deer Hunter, it addressed the issue that arguably moved her in the first place, the plight of soldiers returning from Vietnam. Voigt plays a paraplegic Vietnam vet named Luke Martin, Fonda the patriotic, ex-cheerleader wife (Sally Hyde) of the gung-ho Captain Bob Hyde (Dern). Sally volunteers at a hospital, where she sees vets badly treated. She falls in love with Martin. In so doing she portrays the very cheating wife she described to the boys in "Tokyo Rose" fashion during her "Hanoi Jane" days (when she suggested to the troops their wives and girlfriends were having sex with hippies and protestors back home). Fonda tries to pepper the performance with an apology to her officer husband, but it ends up being more of an explanation, which in light of what we know about Vietnam does not wash. But Captain Hyde saw atrocities in Vietnam that change him. When he returns home only to sees his wife having an affair, he commits suicide. It was a downer, which rarely makes for box office, but this one did. Coming Home seemed to be the realization of the self-fulfilling prophecy she created in 1972.

Then Fonda finally achieved through her art what she and Hayden never achieved through politics. Nuclear arms were another among a litany of liberal complaints. Many of the issues of the 1960s and 1970s were addressed or improved by 1979, but the threat of nuclear war still hung over American heads 17 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. A near-meltdown at Three Mile Island alarmed the public. The Left painted Ronald Reagan, the likely 1980 Republican candidate for President, as a nuclear-trigger-happy war monger.

Fonda made The China Syndrome (1979) with Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon. It was about a near-disaster at a nuclear plant in Southern California. The title suggested if nuclear material seeped into the Earth untreated, nothing could stop its spread through the core of the planet until it emerged in China at the other side of the globe, then theoretically spread unabated across the planet with the most terrible of consequences. This scenario fixed itself in the minds of people worldwide and, as Rush Limbaugh himself points out, is the biggest reason the steady construction of clean nuclear power plants was halted.

Suddenly Jane Fonda was a mainstream political activist, this time arguing along with her husband over an issue that was in the process of gaining a majority, if not already. No longer dressed like hippies, she and Hayden appeared well coiffed; Hayden in a coat, Fonda with pearls, at anti-nuclear rallies.

She was not finished re-inventing herself. Next came a rarity, the feminist comedy Nine to Five. Building on the role she became an icon, advocating better health for women (as if men wanted them sick and fat?). Still beautiful, she was part of the fitness craze taking over in the late 1970s. She began making workout videos, which hit just in time for the emerging VCR market. Dressed in sexy little gym outfits, she led millions of women in daily exercise routines. Meanwhile, millions of men stared, open-jawed, at the videos (and many like knock-offs), but were probably not exactly exercising. Johnny Carson joked if a guy had any problem with Jane Fonda as a gyrating sex kitten, there was something wrong with him.

Fonda continued making successful films and millions of dollars from her workout videos. She famously re-united with her dad in the film On Golden Pond. Her husband did win election, to the California Assembly in 1982 out of the lampooned "People's Republic of Santa Monica."

She eventually apologized to the soldiers, but it was seemingly not heartfelt enough and, for the most part, not accepted. She divorced Hayden and married CNN founder Ted Turner, a strange pairing. Turner, a man who may not be the anti-Christ (but may be), and may not have achieved his success by invoking Satan (but may have), once saw CNN employees adorned in "ashes" to worship Ash Wednesday. He went ballistic about "Jesus freaks" in his employ. Such a crime! Turner was also accused of being a Communist because he partnered with and did all he could to prop up Communist Russia, although when the Soviet Union disintegrated, it greatly negated the issue.

Whether she was put off by Turner, had a change of heart, or simply felt the need to atone for her sins, Fonda declared herself a Christian. As with her apology, it did not strike most as sincere, but then again, nobody can truly know what was in her heart. That was the "last straw" for Turner, who divorced her.

If she thought she had been forgiven by the Right, she was mistaken when, in 2004 a doctored photo of her with John Kerry at the Winter Soldier meetings – she was there and it could have been real but was not – surfaced during his Presidential campaign against George W. Bush. It did Kerry no service to be associated with Fonda. His war record had been exaggerated, a fact revealed by the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, but most damning were his own actions (throwing his medals over the White House fence, later deemed not his actual medals) and words, deemed for the most part to be untrue, in old Winter Soldier footage.

To this day, Naval Academy students end their evenings going around the room saying "Good night" until the last plebe shouts, "Good night, Jane Fonda." The entire company responds, "Good night, bitch."

Why are actors liberal?

Jane Fonda mentored young actors in the dos and don'ts of political activism. Michael J. Fox, Rob Lowe, Alec Baldwin, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were among Democrat actors who followed in her footsteps. As much hatred as Fonda engendered by her actions, ironically celebrities of the 2000s uttered harsher rhetoric. Bill Maher, Michael Moore, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, and others said things about George W. Bush that were more hateful than things Fonda is remembered saying about Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Comics have taken to political discourse, using incredibly foul language Fonda never used. Much of the really disturbing stuff these people say ultimately hurts their cause. Middle America often hears it, analyzes it, applies a little wisdom then common sense, thus deciding whatever they are supporting, they will not support.

But the intense criticism of the Iraq War reminded many of "Hanoi Jane" and voices of the Left during Vietnam. Many have asked, Why are actors so liberal? and in some cases actually un-patriotic . . . or worse? What is it about this profession and the environment, whether it is Hollywood, the New York stage, the arts scene, the comedy circuit, and the media in general that engenders such attitudes? There have always been prominent liberals in Hollywood, going back to Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson. The Blacklist and McCarthyism unquestionably created a backlash, but it seems stronger than just that.

Martin Sheen comes to mind. His political awakening may trace itself to his role in Apocalypse Now, when at age 36 he suffered a heart attack that made him re-think his role in the world. He is an interesting character, liberal to the core but vastly different from the rest of the Hollywood Left.

Sheen's son, Charlie, was at one time thought to be a little bit on the conservative side. Dressed as if on the set of Platoon with a headband he sidled on up to Rush Limbaugh at a party once whispering, "Love yer work." Later Charlie became a conspiracy theorist, apparently believing George W. Bush destroyed the World Trade Center so he could start a war with Islam.

Martin got his liberalism from the Catholic religion. He was apparently like many other young celebs in fleshpot land in the 1970s; good-looking and hedonistic. His heart attack, induced by his bad habits and the stress of filming that monster, was an epiphany leading to a return to the Catholicism of his Ohio upbringing.

There is no doubt Martin's liberalism is based in part on the enormous guilt he felt, first because that is what Catholics are made to feel, but more important because he knew his money and fame was a fleeting thing. Of course he had earned it, but like so many in the entertainment business, it had not been the result of a controlled plan. Entrepreneurs and most other successful people plot a life strategy, follow it, work hard and achieve their goals. Actors are subject to the fickle fates of producers' and agents' whims. Almost all of them look at struggling impresarios in the employment lines and the acting schools, saying (to themselves), "There but for the grace of God <well, maybe not God> go I."

Sheen does believe in God. Those who have worked with him tell stories about his devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ. At every break, he approaches people with his Bible and the story of his savior. Sheen is a man who asks, "What would Jesus do?" There are many aspects of Christ's life that seem Socialist. This has been used by many to justify Communism as real Christianity. This approach loses luster when one studies history and economics (read Adam Smith), determining that the best producer of wealth, which allows more boats in the water to rise with the tide, is the marketplace, not Communism. It further loses credibility when one reads the entire Bible instead of cherry-picking a few passages to serve their own purposes.

Sheen may see a world in which companies like Chevron, Arthur Andersen and Bechtel are peopled by Benedictine Monks producing the engine of wealth in the name of Christ. It is a utopian vision, but at some point folks need to make their decisions in the real world. One asks whether Christ, if he were President, would bomb targets in Baghdad, or worse, Dresden or Nagasaki. The first, obvious answer seems to be, Of course not. But if Christ were President, charged with stopping Saddam from killing thousands and Hitler from killing millions, and He knew killing thousands would save thousands more on our side as well as theirs, and He did not have access to his supernatural powers, would He not do the same thing that FDR, Truman and Bush did?

Probably not, but nobody can make that prediction. He would be smarter and wiser than any human, probably able to come up with an answer we have never thought about. Or he would just let the people be slaughtered as he was slaughtered, without a fight, knowing that life is but a portal to eternity, which is was what really matters. This seems to reflect Mahatma Gandhi's attitude towards Adolf Hitler. But Martin Sheen has no more access to Jesus's motives than anybody else. Furthermore, Sheen is a man who does things by symbol, understandable considering the iconography of his religion. He has accepted the wealth of his profession, living in a palatial Malibu estate. Occasionally, he shows up at a homeless shelter, where he sleeps on the street for a night, or works the soup kitchen, then returns to Malibu. With all due respect, does this really help anybody?

He gives a lot of money to charity. Good for him. He is a pacifist, which is fine, but this principle must be tempered by a reality about the world we live in. The freedoms that we cherish are protected by our power, which we have to fight for. At this point, America is pretty secure, but the world has many insecure places. We go there and have to do some pretty rough things to some pretty bad actors in order to make it safe for others. Sheen himself expresses admiration for Dwight Eisenhower, so there is hope for him. Ike was no pacifist. He understood that peace comes through strength. When it is all said and done, Martin Sheen is an awesome talent, and his passion is to be respected. That goes for many liberal activists. Regardless of disagreement, unless somebody is just over the top, there is more respect for those who care, speak out, put their opinion on the line and have a social conscience – whether agreed with or not - than with slackers who just live off the fat of the land with little knowledge or understanding of the world they exist in. In Sheen's case his Christianity is a big plus and beats the heck out of the Karmic vicissitudes of many of his morally irrelevant cohorts.

Which brings us to his morally irrelevant cohorts. There are two big industries of entertainment; the performing arts and sports. Performing arts generally includes actors of stage and screen, musicians, and dancers. Sports encompass all of athletics. In the United States, professional baseball, basketball, football, ice hockey and tennis are the major endeavors. Internationally, soccer (or football) is huge. Beyond that, Olympic sports like track, skating and gymnastics are popular enough, but really spotlighted every four years.

There is odd confluence between athletes and entertainers. They tend to admire each other, hang out with each other on occasion, and date each other. But there is a tremendous difference between the average athlete and the average actor. The actor, more than any other performer, is subject to the fickle whims of fate. He or she must be selected by a producer or a director, who bases this decision on many irregular factors, not infrequently the infamous "casting couch." Factors such as age, race, sexuality and looks play a role, often over and above pure talent.

For every role in every movie, there are100 struggling actors who tried for it, and probably more who could do it just as well. Even among stars, or at least top actors, there is really little separating them from masses of unknowns who never got their break. True movie stars like Laurence Olivier, Marlon Brando and Al Pacino are the rarest of birds, absolutely irreplaceable talents. There are many actors like, for instance Tim Robbins, who possess good talent and are professionals, but they never rose past a certain level in the pantheon because for every Tim Robbins or Susan Sarandon or Jennifer Aniston or Ashton Kutcher, there is another funny, pretty guy or gal who, given the same boost, the same money, the same PR and marketing, would be just as hot.

Even screenwriters can trace their success to a more market-oriented construct. If a writer pens Chinatown, Apocalypse Now or The Departed, and gets it into the hands of a real agent, it will sell and get made. Beyond that much dreck gets made, no better or worse than what is not made. Authors either write bestsellers or they do not.

Musicians, too, can at least trace their trajectory by a capitalistic ethos. A group of guys gets together, they make music, they either draw good crowds to nightclubs or they do not; they either sell their CDs or they do not.

But there is no greater difference than between actors and athletes. Oddly enough, the athletes "benefit" from government institutions more than actors. The athletes usually played on sports teams, often at taxpayer-funded public high schools and state universities (although private, often Catholic high schools are becoming more dominant over the past 20 years). While the actor probably took drama in high school, he or she generally enters an absolutely Darwinian world falling somewhere between "survival of the fittest," "survival of the luckiest," or "survival of the most willing to compromise themselves sexually"; or all three! They all advocate more "support for the arts" and would love to see Socialist actors' troupes not subject to the whim of box office receipts, a version of little league where every kids gets a trophy whether they hit .604 or .104.

But aside from the fact that both athletes and entertainers perform before audiences, and at the top of both professions the pay is outrageous, there are differences that are more like chasms. Actors are by a large percentage, by all accounts, liberal Democrats. Athletes are generally Republicans. Actors – Marin Sheen is an exception – tend to atheism, New Age religion, or something other than traditional Christianity. Athletes are much more likely to be fundamentalist Christians.

There are numerous Jews in the performing arts. They are rare in sports. Acting is a somewhat lonely, narcissistic profession in which the performer must be devoted to him or herself above all other consideration. The athlete generally grows up in a team environment with hard-nosed, conservative coaches who stress teamwork. A baseball pitcher, for instance, must get run support and good defense behind him to win. A quarterback needs sure-handed receivers, not to mention a running game to balance the offense. His four touchdown passes will not result in glory if the defense fails in a 42-35 loss.

The actor can study drama on his or her own. The athlete often grows up amid tight-knit family values; a dad willing to practice and lend his time, a mother willing to drive the kids to and from practices and games; then support the children from the stands, often traveling out of town.

Sports, the endeavor with a heavier conservative participation, is the most egalitarian, Democratic activity imaginable. The athlete succeeds on pure performance, regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, religion, even size. The Dominican kid who grew up without shoes, speaks no English, has no contacts or supporters whatsoever, is elevated to stardom in short order by virtue of batting .324 with 37 homers and 111 runs batted in. The black kid from the worst ghetto whose mother is a crack addict is a Hall of Famer if he can rush for 1,500 yards five straight years. The troublemaker who can't stay out of strip clubs or his hands off groupies may have six kids from six unwed mothers, but if he can pull down 15 boards with 23 points a night, he is paid gazillions. The fans want them on the team and the general manager to pay to keep them, or pay more to get them on the free agency market. There is scant attention paid to personal problems only when the performance goes down. Barry Bonds was a totally loved figure by San Francisco fans when he was the greatest hitter in the game. The athlete knows his worth. It is quantifiable. The stands are filled (the "House That Ruth Built," Red Grange filling Soldier Field, Bonds making Pacific Bell Park a moneymaker) based directly on their works. When the pitcher's ERA is 6.50, when the forward now scores only seven points a game, when the running back only averages a yard a carry, they are replaced and everybody knows why. The hot actress, or even the hot actor, however, may very well have the role because of the oral skills she – or he – used on the producer. Or worse.

The athlete, on the other hand, knows he has earned his victory, his statistics, his fame and fortune. He did not "slip in through the back door," so to speak. So, the actor is faced with a dilemma in which he or she is wealthy and famous beyond words, but has not really "earned" it. Thus, guilt sets in. Most do not wish to directly address this aspect. They go the other way, assuming arrogance. Since conservatism is the single political ideology that directly speaks to the notion of earning ones' spurs, ones' place in society, they find the most enmity for it.

There is, too, another aspect to the psychology of liberalism, which is less about the actor vs. athlete dynamic, but perhaps roots itself in psychology, maybe even the Biblical story of Caen and Abel. It manifests itself in the way young people reacted to the 1960s.

This parable concerns two brothers, both sons of a great man who fought in World War II, returning to the States to get married, start a family, then a business that succeeds. The father is well regarded by his community as a great man; a church deacon, a pillar of society, a loyal family man. 20 years have past and now the Vietnam War is raging in the 1960s. Both sons are draft age, facing a dilemma. The father believes Communism needs to be stopped, that it is God's will, and that duty calls.

The first son loves his father. He considers him a great man and does not believe he can ever be as great a man. He desires to please his dad, to make him proud. While he does not think he will ever do things as great as his dad, he does think that through hard work and perseverance he will find his own way, do something great; maybe not the same as his father, but great and worthy of pride, nevertheless. This son represents conservatism.

The second son loves his father, too, but early on realizes he can never measure up to the old man. Nothing he tries – sports, school, college, work – is as good as the father. Instead of just re-adjusting, trying harder, or trying different things, attempting to discover his own path in his own way, he decides that, in his mind, the things his father did were not actually great. He says that in fact his father's war record was probably rife with war crimes; that when he came back to the States to marry, that was a sign of homophobia; that his success in business came only because he stole what he had from minorities, so he must be a racist; that his support of the Vietnam War is really war mongering; that opposing Communism makes him a Fascist. This son represents liberalism.

The media age

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.

\- Social critic Neil Postman, contrasting the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, foreword of Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985).

Television is as much an American art form as movies. Its effect on the world was as profound as any medium in history. TV changed the world. It changed the way political campaigns are run, the way wars are conducted, and the way products are sold. It changed much of the traditional, majority view of morality and sexuality.

At the heart of this change was the notion that the world was changing. Two books before 1960 gave us predictions, dire and bold, dystopian and utopian: Brave New World (1931) by Aldous Huxley, and Ninteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell. Two books of the 1960s encapsulated what was happening, telling people what they were sensing as they sensed it: Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage and Alvin Toffler's Future Shock.

Both became staples of high school education. Both were prescient and "in your face." One told the masses they were manipulated but were not able to see past the subversion in their livings rooms every night. The other detailed how technology – the coming Silicon Valley, the micro-chip, the Internet – would change communications and business forever.

Never in all of man's long history has change occurred so quickly as it did in the 20th Century. While the change had been steady since World War I, which started as a 19th Century romance of a cavalry charges, to the dropping of the atomic bomb a mere 31 years later, to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the change was . . . shocking.

But never did the change consolidate as quickly and totally as in the 1960s. Advertising had always been around, and after World War II found a Mecca on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Its masters were men in grey flannel suits and hats, daily riding the commuter trains from Greenwich and New Canaan, the new men of capitalism, the winners of history. The TV show Mad Men depicts them in all their glory and depravity.

Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage

The title of McLuhan's seminal book was supposed to be The Medium is the Message, but the typesetter mistakenly substituted an "a" for an "e." McLuhan thought it was perfect.

"Leave it alone?" he speculated. "It's great, and right on target!"

Warren Beatty's Parallax View largely reflected the book's themes, namely through the use of subliminal images to determine whether his character has the psychological profile necessary to be a "hit man." But when Marshall McLuhan declared that "the medium is the message," what did he mean and does this notion have any value?

McLuhan, a graduate in English literature studying for his Ph.D., reviewed the works of an Edgar Allan Poe story in 1947. Later, Professor McLuhan found parallels with Poe's "maelstrom" as a metaphor for the chaos of the modern world. He saw TV, advertising, and constant attention distractions as harming things of real value. Man, he viewed, found himself constantly trying to "survive" it, as were so many characters in Poe's stories.

Electronic information, in his view, was like a ship dealing with a stormy ocean. Like a character in a Rudyard Kipling poem, however, the key to survival is to remain calm, keeping one's head about them while all others lose theirs.

McLuhan's influences were Harold Innes and Lewis Mumford, who studied media technology and psychology. McLuhan wrote two books on the subject before Understanding Media (1964), earning the title "the oracle of the electric age." Most reviewers were unable to comprehend McLuhan's view of such a fast-changing medium. Aside from "the medium is the message," McLuhan is best remembered for the phrase "global village."

". . . Any technology that . . . creates extensions of the human body and senses," wrote McLuhan, was an extension of the skin, the wheel, the foot, the book, the eye . . . Technological extensions amplified a sense to the detriment of the other four, thus interfering with the sensory balance of individuals. This profound shock to the system extended naturally into society, but subliminally. Major cultural shifts of history - the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution – resulted from these factors. Early man, he argued, enjoyed "synesthetic" harmony.

"Before the invention of the phonetic alphabet, man lived in a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, a closed world of tribal depth and resonance," he wrote. Humankind lived in an "acoustic space" without center or margins. People communicated through speech, information had an instantaneous and social sound to it. "Speech is utterance, or more precisely outering, of all our senses at once," he wrote.

Reading created a solitary man. The phonetic alphabet made for dominance of the sense of sight in the human sensorium, changing thought patterns. Over time, social inter-action became fragmented. Mechanized society exacerbated this. Printing presses created a reproduction of knowledge and information heretofore unknown by humans.

McLuhan said the invention of print created revolutions, nationalism, the Reformation, and the assembly line. Science and art suffered. This was followed by the telegraph, radio, film, the telephone, the computer and television, which he said restored "sensorial balance." There was an instantaneous quality to electronic communication "collapsing the constraints" of time and space imposed by mechanistic technologies. Electronic media did not merely effect the eye, but the entire human nervous system (all five senses simultaneously), thus restoring the "tribal" senses of man before the advent of written words. He called it a planet-wide neural awareness.

Information became all-encompassing, thus turning the "global village" into a single "tribe." McLuhan truly understood the new media age when he observed that the actual content of the message was lost to the greater context of who was delivering it. We have seen this born out most acutely in terms of political news – liberal or conservative – and especially through the prism of the black experience. Whites and blacks see the same thing and describe it in totally different, very racial ways. Content "has about as much importance as the stenciling on the casing of an atomic bomb." Electric light, for example, is invisible to the naked eye, yet we see its illumination.

"The electric light is pure information," he wrote. "It is a medium without a message, as it were . . . Whether the light is being used for brain surgery or night baseball is a matter of indifference." The media creates its own environments.

Social commentator Jonathan Miller compared McLuhan to a "Cubist painting," saying it was not based on reality. Raymond Williams and James Carey called him a "hard technological determinist," his work an aesthetic theory which became, negatively, a social theory.

Umberto Eco, who employed Roman Jakobson's transmission model of communication, felt McLuhan's theses on the nature of media stem from his inability to distinguish between "content form" and "media form." Others found an unfeeling quality to McLuhan's work. He "brushed over" tragedies of history – genocides, revolutions – with simple explanations of man's behavior based on neural transmissions and linear communications. Huxley and Orwell, on the other hand, described dystopian and authoritarian societies with distinctly personal references to its effect on individuals. This is not even counting the effect of religion and the role of God in individuals' choices.

Benjamin DeMott used the Southern civil rights struggle as an example. He was not willing to say that prejudice against blacks, or the Holocaust, came about due to the internal combustion engine, just because this mechanism was used to transport them. On the other hand, a study of the Industrial Revolution, in confluence with "scientific" discoveries – Darwin's theory, eugenics/euthanasia, abortion – are directly linked to de-humanization. In interviews, McLuhan said he made no attempt to "explain" media. A study of his work seems to find contradictions between metaphor and abstraction.

"When, in the cut and thrust of polemic [something] automatically trips off the tongue as a taken-for-granted term of abuse . . . this is a sign that the channels of more serious augmentation have become blocked," wrote Christopher Pendergast. McLuhan's work did stress the impact of a new media and its role in human affairs. Bertrand Russell cautioned that "the purpose of education was to teach us to defend ourselves against the seductions of eloquence." Around this same period of time, Russian and German cinema seduced its citizenry with propaganda. American cinema did so in a more innocent, but perhaps even more powerful manner. As William F. Buckley pointed out in God and Man at Yale, there is a capitalistic marketplace of ideas, whether it be academia or Madison Avenue. People want their education, their ideas and their inspiration the way they want soap; they want what they like.

The America cinematic cowboy, for instance, was a romantic figure who engendered a sense of nostalgia and longing in the hearts of moviegoers. Hitler and Stalin used "the Beast," who now found its greatest strength in a cult of personality, promising to raise its disciples from the ashes of despair, and return to a golden age. Hitler used Norse gods. Stalin created the image of a strong worker, a proto-type of the New Man. The "massage" undoubtedly seduces. Now, in the 1960s, the advertising men set out to use this seduction in a capitalistic way.

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock

Toffler did not merely give us a look into the future, through the prism of technology and its de-humanizing effects on society, but he made futurists think as historians. Only by studying the past are we able to see the future. The cause-and-effect of events was, by the 1970s, no longer just boring history. The 20th Century was so enormous in its magnitude of change that it forced us to look deeply into movements. In studying movements, we conversely studied communications and media in search of answers.

The United States, for instance, adopted as its official policy something called "back to normalcy," an isolationist, we-are-not-Europe reaction to World War I in the 1920s. We quickly found out this "head in the sand" approach was impossible to implement, as we were brought kicking and screaming into the realities of a worldwide Great Depression, inter-connected global media, and finally World War II. Toffler's book addressed the instabilities of this Brave New World, to coin Aldous Huxley's prescient title.

Now the future was filled with obstacles. Toffler's work played to the existentialism of the times, embodied by the French nihilism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Published in 1970, Future Shock was all the rage. 30 years before the new millennium, affluent, educated citizens of the world's richest and most technically advanced nations would fall "victim" to change. They would be overwhelmed by its demands.

A "new force" he called "the accelerative thrust" entered social history. In 1970, the Cultural Revolution was into its fourth year, and the fact that millions were dying in China, not to mention millions murdered in the East Bloc, in addition to conservative claims that the North Vietnamese were not "agrarian reformers" but bloodthirsty killers, lent a new urgency to how we dealt with change. Coming on top of two world wars and a Holocaust, people saw each of these technological "advancements" as potential for disaster; Darwinian-eugenics-Sangerism-abortion times 10!

Whether people thought of it Biblically is problematic, but what they feared was "riding the whirlwind" despite being completely unprepared by previous experience. Abortion, biological tampering, gene-coding, chemical tampering, cloning, robots . . . all forms of over-stimulation via "sensory, cognitive and decision stress." As a coping mechanism, Toffler stressed "personal stability zones," counseling, half-way houses, creating "enclaves of the past" and "enclaves of the future."

". . . What passes for education today, even in our 'best' schools and colleges, is a hopeless anachronism," he wrote, adding "for all this rhetoric about the future, our schools face backwards towards a dying system, rather than forwards to an emerging new society. Their vast energies are applied to cranking out Industrial Men - people tooled for survival in a system that will be dead before they are."

Education should "increase the individual's 'cope-ability' - the speed and economy with which he can adapt to continual change." This would be accomplished via "the habit of anticipation." Schools needed to be futuristic. Science fiction, considered pulp art, was popularized in large measure by Toffler, with TV shows like Star Trek and even The Twi-Light Zone offering tantalizing visions of upcoming times.

Future Shock most presciently addressed technology, with the author advancing "regulation" of scientific advance. This may sound Socialist but has legal value; the Internet and so much of social media crosses state and international boundaries, with tremendous theft of intellectual property. Toffler said "no one is in charge" of technology. We see today the ramifications of this. The Internet offers the vast advance of easy-access knowledge, the ability to learn things reduced from months to minutes. It also makes child pornography and obscenity equally easy to find. Paul Harvey liked to surmise over "what Satan would do." The World Wide Web seems to be the kind of thing he uses most seductively in this Brave New World.

Toffler warned that seeing what was around the technological corner and making informed decisions about how it would be used when it arrived was imperative. Perhaps seeing how easy it would someday be to access porn, build bombs, foment jihad, or even read very dangerous political rhetoric, Toffler advocated blocking some new technology before it could be permitted to rampage through the society.

"A machinery for screening machines" was needed by appointing a "technology ombudsman," but such a thing would carry major ideological arguments depending on whether such a screener was conservative or liberal. Apparently Toffler wanted something not unlike a modern version of the Hayes Code.

"Can we live in a society that is out of control?' he asked. Toffler wanted to use the marketplace, apparently through his version of algorithms that define anything from the propensity of something to be found via Google searches to movements and trends as outlined in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (2002); what he called "social indicators." A system of indicators would measure social and cultural goals, integrated with economic indicators, as part of the technology society needs before it can successfully reach the next stage of eco-technological/post-technocratic planning, development and change management. Much of what Toffler referred to can be found in the "futures market" approach to everything from the stock market to the CIA's "chaos" and "game theories" of potential conflicts based on a "trend approach," not unlike the setting of a betting line over sporting events using the "action" of ordinary bettors as an indicator. Today impending events can be found using the predictive qualities of "chatter" of a million overheard phone conversation, email intercepts, and message chat boards.

Toffler was utopian in that he felt the technologies he described could be used "as a tool rather than an escape" to stimulate imagination. He said "nodes" in a loose network needed to be "spotted" and used for "mapping probable futures." Toffler envisioned a "world futures data bank" serving "anticipatory democracy" that would subjugate evolution to conscious human guidance. This would determine man's destiny, in which he either vanishes as a victim or masters the process.

He also addressed sex in the same way, lamenting the "sexual revolution" that seemingly overtook society "overnight" when "the pill" was introduced. It should have been anticipated and not allowed to "just happen."

Toffler was not the first or the last futurist, but 1970 seems such a central part of history, separating old from new, the dawn of so much to follow with the growth of Silicon Valley a decade or so away, that Future Shock remains the seminal futures book.

NGOs (non-governmental organizations) practically started in response to his calls for action. Many argue this displaced autonomy from individuals and groups into poorly defined and shadowy social locations that could neither be readily located nor challenged.

Criticism of Toffler's work are that he encouraged "technological narcissism" and "spiritual hunger." PPBS (planning, programming, budgeting systems) fell short of his goals. He called for a "continuing plebiscite on the future" and encouraged "social simulation" exercises in schools. Many complained that he outlined only broad complaints without creating specific answers.

He was very concerned with the environment, not unexpectedly. Environmentalism was a huge, growing movement with the first Earth Day in 1970, a reaction to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. In later years technology has come to be seen as an answer to environmental concerns, but in 1970 it was an "enemy," as outlined in Ted Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto.

While Toffler's works were rejected in part, and his theories lost emphasis in schools, during the conservative Reagan and Margaret Thatcher years, Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich was a big fan.

The "spoils of war"

Hugh Hefner probably would not like this analogy, but nevertheless, Playboy magazine represents man's most in-bred needs and desires. Obviously, sex is at the heart of temptation, as old as sin itself. But the sex act in and of itself is not what his magazine embodies.

Through the travail of ages, armies and empires have swept across the plains in search of new territories, natural resources, and naked power. For thousands of years, when one army defeated another army, the result was to enslave the defeated force, then plunder all they had. For this reason, battles were often fought in the far away countryside so that the civilian population would be spread the destructive appetites of the conquerors, more often sex-starved men who had been on the march months or years without seeing women.

"I came, I saw, I conquered," Julius Caesar said in 47 B.C.

If indeed a population was at stake, once defeated, this meant they were raped, pillaged and plundered beyond mercy. The conquering forces would take all material wealth; eat and drink all available food and alcohol; and have their way with any and all defenseless women left to their ravages.

These primal "spoils" represented the nature of man. The ancient Jews resisted this practice under the proviso that to do so would be to imitate their enemies and, more important, offend their God. This ethic carried over when Christian armies spread across Europe and Asia Minor, but despite religious admonition, men often gave into their most base inspirations.

The battles between ancient foes France and England, despite the wearing of crosses on their shields and orders from clergy riding on campaign with them, often contained terrible sexual pillage of the defenseless. The rape and pillage of conquered territories and populations was part and parcel of the aims of war in and of itself. War was entirely an attempt to gain more territory. Nations did not commit themselves to defend other nations, or allies, simply for the righteous cause of it. Always the aim was to gain more land, more wealth, more power, greater influence; naturally, when a victorious army actually did fight and win on "virgin" territory, they took what they could steal from it. The Romans, among many others, allowed their soldiers to take what they could as a form of payment for their service.

There are few if any examples of nations committing itself to war for "benevolent" causes prior to the U.S. Union Army fighting for, among chief reasons, the freedom of slaves (1861-65); to "make the world safe for Democracy" (1917-18); to free Europe from the Nazis and South Pacific native islands, China and Australia from Japan (1941-45); to free proxy nations from Communism (Korea/1950-53, Vietnam/1964-73); to free Kuwait from a Muslim enemy (Iraq/1991); to bring peace to ex-Soviet states and "breakaway republics" (1990s); and free Muslim population from Muslim dictators (Afghanistan, Iraq/2000s). While these wars each held a certain self-interest for America in terms of power, wealth, sphere of influence, security, and so forth, none "had" to be fought to ward off an invading army that was on our shores. In no cases when any of the wars was won by the United States, did the American Army engage in any of the "conquering" and "pillaging" as with most winning militaries throughout history.

When the United States won World War II, they were the only nation to hold in their possession the atomic bomb. At that moment, had they desired, they could have reigned terror on those they chose to, likely obliterating all threats for 1,000 years. They did not. The only thing that stopped them was the decision not to, based above all other belief that God exists, He would not be pleased with them had they done it, and would likely punish those who gave the orders, not to mention those who carried them out.

The dropping of atomic weaponry comes with enough soul-searching and likely a great deal of prayer asking God for forgiveness, but no matter how this issue is analyzed, there is a good argument – some think it less legitimate than others – that while thousands were killed, in the end many thousands more would have been killed but-for the dropping of those bombs. For those who carried these acts out, they can only hope this logic carries weight on Judgment Day.

Nevertheless, America and to a lesser extent, Great Britain were the first countries to wholesale expend a great number of lives and treasure in costly wars in order to save other populations. Then instead of conquering those nations, colonizing and enslaving them, after pacifying, Democratizing and to some extent Christianizing them, we left them. Certainly they created spheres of influence, trading partners and economic expansion making the United States ever more powerful than they had been if they indeed simply held territory the way Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, among most all despots of history have done.

American soldiers certainly enjoyed the company of Italian, German, French and English women during and after World War II. But there was absolutely no evidence of the kind of revenge and rape exhibited by their "allies," the Soviets. Nary a healthy German woman in their path escaped rape of the worst kind, if only that, as the Communists advanced in Berlin, 1945.

Americans were under strict orders not to engage in this kind of thing, but there were millions of them. It was not just memorandums penned by Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur preventing them from engaging in drunken orgies of sexual retribution. America is of the puritan work ethic, a Christian nation that is at its heart moral. A million Sunday school sessions, Bible readings, church sermons and fatherly admonitions inculcated themselves into the collective minds of the G.I. There was no rape or pillage. There were no "spoils of war" in the Roman sense.

Hugh Hefner filled that "void," for lack of a better expression. He did not think of it that way and may never have thought of it in all the years since he invented Playboy magazine in 1953, but his magazine and, more important, the lifestyle it represents, worked hand-in-hand with television, Hollywood, advertising and the mass communications of the post-war era to create a safe, legal, new and non-violent way for men to enjoy the . . . "spoils of war."

Playboy represents a true conundrum in the minds of millions of American males. Yes, it was the good life, the toys and rewards of a new kind of capitalist empire that saved a grateful world from 1,000 years of darkness, but many of those same American males were still hearing the same messages from the same clergy, Bible readings, church sermons, and fatherly admonitions that inherently stopped them from doing wrongdoing when they stood athwart defeated German town after defeated German town.

Now however, nothing was there to stop them except their own consciences. As McLuhan and Toffler aptly pointed out in their works, images are intoxicating beyond all other medium. V.I. Lenin said in 1920 the cinema was the most important art, a new tool of propaganda that could move the masses like nothing before.

Images evoked a passion in human beings that words alone could not. It is not a coincidence that photography and later motion picture imagery occurred simultaneously with the most violent, debasing, complicated, sinful and explosive two centuries in world history; two centuries that in terms of pure social change will probably not be repeated for another 1,000 years. Unless man develops time travel, or can transport himself Star Trek-style from one place to another, or can actually simulate sex, or murder, or other vicarious "thrills" in a way that is actual, not cheesy, in the next 100 years the changes of the future will not compare to photography, cinema, radio, TV, air and space flight, nuclear weaponry, computers, the Internet, and social media.

Playboy spawned the "sexual revolution." This in turn has had a profound impact on politics, education, comedy, entertainment, and race relations. Hefner is a liberal who has never shown any indication he believes in God. He does not seem to begrudge those who do, so long as they do not impose their beliefs on him. In this respect he does not seem to understand that Christians, finding fault with his product, are not so much concerned with what he does, but with the impact he has on their children and future generations. To a secondary degree, also apparently not understood or appreciated by Hefner, is the nature of Christianity, which is not merely to believe, but to spread the word of the Gospel, to "save" him and other sinners from damnation. Hefner and those who think like him completely fail to understand the Christian. The fact is, many Playboy readers are Christian. Many think this a form of hypocrisy; how dare the "Bible thumper" tell the "sinner" that he is sinning when he himself also sins? They miss the point. The Christian reader of Playboy, as with a million other sinful activities, understands he is sinning. He also asks God to forgive him. Man is sinful, by his very nature. The Christian who thinks himself above sin, better than others, is the one who on Judgment Day will be told by Christ, "I never knew you." In other words, it "takes one to know one."

Like much of Catholic doctrine over the centuries, the admonition "don't touch" has more often than not tempted people to do just that. The more people complained about Hefner, the more his magazines sold. But how many young men's souls did Playboy sell into porn addiction? How many lovely young girls lost their moral compass, embarrassing their parents and families, because they posed in its pages? Years after the "glamour" of a photo spread, with a photographer telling her how sexy she is, followed by a few fawning teenage boys elevating her to "goddess" status - all for what, a few thousand dollars? - years after that were they like women who had abortions, filled with regrets? The ones who apparently do not have regrets are trotted out in occasional re-unions, veritable "cougars" trying to claim past glory, wearing skimpy clothes over lipo-suctioned skin and body tucks, publicly expressing only joy and good memory of "Hef" and the experience, which likely meant a one-night stand with Hefner, but no repeat performance. But how many others hide from it?

While the girls of Playboy number 1,000 or perhaps 2,000, the men influenced by it are probably approaching, if not already surpassing, 1 billion. Christianity is not at its heart a restrictive religion. Individual church doctrines may be, but the message of Jesus Christ is that sin is of this world; each human has free will and can reject or embrace sin. Since sin is the nature of all men, it stands that there is no way to reject sin, at least not all sin of all kinds all the time. Therefore, Christ was sent to the world to pay for all those sins.

This is a comforting thought and indeed does provide some relief to, the Playboy stroker and the porn addicted. They know they are sinful by nature, cannot help themselves, and can afterward ask Christ, who has told man if ye ask, ye shall receive, to forgive them. But Hefner promoted an ideology that told millions that there is no sin, there is no evil in this activity, that sex, whether straight or gay, is just a natural, fun and relaxing activity, one that need not be atoned for in an act of contrition towards God. How many pliable young men and women bought this message, refusing to bow down to a judgmental God, and instead committed the ultimate acts of pride and vanity, literally telling God they simply will decide that their way of life is the right way, not God's way, and in so doing engage in perhaps the most egregious sin of all? Calvinist notions of pre-destination may not inter-act easily with the idea that in a world of self will Hugh Hefner led people down the primrose path to hell absent other factors, but there are definitely many who say this is what he actually has done.

Gay lifestyles and marriage are a direct result of the "sexual revolution" Hefner spawned. Many, many homosexuals do not understand the nature of the argument against them. It has been painted as moralistic, hypocritical Christians who, behind closed doors, engage in fornication, alcoholism and all forms of abuse, who "tell" them how to live. This in and of itself sounds a lot like judgment, which in the Gospel of Luke we are told not to do.

But gays almost always miss the point, which is that Christians are indeed every bit as much sinners as they. Christ came for sinners. Sin is as mentioned the natural state of man. Christians are not perfect, as the saying goes, only saved. They are saved not because they avoid sin but because they recognize it, and ask forgiveness for it. In failing to do so, gays are literally playing with fire. Hugh Hefner is a big reason why they think this way.

The list of immoralities is a long one. Birth control likely would have come along without him, but he must take some responsibility because the society he helped create made the atmosphere allowing for Roe v. Wade. Before Hefner, abortion was not just illegal, but considered such an offense against the norms of society, not to mention God, that it was unthinkable. In a few short years it went from unthinkable to a major political argument to an on-demand "right" for every women, minor or of age, that one party expends all their passion and energy into seeing is almost as easy to obtain as the purchase of a candy bar. Since Roe v. Wade, almost twice as many babies have been killed in America as humans were murdered in the Holocaust. This begs the great question, How much longer will God favor America? Perhaps we have fallen out of His favor already. Worldwide, the figure is likely as great or greater than all the men, women and children killed by Communism, Nazism, World War I and War II.

Hugh Hefner and millions like him believe it as an absolute right to abort a baby. He is seemingly a good enough guy, non-violent, pacifistic really, a fellow who would not harm anybody, yet somehow these figures, which are well known, not hidden from him and presumably known by him, do not illicit any condemnation, any self-analysis, any adjustment of thinking or questioning of his values. This failure to critically think, supposedly the great gift of a free people's, leads one to truly ask whether demonic forces really are loosed upon this world. Hefner would, of course, consider such a notion to be that of a religious nut, a primitive.

Between Playboy and "the pill," women were becoming promiscuous and men were taking advantage of it. Nobody needed to hit these girls over the head with a club to subdue them into sleeping around. But Hefner's image of the so-called "girl next door" was a myth. Nobody, it seems, actually lives next door to any girls as beautiful as those depicted in Playboy. Of course this is an exaggeration, but the point is that the standards his magazine created changed the self-image of women and the standards of men. How many high school boys saw Barbi Benton, a beauty from Sacramento and student at UCLA when she began dating Hefner, grace his pages; then entered USC and UCLA hoping to find her, or her "sister," thus making her his girlfriend, too?

For reasons that do not allow for easy explanation, the looks of girls actually did get better, year by year. Pictures of Mack Sennett "bathing beauties," and photos of "it girls" from successive decades, reveal that slowly but surely women simply improved physically. How did this happen?

Diet, exercise, social consciousness, and possibly even a touch of "social Darwinism," probably explains this phenomenon, but high on the list of reasons is the fact young men simply expected more and more from the girls in real life because of the girls they saw in Playboy. This has created an intense competition among females the world over to make themselves not just attractive, but outright alluring, too often to the point of outright sluttiness. Clothing styles and social mores reflect this. It has taken "prudes" to really find "fault" with this, but by the early 2000s "girls" barely beyond pubescence, like Brittney Spears, were bona fide sex symbols not just to 16-year olds, but grown men giving into their guiltiest pleasures.

For every action there is a reaction. Hitler emerged, and when all was said and down, the modern state of Israel was born. Forces of evil made power grabs, and a small group of agrarian colonies, separated by an ocean from the salons of intellect, politics and military power, rose to meet each challenge until it was they who were mightier than all of the previous juggernauts of history. College campuses exploded in protest, and an almost-unemployed actor like Ronald Reagan rode the whirlwind of political success. So too did Hugh Hefner and the "sexual revolution," with all its off-shoots – "the pill," Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, Hollywood liberalism – give rise to the Christian Right, which arguably was the majority in America once; then became the Silent Majority; then had to settle for being the "moral majority."

It was this group who pressured the Reagan Administration into restricting Playboy's ability to sell their magazines off easily available racks in 7-11 stores. The re-telling of this story by Hefner is one of the greatest jokes ever. First, Reagan's Justice Department, reacting to calls from Christian groups to restrict pornography at a time in which it was growing by leaps and bounds, did not tell 7-11s they could not sell the magazines. They simply did not want them to be freely available on racks where underage minors could easily look at them. They wanted a wrapping of some kind hiding the cover nudity, and wanted it placed in a section of the store, generally behind the counter, where a person of age would have to ask for it in order to get it, or at least produce an I.D. showing them to be 18 or over in order to enter this area of the store.

Hefner has described this as the worst kind of censorship, as if it cost him everything; his empire, his freedom, his very essence. It probably restricted sales to some extent, but did not result in the company going out of business or coming close. It did not cost Hefner his lifestyle, his freedom, or much of anything, beyond some lawyer's fees. Yet he would have the world believe he was martyred; that he stood up for the rights of man in some heroic gesture. The same is true of Larry Flynt, who faced obscenity charges that went to the Supreme Court. Flynt certainly paid a lot of money for legal representation, and his business faced some hardship, he spent a few hours or days behind bars, but he never lost his company, had to move out of his mansion, and give up his decadent lifestyle. Nevertheless he, like Hefner, has been held up by the liberal media as saviors of the free press. To actual journalists in China, the Middle East, and numerous other places - imprisoned, tortured, murdered, in house arrest - the idea that Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt are heroes who endured martyrdom as representatives of their cause, is beyond laughable.

The old joke was, "I get Playboy for the articles." Any red-blooded male was bound to look at the photos, but the truth is in its heyday the magazine did have extraordinarily good writers. Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsburg and many others regularly wrote for Playboy. The Playboy interview was considered the most cutting edge in the media of the 1960s and 1970s. The content was always slanted to the liberal side. It often advocated greater rights for minorities, or loosening restrictions on censorship, to the extent there ever was much censorship in the U.S. beyond the Hayes Code. Nobody writing an article arguing for the protection of the unborn; or the good works of Christian missionaries; or anything like that ever got into Playboy. A Richard Nixon or a Ronald Reagan was vilified in its pages. A George McGovern or Ted Kennedy found favor.

Hefner's greatest contribution to society was his legitimate promotion of civil rights through entertainment, mainly jazz music. He hosted major jazz festivals that helped spread the art to a wider audience. His TV program Playboy's Penthouse was one of the first to openly show white women socializing with black men, featuring many top African-American comics, singers and actors of the 1950s and 1960s.

To blame all the ills of society on Hefner would be unfair. Had he not started Playboy, other "nudie" magazines would have come to the forefront. His was the classiest and closest to mainstream of them all. Others were straight pornography, featuring juvenile bathroom humor. Whether Hefner was a pornographer is an argument that cuts both ways. He showed full frontal nudity, but not sex, either simulated or hardcore. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart simply said pornography was "hard to define," but "I know it when I see it."

Hefner's Playmate centerfolds were erotic yet artistically beautiful. A legitimate claim can be made that they were no more "obscene" than Botticelli angels or many of the beautiful art renderings of the Renaissance. Playmates were photographed tastefully, but no matter how well pictured, the ultimate purpose of these images was the addicting act of male masturbation, which unquestionably led to a taste for more and more  
"hardcore" depictions. This ultimately led to every kind of pornography. Regardless of whether a centerfold shoot is straight pornography or not, it is at the very least on the borderline. Hefner himself always insisted his magazines were not pornographic, but by the 1990s and 2000s, with the emergence of the Internet, when his sales dropped as "readers" preferred harder and harder fare, he definitely became a pornographer. Playboy itself never depicted hardcore sex, but they began to show pictorials of triple-X rated porn stars. Web sites sponsored and affiliated with Playboy became hardcore. Most obvious, he began a radio show called Playboy After Dark, which is easily accessible as a visual medium on the Internet or pay-per-view. This held nothing back. Various Playboy productions are available in hotels and pay-per-view that are straight hardcore porn.

Despite all the moralistic condemnation of Hugh Hefner, Playboy is magazine that provided a "coming of age" for many red-blooded heterosexual males. As Western intervention in the Muslim world clearly demonstrated, official government-religious prohibition of sexual activity beyond the narrowest confines of marriage is not healthy, either. Man is free to choose, to sin and to repent. This is the path of life. Each person handles these choices differently. Soldiers in Afghanistan were stunned to discover local villagers willing to sell all their possessions for pornography, such is its power; probably greater when restricted than when available, yet can be discarded by people acting out of their own conscience absent other coercive forces.

There is even a quasi-Christian aspect to Playboy if one stretches hard enough to look. It unquestionably promoted male-female heterosexuality, which at least is part of marriage promoted by the church. This is most definitely preferred over homosexuality. Further, from the standpoint of the winners of a great conflict, it represented the good life, the hard earned "spoils of war" that the Greatest Generation deserved. This most assuredly is a better alternative than the rapings and plunderings of so many other "winners" of history, most notably the marauding Soviets of 1945.

The phenomenon of porn

Whether Playboy magazine in and of itself is pornography probably depends upon who is asked, but there is no denying they played a major role in opening the door to the popularity, indeed the so-called "mainstreaming" of hardcore pornography in modern society. This "Pandora's box" has had profound consequences on generations of people, unleashing a torrent of immorality in the form not just of lascivious sex but of swinging, divorce, abortion, STDs, AIDS, and unhappiness. There is little evidence Mankind is "happier" today than he was in the "repressed" 1950s. Oddly, Playboy never found an ally in the feminist movement, which on the one hand promotes sexual freedom for women, but on the other criticizes sexy women. The on-going debate between Hefner and the feminists exposed feminism as a disguise for lesbian promotion.

Again, free will allows people to choose to do what they wish to do, but pornography is an incredibly powerful medium. Once hooked, it is extremely difficult to rid ones' self of it. It has destroyed marriages, broken up families, totally corrupted millions and millions of the young, while creating legions of porn-addled adults, many rendered helpless to move past its images.

While Hugh Hefner naturally would scoff at such a "primitive" notion, the use of beautiful women as tools of Satan is as old as temptation. Most of the major religions and the texts of Biblical scholarship refer over and over to the temptresses, the Jezebels, Delilahs and Salomes who led men astray using their charms. The beautiful "girl next door" in Playboy, seemingly fresh-faced, even innocent in her allure, is in many ways supposed to dissuade the viewer from thinking such a thing could be Satan's tool, but this is how the devil works. The devil gains little public promotion by advocating death camps, disease, famine and other horrors few men wish to see. He uses beauty, allure and charm. While the Muslim burka is a terrible censorship of human freedom that should be outlawed, at the heart of it as an age old truth, which is that while the "spirit is willing, the flesh is weak."

Pornography goes back to cave drawings. The first time still photography came into existence, no doubt somebody somewhere took pictures of naked women and sexual situations. When August and Louis Lumiere created the motion picture, shortly thereafter pornographic images came on the scene.

For decades, pornography was underground, but certainly available to those with some cash and a few connections. In this respect it was no different from illegal drugs or even alcohol during Prohibition. Public sex, even sex with underage children, is as old as man. The Romans engaged in wild orgies of every possible form of depravity. Nothing was too wild. Child sex was totally common place. A citizen of Rome, certainly an aristocrat, could have a boy or girl of the youngest age simply for the asking. Parents peddled their children, often raising them to be concubines and mistresses. As recently as the "gay '90s" in Paris, girls from connected families were bred as sex partners to the rich. Even as innocent and delightful a film as Gigi (Leslie Caron, Louis Jordan, 1958), tells the story of a beautiful teenage girl raised for this very purpose. The film ultimately shows love winning in the end when the girl rejects such a life, the older man falling in love with her with his whole heart, but it by no means rejected the practice of high society concubines.

With the "sexual revolution," "stag movies" became more widely available. Most teenage boys of the era recall at some point discovering their parents' "stash," or seeing a "blue movie" at the home of some lascivious pal. But Deep Throat (1972) changed the entire dynamic.

Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat, quickly faded from the scene, but not after achieving brief star status in American society. She was featured in Playboy and seemed to be on the cutting edge of an avante garde wave threatening to turn America into Paris, or ancient Rome. In conjunction with pornography were the lifestyle pursuits manifesting themselves in "swinging," "key parties," orgies and an explosion of homosexuality. But Lovelace rained on everybody's parade when she quit, announced she was exploited, forced to do Deep Throat under the threat of death, all for no money (it went to her producer/husband). To really upset the apple cart, she said she was a born again Christian.

The liberal media did not favor such things. Occasionally trotted out to promote morality, Jesus Christ and feminist rights, she was often mocked by hottie interviewers wearing more make-up and sexier clothing than she wore in Deep Throat, calling her a "porn queen" with no credibility. Her own daughter was interviewed, obviously upset, her life turned upside down by what porn ultimately did to her, an otherwise innocent person.
"I'm not happy about it at all," she angrily responded to a TV query. Linda Lovelace eventually died in a car crash. Many said it was from a broken heart. Her counterpart, Marilyn Chambers, had a completely different trajectory. A lovely model who appeared in Ivory Snow ads holding a baby, she was swept up by the promises of "stardom" from the infamous porn-producing Mitchell Brothers in San Francisco. Her debut, Behind the Green Door, was far more professional than the veritable "student film"-quality of Deep Throat. It featured images nobody had ever seen, or in many cases even dreamt of. First, Chambers performed with a huge Mandingo black man named Johnny Keyes, dressed only in skintight white "pants" with a whole at the crotch, from which distended manhood many observers did not know could grow to such lengths. The lillie-white Chambers and Keyes, who represented the ultimate icon of "black power," was a shocking display, but only the beginning.

Chambers plays an innocent ravaged first by a roomful of lesbian girls "preparing" her for a roomful of . . . men. Hanging from a trapeze, Chambers is swung from side to side, handled in every way, helpless but in ecstasy, while each man has his way with her. The ending was a slow motion invention of the Mitchell Brothers, the film a veritable pornographic Citizen Kane of mood and invention, with the demure Marilyn, ecstatic face extended as a target, submitting herself to everything the studly men have to give her in wild multiple climax.

Like radical chic, it became a de rigueur thing for the upper classes to slum it, entering a Mafia-owned theatre in the "red light district" for a showing of Deep Throat and, shortly thereafter, Marilyn Chambers. If there is any socially redeeming value to any of this, it is that the Mitchell Brothers began the process of separating pornography from organized crime, making it a little safer for the performers and its patrons.

The authorities did not know what to do. Drugs and violent crime certainly were on the rise, requiring police intervention far more than enforcing obscenity laws by stopping "limousine liberals" from watching porn flicks.

The 1970s and 1980s were considered the so-called era of "classic porn," depicted in the film Boogie Nights. San Francisco was the capitol of porn for a number of years, mainly because law enforcement turned its eye from the making of the movies in the first place. Los Angeles still clung to its Chandler/Times/Republican/evangelical roots, with active "vice squads" dispatched to stop people from having sex for money, whether it be outright street prostitution, strippers providing a "little extra," or hardcore porn starlets being filmed next to a San Fernando Valley swimming pool.

Porn flicks of the 1970s and early 1980s often featured a "story," replete with rather good shots of San Francisco Bay, the Sausalito avante garde, or the Marin hills. But economics eventually ended the San Francisco period. Los Angeles was where movies were always made. It was where photographers, make-up stylists, studios and all the infra-structure of the movies were already built in. Outdoor shoots in San Francisco were subject to gawking passers-by, the weather, the wind, and myriad other problems. Los Angeles provided warm weather for poolside shoots at swanky private homes often owned by the pornographer/producer, absent the prying eyes of the public or cops.

Ironically, while Hugh Hefner railed on and on about the Reagan Administration's "censorship" of his product at 7-11s, it was Reagan's Los Angeles that decided enforcing prostitution laws on the porn industry was too expensive and time consuming. But the paradigm shift in the business occurred when videocassette recorders were created. If ever a technology was made for an industry, the VCR was made for pornography. Suddenly people could watch porn in the privacy of their own homes whenever they desired. The mob-owned porn houses began to shutter their doors. Suburbanites no longer needed to drive to some dangerous downtown hellhole, subjecting their cars to theft and themselves to arrest or street violence, in the pursuit of flesh. It most definitely put a smile on the devil's face. Normal people simply gave in to it, it was so easy. Mom 'n' pop video stores, often with the children manning the cash register, emerged along neighborhoods all over the country, almost all with an "adult section" easily accessible in the back. Bankers and pillars of the community found themselves bringing X-rated videos to a front desk where the friends of their own kids would hide a smile while handling the exchange. It all made it more and more "mainstream." Everybody was doing it.

The biggest male star of the late 1970s and early 1980s was one of the most caricatured figure ever, Johnny "Wadd" Holmes. Holmes was not even average looking. He was legitimately ugly, but simply possessed the biggest tool of his trade. He seemingly could perform non-stop, producing bodily fluids that defied medical description. He made hundreds of flicks with girls who, by the late 1970s, were exceptionally pretty. Porn was a big hit with college fraternities.

In the mid-1980s, AIDS hit porn as it did society in general. Its first big victim was Holmes. He was a liar who affected a false story about graduating from UCLA and living the high life in a Hollywood hills mansion. In reality, he was an Army veteran who roughed his way out to L.A., never attended UCLA, and was a "mule" for dug dealers. An addict, he contracted AIDS using dirty needles, but his death was used by the AIDS lobby as a warning that the disease was not relegated only to gays.

For many years, especially after basketball star Magic Johnson became HIV positive, it was held up as an article of faith that straight men could contract AIDS. In the years since, it has become increasingly obvious that AIDS is, with some rare exceptions, a disease affecting homosexual males; needle-using drug addicts; and women having sex with bi-sexual males.

Holmes's death was followed by a huge scandal when it was discovered a porn star named Traci Lords, whose sultry hot looks and wild abandon made her one of the most popular figures in the industry, was under age. But by then, porn was such big business that nothing could stop it.

Girls like Ginger Lynn, Samantha Strong and Christy Canyon, who looked like X-rated sex angels, were big stars. The "mainstreaming" of the industry began in part when Ginger Lynn had a torrid, well publicized romance with Wall Street star Charlie Sheen.

Year after year, the industry got bigger and made more money. At some point in the 1990s there were reports the overall income of pornography was greater than Hollywood film production. It was cheap to make, not requiring elaborate sets and location filming. No single star emerged commanding huge sums, as an even sexier one could replace each beautiful girl. The men, never the real stars in the first place, became even less important when Viagra made everybody stand up straight instead of relying on a handful of old pros who could be counted on to "salute the flag."

Companies sprouted up left and right. With this rise came the influx of amateur filmmakers. Swingers, horny housewives, thrill seekers; the amateurs were not restricted in any way. They began to make wild movies, orgiastic parties breaking every boundary of decorum. Eventually many of these amateurs became professionals, leading to what became known as "gonzo" movies. Audiences wanted more, more, more. Sex acts people never even heard of or imagined were performed on screens.

When the Internet came of age, pornography was like Original Sin; everywhere and impossible to stop. It was in everybody's home whether they wanted it there or not. Prior to the Internet, people had to buy or rent tapes if they chose to, or purchase pay-per-view porn only if they paid for it. The vast majority of Internet porn was and remains free. The resistance to it remains one of the last bastions of morality, its spread and influence on otherwise normal men and women, their children, on society, even in school and otherwise "safe" places, something that again evokes the image of Satan loosed upon a world he rules.

A busty blond from Las Vegas, Jenna Jameson, emerged as the biggest star in the biz. She "crossed over" into supposedly mainstream movies, if appearing fully naked as herself in a Howard Stern raunch-fest can be called "mainstream." E! deemed her socially significant enough to run her biography.

By the 2000s, pornography of any every possible kind is freely available. Anybody with a computer or an iPad has it at his or her fingertips, available to summon as a devil worshipper would chant for the Dark Prince to appear. European porn stars are inter-changeable with fashion models, as popular as female tennis superstars and political figures. Some years ago a Polish porn starlet named Teresa Orlowski finished ahead of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa in a Polish popularity poll.

Playboy and other "mainstream" men's magazines suffered a far greater economic loss than anything Reagan or Attorney General Edwin Meese could do to them as a result of pornography. Hefner had to re-brand himself as a reality TV star, offering the nauseating image of an ancient reptile apparently intimate with not one, not two, but three nubile young things. In watching The Girls Next Door, one kept rooting for the girl's parents to show up and kidnap their unfortunate daughters from the clutches of such villainy, like the intervention of kids caught up in the "Moonie" cult of the 1970s. One model actually did the right thing. 25-year old Crystal Harris was scheduled to marry the 85-year Hefner, but pulled a "runaway bride" at the last minute. Good for her.

Playboy no longer offers anything hardcore does not. There was a time in which the Playboy girls were considered a cut above physically, but the marketplace of the last 15 years changed that. Girls can make far more money doing porn than being Playboy models (except perhaps for the Playmate of the Year, a long shot). Hollywood is almost repelled by the silicone porn look of past years, when big-busted beauties like Ursula Andress, Raquel Welch and Jayne Mansfield were all the rage. Today's hottest actresses are generally waif-thin little things with the chests of young boys.

Porn stars today, enhanced by plastic structure, breast "upgrades," lip enhancements, and a host of other figurines, are even more devastating than Playboy centerfolds, although they definitely do not specialize in the "girl next door" look. They make big money not just shooting movies but also escorting, mostly via the Internet. It is so open and obvious that it has become something of a running joke, with L.A. celebrities traipsing about Lakers games or Beverly Hills shindigs with known X-rated starlets fans can look up on their iPads in real time while still standing a few feet from them. There is no shame any more.

Why buy Playboy when porn fans can see busty porn girls who rival or even surpass the attributes of Playmates, with the added "bonus" that they perform the most outrageous sex acts, often with multiple men? At one time only the "ugly" girls performed the truly "gonzo" scenes, but not anymore. Society has rendered the most incredible acts, which not only leave nothing to the imagination but reveal extremes not imagined just a decade ago, to be the expected performance. A veritable coterie of cosmetically enhanced Frankenstein girls form a multi-billion industry, each more willing than the previous to perform the most outrageous sex acts; each more physically extraordinary than otherwise "hard to get" girls, more awesome in appearance than 99 percent of all women that average men see in a lifetime "walking around" in actual society; yet there on screen these same girls are doing things that only captured slave women might have been forced to do against their wills in Caligula's Rome.

The effect on the world's youth is predictably horrible. Young men today often "hate" girls, thinking them sluts unworthy of respect because so many, influenced by these images, imitate them. Girls who once wanted to be Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, or equestrians, now aspire to be the next Briana Banks or Tera Patrick.

Porn has been around long enough to have created a cottage industry of retired stars and their off-spring. The children of porn stars, many grown up by now, have had to deal with this fact of their mother's or father's lives. Many might have thought they could hide these secrets, but the creation of the Internet on mobile devices makes discovery a few mouse clicks away; a prying "friend's" forwarded link is all it takes to unravel a shameful past. Hopes, dreams, careers have been dashed time and again by bad choices at age 19 haunting them at 27. Hundreds of ex-porn chicks have fallen in love with guys, only to see happiness slip away when their past was discovered. Some ex-porn stars even became attorneys, but seem only to get work representing the industry in censorship cases. Countless parents have had to live with the shame and secrets of their porn-children. None of this even begins to count the STDs and the abortions.

There seems no stopping pornography. It makes so much money, has so many adherents, is so widely available that virtually nobody is immune to it. It has captured and imprisoned millions, tempting them not into good but into evil.

For Hugh Hefner, who started his men's magazine in the 1950s hoping to make a few bucks selling the fantasy of pretty girls, fast cars and hi-fi musical equipment, it like so much of society, got out of hand, as all "good things" do. He came into being in confluence with a permissive, liberal society that eventually let go of its "primitive" standards, saying "anything goes."

Like Pol Pot and the "well meaning" intellectuals of Communism, school teachers and "do gooders" looking to make a new culture in which helping the "little guy" was emphasized over "making a buck," only to grow into a monster consuming millions in a maelstrom of evil, pornography has worked hand in hand; an enemy of righteousness, a tool of the un-Godly.

God help us all.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll

Rock 'n' roll music is another American invention, as was jazz, rhythm and blues, and country. Rock emanated mainly from jazz and rhythm and blues. Country music had some similar roots and influenced rock, but to a lesser extent than the other genres. For this and other reasons, country and rock (while there is plenty of crossover; country rock, "rockabilly") are quite distinct from each other. Their popularities certainly cross over, are shared tastes, and share geographical fan bases. But over time, major differences between the music and what it represents have presented themselves. There is a political and racial component to this which, like so much of America has been exacerbated and highlighted over the decades.

Cleveland, Ohio disc jockey Alan Freed started the phrase "rock 'n' roll" in 1951. Rock was popularized in post-war America and England, but quickly spread, and was adopted worldwide. Bill Haley and the Comets, an American band, are oft-credited with popularizing the "beat" of rock music, but the "King" was Elvis Presley. Presley had more crossover appeal than any other artist. He was a white man who "sounded black." He was a Southerner loved by people all over America and the world. There was never any indication of racial animus to Elvis. He was a "cool" guy who brought whites and blacks together. He was a Christian and politically conservative, but his music reflected a sense of "revolution" fueling the 1960s.

At first, he was a major shock to the system. Especially since he came out of the Deep South – born in Mississippi, raised in Tennessee – his was called the "devil's music" by pastors. He shook his hips in sexually provocative manner, and was like a wild animal on stage, a seducer of girls like few others beyond Frank Sinatra. Young girls flung their clothes at him on stage, seemingly mesmerized by his moves and crooning voice. He appeared to cast a spell over his fans, which many felt to be dangerously evil. While it is generally believed Elvis was "innocent" by later standards, he did start something that needs to be examined. Along with Hugh Hefner's Playboy magazine, the advent of pornography, and the post-Blacklist liberalism of Hollywood movies, art and all it encompasses has played a tremendous, more-than-subliminal role in the de-moralizing of culture.

Presley himself certainly never intended to ruin the souls of the young, but many were ruined whether he intended it or not. Rock music became synonymous with sexuality, with drug use, with anti-traditionalism, radicalism, and often a lack of patriotism. It broke up families and, to quote Eric Burdon of The Animals, "ruined many a young boy, and God, I know, I'm one." America's first "rock 'n' roll war," Vietnam, was influenced by its sounds. The role of rock music in the U.S. for the first time not attaining its ultimate war aims must not be discounted.

Classical music was considered beautiful, sophisticated and cultured. The crooners of the "big band era," Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennet, and others, performed in tuxedo splendor before crowds of married couples, lending swank, elegant romance to the world. Rock music was like a big orgy. Countless abortions and sexually transmitted diseases followed in its wake.

Rock music thrived hand in hand with the Motown sounds representing Detroit, Michigan and the popularity of black rhythms of the late 1950s and 1960s. This music, featuring the likes of Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and the Supremes, had its roots in the Gospel. It was liberating, playing a major role in bringing whites and blacks together, but over time the sweet Motown voices were morphed into the larger "revolution" of rock, creating the dastardly sounds of "rap" and "hip hop," which are the most racist, misogynistic, violent forms of music ever found. If a secret cabal of white supremacists wanted to create something that made blacks look as bad as possible, they could not have succeeded more thoroughly than by creating rap music. To listen to rap is to conceive of the devil's influence at play.

Country, classical and the swank sounds of Sinatra remain beautiful and decent, oft-patriot and, in the case of country, strongly Christian. Presley's life mirrors the dark side of the music he made and the effects it wrought. He served his country, offered to root Communists out of the entertainment industry, and did one of the greatest versions of "Amazing Grace," among other Christian ballads, ever made, yet was caught up in a lifestyle he could not control.

After several years of runaway success, Presley was drafted into the United States Army, an absolutely unheard of prospect today. He emerged from his service married and, in the 1960s, transformed his suave image into movie stardom in a series of light musical romances, often set in Hawaii with Elvis fending off or trying to get with a series of beauties, among them Juliette Prowse, Barbara Eden, Hope Lang, Tuesday Weld, Stella Stevens, Ursula Andress, and Ann-Margret. With his slick-black hair, tanned with short-sleeved shirts, hip dance shakes, smooth voice, and irresistible singing ability, he was a sex symbol par excellence. At a time when rock music represented the counter-culture of long hair, drugs and protest, his All-American image made him highly popular with Middle America. His storybook marriage broke up, but resulted in perhaps his greatest song, "Suspicious Minds."

In 1970 Presley was in a limo in Washington, D.C. when he decided without scheduling it to visit President Richard Nixon at the White House. He simply had his driver pull up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, announcing he wanted to see Nixon. The President's aides thought it a good idea, a PR move for the "youth vote." The photo of Nixon shaking hands with Elvis, for all practical purposes dressed as if for a concert, his long hair in bouffant style, represented one of the most bizarre political occurrences ever.

Elvis informed Nixon that a decade-plus after the Blacklist, Hollywood and the entertainment industry were still rife with Communists using their influence to subvert the effort in Vietnam. He proposed that he be made into a "special agent" of the FBI, an informant basically, helping the administration root out Commies. Nixon considered it and probably was rather enamored with the idea, but it also had the potential of going terribly wrong. They departed friends.

His divorce seemed to put Elvis on a downward spiral. He was swallowed up by the out-of-control rock lifestyle. Fame and money could not make him happy. He died at the age of 42 in 1977 when his body could no longer tolerate the pills, the drugs, and the binges. His was neither the first nor the last of the cautionary tales.

In the early 1960s, American rock music had a quaint sound to it, appealing to romantics and kids with an emphasis on girls, surfing, cars and parties. It was the American Graffiti era symbolized by George Lucas's movie set in 1962. Out of this emerged a band called The Righteous Brothers, whose classic ballad, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," remains probably the greatest love song ever. Another band on the West Coast, The Beach Boys, enjoyed worldwide popularity when they hit the big time in 1964. Their melodious tunes about bikini-clad "California Girls" and wild "Surfin' Safaris" did more for the image of Southern California than any single event or movement since the Gold Rush. The trans-continental railroad, the boosterism of the Chandler family's Los Angeles Times, even Hollywood movies, Rose Bowl games and Ronald Reagan, did not influence the notion of "California Dreamin'," to use the title of a subsequent, similarly-themed song by The Mamas and the Papas, as the music of The Beach Boys.

But in 1964 a distinctly different sound emerged, not from the beaches of L.A. but from the crowded pubs of post-war London. It was the British Rock Invasion. First came The Beatles, followed by The Rolling Stones and The Who. The next wave saw Cream (with Eric Clapton), Eric Burdon and the Animals, The Kinks, Pink Floyd, The Yardbirds (and out of them Led Zeppelin).

The British bands engendered enormous influence on America. The long hair styles of the English "mods" helped create the "hippies" as much as Jack Kerouac and the Beats. They did enormous quantities of drugs and had their way with girls. The image of these radical young rock musicians was drastically different from the All-American Righteous Brothers and The Beach Boys. They also introduced America to the stadium rock concert; huge throngs crowded into Shea Stadium in New York and Candlestick Park in San Francisco, to see outdoor concerts replacing the old auditoriums and junior college athletic fields of past venues.

The Beatles embodied this radical new world. Their lead, John Lennon, said they were more popular than Jesus Christ (Time magazine asked, "Is God Dead?"). Their songs were obtuse, drug-addled codes for every kind of psychedelic experience, which many traditionalists pored over wondering if they were calls for a revolution of some kind. Coming just a few years after Spartacus, this notion of rebellion, possibly an armed one, sparking a race war, class warfare, civil discontent of the worst kind, went hand in hand with the Anti-War Movement, the free speech admonitions out of Berkeley, and the varied off-shoots; environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, and civil rights. The environment created by rock concerts, and by psychedelic music in night clubs amidst wildly gyrating girls in mini-skirts, with glaring strobe lights in an atmosphere of heavy drug and alcohol abuse, combined with "the pill," Playboy, and eventually pornography, to create the "sexual revolution."

The rockers had even more influence than movie actors. The words of John Lennon and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones had a bigger effect than Edward G. Robinson or Harry Belafonte. They were seemingly universal liberals, anti-war types advocating "peace" and "love." Lennon and his ilk sympathized with the poor "agrarian farmers" he said the North Vietnamese Communists were. The FBI established a file on him. He was considered dangerous; more so than previous entertainers, even men like Paul Robeson, who was marginalized. The young followed his words as if out of the mouth of God.

Lennon used his art politically, but The Beatles also tried to modify their position. "Revolution" (1968) written by Lennon and Paul McCartney, kicked against their image as Commie-lovers with the words, "But if you go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow." "Back in the U.S.S.R." made fun of the Communist-sympathy angle further, lampooning The Beach Boys and Chuck Berry's "Back in the U.S.A." as if the Soviet Union was where their hearts – and beautiful women – were. The Beatles stopped performing live in 1966 and broke up in 1970. Lennon became more political after he married Japanese radical Yoko Ono, blamed for breaking up the band. His song "Imagine" was for all practical purposes a modern Communist manifesto, urging listeners to imagine one world government with religion, a utopian hope that remains a strange liberal concept manifesting itself in the United Nations and the dispiriting "war on Christianity" always waged somewhere by somebody. Conservatives say while Lennon and his kind "imagined" a peaceful world if only the Right would stop Red-bating the Communists, the world in turn "imagined" Pol Pot murdering 1.5 million human beings after Lennon's dream – American withdrawal from Vietnam – became reality. In 1980 Lennon was killed by Mark David Chapman, giving him legendary status along with other dead icons including Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Che Guevara, and the Kennedys.

While The Beatles had more immediate impact on the 1960s, The Rolling Stones were right behind them and, because they stayed together in one form or another forever, a longer range effect on the world. Many call them the "world's greatest rock 'n' roll band," a subjective title but certainly one that can be persuasively argued. Led by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, they overcame the early death of one of their leaders, Brian Jones. They were arguably "sexier" than The Beatles. Tina Turner taught Jagger how to dance and he writhed around like a skinny little Elvis Presley. Richards was heroin chic personified. They were the ultimate "jet setters," hard partying cocaine sniffers living in a strange new London world of models, actresses, rich playboys, politicians and radicals of all stripe. Their song "Satisfaction" spoke to the youth who could not be happy with what their World War II generation parents had, with strong sexual overtones urging people to take everything to its limits. In later years the Stone were accused of devil worship, a strange malady effecting many rock groups of the era. The title of the song "Sympathy for the Devil" said it all, with descriptive words on how Satan operates, "a man of wealth and taste" inculcating himself into our lives through seductive means, all while he "rode a tank in a general's rank, when the Blitzkrieg reigned, and the bodies stank."

"Who killed the Kennedys?" sang Jagger. "When after all, it was you and me?" The song is a veritable history lesson, well worth studying for its dead-on appraisal of Lucifer, whether considered parody or not. It tells of how vainglorious "kings and queens" sacrificed people in wars for the "god they made." The devil kept troubadours from reaching Bombay to warn of something, possibly the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius (Jagger may have meant Pompeii instead of Bombay). The "nature of my game" puzzles man. His lyrics, "Just as every cop is a criminal, and all the sinners saints" (abortionists, homosexuals, child molestors, traitors, et al) seem to embody liberalism in a nutshell.

While The Beatles and The Rolling Stones led the first wave of the British Rock Invasion, and are arguably more popular, maybe even considered "greater," true rock aficionados will often cite The Who as indeed the best of the best. "My Generation" as similar to "Satisfaction" in addressing the youth, who "hope I die before I get old." In early years, The Who destroyed all their equipment after every performance, a very expensive prop.

Lead singer Roger Daltrey was a muscular, handsome leading man type, far more physically attractive than the mop-heads of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. Drummer Keith Moon was a maniac and probably the most talented drummer of all time. Guitarist Peter Townshend may be, along with Jim Morrison of The Doors, the ultimate "thinking man" of rock.

In 1969 The Who released Tommy, the first "rock opera." It was Townshend's search for meaning beyond the fame, fortune and groupies of the rock 'n' role lifestyle, using a "deaf, dumb and blind kid" named Tommy as a messianic stand-in for Christ. He leads a movement of ordinary people seeking the true path. It was performed on stage in operatic form and became a movie starring Ann-Margret and Jack Nicholson.

In 1971 The Who released Who's Next, possibly the greatest rock album of all time. The album features the song "Won't Get Fooled Again," which was an epic, roaring political anthem disavowing the 1960s. Townshend and his group became involved in the usual '60s movements, ranging from transcendentalism to the anti-war protests to all other manner of utopian claptrap. Their experience at Woodstock, which they considered a dirty mob of loser youths, was the final straw. They realized they were just middle class London children of a generation that fought World War II to give them the freedom they now had. They settled into a much more beer-pub image than the "jet setting" Stones.

Led Zeppelin is grouped in with The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Who among the larger than life British super-groups of the 1960s. Their music is harder to categorize, as is their politics and image. They were the ultimate in "sex music" with their long hair, explicit lyrics and stage antics performed in front of girls who, by the 1970s, lost all inhibitions. But strangely, "Stairway to Heaven" remains a song that may have double meaning, but can be interpreted as a call for the remission of sin on the way to salvation.

In the 1960s, while the Brits were "invading," competing sounds were emanating in California. Bohemian pot-smokers lived in a dilapidated houseboat colony along San Francisco Bay's Sausalito waterfront along with such lost souls as the actor Sterling Hayden, apparently doping himself into oblivion over his role in the Blacklist. The groups who made up this unique world included The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Santana, and Jefferson Airplane. They performed in front of gyrating hippies in Golden Gate Park and in front of paying audiences at the Fillmore West. A young impresario whose family escaped the Holocaust, Bill Graham, became fabulously wealthy creating extravaganzas out of these musical concerts.

On the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, bands played the Whisky a Go Go and other hot locales. The Byrds, Love, Buffalo Springfield, and The Doors were headliners. The Doors only lasted some five years but are arguably the best American rock band; some say the best anywhere. Their front man was Jim Morrison, an ethereal figure who transcends the 1960s just as George Patton transcended World War II. Despite being a thoroughly modern, long-haired, sex object of the rock era, Morrison was an Irish poet in the tradition of W.B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

He was unlike other rock stars in most every way. Raised amidst Pentecostalism in Florida, he eventually moved around a lot because his father was a Navy admiral ultimately in charge of operations during the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Young Morrison was a genius with a photographic memory who read constantly. His favorites were Greek myth, Roman history, Irish poetry, Shakespeare, and everything else. Friends would come to his room, lined with books on shelves stretched to the ceiling lining all four walls. He would turn and ask them to pick out any book and start reading any random page. After a few lines Morrison would recite the rest of the paragraph by memory.

As a child he accompanied his family on a car trip through New Mexico, where they passed the scene of a car accident. Dead and dying Indians lay on the side of the road. Morrison claimed the soul of one of them leapt out of his dying body and into his. He was not musical but was artistic, planning a career as a filmmaker. He rebelled against the rigid military structure of his family and headed to California where he enrolled at the UCLA film school. It was the golden age of the film schools, with George Lucas and John Milius at USC (with Steven Spielberg tagging along), and Francis Ford Coppola at UCLA. Morrison and Coppola had some association at UCLA. When Coppola released Apocalypse Now (1979), it featured Morrison's haunting "The End," which could be the most appropriate movie song ever.

At UCLA Morrison met an intellectual from Chicago named Ray Manzarek. Neither Morrison nor Manzarek fared well as filmmakers. Morrison made a student film that could be described as masturbatory Leni Riefenstahl. Manzarek was a fan of Jean-Luc Goddard and the French New Wave. His vision of cinema verite without a screenplay was rejected by the industry.

By 1965-66, both young college men were drifting about the funky Venice section of Los Angeles, hopeful but uncertain of their futures. Manzarek ran into Morrison on the beach and read some of his poetry, immediately envisioning the words as rock lyrics. Manzarek also knew a young man named John Densmore, a drummer, and Robbie Krieger, a guitar player. They formed a band called The Doors, based on Morrison's readings of The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, which borrowed from William Blake.

At first Morrison sang uncertainly with his back to the audience, but the girls knew he was beautiful and screamed for him to face them. When he did they became wildly successful; Morrison singing while wearing leathers, his face resembling the Greek god Dionysus. They were quickly discovered and their first album in 1967 was an off-the-charts hit.

Morrison was fascinated with death, singing about the theme of the Great Beyond. The band experimented with Satanism and always seemed haunted by the specter of suicide. They sang of revolution, Morrison tacitly urging the youth to rise up against the authoritarian power structure in songs like "Five to One," in which he preached that more rebellious kids than guns and bullets could win a "war." Charles Manson may well have been inspired by Morrison, urging a "race war" to emerge from his slaughters in the Tate-Lo Bianca murders.

In "Not to Touch the Earth," Morrison sang of particularly blasphemous things, invoking the image of a minister's daughter "in love with the snake," which meant sex with Satan. "When the Music's Over" included Morrison preaching, "Send my credentials to the house of detention . . . I've got some friends inside." These are clear references to hell and preference for it over the alternative. In one live, "bootleg" Doors album, Morrison preaches to the crowd, "You cannot petition the Lord with prayer," in the voice of one of the Pentecostalists of his Florida youth. Perhaps he is advocating that Christ's admonition, "Ask and ye shall receive" is not so.

"Riders on the Storm" is about a killer hitch hiking on the open road, couched in the usual allegory and metaphor. "L.A. Woman" remains one of the great paens to the city he fell in love with and became its most enduring musical symbol of. Written after he saw the Hollywood hills burning during a wildfire, he made it a symbol of Los Angeles as a beautiful, flawed woman: "If they say I never loved you, you know they are a liar."

To this day tourists make the trek of Sunset Strip nightclubs, a veritable Morrisonian tour of a nostalgic excess, a time and place long past. A dive motel he briefly lived in, the Alta Cienega, still lures guests to stay in the "Morrison room," but advertises at the front desk a most odd book cover for a place people check into (not unlike The Eagle's "Hotel California"): No One Here Gets Out Alive, Morrison's biography by Danny Sugarman and Jerry Hopkins.

Morrison was a total alcoholic, seemingly fulfilling his own vision of what an Irish poet is. The authorities hated them. They ran afoul of the law in New Haven, Connecticut and in Miami, facing obscenity and disturbing the peace charges for bringing about near-riots at their performances. Parents hated him, for corrupting the youth. Girls flung themselves topless at Morrison on stage. Boys did drugs because Jim did. He was a god of rock who quickly fell in love with himself, like Narcissus. He might have more closely resembled Icarus, who flew too close to the Sun.

In 1971 he was in Paris, France when his body, apparently unable to withstand the onslaught of drugs, alcohol and excess, gave out. His death was a mystery, some even said a hoax, but he likely died in the bathtub of a heart attack at age 27. Like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Che Guevara, the Kennedys - and two other rocks legends who died around that same time, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin – Morrison achieved greater legend dead than alive. His gravesite in Paris' famed Pere Lachaise Cemetery, where great artists of history have been buried for years, is always the sight of a party, a constant flow of pilgrims making the trek to this Mecca of rock.

In 1979 "The End" bookended Apocalypse Now, helping popularize Coppola's film and re-energizing interest in Morrison. In 1980 the Hopkins-Sugarman biography was published to great acclaim.

In 1991 Oliver Stone made his bio-pic, The Doors, starring Val Kilmer as a spot-on Morrison. In 1993 Sugarman, who as a teenager was The Doors' "go fer," wrote Wonderland Avenue, a follow-up to No One Here Gets Out Alive and perhaps the greatest "cautionary tale" in rock 'n' roll annals. At the end of the book Sugarman lists the names of all his friends and associates who overdosed on drugs and alcohol. The names go on and on and on.

Many have speculated what Morrison would have become had he lived. The only way he could have lived would have been had he kicked drugs and alcohol. Had he done that his perspective on life would probably have changed drastically from the young rebel who urged, "Send my credentials to the house of detention."

There are those who compare him to Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver. Driven by demons from a Calvinistic youth, he delved into darkness, experimenting with every kind of drug, even subjecting himself to homosexuality despite not being gay. But Schrader survived his dark period. When sanity returned, he came back to his Christian roots and is described today as a God-fearing Republican. Morrison's background was similar, the Pentecostal snake-handlers of Florida in the 1950s. Despite his ribald hedonism, women described Jim as a "Southern gentleman." He advocated rebellion against authority, but to the consternation of the anti-Vietnam movement, he never joined their cause. Morrison was so well read he undoubtedly knew the horrors of Communism and was not about to advocate Hanoi's cause. He rejected his Christian youth wholesale during his rock star days, but he was a seeker who, given time and some luck, might have found Truth eventually. One can pray for him even now.

Morrison's ambivalence over Vietnam can be compared to Bob Dylan. Dylan was, like Morrison, not a trained singer. It was Ray Manzarek who convinced Jim to sign lead because if Dylan could do it, so could he. Dylan came on in the Greenwich Village scene of the early-to-mid-1960s, singing folk songs. Like Morrison's works, his audience loved it but tried to stretch him into something more than what he was. He was undoubtedly an anti-Establishmentarian, advocating freedom from conformity, but he never joined the anti-Vietnam movement. His numerous cohorts, like Joan Baez, tried to bring him in but he was not of that ilk. In the 1970s he shocked everybody by taking baptism in Pat Boone's swimming pool, but this apparently did not last. He drifted, not pinned down to anything, really. Martin Scorsese explored Dylan, expressing some frustration that the great folk hero never became the liberal icon so many invested hopes in his being.

After the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison in the early 1970s, rock 'n' roll moved into a new, post-Woodstock era. A disastrous Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Motor Speedway near San Francisco was captured in the film Gimme Shelter. In what must be irony beyond irony, as Jagger begins to sing "Sympathy For the Devil," the crowd gets out of control. Hells Angels, brought on as "security," look on with hate in their eyes. A black man was stabbed to death in the melee. The 1960s, the era of "peace and love" that in reality was a decade of Communist genocide, racial hatred, drug abuse, sexual immorality and lack of patriotism, was over. Finally.

The Who encapsulated all the failed hopes of the decade in "Won't Get Fooled Again," ironically picked up on by George W. Bush as one of his campaign themes. Rock music of the 1970s symbolized the lack of spirit. The 1960s, for all its failings, at the very least was a decade of passion. This passion was reflected in the music. The 1970s lacked the passion, featuring only the bad hair, the bad drugs, the bad sex and the bad people in an era of political corruption and malaise. The first half of the decade featured some great music, a carry over from the '60s. The second half was a letdown. After that, music represented little more than a laugh track. Only country music would emerge as something excellent. The one thing that still stood tall in the 1970s was Hollywood filmmaking, but that, too was on its way down.

The Beatles disbanded in 1970. The Rolling Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin went on forever, but there is little any of these bands did beyond the mid-1970s that represents anything close to their best work. The Doors: gone. Hendrix, Joplin: gone. The Beach Boys: their best years lost in a miasma of drugs and self-flagellation. Hendrix changed the sound of music when he went to an electric guitar, introducing the psychedelic styles emblematic of the California drug counter-culture.

Bands and artists like The Eagles, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Van Halen, AC/DC, Credence Clearwater Revival, Journey, Ted Nugent, and Stephen Stills, made wonderful music, but the meaning of much of the 1960s was lost, for good or for ill. Music now mostly represented partying, chicks, groupies, drugs, narcissism. The "seekers," like Jim Morrison and Pete Townshend, were either gone or confused. The anthems of political outrage were over when the Vietnam War came to an end. None of the Left-wingers of rock 'n' roll found it within themselves to make music dedicated to the victims of Pol Pot's Cambodian Genocide except Townsend, who tried to raise money for the refugees.

Two exceptions of the decade were polar opposites who admired each other: Lynyrd Skynyrd and Neil Young. Skynyrd was a hybrid of the Civil Rights Movement; angry, wild-eyed Southern boys wearing Confederate hats making kick-butt rock music. They made no excuses for Alabama or their allegiance to it in awesome anthems like "Sweet Home Alabama." In that song they addressed Young, who made a song called "Southern Man" that tried to emasculate the region in shame, having failed to live up to what their "good book says." Skynyrd struck back, singing of Young, "Southern man don't need him 'round, anyhow." But check these lyrics out: "In Birmingham they love the Governor, and we all did what we could do; and Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you: now tell the truth?" There may not exist in political discourse a more up front, in-your-face defense of the South and its turn to the Republicans more than this 1974 Southern anthem, sung to this day with as much gusto by good ol' boys as any song on the planet.

Young, however, thought them great artists, professing he was "proud" to be the subject of such a great tune. Skynyrd did not end with that. "Free Bird" was not a political song but a rousing tale of love and wanderlust, the story of the Southerner who must uproot himself and venture into the larger world to stake his claim. The Allman Brothers picked up on Skynyrd's themes of Southern rock.

The era of political songs was beginning to come to an end; at least songs with real meaning. The Guess Who was a Canadian group who created the classic "American Woman," using lyrics using symbolizing the United States as a tempting, overbearing woman that the smaller Canadians rejected. Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" was an anthem of motorcycle wanderlust. Fleetwood Mac was another popular group of the era, reflecting the image of the free 'n' easy girl of the "sexual revolution."

Like Hollywood, rock 'n' roll music's heyday was the 1960s and 1970s. By the late '70s, there was little really great being produced. The best bands were generally the older groups still playing together. Journey was a top group of the early 1980s. In later years Bon Jovi and Guns 'N Roses were wildly successful, but the impact of music was essentially over in the rock genre. Rap and hip-hop hit the scene; music that was not just bad, but literally too stupid to be worth mentioning. All of this reflected something strange, which was that in the so-called "information age," in which Mankind had greater access to facts and knowledge than ever before, somehow he knew less and less.

e was not musSports Illustrated launches athletics into TV and big business  
The parallels between the Roman Empire and 20th Century America continued after World War II, with many comparisons to the Roaring '20s that followed World War I. These parallels have much in common with Hugh Hefner's "Playboy lifestyle," which represented the desires of the new conquerors to enjoy the "spoils of war" in the form of beautiful women and a lifestyle reserved for the "winners of history."

The golden age of Hollywood; Frank Sinatra and the rise of Las Vegas; rock 'n' roll music; and the new suburban class raising a Baby Boomer generation in post-war ease and comfort revived the great interest in sports. When the soldiers returned from battle, attendance jumped. With the advent of the jet age and the Federal highway system, the populations migrated to the West, with the great college football interest of the Pacific Coast in the 1920s expanded into all other sports by the 1960s. The building of great stadiums, mostly erected in the 1920s and 1930s, were put on hold only to see new palaces designed with modern architecture in the 1950s and 1960s. Basketball and hockey, once sports played in dilapidated "barns" and converted convention centers, started to be played in gleaming glass-and-steel structures right out of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

Henry Luce was the single most dominant media mogul of the 20th Century, at least until Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner turned cable television into empires. But despite Murdoch's and Turner's great influence, the time Luce lived in – and shaped – make him stand out even beyond these men; even beyond William Randolph Hearst, William Paley at CBS, Philip Graham at the Washington Post, Otis Chandler at the Los Angeles Times, or Arthur Ochs Sulzberger at the New York Times. His influence was greater than any of the Hollywood "movers and shakers"; Meyer, DeMille, the Warners, Zanuck.

Aside from the fact that Luce influenced politics in a way only Hearst arguably did, his creation of Sports Illustrated magazine created a national sports craze, expanding interest far beyond New York and Big Apple media (Yankees, boxing, Army-Notre Dame) which opened all the doors that later became ESPN, Fox Sports, the WTBS "Super station," and so much more.

Few journalists of the 20th Century had greater influence than Jim Murray. His shadow is cast over the entire post-war era, not just in Los Angeles (where he helped turn L.A. into a "big league city" with his Times columns), but nationally. For well over a decade, his influence was in association with Henry Luce. After his noir years, he helped build Hollywood as the cinema correspondent for Life; played a large role in Richard Nixon's seminal Checkers speech; and then helped Luce's Sports Illustrated became a groundbreaking success.

A man named Ernie Havemann called Murray. Havemann was a leading Life magazine journalist. At first Murray figured he was coming west to do a feature on a movie star and they wanted him to grease the skids. Instead, Havemann asked Murray if he wanted to come back to New York and work on a "top secret project."

It was not the first time Murray was approached about a change in career. An editor named Willie Schamm asked if he wanted to write for a "culture magazine."

"My interest in culture was minimal to nonexistent," according to the self-deprecating Murray. He declined. But Havemann's "top secret project" was a new national magazine called Sports Illustrated. Murray's early years, rooting for Notre Dame, going to New York to watch Giants and Yankees games, and the influence of his sports-mad uncles, rubbed off on him. His education and intelligence led him to more highbrow work in entertainment and politics, but he was also tapped as being one of the few writers under the Time and Life umbrella who really knew sports.

Others in the company vied for State Department assignments. Murray was usually tapped to cover the sports angle when the magazine decided to go in that direction. He had covered golfer Ben Hogan and Olympic sprinter Mel Patton. He wrote about Stanford decathlete Bob Mathias and USC shot-putter Parry O'Brien. His geographical location played a large role in his sports assignments.

In 1941, the St. Louis Browns decided to move to Los Angeles. A few hours later came news that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. That was the end of L.A. expansion, but after the war the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams established themselves as successful franchises. The 1932 Olympics had been a great success. USC and UCLA were dominant football powers.

The Dodgers and Giants had yet to move to California. The 1950s was a "golden age" of sports in New York, but below the surface the future obviously lay out west. The Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee and drew huge crowds playing at a stadium with excellent freeway and parking access. It was the age of the automobile. The Polo Grounds and Ebbetts Field were not conducive to car travel. One of President Eisenhower's first moves was to create a Federal highway system. America was driving west. California was the future.

While New York was the media capitol, the majority of great American athletes in all sports came from California. Many of the prominent New York stars were from the Golden State: Frank Gifford, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Joe DiMaggio, Billy Martin. Others of the era included Ted Williams, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzalez, Bob Mathias, Bill Sharman; the list was long. The sun-splashed fields of the golden West produced the most stars. The population was growing. The development of athletic talent was in the West. USC and UCLA were on the verge of riding this crest of talent over a two-decade period of collegiate sports dominance never equaled in history.

The West was ahead of the curve in other ways. Its school systems were considered superior. Integration was common in the West. Its neighborhoods were cleaner, safer and newer. Ethnic hatreds and rivalries were less prevalent. This manifested itself in a more harmonious sports culture. The result of this was that great black athletes such as Bill Russell, K.C. Jones, Frank Robinson, Willie Stargell, Joe Morgan, the Johnson brothers (decathlete Rafer, 49er safety Jimmy), Ollie Matson, Joe Perry, and numerous others, emerged from California. The trend in California was in the suburbs. This was now a national trend.

"The suburbs were growing about five times as fast as the central cities, and there were notably dramatic differences (San Francisco, New York, Cleveland) where central cities were actual losing population while their suburbs were growing phenomenally," recalled later Sports Illustrated managing editor Sidney L. James. "At the same time, the length of the work week was becoming progressively shorter and average vacation time was doubling, with a new wrinkle, winter vacations, fast becoming an accepted routine in upper white echelons. Prosperity was definitely and seemingly permanently on the rise, especially among those who were moving to the suburbs. And these new suburbanites had more time and money on their hands than ever before."

Economists came up with a new term: discretionary income. A combination of time and money meant boom times in the world of sports. The same thing spurred sports growth in the Roaring '20s, but that was not remotely comparable to the explosive post-war boom in the 1950s.

The creation of Sports Illustrated was a natural. America in the 1950s was a nation of prosperity and leisure never seen in human history. The Roman elites enjoyed games and recreation, but never had so much affluence passed on to the general population. We had fought wars and won. We had overcome the Great Depression. The rest of the world was split asunder by Communism, or was in re-building mode after a terrible war. America built everything, producing the cars, the planes, the gadgets of a new world. We had the money to spend, to travel and be entertained. Sex and sports were now national pastimes, trophies, spoils. Higher education produced a literate populace.

Jim Murray had covered the sports scene in the West, as well as other features including Detroit Lions quarterback Bobby Layne and Notre Dame's John Lattner. "I knew the field," he stated.

So it was that in 1953 Murray took a train to New York. The project was originally code-named "Muscles." Henry Luce (who insisted on being called Harry) was enthusiastic about a sports magazine, but nobody else was. Murray discovered great pessimism over its prospects.

"When a sports assignment in  Los Angeles came up at Time,  Murray got it - by default," wrote Rick Reilly. "His proclivity for sports was so strong that, in 1953, when  Henry Luce decided to launch a sports magazine,  Murray was asked to help start it up."

Most of the gloom-and-doomers thought it would be too expensive, but Murray argued sports did not cost that much. He was making around $15,000 at the time, and few made more. He theorized that a reporter could take the subway to the stadium, was fed free food by the team, and given good access to the players because the clubs needed the publicity. Compared to chasing politicians all over the world the daily expenses of sports reporting was cheap.

"How much could you spend interviewing Sal Maglie at Ebbetts Field?" Murray asked.

The sports magazine was "a Godsend" to Murray. His talents were obvious. It was believed he was too valuable to continue writing about movie stars, but proposed career moves meant transferring to places like Boston, which horrified him. He loved Los Angeles; all its nooks and crannies and idiosyncrasies. The city has an odd way of attaching itself to some people.

It is a maligned town. Many Northern Californians and Easterners profess to hate it and all it stands for, whether that be the University of Spoiled Children, Dodger fans leaving early, excess immorality in Hollywood, fake boobs, or the perception of an illiterate, soulless population living in a vast wasteland without a center.

But there are many who love it in the style of Jack Kerouac, seeing poetry in its hills, its nightclubs and expanse, its Jim Morrisonian excess. Murray was one of those people. In the early 1950s, obviously on the move as a writer, he fended off efforts to advance which most often would have meant a move to New York or possibly even an international locale. He wanted to stay in L.A. with his wife Gerry. He turned down offers to be a bureau chief for much more money.

Those "in the know" tried to tell him he was committing career suicide if he thought he could stay in Los Angeles for the duration. But Murray knew that while Washington was the capitol of world affairs, New York the capitol of business affairs, London the capitol of international affairs, and Paris the capitol of love affairs, the future was in Los Angeles. The confluence of movies, television, new technology, sports, electoral votes and a myriad number of other factors made this an obvious trend. But regardless of all that, he knew that it was where the action was when it came to sports. It was the future.

He was now a sportswriter. L.A. was the place to be. Sports Illustrated allowed him to consolidate his place in the Los Angeles sports community. He also sensed, having written about politics and movies, that it was all inter-twined. He knew that somehow he could write about all those things – about greater society – through the prism of sports. Intuitively he felt that he could have a more positive, subliminal affect on his fellow man than he could writing it "straight."

Murray found himself given major responsibility for the early launching of Sports Illustrated. Havemann was detached to write the story of the Kinsey report, a provocative look at the sex habits of Americans. Despite his early role in S.I., he was not confident of its success. Then Luce left the country. His wife, the esteemed Clare Boothe Luce, was an ambassador.

Luce put Sidney L. James in charge of the project. James immediately identified Murray as enthusiastic about it. He was in on the ground floor. Throughout the rest of 1953, Murray was part of the team creating Sports Illustrated. At first they created mock-ups used to attract Madison Avenue advertising dollars. During Christmas Luce sent Murray a letter thanking him for his hard work and assuring him the magazine was set for publication on schedule.

The name of the magazine was not a given. Murray suggested Fame. The idea was that the Luce umbrella include magazines titled Time, Life, Fame and Fortune. During this time, Murray came up with a brilliant idea. He told company president Roy Larsen they should take out the unused parts of a weekly backgrounder he wrote called the "Cinema Letter," add it to the unused parts of the "Washington Memo" (gossip from D.C.), background material from the European bureau, and the overset from the "People" section of Time, creating a celebrity magazine: Fame. The board voted it down.

"If I may say so immodestly, People magazine today is exactly what I suggested in the early '50s," Murray wrote in 1993, adding that its success was well known.

Had Luce's company started People in 1954, they may have put Murray in charge of it. His background as a film writer made him the natural choice. He easily may have never become a bona fide sportswriter. Murray learned valuable lessons working for Luce in Hollywood. One was that readers are interested in people, not things. Once an aerospace writer proposed a story about a break-through in fuselage technology. Murray told him the story was dull unless he could get readers interested in the inventor's story.

Luce understood this inherently. When in fact the Mercury space program began in the early 1960s, he created profiles of each astronaut and their families. It was the personalization of the space program – John Glenn, Alan Shepard, President Kennedy – that Luce used to create some of Life magazine's greatest sales. The great space photography also helped. All of it was captured in the 1983 film The Right Stuff, with the actor John Dehner portraying Luce famously declaring his astonishment at "an astronaut named Gus?" when told Virgil Ivan Grissom's (played by Fred Ward) nickname was Gus.

Over the years People, supermarket tabloids, Entertainment Tonight, Hard Copy and Fox News have succeeded focusing on glamour and high-level gossip to one extent or another.

"In all the years I covered him, I never once had anyone come up to me and ask me how Sandy Koufax gripped his curveball . . ." Murray once wrote, adding that hundreds did want to know what he was "really like."

A Sports Illustrated vice president named Dick Neale felt he could buy subscribers by offering free gifts to lists from other magazines. Murray disagreed. He felt promotions were a good side benefit, but ultimately a magazine succeeded on the strength of good writing. Television and newspapers provided the score; Sports Illustrated told the reader why his team won or lost.

"There's no other reason for sport's existence," he wrote. "It's an extension of the opera stage, the traveling troubadours, the acrobats, trapeze artists. The only difference is, you keep score. The sports fan knows the score."

The launching of Sports Illustrated in August of 1954, its initial edition with Milwaukee Braves slugger Eddie Mathews on the cover, began a huge tidal wave of sports on the world stage. It had the effect of "nationalizing" sports as radio did in the 1920s. This combined with television and Westward expansion, creating a sports juggernaut.

Perhaps the greatest effect of all this was to expand sports well beyond New York City. Until the 1950s, New York dominated most aspects of sports. In the 1900s and 1910s, the New York Giants under manager John McGraw were a great dynasty. College football was an East Coast affair dominated in large measure by the Ivy League and Army.

This trend did not change much in the 1920s and 1930s. The Giants continued to be a power in the National League, but the Yankees cast a shadow on sports unlike anything ever seen. It was only when Notre Dame came to play at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium that they became a mythic national team. Pro football was not a really big thing. Basketball was barely followed.

In the 1940s and 1950s, New York increased its stronghold. The Yankee dynasty became an empire, a baseball version of political hegemony. Beyond the pinstripers, the Dodgers-Giants rivalry reached its all-time apex. It was an age of three superstar center fielders, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider. Pro football was now highly popular, its greatest team the New York Giants of Frank Gifford.

But in the late 1950s a seismic shift occurred. Sports Illustrated did not cater to a New York audience. It was popular in the provinces. Americans began reading glorious sports tales from across this great land. Then the Dodgers and Giants moved west. Now it was truly a National Pastime.

"When Sports Illustrated came along it was a big thing," recalled Frank Gifford. "It was the first major publication that focused totally on sports. Now you have all sorts of magazines, two or three for each sport, but Sports Illustrated was a big break-through. Now everything's the electronic media, they don't want to wait until the weekend to see what's going on.

"When I first came, in all honesty I was not sure who the New York Giants were. I knew there was a team in New York City; there was a football team that played at the Polo Grounds, but football was not much of a sport in New York at that time. It was not until we won the 1956 NFL championship, through television, Sports Illustrated, and the nationalization of our sport, that changed everything. My first few years in the league I'd come home to Bakersfield every off-season and people would ask, 'Where have you been?' Then they started televising the games nationally and that all changed. This had the effect of making the league a powerhouse, and not just in New York. It did not have to rely on New York for ratings and interest."

Television was originally centered in New York City, but Hollywood was where the real talent was. The influence of the media began to move west, too, along with the highways built by President Eisenhower. Jet air travel played an enormous role, of course.

By the 1960s, the New York power base was broken up to some extent. The Yankees dominated until 1964, then fell apart. The Giants gave way to Vince Lombardi's Packers. A great rival of the Boston Celtics, the Los Angeles Lakers made their mark. The San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers had their most competitive decade as rivals. Their success spawned the California Angels, the Oakland A's, the Oakland Raiders, the Golden State Warriors, the Los Angeles Kings, and others.

College football truly became national; Oklahoma, Alabama, Southern California, Michigan, Ohio State, Nebraska and others threatening the top perch once seemingly reserved only for Notre Dame and a few elites. The East Coast became almost obsolete in the college football world. The Ivy League no longer was relevant. In college basketball, once huge in New York, the game shifted to the West: USF and then UCLA. The NCAA replaced the old NIT as the showcase tournament.

Jim Murray's West symbolized this new world. Its burgeoning population, political significance, great weather, geographical beauty, and cultural relevance were topped by the imprimatur of Hollywood glamour. Murray rode the crest. No longer was New York the center of the world. L.A. was not that, yet, but they were getting there. When the Dodgers moved to L.A. everything changed. Los Angeles was now a big league town.

Nobody in the media was better suited to describe what it all meant than Jim Murray. Perhaps because he too was from the East Coast, but by the mid-1950s was comfortably suited in the City of Angels. He understood and gave voice to it. His style was almost patrician in tone. He was well read and understood the impact of history. In the 1940s and 1950s, many writers referred to Rome. America stood as a powerful symbol of Roman power. Our old enemies, Germany, Japan or anybody it seemed who stood in our way, were now modern day Carthaginians or Gauls.

Hollywood was in its most epic era. Cecil B. DeMille and Darryl F. Zanuck created blockbusters depicting these glory days. It was impossible not to pick up on the language of the movies, especially if one lived in L.A. and mixed with the movie crowd, as Murray did.

The USC Trojans, featuring a song called "Conquest," mascots dressed like gladiators, played in a stadium named after the original, with classic architectural column designs meant to evoke images of Greece in its grandeur and Rome in its glory. It was a time of hyperbole and color. It was Jim Murray's time.

Murray finally tried his hand at screenwriting when he was asked to write the remake of Ben Hogan's life story. "Jim loved Ben Hogan," recalled Murray's good friend, Bill Caplan. After weeks struggling with it, he finally gave up, forced to tell Hogan himself he could not get it done. The movie was never re-made.

But Murray wrote often of Hogan, beginning with a 1949 piece for Time. Hogan was at the top of his game, transforming golf. The magazine went so far as to plan a cover story on him, which in 1949-50 was quite unusual. Some very important things were happening in the world. The Soviets were now our enemies all the way, ready to explode their first atomic bomb. China was "lost" to the Communists. Hollywood and Washington were crawling with Russian spies, Commies and fellow travelers. During a serious time, the magazine decided to lighten the subject matter on occasion.

Hogan was probably the first golfer ever to get a Time cover. Sports editor Marshall Smith was enamored of him. He sent Murray to do a story. The deadline for the story was fast approaching when Murray found Hogan practicing at Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. The three-hour time difference worked against him. Murray waited with an open phone line for Hogan to meticulously finish his practice. The presses were waiting "at several thousand dollars a minute in lost time," recalled Murray. Hogan answered questions as meticulously as he played golf. Finally Murray completed the interview and called the story in, barely making deadline. Hogan went back to Texas, where he was accidentally hit by a bus, but fought his way back from it.

His comeback became the subject of a proposed movie to be directed by Sidney Lanfield. The next time Murray saw Hogan in L.A. he was a bigger hero than ever after returning from his injuries. Unfortunately, just as Murray approached him news came over the loudspeaker that Sam Snead birdied 17 and had an 11-foot putt on 18 to tie Hogan. Hogan erupted in fury, sensing that Murray and his magazine were bad luck. Murray "crept away."

Five years later they were re-united at the Olympic Club in San Francisco. Hogan had just shot 287 on a course "so monstrous that only 12 players broke 300 and in high rough so impenetrable that Porky Oliver actually lost a free drop!" wrote Murray. With Hogan the apparent winner, his old nemesis Sam Snead was out of the running. Arnold Palmer was not close, but a guy named Jack Fleck was still within range. Now at Sports Illustrated, Murray approached Hogan at this time. Just as in 1950, Murray's appearance coincided with Fleck's miracle round to force a play-off. Hogan, ready to take a shower and celebrate a victory, instead was discombobulated and lost.

To Hogan, Murray was like "Li'l Abner who always went around with a cloud over his head," he wrote. "Only I bring the cloud to Ben Hogan. I rain on his parade." The record was rather extraordinary. Put on a Time cover, he was hit by a bus. The next two times the author of his story approached him, it coincided with miracle comebacks by opponents to beat him, the last one from a club pro out of Davenport, Iowa. No wonder dark forces seemed to prevent Murray from completing the screenplay about Hogan. All of this became an urban legend of sorts, and combined with other events leading to what some people still call the "Sports Illustrated curse."

In 1967, a coffee table book titled The Wonderful World of Sport was published. The essays demonstrate the impact of Sports Illustrated. Among them was "Duel of the Four-Minute Men" by Paul O'Neill, about Roger Bannister's breaking of the hallowed four-minute mark.

Ted Williams claimed that Joan Flynn Dreyspool's 1955 essay, "Subject: Ted Williams," was the best anybody ever did on him. Robert Creamer's "The Embattled World of Avery Brundage" (1956) addressed the issue of amateur hypocrisy well ahead of its time. Herbert Warren Wind's "The Masters" (1955) gave great vision to this most hallowed of golf events. Some of the legends who penned articles for Sports Illustrated during the era included John Underwood, Dan Jenkins, Clare Boothe Luce, George Plimpton, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. The literary nature and sheer talent, combined with the eclectic subject matter – ranging from golf to horse racing to fishing to football and way beyond – had a great effect on Murray as a writer, as well as the choices he made for columns in later years.

Sports Illustrated's managing editor of the mid-1960s, Sidney James, wrote that Henry Luce was the magazine's "inspiring genius" whose "goading and guiding" inspired its success.

Perhaps staff member Robert Boyle put it best in determining the effect of Sports Illustrated. "Sport permeates any number of levels of contemporary society, and it touches up and even deeply influences such disparate elements as status, race relations, business life, automotive design, clothing styles, the concept of the hero, language, and ethical values," he wrote. "For better or worse, it gives form and substance to much in American life."

In 1967 the editors at Sports Illustrated said sport itself had been shaped in part by the "vast disarray of war," but was "beginning to set the pace it would maintain for some years to come, perhaps up to that magic milestone, the year 2000, and even beyond."

In the mid-1950s, a payola scandal rocked the Pacific Coast Conference, upending USC, UCLA, California and Washington. In the late 1950s, a USC lineman named Mike McKeever allegedly landed a late hit on a California halfback named Steve Bates, causing serious injury. Time's November 16 issue ran an article called "Sport: Too Rough for Football." Sports Illustrated also gave it enormous coverage, seriously questioning whether the game had become too violent, a frequent accusation leveled at boxing.

It was a tremendous sticking point with the Berkeley faithful, with lasting repercussions. Cal actually sued USC. A film produced as evidence supposedly exonerated McKeever, but never quieted the howls in Berkeley. In the 1960s, Cal de-emphasized sports. Once a national powerhouse in football, baseball, basketball and track, they became an also-ran. USC went in the other direction. Led by John McKay, they exploded with the greatest 20-year run (1962-81) in college football history. This same era also saw USC (and their real rival, UCLA) develop into the most powerhouse all-around athletic programs ever.

The "McKeever incident" was a major turning point in sports. The rivalry between USC and California (and later Stanford) became political. It mirrored the social differences between the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Cal fans took to waving credits cards, mocking USC students when they gave the "V for victory" sign while their band played "Conquest." Stanford's band and students eventually took that one step further, making a Nazi salute. The "V for victory" sign, popularized by Dwight Eisenhower as he led the Allies to victory in Europe, was hi-jacked by the anti-war movement as a peace sign, even though it made no real sense.

As Cal de-emphasized sports, competitive athletics became seen by certain elements of the left as a "bourgeois" activity of the capitalistic middle class. Murray watched all of it, writing about it with a socio-political edge. It began during his Sports Illustrated years, when the magazine gave extensive coverage to the recruiting scandals and then the "McKeever incident."

In 1954, UCLA under coach Red Sanders went unbeaten to capture the only national championship in the school's football history. In 1955-56, the University of San Francisco basketball team, led by Bill Russell and K.C. Jones, won their second consecutive NCAA championship. Along the way they won 60 straight games, a record not broken until John Wooden and UCLA in 1973. In 1959, the University of California under coach Pete Newell won the national title.

Basketball became highly popular in the 1960s, developing into an urban art form dominated by black athletes like Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson. Amazingly, in the 21st Century, American blacks no longer dominate basketball. The end of the Cold War revealed a treasure trove of basketball wunderkinds from Croatia, Lithuania, Serbia and other Eastern European nations.

Athletics became nationalized by a combination of things: Sports Illustrated, expansion and franchises moving West, television, color television, the rising popularity of pro football, the creation of the American Football League, and a merger between the AFL and NFL resulting in the Super Bowl.

That same year, Johnny Unitas led the Baltimore Colts into Yankee Stadium for a showdown with Frank Gifford's New York Giants for the National Football League championship. Televised coast-to-coast, it was and many still consider the greatest football game ever played; a rip-roaring, back-and-forth duel between great teams and great coaches featuring legendary players. The game went into overtime, creating a thrilling new expression – "sudden death" – when Unitas's Colts, after first rallying to tie the game at the end of regulation play, drove the field to win, giving Baltimore the title.

The Colts-Giants title game drew such a high audience share, creating such enormous advertising revenues, that suddenly owning a pro sports franchise was not merely about attendance and merchandising. TV became the driving force.

The American Football League formed in 1960 largely on the strength of this premise. In 1962 the Dallas Texas-Houston Oilers championship game, like the Colts-Giants contest, went into overtime with the Texans winning. The game was nationally televised and drew tremendous ratings. The league was on after that. In 1964, a bidding war ensued over the signing of University of Alabama All-American quarterback Joe Willie Namath. Drafted by St. Louis (NFL) and the New York Titans (AFL), Namath spurned the lower offer from the established Cardinals, who figured the imprimatur of their league was enough. When Namath signed with New York, it gave the AFL instant credibility and more.

His deal, worth more than $400,000, was so much greater than any previous athlete that the fascination with such a phenomenal thing alone was sure to draw fans. Joe Louis had reportedly made close to $400,000 in 1938, but so much of that was eaten up by taxes and handlers that it could not compare. Namath's timing was exquisite, coming shortly after the team moved into the gleaming new Shea Stadium, now calling themselves the Jets. A Sports Illustrated cover photo of the charmingly handsome Namath, in full uniform beneath twinkling lights of Broadway, gave birth to one of the great nicknames ever: "Broadway Joe."

Namath was a great quarterback who led the Jets to a Super Bowl win over Unitas's Colts in 1969, but injuries prevented him from attaining the full measure of his talents. But his persona, a roguish "devil" who enjoyed a good time with the ladies and a cocktail every now and then ("I like my women blonde and my Johnnie Walker Red"), combined with his on-field exploits and the fact it was all done in New York, made him one of the most mythic figures in all of sports history. Now he was a New York icon on par with Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Frank Gifford and Tom Seaver.

Perhaps no athlete in history represented his changing times as did Namath. Before him, a Los Angeles Angels pitcher named Bo Belinsky was made famous by gossip columnist Walter Winchell for squiring beautiful women in Hollywood, but his on-field accomplishments paled next to Namath's. Namath was the first pro athlete to wear his hair long, to sport a Fu Manchu and sideburns, to wear "far out" 1960s clothes, mod bell bottoms, even a fur coat. He was the first to wear white cleats. He came of age just as "the pill," the Summer of Love and the hippy movement unleashed a torrent of sexually promiscuous women. Nobody took greater "advantage" of it than did he.

Namath's popularity began the argument over true celebrity and fame. Before Namath, athletes like Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle were held up as great role models of the admiring youth, despite deep personal flaws generally hidden by the press. Henry Luce made re-ribboned generals, statesmen and astronauts the great icons of the world. Movie actors and entertainers had always held a secondary place in society, considered a little immoral. The accusations of Communist subversion in the entertainment industry did their image no good.

But Marilyn Monroe began to change all of that, creating the image of the "blonde bomb shell' and "sex symbol." By the 1960s, celebrity expanded. Movie stars like Charlton Heston, Paul Newman, and Clint Eastwood were now as popular as athletes. Singers like Frank Sinatra and his infamous "rat pack" attained heights of fame far beyond the previous jazz impresarios and Big Band leaders. Rock music totally changed the dynamic. Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Jim Morrison were now in a previously unexplored stratosphere of stardom.

But Namath's stardom replaced the old school sports heroes, the "awe shucks" Mantle, the reserved DiMaggio, the uncharismatic Willie Mays. Namath was as famous for his off-field activities as what he did on the field. The athlete as a "personality," a sex symbol, a flamboyant figure, now emerged. It could not have happened at a better time for business, for Namath and his kind of popularity was made for the great confluence of television, advertising and even movies.

No event in sports brings all these elements together better than the Super Bowl. Created out of a merger between the AFL and the NFL by Commissioner Pete Roselle, to settle the "war" between the two leagues embodied by the bidding for Namath's services, the first two Super Bowls were lopsided victories by coach Vince Lombardi's established Green Bay Packers. But Super Bowl III in Miami featured Namath and his upstart Jets winning over heavily favored Baltimore. After that, the Super Bowl became along with the World Series, the biggest sporting event in the world, bigger even than the Olympics or, in the U.S. at least, the World Cup.

The Super Bowl evolved into far more than a mere football championship, but rather a star-studded party and advertising bonanza. It along with Playboy, Hollywood movies, and Wall Street extravagance came to symbolize America. The athletes were now the gladiators performing for the largest, most affluent leisure class ever known by man. TV and the widespread expansion of sports into the very fabric of American society meant access to this good life. Through all of millennia this had been reserved for kings and queens, aristocrats and the upper crust. It was now available for a modest sum to a great "proletariat" elevated by egalitarian capitalist Democracy, like an entire ocean rising with the tide above and beyond all previous conceptions of achievement and lifestyle. It was represented the essence of American Exceptionalism, a pure, manifest refutation of Socialism and Communism that needed no argument; only to be observed in order to know it to be true.

After baseball expanded to the West Coast in 1958, the Dodgers and Giants squared off in one of the greatest pennant chases in history (1962), with San Francisco emerging as the victor followed by a momentous, seven-game cross-country World Series won by the New York Yankees. This first New York-California Series firmly established baseball as the National Pastime of an entire continent. Combined with the building of the magnificent Dodger Stadium, culminating with Los Angeles sweeping New York in the 1963 World Series, this made the expansion to the Pacific Coast wildly successful.

The building of Dodger Stadium was not the first new stadium, but it set the tone for the new sports palaces of the post-war era, just as the building of Yankee Stadium and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (1923) elevated American sports to a new level after World War I. In the 1960s new stadiums were built in Oakland, Anaheim, St. Louis, Atlanta, New York, San Diego and Houston.

The Houston Astrodome in particular was the most futuristic. Talk of a geodesic dome began with speculation of a stadium to be built in Queens, New York to replace Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn. Instead Shea Stadium was erected after the Dodgers left for Los Angeles. The Astrodome was built along with the Johnson Space Center, which Vice President, then President Lyndon Johnson, arranged for his home state after the space program was initially headquartered in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The Astros were named after the astronauts, and the Astrodome called the "eighth wonder of the world." The idea that a big sport like football or baseball could be played in an in-door, controlled environment, was another American invention previously unattainable by any other country, like the trans-continental railroad, the L.A. aqueduct, or a few years later, the similarly-themed landing of men on the Moon.

In the mid-1960s, color television became commonplace. This had a tremendous impact on college football, particularly in the West. Eastern fans huddled before their TV sets, with wintry conditions outside, darkness already having settled. They watched football spectacles between USC and UCLA, on the green plains of the Coliseum turf, both teams resplendent in home colors; or Rose Bowl epics each New Year's Day; brilliant sunshine pouring over fans dressed in beach attire, with visors and sunglasses making average people look like movie stars, beautiful cheerleaders with tanned legs performing while the teams struggled seemingly for the national championship each year. These events came during the era of The Beach Boys, the golden era of Hollywood movies, and the building of a new, sophisticated freeway system, all boosted by the Chandler family and their L.A. Times. This created a huge migration to the Golden State. Los Angeles replaced Chicago as the second most populous city. Greater L.A., the metropolitan empire stretching from San Clemente in the south to Ventura in the north, from Palos Verdes in the west to Riverside in the east, became the single greatest political, marketing, advertising, economic and sports juggernaut of all time.

In the 1960s and 1970s, USC and UCLA enjoyed unprecedented success in collegiate sports, whether that was football, basketball, baseball, track, tennis, volleyball, swimming, or most any other sport. Trojans-Bruins football games often featured unbeaten teams vying for number one, as with the legendary 1967 game won by Southern California, 21-20 on a 64-yard touchdown run by O.J. Simpson. USC football coach John McKay and UCLA basketball coach John Wooden built their programs in large measure by recruiting black athletes from the large Southern California population, increased in part by the migration west of black families following World War II. USC football from 1962-81 and UCLA basketball from 1963-75 enjoyed dominance unmatched by any other programs. The two schools produced far more Olympians than any other college, in several Olympics so many that had they been countries they would have placed among the medals leaders.

The USC-Notre Dame football rivalry, since the 1920s the biggest and most glamorous in the nation, achieved new heights in the 1960s and 1970s. Each game affected the national championship outcome, with massive TV ratings in every region.

The success of televised college football and the UCLA basketball dynasty helped establish "March madness" and the Final Four as fixtures of Americana. The 1979 NCAA title game between Magic Johnson's Michigan State Wolverines and Larry Bird's Indiana State University gave a level of frenzy and excitement that never abated. The rivalry of these stars (Johnson with the Los Angeles Lakers, Bird with the Boston Celtics), lifted pro basketball from its moribund 1970s level. Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls ascended to unheard of celebrity status, increasing the business and marketing value of sports to stratosphere levels.

In 1969, the St. Louis Cardinals traded baseball star Curt Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies. Flood refused to report, claiming that the trading of an athlete from one team to another violated Federal anti-trust laws established by the Supreme Court in the early 1920s in the form of the "reserve clause." Citing baseball's unique place in the pantheon of American society, the Court gave team owners the right to hold a player's contract in perpetuity until retirement, release or trade. The player had no real control over his destiny. When the amateur draft was instituted in 1965, he did not even have control over the team he could sign with out of high school or college. Unlike an engineer who might choose to work for Standard Oil in California or Texaco in Oklahoma; or an MBA who might choose between a Wall Street brokerage firm in Manhattan or a bank in Boston; athletes were drafted by the San Francisco 49ers or Atlanta Falcons; by the Detroit Tigers or Oakland A's; by the Los Angeles Lakers or Milwaukee Bucks. He had no pick over whether he played in his hometown, in a big market with numerous opportunities, or even a city less friendly to blacks.

Joe Namath, Frank Gifford and Tom Seaver, for instance, were all superstar athletes who would have achieved Hall of Fame status with any team, but whose careers, reputations and incomes were far greater because they, largely by luck of the draft, happened to play in New York City.

Now Flood was traded from the Cardinals, where he made over $100,000 for a contending team playing in front of a big fan base in a modern stadium, to a losing franchise that drew poorly in a decrepit ball park. He sued. The Major League baseball player's union backed his case. In 1970 he did not play ball, and he ultimately lost his case, retired, and never saw riches. Despite losing, however, the dissenting views of the Supreme Court created an opening by which the reserve clause could be further challenged until, in 1974-75, it was declared un-Constitutional. This led to free agency in all sports; whereby a player after playing out the length of his first professional contract was now available to accept bids from any teams willing to vie for his services. The result of this was astounding. It led to enormous contracts, the influence of agents, and a tremendous loss of identity as players freely moved from team to team in mercenary fashion. The unions became all-controlling. Families could no longer own professional sports franchises. Conglomerates, corporations and ownership groups bought teams. In the late 1990s, Los Angeles Dodgers owner Peter O'Malley was forced to sell his team to News Corporation because brutal inheritance taxes instituted under Democrat President Bill Clinton made it impossible to give to his heirs. The Dodgers have never been the same since, a symbol of all that has gone wrong in professional sports.

The unions and the agents attempt to take credit for the huge salary increases brought about by free agency, but the money only expanded when the "pie" expanded. That pie was cable television, begun in the late 1970s, and with it national sports networks like the WTBS "super station," ESPN, and later Fox Sports, among others. While all other factors played into the rising popularity of sports – increasing population, strong economies – cable TV did more to make sports big business than any other factor. Television changed the face of sports.

There is so much money in professional sports now that the athletes are the new economic titans of a gilded age. Gambling in Las Vegas and on the Internet has added a startling dimension to sports popularity. Even college baseball, once a lazy weekend activity for true fans, features its popular College World Series showcased on ESPN.

The Super Bowl is now a worldwide event. American sports have captivated every corner of the globe. In many ways, the charisma of American athletes, teams and their personas - colors, logo, symbols - have cemented the United States as the most influential of all nations.

American superstars like Barry Bonds, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Joe Montana, Tom Brady and Kobe Bryant are household names everywhere. It is not uncommon to go into a bar in Germany and hear Germans argue the relative merits of the Packers vs. the Cowboys. Sports has integrated society, made millionaires out of peasants, created rivalries, city pride, and identity, and transformed the landscape of entertainment.

Baseball attendance dwarfs previous attendance figures. While it is accepted as common knowledge that professional football is the most popular sport in the United States, attendance offers a certain amount of evidence to the contrary. In any given year the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Angels, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Francisco Giants, Chicago Cubs, and St. Louis Cardinals all sell out every home game, or average between the low 40,000s to mid-40,000s for each game. These attendance figures are close to the attendance at many pro football games, in some cases even higher, despite the fact a big league team plays 81 home games, an NFL franchise only eight.

Detroit, Toronto, Minnesota, Seattle, Texas, New York (Mets), Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston, Milwaukee, Arizona, San Diego and Colorado are all franchises that have demonstrated phenomenal attendance, have dropped, but depending on new stadiums or contending teams in given seasons, offer the potential of entering the upper echelon attendance clubs in baseball. Even Oakland, a struggling franchise playing in a decrepit stadium in the shadow of San Francisco's marvelous AT&T Park, still averages attendance that would have been considered excellent during their World Championship era of the early 1970s.

Obviously, because there are so many more big league baseball games played, and on TV, each season, a far larger number of citizens watch baseball games every year than watch football. The argument of course is that each football game is a bigger event because the seasons – college and pro – are shorter, but if individual baseball games were elevated to such importance there is no reason such fever pitch would not attach themselves to these events. Basketball games generally bring in some 12,000 to 17,000 fans, depending on the city and size of the arena, but there is no evidence to suggest if they played in stadiums as big as baseball parks they could match their attendance.

Despite all the excitement attached to pro football, college football in the South, and college basketball in the Atlantic Coast Conference, good old baseball – Our National Pastime – still carries its weight and, in the case of the Yankees-Red Sox, remains the single most intense sports rivalry in the world. While many sports clubs are considered dynasties, among them the Green Bay Packers, Pittsburgh Steelers, Dallas Cowboys, Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, Montreal Canadians, Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Southern California Trojans, and Alabama Crimson Tide; none approaches the longevity (since 1923) and total number of World Championships (27) won by the Yankees.

Furthermore, for a number of reasons, the Yankees probably symbolize American dominance more than any single metaphor or example. Their nickname evokes the name given Americans, especially during wartime. It can be argued they made New York City famous just as much as New York City made them famous. They represent the image of America as the essence of success. They evoke jealousy just as America does, symbolic of Wall Street achieving so much, being so successful, and being so much better than anybody else. They, like America, pay little heed to words given no weight or substance, preferring to simply go forth and produce excellence.

The Times they are a changin'

"I would describe him as a C or C+ student who became an A student through sheer focus and assiduous attention to what it was he was trying to focus on."

\- Bill Thomas, former Los Angeles Times editor, on Otis Chandler

To understand the Los Angeles Times, one must understand the politics and culture of Southern California in the 1950s. It was in the 1950s when L.A. further distanced themselves from Northern California and San Francisco in particular. San Francisco took a Leftward turn politically. It became a union town. The University of California, Berkeley began to foment dissent. Los Angeles, on the other hand, was a Republican city. It was business-friendly, not leaning to union sympathies, but rather to entrepreneurial capitalism. Even the Hollywood movie industry was still viewed as an entrepreneurial venture, a gamble. Its moguls were invested in making movies that touted American greatness in World War II or Biblical epics glorifying God Almighty.

While Joseph McCarthy was exposed as a charlatan of sorts, his career over and McCarthyism a pejorative, Richard Nixon benefited widely, at least in the short term, from the anti-Communism of the era. He represented a robust concept in which America was seen as the greatest nation ever, its can-do way the essence of a newfound spirit ending centuries of human sullenness. At least that was the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce view.

When the Dodgers moved to L.A., the city figured they were the cutting edge town of the future. The L.A. Basin was an endless valley. With freeways, it could absorb expansion as far as the eye could see and beyond. They welcomed all comers. The Rose Bowl became a Pacific Coast-Big 10 affair in 1947. This resulted in tremendous migration from the Midwest, so much so that Long Beach was dubbed Iowa's "sea port." Prior to the Big 10 arrangement, the Rose Bowl was normally a game between a Pacific Coast and a Southern college. This further added to the original allure of Los Angeles as the destination of Southerners moving west after the Civil War because San Francisco was more of a Boston-New York type town.

Patriotic veterans of World War II chose to make L.A., with its Mediterranean climate and Shangri-La landscape, the place to raise young families. Real estate prices were cheap. Gas was cheap. This was the new Promised Land.

The car was king. The highway was a new invention of sorts. A citizen could live in Santa Monica, Pasadena, even out in San Fernando or Long Beach or West Covina or Orange County, and by freeway be at an office in downtown L.A., in Beverly Hills, in Hollywood, within 45 minutes or so.

The meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia

probably shaped the 20th Century, and with it the future of Los Angeles, more than any single event after World War II. America would protect the vested interests of the Middle East. In return, the Middle East would allow Western oil companies to drill in its deserts, thus procuring cheap oil to fuel its car-mad continent.

This agreement played as great a role in the growth of Southern California as the Rose Bowl, the trans-continental railroad, the Owens Valley Aqueduct, the Teapot Dome scandal, or even post-war migration. Driving cars was not expensive. Oil was not expensive. Thus was the cost-of-living low. Therefore, business was good. It could expand and deliver cheap goods benefiting millions, making life easier and more convenient. It was a miracle, a revolution never seen before. Dwight Eisenhower was as business-friendly as any President, saying "the business of America is business."

Middle East oil was not the only source of cheap fuel powering Southern California. The Southland itself was built smack dab right on top of the some of the richest oil fields in the world. The La Brea Tar Pits were located just west of downtown L.A. Oil wells constantly pumped in Huntington Beach, Long Beach, Signal Hill, above Ladera Heights, east of the city, in Fullerton, and throughout the region from Santa Barbara to Bakersfield to Orange County. High school nicknames reflected this: Oilers, Drillers.

Oil wealth dominated Southern California politics. USC was built on it. One of their greatest patrons, Edward Doheny was one of the wealthiest oilmen in the nation, caught up in the Teapot Dome scandal that brought down the Warren Harding Administration in the 1920s. The Left, in California symbolized by the Socialist writer and Gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair, fixated on "big oil" as emblematic of all conservative, capitalist evils.

The reaction to oil, and its effect on the environment, was profoundly different in the Southland from the attitude of Northern Californians. The essence of the region's cultural differences could be found in these attitudes. By 1961, various districts within Greater Los Angeles took on distinctive traits. Downtown Los Angeles was in disrepair. It had not maintained itself as a city-center, with skyscrapers dotting the sky to identify itself in the manner of New York, glorified by the writing of libertarian novelist Ayn Rand. But lack of glamour did not prevent downtown from still being the center of much action. City hall, the main courthouses, stock exchange, newspaper and its attendant business were still there. The big law firms, brokerage houses, banks, oil companies and corporations were centered there. USC, the Coliseum, the soon-to-be-completed Dodger Stadium, the Ambassador Hotel and other landmarks were close enough to be called part of the downtown corridor.

Just to the west was the Miracle Mile, a section of Wilshire Boulevard called the mid-Wilshire, which specialized in insurance, public relations and advertising. Advertising was the glamour profession of the era, its power emphasized by the growth of television. While the profession was centered on Madison Avenue in New York, Hollywood gave the Miracle Mile a certain kind of L.A. panache.

The Westside consisted of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Westwood, Santa Monica and by extension Malibu. This was a relatively new development. When UCLA was established in 1919, people complained that nobody would "go all the way out there." Western Avenue was the last outpost of the city. Between it and the ocean were little more than orange groves, avocado orchards, ranches, farmland, and the like. The elites had beach cottages in Santa Monica, which they accessed by horse and buggy, the model-T, or trolley, on weekends or summers. The growth of UCLA and the choice of Beverly Hills, Bel Air and eventually Malibu as the home of movie mansions created attendant development. By 1961, Malibu was still relatively rural but growing. Century City, the "city of the future," was in development. Marina Del Rey was still sand dunes but in the planning stages.

By 1961, the Westside was a business powerhouse. Its specialties were talent agencies, movie producers, studios, entertainment law, and Hollywood publicity. Between Santa Monica and Long Beach along the coast, Howard Hughes and the so-called Military Industrial Complex, which was a confluence of private companies making planes, aerospace equipment, war weapons, and technology for the U.S. government, dominated industry.

The power of the Military Industrial Complex was already mammoth, so much so that even a military man like Eisenhower warned of its inherent dangers for a free society in his departing 1961 speech. But the benefits of the technology industry running along what later became known as the "405 corridor" had enormous benefits. In 1961, America was embroiled in a full-scale "space race" and "nuclear arms race" with the Soviet Union. This had a direct benefit on U.S. schools, particularly in California. Tremendous emphasis was placed on public school education, and the desire to produce scientists and tech-savvy workers fueling this industry. Later the Silicon Valley and the Internet owed much of its creation to this emphasis.

Long Beach was mainly a Navy town. Oil wells dotted the landscape from Long Beach and Signal Hill to Huntington Beach. But Orange County was growing. In 1961 it was still in a relatively nascent stage. It was intensely conservative, dominated by the John Birch Society. Orange County was the place people lived so as to avoid the "evils" of Los Angeles, which might mean heavy racial integration of schools and neighborhoods; too many Jews; too much government and too much de-emphasis on Christianity and family values; and of course the immoralities of Hollywood.

Nothing fit this image better than Disneyland, opened in 1955. But Disneyland had the effect of springing Orange County from out of its cocoon. It became a suburb of L.A., then an integral part of it, and eventually an entity in and of itself. This was happening at its early stages in 1961.

In 1964, its political power in giving Barry Goldwater the Republican nomination for President meant it could not be hidden any longer. Two years later, the arrival of the Angels made it a national destination. Its beaches and nightlife made it impossible to ignore. It became known as a place where the most outrageously beautiful women – mostly classic California blondes – were found in large supply. Nothing was so irresistible. This made it a place of SoCal glamour. Its business identity seemed to reflect this sensuousness; gleaming buildings shining in the setting sun like statuesque women in string bikinis. It would develop into the home of upscale law firms, real estate and wealth investment.

In 1961, the rest of the Southland was either rural or suburban in nature. The San Fernando Valley was an innocent land of canyons and playing fields where parents let their kids roam free night and day. Eventually, its business identity would be dominated by the porn industry, with all corruption of the family soul inherent therein, but that was almost two decades away. The Mexicans lived in east L.A. The blacks lived in south-central. Hollywood proper was still safe, its hills the place where the movie crowd cheated on each other's spouses. A new kind of music emanated from the clubs on the Sunset Strip. The Beach Boys created a mythological siren song beckoning all manner of humanity to come live the "California dream."

Los Angeles becomes a "big league city"

By 1961, things were on the move in Los Angeles. The Dodgers played at the Los Angeles Coliseum, but filled the cavernous football stadium with huge crowds. They were the World Champions in 1959, the darlings of Hollywood, and had a fantastic new stadium in the works.

Enter the Los Angeles Times. The Los Angeles Times was around since the 19th Century. The Chandler family owned them. Otis Chandler was a young Stanford graduate, just taking over his family's newspaper. Chandler, like his family and his newspaper, was a Republican, but like the "times," he was of a changing breed that would change the Times. The Times always reflected the politics of its city. The Chandlers tapped into that. Otis intuitively understood this dynamic as it evolved over the years.

Because the Southerners of the defeated Confederacy chose the warm climes of Los Angeles, L.A. took on a more Southern, Christian, evangelical, and Republican identity. The L.A. Times catered to a constituency of readers best exemplified by Benjamin Braddock's (Dustin Hoffman) landed gentry Pasadena parents in The Graduate. That was the Pasadena-San Marino social order from whence Otis Chandler emerged.

One of the most contentious issues the paper and the city dealt with occurred when Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley decided upon Chavez Ravine as the future home of his team. At least at the time, it seemed to be the most perfect, centralized, freeway-easy location for a stadium conceivable. It was set on a plateau, resembling a shining city on a hill. It afforded spectacular vistas of downtown L.A. and the basin stretching endlessly to the sea. It was open space in the middle of urbanity, allowing for the park, its access roads and parking to be built in landscaped, airy manner.

The only problem was that Mexican squatters lived in squalor. Many have argued that the Dodgers stole their land. There is little evidence that any of the land was owned by anybody. It was mostly fetid, most of its residents illegals from Mexico, but liberal elements opposed their displacement.

The main powers all stood with O'Malley. These included L.A.'s political structure, Hollywood, and the L.A. Times. Ronald Reagan led a telethon raising money and support for building Dodger Stadium. The Times painted a glorious portrait of a great stadium that would make L.A. a "big league city" at last.

Most historical scholars agree the construction of Dodger Stadium proved to be a major milestone in the formation of modern Los Angeles which, as Kevin Starr, one of the premiere Californian historians noted, "finalized with a flourish the emergence of the region into big league status." Still, despite general agreement amongst historians that the transformation of Chavez Ravine delineated "the transition Los Angeles was making in this era from regional capital to super city," political disagreement remains over related issues.

A flawed historical narrative, portraying Walter O'Malley as corporate heavy, formed the basis for another popular version of Chavez Ravine history that continues to hold favor in Los Angeles' Chicano community. Here, "the public housing project initially planned for the area isn't mentioned and sometimes the Dodgers themselves are said to evict the residents, rather than the city," according to The Battle for Chavez Ravine: Chicano Resistance.

One theory forwarded by Chicano historians, including Rodolfo Acuna, George Sanchez, and David Diaz, gives little credence to the Democratic process lawfully engaged in to create the stadium deal. Instead, emphasis is placed on the "noble" struggle of the Arechiga family's "bold resistance to their brutal evictions," according to Los Angeles historian Matt McCluggage, and attendant "unjust racial and economic exploitation and the seizure of their land," as voiced by The Battle for Chavez Ravine: Chicano Resistance.

Located in the hills directly to the north of downtown, Chavez Ravine was a home to many Mexican-Americans. Whites considered the area an "eyesore" and "shantytown." It was officially deemed "blighted" and earmarked for re-development by the Los Angeles City Housing Authority in July of 1950, backed by funding from the new Federal Housing Act of 1949. The government imposed the right of eminent domain, informing residents they would have to sell their homes to make the land available for a planned public housing project called Elysian Park Heights to be designed by the renowned Austrian architect, Richard Neutra.

Backed by Mayor Fletcher Bowron, it was slated to be a "small village," according McCluggage, in Chavez Ravine. The project was stalled and never fulfilled, ostensibly because the Dodgers eventually took priority. There was a decade-long debate known as the "Battle of Chavez Ravine." Many Latinos were uprooted, with attendant loss of community.

The role of O'Malley is an easy one to demonize, as it comes on top of his controversial decision to uproot the Dodgers from Brooklyn and move them to Los Angeles. This made him "a Machiavelli who made no decision without a ruthlessly dispassionate analysis of how it would affect his profits," wrote Roger Kahn in The Boys of Summer.

O'Malley, however, was not the only political operative or player in this scenario. Los Angeles politicians Kenneth Hahn, Rosalind Wyman, and Mayor Norris Poulson were equally enthusiastic about the building of the stadium.

The expulsion of Mexican-Americans has been studied by Chicano historians David Diaz, Ronald William Lopez, and Rodolfo Acuna, evolving into a narrative of the "Mexican-American experience of injustice, segregation, and dislocation," according to The Battle for Chavez Ravine: Chicano Resistance.

"According to these historians, the public's support for the Dodger Deal must be analyzed within the context of . . . Cold War mentality as well, since practically nothing could possibly be seen as more American than baseball and O'Malley's campaign for support astutely cashed in on the patriotic notion of Our National Pastime," wrote McCluggage. This mindset certainly tapped into the thinking of patrician Los Angeles as embodied by the Chandler Times. The argument against the stadium, favoring public housing, had little political heft behind it since "public housing" in that era was virtually a pejorative for "Reds."

During this time, Otis Chandler was a young reporter learning. He was a fourth generation Los Angeleno, the son of Norman Chandler, grandson of Harry Chandler, and great-grandson of Harrison Gray Otis, his namesake. At first, he was dismissed as a blonde-haired playboy, too pretty, concerned with girls, parties and sports as befits the sons of privilege in a city that, by the 1950s offered every sensual delight. He did not need to work hard. He did not need to make tough decisions. His life was mapped out for him. He could live off the "fat of the land" as long as he chose, eschewing controversy. That was not his nature.

Chandler's background was modern. He was a man of the changing times. He respected the legacy of his family but was bound and determined to make his own unique mark. Growing up a rich kid in Southern California, he was an indifferent student, a great athlete, and an avid outdoorsman who learned how to hunt, fish, track and live off the land. Chandler's love of the outdoors would grow to legendary proportions. He was a great surfer.

Over the years, he would engage in wild safaris, big game hunts, and other incredible adventures in some of the most inhospitable, dangerous conditions of Earth's four corners. He thwarted death at the hands of polar bears, crashing speed racers and surviving other hazards on many, many occasions, sometimes resulting in weeks of hospital care. Years later a profiler would write that, "If Otis Chandler had not existed, Ernest Hemingway would have created him." He was a Hemingway-esque, larger than life figure, with a thirst for insatiable adventure. He was a health nut who never drank or smoke, the original Californian pursuing a life of action and clean living.

His parents wanted him to go to Stanford University, but his grades were not up to snuff. In order to improve him academically, they sent him to the prestigious Andover Academy in Massachusetts. The Chandler name carried no weight at Andover, where the offspring of Presidents, Supreme Court Justices and the Eastern corporate elite attended. Chandler was a tanned, very blonde kid, the picture of the Southern California beach stereotype, which made him the butt of jokes. In order to make his life a little more miserable, he was made to room with the black son of a Chicago janitor, a scholarship student. Chandler and his black roommate got the last laugh, however.

Otis did not have a racist bone in his body. He enjoyed the company of people from different backgrounds, viewing it as a part of his growth and education. His black roommate was an excellent student who handled himself with aplomb, engendering grudging admiration from other students. They hit it off famously as friends.

Chandler proved to be a tremendous track star, which of course made him a "big man on campus." He graduated with good marks and headed off to Stanford. A surf aficionado, he regularly hit the waves at nearby Santa Cruz. He lifted weights for the shot put and developed the body of a veritable Greek god. He looked like a movie star, every bit as handsome as Troy Donahue or Robert Redford. A world-class shot-putter, he was considered a strong candidate for a spot on the U.S. team for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, but just missed out. He was a fraternity hero, a good enough student, and the apple of the eye of every beautiful young girl down on "the Farm," as Stanford's rural campus is called. His nocturnal activities with the ladies were legendary.

When he graduated, he was advised to settle down. He did, marrying Marilyn "Missy" Brant, an attractive fellow Stanford student. She was from the right social order, her family part of old Pasadena-San Marino money. They started up a large family.

During summer vacations while attending college, Chandler was detached to the Times's offices to learn the business. At first he seemed disinclined. After graduation he served in the U.S. Air Force. Upon his discharge, he returned to L.A. and was put through a rigorous program, working as a cub reporter. He learned his trade from the ground up. Otis had a mind of his own. He came from a WASP background, but studied evolution at Stanford. He questioned immutable Christian concepts, but never took anything too far. He still went to church and raised his children as Christians.

He was not the rock-ribbed, unquestioning Republican his father and particularly his grandfather had been. They had not simply boosted the land and water deals that built the region, but invested in and profited from them. The family wealth and power emanated from these and many other deals that crossed the lines of journalism, politics and business. Chandler turned from these precepts, but only so far. He still knew where his bread was buttered.

The paper unquestioningly backed Richard Nixon's political career, Howard Hughes's business expansion, Joseph McCarthy's Communist "witch hunts," corporate expansion, freeway building, and sports stadiums, while paying little heed to environmentalists concerned at the increasing smog settling over the L.A. Basin. The dirt was thought to be the "price of doing business."

Otis Chandler was troubled by all of this. His natural inclinations were by no means radical. He was a businessman and by no means rejected the profit motive, but he was of the new breed. He was shaped by his relationship with a black roommate at prep school, and black teammates and competitors in the sports world. He saw the increasing black population, many of whom had come during the war to work in the shipyards and other war industries. He was not oblivious to the plight of Mexican-Americans, in the 1950s and 1960s practically an ignored underclass of the city. As late as the 1960s, the Los Angeles Times had yet to hire a black reporter. They covered Hollywood, the aerospace industry, sports; black south-central and Latino east L.A. were given short shrift. The ram-rodding of Dodger Stadium despite their objections was given little attention.

The L.A. Times was unquestionably the king of newspapers in Southern California. They were a major profit-maker. They boosted business ventures that unashamedly brought in more profits to the company and the Chandler family. But they had a bad reputation. The East Coast intelligentsia looked down their noses at them. In various polls conducted in the late 1950s, the Times was vilified, some going so far as to call them the "worst" or "second worst" newspaper in the nation. They were jingoistic, blatantly Republican, and provincial.

A world-class paper for a world-class city

After Chandler was hired by his father as a cub reporter upon graduation from Stanford and then the Air Force, throughout the decade he made very little money. Missy Chandler was aghast, thinking she married into great wealth yet was forced to raise her young family in near poverty. Otis worked in almost every section of the newspaper. He was being groomed to take over the company. Norman Chandler wanted him to learn about the ink presses, distribution, advertising sales, marketing, personnel issues, and of course the reporter's trade. Chandler had never grown up assuming he would take over the family business. He went to work at the downtown office, but was not originally convinced he would make it his life's work.

It grew on him. By the late 1950s Otis made it clear he wanted the job, but his father was still robust, while he was still very young. Norman and the powers that be nevertheless decided to make him the fourth publisher in the paper's history. This caused a rift in the family that remains to this day, namely from Norman Chandler's brother Philip, who felt he was next in line. On April 12, 1960, during the Republican and Democrat Presidential Primaries, which eventually led to the momentous Nixon-Kennedy debates, he was introduced.

"I was going to make something of myself as an individual, apart from make something of myself as a Chandler, where it was expected, where you live on your families' and your father's reputation," Chandler said. "They never forced me to be the best at whatever I do. That somehow came from within me, and I never remember a period when I would settle for mediocrity. Never. "

"I would describe him as a C or C+ student who became an A student through sheer focus and assiduous attention to what it was he was trying to focus on," said former Times editor Bill Thomas. "He was amazing that way. He was pretty secure in his own self."

The announcement, however, was not met with great enthusiasm. Even supporters were non-plussed by his youth, accentuated by his shock of blonde hair, jock reputation and veritable surf lingo, exemplified by his first words upon taking over: "Wow!" The Eastern media all but laughed at him.

Otis Chandler's ascension to the publishing suites also separated him from the younger Chandlers. He was the "anointed one." Over the years, Otis would find fault with his cousins and relatives. They all had a stake in the paper. They achieved fabulous wealth through stock splits and associated business ventures. Some would make their mark in other fields, to one extent or another, but the impression was that they were wealthy inheritors living off the money of others. Chandler inherited as much or more as any others, but nobody would ever accuse him of "living off" of anybody. He was a worker, an innovator. He was driven and it showed immediately.

Chandler was not as partisan as his predecessors (although Kyle Palmer was still around, and he was). Nixon was the obvious choice of the paper in 1960. He rode to power in large measure due to the paper's strong backing of his policies in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was elected to Congress, the U.S. Senate, and the Vice Presidency. Nixon's anti-Communism was the papers. It was the regions. But John Kennedy was a striking figure. Nixon was popular in the state. He would take California handily, but JFK had plenty of support.

In 1960 under Otis Chandler, the L.A. Times toned down its partisan act considerably. This was a first, albeit important step. Chandler made several calculations. Republican partisanship was popular, but Los Angeles was by no means a city or region of GOP hegemony. The growing Latino population deserved to have somebody speak for them. So did a black population simmering with discontent. The powers that be failed to notice overt racism within the Los Angeles Police Department. It was papered over under the myth that such things did not happen there. This sort of social discord occurred in the South, or in Eastern cities where ethnic enclaves had decades-old animosities against each other. No so L.A. Terrible riots five years later proved this theory false.

Jews, too, were a growing social and political force in L.A. Chandler knew from his own college experiences that they resented second-class status, shunned from the best fraternities and country clubs even though they often dominated the movie industry.

The G.I. Bill and the government's decision to up-grade education in an effort to meet demands of the space race meant that the paper's reading public was far more educated than in years past. TV brought the world into living rooms. World War II, Korea, the Cold War, and rumblings in Southeast Asia meant the U.S. was actively involved in every corner of the globe.

Chandler decided he would not simply take the partisan sting from the paper, but he would up-grade its coverage. This meant creating bureaus in all the major world capitols. They would not rely on the New York Times and the London Times, the so-called "papers of record," to provide distant stories. They would have a Times team on the spot. In fact, it would be the Times under Chandler's direction that would be the leader, the first and most accurate reporter. A world-class newspaper for a new, world-class city.

Chandler, editor Nick Williams, and the L.A. Times set forth to completely change the nature of the paper, and with it the city they covered. By 1962, the obvious difference they effectuated was demonstrated when Richard Nixon lost to incumbent Democrat Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown. Nixon was stunned that the once-fawning coverage of the Times had "turned" on him. In truth, Chandler's paper just covered it straight down the middle. It was still a "Republican paper." They endorsed Nixon in 1962 and continued to generally support Republicans right up to the Reagan era, but not nearly as vociferously as before.

Chandler and his paper supported America. They never "turned" on the troops during the Vietnam War as so many other media outlets did, but they were not cheerleaders of Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara or William Westmoreland, either. The old Times would have called the war protestors at Berkeley and other college campuses Reds, as they referred to roustabouts, strikers and anarchists of the 1930s. Under Chandler, the paper would take an active role in Latino politics, even printing editorials by a writer named Ruben Salazar that could be considered radical. They were caught off guard by the Watts riots, but endeavored to understand it with a series of in-depth analyses.

Chandler was as much a businessman as a newspaperman. From the journalistic standpoint, he advocated fair reporting and opinion, perhaps slightly leaning to the right but never so obviously as to engender outright claims of bias. Perhaps his greatest contribution was in giving his writers and editors incredible freedom with little concern for cost. His newspaper printed long, analytical, in-depth pieces such as were normally found in a weekly or even monthly magazine like the New Yorker or The Economist. Many argued that fast-paced Los Angelenos were too rushed to read long essays spread over many pages, a thick daily paper packed with enormous volumes of information, and a Sunday paper that was nothing less than a "book," eventually reaching as many as 400 pages.

The choice of articles was astounding. Chandler routinely okayed stories that required reporters to travel to the four corners of the world, always in first class style, taking the time to research and write these in-depth pieces about any and all subjects that seemingly anybody thought might interest somebody. Articles about the environment, exotic animals, tiny sub-cultures, and all form of human interest were prominently featured without the slightest watering down of content or length. For writers, it was journalistic heaven.
He created many new sections. He hired great writers from competitors. His paper was called the "velvet coffin" because working there was so great nobody could be compelled to ever leave. It was the best place to practice their craft, to develop their journalistic chops.

Chandler created a newspaper that people would spend hours perusing. He was not a reader of books himself. He felt the Times could provide all the literary joy anybody needed. A businessman, he reasoned, would be motivated to rise hours early in order to give his newspaper a thorough read. A housewife could linger over its contents over the course of an entire morning of coffee, satisfied each day that she was as firmly informed of world events as any professor or media personality.

But Chandler was equally a businessman. He opened numerous Times offices, expanding the reach of the paper beyond the city-center to all of Southern California. He was always on top of the latest innovations in technology, printing presses, distribution methods, and every other apparatus of a paper. Norman Chandler's decision to have his son apprentice in every department of the paper in the 1950s paid off. It took.

Otis Chandler oversaw his paper's purchase of other newspapers and media outlets. Most – not all - were profitable and helped spur his company profits. In the election year of 1960, Chandler expanded his paper's Washington, D.C. bureau from three to 36 staffers. He inaugurated the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, competing directly with the Associated Press, United Press International, and the New York Times as a key disseminator of worldwide information. Under editor Nick Williams, the paper quickly expanded to 18 foreign news bureaus from Hong Kong to Moscow, from Jerusalem to what was still called Peking. They opened new offices in 12 U.S. cities.

Slowly, year by year in the 1960s, the Los Angeles Times changed, molded into the image of Otis Chandler. They improved, much of the improvement an effort to stay competitive

with the New York Times, who expanded into the West during the decade. A reporter named Dick Bergolz ruffled Richard Nixon's feathers during his 1962 campaign for Governor. Many of the reporters manning the paper's Washington bureau were Easterners, bought off for higher salaries from establishment papers. Many were Jewish in origin. A "battle" of sorts between L.A. main, still mostly conservative Chandler-type WASPs, existed. It symbolized the divide of the turbulent 1960s in a nutshell, some reporters and even editors growing their hair long in hippy style, others repulsed by it.

But the 1964 and 1968 Presidential elections exposed the new way of thinking and the family divide. In 1964 Otis Chandler and even some of the old line Chandlers openly opposed Barry Goldwater. He was thought to be too "extreme," his followers too "angry," much of this drama detailed in splendid style by David Halberstam's The Powers That Be, all remarkably similar to the modern Tea Party movement which prompts the idea that not only must man remember the past, and if failing to do so he is condemned to re-live it, but beyond that, history does not repeat, "it rhymes."

Norman Chandler was the doyen of the California Club, the old-line business fraternity in downtown Los Angeles that was as Right-wing as it gets. Many of the family were hardcore Right-wingers, members of the John Birch Society. But Norman preferred moderate New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to Goldwater. Otis liked neither Rockefeller nor Goldwater, although Lyndon Johnson, who replaced the slain JFK, did not enamor him.

Primary and convention coverage induced vociferous John Birch mail, demanding the paper return to its roots and back Goldwater. A compromise was made between Otis and Norman after long arguments. The paper supported Rockefeller in the lead-in to the Republican convention held at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, of all places. They added a small, unenthusiastic caveat: if Goldwater won the nomination, they would support him. They were a "Republican paper," but the Times they were a changin'.

In 1968 the rift widened. This time Otis Chandler genuinely liked the Democrat nominee, former Minnesota Senator and LBJ's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. Otis was a tacit Republican, moderate to liberal with conservative tendencies. A mixed bag, just as his city had become over the previous decade.

But Richard Nixon prevailed that year. In a 1980s movie about political consultants (Power, probably inspired by Halberstam's book), Gene Hackman references to Richard Gere the old ways, when the Los Angeles Times more or less made Richard Nixon. Indeed he was their "Frankenstein," a Kyle Palmer creation, their "boy" who, as Halberstam pointed out, by 1968 was not their "boy" anymore.

The main opposition to Nixon by this time came from Otis's mother, Buff Chandler. She no longer cared much for politics, consumed by her sponsorship of the arts and the building of cathedrals to promote her passions, principally the magnificent downtown Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  
Nixon turned her off. He was gauche, not quite fit for society. He told bad jokes, pretended to drink milk so his mother did not see him imbibing, then drank Bourbon on the sly. He was invited to the Chandlers' home, where he outlined his ambitious plan for the White House, only to have his own wife angrily interrupt him. If he wanted her opinion, she did not want to go through the aggravation again. Nixon all but ignored her. Buff despised him for that.

Still, there was hypocrisy in Buff's attitude. Nixon was never comfortable with high society. His biographers always highlighted his discomfort with Manhattan and Georgetown parties, because amidst these gatherings were too many Jews and liberals he disagreed with politically, but he was not comfortable even with San Marino-Pasadena conservatives of a "higher station." Buff was hypocritical in that she had hers, she married into the Chandler money, she was not as Theodore Roosevelt once said, "in the arena." Nixon was, naked and exposed.

In the 1960s Otis Chandler was not yet vested in the families' Chandis Securities, a financial apparatus that essentially kept them all rich for perpetuity through the newspaper and numerous business acquisitions. He still needed to tread lightly so as not to completely alienate himself from the other Chandlers, who were not happy with his winning a power struggle while still a mere "child," then taking the paper on a distinct turn towards the middle, which many of them viewed as the Left. He and Norman argued. Otis did not quite win, but they compromised. In 1968 they backed Nixon in the end, but when he ascended to the White House Otis wondered what hath he wrought.

The decade

For almost 200 years, the policy of this nation has been made under our Constitution by those leaders in the Congress and the White House elected by all of the people. If a vocal

minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this nation has no future as a free society.

\- President Richard Nixon's Silent Majority speech, 1969

John Kennedy's victory over Richard Nixon was the closest ever, and a monumental event in American history. It was captured in a book by Theodore White called The Making of the President, 1960. White followed that up with detailed exposes of each Presidential campaign into the 1970s.

Kennedy had been in the White House a couple of weeks in January of 1961. Richard Nixon was approached by Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley and a few others about becoming Commissioner of Baseball. He reluctantly declined. The job went to Ford C. Frick, who that year put an asterisk on Roger Maris's 61st home run.

Nixon returned to California. He joined a fancy downtown law firm on Wilshire Boulevard, for the first time making real money. He moved into a mansion atop Beverly Hills, but that year a terrible fire threatened his home while burning down those of his prominent movie star neighbors. He was shocked when Chandler's Times had the temerity to question his house loan. Nixon spent two years practicing law in L.A. while writing his memoirs, Six Crises, before a failed run for Governor in 1962 which had the effect of his moving to New York to work on Wall Street, the "fast track" as he called it.

On January 3, with Dwight Eisenhower still in office, the U.S. broke off relations with Cuba. Fidel Castro took over after a coup d'état on January 1, 1959. For two years the great question was whether he was a Communist or not. The Right hated him. The Left adopted him, inviting him to New York where he made a rambling speech and was given a celebrity reception by the Broadway crowd.

In April, a U.S.-sponsored Cuban exile invasion of Fidel Castro's imprisoned island failed. Even though the operation was originated under Dwight Eisenhower, enthusiastically endorsed by Richard Nixon, and was a creature of CIA director Allen Dulles, it was John Kennedy who took responsibility for its abject failure at the Bay of Pigs. JFK's unwillingness to use American air power to back up the invasion doomed it.

Shortly thereafter, a shaken Kennedy met Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. Khrushchev sized up the young playboy as a mere "boy," deciding to test him. His first step was to authorize the building of the Berlin Wall.

On April 11, the Soviets launched the first man, Yuri Gagarin into orbit. This kicked off a huge space race with the United States. Less than a month later, Navy aviator Alan Shepard, Jr. became the first American in space.

Los Angeles vs. San Francisco

1962 was one of those years that stand out in American history, like 1776, 1787, 1865, 1927, 1945, 1968, 1989 and 2001. Like 1927, 1962 was a year of culture and sports every bit as much as war or politics. It was a distinctly Los Angeles and California year in many respects. It had the effect of standing out as a year of unique nostalgia in the American psyche. Why 1962 more so than other years? Several reasons. It is often thought of as the last year of "innocence" before Kennedy's assassination in 1963, followed by the Vietnam War. It was also the year depicted by George Lucas in American Graffiti.

The year got off to a rousing start when John Glenn successfully circled the globe three times. On October 1, a fairly forgotten event occurred. Major General Edwin Walker was arrested for organizing opposition to the integration of the University of Mississippi. Lost to greater events of the Civil Right Movement – Alabama Governor George Wallace, the March on Washington, the Great Society, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – Walker's arrest was nevertheless part of a well-worn narrative of the era.

Based on an actual coup planned by right-wing businessmen to take over the government from President Roosevelt at the height of the Great Depression, Fletcher Knebel's novel Seven Days in May was made into a movie in 1963. The Walker incident apparently spurred its production. Walker was mentioned as a proto-type of the kind of demagogue who can stir a crowd into anarchy.

In October Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba. Ultimately the "other fellow just blinked," as Secretary of State of State Dean Rusk put it. But the Cuban Missile Crisis forced the U.S. to agree not to invade Cuba or try and kill Castro, which were openly its goals in the first two years of the JFK Administration. President Kennedy's actions were highly influenced by a 1962 book detailing the blunders leading to World War I, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August.

It was JFK's finest hour, allowing the Democrats to buck historical trends, blunting Republican gains in the 1962 mid-terms. This included the California Gubernatorial campaign between incumbent Democrat Edmund "Pat" Brown and Richard Nixon. One of the most contentious campaigns in history, it marked the first fissure in Southland voting trends and the editorial stance of the Los Angeles Times.

Greater Los Angeles was Nixon country. Nixon all but took his hometown for granted, but did not sweep the old precincts as he expected to. Orange County held, but L.A. swung towards Brown, who was wildly popular in his native Northern California.

It was a key moment of decision for Otis Chandler. The moderately conservative Republican was a Nixon man, but did not allow that to color his newspaper's coverage. Nixon felt betrayed. Seeing the powerful Times critical of Nixon, other media felt free to open up and target the former Vice President. The Cuban Missile Crisis swung the electorate towards JFK and by implication his party. In a close election Nixon lost. In his famed "last press conference" at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Nixon lashed out at the press, tacitly "retiring" from politics.

"You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore," he taunted the press.

If 1961 was not an "L.A. year," 1962 may have been its greatest. It was not just a great Los Angeles year in sports, but in the entire state of California. It was also a key year in the great Los Angeles-San Francisco rivalry. The two cities had battled each other in sports, politics and culture at least since the Owens Valley Aqueduct was completed in 1913, and certainly when USC emerged as a collegiate football power with Stanford and California, then overshadowing them when they began the Notre Dame series in 1926.

When UCLA took their place as USC's key rival beginning in the late 1930s, a sense of jealousy pervaded the northern schools. By the early 1960s, the L.A. schools were dominating Cal and Stanford.

Professionally, the San Francisco 49ers had great players, but the Los Angeles Rams had better teams. L.A. had pro basketball. San Francisco did not. The Dodgers came out west with greater reputation, and in four years on the West Coast still held that distinction.

By 1962, San Francisco was facing a major crisis of identity. They thought of themselves as being the more elegant, sophisticated city, but everything seemed to happen in L.A. San Francisco had Herb Caen and literature, but Los Angeles had Howard Hughes . . . and Jim Murray. San Francisco had beatniks. L.A. had beautiful women and the Sunset Strip. Who could compete with that?

But of all the comparisons in the "who is better?" argument between the two cities, perhaps the quality of the newspapers was the greatest disparity. Chandler effectively accomplished his task by 1962. The L.A. Times may not yet have won a poll asking what the best paper in the world was. The East Coast bias was still too prevalent, but in truth they were a vastly better paper than the Washington Post and able to compete on par with the New York Times. The New York Times was very dry. They lived by old journalistic standards, refusing to acquiesce to increasing reader demand for greater color and excitement. Chandler did not publish a scandal tabloid or a wild-headline Hearst-style paper, but he did understand the value of vivid photographs, human interest, and colorful prose, which by then was undoubtedly identified as the "West Coast style." Jim Murray epitomized it.

A real rag of a paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, burdened San Francisco. The Chronicle had several talented sportswriters, but the paper was riddled with errors, typos and unprofessional quality. They had three star writers, all of whom had talent but did not come without controversy.

Herb Caen was uniquely loved in the Bay Area, but his views were very questionable. He seemed to feel San Francisco was the only place worth living in. Naturally San Franciscans fell for this, but his hatred of L.A. bordered on the obsessive.

Charles McCabe and Art Hoppe were both wildly Left-wing. McCabe openly stated France was a greater nation than America. Hoppe was not yet at full stride, but by the end of the 1960s he wrote in his column he had finally come around to openly rooting for the North Vietnamese Communists over the U.S. This is a view that really needs no commentary in order to know what it is. The other paper, the San Francisco Examiner, was superior, but an afternoon daily with less power and influence. It was certainly not in the same league with the Times.

San Franciscans and Los Angelenos had endless barroom arguments. For L.A. fans, arguing the Dodgers over the Giants, USC and UCLA over Cal and Stanford, the beaches over the bay, the babes over the beatniks; none of these permeated the hardcore San Franciscan. But L.A. had a few aces up their sleeve when it came to bragging rights. They had Vin Scully. Even Giants fans were resigned to admitting Scully's greatness as a broadcaster. They had the Los Angeles Times. Nobody was so deluded as to argue the superiority of the Chronicle. They had Jim Murray, too. San Franciscans might counter with Herb Caen. Herb Caen was a notorious gossip. He did not care if what he wrote ruined somebody's life. Murray never had that mean edge to him. In the entire history of journalism, Caen was the single most provincial writer who ever lived. Murray was the least provincial. Caen could not carry Jim Murray's proverbial "dirty jock strap."

Murray took exception to the clap-trap from "Baghdad by the Bay," which was Caen's moniker for the City (they gave it caps) in those pre-Saddam Hussein days. In 1962 he wrote San Francisco was a "no host bar," criticizing the Giants for allowing their groundskeeper to turn the base paths at Candlestick Park into a "peat moss" pit so as to slow down L.A. speedster Maury Wills.

He mentioned Caen when he pointed out that Sports Illustrated put the knock on "Frisco," the most hated of all names out-of-towners give to the City, in an article called "Akron of the West." Joe David Brown wrote San Francisco was, "Not a big league town . . . Full of drunks . . . A citadel of intolerance . . . Vulgar and cheap . . ." Finally, in perhaps the most unkindest cut of all, he wrote the place was "not the lovely lady I had imagined but a vulgar old broad." San Francisco "leads the nation in suicides, mental disease, alcoholism."

Murray did not write that he necessarily agreed with Brown's assessment, but he did not entirely disagree. But of all Murray's keen observations in his long career, one of his keenest came when he wrote subconsciously San Francisco does not "want to win."

L.A. went for victory, with all its ugly, jarring connotations, as fervently as Howard Hughes trying to land a contract to build rocket boosters. San Francisco embellished the British tenet that, "No gentleman ever plays a game too well." When the City got the best player in baseball, Willie Mays, they rejected him at first. His great talent was almost too vulgar a display of excellence.

Charles McCabe openly wrote of the strange neurosis, stating that San Franciscans rejected ultimate victory as too jarring. Murray wrote that San Francisco has an "insurance against victory better than any Lloyd's can give him." In 1962, it certainly appeared that he was right. The Giants won one of the all-time difficult pennant races ever fought, defeating the Dodgers to capture the National League crown. But they and the City seemed happy to settle for that, when in fact the World Series still had to be played. Everybody appeared perfectly okay with merely making a good showing in an epic seven-game loss to the New York Yankees, a team and a city with no problem handling ultimate victory, in the World Series. Given a chance at redemption in 1963, the Dodgers dispatched the mighty Yankees in four straight in the Fall Classic. The Giants settled for "bridesmaid" status throughout the decade, never ascending to the mountaintop until 2010.

Murray, the East Coast native, seemed to put his pulse on the north-south vibe as well as anybody. He loved San Francisco; its ambience, its views, its architecture. He did not quite say it, but he could easily have said it was a great place if only for the people who lived there. Murray had his chances to move up the ladder in the writing game, and in so doing live in Boston, New York, D.C., Europe; the salons of international power and politics. He consciously chose to stay in L.A. because he loved L.A., dirty air, congested traffic, cultural plasticity and all. He was L.A. and L.A. was Murray. He instinctively defended it and refused to concede its rival city was superior. He also realized that Los Angeles was now one of the salons of international power and politics, whether they set out to be or not. It was inevitable and already a given by 1962.

Murray keenly observed the L.A.-San Francisco dynamic over the years. The protest, hippy and gay rights movements of the 1960s did nothing to advance San Francisco's place in the pantheon of great cities. L.A., however, passed Chicago and by 1975 probably even New York as the American and, by extension, global metropolis. It produced two Republican Presidents who were re-elected in landslides. It was the home of political movements that shook the world. Eventually their place faded and San Francisco, only after 49ers symbolically delivered multiple Super Bowl titles in the 1980s, became a power base politically themselves. Murray, the Nixon man, a moderate Republican, was not pre-disposed to identify with the Summer of Love, the "sexual revolution," and certainly not to the turning of the Berkeley campus into the de facto staging grounds of American Communism.

End of innocence

By 1963, Kennedy was wildly popular, a shoe-in for re-election in 1964. He dealt with a steelworkers' strike and lowered tax rates, expanding the economy. He visited Berlin, the middle of Cold War tensions. Cheered by over a million freedom-loving Germans in a divided city, he gave one of his most famous speeches, declaring "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner"), a statement of solidarity in the West that became a touch phrase of the "long twi-light struggle" he said epitomized the decades-long battle for supremacy with the Soviets.

But in the fall things unraveled. The largely Buddhist South Vietnamese were led by French-educated Catholics. In a plan described in detail by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest, the CIA either orchestrated, sponsored, or at the very least stood by and allowed a coup d'état in which President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated. JFK's man, General Nguyen Van Thieu, was installed as leader of South Vietnam. Kennedy possibly contemplated the possibility that he was in over his head at the least, having allowed a fellow Christian to be murdered in favored of a Buddhist, with all attendant spiritual disfavor thus entailed. He was said to have blanched when he heard it described by Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.

21 days later he, too, was murdered in Dallas. The war was allowed to continue under Lyndon Johnson, with disastrous consequences. The Shakespearean "what if?" nature of these events is mind-boggling.

1964 was a dividing line in American history. Between civil rights and Vietnam, it represented the beginning of what the decade became: the greatest period of change, within the shortest period of time, in history. David Halberstam chose the year for his book October 1964. In that tome, he used the World Series between the Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals as metaphors for that change. The Cardinals were viewed as the "Democrats," a winning coalition of whites, blacks and Latinos. The Yankees were the old school "GOP," country club Republicans, white, corporate, at the end of their string.

President Johnson made a core decision. Long the leader of the Democrats, the former Senate Majority Leader chafed under Kennedy for three years. Now he was determined to make it his Presidency. He needed to win on his own, and to win big. He put one of the all-time political coalitions together. On the one hand, the Jim Crow South was still all Democrat, but the Texan Johnson triangulated by proposing major civil rights legislation. He rode the legacy of Kennedy for all it was worth. Finally, he decided to put an end once and for all to the Democrats' "soft on Communism" label, a holdover from McCarthyism.

If there was any historical accuracy to the notion that JFK planned to pull U.S. forces out of Vietnam, those plans had zero chance of being enacted under Kennedy or any other President after the 1963 CIA-sponsored coup d'état that killed Diem. LBJ went full steam ahead, orchestrating a reason to begin bombing the North Vietnamese Communists at the Gulf of Tonkin in August. Even Republican opponent Barry Goldwater supported LBJ. The war was on in full force.

Despite his provocative military moves, it was LBJ who managed to paint Goldwater as the "extremist" and warmonger. A controversial TV ad showed a little girl picking daisies in a field when a nuclear bomb explodes in the skies above her, apparently the future if Goldwater were to be elected. Goldwater even accepted the "extremist" label, stating that to be extreme in the pursuit of liberty was a noble cause. His supporters said, "In your hearts you know he's right," but LBJ's people responded, "In your guts you know he's nuts."

Johnson destroyed Goldwater in one of the biggest landslides in history. The Democrats swept the Republicans at every end of the political spectrum. The day after the 1964 elections, the Republican were as beaten down as any political party in American history. The Democrats could be forgiven for hubris, a sense that they were the "winners of the 20th Century," for lack of a better term. They seemingly had no fault lines, no weakness. They consolidated every region and aspect of electoral politics. If the Great Society would succeed and America's Hitler-conquering forces triumphant as expected in Vietnam, they would be so powerful the Republicans might not even be a viable party by 1968 or 1972.

But in the bowels of defeat emerged small stirrings of a movement. Goldwater was the first openly conservative Republican Presidential candidate. He began a Conservative Revolution that would grow over the next decades. Its leader would not be Goldwater or even Richard Nixon, but an out-of-work actor who made "the Speech" in favor of Goldwater. Ronald Reagan was given air time in a Los Angeles studio a week or so before Election Day. It was an act of Quixote-esque dimensions, a tilting at windmills. Goldwater had no chance and Reagan was given freedom to say what he wanted. "The Speech" was hardly about Goldwater, but about a point of view Reagan rode to victory in Sacramento two years later, in Washington 16 years later.

The Warren Commission released its report in 1964, stating that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering Kennedy. In the U.S.S.R, Nikita Khrushchev was stripped of all his power. He lost face in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but history records his acquiescing to Kennedy's blockade may have saved the word from a nuclear war. China, now split from the Soviets, exploded their first nuclear weapon. British Labor leader Harold Wilson was elected Prime Minister in the wake of a sex scandal involving a prostitute and a Soviet spy.

In 1965, the U.S. escalated involvement in Vietnam. The public solidly supported Johnson. His Great Society was enacted as Federal legislation, with sweeping reforms of minority voting rights, integration, and health care. LBJ was prescient in his observation of it all when he turned to aide Bill Moyers, telling him signing the legislation meant handing the South to the Republicans for 40 years.

One of the great lessons of politics was learned in 1966. Two years after being left for dead, the Republicans swept to huge gains in the U.S. Congress and state houses. Richard Nixon, now a Wall Street attorney on a corporate salary with an expense account, traveled the nation campaigning on behalf of his party, building huge chits for 1968. The GOP's victory was in large measure a response to the Left. The war took a turn for the worse. Privately, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara knew it. Publicly, General William Westmoreland told the nation we were winning.

Running largely on a promise to clean up the anti-war riots at Berkeley, the reactionary Republican Ronald Reagan "moved into national prominence," according to a November 9 L.A. Times story by Richard Bergholz. Washington bureau chief Robert Donovan predicted the 1966 victory portended Presidential success in 1968, listing Reagan, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and Richard Nixon as leading candidates. The Times headlines screamed, in an article by Lawrence Burd, the Democrats lost up to an incredible 45 House seats. The paper's reach was exhibited by virtue of an article by a staff writer in Boston, Tom Foley, writing of Massachusetts's election of "Negro Republican" Edward Brooke.

Time magazine and the national media shifted focus from civil rights to war opposition. Time enraged Christian America with a glaring cover story asking, "Is God Dead!" The magazine envisioned by Harry Luce! John Lennon of The Beatles further enraged the religious when he declared he and his band "more popular" than Jesus Christ. All the "Is God Dead?" talk played a role in a movie a couple years later, Rosemary's Baby about Satan's spawn featuring one character screaming, "God is dead!" On Broadway, Sir Lawrence Olivier is said to have given the "greatest performance of all time," portraying Shakespeare's Othello.

Cassius Clay rejected Jesus Christ in favor of Islam, changed his named to Muhammad Ali, and to infuriate the Right more, refused to join the Army after being drafted.

"Ain't no Viet Cong never called me n----r," he exclaimed.

If "the '60s" started not in 1960 but on November 22, 1963, then its "high" point of a sort was May-August, 1967 at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. That was when school let out and seemingly every wayward child from Maine to Marin County descended on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets in the City. It was the Summer of Love. Writers like Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe found it was the story of a generation. The rock music revolution of England and the beach vibes of California were joined by a new wave of bands, an explosion of artistic expression not seen since the Renaissance. The Doors, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and dozens of others changed the world, speaking for a generation.

Campuses exploded in protest against the Vietnam War, now a nightly TV event featuring boys returning in body bags. The music, the free sex, the drugs, and the protest had the greatest, fastest, most jarring influence of change on the world perhaps ever seen, at least in such a short period of time. To the older generation, it indeed was very jarring. All their longest-held traditions and ideas about God and patriotism were threatened, questioned. It reached into the world of sports.

America's view of itself took a further blow when the first great tragedy hit the space program. Gus Grissom and Edward White were killed in a capsule fire. In the Middle East, fueled by Soviet support, Egypt planned to invade Israel. The Israelis attacked before they could. In a lightning-fast three-day battle they destroyed General Gamel Abdel Nasser's Army.

Then came 1968. Forget 1962, 1964 or 1967. 1968 made 1962 seem like ancient history. Never had the passage of a mere six years been marked by such a chasm. The promise, the horror and the sensual excitement of the entire decade could be wrapped up in the terrible, wonderful year that was 1968.

Most of the love found at Golden Gate Park in 1967 was now screaming bloody murder across the bay at Berkeley in 1968. It was a year of riots, tear gas and hatred. Events started early, in January when the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive. American forces repelled the attacks, achieving victory. The problem was the American media reported it as a defeat. When Walter Cronkite determined the war was a lost cause, Johnson knew he had lost middle America. In March he shocked the nation, announcing he was not running for re-election. That set off a scramble for the Democrat nomination.

Robert F. Kennedy took the anti-war mantel and was well on his way to capturing the nomination. In a further twist to the great "what if?" question of Nixon having the 1960 election stolen from him, Kennedy very likely would have won the 1968 Presidential election, but in June he was killed at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles by Sirhan Sirhan.

As if divined by forces of judgment, it was in Chicago, where Mayor Daley allegedly stole enough votes to give the Democrats the vote over Nixon in 1960, that his policies led to riots probably giving Richard Nixon the vote over his party in 1968.

Nixon easily dispatched all other Republican contenders, then tapping into the Silent Majority to beat Hubert Humphrey for the White House. Joe McGinnis wrote his classic The Selling of the President 1968, explaining how politics were now glorified advertising campaigns; not surprising since so many of Nixon's people worked at J. Walter Thompson. Many of Nixon's TV spots were highly orchestrated by Roger Aisles, who later ran Fox News. The Kennedy-Nixon drama was not over yet, its remnants to again come to the fore four years later.

The Olympics became very political at Mexico City. After Mexican students rioted in the streets, American speedsters John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised black-gloved fists to express "black power" during the playing of the National Anthem. Black stars like Lew Alcindor were urged by sociologist Harry Edwards to boycott the Games.

The last year of the decade did not disappoint, politically, athletically or culturally. It was another barnburner, with just a touch of hope that things might get better. Nationally, one of the great, incongruous acts in world history occurred. America landed on the moon. The first man to set foot upon the lunar surface Neil Armstrong. The moon landing most likely ranks as the single greatest achievement in world history. Considering that the first flight occurred a mere 66 years earlier, and the first jet flight a mere 25 years before, it was for all practical purposes accomplishing the impossible. President Johnson fostered the space race, declared by President Kennedy eight years prior. Now the U.S officially won it.

However, enthusiasm for the achievement was tempered by the fact the Vietnam War still raged with no end in sight. Nixon took over declaring a "secret plan," but if he felt he and then-NSC advisor Henry Kissinger could buffalo the Communists with fancy diplomacy, he was mistaken. They were hard bargainers. Their people, for reasons that remain a mystery really, were willing to endure any hardship on behalf of . . . Communism!? It was as if they were mesmerized by a desire to die so they would have the right to be murdered.

In the early evening of Friday, August 8, actor Steve McQueen stopped at a restaurant on Beverly Boulevard called El Coyote. A happening Mexican spot, it was jumping. McQueen was planning to attend a party in the hills, but never made it. He met a girl at the El Coyote bar, hit it off with her, and took her home. For that reason, he was not at the rented Benedict Canyon home of actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski. The Charles Manson family was. Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Hollywood hair stylist Jay Sebring, and Polish director Voityck Frokowski were there, too. They were slaughtered. Shortly thereafter, the Mansons went to the Los Feliz home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, killing them in similar manner. For months, the city was frozen with fear. Finally, the case was cracked, Manson and his family arrested, brought to trial, and convicted. While the Manson case cast a dark shadow over L.A., that same month Woodstock cast . . . something else on a farm town in rural upstate New York.

Ronald Reagan was a successful, albeit controversial Governor. Goldwater conservatism was on the ascendancy, largely a reaction to changes the Silent Majority found horrifying: long hair, hippies, dirty kids, free love, abortion, drug excess, immorality, homosexuality, anti-Americanism, unpatriotic war protesters, draft dodgers, rejection of Christianity, and a host of other New Age phenomena. Outside of a few Beatnik poetry readings by Allen Ginsberg in San Francisco's North Beach a mere decade before, these were now phenomenons, a zeitgeist of world culture. Out of this grew violent, radical elements in the form of the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Zebra killers, and in Europe the Meider-Bahnhof Complex. All of these were associated, either vaguely or specifically, with the Left, liberalism and the Democrat Party. The Republicans played it for all it was worth. The question was whether they could handle the reigns of power being handed them as the world entered the 1970s.

Turmoil

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

\- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington Mall, 1963

Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem "White Man's Burden" to "justify" America's military incursions into Cuba and the Philippines. A few years later, Mark Twain remarked, "What about the brown man's burden?" The history of interaction between white people and non-white people is a history of conflict. The most recent history concerns colonization and expansion of the British Empire and what must now be called the American Empire.

The British occupied much of Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, and points in between. The Americans first engaged in wars with Mexicans and Indians, then set forth on the de facto colonization of Cuba, the Philippines, China, Hawaii, and points in between. Most of the white European countries, however, have long histories of interaction with the "native lands." The Roman Empire. The Spanish Conquest. The Crusades. For a couple thousand years, armed whites have ventured into the land of the non-whites and done some serious damage. At this point, a very large portion of the non-white world hates the whites because of it.

The relationship of whites to non-whites is often characterized as being one in which the non-whites are disproportionately hurt, enslaved, exploited and destroyed by the whites. There is no question that in adding up the "score," whites have done far more damage to non-whites than vice versa.

The question, which is not asked without controversy, is whether the non-whites are better or worse off for having dealt with the whites. Any blanket "excuse" for white exploitation, prejudice and violence is easily dismissed as immorality. On the other hand, we live in a world shaped by Western Civilization or "Dead White Males" as some like to say, with a little bit of derision.

The great principles of Western Civilization have been left to roll around in messy confluence with the great evils of Western Civilization. Either way, Western Civilization has shaped the world, for the most part. Western Civilization is not the only civilization. The ancient world includes the antiquities of the Middle East and the philosophies of the Far East and Near East. Europe has given us its fair share of major stinkers. The French Revolution led to a century of revolution, eventually resulting in the Nazis and the Communists. Nevertheless, the contributions of Western Civilization far outweigh the evils.

The age-old question again is asked. Are non-whites better off, or worse off, on the whole, for having been forced to co-exist with the white world? Are the ancestors of slaves better or worse off for having had their ancestors brought to America? These questions have an inherent controversy attached to them, because it forces one to address whether there was justification in what happened. Of course, there is no sense of moral relativism that can ever be used to give credence to slavery or any other evil. But just as American involvement with brutal dictators who opposed Communism must be viewed under the larger picture, so too is the convoluted, complicated relationship of whites and non-whites.

Today, Liberia is a country in West Africa that is rife with genocidal violence. Freed American slaves, under the dictates of President James Monroe, founded this country. The capital of Liberia, Monrovia, is named after him. Are the descendants of these slaves, who barely survive the day-to-day struggle against AIDS, war, anarchy, disease and evil, better off than descendants of slaves living in, say, Detroit, Michigan?

The black-white relationship in the U.S. is more complicated than in other nations. Great Britain, for instance, is so old that one simply accepts their past misdeeds. There is too much history to try to "explain" it. But America was founded on these enormous principles of goodwill and love for our fellow man. The contrast with treatment towards blacks is something that we do try to come to grips with. The beauty of America is that we do not sweep our problems and secrets under the rug.

The question goes back to our founding, when the Constitution was written in light of the "great compromise" between the Southern and Northern states. It is easy to make the argument that the ideals of this nation are counterfeit since slavery was allowed. A defense of these actions leads one to conclusions that the "victim class" would prefer to avoid. Despite everything, the principles of freedom prevailed. The Founders did indeed allow slavery, but they had a plan to end it. The idea was to stop importing slaves from Africa. Throughout history, countries that stopped importing slaves saw slave populations die out over a few generations. The Founders thought this would happen in America.

After the importation stopped, however, an odd thing happened. Slave populations grew. They kept growing exponentially. Eventually, so many slaves had been born in the South that the question of slavery became the overriding dispute in this country. The alarming truth is that the slave populations grew because American slave owners fed them well, had adequate housing, allow for marriage and families. They were allowed to worship, and lived generally healthy lives. They were slaves, but not like any other slaves in any other countries. The inability to pin down all white people as devils in the issue of slavery and civil rights ultimately leads to the success of the civil rights struggle.

American laws enacted by Americans "ended" slavery. There is a sense of patriotism to this fact. America is where slavery came to die. A man can still visit a massage parlor in most U.S. cities and find some poor girl from Vietnam, Hong Kong or the Philippines, who is in some kind of bondage, probably "paying off" her handlers by working in the sex trade for five years to "earn" her freedom. The Russian Mafia has specialized in this practice, too, throughout the old East Bloc. Still, it is correct to point out that the kind of actual slavery that was practiced in the Old South is no more.

The death of Abe Lincoln is particularly tragic because, had he lived, blacks might have been allowed real freedom, instead of being sentenced to another 100 years of de facto slavery. Many blacks in the South more than likely lived worse after the Civil War than they had when they were property. The Andrew Johnson and U.S. Grant Administrations were rife with corruption and ineptitude. Reconstruction, which had started with such high hopes, ended in the 1870s an abysmal failure. The South found themselves more resentful than ever. The easy scapegoats for their hatred were the poor blacks living within their midst. It was a recipe for disaster.

Maybe, had Lincoln presided over the first four years of Reconstruction, he would have demonstrated enough leadership to enact a real peace. Maybe he would have failed, and his legacy would have suffered because of it. Either way, what did come out of it was something called "Jim Crow."

The term originated in a song performed by Daddy Rice, a white minstrel show entertainer in the 1830s. Rice covered his face with charcoal to resemble a black man, and then sang and danced a routine in caricature of a silly black person. He called the character Jim Crow. By the 1850s, this Jim Crow character was a popular depiction of black inferiority.

There is no clear-cut explanation as to why this term was eventually used to refer to "laws" used to keep black people segregated. What is clear is that the laws were in place and used to subordinate blacks to the dictates of whites. Segregation took a clear turn immediately after the Civil War. Both whites and blacks instituted it. "Carpet bagging" whites did come to the South, "mixing" with Northern blacks. The populace quickly scorned this practice. Whites had no desire to share their lives with blacks. Blacks were not comfortable making any attempt to mix with whites.

The former slaves established their own churches and schools. Black Codes enacted to legally impose discrimination were short-lived. The Federal government declared these "laws" illegal. The passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, along with the two Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, and various Enforcement Acts of the early 1870s, curtailed the ability of Southern whites to formally deprive blacks of their civil rights.

For a period of time, African-Americans made progress in building their own institutions, passing civil rights laws. They elected officials to public office. Secret organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were created as a backlash. The result was brutalization and terror. Federal attempts to stop it were weak, in part because they feared starting a "second Civil War."

In 1877, Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction, essentially abandoning Southern blacks. This was not the Republican Party's finest hour. In the 1880s, mob lynchings, a brutal prison system, and chain gangs were imposed upon the black population.

Blacks were required to sit in "the Jim Crow Car," even if they had bought first-class train tickets. Miscegenation laws banning interracial marriages were passed, although violence would likely meet people who dared such a thing long before they faced a court of law. The situation in the South began to take on more than just a "backlash" character. It had started as revenge for losing the Civil War and hatred for all things having to do with the Union. By the late 1880s, however, a disturbing religious character had seeped into the South. The concept of "white superiority" became more prevalent. Many felt it was a "sacred duty" of sorts to "save" the white race from the blacks. Mixing threatened the very survival of the superior white race, according to this logic. Southern states passed suffrage laws and poll taxes. Half the blacks of Georgia and South Carolina voted in 1880. Almost none could vote by 1888. Ballots were stolen, misdirected or simply not counted.

Mississippi disenfranchised black males through literacy tests, poll taxes, and "white primaries." Actual laws replaced fraud and force. By 1910, the entire former Confederacy had adopted these laws. During slavery, blacks and whites frequently co-mingled, but now social contact became virtually non-existent. The result was total lack of understanding on both sides for the other. There was no empathy. For instance, the practice of white nurses volunteering to deliver children or tend to the sick in the black populations was outlawed.

Lower-class whites, who at one time had identified with blacks, now saw them as threats for what was left of society. They wanted to wrest political power from merchants and large landowners who controlled the vote of their indebted black tenants by taking away black suffrage. As time went on, a new problem emerged. Blacks born after slavery were referred to as "uppity" because they wanted full rights as Americans. More and more blacks learned how to read, and by reading the Constitution and related material, they came to realize they were being illegally discriminated against.

The religious context of "protecting" the white race was matched by a pseudo-science called eugenics, which used empirical evidence showing black inferiority. With the Federal government again threatening to intervene, the South legally ended suffrage for blacks to keep Washington out of their affairs. The violence would also abate some what. Some blacks were willing to sacrifice their right to vote in return for an end to terror.

Sharecropping left most blacks dependent upon planter-landlords and merchant suppliers. Any attempts at protest brought the threat of lynch mobs. Banks, merchants, and landlords made it institutionally impossible for impoverished, illiterate blacks to confront Jim Crow.

The Supreme Court sanctioned segregation by upholding the "separate but equal" clause of state laws in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It was the second time the Supremes had gotten it wrong. The Dred Scott case prior to the Civil War had sanctioned the view of slaves as legal property in certain states. The Federal government failed to enact anti-lynching laws.

By the 20th Century, blacks and private Northern white groups had started black colleges. Whites in the South had refused to build black public high schools until the 20th Century. Education became the only avenue for blacks. Their literacy nearly doubled from 1880 to 1930, rising from less than 45 percent to 77 percent. By 1910, segregated black institutions enabled a small, middle class of prosperous black participants who lived "behind the veil," in the words of the black intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. Southern blacks adopted appeasement tactics called "dissembling," or a psychological ploy that manifested itself as shuffling, feigning irresponsibility, and "turning the other cheek." African-Americans endured words such as "boy," "girl," "uncle," "auntie," and "n----r."

African-Americans resisted by mocking whites in song, jokes, and stories, called "putting on the man, " or playing Sambo to manipulate white masters and alleviate suffering. The result was mixed. Whites were too smart to be fooled by the mockery, which simply inflamed their anger more. But the worst part was that in playing, or actually being, the stereotype, blacks found that whites came to expect this docility. In later years, when the Civil Rights Movement picked up steam, the contrast between the Sambo caricature and serious petition became a culture shock for whites they could not handle.

Literature and film of the period immortalized characters like Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, Jim Crow and "Old Black Joe." D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) depicted elected black Reconstruction Congressmen as ape-characters eating bananas on the House floor. Black film actors were cast as lazy, submissive, and docile.

Amid the disturbing realities of life under Jim Crow were acts of resistance. 4,000 African-Americans were said to be lynched, mutilated and burned alive from 1882 to 1968, mostly for challenging or breaking Jim Crow laws.

Owning a prosperous grocery store could make blacks stand out, therefore incurring white wrath. Prosperous blacks took to living in unpainted houses and maintaining "run-down" and unpainted businesses, avoiding new carriages and automobiles, so as to stay unnoticed. Black newspaper editors, church leaders, and civil rights' advocates were especially vulnerable.

By 1905, the debate on how to deal with Jim Crow was between the followers of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. du Bois. Washington was born in slavery. He advocated segregation, farming and community support, choosing to "lay low" in order to avoid violent confrontation that he knew blacks would not win. He helped form the Tuskegee Institute, and discovered that there was a great deal of white goodwill and philanthropy. He chose not to antagonize his white sympathizers, realizing that his cause would never be won unless he had the backing of enough whites. He preached training in the arts of agriculture and teaching. Economic security, Washington said, had to be achieved before any other freedoms were possible.

Du Bois was a Harvard-educated, New England-born intellectual who said Washington was an appeaser. Du Bois insisted that Constitutional rights of citizenry come first, and that a talented elite of black Americans would lead the rest, making the fundamental decisions for the masses.

Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter founded the Niagara Movement, advocating activism over gradualism. The Niagara Movement eventually became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an interracial organization that emerged in 1909. In the 1920s, the NAACP filed numerous lawsuits and lobbied Congress to pass Federal anti-lynching laws. The nationwide laws never came to fruition, but the media exposure reduced the practice.

The philosophical divide between Washington-Du Bois also led to a disturbing trend in which "light skinned" blacks were favored by their own community over "African" blacks. Most of the black intellectuals had a great deal of white blood in them. They effected white hairstyles, called "conking." This was the practice of "straightening" the natural kinky hair of Africans into the long styles of Caucasians.

In the 1930s, the NAACP, under Walter White and Charles Hamilton Houston, challenged segregation and disenfranchisement in the United States Supreme Court. This was the genesis for the Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court ruling of 1954. It was a landmark case reversing the Court's support for the "separate but equal" doctrine, and opened the floodgates for the Civil Rights Movement

Organizations like the National Urban League, the National Negro Congress, and the Communist Party all were prominent in the Civil Rights Movement. Communists, seeing racial inequality as a niche with which to gain a toehold in American society, defended the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930s and formed an off-shoot called the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. The Scottsboro case involved the trumped up convictions of nine black youths falsely accused of assaulting two white women. Rural African-Americans joined the Socialist Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.

New musical forms of ragtime, jazz and blues were a reaction to repression. Jazz, which adapted African and plantation-based rhythms to European harmony, was a huge success with white audiences. It did as much to bring races together as any social factor. It defied old stereotypes of the "coon songs" and minstrel shows. New Orleans in the South and Harlem in the North became centers of black cultural experience. When the music was exported to Paris, it found enthusiastic acceptance there, too.

Sports became the other great avenue for black success. In the West, black athletes played side-by-side white teammates. The University of Southern California is a football power with one of the longest traditions in the nation. Their very first All-American was a black player, Brice Taylor in 1926. Negro Leagues were formed in baseball, and eventually all-star exhibitions were played between the Negro and Major Leagues, with the black teams faring at least on an equal footing, if not better.

Negro League barnstorming teams are responsible for the popularity of baseball in Latin America, where they played in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and other countries. Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo recruited Negro League all-stars to play for his national team in the 1930s, with the warning that they had better win "or else." Soldiers brandishing weapons hammered the point home. The team went undefeated.

In 1936, an Ohio State track star named Jesse Owens put on the greatest display heretofore seen in the Olympics, defying Adolf Hitler and the Nazis who hosted the Games. Boxing had always been a natural road for black athletic success, with mixed social results. Around the turn of the century, the greatest heavyweight boxer in the world was a black man named Jack Johnson. Johnson, however, was ahead of his time. He flaunted his money and fame, openly sleeping with white women. This infuriated white audiences, who howled for his come-uppance, which he defied by egging them on while defeating all challengers. Eventually, it caught up with him. Authorities used the Mann Act to drag him down. This law made it illegal to bring a woman, not ones' wife, across state lines for "immoral purposes." Inherit in the charges was the assumption that any white woman in Johnson's company had to be "immoral." Johnson set black-white relations back by turning whites against his race, reinforcing the attitude that blacks could not handle money or freedom.

Joe Louis was a great champion who in the 1930s fought the German champion Max Schmeling twice. Schmeling defeated Louis the first time, which was a big propaganda coup for Hitler. In the re-match Louis floored him. This was a big moment, because many white Americans rooted for the German, but Louis's defeat of him the second time helped bring the country together, recognizing the threat of the Nazis and the theories of racial superiority.

After World War II, many changes were in the offing. The biggest came when Jackie Robinson crossed baseball's color barrier. Robinson's success on the field and greatness as a man off it were of vital importance in the struggle.

Black protest literature reached full expression in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. "New Negro" poetry and literature emphasized self-respect and defiance. World Wars I and II cut off European immigration, creating a labor shortage and opportunity for blacks in the North. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland had huge increases in the black populations because of the factories. On the West Coast, Oakland and Los Angeles saw migrations of blacks to work in shipyards. They took advantage of less severe attitudes. The North was not the "promised land." Whites resisted the blacks, and race riots erupted in East St. Louis, Houston, Chicago, Tulsa, and many other places.

The NAACP and the National Urban League worked towards integration, but the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League took a different approach. Led by Marcus Garvey, they advocated self-help and black autonomy, which became the "back to Africa" movement. The movement did not materialize because many blacks came to realize that despite racism, America still offered the best opportunity in the world. U.S. laws, the courts and political system, the free press, economic opportunities, and a wide range of social factors combined to lead folks to understand that within the framework of America lay their best hopes.

Many blacks served as soldiers in the two great wars of the first half of the century. This experience had a two-fold effect. On the one hand, they were repulsed by further racism in the Armed Forces, reinforcing their desires to get out of the South upon discharge. On the other, they were exposed to American values, saw the need to defend Democracy, and in comparing the U.S. with her enemies, namely Germany and Japan, the realization that the U.S. was the greatest country in the world strengthened resolve to achieve social goals. At the end of the day, America was too great for social injustice to overcome it. We live in a world in which people of every color, nationality and religion comes here. Almost nobody ever leaves here.

African-American leader A. Philip Randolph had threatened in 1941 to lead 50,000 blacks in a non-violent "March on Washington D.C." to protest segregation in the military. President Franklin Roosevelt had already gained popularity with blacks by creating "relief" during the Depression. Blacks were astounded to find that they could receive checks from the Federal government for not working. Many found panacea in the Democrat Party as a result. Eleanor Roosevelt was a passionate advocate for civil rights. African-American voter registration rose from 150,000 in 1940 to more than a million by 1952.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, stepped onto a city bus after spending a long day working as a seamstress. She took an empty seat in the "white" section, but the front filled up. The white driver then told Parks to relinquish her seat and move to the back of the bus. She said no. Rosa was arrested and put in jail. The act inspired the Montgomery bus boycott, and pointed out a truth about race relations. Whites were happy to take black's money, but "reserved the right to refuse" them service if the circumstances did not suit them. The Montgomery bus company made a significant portion of its income from black riders. The blacks realized that economic protest was a powerful tool. It was a successful non-violent protest, received national publicity, lasted a year, and ended with a Supreme Court declaration that bus segregation was un-Constitutional.

A new activism, now known as the Civil Rights Movement, also was called the "Second Reconstruction" because it completed Congressional action embodied in the 14th and 15th Amendments, passed in the decade after the Civil War. This movement also coincided with the fall of the British Empire. It drew inspiration from the de-colonization of non-white nations throughout the world. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had decided to pattern the movement on the non-violent tactics espoused by Mahatma Gandhi.

With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legalized segregation and the disenfranchisement of African-Americans came to an end. The improvements made in society since then have been so drastic that less than 20 percent of modern college students even know what "Jim Crow" means, associating it with a "vague notion" that it once had something to do with segregation, which to young people today is simply ancient history. Unfortunately, the enormous changes have left many young blacks ignorant of the sacrifices made by their elders.

American Gandhi: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

He was born on Tuesday, January 15, 1929 at the family home in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the first son and second child born to the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., and Alberta Williams King. His paternal grandparents were sharecroppers in Stockbridge, Georgia.

Martin attended Atlanta public schools and advanced to Morehouse College, one of the leading black colleges, at the age of 15. He graduated from Morehouse with a B.A. degree in sociology in 1948, and studied at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania. He studied the Indian independence movement under Mahatma Gandhi

"Non-violence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation," he said of it.

He was elected president of the senior class and delivered the valedictory address. King won the Pearl Plafker Award for the most outstanding student; and received the J. Lewis Crozer fellowship for graduate study at a university of his choice. He was awarded a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer in 1951.

King began doctoral studies in systematic theology at Boston University, and studied at Harvard, earning his Ph.D. in 1955. Dr. King married Coretta Scott in 1953. Four children were born of the union.

He had entered the Christian ministry and was ordained in 1948 at age 19. He maintained pastorships at several churches in the succeeding years. In 1959, he resigned and to moved to Atlanta to direct the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. For the next eight years, until his death, he co-pastored with his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church and was President of the SCLC.

After Rosa Parks started the Montgomery Bus Boycott from 1955 to 1956, Dr. King picked up where she had left off. He was arrested 30 times for his participation in civil rights activities. By 1960, King was a national figure who figured prominently in the Nixon-Kennedy election. Aside from Watergate, Nixon's greatest political mistake may have been failing to intervene in King's release from jail (King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" ranks among the important American documents).

Kennedy did, and the black vote, fairly evenly split between the two, went solidly to the Democrat. King was named Time's "Man of the Year " for 1963. That was the year he led the famous "March on Washington" and made his "I have a dream" speech. That speech is one of the most quoted in history. Ironically his language about judging "not by the color of their skin" but by the "content of their character" has become the cornerstone of conservative opposition to affirmative action. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He was, at 35, the youngest man, the second American, and the third black man to be awarded the Nobel.

Dr. King operated by a concept of somebodiness, which was meant to give every black and poor person the understanding that their lives meant something. It was the purest form of Christian message, the opposite of Communism. It separated itself from politics and compromise. King knew that, in order to succeed, he would have to reach a substantial portion of white America. While he was an international figure, King did not fall into the trap of celebrity. He very easily could have cashed in on his celebrity status in exchange for money and fame.

He realized that he lived in a great country and was determined to see America live up to its creed. The laws and traditions of freedom for his people were set in place. The most important work had already been set in motion by the Founding Fathers, in writing a Constitution just waiting for full ratification. Abe Lincoln had already led this country through a devastating Civil War to bring freedom to his people. Dr. King could have gone on an end run, choosing to use liberal political and foreign media outlets to make his points, leaving his people to fight in the trenches. Instead, King took his fight straight into the heart of the Deep South. He went face-to-face with the very people whose hearts and minds had to be changed in order for his dream to be fulfilled. It was an act of courage that ranks with anything in American history. King was in danger all the time, and he knew it. He never flinched.

He advocated the message of Christ, the most beautiful and irresistible word in human history. He loved his "enemies." The hatred of Southern bigots could be turned into love by Christ's message, he said. The Christian theme played a huge part in the conversion of millions of whites to King's cause. The very white racists who spurned black freedom often were Baptists who went to church on Sundays themselves. They read the Bible, and had to face themselves and their consciences. In their hearts, one by one and by the millions, they had to admit that what was happening to blacks was dead wrong. King did not use the rhetoric of guilt to make his points. He used the language and examples of Christ. It worked.

What made King truly great, and what brought millions of whites to him, was his use of Gandhi's technique of non-violence. By the mid-1960s, radical elements had erupted in black America. The Black Panthers on the West Coast, the black Muslims on the East Coast, and in between fiery speakers like Stokeley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver ("Violence is as American as apple pie") were advocating virtual race war or self-imposed segregation. None of these ideas appeared very optimistic. King had faith in the white race, which came from his Christianity.

King was a great man, but a man nevertheless. He regularly had sex with the many women who made themselves available to him during his many travels. Some of King's own men were troubled by this. Overall, it was excused because he faced great pressures and needed an outlet. In later years, some of those aides publicly spoke about King's infidelities, and were excoriated by the black community, who preferred to maintain his image as a saintly one. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy used the same kinds of wiretaps to spy on King that G. Gordon Liddy used to spy on the Democrat National Committee. Kennedy discovered disturbing information, which was that Communists infiltrated King's organization. The information was presented to King, who unlike Nelson Mandela was never a Communist. King's main concerns were not focused on Cold War fears, although he did go out of his way to oppose the war in Vietnam. He was given the opportunity to clear the small Communist influence out of his organization, and did so, although it forced him to remove people he loved and trusted. Any Communist infiltration of the SCLC was peripheral to the goals of de-segregation, but he understood that if his movement was identified as a Communist front it would be hurt irreparably.

J. Edgar Hoover was no fan of King. He wiretapped him and had damaging information to use as blackmail if he ever felt he needed it. He was appalled at King's adultery, in light of his pious public statements. He said he was a "degenerate tomcat." The Communists in King's inner circle concerned Hoover, but the FBI director also knew that the man was developing a strong national following. He deferred to the politicians on the issue. Their stance was to present the evidence to him and let King handle it his way. That is what happened.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 went to Congress as a result of King's Selma to Montgomery march. In 1968, he traveled to Memphis and made his last speech. Amazingly, it appears now as if King knew his death was imminent. In the speech, called "I've Been to the Mountaintop," he all but predicted his own demise. He old the crowd that he had a vision of sorts in which his dreams, and those of American blacks, were realized.

James Earl Ray shot Dr. King standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. Ray was arrested in London two months later and returned to Tennessee to stand trial. In 1969, before coming to trial, he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in the Tennessee State Penitentiary. In death, King became a martyred icon, although his greatness was the kind that would have shone through despite the vagaries of long life. King offered himself to Democrats and liberals, and no doubt leaned politically to the Left. He and Robert Kennedy are often identified for the idealistic statements they made. King was killed only a few days after LBJ announced he would not run for President in 1968. Had King and RFK not been assassinated, they no doubt would have formed a formidable combination, supporting each other during the 1968 campaign. It is highly doubtful that Richard Nixon would have won.

King did not suffer fools easily. He was a serious man, but fair and driven by genuine Christian ethics. Over the years, as the face of America's social and political structures changed, many believe that he would not have maintained a lockstep approach to Democrat causes.

As affirmative action became a major debating point, King likely would have given reserved support for it, but his words on the Mall would have reminded him that while previous injustice gave credence to the principle of it, it also had the potential of becoming an abused concept.

King's public years were all spent working with Democrats, but he and Nixon would probably have formed a working relationship. King would have recognized honesty and decency, and he most likely would have worked closely with anybody, including conservatives, who did the right thing when it came to civil rights. This is a hopeful concept, but the reality is it may have been subjugated by political considerations.

The Democrats would have considered King a prize. He very likely would have been asked to run for President. He would have been a strong contender as early as 1972, but probably later. He might have been initiated by a Senate or Gubernatorial run. King was an ambitious man with plenty of ego. He might have publicly demurred, playing the Presidential Hamlet while letting "the people" draft him in a traditionally populist manner, but if he could have been President, he may have gone for it.

Once in the arena of electoral politics, King would have found himself playing to the traditional interest groups of the Democrat party. His womanizing would have become public fodder. His legacy may have been great and far-reaching, depending on how he navigated the roiling waters of the game, but King would have been hard-pressed to give credence to sensible conservative positions. Once his power base was firmly established, perhaps then, he would have been in a position to do so. One hopes.

King's legacy is, of course, the establishment of political and social change that has allowed black Americans (and by proxy blacks throughout the world) freedom to pursue lives without the stain of vicious bigotry. However, those who followed Dr. King were not so scrupulous. One finds it hard to believe that if he came back to Earth today and saw what Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are doing, King would approve. Surely he would lose any respect he ever had for Jackson, who was one of his "young Turks." Unfortunately, while others who fought with Dr. King have gone on to important careers, Jackson was the face of "black leadership." The setbacks of American blacks are in part his fault.

Jackson did good work in the years after King's assassination. In 1984 he ran for the Democrat nomination for President, and he provided a voice to the Walter Mondale/ Gary Hart race that needed to be heard. His message of personal responsibility, and advocacy for a life avoiding drugs, was true blue. But in the succeeding years, Reverend Jackson became a charlatan of the first order.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott showed that economic boycotts hurt the pocketbook, which hurts the most. Jackson learned how to use strong-arm tactics against American corporations to achieve his "goals." If, for instance, the Coca-Cola Company did not have enough black employees to fit Jackson's desires, he would organize strikes of his followers against Coke products, complete with pickets and major media. In return for avoiding such spectacles, companies learned to meet Jackson's proscribed quotas while paying off Jackson.

Jackson's brother was a gang leader and murderer but political pull has kept it on the quiet while the brother made millions involving himself in Jackson's scams. Jackson used his muscle to help a friend maintain a nightclub without adhering to fire codes. When the place burned down and people died, the press did not point these facts out.

Jackson became a millionaire and involved himself In every quasi-legal race scam of the past 20 years. Jackson's original Christian ethics were perverted by years of alliance with the Democrat Party. This led him from nominal patriotism to a place where he has now painted himself in the colors of virtual American traitor, kowtowing to terrorists, despots, Communists and, of course the liberal's favorite murderer and mass jailer, Fidel Castro.

Officially, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would likely have supported President Barack Hussein Obama, but this is not an absolute given. It would be very interesting to see what Dr. King thought of black progress between 1968 and 2008. His views on race extortion, "community organizing," black liberation theology, ACORN, Reverend Jeremiah Wright (Obama's pastor publicly demanding that America be damned to eternal hell), and controversial subject matter, are not easy to predict and more than likely would not fall in the convenient niche that liberals might have wanted to put Martin in. Martin Luther King was not a man to be put in any sort of niche.

Malcolm X

Malcolm X scared the heck out of white people in the 1960s. Whites and blacks alike demonized him. Malcolm was a greatly misunderstood individual, but The Autobiography of Malcolm X is highly recommended reading. Dr. King was a great man who is rightly given the honor of a Federal holiday, but Malcolm was close to his equal in some ways. Many white people who have a low or suspicious opinion of Malcolm would do well to study his work. They will come away with a new admiration of him.

He was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19, 1925, but grew up in Lansing, Michigan. The Ku Klux Klan burned down his house. His father was murdered for speaking out. Malcolm's mother was partially white, so much so that she could pass for white in certain circles. The stress of her life was too much for her. She ended up in a mental institution. Malcolm became troubled and spent his youth in detention homes before moving to Boston, where his sister resided.

Malcolm was convicted on a burglary charge and sentenced to prison. It was there that he was introduced to the Muslim religion. Islam grew in appeal among African-Americans, who could not reconcile with Christianity. To pray to a "blonde-haired, blue-eyed" God did not square with the prejudice they faced. Islam was considered the "black man's religion." Islam offered sanctuary to blacks who were caught up in destructive lifestyles. Malcolm drank, smoke, did drugs, fornicated, lusted after white women, ate any and all foods, and lived a slovenly life. His path was taking him to a bad place: more prison time; death from unhealthy treatment of his body; death at the hands of a jealous husband or vengeful white man; death at the hands of other criminals; or other low results.

In 1946, he was converted to the Muslim faith (Nation of Islam). The sect was technically part of worldwide Islam, but offered tenets unique to the condition of American blacks. The sect professed the superiority of black people and the inherent evil of whites, who were called "blue-eyed devils." He was released from prison in 1952, and immediately trekked to Chicago, where the Nation of Islam was headquartered. Elijah Muhammad ran the Nation, and immediately recognized Malcolm was a serious young man with the potential of spreading the message.

Malcolm changed his last name to "X," since family names like Little originated with white slaveholders. Malcolm X spoke around the country. His natural intelligence combined with good lucks and charisma, which gave him political star quality. He possessed remarkable discipline, which contrasted with his previous life of excess. He spoke openly about his conversion, and inspired many blacks. Young men filled with anger and despair, living lives of crime and decadence because they saw little encouragement in a straight and narrow path, were turned around by Malcolm X. The movement grew. Nation members were polite, wore suits, abstained from any drugs or alcohol, did not swear, broke no laws, were encouraged to marry and have children, but to avoid casual sex. They worked hard and had discipline. Outwardly, there was nothing that white people could "pin" on them, which was the key to their success. If whites hated black Muslims, it was pure prejudice, and could not be "justified" by a reaction to stupidity, criminal behavior, moral delinquency, or the other character traits that bigots attributed to blacks.

Still, the Nation was controversial. The religion itself was misunderstood, and certainly not Christian. America is, by and large, a "Christian nation." This strange, new religion raised questions in many people's minds. They also preached segregation from whites, in accordance with the concept of superiority over whites. Whites were kept out of their inner circle, the media given little access, and therefore the Nation was mysterious to most. Whites found them frightening, but at the same time, many were impressed that the blacks had found something to keep them on the straight and narrow.

In 1961 Malcolm X founded Mr. Muhammad Speaks. He was assigned to be minister of the Mosque Number Seven in Harlem, where membership was highest and influence most important. Malcolm outlined white exploitation, but found little to cheer in the traditional Civil Rights Movement embodied by Dr. King. He had no use for white liberals, many of whom were Jewish, who he viewed as carpetbaggers or race prescriptionists. He felt that offers of "help" from liberals did not give credence to black ability to help themselves. Acceptance of said help did little more than place blacks in 20th Century "plantations" of political welfare. Unfortunately, the Muslims were pre-disposed to deride Jews, because of the solidarity they shared with their Middle East brethren. One pretty blonde college student approached him at a campus speech and told him she was not prejudiced, and wanted to know what she could do to help his cause.

"Nothing," was his one word answer.

While Malcolm's qualm was with traditional liberals who happened to be Jewish, since his time the Nation has become a despicable anti-Jewish hate group. Malcolm rejected integration and equality in favor of black separatism, pride, and self-dependence. He advocated the use of violence for self-protection, saying that blacks were justified in using "any means necessary" to carry out their policies. This is what scared whites, making him look like a zealot. Dr. King urged blacks to turn from his path and accept non-violence.

When President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, he was quoted saying it was the "chickens coming home to roost." Malcolm's comment infuriated America, but he had problems within his own community. The publicity he received was bothersome to Elijah Muhammad, who preferred that all homage be paid to him. Malcolm X accepted Elijah's admonition, and remained silent while going on suspension without pay. Then allegations were made from secretaries of Elijah that he had committed adulterous acts with them. A pregnancy had occurred. Elijah had promoted himself as the most pious of men, which was the cornerstone of the faith. Malcolm X revered him and could not believe the reports. He himself had a reputation for strict piety and faithfulness to his wife and children. But the reports were credible enough to be looked into, which Malcolm X did. He discovered that Elijah Muhammad was a liar and a cheat, revealing these facts publicly.

Malcolm X was disassociated from the Nation, who then went on a full-scale campaign to smear him. In March of 1964, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam and announced the formation of his own religious organization. He took a pilgrimage to Mecca. Meeting Muslims of all ethnic backgrounds, including blonde-haired, blue-eyed Muslims, Malcolm X had an epiphany. He modified his views of black separatism, declared that whites were not innately evil, felt world brotherhood could be achieved, and dedicated himself to working with Dr. King. In light of the rigidity of the black Muslim world he had lived in, these revelations were enormous. In his book, he describes them in intelligent, yet humble terms. No longer wearing the face of intolerance and hatred that he felt was his only defense against white racism, Malcolm X was now a statesman. Elijah Muhammad was infuriated. After a period of feuding and threats, he was assassinated while speaking in a Harlem ballroom. Three Black Muslims were convicted of the murder.

Roots author Alex Haley, who had conducted numerous interviews with him just before he was killed, completed Malcolm's autobiography. The book was immediately recognized as a classic of black American autobiography. While Dr. King's death was a tragedy of enormous magnitude, Malcolm X's death had an even more detrimental effect on African-Americans. Dr. King's dream, for all practical purposes, was achieved. Had Malcolm lived, the dream would have been more complete.

Dr. King wanted black people to be judged by the "content of their character." In the aftermath of the two assassinations, many blacks lost faith, either choosing semi-violent or militant means of expressing themselves, or dropping out of society, for all practical purposes. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's worst predictions came through. In the inner cities, black-on-black crime is an epidemic. Welfare, out-of-wedlock births, unemployment and an outright rejection of education as "acting too white" have left the movement far from its ultimate goals. Judging many by the "content of their character" was not of good value to those whose character was judged poor.

Had Malcolm X lived, he would have been a major advocate for discipline, hard work and achievement. His own life was a shining example for others. His death left far too many wondering if it meant anything. His successors have been, in far too many cases, frauds. Reverend Jackson was on the path of continuing the work of King and Malcolm, advocating education and responsibility. He became political and has completely separated himself from the foggiest hint of moral leadership in succeeding years.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan sprung from the faction that murdered Malcolm X. He has preached some virtuous things about responsibility, abstinence from drugs and sexual promiscuity, while urging his people to be self-reliant. However, he is corrupt and venial, a terrible anti-Semite, and a hater of America far beyond mere lack of patriotism. His screeds against this, the greatest nation in the history of Mankind, are for all practical purposes treason. Governmental goodwill is the main thing that keeps him from being indicted. It is unfortunate that the Nation of Islam chooses a man like Farrakhan to lead them down this path. Malcolm X would have led the Nation to enormous popularity.

Whether Malcolm X would have gone into politics is questionable. Certainly, his attitude throughout his leadership years was not friendly to the U.S. political system, but he was moderating towards the end. Had he lived into the 1970s, '80s and beyond, the huge changes that he was so much a part of bringing about might have impressed him enough to put his faith in America.

Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad and other radical black leaders chose to stay and fight their fight in the U.S. This is very telling. They could have gone to a foreign country, most likely a Muslim one. Despite their obvious antipathy towards America, they chose to continue to make this their home and, to large and small extent, use this system to promote their goals.

George Wallace

George Corley Wallace was born in Clio, Barbour County, Alabama, to George C. and Mozelle Wallace. Clio is a rural southeastern county famous for producing politicians. Wallace was registered to vote in Barbour County his entire life. The Klan had a major presence in Barbour County throughout Wallace's life. In 1935, Wallace served as a page in the Alabama Senate. He was a bantamweight boxer and good at it. At the age of 18 in 1937, Wallace enrolled at the University of Alabama Law School. He was elected president of his freshman class, and in 1942 earned a law degree.

That year, he met 16-year-old Lurleen Burns. After graduating, he enrolled in the U.S. Army Air Force. Spinal meningitis caused him to slip into a coma for a week. After recovering, he went on leave and married Lurleen. In 1944, their first daughter, Bobbi Jo, was born.

In 1945, now recovered from his illness, Wallace was ready to go into Officer Candidate School. However, his goal was to enter politics back home, and he made the calculation that more voters would be former enlisted personnel than officers. He opted out of the officer corps for a training program as a flight engineer.

Wallace flew nine combat missions over Japan before being medically discharged for chronic "severe anxiety." In 1946 he won his first election as a representative of Barbour County in the Alabama legislature. Much in the tradition of Louisiana populist Huey Long, Wallace was progressive and liberal in his dealings with and treatment of black Alabamians.

In 1948, Wallace won a seat as an alternate delegate to the Democrat convention in Philadelphia. He opposed President Harry Truman's civil rights program, but did not support Strom Thurmond's "Dixiecrats." In 1949 he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of Tuskegee Institute, a move he sought to actively court black votes. The record shows that while Wallace was a pure politician, he was moderate at a time and in a place where moderation in racial affairs was rare indeed.

In the 1950s, two more children were born to the Wallace family. He was elected judge in the Third Judicial Circuit Court. His nickname was "the fightin' little judge" in reference to his boxing days.

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court called for an end to segregation in public schools in their ruling via Brown v. The Board of Education. A year later Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery. Alabama's reaction was to outlaw the NAACP. When the Supreme Court ruled that buses must be integrated, Wallace found his moderate views to be out of step with the electorate. In 1958, incumbent John Patterson defeated him in Alabama's Democrat Gubernatorial primary. Republicans were virtually non-existent in the Jim Crow South, a fact not unnoticed by two young citizens of the region at that time, Condoleezza Rice and Clarence Thomas.

The Klan backed Patterson while Wallace spoke out against the KKK, even after they offered its support. The "outlawed" NAACP endorsed Wallace. He lost by more than 64,000 votes. His infamous post-mortem was, "I'll never be out-n------d again."

In 1959 Wallace re-invented himself as a hardcore segregationist, refused to cooperate with the Civil Rights Commission designed to investigate voting rights abuses, and opposed President Eisenhower's Federal attempts at reform. He surrendered local voting records to avoid jail time, but only after making his point.

In 1961, Janie Lee, the Wallace's fourth child, was born. She was named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee. A year later, running as a pro-segregation, pro-states' rights candidate, Wallace was elected Governor of Alabama by a landslide. His inaugural speech vaulted him into the national spotlight and infamy. Asa Carter, the founder of a KKK terrorist organization, wrote his "segregation now, segregation forever" speech.

In an ironic twist that falls into "only in America," 10 years later Carter moved to Texas, assumed the identity of Native American Forrest Carter, and wrote his "autobiography," The Education of Little Tree.

Wallace became the face of the new segregationist South. On NBC's Meet the Press, he discussed court-ordered integration of the University of Alabama. Wallace disabused the notion that he was a "wild-eyed" Southern bigot, ignorant and violent. He had supporters throughout the country, and not all of them were bigots. His call for states' rights and desire to keep the Federals out of his business struck a cord with conservatives and libertarians. Many excused his racial views in favor of his independence. He was a rebel in the Southern tradition, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

On June 11, 1963, Wallace stood in front of the admissions building at the

University of Alabama to block two black students from legally enrolling at the university. The footage of the event was broadcast on national television. It made him a hero to a few and a villain to many. As Tip O'Neill once said, "all politics is local." Wallace was a hero to the white voters of Alabama, who he cared about. He had taken his stand strictly for show, knowing he could not stop the entrance into the school.

The next day, NAACP worker Medgar Evers was murdered by white supremacist Byron de la Beckwith in Mississippi. On August 28, Dr. King delivered his "I have a dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial to the 250,000 people gathered for the peaceful March on Washington.

On September 15, 1963, the KKK bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Four African-American girls died in the blast. Condi Rice knew them. The event sparked armed conflict and galvanized the Civil Rights Movement. On

November 22, Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy in Dallas. President Johnson quickly called for integration in the South.

In 1964, with war just starting in North Vietnam, Wallace entered the Democrat Presidential Primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland, and Indiana, winning approximately one-third of the vote. His main planks were states' rights and anti-Communism.

On March 7, 1965, "Bloody Sunday," voting rights advocates marched from Selma to the state capital. Wallace ordered state troopers to hold them back with tear gas, clubs, and extreme violence.

A second Selma-to-Montgomery march was undertaken a couple weeks later under Federal protection. More than 25,000 marched to the Alabama Capitol Building to ask Wallace to allow black voter registration. The 15th Amendment prohibited racial discrimination in voting, but state laws and practices had been placed as roadblocks. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Bill a few months later.

Wallace tried to get the Alabama state legislature to draw up an amendment to allow a sitting Governor to run for a second term, then forbidden. Unable to muster the votes, his wife, Lurleen, ran as his stand-in. She was quickly diagnosed with cancer, but ran anyway. Lurleen Wallace was elected Governor of Alabama in a landslide victory in 1966, with her husband the de facto Governor.

In 1968, Wallace decided to run for President again. Dr. King was assassinated, and on May 6 Lurleen Wallace succumbed to cancer in office. Five weeks later, Wallace launched his anti-liberal American Independent Party campaign. He shifted the focus from race to Communism following the passage of the Voting Rights Bill. Wallace asked conservative actor John Wayne to be his Vice Presidential running mate, but the Duke was not a racist. General "bombs away with" Curtis LeMay agreed to do it. LeMay had been the man behind the Dresden fire bombings, had advocated invasion of Cuba in 1962, and was strongly pro-nuclear weapons. LeMay did not understand populist politics and did not help Wallace.

Wallace's presence in the race was the key to Nixon's Southern strategy. Critics have said Nixon played racial politics, presenting himself as acceptable to white voters who wanted their vote to count. Nixon may have soft-pedaled the racial angle, but his strong anti-Communist credentials and plan for Vietnam were what gave him much of the electorate below the Mason-Dixon Line. However, Wallace took five states away from Nixon. In an election in which Nixon barely hung on to defeat Hubert Humphrey,

Wallace carried enough electoral votes to throw the election to the House of Representatives.

In 1970, Wallace was elected Governor again. President Nixon opposed him by backing incumbent Albert Brewer in the Democrat primary, and launching an IRS investigation of illegalities in the Wallace campaign. A Gallup poll showed Wallace to be the seventh most admired man in America, just ahead of the Pope.

In 1971, Wallace married Cornelia Snively two weeks before his inauguration. She urged him to soften his rhetoric and show a more sophisticated side. Shortly after, Wallace told reporters he had never believed in segregation.

In 1972, Wallace entered the Democrat Primaries. In Florida, Wallace defeated George McGovern, Humphrey, and nine other Democrats by an overwhelming majority, carrying every county in the state.

While campaigning in Maryland on May 15, Wallace was shot by 21-year-old Arthur Bremer, paralyzing him below the waist. Bremer's diary showed that he was motivated not by politics, but by a desire for fame. Despite the shooting, Wallace won in Maryland, Michigan, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

On July 7, confined to a wheelchair, he spoke at the Democrat National Convention in Miami. The party virtually imploded from within. In the end they chose the "poet-socialist" former fighter plot, George McGovern. He was completely overwhelmed by Nixon in November.

Wallace served out his Governorship, dispensing generous social programs. The shooting changed him, and he became a "born again" Christian, appearing on Jerry Falwell's The Old-Time Gospel Hour. After Watergate, Wallace tried for the Democrat nomination in 1976, but his health and public image doomed his chances. He lost Florida and North Carolina to Jimmy Carter. The New South had risen and with it, old Wallace had fallen. Wallace endorsed Carter, trying to paint a picture of himself as making it possible for a Southerner to be elected to the White House.

George and Cornelia Wallace had a nasty separation and divorced. After a few years away from the limelight, Wallace made a phone call to civil rights leader John Lewis. Wallace had fully accepted Christ, and asked Lewis's forgiveness. Lewis and many African-Americans accepted his repentance.

In 1982, Wallace again won the Alabama Gubernatorial election, this time with a large black majority. He appointed a record number of blacks to government positions, establishing the Wallace Coalition, which included the Alabama Education Association, organized labor, black political organizations, and trial lawyers. He addressed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and said his segregationist past was "wrong." In 1986 he finally retired from politics.

In 1996, Vivian Malone Jones, one of the black students Wallace tried to stop from enrolling at the University of Alabama in 1963, received an award honoring her courage from a foundation bearing Wallace's name. He died two years later at 79.

Only Wallace, and those closest to him perhaps, could truly say what was in his heart, and whether it was genuine Christian charity that led to his repentance, or the desire to gain votes in a changing age. Likely, it was a little of both. Either way, by "changing," Wallace led the way for many others to change, too. For this reason, his final tally is a big comeback over what it would have been had he simply held the old line.

J. Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover is very much like Joseph McCarthy. He could have done what he did a lot differently, and probably better. He was a demagogue and abused his powers. He was also right on the big issues. We have allowed him to be tarred and feathered by the liberals. He was, if not a great American, certainly 10 times the American of most of his worst critics combined (not that this says all that much).

Somehow or other, somebody made up a cockamamie story about J. Edgar Hoover being a cross-dresser and showing up at a party in front of other people, i.e., witnessed, dressed in a woman's dress. Now, in the pantheon of possibility, defer to Shakespeare's famous quote, "There are more things on Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than can be dreamt of in your philosophy." In other words, if God gets involved, all things are possible. Water can be turned into wine. A man can walk on water. The sea opens up and swallows pursuing armies.

So, using the logic of miracles, and applying it to real life as if in a movie like Oh, God! or a Twi-Light Zone episode, it is actually, like all other things, possible that Hoover wore that dress. Within the confines of Earthly conception, bordered by the dimensions of sight, sound, touch and smell, however, it is actually so far from being possible that it is, simply rendered that with which is actually impossible!

Nevertheless, it has not stopped liberals, determined to besmirch a man who identified their lies and perfidies for decades, from spreading this filth.

Hoover never got married. He lived with a male roommate, Clyde Tolson. The word is that he was gay, except nobody ever proved it. There is another possibility. The dress story not only goes against Hoover's personality, but also is made exceptionally ridiculous because the guy was careful beyond the realm of the word. In the world he lived in, to be exposed to such an outrageous charge was utterly beyond chance.

Hoover made accusations and used homosexuality as a tool to get people he considered dangerous, through blackmail or other coercions. This is not an admirable fact. The liberals have used the tactic far more often. The idea is that if Hoover was gay then his accusations against bad people who were gay do not stick.

Hoover came off as deeply moralistic. This is just a guess, but great credence should be given to the very real possibility that he and Tolson were asexual, which is not as unusual as it sounds. Some people (not very exciting ones, and Hoover was no Frank Sinatra) are like that. Hoover and Tolson may fall into that category, and found it convenient to share the expenses of a house where they could talk shop away from the shop. Perhaps there is a 60 percent chance they were simply non-sexual men, and 40 percent there was some kind of limited homosexuality going on. There is zero percent chance that they were involved in risky, transvestite, transgender, highly extravagant acts of cross-dressing seen by witnesses at a party.

Hoover was born on New Year's Day of 1895 in Washington, D.C., the youngest of the three surviving children born to Dickerson Naylor Hoover and Annie Marie Scheitlin Hoover. He dealt with anarchism, organized crime, Nazi espionage during World War II, and Soviet espionage.

Hoover advocated for the civil rights of Japanese after Pearl Harbor. He understood the need for security that was behind the internment camps, but wanted it done legally and in accordance with the Constitution. There was, in his arguments with President Roosevelt, a sense of compassion for the situation. More than 100,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and herded into these camps. Treasury Secretary Henry Morganthau, renowned columnist Walter Lippmann, California Governor Earl Warren and President Franklin Roosevelt all called for it.

Hoover described it as "a capitulation to public hysteria," and told Morganthau that arrests should not be made "unless there were sufficient facts <probable cause> upon which to justify the arrests."

"The most serious discrimination during World War II was the decision to evacuate Japanese nationals and American citizens of Japanese descent from the West Coast and send them to internment camps," Hoover said. While it was necessary that they "had arrested the individuals whom it considered security threats, confining others was unnecessary."

When Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy, Hoover quickly looked into the gunman's background. The man was a Communist. Unable to deal with the fact that a Communist killed their man, the Left has spent decades creating a cottage industry of conspiracy theories, none of which acknowledge Communism as the culprit.

Who killed Kennedy? It may be an enigma wrapped inside a riddle, but the chances are a lot better that it was Castro or the Mafia than it was Lyndon Johnson and a cabal of generals and Republicans.

Communism was what made Hoover obsessed with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was convinced, because he had the facts in front of him, that many civil rights organizations were fronts for Communism. As we know from his withheld Venona knowledge, he did not reveal classified information just to justify his cases, even if he faced criticism. He knew what he knew.

Hoover was not a highly enlightened man when it came to the issue of race. That said, the accusation of blatant racism does not hold up, either. Hoover was likely disenchanted with the "new Negro" who spoke his mind in the 1950s and '60s, but he was more disenchanted with the unpatriotic national security threats that coat tailed legitimate civil rights organizations. Hoover probably had admiration for somebody like Jackie Robinson, a college man of great character who overcame long odds to succeed, and voted Republican to boot! He definitely had little use for blacks like Paul Robeson, who – at least until a rumored "death bed confession" - joined the Communist Party and hated America.

Hoover listened to the tapes of Dr. King having "degenerate sex" with various road women in the 1960s. Interestingly enough this seems to be his biggest complaint with King. He did not have a problem with King's Christianity, or the "mountain top" rhetoric. Of course, Hoover taped King on the orders of his boss, Robert Kennedy. Kennedy's concern was the Communist/political angle, since he was "in bed" with King and could not afford to have his man found out as a front for the Reds.

Hoover went out of his way to discredit Dr. King. The FBI called Marquette University in 1964 to tell them not to award an honorary degree to him. Springfield College was told that the SCLC was "Communist affiliated." Marquette did, in fact, back out of giving King his honorary degree. In an act of genuine mean-spiritedness, Hoover mailed tapes of King's sexual affairs to his wife. He attempted to blackmail him, make him a political liability, and anonymously encouraged him to commit suicide. The Left heard about Hoover's actions eventually and went ballistic over the " disinformation" campaign, even though it was, basically, accurate. It was bad form.

Stories of Hoover's power over Presidents are legendary. He knew more about Kennedy's affairs than even the public now knows, all these years later. Hoover was terribly frightened that JFK's dalliances would lead to blackmail involving Russia, Cuba or some other foreign power. He had informed Joseph P. Kennedy that Jack was having an affair with a Nazi spy when the son was a Naval officer. He despised Bobby Kennedy, who was everything he liked least. Kennedy lorded over Hoover, making it clear that as Attorney General he was technically Hoover's boss. No Attorney General had ever taken such a tack. Kennedy installed a phone line directly to Hoover's desk, so he could not screen his calls via a secretary. Hoover seethed. He privately favored union boss Jimmy Hoffa, who had a "blood feud" with RFK stemming from the McClellan Committee. When Nixon decided to run for President, he came to Hoover looking for help, specifically to build a case against "little Bobby" Kennedy. Hoover considered Nixon to be useful.

LBJ: the conundrum

Lyndon Baines Johnson was in the Navy in the Pacific and "won" a Silver Star. In reality, he saw no combat and his "service" was a sham. Johnson was "elected" to the United States Senate in 1948 after he had captured the Democratic nomination by only 87 votes. Charges of flagrant voter irregularity surrounded the 1948 election. He knew how to manipulate the system. In those pre-computer days, especially after the war in which many Texans had died in Europe and the Pacific, there were huge numbers of "tombstone votes." Johnson had mastered the art of getting multiple votes from dead people. It was this tactic which was used to give the Kennedy-Johnson ticket the edge in Texas over Nixon 12 years later.

Vice President Johnson was riding in another car in the motorcade when John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. He took the oath of office in the Presidential jet at Dallas' Love Airfield.

Under his stewardship, Congress finally adopted a far-reaching civil rights bill, a voting rights bill, a Medicare program for the aged, and measures to improve education and conservation. Congress also began what Johnson described as "an all-out war" on poverty. Johnson presided over disunity. His legacy, aside from the disaster of Vietnam, is the Great Society, which were a larger coalition of his legislation in the areas of voting and civil rights; health care, affirmative action, housing and efforts to end racial prejudice and segregation.

Johnson had both houses of Congress on his side in 1965. He was carrying out the legacy of the beloved, slain Kennedy. He had the martyred President's brother there to urge passage. LBJ had the wind in his sails. He got everything he wanted. It was one of the most sweeping mandates in history, and a domestic victory that few Presidents have ever so completely attained.

Almost 50 years later, history is able to render its assessment of the Great Society. Like the New Deal, it can be said that its time had come, and at the heart of the Society was a noble purpose. But it was an experiment, with no practical road map, and no successful test case to demonstrate what it could accomplish and what it could not.

In 1965, a young sociologist named Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a paper for Johnson's Labor Department in which he pointed out a troubling trend among black families in the urban cities. Since World War II, when many blacks had moved to northern cities to work in the shipyards and in wartime factories, huge numbers of black children had been born out of wedlock. By the '60s, they were now making up a dangerous core of urban youth; dispossessed, prone to rioting, often career criminals, and not invested in America. Troubling high percentages of black men were not married to the women who bore their children, and had not made any effort to be a part of these new families. What made Moynihan's report so disturbing was that these facts represented not a phenomenon, but a new trend. Unless it was stopped, he predicted disaster for black America. Black America was no longer considered separate from the larger country. The new politics were that if it was a disaster for black America, it was a disaster for America.

After the Civil War, blacks had been freed, but once the Federal government ended Reconstruction in 1877, the white backlash in the South had been terrible. Scapegoating the former slaves as reasons for the Confederates' defeat, a de facto state of slavery existed for the better part of another century. Finally, in the 1950s with Brown, Little Rock, Jackie Robinson and the de-segregation of the military, blacks were beginning to attain real freedom. When this occurred, they began to travel more, and to branch out. Unfortunately, the result of this was the break-up of their families. Christianity and family had always been the thing that held blacks together throughout slavery and Jim Crow. Freedom broke these rocks of their society apart. This is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.

Moynihan addressed the issue and used a controversial term, urging "benign neglect" as a government policy in the inner cities. What he meant was that government assistance would, in his view, turn the blacks into a dependent class. He pointed out that blacks had survived their worst crises through entrepreneurialism. They were farmers and small business owners, supplying their own communities with goods and services that the whites refused to provide for them. Out of this they had developed self-reliance, economic power, pride, and most important, family strength. A typical black-owned business was a family operation, with all the members pitching in for a common cause.

Moynihan feared that if government filled the needs of these small businesses, the fragile black economic base would crumble in the wake of handouts that, like Communism, had robbed people of their desire to work hard, produce and strive. His term, "benign neglect," did not mean to "neglect" blacks' needs, as his detractors said. Rather, it meant to augment the existing black base. Metaphorically, Moynihan wanted to put a safety net under the blacks, not lift them puppet-like by ropes from above.
Johnson's social engineers could not abide by the Moynihan view. At the heart of the Great Society was a victim mentality refusing to ascribe any blame or responsibility on the blacks. To acknowledge that millions of them had abandoned their families, and their off-spring were now doing the same thing, was a politically incorrect assessment long before that term came into being.

Rather, the powerful new mantra of the Left was that black plight had been caused by white prejudice, which could only be remedied by white, i.e., government largesse. The iron that stoked the fire was based on the emotional weight of guilt, as old as man and at the heart of Judeo-Christianity. While the fact that much black plight had been caused by white prejudice, the lessons of Socialism were not yet learned. The Soviets and Chinese were still engaged in a massive PR campaign to convince the liberal West that their citizens were better educated and more productive than their capitalist counterparts. The concept that people should "hold their own weight," "pull themselves up by the bootstraps," and adhere to "personal responsibility," were considered the racist rants of Barry Goldwater, his white Republicans and their lousy 36 percent of the 1964 vote.

The most frightening message that the Left strove to avoid in these pivotal hours of decision was that white prejudice had actually caused blacks to be productive. Out of hardship they had been forced to pull together. The idea that they had built businesses, provided services for their community, and maintained Christian faith in part because of Jim Crow simply could not be allowed.

But the failure of the Great Society cannot entirely be blamed on LBJ. Between World War II and 1967, black income was gradually increasing. They were, year by year, doing better. But in 1967 the Summer of Love introduced a tremendous drug culture to America. Many young white and black kids got hooked.

To a large extent, many of the young white kids had middle class homes and supportive environments to return to. Many were able to stop taking addictive drugs. Many blacks, on the other hand, did not have this safety net. They had only the streets. A terrible toll was taken on them in the years since.

A small number of blacks quickly realized the sham of the Great Society. Out of this was formed the black Muslims. Led until his assassination by Malcolm X, the black Muslims preached self-reliance, hard work and education. They adhered to the strong moral tenets of Islam, requiring them to avoid drugs and alcohol, and to abstain from adulterous sex in favor of marriage and family. The other problem the Democrats had with Moynihan's message, and any attempt to inculcate self-reliance into the message of the black cause, was the dirty secret of liberalism. This "secret," of course, is now thankfully a well-known fact. In 1965 the strategy of the Left was political, not social. If blacks were set on the path to self-reliance in the new America, a country filled with as much promise and opportunity as any place on Earth, at a time when old racial barriers were coming down, then there would be an inevitable result. That result would be that enormous numbers of blacks would become successful. They would become rich entrepreneurs and businessmen. Their children would become doctors and lawyers. Education would be the cornerstone of their communities. They would develop into patriotic, invested members of the communities they lived in, and the country they thrived in. Their success would impress their white neighbors, who would lay down their old prejudices in favor of admiration.

All of this sounds great, but if the root of it was self-reliance, then these people would not feel the need to pay back the Democrat Party. Worse, all of this success would mean that blacks would be more likely to love America, want their high tax bills lowered, thank God in church for their good fortune, and maintain good schools (mostly private) for their kids. God forbid any of that should happen, since all those concepts are family values, and family values are the basic tenets of, gulp, Republicans!

Johnson's people came up with a great catchphrase: war on poverty. Huge sums of the national treasure were spent trying to create equality in housing, jobs and civil rights. But it failed. Years after the war on poverty, the devastation of America's inner cities is testament to the simple, inescapable fact that Johnson's programs were the wrong approach.

Money spent on schooling has become a major debate. Conservatives suggest that a great deal of money spent on education is wasted in bureaucracy. Teachers unions have devoted themselves to job security above the student needs. Competitiveness, the bulwark of all good results, has been removed. Teachers need not compete to determine who is the better instructor. Schools need not compete to lure students. Students need not compete to move on. Everything in public education has been reduced to an outcome-based result in which the process of learning is replaced with a system designed to allow low achievers to success without their failures being compared to the successful students.

Home schooling and private education have been the successful conservative answer to the perils of public education.

Of all the bad liberal ideas of the Great Society, perhaps none was worse than busing. This concept entailed sending white kids from the suburbs to schools in the ghetto, and black and minority kids from the ghetto to schools in the suburbs. The minority kids certainly benefited from this system, getting the chance to go to clean, safe schools with better teachers. But the downside was horrendous. In essence, busing had the effect of families achieving the American Dream - a nice house in a safe neighborhood near good schools, the result of hard work and benefits earned - only to have the government penalize them for having the temerity of achieving things that contrasted with low achievers.

For black families who had worked their way out of the ghetto, it was a boondoggle in which, after all their efforts, they found their kids bused back to the neighborhoods they had escaped from. If busing was to work, the government should have simply built more schools in the suburbs and bused all the inner city kids in, without forcing white kids into the ghettos. But this would not have been a "fair" thing to do. It would have acknowledged that ghetto schools were bad, and the fiction of liberalism is that everything is "equal."

It should be acknowledged that somewhere in the racial politics of Johnson's Great Society is genuine hope. It was not entirely devised to enslave blacks to liberal prescriptions, and to create a 90 percent voting bloc. Johnson, the Southerner, deserves kudos for overseeing the first real governmental action since Reconstruction addressing the very real plight of African-Americans. Furthermore, the rule of not judging history entirely by hindsight should be put into place here. It is only in viewing it through the lens of time that it fails. In understanding its failure, it is also instructive to note that Johnson's programs only passed because the Republicans got behind them by a large majority. Southern Democrats blocked all of it, and it was only with GOP support that the Great Society came to be. Furthermore, many of the programs, which required years of study, staffing and development before they came into fruition, came into full enactment not under Johnson, but under Nixon.

Nixon, the conservative, was a politician living in, as the Chinese say, "interesting times." He was under pressure from the John Birch wing of the Republican Party to disavow the Society, and he could have done so. But Nixon was not as socially conservative as his reputation might suggest. He did not benefit from Republican majorities in the Congress, and made the decision to compromise on a number of issues. He was bitten badly for this decision, but he did enact major programs in the area of medical care, cancer research, environmental protection, and other areas.

The Great Society was a huge program of disparate type. Therefore, judging it must be compartmentalized. Its environmental programs were needed at the time. Over the years, power was created and given to agencies that have been badly abused, making much of the modern environmental movement not advocates for clean air and water, but de facto collection agencies holding businesses up like old time gangsters robbing stores to pay for "protection."

Social security came about under Roosevelt, and at the time was a reasonable program. Now, it is bloated and corrupt, the very symbol of bad government. It is too powerful to be touched. The medical programs enacted under Johnson - Medicaid and Medicare - have done a great deal of good for people, particularly the aged.

The biggest complaint with the Great Society is in the social engineering aimed at improving the lives of blacks. Moynihan's warnings all came true. Black crime rose horrendously and continuously, along with the rate of single mothers. The break-up of the black family owes itself to the welfare state provisos that Johnson thought was compassion. The only thing that has saved blacks has been to move out of black neighborhoods where, residing amongst whites, they could not live in government housing. Instead, they had to compete for jobs in a world in which there are fewer excuses for failing to achieve productivity and excellence. But for those left behind in the cesspools of the inner cities, the welfare checks sapped people of hope and ambition. The worst part of this is that the result; lazy blacks, men pimping their women; prostitutes shooting up; babies on crack; black-on-black crime; violent, rampaging Negroes, armed gang wars, and humans living as animals; has had the awful effect of promoting the racist stereotypes of those who do not want them to succeed, anyway. It has also exacerbated the front-line tensions of urban blacks and police.

The police see life in these places, unfiltered by liberal spin, but raw and uncut. The cop's first job is to survive, and their survival mechanisms often result in menacing and intimidating behavior around the blacks. Many cops see blacks in their worst environment. They are not as likely to see the many blacks who live good, decent lives. Even black cops in the cities fall prey to this "us vs. them" mentality. Over time, being human, the cops cannot help but develop a military mindset in the "war zones" of our worst urban cores. Blacks and other minorities are too often pitted against them. The result of this can be violent and unsettling. It did not need to be that way.

The other failure of Johnson's Great Society is affirmative action. There are, essentially, two kinds of affirmative action. The first is the one that emerged from the Johnson years, which is an attempt by the government to correct past wrongs by assigning a quota of blacks and other minorities into schools, jobs, the government and other institutions without major regard for qualifications. The theory is that the qualifications cannot be fairly assessed, since minorities grow up in disadvantaged areas and attend poor schools. Their grades, test scores and other criteria are "culturally biased." This is inherently wrong for several reasons. First, not all minorities fall into the "disadvantaged" category, and second it is just plain unfair. The argument against this is that the modern unfairness tips the schools of past unfairness. There is some emotional resonance to this argument, but at the end of the day it causes more problems than it solves, on multiple levels.

The second kind of affirmative action is the one the Republicans eventually put into place, and it is of real value. This is the policy based on the concept that diversity is good; that the experience of different people working, going to school, and striving together for common goals, is a fine thing. The diversity argument does go too far, in education especially. For instance, it is true that it may be beneficial to society for a white student from Kalamazoo, Michigan to sit in a classroom with a black student from Detroit. Preferably, they will talk to each other, exchange ideas, maybe involve themselves in a group project. If everybody is lucky they will drink beer, go to football games together, and at the end of the year visit each other's homes. But it is not true that either the white guy or the black guy can get a quality education only if the dude or gal sitting next to him is a different ethnicity.

What is good is not quotas or lowered standards. What is good is recruitment. A school, a company, or some other institution may look at its roster and say to themselves, maybe with some incentive from the government, but not based on the threat of sanctions or fines, that their roster is heavily white, or perhaps heavily male. They may look about and say that it would be of benefit if they had more women, blacks, Hispanics, or other minorities, as part of that roster.

Then the organization makes the determination that they need a certain number of slots to be filled, either through expansion, or for some other reason. Next, they determine what it is they need to fill those positions; qualifications, experience, education, etc. Then they identify a series of minority candidates who have those qualifications. If they cannot find minority candidates to fill the positions, they fill them with non-minority candidates and keep looking. The process is no different than a football coach who needs two running backs for the next season. He scouts players, identifies a few who have what he is looking for; size, speed, strength, stats, experience combined with work ethic, attitude, and school success. He recruits them and offers scholarships. Some accept and some do not, and hopefully he has a winning season.

The biggest myth about affirmative action is that, without it, minorities will be forced back into their depressing, underprivileged environments. Take college, for example. Say the minority wants to attend a public college like UCLA. Fine school, great alumni contacts, and a place where a kid can drink a fair share of beer and have fun. But the minority does not have the grades to get into this very competitive institution. Does this mean he or she goes back "to the block" and opens a crack house? If the kid has what it takes to even be considered by UCLA, that person is not likely to open a crack house. The chances are the student goes instead to UC-Riverside, or Irvine, or some other fine institution of higher learning in the UC system. Okay, so they do not get into a UC school. Crack house? Think again. There is nothing wrong with Cal State, Northridge, or Fullerton, or Cal State, L.A.

Take the minority student in California, denied by the "system" the chance to get ahead through education. Denied by whom? Not by the system. The black kid growing up in Watts just has to stay out of trouble enough to graduate from Locke or Fremont or Dorsey High School. This is an act of self-reliance that is simply beneficial for society to impose upon the student. Maybe these are not great schools. Maybe it is not the same as attending Chadwick, a private school in Palos Verdes Estates, or Rancho Santa Margarita, a mostly-white school of affluence in Orange County. But it is a school, and if one wishes to learn, they can make it through. Challenges? Sure, but not insurmountable ones.

Now it is on to L.A. Southwest J.C., a junior college located in the general Watts area. Not glamorous, perhaps, but it is a school and the cost to attend is almost nothing. Two years at Southwest, and with a little determination that student can transfer to nearby Cal State, Dominguez Hills. It costs a few bucks to attend, but it is not impossible to contend with the situation. A part-time job helps, and some ready financial aid is available. With some more determination, two or three years later, we have ourselves a college graduate, complete with cap, gown and dreams. All of it done without affirmative action.

Say the kid was good in numbers and graduated with an accounting degree. Will a Big Three accounting firm in the downtown L.A. financial district hire him? If he had good grades, presents himself well, and the firm is recruiting with an eye for diversity, there is a chance that will happen, but it is not likely in a competitive situation like that. Crack house? No way.

Our intrepid graduate calls Accountants on Call, or some other placement firm, and probably starts out with temporary assignments. Maybe he has to do something else to make ends meet for awhile, but he is invested and he is not going to open that crack house. Is this person going to succeed? The chances are he will. It will not be easy and he will struggle, but is this not the regular scenario?

Johnson's affirmative action policies did not take into account these kinds of storylines. Granted, the world was different in 1964-65 than it is in 2013. But the original quota system, that said that White Student was not admitted even though she had better qualifications than Minority Student, in the long run did not benefit most of the other Minority Students. Affirmative action failed to take into account the beauty of America's market place, where hard work and ambition are like cream, which rises to the top.

Johnson's Presidency has been judged to be a failure. His Vietnam policies proved to be a disaster. There are plenty of people on the Left who revere his Great Society, and by no means is this an attempt to defame the Society. The 1960s were extraordinary times. Up until that decade blacks in America had lived in a netherworld of poverty and racism. Something needed to be done, and LBJ took bold steps. Failures of his social policies that manifested themselves in the 1970s and '80s cannot be entirely blamed on what he was doing in the mid-'60s. Conservatives tend to a certain amount of smugness, which comes with being on the right side of history more often than not, but they are not infallible. A grudging admiration is due Lyndon Johnson. Most of the people who worked for him swear by him, especially African-Americans. Simply paying attention to blacks was something extraordinary at that time, and they were grateful for it.

Johnson was a man of huge ego and bluster. He wanted desperately to leave a Texas-size mark on history. His support for the space program is a shining star of his legacy, and the space center in Houston is named after him. Black-and-white images of LBJ are part of Americana. Thousands of college students marched and cursed him. There is a sense that the collective conscience of these people is tinged with some guilt for having done that, somewhat they way people felt badly about cursing Abe Lincoln after he was gone. LBJ was a good American put into a very difficult position, and represents an interesting aspect of history.

LBJ held all the cards in 1965. He had his electoral mandate, his party controlled the Federal government, he passed his social programs, the space program was flying right, and he had popular support for a war against an expansionist evil that was no longer a mystery. In four years, most of it went wrong.

Abe Lincoln, on the other hand, had assumed the Presidency in 1861 under conditions that required him to enforce martial law. He was reviled by his opponents, ridiculed by his supporters, and had no mandate. Out of this disaster he rose to greatness.

Was Abe Lincoln, by character and training, that much better than Lyndon Johnson? Yes and no. Lincoln was extraordinary, but he was a man of extraordinary times. Of course, Johnson faced extraordinary times, too. There is little to suggest that he met the challenge of these times as well as we wish he had.

Where is God in all of this? If America is indeed sanctioned by God, which is a theory worth promoting, then where was He from 1965-69? This was a period of test for this country, so confident and hopeful just a few years prior. There were lessons learned from this era, however, that in the end offers as much in value as an easy victory. It is most unfortunate that these lessons came with terrible personal tragedy that affected millions.

Finally, the strength of America emerges from the Johnson years as the ultimate survivor. This nation faced a near-civil war at home, but like in Lincoln's time, it held together. As for the war against Communism, the Vietnam War was a setback, but the Cold War was still won. Some have pointed this out and say that Communism was going to fall anyway, that Vietnam and all our machinations were unnecessary. Anybody who studies Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and what came out of that, would be a fool to advocate such an idea. Communism fell because the U.S. defeated it. While his five-plus years in office might not be the shining light of this fight, Johnson nevertheless deserves his place with all the other Cold Warriors who stood toe-to-toe with the enemy, stared him in the face, and fought on behalf of this battered yet beautiful nation.

The pressures of public life took their tool on Lyndon Johnson. He retired to Texas. Without the Senate or the White House to preside over, he first died mentally. He was physically gone a short time later. On January 22, 1973, he suffered a heart attack at his ranch and left this mortal coil.

Alabama vs. USC and the game that changed a nation

Early in 1970, University of Alabama football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant was in Palm Springs, California to play in Bob Hope's golf tournament. Before driving to Los Angeles, where he had a scheduled flight out of town at L.A. International Airport, Bryant called his good friend, University of Southern California coach John McKay. He asked to meet McKay at the airport before his flight took off. McKay asked what it was about, but Bryant just told him he would discuss it at the airport. McKay, who suspected he did know what it was for, had assistant coach Craig Fertig drive him to LAX. They were relaxing with Vodkas in the Western Airlines Horizon Room when Fertig spotted Bryant's hound's tooth cap. He looked like "Mt. Rushmore with legs," said Fertig.

After imbibing a drink or two, Bryant got to the point. The NCAA just came out with a decision allowing college teams to play an 11th game in 1970 instead of the previous regular season limit of 10. For $150,000, would McKay agree to bring USC to Birmingham's Legion Field for the 1970 opener in September?

McKay indeed did know what the meeting was for. He had a ready reply, that he would if Bryant would come to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum the following season (1971) for a guarantee of $250,000. Bryant agreed. They shook on it. History was being made.

The last vestige of sports integration was college football. In the 1950s, USC traveled to Texas with an integrated team. Their black running back, C.R. Roberts ran for over 200 yards in the first half, leading the Trojans to a victory, but it did not have the effect of integrating the South. The final nail in the coffin of segregation occurred in 1970. USC was the dominant college football power in the nation under John McKay. They had a roster filled with black stars. Alabama under Bear Bryant was still all white. USC's black sophomore running back, Sam "Bam" Cunningham, ran for over 200 years and four touchdowns in a 42-21 victory. When the game was over, Bryant went to his friend McKay and asked if he could "borrow" Cunningham. According to legend, he took Cunningham into the losing locker room, placed him in front of the 'Bama team, and announced, "Gentlemen, this here's what a football player looks like." Research later revealed he probably did not actually say it; an apocryphal statement not unlike Knute Rockne's fictitious George Gipp story.

The next day, legendary Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray wrote, "On a warm and sultry night when you could hear train whistles hooting through the piney woods half county away, the state of Alabama joined the Union. They ratified the Constitution, signed the Bill of Rights. They have struck the Stars and Bars." Bryant, who already recruited one black player (Wilbur Jackson), quickly filled his roster with black football players. The rest of the South followed suit. Within a few short years, blacks commonly populated not just football rosters but every aspect of college life in Dixie, including the cheerleading squads.

Alabama was segregated. Images of Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor's troops using fire hoses and other strong-arm tactics on civil rights protestors were being broadcast across the nation. In the early 1960s, after a group of black students at UCLA announced plans to boycott and protest if Alabama played in the Rose Bowl, Murray weighed in on the situation.

"The University of Alabama just about wrapped up the all-white championship of the whole cotton-picking world," he wrote after the Tide defeated Georgia Tech. Murray wrote positively about Alabama's on-the-field play, but continued his campaign of columns condemning the idea of inviting Alabama to play in the West Coast's prize bowl game.

The situation was a conundrum. Alabama, in the eyes of Jim Murray and much of the non-South sporting world, could not win for losing. There was vociferous criticism of any invitation of them. On the other hand, they were criticized for not accepting the invitations. Murray certainly saw nothing morally upright in Alabama's position either way and wrote it, holding nothing back. It was literally a white-and-black issue with no grey area. The only way Alabama could get on the right side of the moral equation was to integrate.

In 1966 everything boiled to a head. It was a pivotal year in the civil rights era. 1963-65 had been a time of violence in the South. The violence after that, ironically, was more in the North and the West. Watts exploded in Los Angeles. After Dr. King was shot, blacks in so-called "safe" cities like Newark and Oakland began to unleash their fury. But after a confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the South entered a period of relative, uneasy calm. It was sports that re-stirred the hornet's nest. National television coverage of college football was huge by 1966. Color TV was just coming into popularity. Fans in all regions of the country regularly saw games featuring teams from other regions. Whether they were integrated or not was glaringly obvious.

In basketball, 1966 was a big year for integration. Texas Western University (now UTEP) somehow managed to make it to the NCAA basketball championship game. Featuring five black starters, they faced all-white Kentucky, led by a coach people say was racist, Adolph Rupp. When Texas Western triumphed it shocked the nation.

Slowly but surely, black faces began to dot the rosters of Southern college football teams; at Wake Forest, at Southern Methodist, eventually at Kentucky, Florida and Auburn. But Alabama was completely white and resistant to any change. This was the cause of much angst in the state. Governor Wallace and his wife, Lurleen dominated 'Bama's all-Democrat Jim Crow politics of the decade. But even in Alabama there were voices of change. A black lawyer was threatening a lawsuit against Bear Bryant for not providing athletic scholarships to black players.

A white attorney, Richmond Flowers, Sr. battled the KKK. In an ironic twist, his son, Richmond Flowers, Jr., was dubbed the "fastest white boy alive," an Alabama prep football-track star. The possibility of his playing for Bear Bryant was cause for much discussion. When he chose Tennessee he became "the most hated white boy alive," at least in 'Bama.

In 1964 and 1965, some of America was aghast at the sight of the all-white Crimson Tide winning consecutive national championships. Enter Jim Murray. Calling his column " 'Bama in the Balkans," he opened, "So Alabama is the 'National Champion,' is it? Hah?

" 'National' champion of what? The Confederacy?

"This team hasn't poked its head above the Mason-Dixon line since Appomattox. They've almost NEVER played a Big 10 team. One measly game with Wisconsin back in 1928 is all I can find. They lost.

"This teams wins the Front-of-the-Bus championship every year – largely with Pennsylvania quarterbacks. How can you win a 'national' championship playing in a closet? How can you get to be 'Number One' if you don't play anybody but your kinfolks? How do you know whether these guys are kicking over baby-carriages or slaying dragons?"

He went on to say he might respect Alabama's "national championship" if they played Ohio State in Columbus, Michigan in Ann Arbor, or Notre Dame "anywhere." Bryant claimed his schedule was the best in the country, but Murray said there was no way to prove than since none of the other SEC teams played anybody "you couldn't invite to the Cotillion."

He excoriated the conference and Alabama for letting great black athletes – who were "Americans" too, in case anybody forgot that – go to the Big 10, the Pacific Coast, or Syracuse every year. Their flag, he said, should be "all white," absent the red, the blue and the stars. Murray freely stated they played "ferocious" football in Dixie, but added that the word also applied to a Balkan war. Bulgaria, he said, could not slaughter England, "just because it obliterates Mesopotamia."

Then Murray did the unforgiveable. He made fun of Bryant, who actually "walked on water" in a Coca-Cola billboard along the Alabama highway. He tied him in with Wallace, already touting himself as a Presidential candidate. Murray was mistaken in this area. Bryant and Wallace did not get along. Bryant mistrusted him, but Wallace knew he needed to look close to the coach to get votes.

For Alabama to be given real national title consideration, Murray wrote, they needed to "venture up in the snow country where the field is white but the players not necessarily . . .

"Until then," he concluded, "don't make me laugh." Murray once called the Sugar Bowl the "White Supremacy Bowl." Bryant, he wrote, was "tired of winning the Magnolia championship." Murray's chidings did not go unnoticed by Alabama fans or Coach Bryant. While most in the region simply took umbrage, Bryant was smart enough to know that Jim Murray was a nationally read sports columnist, highly respected and influential. He needed the likes of Jim Murray in order to create respect for his football team. He needed the Jim Murrays of the American sporting scene to give his team the number one vote in the polls when they were in contention for it. He and John McKay were close personal friends. Bryant knew that John McKay had great respect for Jim Murray! Murray could not simply be brushed aside as a "Connecticut Yankee" or a "liberal." He was a man of substance and needed to be dealt with.

In 1965 Bryant granted an interview to Look magazine. Bryant may very well have been aiming his words at Jim Murray when he indicated change was in the air, and that black players were coming to the Southeastern Conference. Bryant was looking for the right time, the right opportunity. The George Wallace situation, his alumni base, the politics of the times made this perilous, but he had a plan, perhaps best exemplified by his statement that he would not be the first to integrate, "but I won't be third, either."

Murray responded with this riposte: "The South asks for terms."

It was on. Murray's column spread in viral fashion in the 1960s. "Thems was fightin' words" in Alabama. By proxy, it made USC a rival, since USC was the school in Murray's Los Angeles that did play anybody, anywhere.

So, the stage was set for more fireworks, and in the fall and winter of 1966 they exploded. All season long, three teams maintained an unbeaten record, headed for a showdown for the national championship. Alabama moved up to third in the rankings, but had no overriding claim to the top spot. That was reserved first for Notre Dame and, if not the Fighting Irish, then Michigan State. These were two of the greatest teams ever assembled.

It was Ara Parseghian's best team ever at South Bend. All-American defensive end Alan Page, a future star with the Minnesota Vikings and state supreme court judge, was black. Notre Dame always had an open door racial policy. Michigan State was flat blatant about it. Coach Duffy Daugherty's Spartans were called the "underground railroad," loading their roster with black stars from the South. In 1966 they featured two all-time greats, linebacker George Webster and defensive end Bubba Smith.

The 'Bama faithful chafed all year as their team compiled an unbeaten record, but both the Irish and Spartans were also unbeaten, ranked ahead of them. Bryant's team was great, but absent all other considerations, the two teams rated above them were a little better. The hope that both those teams would lose was compounded by the fact they were scheduled to play each other at season's end.

They called it the "Game of the Century." Played at Spartan Stadium in East Lansing, Michigan, the result was precisely what Alabama hoped for, or at least thought they hoped for: a 10-10 tie.

Alabama fans watching on TV were at first overjoyed, then struck by a nauseating reality. Playing for a tie, Notre Dame had just the right "constituency," which consisted of the East Coast press and the "Catholic vote." But most important, before anybody heard of the term "politically incorrect," it was just that to vote for the all-white Crimson Tide.

Indeed, Notre Dame retained the number one slot. Alabama did not even pass Michigan State. Further frustration ensued for Alabama when they destroyed Nebraska, 34-7 in the Sugar Bowl to finish 11-0. Notre Dame still had a self-imposed bowl ban (between 1926-69). Michigan State was constrained by the Big 10's refusal to let champions repeat trips to Pasadena. Michigan State went the previous year.

Despite both teams spending New Year's at home, the polls were closed, as if the Sugar Bowl were an all-star game or an exhibition, with victorious 'Bama stuck at third behind the Irish and the Spartans. Alabama fans unfurled banners blaming Notre Dame of playing politics. A 'Bama newspaper showed a disgruntled Confederate soldier holding the AP poll and saying, "NUMBER 3 – HELL!"

The fall-out was tremendous. Not since the Civil War had the South felt so cornered as they did during this infamous period. Every pundit in the nation weighed in. None were so opinionated and open in their disdain of the University of Alabama as Mr. James Murray, Irish Catholic gentleman, Malibu, California. The Internet was unknown, but his columns were read far and wide. There was no BCS, no computers. Sportswriters like Jim Murray determined their fate. They had incredible influence. None had more than he. There was no question in the minds of the Alabama football faithful that Murray was everything incorrigible in this world: Irish, Catholic, an East Coast native, now a West Coast liberal in the land of war protestors, hippies and dilettantes. He could not have engendered greater hatred had he flown to Hanoi and taken photos on a North Vietnamese tank, but of course nobody would have been that crazy . . .

"Jim Murray wrote a lot about this issue," Art Spander recalled in One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation (2007). "He had a real social conscience. I met him in 1959 when he was at Sports Illustrated . . . Jim and I were very good friends. He was a great guy and a fantastic writer. He once wrote that Alabama was 'the King of the Caucasians.' There was debate about Alabama winning the national championship one year, and Jim influenced the votes by emphasizing that Alabama didn't have any blacks and didn't play any teams with blacks. There was a lot of stuff in the papers about that."

In the aftermath of the 1966 season, there was much soul-searching and blame-gaming in Alabama. The fans and the press tended to hunker down, taking an "us vs. them" attitude. They were in the right, their traditions were intruded on, the Feds had no right to come to their state, these were states' rights issues, et al. But Bear Bryant did not go in that direction. He took responsibility. He said he needed to schedule a tougher, more diverse schedule. He said he wanted to field a team leaving no doubt they were the best, not leaving it up to the opinion of pollsters. The fact of the matter is he was already meticulously planning to make drastic change. He just needed the opportunity.

Bryant was born dirt poor in Arkansas. He identified with the plight of blacks because he, too, came from nothing. He had tried to integrate in the past, but was always halted by segregationist politics. He befriended John McKay, and the two often spoke of how a game between their two schools could effectuate change.

Bryant told Look magazine that integration was coming to the Southeastern Conference within four years, he wanted to be the "Branch Rickey of college football," and while he might not be the first to integrate, he would not be the last, either. By the late 1960s, the Vietnam War heated up and had a huge effect on attitudes, especially among the young. The lawsuit filed by a black civil rights attorney caused a stir. George Wallace was no longer Governor of Alabama. Thus, Bryant saw an opening.

He went after Wilbur Jackson, a talented, quiet, Christian kid with good grades from a good family in Ozark, Alabama. Undoubtedly, he wanted to do something to make Jackson's initiation as painless as possible. He chose McKay and USC as the team to come play at Birmingham's Legion Field in the historic game

"I can see that Bryant chose McKay out of friendship, more so than choosing somebody else, based upon being less bitterly divisive than a school from the Yankee North," said L.A. Times sportswriter Jeff Prugh.

"I know my dad and Jim were very close and my dad had the greatest respect for him," recalled McKay's son, John K. "J.K." McKay, a Trojan star of the 1970s who played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, became an L.A. attorney, and is now USC's associate athletic director.

"I can only imagine there was pressure in those times to speed up integration as it relates to sports. I was not frankly aware that Murray was writing those columns but he carried a lot of weight. He was a friend of my dad's, so that gave him credibility in Bear's eyes."

Not only was USC integrated, with a black assistant coach (Willie Brown), they featured a rare black starting quarterback, Jimmy Jones. They had the only all-black backfield in history up until then (Jones, tailback Clarence Davis, fullback Sam "Bam" Cunningham). Their defensive core, particularly at linebacker, was big, black and imposing. They were a visual sight, to be sure.

Jones was a fine field general. Davis played a great game, but the star was the sophomore from Santa Barbara, Cunningham. He rushed for 135 yards and two touchdowns, but his numbers belie his awesome effect. He literally bounced off 'Bama defenders. It was not just speed or elusiveness. He could not be tackled. By the fourth quarter, the crowd was so quiet, they could hear the shouts of USC players on the sidelines. Or the cheers of a few black fans given high end zone seats, rooting not for the Tide but the Trojans. Finally, towards the end, the sound of Biblical hymnals could be heard. A crowd of local blacks gathered outside Legion Field with Bibles and candles to "witness" a kind of deliverance. They sang songs of Christian joy.

When the game was over, a throng of reporters, administration and alumni crowded into the USC dressing room, spilling out in the hallway. The sense of excitement and exhilaration was marked by a little bit of confusion. What just happened? Obviously the Trojans had won a big victory, but they sensed something larger was at play. Then Bryant entered their dressing room, asking to "borrow" Cunningham.

Two people accompanied them. One was Loel Schrader of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. The other was assistant coach Craig Fertig. Friendly alums and press diverted Fertig's attention. Always sociable, he was chatting it up with these people. Schrader swore that Bryant took Cunningham into the 'Bama dressing room. Glistening with sweat, shirtless and wearing only hip pads, he was propped up on a stool, looking down on the beaten white boys of Alabama.

Bryant was said to have stated, "Gentleman, this ol' boy, I mean this man, Sam Cunningham, number 39. This man and his Trojan brothers just ran us right out of Legion Field. Raise you heads and open your eyes. This here's what a football player looks like."

Then, the coach is said to have instructed each Tide player to shake Sam's hand. Various phrases like, "You're a better man than me," a (phrase attributed to 'Bama quarterback Scott Hunter and others) were stated to Cunningham.

This story became Holy Grail, repeated by McKay, Fertig, assistant coach Marv Goux, announcer Tom Kelly, and others in the media and at alumni banquets for years.

It was not until 2004-07, when a book on the subject was being researched and published, with a movie on it entering development, that the truth, as much as can be divined, came out. Apparently, Bryant never made this utterance. It was speculated he said something similar to that in the hallway.

How it went down was rather immaterial. "No, it didn't happen," said Scott Hunter, "but it should have happened. The story was too good not to be true." He was right, because the spirit of Bryant's words somehow changed hearts and minds in the South.

The September 13, 1970 L.A. Times sports page featured Jim Murray's column, "Hatred Shut Out as Alabama Finally Joins the Union." "Our newest state took the field against a mixed bag of hostile black and white American citizens without police dogs, tear gas, rubber hoses or fire hoses," he wrote. "They struggled fairly without the aid of their formidable ally, Jim Crow.

"Bigotry wasn't suited up for a change. Prejudice got cut from the squad. Will you all please stand and welcome the sovereign state of Alabama to the United States of America? It was a long time coming, but we always knew we'd be 50 states strong some day, didn't we? Now, we can get on with it. So chew a carpet, George Wallace . . . Get out of our way. We're trying to build a country to form a Democracy.

"The game? Shucks, it was just a game. You've seen one, you've seen 'em all . . . Hatred got shut out, that's the point. Ignorance got shut out, that's the point. Ignorance fumbled on the goal line. Stupidity never got to the line of scrimmage. The big lie got tackled in the end zone . . ."

Murray pointed out that the citizens of Alabama took their football so seriously that they realized if they wanted to play in the big time, it would require integration.

"And," wrote Murray, "if I know football coaches, you won't be able to tell Alabama by the color of their skin much longer. You'll need a program just like the Big 10." Murray's turning of phrases, "Hatred got shut out . . . Ignorance fumbled on the goal line . . . Stupidity never got to the line of scrimmage," were classics. Few if any writer of any genre ever really came up with this these kinds of terms before. In 2006, CBS and College Sports Television produced a documentary about the game. Its title was pure Jim Murray: Tackling Segregation.

"With Jim, civil rights was a moral issue," said his widow, Linda McCoy-Murray. "It was not a religious issue really, but just the right thing to do. He hated injustice and used his position when he saw a wrong being perpetrated."

It could be argued that the American South between 1970 and 1973, and then over a more prolonged period, changed faster and for the better more so than any region in history. In analyzing this, the prospect of God's will becomes more profound. In so doing they "rose again." The region became an economic juggernaut. Pro franchises flooded into their big cities – Jacksonville, Nashville, Charlotte – and their college sports programs became the envy of a nation. Atlanta hosted the 1996 Olympics.

Husbanded into the union, the mainstream of American politics so to speak, by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, they became a "Republican lock," to the consternation of Democrats and the Left. This development has an unsettling effect upon analysis. When they were ignorant and racist they were Democrats. Upon enlightenment they became Republicans. This manifest truth has proven to be the GOP's strongest selling point during a 40-year stretch that has seen their greatest electoral winning streaks.

On a less political, secular note, consider the 1978 football season. USC returned to Birmingham. Of course the Trojans were loaded with black stars as always, but so was Alabama. Writers and players making that trip do not recall the racial issue ever raised. In this respect, its success is most obvious. It was subliminal, quiet and peaceful, just as Bryant planned it. It just happened. It was self-evident, manifest. It needed no champion, no loud voices. It just was, but that was not the half of it.

USC again defeated Alabama, the Tide's only loss. USC lost one game. Both teams won their bowls and finished the season with one defeat. Logically, everything being equal, the national championship should have been awarded to the Trojans. They beat Alabama on their field. Instead, USC had to share the championship, capturing the UPI (coaches) poll while Alabama took the AP (writer's) poll.

Contrast that with 12 years earlier, when the vote so famously went against the Tide. Now, having successfully integrated, Bear Bryant was a beloved figure, his team a source of pride and joy to people of all colors. Nobody said it at the time, but Bryant and his team should have called a press conference to thank Jim Murray. Murray's exhortation of the coach and school to do the right thing, then praise of them when they did, did as much to change the "hearts and minds" of voters as Sam Cunningham's touchdown runs.

Movement politics

It is most ironic that the Civil Rights Movement, most probably the greatest triumph of the so-called Left in American politics, really benefited the Right. President Lyndon Johnson predicted as much with his comment to Bill Moyers upon signing the landmark legislation of 1965, that he was handing the South to the GOP for some 40 or 50 years. It was indeed the South, in the fashion that Mahatma Gandhi proposed for Great Britain, that benefited when they changed. It was not easy . Much blood, sweat and tears went into it, but it did happen, and when it happened it occurred swiftly.

The Republican Party gained a huge voting bloc that is as secure today as it has ever been. While there has been a shift, in which the Northeast and much of the Pacific Coast is now reliably Democrat, there is no real correlation, and electorally the GOP is happy to make the "switch," for lack of a better term.

The Civil Rights Movement started first. It can be argued it began the day President Abraham Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation (1863). It was advanced by the competing DuBois-Washington wing of the early 20th Century, and progressed through two world wars, then against the startling rise of the KKK in the 1920s and again in the 1960s. Jackie Robinson, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Harry Belafonte propelled it, among many others. Both Christians and Muslims played prominent roles in its ascendancy. Hollywood, the music industry and sports were instrumental factors. Ultimately capitalism and Democracy gave it room to flourish.

The Civil Rights Movement gave rise to spin-off movements. These included the free speech movement, the Anti-War Movement, the feminist movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement, which was adopted by conservatism, ultimately benefiting from it, the other movements were and remained liberal. Each has established itself as a constituency within the Democrat Party. The spin-offs have provide fundraising, political action and rhetoric for the Left, but the price paid for this "support" is arguably greater than the support itself. At this point these remain the core of the party's constituency. To disavow any of this is to virtually splinter the Democrats into unrecognizability. There is also a very large difference between the Civil Rights Movement and the African-American voting bloc of the modern Democrat Party. While blacks vote upwards of 90 percent Democrat, like the other special interest groups the price the party pays for this reliability is likely greater than its benefit. All these movements are important and potentially powerful, but the rise of conservative media since the late 1980s has continually diluted its effectiveness. At one time these groups could make virtually un-challenged statements, repeated by network news media outlets acting as de facto public relations spokesmen; not any more. They are challenged and disputed, with wholesale cottage industries sprung up on the Right to find factual fault with their assertions.

The free speech movement began at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, led by an agitator named Mario Savio. Many people have a hard time really recalling what its genesis was. There was angst at Berkeley over tuition at a state university, over the right to speak openly or even dispute professors, and over the issue of McCarthyism, the Blacklist, and the signing of loyalty oaths. But as early as 1964 it really was already about civil rights, not only in the South but also in the Bay Area, which was not nearly as liberal then as it is today. It was, of course, also about Vietnam, which was heating up in a big way that year. It quickly morphed wholesale into anti-war protest, spreading to most of the campuses in America.

The Anti-War Movement grew in large measure with the hippies who sprang up out of the Beatnik era of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey's "merry pranksters," plus the writings of Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Norman Mailer. It spread as the war became bigger. Its most virulent locations, aside from Berkeley, were Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin, San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, New York's Greenwich Village, and the Washington Mall. It took on its most virulent overtones when the National Guard opened fire, killing students at Kent State University in 1970. Activists firebombed buildings, or attempted to firebomb buildings, at Berkeley and Wisconsin-Madison. There were numerous sit-ins and "take overs" of campus buildings. The University of Michigan, the college of Tom Hayden and the Students For a Democratic Society, was also a hotbed of protest. Hayden's 1962 Port Huron Statement was a demand on behalf of all college students that, from that point forward, all education was to be "creative, not mechanical," among other gibberish.

The Anti-War Movement gave further spin-offs to some of the most radical elements in modern history. The Chicago Seven were the Left-wing group organized by Hayden to cause riots at the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago. They spun off numerous anti-war committees and "moratoriums." The Winter Soldiers were a group of war veterans organized by the Democrats to accuse officers of committing war crimes in Vietnam.

The "Zebra killers" were murders of random whites by blacks in the 1970s. The Symbionese Liberation Army was a similarly themed Left-wing urban militant group that engaged in bank robberies, murders, kidnappings and other acts of violence against law enforcement. The SLA gained infamy when they kidnapped publishing heiress Patricia Hearst, then "brainwashed" her into joining their cause, ostensibly out of "liberal guilt" for the "role" her rich family and race played in the plight of the oppressed.

Dr. Timothy Leary originally began his group as a form of "protest," but they morphed into an LSD-and-sex party. The Weather Underground was formed to  
"free" Leary from jail. They were a faction of Hayden's SDS with strong black separatist connections. Based on the title of a Bob Dylan song, they engaged in a series of bombings, murders, fire bombings of police stations, attempted murder of a judge, bombing of the Pentagon, a townhouse explosion, prison breakouts, fires, attempted bombing of the California state Senate, the break-in at an FBI building, other attempted bombings, the placing of a bomb under a police car that did not go off, attempted murders, domestic terrorism, and sundry other crimes.

While some members expressed regret over what they did, others became heroes of the Left, gaining status, money and college professorships at liberal colleges. Their leaders, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, somehow evaded lifetime jail sentences, instead mentoring Barack Obama, who by all accounts identified with and agreed with their tactics, when he entered the byzantine world of Chicago politics in the 1990s. Ayers may or may not have been bi-sexual, but he had sex with his best male friend during a drug-dazed party, possibly to gain "solidarity" or "understanding" with the gay rights movement.

The Weather Underground came out of the black radical movements of the 1960s, even though they were mostly comprised of "guilty" whites that justified their actions under the proviso that all Western Civilization, European culture, Democracy, capitalism, and Christianity were immoral concepts that needed to be "avenged." They, along with the Zebra killers and the SLA, provided the impetus for what has come to be known as "black liberation theology." An off shoot of the long tradition of black church attendance, it evolved from the fact that churches were not only a place of worship but gathering places, community centers, and political meeting places. It "hi-jacked" the empowering message of the Lord Jesus Christ, which gives peace to all who seek Him, regardless of ethnicity. Instead, not unlike Adolf Hitler, it told radical blacks they and only they were beneficiaries of this "salvation." Whites were "blue eyed devils," like the Jews of Nazi Germany theoretically fodder for Satan. They created made-up holidays to replace the real ones, like Kwanzaa. They told their people lies, such as a mythical "university" in Africa, a kind of black Atlantis, that supposedly was the light of world intellectualism until the "white man" somehow erased all the knowledge once emanating from it, responsible for millions of blacks suddenly rendered stupid.

This message became a charismatic, politically popular one within a portion of the black community who, it must be assumed, do not actually believe in the truths of Christ, instead choosing to try and "use" His power to foment revolution. In large urban centers these "churches" became the political meeting place of choice in radical Left-wing circles, the place to see and be seen for young Barack Hussein Obama and his wife, who joined one in Chicago. It was led by a man named Jeremiah Wright, who in 2001 expressed the desire that America be damned to eternal hell (although whether he, or these "churches," actually believe in the literal divinity of Heaven and hopelessness of hell is not determined in full). Wright was an associate of Louis Farrakhan who once made a tributary visit to Libyan dictator/murderer Muammar Gaddafi.

The black Muslims and the Black Panthers expressed certain aspects of black liberation theology, but did not embrace its tenets in full. The Panthers were more political and violent. A number of Black Panthers committed murder and other heinous crimes, which even black liberation theology frowned on under the guise of religious adherence. The worst were the murderer Huey Newton, the rapist Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale, imprisoned on various offenses including murder allegations, George Jackson and Angela Davis. Jackson and Davis combined the violence of the Panthers with Marxism-Leninism. Davis, a Communist, snuck a gun into the Marin County jail which Jackson – an adherent of Mao Tse-tung - and his gang used to kidnap and then murder Judge Harold Haley (a grandfather) and paralyze district attorney Gary Thomas before they were shot and killed themselves.

The Left, popularizing the term radical chic, immediately martyred all of these individuals as heroes. Bob Dylan sang about them. Black liberationist author James Baldwin wrote that, despite numerous eyewitnesses, Jackson's killing was all a "set up" of some kind. For some reason Davis and other survivors were not just allowed to freely walk about the Earth like Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayres; some were given positions of great prominence. Ayers became a college professor, as did Davis (UCLA). In 2012 a liberal organization named her one of the "great American women." Jackson's attorney, Stephen Bingham, went into hiding but eventually emerged, also a martyr of the Left.

The black Muslims adhered to actual Islam and, aside from occasional murder-for-hire political killings (as with Malcolm X in 1965), were less violent. Despite the racial exclusivity inherent in their name, they did in part embrace Islam as a whole, which like Christianity cannot be reduced to a single race.

Aside from Davis, many other violent black anarchists were rewarded with tenure at major universities, These included Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulena Karenga, founder of the United Slaves. Once convicted of torture, among numerous other crimes, today he freely moves about and "teaches" a "black studies" course at California State University State, Long Beach,

David Hilliard, the Black Panthers' "field marshall," once threatened to kill President Nixon in front of a quarter-million people. He has taught at various schools. Other black liberation radicals freely allowed to teach include two of President Obama's Harvard associates, Henry Gates and Derrick Bell, as well as Obama himself, once an adjunct teacher.

J. Edgar Hoover realized early on that Communists funded all of these radical, liberal and Left-wing organizations. Most of the money was laundered in such a way as to avoid direct linkage to Moscow and China. A good deal of it was just homegrown terrorism-Communism-treachery, not officially controlled by the U.S.S.R. Hoover had been following and tracking these organizations since the days of anarchism; Sacco and Vanzetti; "Red Emma" Goldman; the bombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home; the first Red scare (1910s-20s); the Venona Project; Soviet espionage, infiltration, subversion and influence in Hollywood, the State Department, and the Roosevelt Administration; the Chambers-Hiss case; the second Red Scare (1940s-50s); McCarthyism; then the Vietnam War. He saw that Communism infiltrated the Civil Rights Movement, a fact shed light on by the testimony of baseball star Jackie Robinson. He knew Communists were inside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s group and that Nelson Mandela's South African National Congress was Communist. He knew most of the street protests at colleges were funded by Moscow and Red China. He knew that liberalism was not merely the fuzzy, "feel good" ideology of happy "do gooders" who just wanted to feed the homeless and help the 'little guy." He knew human nature, and that out of this way of thinking grew a strange psychosis telling these people since they were doing "good" and were in the "right." Ayers, Cleaver and many of them later said they felt any crimes committed were justified. Saul Alinsky dedicated his work to Presidential assassin Sirhan Sirhan, while Obama was rewarded for his association with these causes with the White House.

There was also a great deal of international linkage not just with Soviet Communism, but other Communist and radical organizations of the era. One was the Baader-Meinhof Complex, a Left-wing German group aligned with the Palestinians in the wake of the 1967 Israel-Arab War. They engaged in fire bombings, political murder, and terrorism, all replete with hoary statements demanding that various murderers and terrorists be released from jails in Germany, Israel and the like. The Baader-Meinhoff Complex also engaged in promiscuous "swingers style" sex, typical of the anti-Christian lifestyle of Communists, as it was with the SLA and other American groups. The act of sex became a political tool; white women availing their bodies to blacks as a form of "reparations," or Bill Ayers having sex with a male friend, Terry Robbins, to promote the notion of homosexuality as superior to Christian ethics. Robbins later blew himself up making a bomb intended to kill soldiers at Ft. Dix, but Ayers was not killed.

So crazed were the Weathermen during the Chicago riots (1968) that even the Black Panthers disavowed them as being too violently radical. They specialized in flying the Viet Cong flag, a direct act of treason during the Vietnam War. Future Obama advisor Bernardine Dohrn, for instance, liked to sing a song, based on Bob Dylan's "Lay Lady Lay," celebrating the group's causing paralysis of a city official named Richard Elrod. She also publicly celebrated the Manson killings, urging children to "kill your parents – that's where it's at!" A documentary called Point of Order, a diatribe against Senator McCarthy, lauded Ayers and Dohrn for their bomb-making. Today she is a professor at Northwestern's Children and Justice Center.

The Palestinians became the latest cause célèbre, Yasser Arafat forming the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its off-shoot, Black September. They engaged in hi-jackings and bombings of airplanes, airports, and public places, killing indiscriminately. In 1972 Black September murdered most of the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympics. Carlos the Jackal was an international Left-wing terrorist who engaged in a series of bombings, murders, kidnappings and acts of terror on behalf of radical causes, usually for pay.

Several theorists and political apologists emerged out of all this. One was Noam Chomsky, a college professor-author who twisted history, using moral relativism to "justify" Communist expansion as some kind of "normal" act of "progress" or reaction to American, Western, imperialistic, jingoistic, capitalistic – pick your pejorative – political ideology, rooted at its heart the protection of moneyed interests. Much of Obama's writings, early speeches, books, and even Presidential policies can be extrapolated from Chomsky, as much a patron saint of liberalism as William F. Buckley was to conservatism.

In Chomsky's worldview, the gulags, the genocides, were just acts of war, the victims casualties of a tragedy of colliding ideas, with racism and greed fueling the American Empire. The dropping of the atomic bombs, Dresden fire bombings, the "Christmas bombing" campaign of 1972, even "water boarding" at Guantanamo Bay or prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, was again morally relative to the Cultural Revolution or Stalin's "forced famines." To think and use all of ones' intellect, passion and talent to argue such things, as Chomsky has spent a lifetime doing, can logically occur only if one is a psychotic. David Horowitz was one of Chomsky's disciples who at some point "saw the light," and has spent his lifetime exposing it. This view of America as equally immoral with historical criminals was thoroughly endorsed by Chomsky himself, Professor Ward Churchill, Obama's mentor Bill Ayers, Obama's "pastor" Jeremiah Wright, Obama's large monetary donor/supporter/apologist Bill Maher, Obama's White House aides Van Jones and Anita Dunn (who said she shared her political philosophy with one of her "favorite" historical figures, the mass murderer Mao Tse-tung), among numerous others associated with Obama, the Left, and the Democrat Party, after September 11, 2001. 9/11 opened a whole new soap box for the Left to tell the world that the chickens had apparently come home to roost. All of this is a definite pattern starting with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, carrying through the French Revolution, 19th century Euro-revolts, the Communism Revolution, 20th Century Communist genocide, with off-shoots in Islamic jihad, plus related Leftist causes. As Michael Savage has often pointed out, liberalism is literally a mental disorder. How else to explain it?

Chomsky and eventually Obama were the intellectual voice of the Left, using history, academia and the free speech protections of America to promote their views. A "community organizer" was needed to take them out of the "ivory tower" into the streets. One of those men was Saul Alinsky. He came out of the Communist unions of Chicago, sponsored by Moscow and spread into the WPA (like Alger Hiss) among other New Deal organizations; largely Jewish groups promoting the view that American racism and greed was out of control and could only be countered by radicalism within the apparatuses of regulation and bureaucracy. Government bureaucracy, Alinsky knew, was the way to usurp Democracy and the vote. He knew that America was a patriotic nation, its institutions respected, the success of its capitalist system impossible to argue with. He did not try. Instead he took lessons from Machiavelli and mocked patriotism, the profit motive, and traditional righteousness. He organized demonstrations that made fun of these traditions; tarred and feathered them with the brush of Nazi sympathy, KKK racism, greed, and violence. He used violence and the threat of violence to get what he could not get by the vote. He mocked religion and used Communist tactics of usurpation in the infiltration of black agitation groups and radically Leftist organizations, stirring up violence and hatred as a means to achieve this. His worked was eventually carried on by Obama, the man who best combined community organizing with the ivory tower views of Left-wing history and academia.

Alinsky viewed the clash between his aims and the Establishment as "war," the ends justifying almost any means. People are expedient in the moment. He found ways to justify this as consistent and moral after the fact. We see this first in the French guillotining of priests, Joe Stalin's admonition that mass murder is okay because one cannot "make an omelet without breaking a few eggs," the attempted bombings carried out by Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the complicity in murder carried out by Angela Davis, among thousands of Left-wing examples stretching back centuries.

Only two kinds of people can afford the luxury of acting on principle, Alinsky said: those with absolute power and those with none and no desire to get any. To be effective one must learn to be "unprincipled" enough to compromise in order to see their principles succeed.

Examples of Obama following Alinsky's example, first justifying his aims by any means, second by eschewing "principles," are numerous. One early indicator came when he broke Illinois law in unsealing the divorce records of his 2004 U.S. Senate opponent, Republican Jack Ryan. It was pure politics of personal destruction. Ryan was divorced from bombshell actress Jeri Ryan. Allegedly during their marriage they attended a club, where Ryan proposed the idea of having sex with his wife in private. Apparently they "chickened out" and did not do it, leaving.

Completely sealed under court order, Obama arranged to have a friendly judge publicly expose it. Ryan, running as a devout Christian conservative, was shamed by the Right into dropping out. Obama won without competition. It was a terrible blow to the Ryan family, which included their son, and the end of Ryan's future hopes. Success or failure, as Alinsky stated, is a "mighty determinant" of ethics.

Yesterday's "immoral terrorist" is today's "moral and dignified statesman of high standing," an Alinsky statement literally begging to be magnified next to Obama's photo in a campaign commercial. Yesterday's "moral statesman," Alinsky continued (echoing Mao and Khrushchev), is "sitting in front of a 'war crimes tribunal' today - because he lost." More difficult to do in America, Obama has used this philosophy to "blame Bush" for all past woes. Alinsky further advocates the oft-repeated revolutionary call to violence, "Burn the system down!"

"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon," Alinsky stated, but in this case conservative talk radio managed to turn this trick on his followers. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." This was Alinsky's most controversial rule, used often by race extortionists Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Obama and others to find a CEO in a company, hound him with threats of racism, wait until he collapses, then validate their actions under the premise that the CEO "giving in" justified their means in the first place.

Alinsky's methods were used by all the Communist front groups of the 1960s and 1970s protest movements, from the war to feminism, civil rights, environmentalism, gay rights and beyond. He wrote a book called Rules For Radicals, which was dedicated to Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan. Barack Obama dedicated his book to Alinsky, stating that as influential as Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright had been, Alinsky was his true ideological mentor. His methods of race extortion were the cornerstone of this "work."

The various movements emanating from 1960s street protest all originate with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the genocidal French Revolution of 1789-93. The difference between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street similarly is the difference between the Founding Fathers and the Terrors.

Ronald Reagan's career was built opposing these movements; first union thugs threatening to throw acid in his face and blow up buildings during Communist protests of the 1940s, then by the drug-addled hippy anarchists on California campuses in the 1960s. Conservative talk host Dr. Michael Savage, who grew up in New York in the 1950s, said that many of the protestors were the children of Communists who indoctrinated them, a fact endorsed by the studies of political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. Much of this angst was found in the Jewish community, morphing between anger towards prejudice against Jews and historical Jewish guilt over Christ's death. Many modern protestors literally were radicalized with their parents, who brought them to marches as children. Drugs became the fuel powering their action then and now.

As for the free speech movement, iconoclastic Right-wing author Ann Coulter caustically noted that liberals "supported free speech until they realized, years later, how bad speech is for them and began demanding hate crimes legislation, speech codes, and sexual harassment laws restricting free speech laws." When Coulter herself arrived on many of those same college campuses to make . . . speeches . . . the progeny of the free speech movement first protested her appearances then, unable to overcome the fact speech is actually free in America, tried to shout her down, even throw pies in her face. This is the "direct action" espoused by Alinsky, seen in groups like Code Pink. Her books are huge bestsellers. Chomsky's are covered in dust.

Each of these radical causes seemed to empower the other. The same ideology that supported the Baader-Meinhof Complex, or the SLA, while perhaps not approving of actual murder, nevertheless found kindred spirit with the anti-authoritarian attitudes that seemed to lump all tradition, Christianity and American patriotism with "imperialism," a concept which, in light of America's fighting colonist past makes no sense, but very little of the 1960s-70s causes made much sense.

Out of the Civil Rights Movements, the free speech movement, the Anti-War Movement, black liberation theology, the Black Panthers, the PLO, and radical-terrorism grew feminism, environmentalism and gay rights. Perhaps because the earlier movements became very violent, feminism allowed itself to promote Margaret Sanger's abortionist crimes, justifying the eventual mass murder of unborn babies in the name of itself.

The modern sexual revolution really started with the Communists, Bohemians and radicals of the early 20th Century, as advocated by "Red Emma" Goldman, John Reed and Eugene O'Neill, given full flower in the works of Upton Sinclair. It certainly refuted the Victorian age and operated in easy confluence with Darwinism, since man emanated from monkeys by virtue of repeated sex acts rather than being saved by a God who came to this world immaculately. After World War I women, now allowed to vote, became sexualized via Prohibition, which gave rise to the flappers, the Jazz Age, and Hollywood. World War II gave them mobility and economic freedom. After a decade of "repression" (1950s), "the pill" combined with rock music, loosening of the Hayes Codes, Playboy magazine, Hollywood promiscuity, the French New Wave, Joe Namath and the sexualization of professional sports, and pornography to unleash an entirely new kind of mini-skirt-clad "chick," to borrow a Frank Sinatra phrase. Sinatra and his "rat pack" had been wreaking carnage on women in Las Vegas for years. Now everybody was doing it.

Two leaders of the early movement were Gloria Steinem, who went undercover as a Playboy bunny to uncover the misogyny of Hugh Hefner's empire, and Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan, a magazine glorifying one-night stands, masturbation, sex with multiple partners, and female enjoyment. The feminist movement galvanized around the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, giving all women in the nation abortion access on demand. Over the years, the movement has lost much of its early power for various reasons.

For one, women face little if any discrimination anymore, meaning the reason for the movement no longer has a reason to exist. A return to Christian morals in the 1980s created a backlash, as well. When medical science began to inform people how abortions were really performed, complete with photographs of dead babies not unlike stacks of the murdered at Auschwitz, many were repulsed. Over time, the movement has become militantly lesbian, enforcing the notion that women do not need men; children could be adopted or had by fertilization without bringing men in to raise them. But Rush Limbaugh probably hit the nail on the head when he observed that the feminist movement existed so as to give ugly women a political voice. Once every decade or so an abortionist is murdered by an extremist who thinks he is saving children. In the ultimate act of moral relativism, the feminists place forth the fiction that this represents a threatening form of systematic violence from the Right, somehow comparable with the 50 million-plus (at least) dead babies who remain Margaret Sanger's, Thomas Malthus's . . . and Gloria Steinem's legacy.

Like feminism, environmentalism allowed itself to become violent probably because the same "justifications" of the radicals and black liberation theologists, the narcissistic view that they were selfishly in the right, and that all disagreement was therefore evil, inculcated itself into their movement as it did with abortionists. Thus radical environmentalists began to commit acts of eco-terror, particularly against loggers and "clear cutters" in forested areas. One of its proponents, a former Berkeley professor named Ted Kaczynski, mailed bombs to those he deemed part of the technology establishment, of a sort, killing many. He was called the Unabomber.

The movement lost much steam when it was pointed out that the loggers planted and grew far more trees than they could cut down. In the 1970s they decided a new ice age was descending upon man. Playboy featured an article depicting a bikini-clad maiden on an iceberg. A few years later, when proof of the ice age no longer existed, so did talk of it.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, international Communism began looking for a new cause. Women and blacks no longer faced real discrimination. Actual environmental disasters were found not in the industrial West, but the Communist East: the old Soviet Union, East Germany, Red China, and so on. In order to divert people from this knowledge, global warming replaced the ice age as the new cause of international Socialism.

In a lucky strike, this occurred during a period in which the globe did experience some temperature increase. The argument has ensued for years whether this is the natural changing of temperatures as had occurred for eons, or is the result of man's action since the Industrial Revolution, exacerbated by two world wars. Electricity, over-population, plastic, smoking, aerosol sprays, and other factors are said to cause global warming.

The Left says the science is "settled," not up for debate. The problem is that tremendous evidence exists that either shows global warming is a hoax not caused by man, or that man may bear some responsibility, but a very small percentage of it in comparison with nature.

People who have lived in American cities like Houston and Los Angeles since the 1960s have seen the air become vastly cleaner than it was then, seemingly anecdotal evidence that what the Left says man must do, man already has done in the form of cleaner-burning fuels, cars emitting less carbon dioxide, and many other splendors of profit-driven, capitalistic technology. To admit that profit-driven, capitalistic technology has cleaned up the environment rather than ruined it would erase the raison d'être of the Left, at least until they can find the next movement.

This has not stopped the Left. In the tradition of the Unabomber, they routinely resort to violence, extortion and destruction, as when they routinely riot and destroy city centers like in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization; Iraq War rioting; and the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, which resulted in widespread vandalism, rapes, disease, criminality, filth and all manner of villainy. This is their modus operandi.

Coulter compared the radicals who made up these movements with a failed novelist in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Demon, which he based on the French Revolution. The novelist "toys with nihilistic anarchists to feed his own ego, flattering them as the only the generation to speak truth boldly, while boasting about his own atheism."

The '60s bequeathed us radicals who are, as Coulter says using Dostoevsky's words, "neither as outrageous nor so violent at first. The poison has worked its way into our soul, the effects becoming less visible to us as they become more ordinary."

Whether modern man is outraged anymore does not mean God is not. As it says in Zephaniah 3:5: ". . . The unjust knoweth no shame."

Vietnam and triangulated global diplomacy

What then is our course? . . . Must freedom wither in a quiet, deadening accommodation with totalitarian evil?

\- Ronald Reagan

The "will to power" (German: "der Wille zur Macht") is a prominent concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The will to power describes what Nietzsche may have believed to be the main driving force in man: achievement, ambition, the striving to reach the highest possible position in life; these are all manifestations of the will to power.

Alfred Adler incorporated the will to power into his individual psychology. This can be contrasted to the other Viennese schools of psychotherapy: Sigmund Freud's pleasure principle (will to pleasure) and Viktor Frankl's logotherapy (will to meaning). Each of these schools advocates and teaches a very different main driving force in "man." The will to power has been "identified" in nature in the dominance hierarchies studied in many living species.

In the documentary In the Face of Evil, the story of Ronald Reagan's lifelong struggle against Communism, the facts about Nietzsche's will to power are described amid depictions of 20th Century genocide, gulags, riots and mass hatred, mixed with mesmerized audiences yearning to love a man of politics. Throughout the documentary, the narrator keeps referring to "the Beast," obviously a reference to Satan. In the 20th Century, as Mankind approached its 2,000th year since the life and death of Jesus, it would certainly appear that evil does exist, it never goes away, and in this wonderful, terrible century the confrontation between the forces of good and evil came to the most climactic head in human annals.

Jingoistic or not, if one gives any credence to the notion of God and, by extension, the devil; of good and evil; of forces reacting to each other; then one is irresistibly drawn to conclude that America was a nation created by God just in the nick of time to stop the forces of evil before they embarked on 1,000 or 2,000 years of darkness and horror unimaginable compared to any previous dark age.

A more vivid visual, absent the existence of America, might be one of a sky filled with Nazi, Soviet, Red Chinese and Islamo-Fascist air weapons strafing the Earth with a bombardment of nuclear weapons. A substantial portion of the Left, much of it residing in the U.S. and given strong credence by the Democrat Party, would argue that the evils of the 20th Century were not solved by American intransigence against its existence; bravery in the face of danger; willingness to uphold justice; or any other Old West My Darling Clementine notion of simplicity the simpleton, unnuanced Christians ascribe to it.

Above all arguments they make to justify their thinking, the Vietnam War may be their strongest case. Here was a conflict that started out as the clearest of American resolves. A shiny new President argued that we "shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." We had unprecedented power and had won the greatest war against the most implacable enemy ever assembled. We were invincible.

Communism was laid out before us, an enemy that had to be destroyed at "any price." A mere decade earlier, we had that chance, but President Harry Truman chose not to deal a death blow but to appease it, firing General Douglas MacArthur. Now it reared its ugly head again, in Vietnam. To Lyndon Johnson, it was a golden opportunity, to right Truman's failure and achieve this ultimate victory here and now. But this period expands on the theme of Nietzsche's will to power, which is eternal in its own worldly way. The forces behind it, whether Communist, Nazi, jihadist, are merely causes of a particular day used by the devil to battle goodness, to wear it down. To discredit, dispirit and demoralize it.

Nixon's war

By the time Richard Milhous Nixon took over as President of the United States on January 20, 1969, however, the Vietnam War was entirely unpopular at home, and had poisoned our relations with Europe. Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, had a plan to use the war to turn the two rival Communist powers, China and the U.S.S.R, already at rift with each other, further into global rivalry. The U.S. plan was to place themselves into the role of arbitrators, using both of them for our own purposes. It was brilliant. It was also an act of desperation. Victory, the great American goal, was no longer possible. Not the old school victory, the kind that came with armies marching triumphantly through adoring cities, returning to cheering crowds at home.

Nixon did not have the public support to fight the "total war" necessary to achieve ultimate victory in Vietnam. He had to make do with what he did have. Eight years earlier, Kennedy had stolen the election away from him with the Cook County and Texas voter frauds. This created profound changes in the global landscape.

In his first term, Kennedy had met Nikita Khrushchev at Vienna. Kennedy, who used his looks and charm to his advantage his entire life, entered the summit thinking he could do the same. He felt that reasonable argument would prevail, and made a major point of indicating to the Soviet Premier that if the two countries engaged in nuclear war, 70 million people would die. Khrushchev just looked at him as if to say, "So what?" After all, V.I. Lenin had once said it would not matter if most of the world's population perished, so long as the survivors were Communists. Joseph Stalin used New York Times reporter Walter Duranty to put it in American terms, stating that in order to win this worldwide revolutionary "omelet," it would be necessary to "break a few eggs."

Khrushchev, the hero of Stalingrad, had seen more war than any man should ever see. He had no desire to see more. But he had decided to hard-line Kennedy, to make the young President think that no sacrifice was too great in the name of the Communist cause. This was the big trump card of Marxist-Leninist theory, the idea that people in the present were never more important than the goal, the plan, the future; some utopian land that everybody would occupy once "purification" had rent it of the bourgeoisie.

Kennedy had tried to convey a tough message in his Inauguration speech, espousing the idea that the U.S. would tackle any task, help any friend, and oppose any foe. But Khrushchev knew that JFK was bluffing. At Vienna, he sized up Kennedy and determined that he was still a "boy," controlled by his father, part of a political philosophy that had aided and comforted Communism during the McCarthy era, and not willing to put his prestige on the line to oppose him.

This decision manifested itself in two areas: the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy was on his heels. He was not prepared to launch any military offensives against Communism after the Cuban fiasco. Khrushchev knew it.

The question is, What would have happened if Nixon had been in the White House, as he should have been? Nixon was the most ardent, hard-line anti-Communist politician in America. While McCarthy was posturing, Nixon was doing detective work, rooting out Communists. His big prize was Alger Hiss, a top State Department aide to President Roosevelt and one of the architects of the Democrats' post-World War II reconstruction strategy.

Nixon demonstrated a hard line time after time after Hiss. He called Helen Gahagan Douglas the "pink lady." He proposed "battlefield nukes" at Dien Bien Phu. Nixon stood up to Communists in face-to-face confrontations in Latin America, and earned heroic status for his bravery. He met Khrushchev and debated him in Russia and the U.S., including the famous "kitchen debate" in which the two matched the relative merits of their respective systems while standing in a kitchen that they were touring. He was intimately involved in CIA plots to disrupt Communism in Latin America. He was the driving force behind the plans to invade Cuba after Fidel Castro's revolution, which were the early stages of "Mongoose," orchestrated by Central Intelligence to eliminate the Cuban despot.

During the 1960 election, Nixon pointed out that 800 million people lived under Communism, and only 500 million lived under freedom. He lost many votes because he was unable to discuss the top secret plans to topple Castro, and when goaded by JFK about it he held his tongue.

Nixon was not a man to be trifled with when it came to the Communist threat. Nobody understood that better than the Communists themselves. Nixon learned a valuable lesson, too. His enemies (foreign and domestic) thought of him as slightly unhinged and more than a little bloodthirsty. Nixon did not try to play that image down. He let it work for him. In prosecuting war and peace with an enemy who respected only force, it was his best trump card.

Had he taken office in 1961, history may very well have been written much differently. It did not happen that way. Instead, Lyndon Johnson took us to war in Vietnam, as Speaker Sam Rayburn said, "by inches."

With Nixon finally in office by 1969, William Rogers replaced Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Melvin Laird replaced Clark Clifford as Secretary of Defense, Henry Kissinger replaced Walt Rostow as National Security Advisor, General Creighton Abrams had already taken over from General William Westmoreland, and Admiral John McCain replaced U.S. Grant Sharp as the head of CINCPAC.

Nixon faced tough sledding because the media and the protest movement were in full force against Vietnam. Bobby Kennedy had changed the entire outlook on the war, advocating a complete withdrawal. The Left now demanded nothing less. Nixon's anti-Communist credentials were viewed as the archaic ramblings of a political dinosaur. Liberals wanted to end the Cold War and had adopted the politics of peace, love and uni-lateral withdrawal.

The Communists watched all of this from their perches in Beijing and Moscow, almost besides themselves over their good fortune. America seemed to be in a state of insanity. If they continued in this manner, everything they had worked for would be handed over to the Communists. The U.S. would cut and run from Vietnam. After that it would only be a matter of time before the Americans gave in over Berlin and Seoul. Had Bobby Kennedy been elected President in 1968, and there is little to suggest he would not had he lived, then the damage done by unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam in 1969 would have been incalculable.

The question is again posed: what forces were at play? Were the Kennedy assassinations random acts of violence, or part of an ironic, cosmic plan? The idea that the uncharismatic Richard Nixon was by turns the victim of Kennedy avarice and the beneficiary of their murders is anathema to the liberal mindset. His eventual tragic fall via Watergate, when he was searching for dirt on Teddy Kennedy, caps a bizarre, 14-year period that changed America forever.

In 1969, the conservatives were in power, and Communists knew their window of opportunity had passed. Had Hubert Humphrey been elected, it would have been clear sailing for them. They would have just let the American Empire self-destruct right before their eyes. But it, too, did not happen. Instead, the Nixons came in with a "two-track" approach separating military and political conflicts.

Vietnamization

The plan was for Hanoi and Washington to negotiate a military solution, while Saigon

and Hanoi negotiated political solutions. The "Vietnamization" policy was put into operation, aimed at transferring the burden of the war from the U.S. to the ARVN. Kissinger created a "carrot and stick" strategy, deciding to always negotiate through strength. Nixon placated the anti-war crowd with a proposed "mutual withdrawal" of troops, and reduced the bombing of North Vietnam.

In the mean time, he ordered Operation Menu, the secret bombing of Cambodia beginning on March 18, 1969. The Communists had created bases, camps and supply lines in Cambodia. Nixon was not going to let them get away with it. The bombings continued until 1973, with 16,527 sorties dropping 383,851 tons of explosives on Cambodia.

When the story leaked to the New York Times on May 9, Kissinger ordered wiretaps on seven NSC staff and four reporters. 241 U.S. soldiers died at "Hamburger Hill" in A Shau Valley on May 27, and after that 25,000 troops were withdrawn on June 8. The White House called this a "meaningful signal" that the war was winding down. They found themselves involved in a delicate situation. On the one hand, they were negotiating through strength with the Communists, bombing them into submission and making them pay for any deceptions. On the other hand, the Left had grown strong politically, and international support for the American position was in line with the Left. Nixon had little real support other than the Republicans, but they were increasingly marginalized. The Silent Majority was still with him, but their "silence" made it seem as if they did not exist. Nixon was determined not to commit national suicide. He knew that what he was doing was unpopular, but was as necessary as air is to a suffocating man.

In July, Nixon made his Pacific trip to meet with South Vietnamese President Ngyun Van Thieu and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines. What emerged was the "Nixon Doctrine" promising that the U.S. would honor treaties and extend nuclear shield to allies, but not U.S. troops. The press dubbed this "global Vietnamization." Kissinger was engaging in the secret Paris peace talks at the apartment of Jean Sainteng. On September 2, Ho Chi Minh died. A Politburo committee consisting of Pham Van Dong, Le Duan, and General Vo Nguyen Giap replaced him.

Kissinger and Polish Ambassador Walte Stoessel proposed talks in Warsaw with the Chinese to begin in 1970. The national mood continued to swing further and further against the war. People did not see the delicate diplomacy of Kissinger. In October, a Vietnam Moratorium Committee was established and 250,000 marched in D.C. In November, one year after his election, Nixon made a direct TV appeal to the Silent Majority, asking for their support. A moratorium demonstration of 500,000 in D.C. on November 15 was the largest anti-war demonstration yet. As the streets exploded, the college campuses were rocked with anarchy, and the press raged against him. Nixon feared chaos and disorder.

My Lai

Then Seymour Hersh published a story about the My Lai massacre of 500 civilians that had occurred on March 16, 1968, led by Lieutenant William Calley. This story had the effect of inflaming the anti-war populace beyond control. The My Lai case was an awful moment in U.S. history, but the way the press handled it was wrong. The Hersh story seems to be true, although the fog of war creates opportunities for mistakes in deed and interpretation.

It was portrayed as callous Americans murdering innocent civilians for little reason beyond the love of death. Two things were missed from the general public discourse surrounding My Lai. First, the "innocent civilians" of Vietnam were often Viet Cong guerillas. By not wearing uniforms or operating under recognized military command structures, they looked and acted like civilians. Many were running supplies to the North Vietnamese regulars. Worse, many were women and children. Combating them put the U.S. forces in a lose-lose situation.

The other fact of life that the press refused to address as a counter-balance to My Lai and other like stories was the torture and murder of American POWS by the Communists and the Viet Cong. The Geneva Convention was observed neither by the Hanoi government or their Viet Cong allies. American soldiers were forced to endure the mutilation of their buddies, and expected by liberals to treat the suspects like kindergartners. The torture of U.S. military personnel, particularly at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" prison, is simple proof that the North Vietnamese Communists were evil, and they were part of a larger evil. They were no different than the Japanese who killed Americans, British and Australians during the Bataan Death March. There is no moral equivalency that excuses what they did and makes them any less horrid than Nazi concentration camp guards. The fact that average Americans, who otherwise might have been sunning themselves at the beach, going to college, or playing a little football, were thrust into a death grip with these animals and some of them snapped is not some proof that the Left is allowed to trot out as evidence that America is "no better" than anyone else.

Paris peace talks and invasion of Cambodia

As 1969 turned into 1970, Le Duc Tho replaced Xuan Thuy in Paris for the second round of talks lasting from February to April. They demanded an end to the "illegitimate" Saigon government. Emboldened by news of protests in the streets of U.S. cities, and by a withdrawal of support from such "allies" as France, the Communists invaded Laos and Cambodia. They defeated the Hmong army and captured the Plain of Jarres. The result of this was the creation of a new political party called the Khmer Rouge.

This was a major development. Now, the Communists had invaded sovereign neighbors. They were butchering and torturing thousands of civilians. The U.S. was the only force left to help these people. The Left painted our efforts to save innocent humans as the greedy, war mongering, heavy-handed designs of a conservative, colonial power. Outside of the rubber, there was little in Vietnam that a capitalist nation like America could "exploit," yet the protest movement and their liberal allies in the media made it sound as if pure greed drove this tortuous confrontation with the forces of Marxism.

The CIA managed to help foment a Cambodian coup on March 18, replacing the neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk with the pro-U.S. Lon Nol. On April 25, Nixon screened the film Patton. Spurred by its depiction of patriotism and American military power, he made the decision to meet the Communists head-on and invade Cambodia. 32,000 U.S. troops attacked the Fishhook and Parrot's Beak for two months, destroying North Vietnamese supplies and setting the Communist's back by two years. Instead of cheering the operation as the military success it was, the Left upped the campaign of hate.

In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger insisted that all the "civilians" were gone from this strategic section of Cambodia. The American aggression was not thrust upon a large, innocent civilian population, but upon a Communist monolith who had already wiped out the civilians ahead of time.

Kent State shootings

At Kent State University, a demonstration on May 4 became heated. Untrained ROTC troops opened fire against them. Four students were killed. It was an act of heavy-handedness and stupidity on the part of the U.S. government that may be unmatched in our history. The soldiers should have been equipped with rubber bullets.

Campus demonstrations had gotten out of hand. ROTC buildings were being bombed and set on fire. Demonstrators were throwing bags of feces at cops and troops. The choice between order and anarchy was being narrowed. Nevertheless, the political fall-out of confrontation between armed forces and civilians was a disaster. The images were rife with all the symbolism of long hair, peace signs, free love, flower children, psychedelic folk music and general "coolness." On the other side were uptight, uniformed, armed, bulldog shorthairs. The media was entirely sympathetic to the "kids."

Actress Jane Fonda openly supported the Communists by flying to Hanoi to pose lovingly with the North Vietnamese Army. The kids who chose not to demonstrate, and instead served, came back from their tours, sometimes maimed, missing limbs, in wheelchairs, or scarred by the experience of seeing their friends killed and tortured by the meanest of all possible enemies. They received nary an ounce of sympathy from the liberals. They were spat on by hippies and excoriated as criminals by the Fifth Estate. It was disgusting.

Nixon agonized over the state of his country, and turned to the lessons of history for guidance. Trying to imagine what "Honest Abe" Lincoln would do, he woke up in the middle of the night of May 9, unable to sleep, ordering his driver to take him to the Lincoln Memorial. He got out of the car and walked up the steps, which were littered with sleeping student demonstrators. Slowly but surely, the kids began to wake up and recognized, in amazement, that the President was amongst them. They crowded around him, menacing but quiet. A dialogue began. Nixon, uncomfortable with his surroundings, tried to talk about subjects he thought would connect him to the students. He talked about college football and the perfect surfing conditions near his Orange County beachside mansion. The kids tried to change the subject to the war, but Nixon, the great debater who had impressed Khrushchev and sold a nation on his sincerity with the Checkers speech, found himself face to face with the famous "generation gap." His Lincoln Memorial jaunt was something between a disaster and an oddity.

The Democrats went to work undermining Nixon. The Cooper-Church amendment limiting U.S. troops in Laos and Cambodia passed the Senate by 58-37 on June 30. When Le Duc Tho met Kissinger in Paris for the third round of talks in June, he knew he had the upper hand of tacit Democrat support. Half of his enemies were his "friends." The Hatfield-McGovern amendment to require complete withdrawal from Vietnam was met by enough Republican opposition to prevent complete undermining of the Nixon-Kissinger plan. Kissinger traveled to Pakistan in October, and President Yahya Khan acted as the intermediary with new Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. The U.S. gave aid to Khan in March, 1971 to suppress the Bangladesh revolt, but India defeated Khan and created Bangladesh in December, 1971.

From January 31 to February 2, the Winter Soldier investigation by John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans against the War included 116 veterans testifying about atrocities committed by the U.S. in Vietnam. No mention of Communist decapitations, torture, murder and sundry acts of evil were allowed to offset the impression that the investigations were meant to convey. There was no mention of the Cultural Revolution going on in China at that time, in which most of the 55 million humans who died under Mao met their ends. There was no mention of the Siberian gulags. There was no mention of the tanks that the Communists had sent to Prague a couple of years earlier when some politicians decided to try "Socialism with a human face."

It did not have a human face, and yet the great victory of Communism was almost at hand. A world in which their atrocities were forgotten, and a handful of crimes committed by troubled American citizens was, in this new upside down world, made out to be the moral equivalent of Dachau and Buchenwald. It was as if the Nazis had come out of World War II with a truce, in subsequent years had made people forget about the Holocaust, and now that they were on the march again, the Americans trying to stop them were suddenly viewed as worse than them. Only the thin green line of American conservatism stood between freedom and this disturbing new reality.

On February 8, in Operation Lam Son 719, the ARVN invaded Laos with U.S. air support but failed to close the Ho Chi Minh Trail, showing that Vietnamization had failed. Kissinger met with Le Duc Tho in further secret talks in a house on the Rue Darthe rather than the formal talks at the Hotel Majestic, in February. The south's failures had taken a crucial card from the NSC advisors deck. The talks stalled.

A ping-pong team visited China on April 10, the first official exchange between the U.S. and China since Mao's revolution. The 21-year trade embargo was lifted in June. Nixon made his five-powers speech in Kansas City, outlining a world to be dominated by economic superpowers U.S., Russia, Western Europe, Japan, and China. This vision of the world might be said to be the "true fallout" of World War II, its effect having taken 26 years to take shape.

Rapprochement with China

Kissinger visited Peking on July 9, 1971 and shook hands with Zhou Enlai (unlike Allen Dulles, who had spurned him at Geneva in 1954). Now the U.S. supported admission of the People's Republic of China to the U.N., and began to remove U.S. troops from Formosa (Taiwan). At first, conservatives could not believe Nixon was seriously considering rapprochement with Red China. They had been our enemies in Korea, tortured and brainwashed POWs. Nixon himself had called Mao a "monster."

But the Chinese had split with the Soviets, and this was an enormous opportunity for the U.S. to fill the power vacuum of this event. Nixon knew that he and he alone had the "anti-Communist credentials" to pull this off. Any Democrat would be excoriated for being "soft on Communism." Eisenhower might have been a man who could have done

it, as well as MacArthur had he been President. But no Democrat had the prestige to afford such a risk.

Nixon arrived in China on February 21, 1972, negotiating the Shanghai Communiqué with Mao and other Chinese leaders. Diplomatic relations with the P.R.C. were opened, and most important, the U.S. had created a fissure in the Communist monolith. Distrust was high between the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C. The U.S. was in a position to negotiate separate, favorable deals with both, all of it setting the table for a peaceful withdrawal from Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese were not willing to go down, a mere pawn in the global strategies of Russia, China and America. They invaded Quang Tri on March 30, their largest offensive since Tet. Nixon responded with Operation Linebacker on April 6, resulting in bombing north of the DMZ, using B-52 raids on Hanoi and Haiphong. The North Vietnamese captured Quang Tri City on May 1. The South Vietnamese Army was now in complete collapse. Somehow, historians never speak of the utter failure of the ARVN when discussing the "inevitable" failure of Vietnam. After all the tragedy, pain and suffering, after the Pentagon Papers, the simple goals of the war are forgotten. It was deemed impossible in the minds of people to conceive if the Communists could have been stopped from turning the south into their slaves, the objectives would have been attained. When it was all said and done, the South Vietnamese failed to defend their homeland.

Le Duc Tho and Kissinger met in Paris on May 2 for round four. Shortly thereafter it was decided to mine Haiphong harbor and blockade the North Vietnamese coast. Four aircraft carriers were added to the 7th Fleet. A massive bombing campaign of "jugular diplomacy" proved successful. The Communists retreated on June 18 and Quang Tri City was re-taken.

Kissinger's global strategy with the other superpowers, and his decision to negotiate through strength with the Vietnamese, was now working. In light of the China trip, Nixon arrived in Moscow on May 22 to sign the SALT I treaty. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev agreed to help pressure the North Vietnamese. General Giap, now ill with Hodgkin's disease, and new military chief Van Tien Dung urged North Vietnam to return to the Paris talks and make a settlement that would give them time to recover losses.

Le Duc Tho and Kissinger met in Paris in the summer, making progress. The Communists agreed to a coalition government. Kissinger agreed to allow their troops to remain in place, but Thieu rejected the nine-point proposal worked out October 8-12. Nevertheless, in an October 26 peace conference, Kissinger announced that "peace is at hand."

"Christmas bombing" leads to peace

On November 7, Nixon defeated the liberal anti-war Democrat, George McGovern, by the largest and most complete margin in the history of the United States. Le Duc Tho suspended negotiations because of Thieu's opposition, but Nixon's December 14 ultimatum to resume negotiations or "suffer the consequences" was followed by the Christmas bombing of December 17-30. It was the most intense bombing campaign of the war. The liberals hated it. It ended the war.

In light of the bombing, Nixon threatened Thieu, on January 5, with the "gravest consequences." Kissinger's strategy was to play the role of peacemaker. Through carefully orchestrated placement of stories in the press and depictions of Nixon as a "madman," he managed to convince the Communists the President was willing to bomb them into oblivion, but was "held back" only by Kissinger's diplomatic skills. Nixon strategized it all.

Kissinger and Le Duc Tho signed the peace treaty on January 27 in Paris. The POWs were released in 60 days, a ceasefire under the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICC) began, and a coalition government in South Vietnam was created to arrange elections, with the U.S. aid to the south continuing.

591 U.S. POWs came home. U.S. troops were withdrawn by March. In order to keep the Communists' feet to the fire, the bombing continued, but the Democrat Congress decided to stop pressuring them. They cut off funds for war on June 30, to become effective August 15. The War Powers Act was passed on November 7, 1973 over Nixon's veto.

By this time, Watergate had hit like a ton of bricks. The Democrats were much more interested in destroying Nixon than they were in securing the victory in Vietnam. Kissinger's diplomacy, Nixon's bombing and the sacrifices of the military set everything in place. Their partisan, disloyal pursuit of this issue resulted in everything the U.S. fighting for in Vietnam being lost. The Democrat record of 1973-74 is nothing less than disgusting. The fact that the U.S. managed to win the Cold War anyway is a remarkable achievement occurring despite them!

The day after the 1972 Presidential Election, Nixon "fired" an enormous number of Federal employees. Many were "hired back," but the move was his attempt to re-shape government in the Republican image, downsizing it to manageable levels. Had Watergate not occurred, he might have accomplished this task. In succeeding years, no Republican President has managed to do this.

Watergate

I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish, and I guess if I'd have been in their position, I'd have done the same thing.

- Richard Nixon, Frost/Nixon interviews (1977)

Considering America's track record, many are not prepared to concede that the U.S. simply had no way of "winning" in Vietnam. The judgment of this war, as always, requires an understanding of what leaders' decisions were based on what they knew at the time. 20/20 hindsight allows historians the advantage they did not have. Still, a series of events, mishaps, and ironic Shakespearean twists tell the story of our "failure" there as much as the supposed predictions of the "Pentagon Papers."

Pentagon Papers

One man who believed the Papers, or at least believed certain parts about them that fit his changing worldview, was Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was one of the "best and the brightest," the kind of man Norman Mailer wrote about in Harlot's Ghost. He was Ivy League educated, had gone on patrols with the Marines, and believed in the "church of America" (the CIA). This is a description embodying a 1950s view of this country "sanctioned by God" to fight Communism and protect the Earth from evil. If there is any single casualty of Vietnam, it is the notion that this sanction was a discredited thesis. It has taken decades to restore belief in the sanction, and still only conservatives really believe it anymore.

In the late 1960s, "God's sanction" did not seem to apply to My Lai, or the notion that Vietnamese villages needed to be destroyed in order to save it. That phrase is a typical example of distorted liberal reporting, from the likes of David Halberstam, Walter Cronkite, Seymour Hersh, Neal Sheehan, Peter Arnett, Dan Rather and Morley Safer. A reporter was at a village that had been burned, and an officer said, "It's a shame it had to be destroyed." Arnett changed the quote to, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The term became a catchphrase of liberal Democrats, with their long hair, their marijuana cigarettes, and their free love, sittin' around college campuses criticizing America while real Americans were in Vietnam fighting for other people.

Ellsberg was not one of these people, though, so he was the perfect spokesman for the New Left. He had been a researcher at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. His task was to study war games, and his take on history was that fear and intimidation were tools the U.S. needed to use in order to effectuate its political and military objectives in Vietnam. He had advocated the use of the atomic bomb in Japan on the grounds that it rightly saved more American and Japanese lives in the long run than it killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He used as examples to back up his ideas the Dresden fire bombings of 1945, which through sheer terror inflicted on a civilian populace had helped break the German spirit, leading to victory sooner rather than later. Ellsberg very well might have been on Henry Kissinger's staff, since it was the diplomatic tools he advocated, backed up by force, that Kissinger later used to end America's involvement in the war on terms favorable to the U.S.

But Ellsberg was sent as an advisor to Vietnam, where he went on patrols and observed the prosecution of the war up front. He saw draftees who were not committed and fell prey to drug use. He was influenced by diplomatic and journalistic contacts who did not back the war, tearing at his resolve. He found himself unable to handle casualties on the battlefield. When he returned home, he still backed the war, but started to waver. His marriage buckled and he started a relationship with another woman. Ellsberg fell in with friends who had joined California's counter-culture of "swing party sex," drug and alcohol use, and became a hippie. He began to see a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills.

Ellsberg returned to the Rand Corporation, but now questioned the war more and more. He knew, from having contributed his theses to them, of the existence of the Pentagon Papers. He suspected that within its pages was information confirming his fears that the U.S. should no longer be in Vietnam. The Papers were classified, but his position at Rand allowed him to get them, which is what happened. Ellsberg read them, reportedly several times, and decided that within this work was the proof the war was a mistake. The only "alternative" was immediate withdrawal.

He confided to his counter-culture friends the secrets of the Pentagon Papers. They all urged him to reveal them publicly. The law was very clear on this matter. To reveal such classified documents, especially ones as sensitive in nature tied to national security as the Pentagon Papers, was absolutely an act of treason. But Ellsberg calculated that the media had become so anti-American that they would champion his cause. He reasoned that he might get away with it. He made copies of the documents, which was completely illegal, and gave them to the New York Times. The Times of course knew it was illegal for Ellsberg to do so, and it was illegal for them to possess the Papers. They knew that the laws were clear regarding publication of the Papers, and that to do so was treasonous. Since they disagreed with Richard Nixon and were enthusiastic about the fact that the publication of the Papers would make America look bad, they decided to print it under the guise of the First Amendment. Like Ellsberg, they figured that the power of the liberal media would help protect them from fully paying for their crimes.

Many consider Ellsberg to be an enemy of America. The Left adopted him as their hero, and the Right as an enemy. In many ways, he was a victim of a terrible war, a casualty if you will. He had grown up as an idealistic American and fallen prey to the cancer of the Left-wing '60s. He thought he was doing a service for his country, but he was misguided. Eventually, the calculations of Ellsberg and the Times proved correct. Attempts by the government to prosecute and repress them failed. Ellsberg emerged an even bigger hero, and today is considered a nostalgic champion of the Left.

Ellsberg's actions opened the floodgates to one of the most contentious periods in American history. While the Pentagon Papers were relatively old by the time the Times published its excerpts, the actual printing of the words was not what bothered the Nixon-Kissinger Administration the most. After all, it described mostly the "failures" of their predecessor, Johnson. But they came amid a series of terrible leaks in the administration. Almost nothing was secret in the first Nixon term.

The "plumbers"

With virtual civil war roiling the streets and the campuses, the press now openly hostile, the White House feared they were entering a period not unlike the one Lincoln faced. Drastic measures, it was decided, were necessary. The first task was to plug the "leaks." The second was to discredit Ellsberg, whose lifestyle had deteriorated to the point in which truthful depictions of him would negate his position as an advocate of the anti-war position. But beyond all of this was desire for revenge, to get something that would truly embarrass the Left, really put them out of business. It was Nixon's strong desire to get back at the Democrats for taking what was rightfully his in 1960.

Thus was formed the "plumbers," a group of White House operatives, headed by G. Gordon Liddy and including a number of CIA veterans from the failed get-Castro years. Their job was to find out, through bugging and wiretaps, what reporters were talking to what administration sources. They also were sent to Beverly Hills to bug the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for damaging testimony from Ellsberg discussing having sex in front of his children, killing innocent civilians in Vietnam, taking drugs and engaging in acts of treason. The plumbers were the men who eventually would be caught at the Watergate Hotel.

On the surface, Nixon appeared to be the most powerful President since Roosevelt, but the irony pervading his rivalry with the Kennedys would rear its head. In June, 1971, after the Pentagon Papers were published in the New York Times, the plumbers had been formed to plug "leaks" to the press. Ironically, it was Kissinger's idea, and eventually the plumbers found that he was one of the biggest leakers.

G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt led the plumbers. Hunt was a former novelist and CIA station chief whose specialty was pro-American propaganda. He had been intimately involved in the Bay of Pigs operation and harbored strong resentment of Kennedy for not backing up his Cuban invasion force. Hunt had been out of major circulation for a number of years, but he had a hardcore group of Cuban veterans of the anti-Castro campaigns at his disposal.

Liddy was the patrician son of a Wall Street lawyer. He grew up Catholic in the 1930s. The family maid, a German émigré, listened to Adolf Hitler's speeches with young Gordon until the father discovered and forbade it. Liddy, however, learned to speak fluent German. A sickly boy, Liddy was frightened by lightning and rats. He decided to confront his fears by sitting on the family's Hoboken, New Jersey rooftop during an electrical storm, then captured and ate a rat.

A brilliant student, Liddy ran cross-country at Fordham University, his father's alma mater. After graduation, he became an Army officer during the Korean War. Upon his discharge he attended Fordham Law School on the G.I. Bill. He turned down his father's offer to join his Manhattan law firm, entering the FBI instead. Known heretofore as George Liddy, he affected the appellation G. Gordon Liddy because of the cult of personality surrounding J. Edgar Hoover in those days. He was an innovative agent.

One fugitive was known to frequent a whorehouse in Wyoming. Liddy and his partner approached the madam, who told them to go fly. Liddy read in the local paper that a state wrestling tournament was being held in the town that weekend. He knew where the wrestling coaches would be at night. Liddy saw a car pull up. Four beefy men who could only be high school wrestling coaches got out to approach the bordello. Liddy approached them, identifying himself as a reporter for a local media outlet doing a survey on "whorehouses in the area."

"Why do you choose this particular whorehouse?" he asked the coaches. "Does this whorehouse offer services that cannot be found in competing whorehouses?"

The coaches turned as white as ghosts and sped off. The madam then approached Liddy, screaming loudly about the loss of business. Liddy informed her that if she would inform on where the fugitive could be found, he would leave her be. She immediately gave him up and Liddy had his man.
When Liddy was ready to get married, he had a background check run on his future wife. The low pay of an FBI special agent put a strain on Liddy and his growing family, so he took up his father's offer to work on Wall Street, but close proximity to his father did not sit well with him. He became the District Attorney of Duchess County, an affluent, Republican bedroom community of New York City. In 1966, a Harvard professor named Dr. Timothy Leary took up residence in a mansion in Duchess County. He was holding crazy sex parties there, inviting all the young girls of the area to partake in drugs and all attendant "activities." The local gentry demanded immediate action. Liddy took to the task life a sheriff in the Old West.

When Liddy's men raided the mansion, he discovered Leary en flagrante delicto, wearing a shirt and nothing else (a la Teddy Kennedy). The arrest made Liddy into a national figure. In 1968, Liddy decided to run for Congress. A Republican, Hamilton Fish, already represented his district. Fish approached Liddy and made a deal with him. If he would decide not to challenge him in the primary, Fish would assure him a job with the Nixon Administration should he be elected. Nixon was elected and Fish lived up to his word, helping Liddy get a position in the Treasury Department.

When the Ellsberg case hit the world, Liddy was recruited to form the plumbers. Their first job was the Beverly Hills office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, but they found little they could use. Washington columnist Jack Anderson hated Nixon and had revealed the name of a CIA agent, resulting in that agent being killed by the Soviets. Similar events were taking place. The Nixon people realized they faced a situation of unprecedented treachery from the Left. Liddy volunteered to "take out" Anderson, but it was not taken seriously. Discussions about bugging and wiretapping to combat leaks and gain knowledge of Democrat strategy began. The question of the legality or ethics of such a move was countered by knowledge that the Democrats had been doing it for years. Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson routinely wiretapped Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other political opponents. In the radical "civil war" atmosphere of the early 1970s, in light of the fact Nixon had the election stolen from him a decade earlier, the work of the plumbers was justified in their minds.

Nixon was paranoid about Senator Kennedy. He was determined not to get "rat-f----d," a term they applied to Kennedy's hardball tactics. Getting inside information on him was priority one for Liddy and his people. In addition to Liddy's work, the Nixon people began a series of campaign hi-jinks to offset the Democrats.

Dwight Chapin, Nixon's appointments secretary, recruited an old friend from the so-called "USC mafia" named Donald Segretti. Segretti, a native Californian, graduated from USC and the Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkeley. He was a captain in the Army during the war. He was brought in to perform the kind of "dirty tricks" that he, Chapin and Ron Ziegler (Nixon's press secretary) specialized in during the USC campus elections. His operations were known for their "wit and humor," and included press releases announcing Democrat rallies that did not exist, and the accusation, written on Hubert Humphrey's stationary, that Senator Scoop Jackson had fathered a "bastard child."

"At the very least it improved the man's image," Segretti quipped.

Liddy came up with a plan to employ prostitutes at the Democrats' 1972 Miami Beach convention, bug the rooms, and get them to draw Democrat bigwigs into confessing inside secrets. He offered to personally select and "train" the girls personally! He even selected a group of girls, half of whom were "flaxen-haired and fair," per his Nordic tastes; the others fiery Latinos as selected by his Cuban operatives. When questioned by Attorney General John Mitchell, Liddy exclaimed, "General, I want to assure you, these are the finest girls from Baltimore!" The plan was, like the Anderson "assassination," discarded.

In June, 1972, however, Liddy, Hunt and their Cuban operatives entered the office of Democrat National Chairman Larry O'Brien at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. They previously bugged the office, but they wiretapped the phone of a secretary and got mostly unusable "love life" gossip and beauty parlor appointments. The decision to go back in to get more was made, but a security guard caught and arrested them.

Woodward and Bernstein

One of the Cubans, Bernard Barker, had the phone number of the White House on his person. It was immediately called a "third rate burglary." Nobody could pin it to the President or attach great importance to it. Bob Woodward, a Republican former Navy officer, had recently joined the staff of the Washington Post. Assigned to the metro desk, he had done a series on restaurants that were operating below code, resulting in some shutdowns. He was anxious to crack a big story and hung to the Watergate case in dogged manner. Veteran reporter Carl Bernstein, who had a reputation as a muckraker and self-promoter, joined him. Editor Ben Bradlee had been one of John Kennedy's closest friends.

In 1960, Bradlee did not pursue the story of JFK's stealing the election, but he did like the idea of going after Nixon. Suddenly, he had a raison d'être, a justification for some real investigative journalism. He encouraged Bernstein and Woodward at every turn. At first, the odds were against them. Nixon was riding high, having recognized China and ending the Vietnam War. But the Democrats got hold of the Watergate issue and refused to let go. Their willing accomplices in the media put it on television, hoping to find disaster. When it was discovered Nixon had ordered his own office to be recorded, the committee wanted the tapes. Nixon refused, causing a firestorm. Eventually, it was discovered that Nixon had attempted to thwart the investigation, leaving him and many of his key people open to charges of obstruction of justice.

When the tapes were finally played, a suspicious 17-minute gap of dead air was discovered during some key conversations. This has never been adequately explained to this day. The Post built the story to a national crescendo. To make matters worse, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned in October, 1973 after he was charged with corruption that began during his tenure as county executive of Baltimore, Maryland. As the revelations of wrongdoing piled up, Nixon became preoccupied with preserving his Presidency. He jettisoned top assistants in the White House and fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. After the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, required that he supply Cox's successor, Leon Jaworski, with tape recordings of conversations with his advisors, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend (July 27-30, 1974) approval by the full House of three articles of Impeachment against the President. On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned his office and was succeeded by Vice President Gerald R. Ford, whom he had selected to replace Agnew. After Nixon's resignation, Ford pardoned him for any crimes he might have committed as President. Nixon accepted the pardon, but sought thereafter, with some success, to portray himself as an elder statesman.

G. Gordon Liddy

A number of Watergate figures served time in prison. The scandal almost destroyed the Republican Party. Combined with the recession, Ford was hurt badly and lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976. The party lost all its influence, and with the Democrats calling the shots Vietnam was abandoned to the tender mercies of Communism. The result was the death of millions after the fall of Saigon and the infamous Year Zero declared by Pol Pot, who tried to "purify" Cambodia in a manner similar to Mao's Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 in China.

Few Republicans emerged from Watergate successfully. RNC Chairman George H.W. Bush managed to steer clear of scandal, landing several plum jobs on his way to a White House destiny. Ronald Reagan was safely ensconced in California, avoiding taint of his fellow Californian Nixon.

Perhaps the one who actually benefited from Watergate, ironically, was G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy had been the ultimate Watergate figure, the one who committed the actual crimes and handled the entire secretive operation from soup to nuts. Watergate figures "ratted" each other out left and right, "giving up" the President and others to save their own skins and receive lessened sentences. But Liddy's code of honor was to handle his punishment stoically and not betray his superiors. Knowing that he represented a political liability to the White House, he immediately offered to stand on a street corner and be assassinated. That suggestion was, like his offers to kill Jack Anderson and use prostitutes at the Democrat National Convention, brushed aside.

He refused to talk to prosecutors or Federal Judge John Sirica. When asked to place his hand on the Bible and tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth," he replied, "No." He was sentenced to a long prison term, starting at a dilapidated Washington prison where Lincoln's assassination conspirators had been hung. He was transferred to different prisons because he caused trouble wherever he went. When one warden opened his mail, Liddy sued him. In court, Liddy acted as his own attorney, and before questioning the warden, he told him, "You're in my courtroom now, warden."

Liddy learned martial arts skills and proved capable of defending himself against the hardened criminals he was imprisoned with. Unlike other Watergate figures who did time in "country clubs," Liddy was in hardcore maximum security prisons. Liddy then offered his legal services to the other prisoners, who realized he was a man of toughness and honor. He became the de facto "king" of the prison population. President Carter pardoned Liddy, but he was barred from practicing law. With a wife and a large family, Liddy faced financial hardships, but he accepted every challenge exuberantly. His prison experience had been "one of the most interesting times of my life," he later said. His children had been raised to be tough. In Washington, they got in many fights when teased by other kids for wearing short hair and having a father in prison. After beating up their detractors, the school tried to get them to stop. Liddy made the point that in the 1930s French children had been taught to be pacifists while German kids were taught to fight.

"Considering that Germany took over France in a matter of weeks," Liddy said, "I prefer the German way." Liddy's children all have been successful: attorneys, politicians, Navy SEALS and Marine officers.

Liddy set about writing his memoirs. Will was a runaway bestseller and made into a television movie starring Robert Conrad as Liddy. As part of his book tour, Liddy and his old nemesis, Dr. Timothy Leary, began touring college campuses, debating each other on the merits of conservative lawfulness vs. liberal radicalism. Liddy appreciated Leary's "Irish wit," and despite his tough guy image proved to be extremely personable, friendly, funny and sexy. Millions of Americans instinctively realized partisan Democrats had railroaded Watergate down their throats, while their party had done the same thing but gotten away with it. Liddy's "in your face" success made him a hero of the Right, driving the liberals out of their cotton pickin' minds!

Liddy parlayed his success into a stint as an actor. Among his roles, he played a bloodthirsty arms dealer supplying the Nicaraguan Contras on Miami Vice. When asked by a character to prove he was who he said he was, he put a sack on a table, turned it over, and various items fell out.

"I anticipated your skepticism," he announced.

"What the hell are those?" he was asked.

"Ears," he deadpanned. "Sandinista ears."

Liddy became a Renaissance Man. He learned how to fly airplanes, and then became the host of a nationally syndicated conservative talk show, part of a phenomenal trend that has the liberals in a state of utter apoplexy. Liddy's daily rants against Bill and Hillary Clinton, then Barack Hussein Obama, prison guards, and morally questionable lesser lights irked the Left even more than Rush Limbaugh. That a man who officially considered Democrats enemies has garnered legitimate hero status from millions of Americans who believe the same thing is something they cannot stomach.

Elder statesman

As for Liddy's boss, Nixon went into seclusion in the southern Orange County town of San Clemente, California, where he holed up in the former "Western White House." He wrote his Memoirs, a 1978 bestseller considered one of the top political biographies ever. That book, and his interviews with David Frost, was done in conjunction with Nixon's continued appearances at Anaheim Stadium, where he cheered the 1979 American League West Division champion California Angels. Over time, Nixon's "rehabilitation" as an elder statesman was complete.

He moved to New Jersey, opened an office in Manhattan, and became a regular political advisor and pundit. Nixon was often seen at Yankee Stadium and Giants Stadium. In 1986, Newsweek announced his exile was over, and his "Napoleonic" return was accomplished without any Waterloos. He wrote numerous successful books on history and politics, outlining the proper way to handle the fall of Soviet Communism. His recommendations all proved to be on the money.

Even the Democrats lost their hatred for him, perhaps because over time they instinctively realized they had gone overboard in destroying him and hurting the country in the process. Conservatives loved seeing Nixon on the public stage again, considering this a vindication for the unfair treatment he received. Bumper stickers saying, "He's tanned, rested and ready: Nixon in '88" and later "Nixon in '92" became popular.

In the end, greatness eludes Nixon for two reasons. The first, obviously, is Watergate. The other is the fact that, for all of his accomplishments, he remained a divisive figure. Ronald Reagan overcame divisiveness and Dwight Eisenhower towered above it, but Nixon was a very partisan Republican. The most difficult dance of politics is to use the two-party system without being a slave to it. Nixon's "enemies list," his paranoia, and his penchant for self-destruction despite his careful planning were indications of a flawed and complex man. Interesting as all get out, but not great.

He died in New York City on April 22, 1994, and was buried at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. President Bill Clinton, of all people, coined the phrase that applies not just to Nixon but to the incredible times he lived in and in many cases shaped: the "age of Nixon."

In 1995, Left-wing filmmaker Oliver Stone produced the film Nixon. Stone's animus toward Nixon, who he reputedly had said he would "take out" with a high-powered shotgun after he came home from Vietnam in 1970, made conservatives fear that the film would savage him. In reality, the movie was relatively even-handed, although not a propaganda piece for the controversial ex-President. Stone is a lot of things, and one of them may be the best director Hollywood saw between 1986 and 1999. He cast the English actor, Anthony Hopkins, in the lead and it worked. Stone himself even said that his study of Nixon led him to reach a favorable overall conclusion. The movie did have its conspiratorial elements, typical of the Stone genre. A group of John Birch Texans and Cubans are shown intimating to Nixon that they plan to kill Kennedy. Stone also uses powerful imagery to depict Nixon as "helped" by the forces of evil. If one looks closely, Nixon casts shadows depicting a Satanic figure while he questions who is helping him rise to the top over littered "bodies," including both dead Kennedys.

The "church of America": Central Intelligence Agency and the Church Committee

Natural ability was closer to God. It meant you were wellborn. Bantu blacks in Africa, I came to learn in CIA, believed that a chieftain should enrich himself and have beautiful wives. That was the best way to know God was well disposed toward you. My father shared this view. Natural ability was bestowed on the deserving. Lack of natural ability spoke of something smelly at the roots. The clumsy, the stupid, and the slack were fodder for the devil. It is not always a fashionable view today, but I have pondered it all my life. I can wake up in the middle of the night thinking, What if my father was right?

- Harlot's Ghost (1991) by Norman Mailer

On January 22, 1946, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order setting up a National Intelligence Authority, and under it, a Central Intelligence Group, which was the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Since 1947, the CIA has involved itself in the politics and military affairs of over 50 nations. The main function of these activities usually involves propaganda, political action, economic activities, and paramilitary operations.

Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were successful examples of corporate structures set up by the Company, as it is company called. CIA airlines included Air America, Air Asia, Civil Air Transport, Intermountain Aviation, and Southern Air Transport. The CIA subsidized the National Student Association along numerous fronts to channel money, business, labor, and church groups; universities; charitable organizations; and educational and cultural groups.

"Black propaganda" was intended to hurt the image of the Soviet Union, sometimes using the Voice of America broadcasting station to secret CIA transmitters in different parts of the world. "White propaganda" was the dissemination of positive information about the U.S. and the West, which would otherwise not be heard in the Communist world. The CIA published newspaper and magazine articles, books, and even the memoirs of Soviet officials or soldiers who defected. They also used disinformation.

Covert political actions are attempts to change the structure and policies of other states secretly, going beyond propaganda but stopping short of military action. After Korea, the Soviets became as much a political threat as a military one. Covert CIA action was stepped up accordingly.

Subversive support to domestic opposition of unfriendly governments is known as "benign." Assassination of dictators unfriendly to the United States or its interests was carried out. Marxists like Castro or terrorists like Moammar Gadhafi were targets but action against them either was not carried out, or failed.

While not every action the CIA ever took was justified, the bottom line in assessing them is this: either the U.S. is a force for good whose cause is just, or it is just another country that engages in activities no different than their enemies. The U.S. engaged in espionage and subversion similar to and beyond the scope of what the Soviets were doing to the West, particularly after World War II. That is not the question. Either we were right in doing it, or we were not. If one says we were not, then the root of all political discourse regarding America's role in the world springs from this premise.

In 1975, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, headed by Democrat Senator Frank Church of Idaho, began hearings on the CIA. The Church Committee issued a 1975 finding entitled "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders." The CIA was involved in assassination plots against Castro, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, and Ngo Din Diem of South Vietnam. They allegedly planned to assassinate President Sukarno of Indonesia and Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier of Haiti, but this was never proven.

According to Loch Johnson in A Season of Inquiry, "In no case was an American finger actually on the trigger of these weapons. And even though the officials of the United States had clearly initiated assassination plots against Castro and Lumumba, it was technically true - as Richard Helms had claimed - that neither the CIA nor any other agency of the American government had murdered a foreign leader. Through others, however, we had tried, but had either been too inept . . . or too late to succeed."

The CIA helped countries become more economically efficient by urging them to adopt Democratic ideals that would lead to greater prosperity. Paramilitary operations were necessary and dangerous. Soviet domination of the Third World was too great a threat to stick with propaganda. Such ops were part of the 1954 Guatemala campaign, but Kennedy decided to adopt a policy of unconventional warfare capability to counter the Communist guerilla activity in Southeast Asia and Africa. Along with the new Green Berets, counterinsurgency prevented Communist military victories involving U.S.-Soviet conflict. Kennedy ordered the CIA to use paramilitary operations around the globe.

The decolonization of Africa separated that continent from the Middle Eastern Division. Growing Soviet presence there and in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia, resulted in a four percent increase in the size of the Western Hemisphere Division between 1960 and 1965, including operations in Angola, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba. Fred Branfman, in a book entitled Uncloaking the CIA, by Howard Frazier, recalls an episode that is indicative of the dangerousness of what America was involved in trying to defeat, and how in fighting "bad guys" it is impossible to avoid "fighting dirty."

"There are many stories I could tell about him, but I will tell just one. In the late 1960s a friend of mine was a pilot for a private CIA airline. The agent threw a box on the airplane one day and said 'Take this to Landry in Udorn.' (Pat Landry was the head of the CIA in Udorn, coordinating the Burma-Thailand-Laos-North Vietnam theatre). My friend started flying the plane and noticed a bad odor coming from the box. After some time he could not stand it anymore and opened up the box. Inside was a fresh human head. This was a joke. The idea was to see what Pat Landry would do when someone put this box on his desk. You cannot throw a human head in the wastepaper basket, you cannot throw it in the garbage can. CIA paramilitary activities were and are being carried out by people, like this agent, who have gone beyond the pale of civilized behavior. There are hundreds of these people now working in the Third World. This fact is, of course, not just a disgrace, but a clear and present danger."

The CIA developed darts coated with biological agents and different types of pills, and a special gun to fire darts to incapacitate guard dogs, enter the installation the dogs were guarding, and return the dogs to consciousness upon departure from the facility. Biological agents may have been used on crops and animals, according to the Church Committee.

President Richard Nixon renounced it. He ordered the disposal of existing stockpiles of bacteriological weapons and later included toxic chemicals in the directive. A CIA scientist ignored the order.

Project MKULTRA's purpose was:

". . . To develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials . . . Aside from the offensive potential, the development of a comprehensive capability in this field of covert chemical and biological warfare gives us a thorough knowledge of the enemy's theoretical potential, thus enabling us to defend ourselves against a foe who might not be as restrained in the use of these techniques as we are."

86 universities were involved in Project CHATTER, which involved "truth drugs" for interrogation and agent recruitment. It ended in 1953. The hallucinogenic drug LSD was tested on human soldiers who volunteered. On November 27, 1953, Dr. Frank Olson, a civilian employee of the U.S. Army, died following participation in an LSD experiment, when he unknowingly received 70 micrograms of LSD placed in his drink by Dr. Robert Lashbrook, a CIA officer. Olson jumped to his death from a 10-story window.

The Senate Committees discovered that testing was performed on "unwitting subjects in social situations." Heroin addicts were enticed into participating. Most of the MKULTRA records were destroyed in 1973 at the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms.

In 1949, the CIA founded the National Committee for a Free Europe and the Committee for the Liberation of Peoples of Russia. Radio Free Europe in Munich and Radio Liberation were started. Émigrés' broadcast to their countries in their native languages. Broadcasts inside the Soviet Union were in 14 different languages. Satellite countries of Eastern Europe were special targets. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberation weakened the Communist message.

The success story of Taiwan is due in large measure to the CIA. They pointed out the failures of the People's Republic of China compared to Taiwan. Technological guidance on modern farming techniques helped Taiwan prosper. "Miracle seeds" and chemical fertilizers further increased agricultural production. Around 1960, the U.S. decided to help the Chinese Nationalists of Taiwan set up food-growing demonstration projects in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. This economic aid program built prestige and political contacts for the Nationalist Chinese, and was an embarrassment to the Communists. Taiwan's enormous successes, compared to Mao's failures, were the best kind of propaganda: simple true facts.

The Taiwan model was an even greater demonstration of capitalist and Democratic superiority than South Korea and West Berlin. Those two countries were roughly the same size as their eastern and northern rivals. But Taiwan, a tiny island, quickly emerged as the economic superior of the huge Mainland China. Ray Cline, a touring case officer for the CIA, engaged in "off the record talks with Chiang Ching-kuo, the savvy son of Chiang Kai-shek, who was perhaps the most far-sighted political leader in Taiwan . . .

"Ching-kuo grasped the concept immediately and saw the benefits, as did other Taiwanese foreign and agricultural policy officials," Cline added. "The program was organized by the Chinese with a minimum of American help and it worked well for about 10 years. In some regions, it continued to work even longer, and everyone has profited from the program."

When Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, the U.S. endeavored to eliminate him. According to Cline, who became Deputy-Director of the CIA, "The CIA had advocated the 'elimination of Fidel Castro' as early as December, 1959, and the matter was discussed at Special Group meetings in January and March of 1960. At an NSC meeting on March 10, 1960, terminology was used suggesting that the assassination of Castro, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara was at least theoretically considered."

In Cline's book, Secrets, Spies, and Scholars, "There was almost an obsession with Cuba on the part of policy matters . . . that the assassination of Castro by a Cuban might have been viewed as not very different in the benefits that would have accrued from the assassination of Hitler in 1944."

His book explains further that, "The several plots planned at CIA headquarters included treating a box of Castro's favorite cigars with a botulinum toxin so potent that it would cause death immediately upon being placed to the lips; concocting highly poisonous tablets that would work quickly when immersed in just about anything but boiling soup; contaminating a diving suit with a fungus guaranteed to produce a chronic skin disease called Madura foot and, through an intermediary, offering the suit as a gift to Castro; constructing an exotic seashell that could be placed in reefs where Castro often went skin-diving and then exploded at the right moment from a small submarine nearby; and providing an agent with a ballpoint pen that contained a hypodermic needle filled with the deadly poison Black-leaf 40 and had so fine a point it could pierce the skin of the victim without his knowledge."

The CIA used underworld figures, too. In 1962, Attorney General Robert Kennedy stopped a deal between the CIA and the Mafia to murder Fidel Castro.

The CIA asked a mobster named Johnny Roselli to organize hit squads of Cuban exiles to infiltrate Cuba. Rosselli, Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, and La Costra Nostra chieftain Santos Trafficante, were brought in. A $150,000 reward was offered for Castro's assassination, and the agency agreed to support the effort. The plan did not reach fruition, but strong ties between the Mafia and the Kennedy Administration were established. JFK carried on an affair with a woman named Judith Campbell Exner, who may have been a prostitute working for Sam Giancana. She had a relationship with Giancana, and became the main "go-between" of messages between Giancana and Kennedy.

CIA operations in Laos were known as the "secret army." For over a decade, over 100,000 men saw action there and extensive bombing operations took place in an effort to help the Laotians defend against North Vietnamese Communist attacks.

"It created an army of its own, an army paid, controlled, and directed by American CIA officials entirely separately from the normal Laotian government structure," according to Fred Branfman. "Some troops from every people in Southeast Asia were bought into Laos as part of what became known as 'the secret army.' The CIA trained the secret army; directed it in combat; decided when it would fight; and had it carry out espionage missions, assassinations of military and civilian figures, and sabotage."

Special photoreconnaissance teams determined bomb targets. Psychological warfare, designed to win the "minds and hearts" of the people, was instigated via land reform, education, and economic assistance. The Laotian effort was not successful. The people did not appreciate having their politics controlled by the U.S., and did not view the Communist North Vietnamese as being as much a threat as the Americans knew they were.

Phoenix program

From 1962-1965, the CIA worked with South Vietnam's police and paramilitary. The CIA fought a "war within a war" throughout the entire conflict. The Phoenix program, initiated in South Vietnam in 1968, was an attempt to "neutralize," assassinate, or imprison civilians of the National Liberation Front (NLF). The "Viet Cong infrastructure" was the target. The Communists had decided to use the civilians in two capacities. One, they disguised fighters as civilians and hid behind civilians, using them as shields. Two, they used civilians to run non-military tasks like supply operations, food chains, and other efforts. The Communists were successful in this because it forced the Americans to accept casualties inflicted by the civilian Viet Cong, but played on the natural good tendency of American soldiers not to fire at anything that looked like civilians. Further, any military action taken against civilians met with great anger by the unsupportive Left, who knew the facts but arrived at their opinions for political reasons.

Military units carried out sweeps through villages. Most of the actual killing was carried out by CIA-led South Vietnamese soldiers, organized into Provincial Reconnaissance Units. The Phoenix program ended because so many civilians were actually Viet Cong fighters that to kill them all was not something Americans were able to conscientiously do, despite killings and torture by Viet Cong applied to Americans. Identifying members of the NLF was also too difficult, since the killers among them included women and children. The U.S. made the decision that they were on the side of good, and therefore chose to accept higher casualties rather than make mistakes and kill innocents, despite the fact that the Viet Cong numbered hundreds of thousands. William Colby, the director of the Phoenix program, testified before Congress in 1971 regarding American sponsorship of Phoenix.

"The Americans had a great deal to do with starting the program," said Colby. ". . . We had a great deal to do in terms of developing the ideas, discussing the need, developing some of the procedures, and so forth . . . maybe more than half the initiative came from us originally."

"The United States clearly set quotas in an attempt to force the GVN <Government of South Vietnam> officials into something they preferred not to undertake," said Fred Branfman. Vietnam Information Notes, published by the U.S. State Department in July of 1969, reported that, "The target for 1969 calls for the elimination of 1,800 VCI per month."

Assassinations and jailings of civilians occurred without judicial procedure, according to Colby. Despite cutting back, the Phoenix program resulted in the deaths of 20,587 persons as of May, 1971, he said.

The Allende coup d'état

CIA involvement in Chile began in 1963, but events of 1973 became publicized. Covert assistance had begun for Eduardo Frei in his campaign for the presidency against the Leftist Salvador Allende. Frei won the election, and the United States decided to stay in Chile to run a propaganda operation. CIA station in Santiago placed notices in the Chilean media, maintained assets and agents on newspapers, radio, and television stations, and disseminated "black" propaganda. They supported the government via commercial television service, aired anti-Soviet propaganda on the radio news stations and in newspapers. Money was given to El Mercurio, a Santiago daily. The operation cost over $12 million.

They influenced elections, costing over $3 million. The agency fought Communist labor unions and returned universities to the nation after they had been taken over by "students." In 1970, with Allende having formed a government, Kissinger ordered the CIA and the State Department to reverse the election results. The CIA case officers offered resistance to the idea, but Kissinger particularly felt that an Allende-led Chile was susceptible to becoming a Soviet satellite. A coup was staged. The actual U.S. operation failed, but Chilean military forces did continue to work against Allende over the next three years. The CIA provided around $8 million to support parliamentary opposition to Allende and an opposition press. In 1973, he was overthrown in a non-CIA coup caused by anti-Allende forces. Kissinger judged that the resulting Augusto Pinochet regime, despite committing atrocities, was better than the Allende government would have been. Despite the truth or non-truth of that statement, the Allende ouster is generally considered one of the big mistakes of American policy.

McGeorge Bundy, former Special Assistant for National Security Affairs to Kennedy and Johnson, has said, "While in principle it has always been the understanding of senior government officials outside the CIA that no covert operations would be undertaken without the explicit approval of 'higher authority,' there has also been a general expectation within the agency that it was proper business to generate attractive proposals and to stretch them, in operation, to the furthest limit of any authorization actually received."

This came to be known as the "blank check" policy. CIA officers came to the conclusion that informing the President disabled his ability to "plausibly deny" knowledge schemes.

Darrel Garwood, the author of Under Cover, wrote, " 'Plausible deniability' could be regarded as one of the most wretched theories ever invented. Its application . . . was based on the idea that in an unholy venture a President could be kept so isolated from events that when exposure came he could truthfully emerge as shiningly blameless. In practice, whether he deserved it or not, a President almost always had to take the blame for whatever happened."

The 1986 Iran-Contra Affair was an example in which "plausible deniability" was exercised. The CIA itself was not directly involved in the operation, which was run by Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North out of the White House basement. The program carried out the "aims" of President Reagan without his direct knowledge, in direct contravention of the wishes of Congressional Democrats. It channeled funds from arms sales to Iran to the Contras in Nicaragua. Media attention and Congressional investigations showed that whether Reagan knew or not, he had to take responsibility, and the premise of "plausible deniability" would not hold up under public pressure.

The Church hearings

The Church hearings resulted in Congress instituting stringent oversight during the Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter years. In 1981, Ronald Reagan relaxed the strictures and put the agency under control of an "old-time spook," Bill Casey, who was a veteran of "Wild Bill" Donavan's OSS. Casey was excoriated because he used methods that violated the human rights of murderers and terrorists. However, an analysis of American success and prestige in the Ford-Carter period of 1975-80, vs. the Reagan-Bush record of 1981-89, indicates that the Church Committee did damage to the United States.

With the CIA unable to perform its usual functions, the Soviets moved swiftly throughout the Third World. When Reagan and Casey restored the CIA, Communism was rolled back in the 1980s. When Bill Clinton took office, he again emasculated the agency, with the result being a rise in post-Cold War terrorism. When George W. Bush took office, he gave "teeth" back to the CIA. Terrorism no longer has a free run. The record is now complete enough to determine that, despite CIA excess, which produced a highly imperfect record that includes atrocities such as the Phoenix program, a vibrant Central Intelligence Agency is of great benefit to the United States and the world.

Still, the CIA has modernized. Severe beatings and assassinations of dictators were measured in light of larger goals. Assassinations of heads of state are no longer legal in times of peace, although killing those not running countries is not illegal. The recent War on Terror makes it obvious that assassinations have a place. Under a state of war, assassination attempts against Saddam Hussein were justified. Nobody argued the value of getting Osama bin Laden. Where terrain, geography or friendly states protect terrorists, assassination attempts by drone aircraft and "smart missiles" make all the sense in the world. Torture has actually been replaced by mind control, in most cases. The CIA has found that old torture methods are not particularly reliable, while sleep deprivation, disinformation, appeals to conscience, pitting terrorists against each other, using incomplete information, and so forth, are not foolproof, but are better tools. "Water boarding" was politically controversial, but in truth was only used a few times and in fact produced very useful information used to save lives and capture terrorists.

Not all Democrats opposed the CIA. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, once said, "No, Mr. President, we have not told the country, and I do not propose to tell the country in the future, because if there is anything in the United States which should be held sacred behind the curtain of classified matter, it is information regarding the activities of this agency . . . It would be better to abolish it out of hand than it would be to adopt a theory that such information should be spread and made available to every member of Congress and to the members of the staff of any committee."

Former CIA director Allen Dulles said before a Congressional committee, "Any investigation, whether by a Congressional committee or any other body, which results in disclosure of our secret activities and operations or uncovers our personnel, will help a potential enemy just as if the enemy had been able to infiltrate his own agents right into our shop."

"If you are going to have an intelligence agency, you have to protect it as such . . . and shut your eyes some, and take what's coming," said Mississippi Senator John Stennis.

John Lennon sang "Give peace a chance," and Southeast Asia "imagined" Pol Pot

Well intentioned and good people reached out in an effort to reason with the Beast, and civilizations responded as civilization always had. Trying to wish it away, hoping the wolf would pass by the door.

\- In the Face of Evil

On August 9, 1974, Nixon resigned. Gerald Ford took over, but the Democrats controlled Congress and were bent on seeing to it that all conservative Republican nostrums regarding the concept of Communism being the enemy should be discredited. To take up the cause of anti-Communism would be to acknowledge that McCarthy had a point; that Nixon was a hero for nailing Hiss; that LBJ was right and Bobby Kennedy was wrong; and worst of all, that Nixon and Kissinger were brilliant global strategists.

To accept the anti-Communist line would disrupt their own moral equivalencies. It would tacitly blame the liberals who apologized for Lenin and Stalin for 20 years, and the Hollywood useful idiots who had made movies glorifying these mass murderers and then, after being identified, getting Blacklisted. If ever free people actively chose to put themselves on a course that would prove they were on the wrong side of history, it was the American Democrats of 1973-74.

No longer constrained by the "thin green line" of conservatism, the Communists attacked Phuoc Long and started the third Indo-China War. Without the Americans to preserve order and peace, the Khmer Rouge attacked Phnom Penh. Ambassador John Gunther Dean and 276 U.S and Cambodian personnel were evacuated. Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Ambassador Graham Martin and 7,100 U.S. and South Vietnamese personnel were evacuated the next day.

The Cambodians were confused at the way the Americans abandoned the region. They were unable to understand the perfidy of one political party (the Democrats) willing to forego the most basic tenets of their nation's foreign policy loyalty, apparently in order to hurt a single man and his party.

Had the Democrats supported a widened war and further bombing of sanctuaries in Cambodia, the Communists might not have been in a position take over. The Phnom Penh government misjudged the long-term American intent, failing to understand that the U.S. was on the decline in Indo-China.

"I can't help a sad feeling that Cambodia is a little country that we have used and for which we must now bear a moral responsibility," reflected a senior American official with long experience in Indo-China and intimate knowledge of the American-Cambodian relationship.

Norodom Sihanouk held the United States responsible for the downfall of Cambodia. He is right. The American Left deserves the blame. They joined forces with the street radicals and the liberal media when the world needed us the most. The invasion of Cambodia had upset the North Vietnamese supply network sufficiently to produce a lull that lasted until the big Communist offensive in the Spring of 1972. When Watergate hit the U.S. was not allowed to maintain vigilance. The Democrat Senate rejected a request for $266 million in additional military aid for South Vietnam by 43 to 38. For all practical purposes they sentenced to death millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians. Ted Kennedy led the attack on the administration plan, despite Defense Department warnings that refusal to grant the additional aid would have "grave consequences" for South Vietnam. Republicans warning the same thing on the Senate floor were drowned out by the outpouring of Democrat moral relativism. Senator Kennedy's amendment to the supplementary defense bill prevented additional funds for military aid to South Vietnam.

Senator Kennedy attacked the proposed accounting procedure as a "bookkeeper's sleight of hand" that would reward a "Pentagon mistake" by giving "back-door authority" to spend additional money in South Vietnam. But the main Kennedy attack was that with the military aid request the administration was continuing the war and "perpetuating old relationships and policies" in Indo-China. In other words, continuing opposition to Communism.

Democrat Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, knew his party was doing the work of Marxism.

"We came out of there with our flags flying," he said. "I am not willing to turn my back" on the American soldiers killed or wounded in Vietnam. He described the increased aid as "an obligation to an ally" and "part of the process of winding down and getting out as fast as we reasonably can."

"How long are we going to hear that argument?" Senator Kennedy shot back. "We have heard it long enough."

The U.S. military attempted to convey "assurances of President Ford's strong support in the determined resistance of the people of South Vietnam to the massive invasion by a North Vietnamese expeditionary corps in flagrant and cynical disregard of the provisions of the Paris agreement." Kennedy had the upper hand, however.

As a result of Kennedy's "leadership" and the like thinking of his ilk, "We enter Phnom Penh as conquerors," a Communist representative said. "We order the surrender of all officers and officials of the Phnom puppet regime under a white flag."

Mary Jo Kopechne would not be the last to die as a result of Kennedy's cowardice. The "killing fields" had begun. Forces led by Pol Pot took control of the Cambodian capital on April 17, 1975.

"We feel completely abandoned," Premier Long Boret said. "We have no more material means." The Communists marked Long Boret and other Cambodian leaders for execution. Peter Arnett was among the newsmen remaining in Saigon to give voice to the Communists.

The White House announced that the United States would no longer back President Nguyen Van Thieu. The country began its death throes. President Duong Van Minh announced the unconditional surrender of the Saigon government and its military forces to the Viet Cong. Those were all the people who were depicted as the innocent victims of My Lai. President Ford had "no comment" on the surrender of Saigon. A White House spokesman said the surrender was considered "inevitable." The Viet Cong flag was raised over the presidential palace. Soon after, a detachment of Communist troops, led by General Minh, arrived. Thieu went on radio and blamed the United States cuts in aid for the debacle of his forces.

In a news analysis for the New York Times called "Vietnam, Test of Presidents, Was Distant War and Battle at Home," Leslie H. Gelb gave voice to the American press, which immediately set about discrediting our involvement in Vietnam.

Liberalism run amok: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge

Someone once said that if conservatives are left unchecked, they will form a Rotary Club . . . or write the Constitution. Some have tried to say they would become Fascistic like the Nazis, which completely disregards the fact conservatism is based on the opposite of the Nazis: small government and individual freedom.

On the other hand, liberalism left unchecked, allowed to run amok, becomes something more resembling Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge who presided over genocide on Cambodia between 1975 and 1979. Liberals despise this analogy. They think themselves of as latte-drinking dilettantes, friendly patrons of organic markets, and allies of poor minorities. In a free society such as America, where a two-party system and a strong conservative movement has always existed, this is true.

But history offers disturbing lessons. Books like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, and the simple study of Marxism-Leninism tell us something much different.

At the heart of all this is the city of Paris, France. This marvelous City of Lights, so glorious and romantic, fought over and protected, a tourist destination, a city of art, of culture, and beauty; how could this of all places be where the Beast has fomented some of his most monstrous hatreds? Surely Moscow, or Berlin, or even London, where Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto; these places perhaps, but lovely Paris?

In 1762, the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote Of the Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right. Blaming over 200 years of mass murder on Rousseau is too damning an indictment, just as Communism cannot be completely laid on the doorstep of Marx; Nazism ascribed solely to Friedrich Nietzsche, or even Richard Wagner; and the ills of Left-wing American radicalism entirely ascribed to Henry David Thoreau and "Red Emma" Goldman.

No, these kinds of horrors are the work of the Beast, or an evil spirit unleashed on Mankind at the beginning of time. Evil did not start with Rousseau, and did not end the day the Berlin Wall came down. It is eternal, and it emanates from anywhere and everywhere. The devil was in the crowd, stirring the cries of "crucify Him" when Pontius Pilate weighed whether Christ should be sentenced to the cross, just as he entered the hearts and minds of men who lynched blacks in Alabama in a very dark time.

No single man, no human political theory alone, can be blamed. Liberalism in and of itself is not inherently evil. Not even such monsters of history as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin are fully at fault. Even Left-wingers have tried to ascribe this notion of a malevolent spirit, as with the films of Oliver Stone. In both JFK and Nixon he infuses scenes with subtle, subversive imagery of a sort of "Beast" barely seen in the clouds. In Stone's view this creature is prodding, overseeing or "helping" a Right-wing cabal plot the murder of John Kennedy, or putting Richard Nixon in the White House against long odds.

There is little real defense against the Beast, other than Christian prayer and supplication. Conservatism is injected with this faith, but it is still run by humans corrupted by Original Sin, meaning it is not immune to this sickness. America in its 200-plus years seems to be the place where righteousness is given a voice, where it is strong and dominant, but this is also a country that has allowed the abortion of millions of innocent babies. Satan, like God, works in mysterious ways, often behind the scenes.

There is no inherent reason why Paris, France is a place where so much evil has been fomented, but for over 200 years it has brewed there, oft-unnoticed except by those watching. In the years after Rousseau's book, a revolution was launched in America. Many early leaders of the revolt discouraged the Boston Tea Party because it looked too much like a mob. The Revolutionaries were men of honor, law-abiding citizens who preferred petition based on reason and moral equality. They insisted the tea spilled in Boston Harbor be paid to the East India Company.

But the French Revolution was a demonic mob. Thousands were killed in the most horrible manner; heads cut off, placed on pikes in the public square, bodies disfigured, innocents crying for mercy slaughtered by crazed lunatics, whether peasants or "officials" of a new state that said men's rights came not from God but from other men. Indeed God was the enemy; Catholic priests killed en masse, with all traces of Christianity literally wiped away in the form of new calendars replacing those based on the calendar of the "year of our Lord." Many on the Left have hidden the brutality of the French Revolution, preferring to think of the French as civilized, our betters, the cultured, nuanced elites advanced beyond the primitive Christian notions of rural American hicks. But the Terrors were not simply the most brutal period of Western Civilization until that point, but in fact a "blue print" for a century of awful European revolutions, followed by another century of Communism, Nazism, mass murder, and immorality beyond the pale of all previous human concept. Through it all, while London, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo and many other cities burned and lived in siege, Paris remained protected by some sort of unseen hand.

The French piled all blame on Kaiser's Germany, bankrupting her after World War I. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer described Paris in between the wards; a place of total immorality and sin. They sat on their hands, pacifistic to the point of cowardice; anti-Semitic and in collaboration with Nazi evil; until America rescued her, then pretended they had contributed to their freedoms. The French sniffed, turned up their noses, inventing the lie that they were morally superior to the Doughboys and sons of the Midwest who fought so they could live this concept.

So it was in Paris where the likes of Jane Fonda had their minds brainwashed by the intellectuals of the French New Wave, taking a good American girl and filling her head with devilish theories of America to blame for all ills; to go back, use her looks, her charms, her sex to convince the dumbasses of a new longhair generation that this falsehood was a fact.

These salons, these cultured and cultivated havens of cafe society, where Rousseau's book stirred the peasants to kill the Catholics; where Napoleon Bonaparte was urged to conquer the world; where rights were deemed bestowed not by a deity but by a bureaucratic; where the cowards sat drinking while the courageous of other nations fought for on their behalf, the guns heard from these very cafes; after World War II they became the place where a new generation did the work of the Beast.

Pol Pot in Paris

Pol Pot was born on May 19, 1925 in Kompong Thom Province, Cambodia. Many liberals love to espouse the great "mysticism" and "humanity" of Eastern religions. Pol Pot lived in a Buddhist monastery for six years. He studied carpentry for one year at a technical school in Phnom Penh. He was a mild-mannered schoolteacher. There was nothing to suggest a tendency for mass murder.

Then he moved to Paris. In the cafes of this, the City of Lights, he engaged in "intellectual" discussions. He was told the "white man" was at fault for all ills of this Earth. Colonialism, imperialism, racism, intolerance, greed, plunder and exploitation were his tools. He used a false religion based on a blue-eyed god to pacify the dark-skinned into letting him steal from them for their own good. He needed to be destroyed. A new order, Communism, was now at play; the single political theory that could combat the centuries of exploitation that must be avenged upon Western Civilization.

Jane Fonda would have to return to a nation filled with conservatives on a soap box to oppose her, the vestiges of a capitalist studio system unwilling to give her voice full throttle; even a Christian faith she would adopt, asking for forgiveness of those she trespassed against. But Pol Pot would be sent back to his homeland at just the right time, when the Americans, forced by the full force of the Left's political and propaganda arms to cut 'n' run, were gone, leaving him and his ideology to run amok, unopposed. What happened is what happens when this ideology has no John Kennedy, no Richard Nixon, no Ronald Reagan, no 101st Airborne Division, to oppose it. It is what happened in Castro's Cuba, in Stalin's Russia, in North Korea after President Truman fired Doug MacArthur, or in China when Theodore White's analysis was given the total power of his voice in Time magazine.

The Beast was on the move again, and as before, those who called it out were called . . . paranoid, war mongers.

The "killing fields"

He returned to assumed the leadership role in guerrilla warfare under Ho Chi Minh, joined the Cambodian Communist Party, and engaged in revolutionary activities. Fleeing from Phnom Penh because police suspected his Communist activities in 1963, he built up the Cambodian Communist Party, serving as party secretary from 1963 to 1975. He led Khmer Rouge forces in the overthrow of the Lon Nol regime that year, and became prime minister of the new Khmer Rouge government from 1976-1979. He headed Khmer Rouge forces in the mountains of southwestern Cambodia against the Hanoi-backed government from 1975 to 1985. He was allegedly removed from military and political leadership of the Khmer Rouge because the crimes he orchestrated had become public throughout the world. Actual knowledge of Communist excesses was not of value to their cause.

Between 1975 and 1979 Pol Pot was prime minister of the infamous "killing fields" Communist government. His radical Maoist version of Communism centered on a return to a utopian agricultural society and rejection of modern urban life. The populations of Cambodia's cities were forced to evacuate, move to the countryside and engage in agricultural labor. In the forced mass exodus, the government caused the deaths of an estimated 2 million Cambodians through imprisonment, torture, overwork, starvation and execution. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger were forced to watch this, unable to do anything because the Kennedy-led Democrats simply allowed it to happen. Jimmy Carter sat around and let it happen some more. Finally in 1979, a border dispute led to a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. They overthrew Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government and installed a regime friendly to the Vietnamese.

Pol Pot fled to southwestern Cambodia where he led a Khmer Rouge insurgency against the Vietnamese-backed central government. China and Thailand in the 1980s supported a three-party guerrilla alliance that included the Khmer Rouge and royalists against the Vietnamese-supported government of Premier Hun Sen. The government would not negotiate with the Khmer Rouge as long as Pol Pot remained its leader.

In 1991 the Khmer Rouge signed a peace treaty officially ending the Cambodian war. In 1992 Prince Sihanouk denounced the Khmer Rouge and allied with Hun Sen, upsetting the balance of power. The Khmer Rouge withdrew from the peace process, resumed fighting, and in 1993 boycotted a national election. Royalists won the election, a new constitution re-established the monarchy, and Norodom Sihanouk again became King.

The Khmer Rouge split apart in 1996 and its moderate faction based in the north defected to the government. Hard-liners under Pol Pot stayed in their mountain jungle stronghold.

Pol Pot died on April 15, 1998 in Bangkok, Thailand, evading prosecution for the deaths of as many as 2 million of his countrymen.

Yale University catalogued millions of documents and photographs as evidence of one of the century's worst atrocities. Cambodian journalist Dith Pran barely survived the mass killings by the Pol Pot regime and was the central character in the 1984 Warner Brothers movie The Killing Fields. Through New York Times journalist Sidney Bluementhal, his story was told. Incredibly, had it not been for a handful of men, this story might have flown under the radar screen of history. The fact that such a thing can happen while a country as powerful as America allows it, and the world populace yawns over it, is an example of the "banality of evil" used to explain how genocide occurs. Dr. Haing S. Ngor, the Cambodian actor best known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of Dith Pran in The Killing Fields, was gunned down outside his home near the Chinatown section of Los Angeles in February, 1996. It may have been a political slaying. Ngor's wallet and money were not taken.

John Lennon of the Beatles was a leading voice of the Left throughout the Vietnam War. He sang "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine" which offered the image of a world without countries, and "no religion, too." The Left either recognized the approximation of these words with Marx's Communist Manifesto and liked it, or was too addled by drugs to understand it. While Lennon wanted the U.S. to "give peace a chance," the Communists were torturing our POWs and continuing to aggressively spread war throughout the country. Lennon's vision of "peace" certainly was not the wholesale invasion of Saigon, which of course does not change the fact that this is exactly what happened when the Democrat Congress finally did follow his "advice." "Imagine" might have envisioned a world without the pesky judgments of organized religion, but Lennon's vision surely did not resemble the Year Zero "re-education camps" of the atheist, former Buddhist Pol Pot. Of course, this does not change the fact that the reality of Lennon's utopian vision precisely resembled the "killing fields."

America in decline

I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American Democracy . . . The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation . . .

\- President Jimmy Carter, 1979

An American folk singer named Barry Maguire had a big hit during the Vietnam War called "Eve of Destruction." A typical hippie peace anthem, it challenged fighter pilots to look into their souls, presumably because what they were doing was supposed to be immoral. The premise of the song was that America's efforts in Vietnam were the pre-cursor to Armageddon, which was the "destruction" in the title. There is nary a word about the 50-60 million dead during World War II, the 35 million who died under Soviet Communism, the 55 million under Chinese Communism, or the millions of other dead due to various other forms of Communism. Maguire was "right" despite being wrong. The bombings (performed by the "immoral" fighter pilots) pushed the North Vietnamese into a binding agreement that brought peace, not destruction, to Vietnam.

After Watergate, however, the Republicans lost all their Congressional power. With the Democrats in control, South Vietnam was thrown to the wolves. The wars, savagery, genocide, Holocaust, misery, re-education camps, "killing fields," refugees and utter destruction that enveloped Vietnam, Laos and Pol Pot's Cambodia as a result of this perfidy was highly, precisely, and to quintessential effect exactly that with which Maguire's song described. Maguire would presumably hate this assessment and claim it to be a lie. Many will be outraged that such a thing should be suggested. None of this changes the fact that it is simply that with which is true.

The "brink" was not Nagasaki or Hiroshima. It was not the Cuban Missile Crisis or Vietnam. The brink occurred after August, 1974, when Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency. With Republican Gerald Ford in the White House and Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State, America "held the line" as long as she could, but in the words of Led Zeppelin, "when the levee breaks" the effect can be devastating. The "levee," in this case, was the "thin green line" of funding keeping the North from invading South Vietnam. The Democrats said "no," and that was that. To those non-Communists who were there, what happened was Biblical. The effect was more far-reaching than Southeast Asia. Communist "adventurism," to use a word used to make the Soviets look like modern day Teddy Roosevelts, or Winston Churchill testing his manhood as a young officer, extended into the entire Third World. It expanded the Cold War at a time when the West stopped calling it the Cold War, hoping if they did it would go away. It strengthened the Communists more than the Bay of Pigs, Castro or the Tet Offensive ever could.

The term "traitor" is a powerful one. In many poor countries and criminal organizations, treachery is identified every day, and punished severely. But in America, with the Constitution, due process of law, the "court of public opinion," and the media, such a post-McCarthyite phrase is deemed to be an overripe conservative term. The fact is, there are many who do things that are treacherous, if not meeting the legal definition. They are protected not only by the courts and the "guilty until proven innocent" premise, but simply by the power of America. It is to the great credit of this great nation that drugs, terrible Presidents, civil wars (both military and social) and really bad political philosophies have not destroyed us.

The "civil war" atmosphere of the 1960s saw students take to the streets and the campuses to protest and show what they claimed was not "hate" for America, but was something that sure resembled it. If one were to ask what was the biggest domestic threat to this country since the War Between the States, most would respond that it was the 1960s protest movement, or Nixon's Watergate scandal. They would be wrong. Watergate was a scandal that wounded American international prestige, but it was the aftermath of Watergate, prosecuted by the Democrat Party led by Senator Edward "Teddy" Kennedy, that posed the biggest threat ever. The fact that this threat did not destroy the United States, is a testament to the strength of the country. We have a built-in, systematic ability to withstand these things.

Still, the late 1970s were a time that, in retrospect, demonstrates that point in which the U.S. almost gave in and rescinded its role in the world. Some believe this role is sanctioned by the Almighty, and therefore felt such a thing could have had an effect of, well, Biblical proportions. It never got to that pitch. Ronald Reagan saved the day, simplistic as it sounds, with a Hollywood ending, but it was not looking good for a few years there.

Richard Nixon deserves his share of the blame. All of the comparisons with the Robert Kennedy/Lyndon Johnson/J. Edgar Hoover buggings do not make what he did right. The fact that Franklin Roosevelt's lies made Nixon look like Mother Theresa also do not excuse Nixon. All of Nixon's "excuses" have been detailed. Nixon failed his country, and he paid an appropriate price for it. In the long run, he did the Republican Party a favor, because the lesson learned by the GOP is that it must hold itself to a higher standard. They have ever since. The public recognized it, and the party enjoyed a 12-year "winning streak" (1981-93) followed by a second eight-year run (2001-2009). The Republicans took advantage of situations in which the Democrats were vulnerable.

But Watergate provided the Democrat Party a unique opportunity to strike major electoral blows to the GOP, first in the 1974 midterms and especially in the 1976 Presidential election. They had every right to pile it on. But in abandoning the fight against Communism in Southeast Asia, they allowed the murder of millions. It would be moral relativism to say the Democrats "murdered" all those people. The North Vietnamese, Chinese, and Khmer Rouge Communists did that, nobody else. The question is how foreseeable it was, and based on that foreseeability, what was the responsibility of the Democrat majority that held their fate entirely in their hands? Allegories and examples could go on for pages. The rest of the world had abandoned the Vietnamese, too, but the responsibility is America's. We are better than the rest of the world. You cannot choose leadership, you have to accept it. It was not America's finest hour.

The U.S. is the world's leading capitalist Democracy. Dealing with nations that were neither Communist, nor capitalist, proved to an exercise in clumsiness. In Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, which makes up the Third World then and now, doctrinaire Communist revolutionaries were trained, funded, and controlled by the Soviet Union. The locals who opposed them, more often than not, were unsavory. The question then came down to whether the Marxist-Leninist tide was greater than the danger of non-Communist despotism. This question had some relevancy. It was worthy of a Platonic discussion of "just cause" and the "ends justifying the means." All things being equal, foreign policy could have been decided on a case-by-case basis, weighing each country, situation, danger level, and the "unsavoriness" of selected militants, freedom fighters and dictators.

However, the Democrats could not enter into this discussion in such a manner. Their baggage was too heavy. McCarthy's accusations, Johnson's poor handling of Vietnam, and the fact that the hated Nixon had emerged as the geo-political thinker of the era, meant that the Great Threat had to be reduced. It had to be reduced not by our military, the intelligence community or by popular uprising, but by saying it never was what the conservatives said it was.

Liberals had, of course, been saying this for years. But the Silent Majority saw through them and refused to hand the country to them. Now, the Silent Majority's man had been felled by his own sword. The enthusiasm for defending our principles temporarily lost momentum. The Democrats jumped all over it. The official decisions they made from 1974-80 are very close to treachery.

Laugh track decade

Look at old photos from the 1970s. If you have a vague sense you are looking at something sick, it is because you are. The hippies, the most spoiled, over-indulged generation in history, were a group of people who knew they could never achieve what their parents had, which was overcoming the Great Depression and Hitler. Instead of trying, or expressing gratitude for these efforts, which of course gave them the freedoms they now had, they decided to "tune in, turn on, and drop out." They did have political passion over the war, misguided as it was. But the ragamuffins who followed the hippies in the 1970s were as unimpressive as any Americans who have ever lived. The photos show longhairs who wasted God-given athletic ability, drug dealers and drug abusers, alcoholics, bad clothing styles, and disaffection. American kids had little respect for tradition. The excellent music of the 1960s was replaced by a funk sound in the 1970s that today is used mostly as a laugh track.

The 1970s were not all bad. The Major Leagues were golden, although the old-fashioned values that makes one a real baseball fan were lacking, so attendance in the 1960s and '70s sagged. Pro football had a big decade, too, as did Hollywood. But the military was reduced to accepting criminals doing service instead of sentences. The economy suffered. American prestige hit an all-time low.

Gerald Ford, a football star at the University of Michigan, was reduced to a Chevy Chase skit on Saturday Night Live. Jimmy Carter became the "accidental President." Carter had graduated from the Naval Academy and served as an engineer in Hyman Rickover's nuclear Navy. After retiring, he became a peanut farmer in his native Georgia, but was bit by the political bug. He became the unlikely Governor of Georgia, one of the first tangible results of the Voting Rights Act. Carter eschewed the racist rhetoric of Southern politicians of that era, among them Lester Maddox, Ross Barnes and George Wallace. He received the "new" black vote, and was in actuality not racist. This is to his great credit, especially considering that he was a white man who grew up in the Jim Crow era. He was, and is, an evangelical, "born again" Christian, devout in his faith. His entrepreneurial background, heavy drawl and Naval career made him palatable to the "good ol' boy" network.

After LBJ, the South was not considered the best breeding grounds for Presidential candidates, but Nixon's "Southern strategy" in 1968 made it a battleground region the Democrats needed to win. After Watergate, Ford's Republicanism destined him to lose. Carter changed the complexion of modern campaigning. He hired a pollster, Pat Caddell, who did groundbreaking work in the area of opinion gathering and making. Carter also started campaigning earlier than any other candidate. 1976 was the first of the modern "Primary campaigns." Carter endeavored to make the nomination his by virtue of winning in this manner, instead of focusing on the summer convention and the "smoke-filled room" approach of canvassing and strong-arming delegates (which LBJ and RFK had mastered). He virtually lived in Iowa, site of the first caucus, and in New Hampshire, the all-important bellwether Primary.

Chappaquiddick, whose seven-year old wounds were still raw, burdened Teddy Kennedy, all-powerful in the Senate. The old McGovernites were supposed to be too liberal. Hubert Humphrey would soon be dead of cancer. The old guard fell. The Republicans went with Ford, but Ronald Reagan made a strong run. He was still firing everything he had at the convention in Kansas City, but a sitting President is difficult to unseat as a party nominee.

History requires us to ask what would have happened had Reagan emerged as the 1976 GOP nominee. He was identified with Nixon, being of the same vintage and a Californian, but he did not have Ford's pardon of him to overcome. Reagan proved four years later that he was a great campaigner, and for all practical purposes wiped the floor with Carter. But in '76, Carter did not have four horrible years attached to his record. Reagan was a conservative in a distinctly unconservative time; a Cold Warrior when the press no longer used the term, preferring to call it détente. Reagan's advocacy of a strong defense and justification for nuclear weapons would not have been a popular campaign approach. He called the Vietnam War honorable when few wanted to hear that. He called the Communists what they were when most just wanted to pretend they were not.

Had he won in '76, he might have been too late to prevent the "killing fields." North Vietnam would have invaded the south almost two years prior to his inauguration. The Pol Pot nightmare was two years old. Iran and the hostage situation, Africa and Afghanistan very possibly might have played out differently. Had Reagan lost to Carter, he still would have been viable in 1980.

The battle for the Third World

The 19th Century confidence that the world would emulate America as a "beacon on the hill" was severely questioned, and at a certain point abandoned, in the 1970s. America lost confidence that Democracy would triumph as a universal system. Patriotism, love of country and old-fashioned flag waving were all but gone. It was a liberal time, and it was a terrible time. The breakup of Europe's colonial empires throughout Asia and Africa was a conundrum. On the one hand, the U.S. had advocated that Britain give up its colonies. Much of the Roosevelt-Churchill Grand Alliance was based on this implicit promise. The fact that it happened has left some historians questioning Churchill's legacy. In the modern era, Great Britain is seen as a loyal, yet relatively Leftist, junior friend and ally of the U.S. It is almost comical, with "page three girls" and eccentric unseriousness. English girls, once prim and proper, have developed a reputation for unbounding promiscuity, and the men enjoy drinking, wearing rubber suits and getting spanked. The royals are as vulnerable as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire, devoid of any public power. Their affairs and scatological peccadilloes are tabloid fodder. Tony Blair was a '70s Mod with Pete Townshend hair who managed a rock group. Not exactly Churchill. These observations reek of sweeping stereotype, yes, and admiration for the Brits remains, but the point is this is not your grandfather's England.

This transformation was occurring in England in the 1970s, and it was also occurring in America. England had lost its political will. Instead of American-style freedom, the old colonies were now sore spots, hostile to the West and vulnerable to Communist takeover at the worst conceivable time. Vietnam and Watergate had robbed the U.S. of its political will, too.

The Democrats decided it was an opportunity, not a disaster. A hopeful view prevailed that the ex-colonies would choose Democracy and capitalism, and in so doing "vote the Soviet Union out of office."

This hope, in and of itself, was not something to blame the Democrats for. It has a distinctly conservative flavor to it, and reminds one of the famous Reagan optimism. These hopes, however, were dashed. The Third World de-colonized, and were replaced by dictatorships and invitations to Moscow to come in and stick around for awhile. In the end, the real victim was the Third World itself. They were reduced to a battlefield. Before it was over, though, Left-wing revolutionary movements threatened to overwhelm the U.S.

Washington had long regarded any anti-Communists as allies, regardless of criminality or instability. The fact that organized criminal syndicates are naturally anti-Communist, since they engage in pure profit motive, is summed up in The Godfather, in which one family head says Don Vito Corleone must share the judge he has "in his back pocket."

"He may present a bill," the Mafia man says of Corleone. "After all, we are not Communists." The film, which came out in the 1970s, was part of a "new wave" of social cinema in which Francis Ford Coppola chose to make the mob out to be an allegory for capitalism in America. The subliminal message was that this beautiful nation is just a bunch of crooks.

This mindset quickly imbued the critics of American Third World policy. Our "allies" were a bunch of critics, and by the way, so were we. Unable to stand up to the exemplary image we had set for ourselves, how could we stand up as the moral and mortal enemy of Communism? How bad could Communism be? The 55 million dead Chinese were known to people by this point, but the question was asked anyway.

If one of our anti-Communist allies imprisoned some students, or tortured some terrorists, or salted some money away in a Swiss bank account, this automatically gave the media carte blanche to asses them as no better than those who ran the gulags and the re-education camps. Worst of all, everything was now about "corporate exploitation" or "big oil," and these terms were suddenly just codes for racism.

President Harry Truman's doctrine in 1947 proclaimed assistance to friendly governments resisting Communist aggression. JFK's 1961 speech famously reiterated it. By the mid-1970s, those concepts seemed archaic. If the U.S. were to abandon these principles, the results would be disastrous. Washington had actively exerted itself in Central America and the Caribbean for decades. To do so on a global basis opened this nation to international hatred.

The question, then, is what should we have done? This is the tricky part of the deal, the one the Left never has an answer for. What alternatives did we have? Criticism is easy, developed into an art form.

The South Vietnamese government up until the fall of 1963 had been Catholic and patrician in a poor, Buddhist country. Bad allies. Fulgencio Batista let Meyer Lansky run sugar into his country and open a few casinos. The shock of it all. Rafael Trujillo told the Negro Leaguers to "win or else." The Shah of Iran had little regard for the masses. South African politicians had the temerity to be white. Were all these people worse than the Communists? Instead of addressing this question, we were accused of "false realism" and "moral insensitivity."

"There is a disturbing tendency to view such regimes in caricature, regarding Right-wing governments as valuable friends whose repressive excesses must be ignored or excused, while perceiving Leftist insurgent movements and governments as mortal threats to America's national interest, justifying a posture of unrelenting hostility," wrote Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute in The United States and Third World Dictatorships: A Case for Benign Detachment.

"For example, the Reagan Administration pursues a confrontational policy toward the Marxist government of Nicaragua, terminating all aid programs, imposing a trade embargo, and supporting rebel guerrillas. At the same time, Washington lavishes economic and military aid upon equally repressive 'allies' in South Korea, the Philippines, Zaire, and elsewhere.

"The consequences of this simplistic and morally inconsistent strategy are highly unfortunate. America finds itself involved far too often in futile or mutually destructive confrontations with Left-wing regimes. Even worse is the evolution of a cozy relationship between Washington and a host of Right-wing authoritarian governments. A pervasive perception of the United States as the sponsor and protector of such dictatorships has undermined America's credibility as a spokesman for Democracy, caused Third World peoples to equate both capitalism and Democracy with U.S. hegemony, and established a milieu for rabidly anti-American revolutions. It is an approach that creates a massive reservoir of ill will and, in the long run, weakens rather than strengthens America's national security."

While Carpenter's assessment was written long after the 1970s, this mindset was in place during that time. Even in retrospect he does not offer the alternative: invasion and occupation, accompanied by a whole lot of death and destruction courtesy of the red, white and blue. Instead of giving credit for choosing the more benign approach, we are accused of going too far, as if all of these cesspools have Daniel Webster and William Jennings Bryan waiting in the wings, only to be passed over by us in favor of Augusto Pinochet.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had made the practical decision in the 1950s that the U.S. had no real choice but to choose sides in Asia and Africa. This might seem simplistic to the brainiacs of the moral Left, but simplicity is most often the best politics. In Dulles's view, neutrality always worked to the Soviet advantage. The understandable resistance to American efforts to "annex" allies could only be explained by pointing out that the Communists had no intention of recognizing non-alignment. Acrimonious competition between two alien superpowers. India, for instance, owed its independence as much to Roosevelt's urgings and American media sympathy as to Gandhi, but refused attempts to join forces against Communism. Its size, traditions, and military power made it naturally resistant to Communism on its own, but they were not a normal situation. It is understandable that they did not want to be the DMZ of the Cold War, but we could have used their help. Washington pressured Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but never threatened to invade.

Furthermore, let it be stated that countries, which made the conscious decision to align themselves with the freedom and Democracy of America, were exercising far better judgment. They did much more good for the rest of the world than countries that either aligned themselves with murderous Communism, or turned a blind eye to it. That being said, the U.S did then and continues to direct enormous largesse on all these countries, regardless of affiliation. No other nation has provided these Third World countries more humanitarian aid and pure goodwill than America. Only certain, highly belligerent countries like Cuba were disaffected from this largesse. Even in Cuba's case it is likely that since the Russians abandoned them, the U.S. has (indirectly) given them more than any other country (despite the embargo).

When the Cold War shifted to Africa, both the U.S. and the Soviets found themselves in a sticky thicket where few of the modern rules applied. Angola was typical. The struggle was a myriad of language, tribes and economics. It was "an unprecedented Soviet geopolitical offensive," according to former Secretary of State Kissinger. Gerald Ford saw it as "pro-Communist" and "pro-West" forces. Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick described Mozambique and Nicaragua as satellites of the U.S.S.R., with little national identity. President Reagan formed a bi-partisan commission on Central America to address the "geo-strategic challenge" there. Criticisms of these approaches assume some better alternatives existed. Assuming the alternative is something other than invasion for the purposes of defending against Communist incursions, is it likely that our best plan would have been to ship a bunch of copies of the Federalist Papers along with a $1 billion check, and then let go? The phrase "we will let the West sell us the rope we use to hang them" emanates from the hope that American leaders would be fuzzy enough to do this. Some were. Jimmy Carter was. Others were too sharp. Nixon and Reagan were among the sharp ones.

To accuse the U.S. of failing to understand the complexities of the Third World is tantamount to saying we let the Jews get rounded up and sent to Auschwitz because we failed to understand the complexities of European schtetls. Elie Weisel had a point when he told the world to "never forget." The decision to stop the spread of Communism in the Third World respected his warning. Carter's departure from this policy was a direct refutation of historical lessons.

On New Year's Eve, 1977, President Carter toasted the Shah of Iran, a man who had been a friend to America but not a caring leader of his people.

"Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world," said Carter. "This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership, and to the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you. We have no other nation on Earth who is closer to us in planning for our mutual military security."

One year later, the Shah was ousted in a brutal fundamentalist Muslim uprising. The years since then tell us that the Shah was much better for Iran than the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, just as Czar Nicholas Romanov was better for Russia than V.I. Lenin.

The CIA had warned Carter that the Shah lacked the popular backing to withstand a major revolution. Carter, a man who ascended to the White House with no foreign policy experience, thought wishful thinking would manifest itself. He was deluded. Many in his party actually loved to see the Shah fall. He was a "Right-wing" autocrat, and therefore he and his country deserved what they got, in their view.

Vice President George H.W. Bush said of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, "We stand with you sir . . . We love your adherence to Democratic principle and to the Democratic processes. And we will not leave you in isolation."

Obviously, Marcos was no friend of Democracy, but he was a foe of Communism and provided this country with an important strategic toehold, in the form of Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Force Base. Eventually, his excesses became too much for his people and us. President Reagan oversaw his peaceful removal. The way Reagan handled Marcos was the way to do it. The way Carter handled the Shah was not. The philosophy that separates why Reagan succeeded and Carter failed is a lesson for all.

Marcos had indeed suspended the national constitution, declared martial law, governed by decree, and imprisoned political opponents. Vice President Bush knew these facts. Obviously, Bush's enthusiastic endorsement of Marcos did not sit well with those who opposed his autocracy. But there was prudence to the Reagan/Bush approach. Wild protestations of Marcos would likely have resulted in further repressions, and possible civil war. The result would have been loss of the bases and Communist takeover. Public posturing and private directives, which was the way Reagan approached Marcos, worked much better than anarchy.

Debating Walter Mondale in 1984, President Reagan defended America's handling of the Manila regime as the only alternative to Communism. The liberal media called it a "gross distortion of reality," which does not change the fact that Reagan was right. Whether or not full-scale Soviet-style Communism was waiting in the wings is not something that can be judged by the Monday morning quarterbacks. At the time (which is the framework in which leaders must be most accurately judged), Communist guerrillas threatened Manila (the "guerilla in Manila?"). Everybody who had been on the crew of Apocalypse Now in the 1970s could attest to the tenacity of Communist insurgency against the Marcos regime. It was these attacks which held up filming of the movie more than anything else in the agonizing four-year struggle to complete the project.

For over 30 years, the U.S. equipped the Somoza military in Nicaragua. Somoza was oppressive and he robbed his country. When Carter took office, he addressed situations like Somoza, aid to the Shah and to SAVAK, his secret police. Washington had been assisting Brazilian military governments, Guatemalan dictatorships, and military juntas in Greece from 1967 to 1974. In the post-Watergate era, the Democrat Congress felt that human rights were more important than anti-Communism.

In Iran, American patronage caused hatred toward us, but there is moral relativism at play here. Were viable Democratic alternatives available in Iran? The only alternative was fundamentalist Islam, and the fact that this is a bad thing is simply obvious on its face. Our "propping up" the lesser of two evils in a less-than-perfect situation does not excuse the excesses of the fundamentalists, yet there are many who proffer the fiction that fundamentalists rise because of America, as if absent our presence the Iranians are a peaceful culture. Is there some alternate Universe in which this is true? The answer is no.

Repudiation of American capitalism is supposed to be a response to having it shoved down their throats. The fact that American consumer goods have proven to be one of the major breakthroughs in overcoming these autocracies in succeeding years puts the lie to this premise, too.

"U.S. citizens see [capitalist Democracy] as having given them the highest standard of living and the most open society in the world," says historian Walter LaFeber of Central America. "Many Central Americans have increasingly associated capitalism with a brutal oligarchy-military complex that has been supported by U.S. policies - and armies." This statement may be true, but it does not address the responsibility of people in these countries. Are they not held to any kind of standard? The basic idea that America controls every aspect of their fate is simply international affirmative action. The people who live in Haiti, the Dominican Republican, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico and other nations of Latin America, as well as Africa, have not entirely proven that they can govern themselves left to their own devices. Not yet.

"Yanqui go home!" may be a popular refrain, but without the Yankees, carnage reigns. There may be implicit racism in our insertions into their affairs. We would prefer not to have to do it. It would be nice if these countries were like Belgium or Holland, independent, not particularly friendly, but safe. When the Cold War raged, there was no choice. Since the Cold War ended, the U.S. tried to let the people handle their own affairs. A look at Africa quickly leads to the conclusion that, for the most part, there are many who are unable to run their own countries in the modern world. The "white man" is easily blamed for having invented and imported gunpowder (actually a Chinese invention), weapons and disease. Would Africa, for instance, be better off if tribes fought wars with limited weapons that resulted in hundreds of dead (and they always have fought and enslaved each other, rather than live peacefully), instead of wars with lethal weapons that result in thousands of dead? Yes. Would they be better off without hospitals and roads?

Ferdinand Marcos, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Chun Doo Hwan in South Korea were "capitalists." Their poor leadership led some in their countries to think Communism was a viable alternative. In Nicaragua, this thinking reached critical mass in opposition to the detested Somozas. Zaire was another example, in Africa, of a former colony (the Belgian Congo), taken over by a brutal yet anti-Communist dictator, that reached a boiling level in the 1970s and '80s. Guatemala seethed with anti-Americanism in response to the CIA orchestrations that led to their long civil war. As the Korean War generation grew older, South Koreans lost their appreciation for American protection.

"This will become one of the most bitter, anti-American countries in this part of the world," predicted Philippine National Assembly opposition member Ramon Mitra during the Marcos era.

Every case is different. There is no such thing as the "State Department playbook" for dealing with these countries. Our flexibility and intelligence in veering from pure doctrinaire approaches in favor of designer diplomacy separated us from the Communists, who tended to shove Marx down throats. Yugoslavia Premier Josef Tito broke with the Soviet Union in 1948, and we cultivated an important relationship with that country without fomenting revolution. Nixon's rapprochement with China was based on the success of the Tito policy. Co-existence with Marxist regimes was not our preferred policy, but it was unavoidable realpolitik. The key, as Kissinger understood and others apparently do not, is self-interest. It has long been argued that we should relax our attitude toward Castro's Cuba, but such an act is pure unilateralism without regard to our interests. The argument, for instance, that Castro was a small "d" democrat, driven to Communism by American heavy-handedness, is a lie. Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko said that in 1960 Nikita Khrushchev felt the American attitude toward Cuba would "drive Castro to the wall" when we could have accepted his regime under a normalization policy. We were "stupid," Khrushchev concluded. "Castro will have to gravitate to us like an iron filing to a magnet."

Castro's deprivations were far greater than Somoza, the Shah, Pinochet, Marcos and the rest of the "rogue's gallery" of propped-up U.S. "puppets." The difference between Castro and the others is that Castro stole from the rich. His reputation for "giving to the poor" is a propaganda lie, as is his "terrific health care system." The reality, "ugly" as it may be, is that "Right-wing dictators" who allowed business to flow in their countries were allowing flowing of the spigots of commerce that kept their nations alive, despite repression. Castro offered only repression without the commerce. The fact that Castro is a hero to a large segment of people, while the Pinochets and his ilk have met the fate of international tribunals is a disgusting commentary on this reality.

Castro did interviews with the American media claiming not to be a Marxist, but these were lies. His revolution and subsequent actions were not those of a Democratic-style freedom fighter. Reagan was determined to learn from the errors of our Castro treatment. He did not give the new Sandinista government of Nicaragua time to establish itself. He identified them for what they were from the beginning: Communists. He isolated the Managua regime by imposing economic sanctions. He allowed for the "covert" funding of the Contra guerrillas. He lent his best rhetoric to their struggle. President Reagan called the Contras "the moral equal" of the Founding Fathers, which drove his political detractors to apoplexy but left them in a quandary. On the one hand, the Contras were not the moral equivalent of the Founders. But his opponents had long been critical of the Founders as "Dead White Males" who owned slaves. They found themselves locked in by their own pernicious rhetoric, which either acknowledged the Founders as moral or tacitly placed greater credibility to the Contras, presumably based on their "people of color" status. In the end, they decided to disavow Reagan, the Founders and the Contras, preferring to legislatively side with the Sandinistas via the Boland Amendment (sponsored by U.S. Representative Edward Boland, D.-Massachusetts).

They romanticized the Sandinistas' suppression of political dissent, rationalizing its brutality (in particular treatment of the Miskito Indians). Fears that Nicaragua would become a Soviet satellite in Central America proved to be less than fully founded. An autopsy of Communism's final days shows that the Soviets were not capable of funding such an operation. But this was not known when the Boland Amendment was voted on. The "self-fulfilling" prophecy of "creating" Communism in Nicaragua turned out to be a farce. What did happen was Reagan found a way to overcome Boland, fund the Contras, and as a direct result the Communists were voted out in 1990. Of course they were. No Communists government had ever been voted in. All of this history has led to common sense about who was right and who was wrong. American hostility toward Left-wing regimes in the Third World was correct, and in the cases where it was relaxed, anarchy and genocide followed.

Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was ousted with the help of the CIA in 1953, allowing the Shah to establish his monarchy. Mossadegh had depended on Communist elements for support and opposed American business interests. The Shah's unenlightened administration and subsequent fall lead to the "conclusion" that the U.S. was to blame. Had Mossadegh stayed in office, Communism may have enveloped the Persian Gulf by 1960. The opposing argument is based on the belief that "what we don't know can't hurt us."

The Jacobo Arbenz overthrow in Guatemala, in which the U.S. Ambassador is supposed to have said he had brought the counter-revolution to a successful conclusion barely "45 minutes behind schedule," was found by President Reagan's bi-partisan commission on Central America to be rife with errors and mistakes. CIA hubris has been detailed. The results of this adventure were fairly disastrous. Whether these results were still better than Castro-style rule is known.

The United States got rid of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of the Congo (now Zaire), in 1960. Lumumba had solicited Communist support. In 1973, the CIA orchestrated a military coup to remove Chilean president Salvador Allende in favor of the military strongman Pinochet. Nixon's administration thwarted Allende's 1970 election, orchestrated Rightist elements of the military, and destabilized Allende through economic means. National Security Adviser Kissinger authorized covert payments of more than $8.8 million to Allende's opponents for three years. Kissinger and Nixon said Allende's downfall was an internal matter. Allende was a Marxist whose economic system was a disaster for the middle class. Despite his Democrat status, he had quickly eliminated much of his opposition.

Allende was "not merely an economic nuisance or a political critic but a geopolitical challenge," said Kissinger. The Allende incident is considered a reprehensible interference in the internal affairs of Chile. It was indeed heavy-handed and other actions may have been the better plan. But considering that Allende was Marxist, and what we knew about Marxism-Leninism (the record of the Soviets, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Castro, et al), was the decision to "do something" about Allende so bad?

What if World War II ended in a stalemate and the Nazis were expanding to Chile? What if Hitler had taken over and filled the heads of the elites that they were the "master race" of Latin America, and elimination of all the "sub-humans" of majority Indian ancestry would solve all their problems? Would the Nixon-Kissinger coup look better under those circumstances? While Hitler-style Holocausts did occur under Communism, in places where they were prevented, the reason they were prevented can be summed up in five words: the United States of America.

Or as country singer Toby Keith puts it, "Courtesy of the red, white and blue." Those who do not believe it are the ones who never had to find out whether their lives or the life of a loved can only be saved if these theories are valid.

Lumumba's ouster "gave rise" to Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire. Mobutu was corrupt and repressive. In 1974, when Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in the "Rumble in the Jungle," the rumor was that thousands of tortured political prisoners were being held in cells under the very outdoor stadium where the heavyweight championship of the world was held. If Mobuto's position mirrored the desire of the U.S., is it not worth considering what we wanted? Was Lumumba going to bring to Africa "Socialism with a human face?" Did the U.S. "pick" Mobutu because we have a particular love for dictatorship? Lumumba had been not elected. He was not the "people's choice." Again, what about the people? Are their responsibilities in ruling themselves abrogated completely? So far most of Africa has only shown that warlords and old tribal factions have "what it takes" to attain power.

Allende has been given virtual sainthood by Western apologists. He was a complete authoritarian. His "election" was most likely rigged, and even so, the public did not know his Marxism at the time (but the CIA knew). He was the last in a four-decade succession of Democratically-elected rulers. Pinochet was a brutalitarian.

The "change in government in Chile was on balance favorable - even from the point of view of human rights," assessed Kissinger. Was Kissinger blind, cynical, or speaking the truth? Kissinger was a realist who played on his own celebrity status. He was also a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He was as knowledgeable about history and the machinations of diplomacy as any American. He drew from Napoleonic military truces, and had studied every minutiae of the Vienna Conference. His knowledge of European revolutions was unmatched. He proved himself equally adept negotiating with Orientals, Europeans, Communists and Latinos. While it is true that he is capable of coloring history to justify his record, he is a man who's credibility is not easily dismissed. If he says that Chile under Pinochet was better than Chile under Allende, this prospect cannot be discarded as pure political effect. His controversial use of force as a diplomatic tool, portrayal of Nixon as "crazy" (with RN's approval), and staunch anti-Communism during the most dangerous era in U.S. Cold War annals, combined with his enthusiasm for CIA adventurism. The advocacy of Kissinger's position comes with caveats. The only thing to do is examine the record with an open mind. American actions did not always produce the results we coveted, but were almost always better than the alternative.

Access to natural resources combined with keeping markets open for capitalist trade was vital. State-run Marxist systems were antithetical to our interests. The big question is whether all these far-flung operations were vital to our strategic military and economic interests. This question goes back to the Teddy Roosevelt Administration, in which T.R. chose to wield the lumber of modern U.S. power to protect dominant market interests in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. In the years since the Soviets launched their most aggressive Third World campaigns, events have answered these questions. As it turns out, the naked truth is that Latin America, Asia and the Middle East proved to be vital, and Africa did not. The bald facts are that, because we fought for our interests in the former three but gave up on the latter, Latin America is a region of struggling Democracy and markets. Asia is the "tiger of the Pacific." The Middle East is kept from total conflagration by U.S. power. Africa, left to its own devices, is the new home of Satan.

An African-style disaster in Latin America would reverberate in our own "backyard," with consequences that would hit too close to home. If Asia had been "thrown to the wolves," Pacific Rim trade would have dried up, with results short of Japanese attack but not a lot better for the starving masses affected by it. Conflagration in the Middle East is not something to even contemplate, for reasons most people understand.

Is the abandonment of sub-Saharan Africa a form of racial bigotry? There may be something to this, but certainly it goes beyond that. Africa was so tempestuous and uncontrollable that even the Soviets saw little of value there. It has all the natural resources needed to feed and fuel a world power, but the size of the place, the difficulties navigating the terrain, combined with the dangers inherent in dealing with the people and politics of the region, turned them back.

America let the place go because we had to deal with the rest of the Third World first. Now, in the 21st Century, Africa could be the Next Big Challenge. If we do not meet the challenge, in the words of Robert Kennedy, "If not us, who? If not now, when?"

The other unanswered question is the one that, luckily, was never put to the test. The unpopular, unstable regimes that the U.S. backed were never asked to ally themselves with us in a shooting war. Certainly they proved to have excellent local intelligence, but Guatemalan security forces never had to join with the Marines to defend the region. The Shah's military never linked up with Special Forces to stave off a Soviet incursion into the oil rich lands of the Persian Gulf. Russian paratroopers never had to be fired at by Chilean defenders. Why? Was it because (a) the Soviets had peaceful intentions, (b) because we aligned ourselves with "Right-wing" governments who opposed them, or (c) because we had the superior military and they knew it? There is no chance the answer is (a). The answer is definitely (c), and more than likely both (b) and (c). Opponents will tell you that these incursions weakened our security. They cost us too much money and stretched thin the "two-front war" theory. They loved the word "quagmire." They sleep under a blanket of freedom that lets them utter their criticisms.

The closest that these people come to having a really legitimate point is in casting suspicion on whether Left-wing governments would be puppets of Moscow. Democracies succeeded militarist dictatorships in Portugal and Greece, despite great fear of Communist intervention. Leftist government subservience at the beck and call of Moscow handlers was assumed, but not assured. The belief in these horrors was based on McCarthy ideology of the 1940s and '50s. The pessimism of these theories had some validity. Over time it was thought to be headed toward obsolescence. China had broken from the U.S.S.R. Yugoslavia was reasonably "independent." Even Romania was a maverick of Communism, albeit more dark and horrible than the Soviet Union itself (which did not stop the Western press from calling it the home of "Marxist Balzacs" and the "Paris of the East"). All of this is fine for the "cocktail courage" crowd, but was it really so easy to forget Castro and the definitive Marxist expansions of Eastern Europe and Asia?

In the 1970s, Iran and Saudi Arabia helped engineer OPEC's massive oil price hikes. Both were American allies, but did not forego economic gain even at the expense of the U.S. All this proves is that they were not "puppet" regimes, which many said they were. They were independent and operated by the Kissinger "self interest" rule. Would Moscow have allowed a Marxist state to behave so freely? In 1980, President Carter imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union after they entered Afghanistan. The United States asked its allies to cooperate in the boycott. The Argentine military junta, backed by Washington, boosted grain sales to Russia. One could look at this and say it was an example in which our "allies" abandoned us. It also could be seen as an example in which those we "propped up" might not have really been propped up. Is financial help, cultural influence and examples of a better way "propping up?"

Not all Communist client states were embargoed all the time, either. Oil and mineral commerce with the Marxist government of Angola continued. Mainland China was an obvious example. This realpolitik paid off in that the U.S. knows that exporting Democracy often comes from exporting and importing goods and services. Commercial ties with the West proved to be a vital factor in America winning the Cold War. Economic boycotts orchestrated by the U.S. have usually been done only in the most egregious situations. The sincere desire by the American government for people to thrive, despite ties to strong-arm governments, has usually superseded all other actions.

The Reagan Administration did impose a trade embargo against Nicaragua. This proved to be good selective policy. Interior Minister Tomas Borge then charted a Marxist-Leninist policy, which failed like all other Marxist-Leninist policies. After Daniel Ortega was ousted in 1990 the embargo was lifted.

Embargoes offered the opportunity to identify the failure of Communism. In filling the void, like in Nicaragua, the Socialist system was consistently proven to be a joke. The U.S. consistently offered a "carrot and stick" approach that left other countries with the inescapable conclusion that our way was not perfect, just the best. Marxist Mozambique looked to the Soviet bloc for assistance, but central planning was particularly inappropriate in this case. They turned, of their own accord, to the West.

It is true that Rightist governments are not Jeffersonian, and Leftists not automatically totalitarian. It would be a mistake to say that all Rightist governments were backed 100 percent by the U.S., while all Leftist ones were put on an "enemies list."

Traditional authoritarian governments are "more susceptible to liberalization," and are "more compatible with U.S. interests," said former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick. Autocracies may offend American "sensibilities," Kirkpatrick said, but she clearly determined that they were better than the "revolutionary autocracies." Perfect examples exist today in Singapore, and in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, Jordan and until the failed "Arab spring" (now the "Arab winter") in Egypt. The politics differ in all cases, but these countries do not offer traditional freedom. Compared to Iran and Hussein's Iraq they looked, at least until Barack Obama called for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, like Nebraska.

Kirkpatrick's thesis is flawed only when opponents desperately try to go beyond the pale of reason to come up with apologist examples of Marxist governments that do not, as Ted Carpenter calls it, "eradicate all competing power center . . . 'totalitarian' regimes are usually more efficient in institutionalizing their repression. Nevertheless, it is pertinent to observe that several former and current U.S. allies in the Third World have amassed appalling human rights records. Their brutality may be less efficient, but in many cases it is scarcely less severe."

In other words, the best case scenarios still offer up Marxist regimes that were "more efficient" in torturing its citizens, which means they should not have been identified as enemies because the governments the U.S. supports are not as good at killing their people. Even the Left concedes Leftist repression is worse than Rightist repression. America has consistently faced the conundrum of participating in repression or pretending it does not exist. The alternative, as it has been mentioned before, more often than not, means military intervention. This is the way the Nazis and Soviets did it, every chance they got. While we have intervened, we have always tried to maintain it as the last option. Sending money almost always meant having it stolen by the despots.

Jeane Kirkpatrick made the deductive observation that traditional autocracies often liberalize, while revolutionary Socialist governments never have. Her examples have panned out over the years, and include Spain, Greece, and Brazil. Rightists removed Communists. Militarists have overthrown Democratically elected governments, but the cases are few and far between. In 1948, Czechoslovakia's Communists threw out a Democracy. Military coups overthrew Democratic regimes in Spain (1936), Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Greece (1967), the Philippines (1972), Chile (1973), and Argentina (1976). The natural assumption of critics is that the elections that brought in the previous revolutionaries were not rigged, and that the militarists always were worse than the revolutionaries. Considering Communist history, it is a stretch to imagine the radicals being the better choice.

Kirkpatrick's thesis exposes the "double standard" of American liberalism toward Third World dictatorships. The Castro example is glaringly obvious. In the post-Cold War atmosphere, the liberal agenda has become clear. It becomes less about Communism and Socialism, and more about radicalism and hate of America. The Left does not like American success and power. While few know who Emma Goldman was, it is her legacy that remains more strongly held within anti-Establishment forces than Lenin. Selective morality is their credo. How else to explain the criticism of American allies in Southeast Asia in the 1960s, compared not just to silence, but outright outpourings of love and support for Hanoi? The fact is the Hanoi regime was every bit as evil as Hitler. Ho Chi Minh may not have started out that way, but hell hath no fury like that with which he wrought. This is simply the truth. When Pol Pot came along, the Left was not just silent. It went beyond silence. It was as if he did not exist. The average American did not know what the "killing fields" were until the movie of the same name came out in 1984, and even that film spent the first half demonstrating that the Cambodian atrocities were in response to U.S. bombs.

Refugees told a different story. They eventually came to the West and told their tales. They are among the most pro-American people in the world. The Left demonized South Africa, which practiced white Apartheid against the black majority. The fact that the black majority was propelled by a Communist organization was conveniently left out of the argument. In the view of the Carter crowd, Chile was bad and Cuba was good. The Soviet Union was just a country that had chosen "another way."

Kirkpatrick and Reagan were willing to say that the "emperor has no clothes" when it came to elections. Elections in Nicaragua were called a "farce" because of restrictions the Sandinistas placed on their opponents. South Korea held elections shortly thereafter that were far from free and open, yet Reagan called it a "step toward full Democracy." The succeeding years shows that his patience in South Korea and opposition to Nicaragua paid off. Today, South Korea does have full and fair elections. Reagan was right. It was a "step." Other, better steps followed. U.S. support was 100 percent responsible. The implicit criticism of South Korea carried with it the unspoken idea that South Korea was somehow no better than North Korea.

Kirkpatrick favoring Somoza and the Shah because they worked with the U.S. is straight out of the Kissinger "self-interest" rule. The deposing of Marcos justifies this in simplicity. Somoza and the Shah were better than Ortega and Khomeini. Marcos was not better than Corazon Aquino. Political opponents know these facts, and that they make sense. Since it renders their argument limp they choose not to accept it.

Some people who send their children to our colleges described America as evil. The marketplace of human choice exemplifies the promise of America every day. Refugees choose to come to our country all the time. They could go to many other countries. They choose America, often at great personal expense and anguish. Kirkpatrick, Kissinger, Alexander Haig, and George Shultz were criticized for hosting cocktail parties for military dictators who allowed torture and murder of political opponents at home. This was called a double standard. This criticism assumes a "perfect world" and conveniently forgets that we were allied with Stalin from 1941 to 1945. Everything comes down to the central argument that conservatives make, which is that Communism was as bad as Nazism. The Left has fallen for the Big Lie of Communism. Communism espouses the lie that it is for the "little guy," the masses, the peasants, the "great unwashed," the blacks, the "people of color," the "little brown people," and the minorities. The fact that it is responsible for the murder of more "little guys," masses, peasants, "great unwashed," blacks, "people of color," "little brown people," and minorities than any entity in history somehow does not seep into the liberal mindset. More "little guys," masses, peasants, "great unwashed," blacks, "people of color," "little brown people," and minorities have been saved by the United States of America than any entity. Based on this fact, the seemingly fatuous argument that Michael Savage makes, which is that liberalism is actually a mental disease, actually becomes something conceivable. If Communism's evil is not believed, then everything unravels from there.

It has also been born out that the human rights records of these dictators were constantly on the agenda of the Reagan Administration. It was conducted in private, not in the op/eds of the New York Times. The same situation was is in existence in the Middle East until the "Arab spring' rendered most of the gains there moot. The leaders in Egypt and Saudi Arabia told the Bush Administration that if they liberalized, their nations would become anarchic. Obviously, those "waiting in the wings" were more similar to Osama bin Laden than Anwar Sadat. The criticism is always the same, in that it offers no solution. Our opponents have been Nazis (who killed millions), Communists (who killed millions) and terrorists (who have been kept from killing millions by us).

Carter was the man who tried to change policy. His approach to the Third World was called "sophisticated." Previous administrations were "unenlightened" compared to Carter.

"Being confident of our future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear," Carter announced shortly after taking office.

"Inordinate." Tell John McCain, Whittaker Chambers, Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel that fear of Communism was "inordinate."

The fact that Carter made human rights a determinant in whether countries would receive aid and military assistance was admirable. The fact that he characterized the Communist menace as an "inordinate fear" could have placed him in a category with Neville Chamberlain and Joseph P. Kennedy. It could have made him a character to be mentioned in the same breath as Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. The man who defeated him, Ronald Reagan, saved Carter from this historical calamity. He managed to simply overcome all of Carter's perfidy.

"I was determined to combine support for our more authoritarian allies and friends with the promotion of human rights within their countries," said Carter. Make no mistake about it, Carter's intentions were good. We need people like Jimmy Carter. But when the Jimmy Carter's of the world are given the power of the Presidency, the results can be devastating. In Carter's case, his Presidency actually promoted America's victory in the Cold War. Here is how. He was so weak that the Soviets, who always operated on five-year, 10-year and master plans, saw in his weakness opportunities that seemed to be Manna from Heaven (if they only believed in Heaven). They put on a major offensive in the Middle East, Central America, Africa and the Asian Steppes. In so doing, they extended themselves beyond their plan. When Reagan was elected in 1980, this caught them off guard. They made the mistake of making their plans as if the "Carter way" was the "new American way." What they ran into after Reagan took office was a buzz saw.

Carter tried to balance U.S. security with Communist aggression and human rights considerations. Carter saw human rights to be much more than free speech, political pluralism, and the discreditation of torture. Education, nutrition and housing were part of his agenda. The result was that Carter's meddling in the internal affairs of foreign nations became more pervasive than previous covert ops of the CIA. Chaos ensued.

"The fundamental weakness of the Carter approach was its attempt to graft concern about human rights to an existing interventionist foreign policy rather than reassessing the underlying elements of that policy," wrote Ted Galen Carpenter. "Administration leaders should have viewed human rights considerations as a rationale for reducing the level of American political and military involvement in the Third World. But to adopt such a course would have meant evaluating whether the preservation of various . . . autocracies was actually vital to American security, indeed, whether important American interests were involved at all in regions remote from our own homeland. Neither the President nor his subordinates were willing or able to make such a drastic reassessment. Consequently, the human rights issue became a vehicle for more rather than less intervention."

This led to Carpenter's recommendation called "benign detachment" toward Third World dictatorships of all ideologies. The concept was "grounded in the indisputable reality that, for the foreseeable future, the United States will confront a Third World environment in which a majority of nations are un-Democratic." He acknowledged that simply wanting capitalist Democracies would not produce capitalist Democracies. He ended up promoting, after a long diatribe against the policies of Kissinger, Kirkpatrick and Dulles, that the U.S. "coexist" with a variety of dictatorships. This is what Kissinger, Kirkpatrick and Dulles advocated, so long as the dictatorships were not Marxists. His term "benign detachment" reflected the Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommendation of "benign neglect" of urban centers. Carpenter's piece was written during the Reagan era. Events since then are instructive. First, American policy toward dictatorships was more benign than the Left would think it was. We did actively work against Marxist governments, no question. We let authoritarian dictators operate without undue American intrusion. In Latin America, the Reagan policies produced peace and Democracy.

With the death of Marxist ideology, the dictators disappeared. The human rights abuses faded away. The approach reflects the fact that a "first things first" plan was in fact necessary. The first thing was to get rid of the Marxists. Then, and only then, could we address all the other things. It is totally similar to the Palestinian situation, in which the first thing that must be done is to get rid of terrorism. Then we can clean up the streets and allow for an independent state. In Iraq, security must come before installing a full-scale, sovereign government. In both cases neither has come to fruition.

The blanket normalizing of diplomatic and commercial relations with such states as Cuba, Nicaragua and Vietnam would have been disastrous. Cuba and Nicaragua were belligerent enemies (until the Communists were tossed out in Nicaragua). Vietnam is now thought to be benign; incredibly if they were in the early 1960s what they are now, the U.S. never would have fought there.

China is a country where some historians say that American partnership prevailed over manipulation. In the 1950s and 1960s, isolation of the P.R.C. supposedly "caused" the Cultural Revolution. Since Nixon opened up China, the country has become more open and progressive. But China is not a good example to compare to, say, Chile or Guatemala. First, it was already Marxist. Second, the isolation of the country helped to reduce their international influence at a time when worldwide Communism was on the march.

Deng Xiaoping welcomed Western trade and investment. Eventually, Chinese interest in high technology was exposed as espionage, destined to give them an economic and military advantage. The Chinese have reduced the Marxist model of central planning in favor of some private property and a market economy. Their civil rights record is still atrocious. Based on this fact, the old Carterites would have us isolating them instead of working with them. They are still Communists and would overpower the West if they thought they could do it. The Chinese are an ancient civilization who views history in chunks of centuries, not decades. They are not to be trusted.

A visionary

. . . Push the New York Times off its perch.

\- Otis Chandler's marching orders to the Los Angeles Times, 1980

The 1960s and 1970s were a period of astounding growth in Southern California. This growth came with many setbacks. Air quality was abysmal. Traffic, over-crowding, crime and a relatively new phenomenon, illegal immigration from Mexico, were major problems. However, over two decades in which much of America suffered, the major cities of this country in terrible decline, Los Angeles stood atop the nation. It was America's most important city. It's so-called "rival," San Francisco, could only see their best days in the rear view mirror.

San Francisco had little of the panache and Old World charm that marked its heyday right after World War II. Its sports teams were a joke, all dominated by champions in L.A. Politically, they had no power, no influence.

But the world was changing. A new decade, the 1980s, beckoned. Tremendous changes in sports, politics and culture would be ushered in. Los Angeles would experience major changes, some for the good, some not so much for good. Its influence would not wane. Politically, an ethos with Southern California roots, its major protagonists men shaped by its uniqueness, would shape the world.

But for Otis Chandler, the '80s would be much different than what they previously experienced. Once Otis Chandler firmly affixed his imprimatur upon the Los Angeles Times, "it was like a comet in constant ascent, nothing but growth, bureaus opened, reporters hired, the world conquered, old friends alienated, new friends made," wrote David Halberstam in The Powers That Be. The Times opened a San Diego bureau. Chandler ascended to heights previously reserved only for Henry Luce, William S. Paley, William Randolph Hearst, Phil Graham, Arthur Sulzberger, later Rupert Murdoch; titans of communications, movers and shakers of the American Century.

Richard Nixon thanked Norman Chandler for his support in 1968. He did not thank Otis Chandler. But Chandler did not turn Left. He supported the Vietnam War with reservations. He hated it, but was not blinded by liberalism. Thus, he was able to recognize the global strategy of Vietnam, which some 40 years later can be viewed as only a Pyrrhic victory by the Communists, a battle in the "long, twi-light struggle," as JFK put it, ultimately won by the United States.

Chandler and his paper recognized the brilliance of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of triangulation, ultimately earning for Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. Nixon was wildly popular, at least from a purely electoral point of view. He seemed to have prevailed. Otis and Missy Chandler accepted White House invites, California royalty in a world dominated by Californians.

Invited to the Western White House in San Clemente, sitting on a promontory overlooking some of the wildest surf on the coast, Otis was even allowed to surf the breaks. He was embarrassed because other surfers were barred from riding the popular point. Otis did not like the privilege, even though he spent his life in privilege.

Editorially, his newspaper in the 1970s more resembled a daily magazine. It was a tour de force, a massive accomplishment manifesting itself day after glorious day. Otis's rise met a bump in the road in the form not only of Watergate, but of an oil deal he entered into with an old college pal. It went bad and his friend did jail time, although Otis escaped anything beyond embarrassment. Nixon and H.R. Haldeman were infuriated over Watergate coverage. Despite having a news service partnership with the Washington Post, their editor, Ben Bradlee, put distance between his paper and the Times, grabbing the entire spotlight engendered by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. If Nixon thought the Chandler connection, so much a part of his legacy, would protect him, he was wrong. Still, Halberstam wrote that the Times's L.A. editors were not plugged into Watergate, heading to their tennis courts, not fully aware of the massive implications in D.C.

The Times made hay of the USC connection, pointing out all the ex-Trojans (including the First Lady) in their administration. This caused Nixon, in one of his infamous tapes, to suggest that as long as they were to accept blame for the so-called "USC Mafia," they might as well take credit for the record-breaking performances of Heisman Trophy winner and NFL superstar O.J. Simpson (which ultimately would not have worked out well).

Chandler and his paper were even investigated to some extent during the Watergate hearings, but after some nervousness emerged stronger than ever. History ultimately judged that when the pressure was on, they investigated and covered Watergate with dogged aplomb. They were not the old lap dogs. The stakes were too high. After Watergate they consolidated holdings, expanded, bought new publications, becoming one of the richest papers in the world, and in the minds of many the best, pure and simple.

To the extent that Richard Nixon gained a measure of "revenge," it came when Norman Chandler came down with throat cancer. While staying at the family compound in Dana Point, not far from San Clemente, he was told during the last days of Watergate that the President would visit him before he passed away. Both times Nixon was a no show without immediate explanation. It was rumored Haldeman canceled the visits as retribution for the Times' coverage of Watergate.

50 years after William Mulholland's St. Francis Dam collapsed, the Los Angeles Times won its 10th Pulitzer Prize for their coverage on shoddy and unsafe dams in the United States. Gaylord Shaw did most of the investigative reporting.

Watergate changed journalism forever. Young men and women were entering college to study it. They wanted to be the next Woodward and Bernstein. This was a new generation, a post-Vietnam generation, cynical because much of what they were taught about the United States was not true. Journalism, Hollywood and media in general always had a distinctly conservative, patriotic flavor to it. Not entirely, but without a doubt the Right had their voices. The Hearst chains were distinctly jingoistic. Business moguls who used their art form to tell stories of American Exceptionalism ran the movie industry. The cowboys beat the Indians. The U.S. Army and the Navy beat the Germans and the Japanese. A male patriarch, the wife a happy, secondary partner, ran the family unit.

But all of this was a thing of the past by 1980. Hollywood was now a distinctly Left-wing vehicle, part and parcel of the Democrat Party. Not only was it a source of liberal propaganda, but it was a source of campaign fundraising and enthusiasm. After Watergate, the Democrats had a field day. They won complete control of American electoral offices at every level. There seemed little reason to think there would be a major shift away from this.

Otis Chandler was not a Left-wing liberal, but he was not the rock-ribbed conservative his ancestors had been. The Chandler family had never been prejudiced, but Chandler adapted to drastically changing times more than might have been expected of somebody from his station. The black underclass, Chicano radicalism; these were all issues that rose to the fore during his career as publisher of the L.A. Times. When a Latino writer, Ruben Salazar was tragically shot during an altercation, Chandler cried. Instead of recoiling at Salazar's incendiary writings, he allowed them to be published in the editorial pages, and opened his mind to Salazar's point of view.

Chandler drastically changed the culture of his newspaper. This change at the Times reflected the times. By 1980, the Right generated much of its mojo in criticism of the "Left-wing media." After the New York Times exposed the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Post exposed Watergate, and Hollywood dramatized it (All the President's Men), conservatives considered the "dominant media culture" to be the enemy. Conservative talk radio, not to mention the Internet, were far from coming into being. The Right was alone. They had few allies. The odds certainly seemed stacked against them.

No Republicans were running around touting the "friendly" nature of the L.A. Times. Richard Nixon paid extra attention to them during Watergate, as it was his hometown newspaper. Chandler hired cartoonist Paul Conrad. Conrad was a vitriolic liberal. His depictions of Nixon, Republicans, and later Reagan, were vicious. The Right felt he crossed the line, that there was no middle way, not fairness; just Left-wing hatred. But Chandler hired him, kept him and defended him. None of his ancestors would have let him in the building.

Now, a new candidate, similarly a Los Angeleno, Ronald Reagan was making his mark on the political scene. He, too, paid attention to the Times. His wife, Nancy was known to personally call Chandler, often complaining about Conrad. But Chandler's paper was considered fair and balanced overall. It was by no means considered the kind of partisan liberal paper the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Nation and increasingly even Time magazine was becoming since Henry Luce's 1967 passing.

Chandler's paper was profitable, expansive, and influential. They made a $56.8 million upgrade of its letterpress process. It had begun the process of regional versions of the paper, specializing in issues in San Diego, Orange County, Ventura County, the San Fernando Valley, and other outlying areas. The articles were long, with an emphasis on lifestyle, feature pieces not subject to word count limitations. It provided extensive coverage of Hollywood, rivaling such trades as the Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety.

The expansion of the Times into outlying regions had the effect of making local papers improve themselves. The Orange County Register extended their reach after changing their name from the Santa Ana Register. They beefed up their staff and became a top paper. Their obvious conservatism played to a constituency that wanted a counter-weight to the all-out voices of the Left seemingly inundating them from every angle.

In the late 1970s, the health nut Chandler began to experience physical maladies. The former Stanford track and field athlete, a lifelong weight lifter and bodybuilder, maintained an incredible physique all the years he was at the newspaper and into retirement. The man was also an adventurer. He surfed, did sport fishing, big game hunting, and engaged in extreme activities. He tempted fate on many occasions, absorbing injuries here and there. This, more than natural causes, likely was the source of any ill health.

Chandler saw that Punch Sulzberger of the New York Times and Katharine Graham of the Washington Post were still holding onto their positions. He felt they had been their too long, and figured if they were, so too was he. He though it time to "Give someone else a chance."

His son, Norm started at the Times in 1976. "What he really wanted was to be a surf bum," his wife, Jane Yeager Chandler, said. "His passion was surfing and if he could have figured out a way to make a living at it I think that's what he would have done."

Norm's brother, Harry wanted to be a filmmaker. Both graduated from Stanford. Neither ever had any military training, as their father had growing up in the shadow of World War II and Korea. They were the new breed. Norm went to work for the paper, but there was no assurance he or any of his siblings would inherit the paper as their ancestors did.

In 1980, more than 8,000 people worked at the Times. Its average weekday circulation was 1,043,028, second only to the New York Times. The Times-Mirror Company had an empire of assets at their disposal.

"I didn't want to continue as publisher until death or retirement," Otis said. He wanted to work on his health in retirement.

There was increasing complaint that the Times were becoming liberal. The Chandlers were still conservatives, but over time the editorial control slipped away from him somewhat. He could not argue against the excesses of Nixon and Watergate. His choice to replace him was rooted in these sensibilities. He picked Tom Johnson, a Georgia native, and all that meant. His directive was to "move it forward." In his retirement speech, Chandler said he left the paper "a better company than when I came in 20 years ago." Chandler was a self-described "fighter, a gambler." His marching orders to the newspaper were to "push the New York Times off its perch."

Many felt he already did that. The New York Times still had greater influence among the political class and the East Coast Establishment. There was no way to get around that. Geography was impossible to overcome. But to those who read and compared both papers, Chandler's Times was better, more informative, balanced, lively, and highly readable. It had better photography and a much, much better sports section. It covered Hollywood better, a major source of fascination. It covered the doings of the Pacific Rim business community, which was replacing the old ways in the wake of Chinese recognition and the rise of Japan as a world economic power.

Chandler made himself chairman. He would remain as involved as ever before throughout the first half of the 1980s. A writer named Carey McWilliams wrote that many visitors and pundits came to L.A. to find out how it all happened, what drove the city of L.A., what made it tick. "But it was, of course, the Times that put the city on the map; that made it known – at the dawn of what I suppose can fairly be called the age of the media," McWilliams wrote.

Chandler's stepping down as publisher freed him to express his political views more openly. "To Otis, Ronald Reagan seemed the perfect guide to sleepwalk America through the 1980s; a former actor with a good, conservative heart who was never faced with a Vietnam or an assassination," wrote Dennis McDougal in Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty.

"He did some good things," said Otis of Reagan. "He was very articulate when he spoke. He knew California well. I think he made some booboos too, like when he said, 'If you've seen one Redwood tree you have seen them all.' Things like that."

But Reagan "came across the radar at the right time." Chandler concluded Reagan was both lucky and good, a combination Napoleon Bonaparte always said made for greatness.

Tom Johnson's tenure as publisher was not met by in-fighting or family control struggles. Norm Chandler preferred to try and work in Hollywood. He did not have the acumen for the newspaper business as did his predecessors. Otis himself said so in cutting interviews that roiled the family, but he did not care.

But in the mid-1980s, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote a book about the drug overdose of comedian John Belushi. He was shocked to discover rampant cocaine and drug addiction in Hollywood, and was "embarrassed" that the Times paid such scant attention to a terrible epidemic in their own back yard. By 1986, however, Chandler's influence had waned considerably. Some called it a "palace coup." Chandler himself refused to characterize it that way, but changes had definitely been made in the corporate structure of the paper. Any remote hopes that Norm Chandler would take over were dashed when he suffered a brain seizure, forcing him to the sidelines.

Otis Chandler slowly drifted off to do other things, engaging in a range of oft-dangerous Hemingway-esque physical activities as he always had, while lending the family name and money to a variety of philanthropic organizations. It could be argued whether the Los Angeles Times was still nominally a "Republican paper." To the extent they might have been, this lasted through Reagan's landslide 1984 re-election and possibly the election of his successor, George H.W. Bush in 1988. Reagan was a wildly popular local hero, and California voted for Bush in 1988. It was the last time the state went Republican. By 1990 the Times was decidedly not conservative, and would shift further to the Left in succeeding years.

The affect of the Times on Reagan was far less important than it had been with Nixon. The paper (Kyle Palmer), along with the Chamber of Commerce and business interests, seemingly built Nixon, brick by brick, beginning with his recruitment and first Congressional campaign in 1946. Reagan was a movement, an idea. He tapped into something, and no newspaper could control it.

The greatest newspaper in the world

Chandler wrote in 1987 that he created several new sections of the paper, with two ultimate goals in mind. One was to make it the best paper in the United States. While this may be an arrogant view, one can take this goal to be that if the Times attained "best paper in the U.S." status, it invariably meant it was the best paper in the world. Non-English-speaking publications such as Der Spiegel (a weekly magazine) may argue the point, but realistically the only effective "competition" for this mythical top slot came from the London Times and the New York Times. If one were to compare the L.A. Times and the London Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, or any other daily newspaper, side by side, section by section, over a period of decades beginning in 1960, if indeed by the 1980s and 1990s the L.A. Times fulfilled Chandler's goal of superiority, it could well be argued the edge came in the sports section. In so doing, it was the hiring of Jim Murray that made the difference. If his newspaper were a baseball team, he was the free agent slugger whose triple-crown season pushed a great team to dynasty level, or a pitcher whose 27 wins and 1.73 ERA, as in Sandy Koufax's 1966 statistics, made the difference between average and ultimate greatness.

But it was Chandler's admonition of a second goal that seemed to answer the question, how did he achieve the first? Chandler's background as a businessman from a conservative family is telling, for his second goal was to make his paper "the most profitable in the world."

There are many in the newspaper game, then and especially now, who would argue such a goal is mutually exclusive from the paper's "greatness." Bernard Goldberg tells the story of an adamant disdain at CBS News for profit; that its purpose superseded such grubby considerations. Many would say if a paper is highly profitable, it goes to show it automatically cannot be great. When USA Today arrived it was derived as a "McPaper," as in the McDonald's fast food franchise, which is certainly profitable but does not produce the "best food in the world."

In light of what we now know, in the Internet era of bailouts in which former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, viewing the mainstream media as an ally, called for the subsidization of papers by the government, Chandler's profit motive is worth studying. Since he sold the newspaper, their editorial content did indeed swing to the Left, and their profits have indeed swung low. The days of Chandler overseeing a respected journalistic organization that made wild profits is over. While many conservatives would point to this as a sort of "proof" that conservatism is superior, it is impossible to ignore the profound differences in the media landscape of Chandler's day, particularly at the beginning.

But Chandler was an aggressive, hard-charging, optimistic publisher. He had vision, and his vision came true. At first, he faced gigantic costs in up-grading his staff, hiring and training personnel to meet better requirements, to add more space and build additional production facilities. New technology was coming in. He had to spend money to meet these research and development needs. His paper was a pioneer. He was their leader.

He saw the future. Chandler's decision to create regional editions of the Times not only allowed his paper to stay ahead of competition such as the Los Angeles Herald-Express (later the L.A. Daily News), the Orange County Register, and the Long Beach Press-Telegram (by providing better local coverage than the local papers), but helped unify disparate parts of Greater Los Angeles into a cohesive, single entity. The average resident of Newport Beach, West Covina, or Calabasas, just to name three places south, east and north of downtown L.A., when traveling to Europe or even within the United States, when asked where he or she is from, is likely to just say "L.A.," or "near L.A." unless the opportunity for specificity presents itself. One of the central unifying experiences of these three very different communities has always been the Los Angeles Times.

Chandler's business model would make many wealthy. By 1987, when Front Page: A Collection of Historical Headlines from the Los Angeles Times was published, their net revenue increases were $400 million, or 650 percent. Daily circulation would grow by 520,000, or 104 percent. The Sunday circulation would increase by 400,000 (45 percent). Advertising, the lifeblood of all newspapers, went up by 87 million lines (110 percent). The staff increased by 1,900 employees (40 percent), 417 (140 percent) in editorial. Operating costs went up by $27.5 million, an increase of a staggering 820 percent. This was a sign of growing unionism and high-tech costs, ultimately not boding well for the post-Chandler years. In 1970, Chandler's vision of regional site expansion began in Orange County and San Fernando, along with modernization of the downtown plant, at a cost of $220 million over five years.

Under Otis Chandler, the L.A. Times rode the whirlwind during a time of L.A.'s greatest growth. No paper remotely approached the size, depth, weight and substance of Chandler's Times. He achieved his goals: the best paper in the U.S. (and the world) with the highest profits.

In so doing, Otis Chandler helped usher in a new era in Los Angeles, the glory days. The high point was probably 1984, when the Olympics showcased the Southland. The L.A. Games embodied the Los Angeles of Chandler, Murray and the Times. The old saw was that great journalism, literary heft, intellectual gravitas, political power; these were the provinces of Eastern salons. But history could not be denied.

Once upon a time, the center of the world was Europe. Effete Parisians and highbrow Londoners laughed at American notions of individual liberty and, more preposterous, the concept that such liberty was bestowed not by a King or a court, but by God! In the 20th Century, America replaced Europe as the center of world power, ideas, culture. After World War II, that power was in New York and Washington. Los Angeles was an outpost. But just as Otis Chandler showed up at Amherst, forging respect from his Eastern classmates through sheer excellence, so too did his city and his newspaper symbolically and actually do the same. They made their presence known, and then some.

1984 symbolized this Renaissance. With Ronald Reagan in the White House and the Games played against the backdrop of the new art form, Hollywood, sports, politics, and culture all came together with a California theme. That theme could be summed up in Chandler, the athlete who loved the mountains and the ocean, who had an eye for pretty women, who did not see any logic in the concept that intellectual stimulation can only be promoted amidst dirty urban settings, in cold weather, by frail academicians eschewing physical attractiveness in favor of deep thought.

The "Reagan revolution"

Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted Mankind.

\- President Ronald Reagan

What is conservatism and where did it start? Its roots might be found in the Ten Commandments; the rules and laws God bestowed upon humans, instructions on how to live. Jesus of Nazareth was by no means a conservative, not in his time. He was a radical, a revolutionary, but his teachings and influence remain the very heart of conservativism. Man "is immortal because he, among all creatures, has a soul," Ronald Reagan said, echoing this theme. "A spirit capable of compassion, of sacrifice and of endurance."

Western Civilization does not offer true conservatism, whether it is Democratic Greece, Rome of the Republic, the King's England, monarchical or Napoleonic France. But it was an Englishman, John Locke, who followed in the tradition of Francis Bacon; an enlightenment thinker, what was called "classical liberalism" at the time, who might be the first of the conservatives. His theories of religious tolerance and respect for individual liberty, particularly private property, spurred the American Revolution.

Add to this list of early influences the name Adam Smith, a Scottish social philosopher who wrote the seminal An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Considered the founder of free market economic principles, he has his detractors, or at least detractors of those who say he was a true conservative. Noam Chomsky advocates that Smith found fault in the so-called "division of labor," apparently proposing Smith felt all who labored were equal (Communism?). Chomsky says Smith was for large government intervention, but large government intervention in the late 18th Century meant something very different than it did just four score and seven years later. Many who considered themselves conservative read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), concluding that government intervention was vital!

America's geography played a role in the new politics of conservatism. Its rural-agrarian market economies, spread throughout the Southern colonies, interspersed with labor-intensive Northern cities likes Boston and New York, created entirely new financial paradigms that required never-before-expressed ideas and understandings. In a free, capitalist society, a man could earn what he worked for without owing it to the king.

Plymouth Governor William Bradford, leader of the first Pilgrims, originally instituted Socialist virtues. In the first harvest, the collective of the group was to be shared equally. After a disappointing year, he said in the next harvest each could keep what he grew without dispersing it. All improved in this competitive environment, with the least successful still improving over the previous year's take.

Thus did the young nation grow until the 1830s, when Alexis de Tocqueville came from France to find out how this tiny series of agrarian colonies, following a wildly great revolution, was doing so much better than mighty France, felled by a brutal revolution it never recovered from. His great work, Democracy in America, is a primer on conservative principles. Its simplicity is its key; belief in God, organizing of service groups like Rotary and Lion's Clubs, creating what centuries of thinkers and monarchs failed or were too afraid to accomplish, lest the people free themselves from their shackles.

Abraham Lincoln: Republican. The Industrial Revolution: won by America. Theodore Roosevelt: promoter of American power. The Roaring '20s: America as the New Rome. Then came the Great Depression, and according to many, total refutation of capitalism, most assuredly, conservatism, and maybe even America itself. But out of World War II, two economists emerged. Ludwig von Mises and Friederick Hayek (The Road to Serfdom) were two Austrians who understood that Adolf Hitler was not simply a phenomenon, but rather the result of large governments which, if a society allowed itself to cede power, could become totalitarian, run amok like Pol Pot was later allowed to do.

In 1951 William F. Buckley authored God and Man at Yale, perhaps the first scathing attack on liberal academia, creating the image of ivory tower professors out of touch with real world issues; most assuredly not in touch with the religious beliefs of many of their students, or their parents footing their tuitions.

Buckley – the "patron saint of conservatism" - went on to publish National Review, which along with Regnery Publishing (Human Events) was a voice of the Right. Henry Luce's Time still leaned to the Right, but as Joseph McCarthy lost favor the press swung Leftward. Robert Taft was an Ohio Senator and likely 1952 Republican Presidential nominee who represented conservatism of the era, but was swept away by the hysteria surrounding President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Richard Nixon represented not just the growing population (and electoral votes) of the West, but along with Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a rugged individualism embodied by the region, given strong voice in Orange County, California.

There were factions. New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's Establishment wing clashed with Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and the Libertarians who followed Atlas Shrugged author Ayn Rand. In 1964, when Lyndon Johnson destroyed Goldwater, it was obvious the movement was disorganized, but if there was hope, it was in California.

There, neophyte Senate candidate George Murphy beat John Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger. Nixon was in his so-called "wilderness years," but many still attached hope to his political future. But if the Conservative Revolution had, if not a birth, a "big bang," it occurred when Ronald Reagan made the Speech on behalf of Senator Goldwater in 1964.

The conservative West

The rest of America began to catch up with Los Angeles in the 1980s. It was not a matter of L.A. slipping, but other cities and regions finally getting back on their feet after the economic disasters of the 1970s. The stigma of Vietnam and Watergate were quite thoroughly erased. It was a Camelot period for much of the nation.

They enjoyed all the advantages of having a Los Angeles politician in the White House, with none of the headache of Watergate and subsequent disgrace. The power of Los Angeles and the state of California, politically, financially, culturally and on all other ways, grew beyond previous eras, but other areas grew with them.

Ronald Reagan was not really a Los Angeleno, but by L.A. standards he was one of them; the Cubs' announcer whose screen test led to his big break, as George Gipp in Knute Rockne: All-American. From there: president of the Screen Actor's Guild; the Blacklist; support for Nixon in 1960; and finally switching registration to the Republican Party. He took to conservatism with the zealousness of the convert.

His eight years as Governor were successful. He was a reactionary with much to react against: campuses aflame in protest, the Watts riots, and the social disorder conservatives galvanized against. In 1967, an international student forum was held. It was liberal by nature; young people disgusted by Vietnam, trying to make sense of the Cold War, thinking there was a way Communism and freedom, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could co-exist.

Senator Robert Kennedy, a darling of the Left and the youth, an international superstar still glowing from his brother's great appearance in Paris with his dazzling bride Jackie, was invited. A "sacrificial lamb" of the Right was also asked to debate. That was California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a "red ass," a reactionary prone to anger. He was prodded by the students to explode, to make a fool of himself. One African student blathered on and on, lecturing Governor Reagan on his one-sided point of view, arguing that Communism was valid, it was . . . morally relevant.

"At the end of World War II, one nation in the world had unprecedented power, had not suffered any damage to its industrial complex, had the greatest military force the world had ever seen put together: the United States," Reagan said in an even, yet firm tone. "The rest of the world was war weary. The United States had the only 'bomb' that had been demonstrated. We had the atomic bomb, that great weapon. Now, the United States disarmed, the United States made no effort to impose its will on the rest of the nations. Can you honestly say in your hearts that had the Soviet Union been in a comparable situation with that 'bomb,' or today's Red Chinese in a position with that 'bomb,' and with that great military force, the world would not today have been conquered by that force."

In this single paragraph, this one response, Ronald Reagan encapsulated not only the 20th Century, but all of human history. Measured in between the lines is the tacit belief that God exists, and that He favored America, thus giving her, and no other country, the power Governor Reagan described. He was as right as any man can ever be; that not only in the post-war era but throughout all of human history, virtually all nations with the probable exception of Great Britain, if they were given the one-sided power the U.S. had, particularly between 1945 and 1949, they would have used "the bomb" to destroy any and all enemies, and take over total world domination.

The Romans or Genghis Khan; Napoleon Bonaparte; V.I. Lenin, Joseph Stalin or Chairman Mao; Adolf Hitler or Hideki Tojo; plus a laundry list of others who never knew this power but lusted after it, Original Sin dripping from their blood-red lips, all would have pressed the button without thinking twice. America had not. Nothing stopped America from eliminating all enemies in one fell swoop, turning them all into fire, except the American decision not to do it. Why? Because they knew God did not ordain such a thing, and feared God above all enemies.

This exchange, which can be found easily at YouTube.com, defined Reagan's fighting, forceful, yet ultimately peaceful persona. It also assured him "victory" in the debate over Bobby Kennedy, who reportedly cornered an aide afterward and told him never to schedule him against Ronald Reagan again. The former actor was on his way.

Against longs odds and much criticism he overpowered Jimmy Carter in the 1980 elections by a wide margin. He inherited a terrible economy, Soviet military adventure all over the world (including the conquest of Afghanistan), and an America weakened by almost every possible factor over the previous seven years. Reagan had some advantages, however. Like his country, he had the advantage of history and its lessons. Just as America learned from 1,000 years of European mistakes while forming "a more perfect Union," so too did Reagan have the advantage of seeing the mistakes of Nixon, and how to avoid them. Besides, he was much different. Nixon was paranoid. Reagan was open and friendly.

Reagan immediately shut down unions, instituted conservative capitalistic principles, and by late in his second year had the economy moving. He called the Soviets the "Evil Empire," and built up the Armed Forces. By 1984 he was among the most popular of all U.S. President's, annihilating Walter Mondale in a 49-state sweep.

In his second term, the economy exploded. His policies pushed the Soviets first out of Afghanistan, then led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the freeing of billions in Eastern Europe, and victory in the Cold War.

Reagan was from the Midwest, but his easy-going style and Hollywood flair made him much more a California type than the buttoned-up Nixon. His cabinet was filled with breezy California politicos, mostly from his Sacramento days.

His home state owned him, loved him. In a huge place he had his detractors, but he won by tremendous margins. His Vice President, George H.W. Bush had little in common with the state, but Reagan's glow was powerful enough to give him its electoral votes in 1988, pushing him over the top.

Economically, the 1980s was a big California decade. Under Governor Reagan's stewardship, the state flourished in the 1960s and 1970s when New York nearly went bankrupt, and the "misery index" was hung around Carter's neck. But Reagan kept his region on top and now helped the rest of the country get there, too.

Reagan further opened up trade with China and unquestionably turned the Pacific Rim into the most important port of call. L.A. replaced San Francisco and the East Coast, if indeed they had not done that years earlier. It was the age of Silicon Valley, a computer revolution, but as Reagan himself would say, "You ain't seen nothin' yet." Wall Street had a huge run. With that, New York began their comeback. Many depressed cities began to re-build.

The South made enormous strides. Now over their sordid racial past, loving Reagan, and hitting their stride financially amid huge population shifts into the Sun Belt and Bible Belt, they were now the juggernauts of the American engine.

Hollywood, however, took a big hit. They were not really part of the glory. This was ironic, as Reagan was so much a part of the movie business, but his people were the old timers, the Bob Hopes and Merv Griffins whose influence no longer dictated the game. John Wayne died in 1979. In the wake of Jaws and Star Wars, it was the age of the blockbuster. That meant some movies were wildly successful. Many were not. But the quality was way down. The sheer greatness of movies, as evidenced by the incredible fare of the 1960s and 1970s, was gone. It has never returned.

The biggest hits of the 1980s were action shoot 'em ups, often with a Reaganistic revenge-for-Vietnam theme in which macho American ex-Delta types returned to the 'Nam, rescuing POWs and wreaking havoc on the Communists. Gone With the Wind it was not. But under Reagan, American Exceptionalism returned, exorcising the ghosts of Vietnam . . . and Watergate. For the Republican Party, he was a Godsend.

Laying the groundwork

Nobody could have known or predicted it, but events were set in motion before Reagan's 1980 Presidential election that shaped history in a conservative image. In 1976, things could not have looked worse for the Republican Party, but right after nominating Gerald Ford, Reagan spoke in Kansas City. The crowd filed out, and the sentiment was strong: "We nominated the wrong man." Out of this a flicker of hope for 1980.

In 1978, the Republicans made strong mid-term gains, including the passage of Proposition 13, a powerful anti-tax measure in Reagan's California. Opposition to President Carter's giving the Panama Canal back to Panama did not sit well with the Right, either. In 1979 a shopkeeper's daughter named Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister. She was a hard line conservative, promising to break up unions and privatize the moribund British industries.

Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II. He believed his life had been spared for a reason when he survived an assassination attempt. He wanted to end Communism and replace it with Christian faith. His first aim was his native Poland, heavily Catholic in the face of Soviet rule. The first stirrings of an anti-Communist movement called Solidarity, led by a man named Lech Walesa, was underway. Pope John Paul II backed Solidarity, to the consternation of the Soviet hierarchy.

If President Jimmy Carter had any hope of re-election in 1980, it went up in smoke when a helicopter attempt to rescue the Americans held captive in the Iranian Embassy failed. Right or wrong, the failed attempt played out against a political dynamic. When conservatives were gung-ho it worked. When liberals tried it, their apparent lack of enthusiasm for valorous acts seemed to doom them from the start.

Israeli commandos seemed able to make dramatic rescues of their people when held by bloodthirsty thugs. A hard-charging Texas businessman, Ross Perot had more success orchestrating a daring private extraction of his companies' employees than Carter with the whole military at his disposal.

Rudy Abramson's April 26 front-page L.A. Times piece, "Tense Day, Tragic Night" told the story of the disaster in the desert, reducing the President of the United States to ringing his hands. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, the Hamlet of American politics, had his best chance ever in 1980. He challenged the sitting President all the way to the convention, but like Reagan in 1976 could not overcome the power of the White House.

The hostage crisis overshadowed Carter throughout the summer, during the convention, into the fall election season, the losing Election Day, his lame duck last two months in office, his final hours in the White House, and even Reagan's Inauguration. The Iranians toyed with him, probably laughing at him. Reagan soundly defeated him and then took office. Carter's last aborted attempts to free them while still in office failed. Virtually the first act of Reagan's Presidency was the return of the hostages, but officially under his watch. It was a last insult to President Carter.

The bad political news was the backdrop for one of the great sporting events of all time when the United States won the famed "miracle on ice" Gold medal, defeating the vaunted Soviets at the Winter Olympics before a chanting crowd in Lake Placid, New York. With the crowd screaming, "U.S.A! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" the victory raised hopes at a time in which the hostages were still being held in Iran, the economy and interest rates were terrible, the Soviets were invading Afghanistan, and as a result President Carter announced the U.S. would not travel to Moscow for the Summer Olympics.

President Reagan took office in 1981. He inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression. Federal monetary policies made it virtually impossible to get a loan to buy a house, the American Dream. Motorists planned their days around trips to the gas station, bringing reading material while waiting out long lines.

On March 30, 22-year old John Hinckley shot the President on a Washington street. As in the great question, "What if Richard Nixon beat John Kennedy in 1960?" the next Shakespearean drama could have revolved around what might have happened had Reagan been killed, or unable to regain his health and resume his duties. Incredibly, he did recover. His fortitude in overcoming the assassin's bullet popularized the Republican in a way few policies ever could. Upon awakening from his coma he told Nancy, "Divine Providence" saved him for a reason. This, along with Pope John Paul II surviving his assassination attempt, was an amazing drama; two failed attempts to kill the pre-eminent Western leaders of the world, creating a drama that would play out over the decade with results no scriptwriter could have penned. In June, 1981 the Israelis bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor built by Saddam Hussein when they found out Saddam was almost ready to make it operational.

In February of 1982, a meeting was held in one of the high conference rooms of the Bank of America Tower in San Francisco's downtown financial district. With a breathtaking view of the City, the Bay Bridge, the bay, and seemingly all of America beyond, the presidents and CEOs of some of the nation's leading corporations – banks, stock brokerage firms, utility companies, others - met with U.S. Senator Robert Dole (R.-Kansas) and Treasury Secretary (soon to be Secretary of State) George Schultz, a longtime San Francisco player with the Bechtel Corporation.

The subject was the economy. President Reagan had been in office one year. He inherited a failed system amid much angst and even belief that capitalism was dead. The Soviets were a powerhouse. China was on the ascendancy. England and Europe had gone Socialist in the 1970s. Perhaps, as Richard Nixon himself said after initiating price controls in 1971, "we're all Keynesians now," a reference to British economist John Maynard Keynes, one of the theorists of the New Deal.

Then Schultz stood up to speak. There were no reporters in the room. What he said was not meant for public consumption. The men in that room were the movers and shakers of American capitalism, and in this respect considered allies of President Reagan. Schultz, who had worked in the Nixon Administration, plainly stated that President Nixon was going to do "it," but "Watergate f----d 'it' up." Now they had a second chance to do "it."

"It" was never referred to by specific words, but the men knew what "it" was. Now, Schultz stated, Reagan was prepared to "wreck the economy." The economy was ostensibly what "it" was. Reagan had cut a deal with the Democrats in 1981, going against his own instincts, but that was to set up his opponents. Now he was prepared to implement his long held, most cherished beliefs about the financial system. Schultz stated that the systems put in place not just by Carter but also by Nixon and before that Lyndon Johnson had to be excised like a cancer. Nixon could not do it in his first term but planned to implement this plan in 1973-74 until Watergate blew his chances.

Now, here they were again. Reagan planned to "break up the unions," starting with the air traffic controllers, and install free market concepts, mainly in the form of massive de-regulation. Stock brokerages, banks and insurance companies could now merge businesses. Money market accounts could now have check-writing privileges. A freewheeling economic experiment was about to be unleashed.

When Schultz was finished, a sense of drama pervaded the room. Men ran to phones. The plan was on. Senator Dole was in a hurry. He went downstairs to his limo. The driver asked if he was going to the airport.

"Yes, but we have to stop at the Palace Hotel to pick somebody up," Senator Dole stated. The man they picked up was Alan Greenspan, the future head of the Federal Reserve. Greenspan was accompanying Dole and Schultz back to Washington, to implement the plans Schultz spoke of at the Bank of America Tower. The Reagan economy was at the starting gate.

By the end of the year, its first effects were known. Gone were the long gas lines, the embargoes, the high interest rates. With that homes could be built and bought, jobs could be had. The U.S., and also the world economy, was on the rebound. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was implementing the same free market principles. It was the beginning of the greatest uninterrupted run of economic expansion in the 20th Century.

True believer

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were politicians driven by self-interest and realpolitik. Ronald Reagan was a true believer, driven by a messianic desire to rid the world of Communism. The Communists knew who their enemies were, and they took them seriously. Joseph Stalin once ordered John Wayne to be assassinated. The East German Stasi similarly had a dossier on Reagan. He is "a firm and unbending politician for whom words and deeds are one and the same," it stated.

"Reagan's strategy was based on a simple belief, that good wins over evil," said his Attorney General, Ed Meese. "He gave us a blue print for fighting evil in all of its forms, now and in the future."

Rome of the Republic was determined, austere, stoic; the prototype of America's Founding Fathers. Republican Rome's most admired statesman, Cato, was the strongest advocate of free men's inalienable right to govern themselves. He viewed the tyrants of Carthage as the mortal enemy of the Roman people. In his 40 years in the Senate, Cato ended every speech with the same mantra: "Carthago delenda est" ("Carthage must be destroyed"). Ronald Reagan woke up each day feeling the same thing about the Soviet Union.

But he had detractors, and not all of them were Democrats. Kissinger thought Reagan was one of the most dangerous men in America; unsophisticated, and given to wild posturings

"If history teaches anything, it teaches self-delusion in the face of unpleasant facts is folly," Reagan stated. Asked his ultimate strategy against the Soviets, he replied, "We win, they lose."

In March, 1983 Reagan made the speech that defined his Presidency. Speaking to Christian evangelicals in Florida, he referred to the Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire," a movie term, straight out of the Star Wars series. It was his response to the nuclear freeze movement, when the Soviets had infiltrators spur the protest against American arm build-ups.

"So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride, the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an 'Evil Empire,' to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil . . ." he said. "They preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the Earth. They are the focus of evil in the modern world."

It was a shot across the bow. The Soviets were in the midst of a period in which several premiers were given power, only to die in office. Reagan was promoting another "Star Wars," a missile defense system planned to shoot down Soviet nukes before they could land on American soil. He was actively arming "freedom fighters" defending against Communist expansion in Latin America. He and his CIA director, William Casey, were formulating ingenious ways to disrupt Russia's occupation of Afghanistan. The Soviets were scared of him. They installed a moderate, Mikhail Gorbachev, to lead their nation. The idea was that Gorbachev might be less confrontational, therefore appeasing the "cowboy" Reagan.

In August of 1983, the Soviets shot down a South Korean passenger plane. It was likely a mistake, but the result of provocative action on the part of the Russians. The shoot-down amped up the Cold War to its highest tensions. Peace movements "all tried to ward off the Beast," according to In the Face of Evil.

1984 was the year chosen by George Orwell as a period of gloom and oppressiveness in his 1948 novel, but it may have represented the ultimate opposite of that: free market capitalism and Democracy at its highest peak. Whatever 1973-75 was supposed to have been, when Richard Nixon gripped the reigns of world power as tight as it had ever been but let it all slip away, and Vietnam with it, 1984-85 was a chance, one decade later, to re-gain all that lost ground. This time, Ronald Reagan did not let it slip away.

President Reagan presided over the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Due to smart planning, both traffic and smog were reduced greatly during the 1984 Games. Looking back from the perspective of more than 25 years, the Olympics were the beginning of the cleansing of the Los Angeles Basin's air and overall environment. In the early 1980s, football fans could barely see the other side of the Coliseum. They often could not tell because of dirty air what was even happening on the field. The Coliseum press box and adjacent veranda are particularly situated with unobstructed east, west, north and south views of the Santa Monica Mountains, Hollywood hills, the Hollywood sign, the downtown skyline, the San Gabriel range, the entire L.A. basin stretching to Orange County, the endless strand, and the Palos Verdes peninsula. Prior to this period, all this and more, with the exception of rare, breezy winter days immediately following heavy rains, was like the Holy Ghost: you knew it was there, but you could not see it.

Global warming advocates may disagree with the logic, arguing the environment is getting much more polluted year by year, but in succeeding decades the L.A. environment has gone from worse than dismal to remarkably clean and clear. It started with Peter Ueberroth's Olympics. This is not even opinion. These facts have simply manifested themselves before the very eyes of the citizenry, which are always the best kind of facts.

Given the worst economy since the 1930s, Reagan turned it around in a little over a year. By 1984, America was flush with success, secure in "peace and prosperity," a phrase given to Reagan throughout his campaign. A simple advertisement called "Morning in America" captured the essence of Reagan's homespun appeal. To Republicans at least, "the Gipper" was true and righteous.

Politics being politics, Democrats disagreed with Reagan. Their choice of Walter Mondale, a former U.S. Senator from Minnesota and Jimmy Carter's Vice President from 1977 to 1981, was telling. Perhaps it was no more telling than the choice of the man Richard Nixon dubbed a "poet-Socialist," George McGovern in 1972, but for a brief period in 1983-84, it seemed they had a chance to go in a different direction.

While the 1980s offered few prizes in the way of great movies, one exception was the 1983 classic The Right Stuff. Based on Tom Wolfe's narrative story of the Mercury space program, it featured Ed Harris in his first big role as the heroic astronaut John Glenn. No political campaign could have presented a man in a more positive light.

Glenn was now a U.S. Senator representing the state of Ohio, a bellwether decision-maker in Presidential campaigns throughout American history. His heroism, patriotism and Christianity were above reproach. He declared himself a candidate for the Presidency, and The Right Stuff was dubbed his campaign commercial. Even some Republicans liked him enough to consider favoring him.

A Kennedy Democrat who loved his hero, the man who inspired the space program, Glenn received no love from his party in the Primaries. Colorado Senator Gary Hart and Walter Mondale quickly distanced themselves from him, and that was the end of Glenn. Many historians have pondered whether it was in some way the "end" of the Democrat Party or what men like Glenn knew it to once be.

Whether Glenn could have stolen Reagan's thunder or not probably was rendered immaterial by the strong economy of 1983-84. It seemed everybody voted for President Reagan in a re-election landslide to beat all landslides, a 49-state sweep.

By and large, things continued to go Reagan's way in 1985. This made his Presidency unusual. Successful first-term Presidents historically tank in the second term. Cultural anthropologists who view the decade as one of extravagant wealth to the point of greed, view that year as its pinnacle. The movie Wall Street, which actually came out in 1987, was set that year.

Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland in 1985. The two got along well. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher remarked that Gorbachev was a man she could "do business with." That seemed to be the case when the leaders of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed to dismantle a huge payload of nuclear weapons. At the last minute, Gorbachev tried to spring one on the old man. He would agree if Reagan would de-fund Star Wars. Reagan knew it was the ace up his sleeve and refused. The media blamed Reagan for "blowing" an opportunity to achieve world peace. He stuck to his guns, literally.

"He had taken Reagan to the mountain top, tempted him, to be a peacemaker, to win the Nobel Prize, to be an historic figure," intoned the narrator of In the Face of Evil, using a great allegory. "Ronald Reagan refused."

After the Soviet empire imploded, their leaders admitted publicly they were afraid of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, and that the American President's refusal to give in was the ultimate kick keeping them down for the count. Archives of the Venona Project confirmed this, along with interviews with ex-KGB agents expressing downright admiration for Reagan's skill In the Face of Evil. In an event of incredible symbolic truth, the Soviet Union literally seemed to melt down when a nuclear reactor located in Chernobyl, Ukraine incurred an accident.

The inexorable advance of American Execptionalism under President Reagan hit obstacles in 1986. Early in the year, on January 28, the space shuttle Challenger exploded above the skies of Florida. In October, the Iran-Contra scandal hit. The United States, prevented by law from funding the Nicaraguan Contras in their struggle with the Communists, covertly decided to sell arms to Iran, who in turn were to release hostages being held in the Middle East. The money from the arms sales was to go to the Contras. It was discovered prior to the mid-term election, and played a large role in the Senate switching to the Democrats.

Two events dominated American domestic news in 1987. The Iran-Contra hearings were held, meant to embarrass and possibly even Impeach Ronald Reagan. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North turned the tables on them during his testimony. Lieutenant Colonel North had been the driving force behind the plot to go around laws designed to prevent American aid to freedom fighters battling the Communists. North effectively painted a picture of patriots, a little mis-guided and zealous perhaps, who were frustrated that an American political party did not wish to actively oppose an ideology (Communism) responsible for the murder of some 100 million human beings. As with G. Gordon Liddy, imprisoned for his role in Watergate, North could not be destroyed. North faced years of legal battles and eventually was exonerated of all criminal wrongdoing. He became a folk hero of the Right and, like Liddy, remains one to this day, all causing much weeping and gnashing of teeth among their detractors.

In October, the stock market lost a record 508 points in a single day. Somehow, it was only a blip, as the economy just picked up and kept going strong. Reagan weathered these storms in large measure because he was negotiating a series of arms-control agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev, which increasingly had people seeing the end of the Cold War on the horizon, to the advantage of the U.S.

Despite efforts to make Reagan look bad, he towered above all world figures when he inspired West Germans with exhortations of Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall" in a speech before the Berlin Wall. As with John Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech of 1963, it was met with wild enthusiasm.

A CIA-sponsored war in Afghanistan, sponsored in large measure by a rogue Texas Congressman named Charlie Wilson, resulted in a Soviet defeat which historians dubbed "their Vietnam." The Cold War was all over but the shouting.

Despite America's good efforts on behalf of Muslim countries, the Middle East continued to roil in turmoil, a precursor of the next great challenge. A Palestinian Intifada rocked Israel, causing great consternation and a fair amount of bad feeling towards the Jewish state. For many it was a kind of "last straw" after years of fruitless hope that a peace, an accommodation could be found between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors.

With Ronald Reagan making arms-reduction deals with the Soviets, increasingly leading the U.S. to inevitable victory in the Cold War, his successor, Vice President George H.W. Bush ran for President against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Bush used a controversial ad featuring a black criminal, Willie Horton. Furloughed by Dukakis, Horton committed more violent crimes. Bush rocketed from 17 points down to a comfortable election victory in November, 1988.

For Reagan, it was like a great athlete in his last season, a swan song and chance for his fans to serenade him, to say good-bye. Under his leadership, the world was generally peaceful and prosperous.

"I have to believe that the history of this troubled century will have to be redeemed in the eyes of God and man, and that freedom will truly come to all," Reagan stated at a dinner honoring Soviet dissidents. "For what in justice can withstand your strength and what can conquer your prayers?"

At an appearance in the soon-to-be-defunct U.S.S.R. Reagan spoke to a group that included KGB officers. He intoned, "Gentlemen, let's pray." They all bowed their heads as Reagan offered a silent Lord's Prayer. Asked by a Russian journalist if he still considered Russia to be the "Evil Empire," Reagan replied no, he no longer did.

The last year of the decade turned out to be what goes down in history as a "game changer," to use a sports term. In June the Chinese fired on pro-Democracy riots by their citizens who wanted the country . . . to be more like America! Thousands died. The sight of a faux Stature of Liberty dubbed by their people the "Goddess of Democracy" enraged the Chinese leaders who wanted only kowtowing to images of the murderer Chairman Mao and the reading of his stupid Little Red Book.

With George H.W. Bush having succeeded President Reagan, the world picked up on the Chinese protests at Tiananmen Square. The quest for freedom, inspired by Reagan, was moving all over the world. In November Reagan's exhortation that the Berlin Wall be torn down came to fruition only two years after he asked for it to fall. It effectively meant the end of the Cold War. It was a moment of enormous triumph for the United States. He had forged victory eight years after the Soviets were on the march in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and, of course Eastern Europe. Now Eastern Europe was free. Russian militarists tried a coup against Boris Yeltsin, but it was put down. The Soviet Union officially broke up, and pundits proclaimed, "Peace has broken out all over."

It was a triumph for American conservatism, which now looked upon themselves, working within the framework of Christianity, capitalism and Democracy, as the "winners of history." The Reagan-Bush era was the longest, most successful run of economic expansion (12 years). There were many soldiers in the "long, twi-light struggle" John Kennedy called the Cold War, but Reagan was its Commander-in-Chief.

The first couple of years of the new decade appeared to be a consolidation of the American Empire. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In the old days, the U.S. would not have done anything, as they did not fight Gamal Abdul Nasser and Anwar Sadat, but unlike Egypt then Iraq now was alone, not a Soviet client state. President George H.W. Bush sent the full force of American resolve into the Middle East and had the Iraqis beaten in a month or so. He had 91 percent approval ratings. There was no chance he would not be re-elected.

The historians all tried to make sense of it. Bush made a speech and called it the New World Order. That sounded about right. Whatever that was, the boss was America. A writer named Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay called, "The End of History." The argument basically was that everything America fought for had been accomplished. Slavery, Nazism, Communism, radical terror; all had been defeated, forced to bow down at our altar.

"Maybe I did well and maybe I led the battle but nobody ever said we were going to win this thing at any point in time," said one of Reagan's influences, the Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman, Ph.D. "Eternal vigilance is required and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it."

Asked if his side "won," William F. Buckley reflected that as he grew up, America was in a Great Depression, in thrall to the New Deal; that Communism controlled three-fifths of the world's population after Red China went to them; and in Vietnam we were humiliated. But the country rallied. The U.S.S.R. disbanded. Vietnam became what we fought for them to become, or something like it. China after Mao expanded using capitalism. Bill Clinton said the "era of Big Government is dead." Liberalism was a dirty word, conservatism a source of pride. 18 percent of Americans identified themselves as liberal, 40 percent as conservative.

"Sure we won," he said before his passing.

"Freedom is never an achieved state; like electricity, we've got to keep generating it or the lights go out," said NRA head Wayne LaPierre, echoing a cautionary theme.

"Voting is no substitute for the eternal vigilance that every friend of freedom must demonstrate towards government," wrote James Bovard in Voting is Overrated. "If our freedom is to survive, Americans must become far better informed of the dangers from Washington - regardless of who wins the Presidency."

Glasnost, perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev

The media continued being liberal. While terrorists like Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace prize, and various unimpressives were honored by other unimpressives with Oscars, Pulitzers, Nobels and other "prizes" with no value. Naturally, Ronald Reagan was never so "honored."

Mikhail Gorbachev was named Time magazine's "Man of the Decade" for the 1980s instead of Ronald Reagan. This is like naming Joe Frazer "Man of the Decade" in the 1970s because he lost to Muhammad Ali a couple of times. In 2000, they named Albert Einstein – not Reagan, Winston Churchill or Dwight Eisenhower – their "Person of the Century."

There is no doubt, however, that Gorbachev was a "different kind of Communist." He did not necessarily intend to be, but give him credit for being smart enough to see that the Soviet Union was crumbling, and trying to do something about it. In letting the country be destroyed, he did more good for Russia and the world than if he had succeeded in propping up the system.

Gorbachev was youngish, attractive and media savvy, as was his equally attractive and personable wife, Raisa. Russian women were so ugly before her that words cannot describe them. Amazingly, after the country opened up, girls who looked like Anna Kournakova started coming out of the woodwork. What gives?

Anyway, in overseeing Communism's demise, the Gorbachev's were the best PR symbols for Communism. They left some people with the impression that Communism was not so bad. The Nazis were defeated and the Cold War was not fought with them, but Gorbachev was not a theory. Does he deserve some credit for ending the Cold War? In the tradition of American magnanimity, yes, he does. But he did not set out to achieve that goal. He was on the losing end of a conflict with Reagan. Robert E. Lee, who quelled talk of a protracted Confederate guerilla insurgency, is certainly a nobler figure in defeat than Gorbachev is.

Like Theodore Roosevelt, he was in the right place at the right time, and a succession of deaths elevated him to the top party spot in March of 1985. Immediately, Gorbachev impressed everybody as a new kind of Soviet leader. When British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a staunch anti-Communist, said he was "the kind of man I can work with," the hopes of the world were thrust upon his shoulders.

He advocated and carried out significant reforms to make the system efficient and more Democratic. Two key phrases emerged. "Glasnost" meant openness, and "perestroika" meant reform. He attempted to shift resources to the civilian sector of the Soviet economy. When presented with evidence that Reagan was placing more arms in Europe, building technologically advanced weaponry in the U.S., and was conceiving of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which would create a "shield" against Soviet nukes, Gorbachev called for an end to the arms race with the West.

Gorbachev moved too fast for the glacial Communist establishment. The old hands knew that Communism was a failure. The only thing they cared about were their personal privileges. Gorbachev was their worst nightmare. By actually trying to make Communism work, they knew he would destroy it! If ever the old Vietnam saw about destroying the village to save it can be analogized to a country, it was the U.S.S.R. under Gorbachev. However, once he became the media darling of the West and popular among the Soviet citizenry, the old style of political change - a bullet in the back of the head or, if one was lucky, a silent coup \- was no longer an option. Gorbachev found himself in a tight squeeze. Radical reformers emerged in the U.S.S.R. who wanted to eliminate the one-party state and central economic planning.

Faced with Reagan building up U.S. defense forces but unwilling to accede to Gorbachev's demands for a weapons halt, the Soviets fell into economic crisis. In particular, Reagan would not give in on SDI. Gorbachev tried his best move at Reykjavik in 1985. With huge media coverage, he met with Reagan and agreed to all of Reagan's demands on proposed arms de-escalation. He played the Western press, leading them to believe that a major treaty was about to be signed. Then, at the very last minute, he presented a new demand to Reagan, in which he said that everything they had agreed upon was now dependent on the U.S. ending SDI research. Reagan identified the trick and refused to fall for it. It appeared that the summit had ended in recriminations and bad feeling. The Western media excoriated Reagan, stating that he had thrown away a golden opportunity to make the world safe in favor of militarism.

There may be no other time in which so many intelligent people with access to information have been so wrong. Reagan's hard line in 1985 was the quintessential moment in which the United States won the Cold War. Everything after that were details.

Gorbachev's big move was the only card he had in his deck. Failing at Reykjavik, he was faced with criticism from the Politburo, similar to what Khrushchev dealt with after being schooled by Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The circumstances were reversed. Khrushchev, the older man, had judged the young Kennedy as too weak to stand up to the heat. Gorbachev, the younger man, had judged the old Reagan to be weak enough to be fooled. In both cases, the Communists were wrong.

Then Gorbachev faced problems from the Baltic states. Other Soviet Republics began to call for independence. The nationalistic fervor created alarm bells not just in the Soviet Union, but throughout the world. Since World War I had started out spurred in part by these kinds of nationalist demands in this part of the world, concern over stability entered into the picture.

Glasnost allowed the people in the Baltics and the Republics to demand its twin, perestroika. Gorbachev's foreign policy successes were the result of Reagan's goodwill. Both men knew this. The key for Reagan was to stick with the long-term strategy of holding Gorbachev's feet to the fire, when most of the Western media demanded that he acceded to Gorbachev's agenda. It would be incorrect to say that Reagan felt his policy would result in the fall of the Soviet Union. That was an event that took everybody by surprise. But Reagan did feel that he was part of a grand strategy that would oversee the fall of Communism. The fact that it almost happened on his watch (in reality, the Berlin Wall fell 11 months after he left office) was the result of his policy, the sickness of Communism, and Gorbachev's willingness to let freedom have its chance. He could have cracked down, as others had. Many say he opened a "Pandora's box." Hard-liners in the old Soviet Union were not then and are not now his biggest fans.

This is the best compliment that Gorbachev can be given. He was a Communist, but he was far and away better than all previous Communist leaders. It is impossible to simply place Gorbachev into the same category as Stalin, Brezhnev, and the rest of them. He is a moral man, and in the end that is the most one can ask for.

Gorbachev's arms control agreements with the United States eased Soviet fears as well as American ones. The peaceful breakaway of Eastern Europe (civil wars followed his tenure, though), followed by German unification and NATO membership for the new Germany, were all great events in the history of the world.

In August of 1991, hard-liners made one last, desperate attempt to regain power. Gorbachev was on vacation in the Crimea. Militarists attempted a coup. They lacked public support, were led by incompetent officers leading incompetent troops, and were met by massive street protests in Moscow. The President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who was no longer a Communist (and had never been on the fast track in the party as a younger man, anyway), met Soviet tanks in the streets in a show of great courage. The city rallied around him. Western media covered everything. In the old days, the Communists could put their foot down without a lot of attention. The coup failed.

Gorbachev was shaken by the event, however. The various Soviet republics were no longer within his control. On Christmas Day, 1991, Gorbachev went on worldwide television and announced that he was resigning as President of the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union was no more. It was just Russia. Since then, Russia has faced tough economic times. Their attempt to reform into a capitalist Democracy has not been easy, and probably will not see real success until a generation or two has passed, rooting all the old Communist elements out of the country.

A few years later, the Venona archives were opened up. Gorbachev did win the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. Historical analysis of his career has determined events shaped him more than he shaped events. Nevertheless, his place in the pantheon of 20th Century movers and shakers is on the side of good, not evil. A Gorbachev Foundation was established, naturally, in San Francisco, but quickly became moribund. Ironically it was located on the Presidio Army base grounds. U.S. soldiers – most staunchly anti-Communist, Reagan fans and Republicans – mocked the building named after the man they and they and their favorite President defeated.

The Reagan theory

50-60 million people died in World War II. However, it is accepted that despite this enormous cost, the political result of the war made fighting and winning worth it. Suppose that after Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech of 1983, the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. went to war. We fought a conventional war, which lasted from 1983-89. 50 million died in "World War III," which spread across every major continent on the globe.

Through superior technology, better leadership, attrition and perhaps a little divine guidance, the United States prevailed, taking the march to Moscow and winning a total victory in the fall of 1989.

The political results of this horrific war were that the Soviet Union crumbled, the Eastern Bloc broke up, the Warsaw Pact was disintegrated, Germany re-unified, Communism became an outdated political theory, and with the exception of a few "brushfires" in the Baltics and Iraq, America emerged the sole superpower presiding over a peaceful world. We stopped occupying Moscow as we stopped occupying Berlin and Tokyo.

In other words, the political result was exactly, completely and precisely what Caspar Weinberger, George Schultz, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and the heroes of 1981-93 accomplished, only in this case, as Margaret Thatcher proclaimed, "without firing a shot!"

If we fought that war, and that many people died (say 450,000 were Americans), and the result was as described, history would unquestionably state that it was worth it, a great victory despite its terrible price! Dwight Eisenhower said his greatest accomplishment was not winning World War II, but keeping the peace during his eight-year Presidency. This could be Reagan's greatest legacy.

A Times to live and a Times to die

Shelby Coffey III was "the quintessential guilty white male: insular, kindhearted, cluelessly patronizing, endlessly infuriating."

\- Catherine Seipp of Buzz magazine, contrasting Coffey from his L.A. Times predecessor Otis Chandler

For the Los Angeles Times, the final, official ousting of Otis Chandler was the beginning of the end. With his departure, true excellence was replaced by mediocrity. It did not happen over night, but year by year greatness was lost, replaced by a sea of political correctness and myopia. For the city of Los Angeles, a similar fate; drip, drip, drip. One event after another, symbolic or metaphorical as they may have been, the greatest city ceded its power. New York rallied. The South rose again. San Francisco swept past them, its sports teams, its political power, its economy and cutting edge role in technology eclipsing L.A., the old dinosaur of the Howard Hughes era gone with the last beleaguered Soviet troops leaving Afghanistan.

Pride goeth before the fall.

Lightweights all in a row

In November of 1989 the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner shut down. With it went an institution. A great city often judged its greatness in part by its newspapers. The Times was Los Angeles. The Herald-Examiner paled in comparison, but the idea that the Times could be read in the morning, the Herald-Examiner at night, long clung as a popular notion.

Its closing seemed a victory for the Times. It was like New York in 1958, when the Yankees had the city all to themselves after the Dodgers and Giants split town. But it was a hollow victory, or would prove to be one. Yankees attendance actually went down in the years following their departure. Caesar captured Gaul but could not make her love him. Baseball attendance would go down all over the country, and the Yankees would eventually hit rock bottom in the late 1960s.

The Herald-Examiner's failure was a forecast of general newspaper failure that would eventually affect the Times. Competition is what America thrives on. Absent its motivating force, complacency becomes cancerous.

Tom Johnson resigned from Times Mirror in 1990 to take over CNN. Conservative members of the Chandler clan pushed for his ouster. Privately, Johnson was disappointed that Otis Chandler did not fight for him. Circulation was at an all-time high in the immediate wake of the Herald-Examiner's closing, 1,225,189 daily and 1,514,096 on Sundays. It passed the New York Daily News. The quality was astounding; the same long, fabulous articles on virtually any subject from any country. Something for everyone. To a true newspaper aficionado, there remained no greater pleasure than lingering for hours over each section of the Times with a pot of coffee.

The paper was at the top. The parent company owned numerous profitable businesses and other media outlets within its conglomeration. They expanded, building new plants, more out-reach. But now it was official. Long thought of as the best paper, its circulation a little lower than the New York metropolitan giants not because of a lack of quality, but due to demographics, the reading tastes of the on-the-go, hyper-active, transplanted Southern Californian; well, not anymore. Now they were "number one." On paper.

But the beginning of the end came in 1990 in the form of a genial gent with Virginia roots named Shelby Coffey III. Otis Chandler discovered him lifting weights. This was a big plus in the eyes of Chandler. Coffey was brought on board and groomed at the Dallas Times Herald, a subsidiary paper. When Johnson left he ascended. He had ideas.

Coffey started printing editions in Armenian, Vietnamese, and as a "service to the boy and girls in uniform," a special edition to be delivered by various forms to service personnel shipped to the growing crisis with Saddam Hussein in Saudi Arabia. Critics said he wanted his paper to be all things to all people everywhere instead of Los Angeles' paper in L.A. A corruption scandal involving Mayor Tom Bradley was skirted by Coffey. The inside word was that Coffey did not want to go after a black Democrat.

Coffey changed the look of the paper, designing a "faster format" comparable to USA Today, disparaged as "McPaper." He created a list of "pejoratives," banning a slew of words, many of which were staples of the Jim Murray lexicon. It was pure censorship. Ghetto, skirt chaser, inner city, bitch, Dutch treat, Indian giver; these were among the words no Timesman dare speaketh. There is no available record of Jim Murray's reaction, but one can imagine he viewed this as pure hogwash.

"At the height of the Shelby era, you couldn't swing a dead cat on Spring Street without hitting some touchy member of the Diversity Committee, who would then most likely announce that such metaphor was offensive to feline-Americans and stomp off to organize a petition," said one former staffer. He was said to water down controversial stories if they concerned "protected" political groups and liberal causes. The term "politically correct" was just becoming a common phrase. It had its roots in the Tailhook affair being investigated by female members of Congress, with Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign, and the attendant "Year of the Woman" election of prominent females to the U.S. Senate. Rush Limbaugh got a hold of the term, which is probably why it lives today, but Shelby Coffey III and the L.A. Times were among the most active in carrying out its "mission."

Former Times staffer Dennis McDougal wrote an all-encompassing history of the newspaper and the Chandler family, Privileged Son: Otis Chandler and the Rise and Fall of the L.A. Times Dynasty (2001). In it he described what probably could be called the high point of the Times's history, its phenomenal coverage of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Coming on the heels of Jim Murray's Pulitzer Prize (1990) and news that they had the highest circulation in the world, they earned praise from Time magazine for having provided the "most extensive and informative coverage of the war." Pulitzers were won for the paper's extensive coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union and an aborted military coup against Boris Yeltsin's government, and also for domestic coverage of the Rodney King beating trial, thus earning another Pulitzer for this effort. From there McDougal describes a paper slowly falling in many respects over the course of the 1990s.

By the end of 1992 the Times saw a cut in their profits. The paper was extended, having bought a number of entities and investments, while expanding their operation, including the creation of a huge printing plant a few miles from their main offices. But in an effort to cut costs, they began offering buy-outs to veteran staffers. Once dubbed the "velvet coffin" because no writers ever left, employment under Chandler being better than all alternatives, the paper was finally unionized and paying for it. A drain of talent began.

"It took 20 years for the paper to build up a great staff and it took just a few months to dismantle it," observed Washington bureau reporter Doug Frantz, one of three dozen Timesmen to defect to the New York Times. In Chandler's heyday, the Times routinely raided the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time and other established East Coast publications. Now it was going the other way.

"I remember when they paid you to come to the Times," quipped columnist and former city editor Peter King. "Now they pay you to leave." In less than five years, the Times lost 30 percent of its reporters. Forbes published a report on the business troubles of the newspaper industry, which alarmed many.

In 1992, Presidential candidate Bill Clinton campaigned using futuristic terms like the "Information Superhighway" and "a bridge to the 21st Century." He was talking about the Internet, which was not invented by his Vice President, Al Gore, but owed its roots to college and military communications projects, some of which traced as far back as the 1960s.

In 1993 the World Wide Web made its "debut." That year, Otis Chandler's second son, Harry was put in charge of a program exploring the emerging nexus of personal computers, newspapers, and the Internet. "This Harry Chandler appeared equipped to guide the Times into a new century," said narrator Leiv Schreiber in Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times.

Otis sent Harry a Christmas card, expressing great hope that this time a Chandler would emerge to pick up where he left off. However, a Vanity Fair piece in which Otis all but unloaded on the rest of the Chandler family derailed much of the support Harry would have needed to wrest control from the powers that now were at the paper.

"He was pitted against this nefarious group of family members; nefarious and anonymous," said David Margolick, author of the of Vanity Fair piece. In Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times, these people are depicted as such, using shadowy, fleeting images to give them a sense of behind the scenes string-pullers.

"You never saw them. No one ever saw their pictures. They were lurking in the distance somewhere, these malign influences. Right-wing, intolerant, xenophobic people." The article quoted Chandler saying they were "elitists," bored with the problems of AIDS, the homeless, and other social problems. They were depicted as early 20th Century examples of Republican greed, a part of the past, yet here brought to life almost as if in a Stephen King movie, a ghost ship scene of jazz flappers. Either way, it spelled doom for Harry's chances at succession, and in so doing it was the beginning of the end for the paper. Not only did the Los Angeles Times need a dynastic Chandler presence, Harry may well have gotten a handle on the role of the Internet before it swallowed up the paper's profits. It was not to be.

In the meantime, Otis Chandler sat to the side. Many have speculated over the years at what he was thinking, and what his motivations were at this time. McDougal's book described a man in repose. Chandler, the adventurer, engaged in a wild attempt to re-capture his youth. He divorced his first wife, was re-married, but had mixed relations with his children. There was a certain amount of resentment at his not having promoted his off-spring to positions of high authority at the Times over the years. That was long the Chandler way, from General Gray to Harry, Norman and Otis Chandler. Otis seemed to believe his children lacked the essential qualities of leadership necessary to steer a ship as great as the L.A. Times.

He had handed the keys to the kingdom to the likes of Tom Johnson, Shelby Coffey III, Bob Erberu, Mark Willes; and they had collectively, over time, allowed what the Chandler's made great to slowly become, still above average, but less than outstanding. But Chandler was too busy big game hunting, trekking the ice caps, racing cars, surfing, hitting the weights; whatever he needed to do to maintain his youth.

But he and his family positioned themselves through Chandis Securities and various airtight trusts, maintaining and building enormous profits. McDougal's book enthusiastically described the glorious rise of the paper. It did not avoid controversy, detailing Chandler family corruption, nefarious land deals such as the Owens River Valley Aqueduct, illicit gains, and the like, but by and large provided an admiring look at how they, and particularly Otis Chandler, created one of the greatest, most powerful entities in the annals of American capitalism and power.

But McDougal also did not steer away from Otis's strange 1990s malaise, his twi-light years. He described an extremely selfish man and a selfish family. The book was written with Chandler's grudging cooperation, unlike a 1977 tome called Thinking Big by Robert Gottlieb and Irene Wolf, which Otis gleefully reported as only having sold 5,000 copies. McDougal noted that while he admired Chandler and his paper, the former publisher would not be entirely happy with all his conclusions. His view of Otis and his family after he was forced out would fall under that category.

Otis had little good to say about his various cousins and extended family. He was the only one of them who truly made a big name for himself by virtue of actual accomplishment. Chandler had been given the keys to the kingdom, but he worked hard to forge greatness. The rest were described as being just rich San Marino conservatives, peeved at the world they now lived in, dominated by a liberal media and a Democrat Party bent on demonizing them with class warfare, aghast at a country that could elect the likes of Bill Clinton, for God's sake! But those cousins and extended Chandler family were continuing to live in enormous wealth courtesy of the trusts established, and in particular by the business model and investments envisioned and carried out by Otis Chandler.

But the Los Angeles Times itself was hemorrhaging money. It was not just the unimpressive leadership, ideas and model of Shelby Coffey III. Bob Erberu, well placed in Los Angeles society, somehow found himself at the top of the Times after Chandler's departure. He was the chairman of the Times Mirror Company.

"The family should have taken Erberu out and shot him," said Dan Akst, a business columnist. The general attitude among Timesmen was that Erberu "wrecked that company." It was all a maize of big-money deals, stock options, inside deals between Erberu and the family. They all got rich, but they began the demise of a newspaper. The national media was noticing it all. Newsweek and Newsday among others ran stories of the Times's financial problems.

Then came Mark Willes. The former vice chairman of General Mills, he was dubbed the "Cereal Killer" because he seemed to think he could sell a newspaper the way he sold Honey Nut Cheerios. He was the anti-Chandler. In many ways he was a product of business school theory. He had his theories, his classroom concepts. The jock Chandler graduated from Stanford but nobody ever accused him of being an intellectual. He was a real-world business executive. It was like the scene in Back to School when the snooty professor tells the class how to sell "widgets," but Rodney Dangerfield contradicts him with descriptions of how a businessman must first pay off the mob guys, grease the unions, and keep the corrupt politicians happy.

In the mean time, Coffey made a decided left-leaning turn in the editorials and reporting of the newspaper. "The paper tries to be all things to all people, but in the process it becomes very little to anyone," reporter David Freed of the Columbia Journalism Review wrote. "It has no soul."

Accuse Kyle Palmer and the Los Angeles Times of "building Richard Nixon," of being a "Republican paper," and call Otis Chandler "greedy," but nobody could ever say they lacked a soul!

McDougal concluded that Willes's and Coffey's "Column Left" and "Column Right" op/ed format split so closely down the middle that the paper now produced "politically correct pabulum."

"Under Coffey and <David> Laventhol, the Times had developed a vacillating news policy that <Catherine> Seipp described as 'All the News That's Fit to Print . . . As Long As No One Gets Hurt,' " wrote McDougal.

Coffey was described by Buzz magazine's Catherine Seipp as "the quintessential guilty white male: insular, kindhearted, cluelessly patronizing, endlessly infuriating." Rank-and-file reporters contrasted Coffey from Otis Chandler, typically agreeing with her opinion, favoring Otis in comparison.

On "Black Friday," July 21, 1995, 750 people were fired at Times Mirror Square. Willes oversaw the operation in the detached manner of a mob hit man. The "Velvet Coffin" was thereafter called the "Pine Box." Then Willes had a staff conference and asked the remaining employees how they could "shape people's thinking." Reporters, used to longtime journalistic practices of reporting both sides of a story, "sat dumbfounded," according to Privileged Son. Willes did not say it, but the unsaid message in his pleas might as well have been, "How do we help Bill Clinton get re-elected?" A Presidential election year was coming and California was in play. Otis Chandler's  
"Republican paper" was now openly advocating for Democrats. The two great conservative journalistic organs of the 20th Century, the Chandler Times and Henry Luce's Time magazine, were now liberal, all the way. Both their reputations and their economics suffered for this reason. They pre-cursored the fall of print media that would only get worse over the remaining years.

The old paper, with its wonderful, long, analytical articles, was now dubbed, "Read this. Quick," by detractors. Old hands called on Chandler: please help, come back. Otis ranted to Vanity Fair about what was being done to his jewel. Michael Parks, renowned for his work covering South African Apartheid, was brought in. Richard Schlosberg and Coffey left in 1997. Otis began to evaluate his life and place in history. He did not like what Willes, Coffey, Erberu and a host of lightweights had done to his legacy.

"Can you believe this turn of events?" he wrote to his old secretary, Donna Swayze.

Dorothy "Buff" Chandler died that year. She was as responsible as her late husband or her son for the making of Los Angeles. A great city needed a great paper, a great sports palace, a President or two to emerge from its political structure, but it also needed an opera house, museums, and culture. She was the number one reason Los Angeles was now equal to New York, San Francisco, Paris, London – whether the pundits cared to admit or not – when it came to this.

Back at Times Mirror Square, employees were in rebellion. Willes's response was that he would use a proverbial "bazooka, if necessary." More re-organization followed. Subscriptions slipped. He was even changing the Times masthead. Old bromides promoting business and "jingoistic" slogans boosting Los Angeles and America were replaced by political correctness. Willes was accused of not understanding the Internet. Reporters were afraid to go out of the office on assignment, much less vacation, for fear that upon their return a pink slip would be waiting. Instead of one great product, Willes's "Our Times" concept created separate papers catering to different ethnicities, languages and neighborhoods. It failed. He courted Latinos with advertising in the Mexican-American media, to no avail.

Coverage of a police shootout in North Hollywood, later depicted in a movie, awarded the paper a Pulitzer in 1998, but it was a rare bit of good news. Ranked number one in every way a paper could be ranked just a few years earlier, the Times dropped precipitously to fourth behind the New York Times, USA Today and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal on journalism lists. Willes eliminated Chandler's position as a director, his last official tie to his pride and joy. Otis stated he was "glad I'm not around" Willes anymore.

An untrained woman, Katherine Downing was made president of the paper. She was not qualified and offered little, but she was a woman. Otis fumed from the sidelines. He was "horrified," offering "she knows nothing about newspapers." McDougal described Willes during this period as similar to the Humphrey Bogart character in The Caine Mutiny court martial. Willes tried to say he "studied generals," but whatever lessons he may have "learned" from George Patton or Sun Tzu were not correctly applied. He cut more of the paper. Readers had less to read, less to analyze and think about and pore over. They noticed. Circulation slipped more.

Then came the Staples Center fiasco. Willes presided over a partnership deal with the Lakers' new basketball arena sponsors that broke standard journalism practices, engendering tremendous criticism from all sources. Downing was caught in the middle like a deer in the headlights. She had no idea how to handle the fall-out. Otis chimed in with public criticism. Petitions were circulated in-house protesting the deal.

Finally Otis and old hand Bill Boyarsky, one of his leaders in the glory days, approached Michael Parks to say enough is enough. They communicated their profound displeasure to the entire staff of the paper. The result: cheers throughout the corridors of the paper. Old photos of Chandler popped up. He represented a kind of cult of personality, a rallying cry against inferiority, political correctness, bad marketing, and all other forms of unimpressiveness. He was a champion, a winner. He was admired, an icon. He had been there before, but now he was heroic.

"Otis is Zeus," deputy managing editor John Arthur raved. Then there was this classic in Privileged Son: "Otis was General Patton," said Bill Dwyre, the sports editor, "and you want to go out and get on the tank and ride with him. If Patton comes back and says, 'Let's go! There is one more mission,' you go with him."

"Otis was also Odysseus, home from 20 years of hard sailing and not at all happy with what the suitors had done in his absence to his palace and his Penelope – his one true mistress, his Times," wrote McDougal.

National attention followed and the paper was forced to back out of the Staples Center deal. Willes, Downing and Parks all were rudely deposed, but were not replaced by Otis Chandler or anything like Otis Chandler. Unfortunately, the Chandler family endorsed the final indignity that did nothing for the Chandler legacy. On June 12, 2000, the Los Angeles Times was sold to the Tribune Company, parent company of the Chicago Tribune.

Unbelievable.

What was really unbelievable was that Otis and his family just took the money and ran. They received a huge buy-out, as if they were not all rich enough already, and faded into the San Marino sunset, or wherever Otis happened to be. Between moving from mansion to mansion and his adventure trips he was never in one place very long. The Chandler's greed did not go over well with the old Times hands who shortly before fantasized he would lead the charge in saving their beloved paper.

The sale to the Tribune Company was a symbolic gut punch of monumental proportions, meaning so much more than just a business transaction. California had built itself into the greatest state in the union through blood, sweat and tears. The Gold Rush, the trans-continental railroad, the Owens River Valley Aqueduct, the Hoover Dam, two world wars, bridges, freeways, Hollywood, Presidents, sports dynasties and athletic "colosseums" rivaling the one that stood in Rome; all of these accomplishments had made the Golden State number one. Los Angeles was its shining city on a hill, the Times its "herald of angels."

As California and Los Angeles rose, among those entities they surely surpassed big old Chicago, the Second City. In the late 1960s they passed them in population, but long before that they passed them in importance. Now they ceded their crown jewels to their defeated rivals, and for what?

Shelby Coffey III, Bob Erberu, Mark Willes, Katherine Downing. There were others, but this unholy foursome go down as enemies of the Los Angeles Times's legacy, destroyers. They led the paper down a path paved with good intentions, not to hell, but to mediocrity in comparison with the pillar they once stood as. They did this terrible thing in a decade, probably less. Of the four, Coffey and Willes deserve the greatest scorn.

The fall of a great newspaper mirrors the decline of a great city

The fall of the Los Angeles Times was indicative of the fall of newspapers in general. There were different reasons for this decline. Political correctness, then downright liberalism, has played a major role. The rise of the Internet certainly can be attributed, in part. But the mediocrity of the L.A. Times also mirrored the mediocrity of a great city and region, too.

San Francisco was the city, or the City, the "Paris of the West," after the Gold Rush all the way to the 20th Century. The building of William Mulholland's aqueduct, the rise of the film industry, the Federal highway system; by the 1960s Los Angeles was the city in the West, and eventually the world. Nobody thought the ride would end. In the 1970s, when America struggled, Los Angeles thrived. In the 1980s, when America thrived, Los Angeles led the way. Its longtime rival in everything, San Francisco, fell by the proverbial wayside. L.A. hardly noticed. San Francisco despised the fact L.A. did not care.

But years earlier in a non-descript part of the San Francisco Bay Area set next to coastal mountains called the peninsula, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made monumental discoveries and innovations with micro-chips and computers. Thus did their non-descript peninsula take on the name Silicon Valley. By the early 1990s, it had transformed the area's economy. The Silicon Valley was cutting edge, the future. The Military Industrial Complex was a dinosaur, the past. The money, the talent, the investment once poured into the "405 corridor" between LAX and Long Beach were now poured into start-ups and high-techs between San Francisco and San Jose.

This began a huge shift in the San Francisco-Los Angeles dynamic. In the decade in which the great L.A. Times would tumble, San Francisco rose. It was a rivalry again. Once dirty, corrupt, a shadow of its once high-livin' self, the Silicon Valley culture glamorized San Francisco again. It created something called SoMa (south of Market Street), an entire business and residential community hewed out of old, previously run-down San Francisco neighborhoods. Thriving companies, high-rise condominiums, happening nightclubs, and something people thought was almost banned in the City for years: beautiful girls. The spirit of entrepreneurial business adventure was so great that San Francisco even elected a quasi-Republican Mayor, Frank Jordan. He told people he was a registered Democrat, then winked.

In 1991, a group of high-flying Navy and Marine fighter jocks gathered at their annual Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, named after the contraption that affixes to the wheels of a jet as it lands on an aircraft carrier, bringing it to a stop. Young and full of testosterone, they drank and whooped it up. Some pretty women happened by and they whooped it up some more. Somebody complained to Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D.-Colorado). She and her female colleagues reacted as if it were the male chauvinist pig version of My Lai, the Holocaust and the gulags combined. They hounded Navy and Marine brass endlessly. It was so bad one of the officers involved later took his own life. A Republican Senator from Oregon had the temerity to notice some women were attractive. So did one of President Bush's colleagues from Texas, former Senator John Tower. For this they were excoriated.

Also in 1991, Bush nominated a black man to the Supreme Court. Somebody came forth and said that Clarence Thomas once offered a can of coke to a female colleague and, in so doing, made a sexually suggestive remark. Same thing. He was hounded as if he were a child molester.

As with Tailhook, the women – none of whom were the ones identified by the aforementioned as attractive - went ballistic. Schroeder, Congresswoman Barbara Boxer (D.-California) and others marched to Capitol Hill in a famed photograph, acting as if they were protecting womanhood from Thomas. His accuser was not found to be believable and Thomas was confirmed, but on lines divided to this day.

The kinds of things that happened at Tailhook were probably the kinds of hi-jinx that marked most every day of Otis Chandler's rambunctious life, but now they were de facto crimes. Guys like Shelby Coffey III were calling them politically incorrect, and banning a slew of words that might reference this kind of now-verboten behavior. A new age was on us.

In 1992, the Democrats ran a host of aggressive women for the U.S. Senate. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Patty Murray of Washington, Carol Mosely Braun of Illinois, and both Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California were elected on Bill Clinton's coattails in the Year of the Woman.

There is a passage in the Book of Psalms that describes men being "ruled by women," ornamented, with "mincing, princing" steps, and "Instead of fragrance there will be a stench," leaving men to "fall" while "The gates of Zion will lament and mourn."

So it was in 1992.

The elections of Feinstein and Boxer marked a major shift in the SoCal-NoCal rivalry and dynamics of the state. Not only were they women, they were both Jewish and from San Francisco, considered the epicenter of liberalism. Feinstein was much more moderate. She was only nominally Jewish. She also had Catholic roots and while definitely Democrat, was and never would be viewed as a real Left-winger. She was the former Mayor of San Francisco, but also owned a vacation home on the Marin County coast.

Boxer was a different story. She was Jewish, although how observant was not really known. She lived in Marin, where she had represented a district encompassing parts of San Francisco as well as Marin, Sonoma and Solano. She was highly partisan, extremely aggressive, a militant feminist, and considered as liberal as any Federal elected official in America.

In a state long dominated by the Republicans, it was jarring. Californians had always gone for strong, hawkish, white Southern California men cut out of the Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson and George Deukmejian mold. Mostly WASPS; Earl Warren, Richard Nixon, Tom Kuchel, William Knowland, Sam Yorty, Daryl Gates, Caspar Weinberger, George Schultz, Edwin Meese. Pro-business, pro-family, pro-law enforcement, pro-military.

The Southern California political scene was bereft of strength and ideas. John Seymour, a milquetoast Orange County state Senator, was appointed to the U.S. Senate after Wilson went to Sacramento. He got clocked when he tried to run on his own. Suddenly the star power, the fundraising money, the clout was in the north. But that was only part of it.

The Los Angeles economy, long dependent on the Military Industrial Complex that funded huge weapons-building in an industry once dominated by Howard Hughes between Santa Monica Airport to the Long Beach Naval yards extending down to Orange County, was in the tank post-Berlin Wall. It would take more hits. In 1991, white L.A.P.D. officers beat a black motorist named Rodney King to a bloody pulp. It probably was not a rare thing, but a relatively new device was at play in the world: the camcorder. An amateur videographer caught the whole thing on tape. CNN played it over and over and over for months on end.

In 1992, the cops went to trial. South-central L.A. was none too pleased when they were assigned first the venue of Simi Valley, as white bread a town as could be found in the Southland, and naturally an all-white jury. When the jury acquitted three of the officers, wild, rampaging blacks tore up Los Angeles. It made Watts in 1965 look like the Rose Parade. Racial politics were at their most overheated.

Gangs roamed the L.A. streets. The cops, afraid of lawsuits, riots and discipline, let them ply their trades. The Bloods and the Crips ran rampant. Raiders games were veritable gang conventions. It got so bad that one day a college football player was struck by a stray gang bullet. A few years later, Orange County, of all places, declared bankruptcy. It was totally shocking. The O.C. symbolized wealth, the good life.

As bad as the King riots were, the O.J. Simpson trial took the cake. O.J. was jealously claimed by western New York (Buffalo Bills) and, therefore, New York City (where he partied with Joe Namath). His hometown of San Francisco loved him, but L.A. was his domicile and place of greatest hero worship as a USC icon. He lived in Brentwood. It was "the life," the blonde bombshell wife, membership at Riviera, Hollywood fame, mistresses, a coast-to-coast free lunch, and he was welcome to it.

In 1994 he probably murdered his wife and a handsome waiter. An all-black jury acquitted him. The racial angle was infuriating. If L.A. thought they were the city that "got it right," that did not play when it came to O.J. O.J.'s travails, his slow speed freeway extravaganza and embarrassing trial, were the worst possible publicity.

But all of this was still not the whole story. San Francisco and the Bay Area surpassed Greater Los Angeles in just about every way. There were a few good movies made in Hollywood (Glengarry Glen Ross, The Player, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, American History X, Saving Private Ryan, Good Will Hunting, The Thin Red Line), but it was no replay of the 1960s and 1970s. The Right continued to rail at un-patriotic, anti-family fare.

But perhaps it was on the fields of play where it really played out in its starkest terms. What a difference. The San Francisco 49ers were the most dominant team in pro football. They transitioned smoothly from coach Bill Walsh to coach Bill Seifert, from quarterback Joe Montana to quarterback Steve Young. When they won their fifth Super Bowl in January of 1995 over the San Diego Chargers, it marked what probably is the greatest continued dynasty the game has ever known. They continued to perform at a high level throughout most of the 1990s.

1994 symbolized the shift in sports power. While the 49ers went all the way, the Los Angeles Raiders, anemic in L.A. over the last years, playing before the embarrassing sight of gangbangers who took to their silver-and-black colors, packed it up and moved back to Oakland. The city where there was "no there there" was preferred to Hollywood, the City of Angels, dreamland.

Then the Los Angeles Rams, an institution at the Coliseum who once played before 102,000 fans before moving to Anaheim, in 1995 left for St. Louis. The last insult was their glorious 2000 Super Bowl win over the Tennessee Titans. Pro football has never returned to Los Angeles.

The sale of the Los Angeles Times, coming on the heels of the Rams move to St. Louis, were emblematic of the cities' fall. There is really no objective way of looking at the Times's sale to the Tribune Company and determining it to be anything other than a disaster. After that, the paper was never remotely close to what they had once been. While the Tribune take-over hurt the Times, the Hearst Corporation's buy-out of the San Francisco Chronicle that same year had the opposite effect. The Chronicle was long a laughing stock, as much a sign of the City's inferiority compared to L.A. as Candlestick Park vs. Dodger Stadium.

But the Chronicle improved dramatically under Hearst ownership. Scott Ostler, once a rising star in the Jim Murray mold at the Times, was among their star sports columnists. It would not be accurate to say the Hearst Chronicle was ever as good as the Times, but at least for a while they were comparable.

"Now San Francisco has the better writers," said longtime Los Angeles sports radio personality Fred Wallin.

But of all sports symbolisms, the demise of the Los Angeles Dodgers most clearly represented the way the city fell, and how the rivalry clearly favored San Francisco in sports and other ways. After winning the 1988 World Series, the team suffered on the field and had a series of embarrassments off it. Tom Lasorda was half-forced to the sidelines and in a brutal move, one of those kids born to be a Dodger, Mike Piazza was traded away.

But in 1997 the absolutely unthinkable happened. The O'Malley family sold the team to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Peter O'Malley said that changes in tax estate law enacted under President Clinton made it impossible to continue family ownership of the team with a smooth inheritance. Of all the great business moves Rupert Murdoch engineered, until revelations of phone-hacking in England, this was his one glaring error. He put a man named Bob Daly in charge of the team. Daly was a movie executive with no baseball background. It was like asking Tom Lasorda to direct The Godfather. Their glory days were done.

But above all events – the election of Feinstein and Boxer, the Chronicle catching up with the Times, Cal and Stanford competing evenly with their old tormentors, the Raiders leaving L.A. for Oakland – the building of Pacific Bell Park in San Francisco, and the subsequent performance of Barry Bonds demonstrated the newfound superiority of San Francisco. It was unbelievable.

Not only had L.A. fallen behind San Francisco while their newspaper was now just a subsidiary of Chicago, but New York passed them after a long down period. Starting with the Wall Street resurgence under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who used the RICO statutes to drive a stake into the heart of the mob, New York cracked down on crime and smut while cleaning up the city, making it a destination again. The Yankees' dynasty had some of its greatest glory years.

There was some brightness. The air in Los Angeles was much, much cleaner in the 2000s than it had been in the 1960s, when a knife could seemingly cut it, But under bad leadership, the state of California completely lost its mojo in the 1990s and 2000s. The state, built by William Mulholland, Otis Chandler, Buff Chandler, William Randolph Hearst, Howard Hughes, Darryl F. Zanuck, Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan; that was no more. It had become reliably "blue," but often the rest of America ignored them, voting their way. Its huge Electoral College votes were not needed any more. The Southwest, led by Texas, was more efficient, successful, and produced more. Ravaged by unions and illegals, California had the worst public school system in the U.S. The economy tanked. A huge migration of the middle class moved to Oregon, Nevada, Colorado. It was no longer on the cutting edge. Its trends no longer started there and led the way.

Politically, the election of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was viewed as a touch of Hollywood panache, but the thrill was quickly gone. California appeared to be stuck in the 1960s. The state is completely Democrat, mired in its worst period ever.

Both California and America appear to have seen their best days. It is doubtful that either the state or the country will rebound in our lifetimes, in our generation, to the glory days of Ronald Reagan, when California led the way and the greatest nation on Earth followed in its footsteps. A period of Socialism, of malaise, of unimpressiveness, in which the second rate, the low rent have become the common place, the expected, have afflicted this great country. Whether this trend can be reversed remains an open question.

After the Tribune Company buy-out, the paper closed various plants. Under Tribune ownership they completely turned from what it had been under Otis Chandler. They had a guy named Robert Scheer writing op/eds that the conservatives flat called unpatriotic. George Bush and the Iraq War; maybe it was a bad idea, mistakes were obviously made, and there were no WMD found, but the Times joined a chorus of liberal voices; what they did to Bush was so far over the top that America stopped buying what they had to sell. It had a strange, unintended consequence. From a purely political point of view, liberal criticism helped the Right.

Otis Chandler died in 2006 at the age of 78. Sam Zell bought the Tribune Company and, with it, the Times in 2007. He was said to be a conservative. There was no evidence that if he is, his politics could particularly be found in the paper. They continued to flounder. So did the state of California.

Rome is burning

To vote for Bill Clinton.

\- American soldier who defected to North Korea to become a Communist, when asked why he returned to the U.S. in 1996

The 1990s remain a conundrum, in which the American economy exploded and high-tech dominated the landscape, yet huge steps backwards were taken. It was a time resembling Rome after the death of Julius Caesar, when immoralities helped bring the empire down. While Christians were thrown to the lions, and the city burned, Emperor Nero literally "fiddled away."

For the Republican Party and the conservative movement, it was a befuddling predicament. Today, given the gift of hindsight, conservatives are not able to explain their errors, lack of judgment, failure of vision, and ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, not once but twice. While Ronald Reagan ("Ronaldus Magnus" in the words of Rush Limbaugh) was given high esteem upon his leaving office in 1989, by the mid-2000s he was elevated by his party and by a large portion of the country, to Rushmore status among ex-Presidents approached only by George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. While Democrats would argue, history is slowly separating Reagan from Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy. His successor, George H.W. Bush, has been rehabilitated in part because their successors, both Republican and Democrat, fell so far below the overall standards set before them that a new appraisal is merited. Liberals must chafe at the fact that in Washington the airport and the CIA complex are named after Reagan and Bush, respectively.

Certainly, the difficulty of Reagan in overcoming the Soviets in the Cold War, in achieving continued economic success, and in elevating America to its highest self, is something even hardcore Republicans now admit is not only very hard to achieve, but may never happen again in our lifetimes. So badly have successive administrations screwed up the United States that at certain moments of melancholy, conservatives actually start believing defeating Adolf Hitler and Marxism-Leninism was "easy" compared to the challenge faced today, due to errors and failures that seemingly did a century's worth of damage in a mere two decades.

The Bill Clinton and, to a lesser extent, the Barack Obama years, provide the discomfiting notion that the few "successes" achieved by Democrats come either when they adopt GOP policies (Clinton) or have their Big Government "boondoggles" stopped by Republicans (Obama). Either way, Republicans remain befuddled as to why such facts do not result in a nation wholesale deciding to simply vote Republican from here on out; to make the Democrats a thing of the past. After all, if a nation prefers Republican policies, or at least Republican results, why not vote Republican instead of a "Republican lite" Democrat, as Bill Clinton turned out to be? This prospect has looked tantalizingly close a few times, but never came to pass. The fact the Republicans are far from an ideal alternative remains as easy a reason as to why this happens as any, but there are other, more disturbing societal reasons at play. In the mean time, Republican "vision" has not particularly strayed much beyond wistful memories of Reagan, calls for "another Reagan," or the question "what would Reagan do?" Many look at the precipitous decline of America and blame Democrats, who are worthy of their "fair share" of the blame, to use one of their bromides, but Reagan rescued his country instead of just blaming Jimmy Carter. Whether a repeat performance is in the offing is very much an open question.

Perot: enemy of America

Bill Clinton may have been the luckiest President in American history. The sheer volume of perfect scenarios, unearned by but benefiting him, mostly dividends from the investments of Ronald Reagan, are staggering. In the film Nixon, Oliver Stone portrays Richard Nixon as a man who "benefits" from the tragedy befalling the Kennedys. A dark visage peers through the clouds, a "Beast," as Nixon asks, "Who's helping us?" The fact that the great works of a conservative Republican President, oft-fighting the sentiments of a Democrat Party trying not just to stop him but even Impeach him if possible, being the bulwarks a liberal Democrat uses to get elected, get re-elected, and preside over a great economy, is irony beyond Shakespeare's talent.

It started with the "peace dividend." In a new, peaceful world, we would no longer need to build mega-weapons to defeat our varied enemies, beaten by Ronald Reagan, to quote Margaret Thatcher, "without firing a shot." They were all slain in one form or another. Therefore, we could use the money normally spent on SDI and nukes and use it to feed the poor. "Guns for butter," they called it.

In 1992, Bush ran for re-election, still hoping his 91 percent approvals from the Persian Gulf War would carry the day. Called the "resume President," in the history of America he may well have been the most qualified man, with the greatest background for the White House ever, and that did not include the fact he already had four years on the job!

Pundits called the Democrat field the "seven dwarfs." When Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton won, the Republicans laughed. He was the man they wanted to run against. He had a reputation as a womanizer who needed a full-time staffer to stem "bimbo eruptions." He was a draft dodger running against a World War II fighter pilot twice shot down by the Japanese. There were reports that he oversaw an airplane strip in Mena, Arkansas that was a drug-running operation. His detractors described something called the "Clinton body count." There was a list, somewhere between 15 and 100 people, who posed threats in one way or another to the political careers of Governor and Mrs. Hillary Clinton in Arkansas. All had died; in mysterious car accidents, hunting mis-fires, strange heart attacks and drug overdoses . . .

Holy cow, it was easy pickins. Clinton was not heading to the White House, he was ticketed for the "big house." Pride goeth before the fall.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the "peace dividend," Saddam Hussein's humiliation, peace "breaking out all over," and the "end of history"; well, having triumphed over these grave threats, we stopped giving Northrop and General Dynamics and Hughes Aircraft and a host of other big, bloated giants of the Military Industrial Complex billions of tax dollars to build missiles like it was Dr. Strangelove or other something. A funny thing happened. They started laying off workers. The California economy took a dive. As California goes, so goes the nation (at least in those days).

In 1991-92, the United States was in a recession. It was, as recessions go, fairly mild. It was the kind of recession that used to hit every five years or so, but when free market principles really became the way of this land, were diverted to every 11 years or so, as in this case. The last one had occurred under President Carter. But Bill Clinton had an advisor named James Carville, and he kept repeating, "It's the economy, stupid." He had his guy run around America calling it, "The worst economy since the Great Depression." In fact, the statistics later showed that it actually ended a week before Election Day, 1992, but it was too late. Bush killed himself after raising taxes in 1990 after having famously declared, "Read my lips, no new taxes."

The Republicans were victims of their own success. Retail politics are about connecting with people. He did not speak well. He could not communicate. The actor, Reagan, could. So could Bill Clinton. Clinton was brilliant, highly educated and well read. Not just well read; he actually retained everything he read and could recall it at a moment's notice, a rare talent. Somebody would mention an essay in an obscure journal. Clinton had read it. He was a born politician. He had a genius for it.

George H.W. Bush still would have eked out a victory over him, but Texas billionaire Ross Perot, a conservative, ran as an independent. He tapped into something America was looking for and won 19 percent of the vote. The great majority of that 19 percent came from Bush's base. Clinton got only 43 percent, barely more than Carter when he was badly beaten in 1980, but it was enough.

Newt Gingrich's Contract With America

Clinton himself was not a "true blue" liberal. Coming from Arkansas he retained some "bubba" flavor to him, but his wife, Hillary was a militant feminist who turned against her father's upbringing, finding fault and immorality in all things that made America a superpower. The Democrats were totally in thrall to the far Left, and they needed to be paid off.

In 1993 Clinton lied. After promising he would not raise taxes in the campaign, he raised taxes less than a month after his Inauguration (including the hated inheritance tax, one of the most immoral of all political retributions and a favorite of his party). His wife tried to install national health care, dubbed Hillarycare. President Clinton broke the ban on gays in the military so long as they adhered to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that pleased nobody. They both showed open disdain of military officers and Secret Service details, screaming and swearing at dedicated American officers serving their nation faithfully. Hillary used be-medaled, high-ranking military officials as waiters at White House parties, where cocaine use was reported. Stories from their Arkansas past continued to pile up. They engaged in myriad illegal activities, broke a number of laws, "earning" huge profits through insider trading and phony land deals. They lied to Congress and investigators. Reports of people killed or ordered killed by the Clintons piled up. One aide, Vincent Foster, supposedly committed suicide. The White House hindered the FBI investigation. If the Clintons ordered his death, they got away with it. "Slick Willie" was one of those smart lawyers who always stays 10 paces ahead of his pursuers, knowing if he did this, they would do that, then he would do this, then they would do that it, and in the end legalities, subpoenas, paper work and the devil's details would prevent him from really paying for his crimes. His Presidency was a modern re-telling of Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War, mixed with Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear. Conspiracy theorists said it was more of the same.

Rwanda exploded in genocide in 1994. The White House and the U.N. dithered mainly over whether they should officially classify it as genocide or not. North Korea made their great breakthrough in the area of nuclear status, which they were never able to achieve during the Reagan-Bush years.

Republican Congressional leader Newt Gingrich of Georgia devised the Contract With America (Clinton called it the Contract On America), a list of Constitutional promises to restore the rule of law and morality to the body politic. America's repudiation of the Clintons appeared complete when the Republicans destroyed his party in the 1994 mid-terms. The GOP captured an unbelievable 54 House seats, eight Senate pick-ups, and swept statewide races for Governors and legislatures. It was as complete and total a wipeout by one political party over another as could be conceived. With the exception of a brief period during the Eisenhower years (before Senator McCarthy's fall from grace), it was the first time the Republicans held the House in many decades, since before President Franklin Roosevelt.

The movement, led by now House Speaker Gingrich, was viewed at the time as the final triumph of the Reagan/Conservative Revolution. President Clinton was called "irrelevant" by the mainstream press, his election a mere blip on the radar, history an inexorable tide of conservative triumph wrapped in a red, white and blue banner. Many in the GOP assumed a shift had been made; the United States was a "conservative country." It became an article of faith that he would lose his 1996 re-election bid, that Gingrich had led a successful Republican revolution.

It was a center-right country, but not a full-blown conservative one, especially not on social issues near and dear to the Christian Right. Gingrich's mis-handling of the budget process opened the door for Clinton, a masterful politician, to regain ground heading into the 1996 Presidential election year.

Why the Right went after the Clintons

The Republicans overstretched their welcome in a series of events starting with the 1995 Federal government shutdown, ending with the 1998 Impeachment of President Clinton. The lessons from these mistakes do not appear to have been fully learned.

Speaker Gingrich developed his own "cult of personality." He was a bombastic, intelligent, opinionated man who felt he was smarter than everybody else. He railed against perceived slights, thinking he should be accorded the same privileges as a sitting President. He and President Clinton feuded over the budget, as Republicans and Democrats always do. It was a duel, two high school kids playing "chicken," with Gingrich unwilling to swerve to the side. Thinking the country was with him, the 1994 sweeps clear indication that the nation was now conservative in the Reagan image, he did not give in and the Federal government was forced to "shut down." It was perceived as the Republicans overreaching, with sympathy accorded to poor Bill Clinton, the irrelevant President just waiting to lose in 1996. Polls began to swing back towards the Democrat.

The Republicans felt that the Reagan blueprint could be run on with success every time, like the formula of a successful blockbuster such as the Rocky or Star Wars series. Black Army General Colin Powell, mastermind of the 1991 Persian Gulf War victory, was promoted as the Republican nominee; a chance for the party to reverse African-American voting trends and win a historic election. But General Powell bowed out, and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole (R.-Kansas) was nominated.

Senator Dole was a war hero from the battle of Anzio and a stalwart of the GOP, but basically a moderate, too old, and boring. He also found himself facing an incumbent running on the strength of a great economy. Clinton benefited from the world Reagan and Bush left him. With the break-up of the Soviet empire he was able to reduce military spending. All of those tech-savvy workers who lost jobs in the Military Industrial Complex helped fuel the Internet economy of the 1990s. The Internet was a gift, like Manna from Heaven, creating a tremendous economic boon in the decade.

When the Republicans took over Congress, they imposed new policies, namely tax reduction. Clinton was smart enough to adopt House Speaker Gingrich's bills. He triangulated, ending "welfare as we know it," and in adopting Republican philosophies enjoyed success.

Clinton accepted millions in campaign donations and illegal personal money and gifts from a shadowy Pakistani businessman named James Riady and the Lippo Group. This combined with essentially "selling" America to China, was the root of Pakistan becoming a quasi-terror state with America the enemy. China did not have the technological capability of sending nuclear missiles to the U.S. In return for donations and bribes, Clinton allowed Red China to buy the technology to release throw weights of their missiles, thus now allowing them to reach American shores.

But the Right overextended their accusations. The story of the Mena drug-smuggling operation could not be proved. Some theorized that the Republicans did not pursue it because George H.W. Bush was also involved, using profits to fund the Nicaraguan Contras during the 1980s. Facing stonewall tactics, the Republicans could not prove Vince Foster's killing was Clinton's doing. His Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown was killed in a very suspicious plane accident, just as he was threatening to "spill the beans" on the Clintons' illegalities. Clinton was caught by the camera smiling like a happy bride until he saw he was being photographed entering the funeral, whereupon he produced a fake tear.

Several other killings from his Arkansas days were proven false. However, many were never disproven, which of course was, as Clinton's apologists put it, trying to "prove a negative." However, many mysterious deaths had occurred. Over time, the killers unfound, the circumstances still a mystery, the shadow of accusation against the Clintons was either worn away by time, or their lack of proof used by Hillary to claim a "vast Right-wing conspiracy." Pundits in the conservative media like Rush Limbaugh turned her comments on her, stating that essentially the "vast Ring-wing conspiracy" consisted of "millions of patriotic American citizens who register and vote."

The case of children killed next to railroad yards, apparently having seen nefarious murders performed by contract killers on behest of the Clintons, remains a mystery, but so many died in Arkansas that talking about it became, like Chappaquiddick, a taboo subject. The Left pointed out that big money conservatives, such as Richard Mellon Scaife, seemed obsessed with the Clintons in the manner of a modern Ahab, shedding just enough sympathy on the "beleaguered" President and First Lady to help their cause.

In truth, Clinton had emerged from the Hot Springs Mafia, of which his gangster moll mother was deeply involved and often forced to perform "favors" to pay off gambling debts. He had a well organized criminal organization at his beck and call all his years as Governor, including completely corrupt state troopers. In fact his ability to carry out these deeds was not nearly as incredulous as the average voter might have surmised.

As in the 1992 campaign, it was a draft dodger against a World War II hero. Clinton, who "loathed the military" and used all the skills at his legal disposal to avoid being drafted in the 1960s, defeated a man who left much of his body in the mountains of Italy, Bob Dole. That year, an American soldier who defected to North Korea during the Korean War in order to live as a Communist, was allowed to return to the United States. When asked why he came back, he answered, "To vote for Bill Clinton." Ross Perot ran again. His influence did not cost Dole the victory, but it did not help. Clinton won, but failed again to capture a 50 percent plurality.

In his second term, many women emerged accusing him of wrongdoing. One said he used the color of his authority to try and force her into a sex act in Arkansas. The other, a Democrat volunteer, identified Clinton as a rapist who sexually assaulted her. After smashing her face in, he advised that "you'd better got ice on that," referring to her black-and-blue injuries. Others claimed indiscreet sex, threats of sex, and various other immoralities. One intern, Monica Lewinsky, provided oral sex on President Clinton while he did phone deals in the Oval Office. Apparently his effluence splattered on her dress and about the august old room.

Sued by Paula Jones for sexual misconduct, Clinton lied under oath about Lewinsky, an illegal act falling under the "crimes and misdemeanors" clause of the Impeachment provision in the Constitution. The House voted to Impeach him, but the Republican Senate chose not to. They had several reasons. For one, as despicable as his actions were, the Lewinsky oral sex and subsequent lying about it was seen as more a moral failing than a genuine Presidential crime. It did not, in the minds of many Republicans – Democrats backed Clinton to the hilt – rise to the level of an Impeachable offense. But there were practical political factors at play. Clinton was not up for re-election, but his Vice President, Albert Gore was. If Clinton were forced out of office, it would elevate the man the Democrats most likely were running to replace him to the imprimatur of a sitting President. The GOP calculated they would rather leave Clinton in and force his V.P. to run with the shame of Clinton's record hanging over his head. The Right went after him ostensibly because they had never been able to pin the Vince Foster killing or numerous Arkansas murders, or other crimes, against him. This was their "chance," so to speak.

Hillary Clinton complained that Newt Gingrich was given an enormous multi-million-dollar advance for a book. He gave the advance back. Sales of the book were good enough for him to make the money on merit in the end. A few years later Bill and Hillary took the enormous advances they criticized Gingrich for taking before he returned it. They did not return it.

Gingrich became a lightning rod for criticism throughout the Impeachment proceedings. If there was any question that the L.A. Times had turned completely from the old days under Otis Chandler, their 1998 coverage and criticism of the Republicans and special prosecutor Ken Starr ended that conjecture. It was the turning point for the Times. Starr, a decent Christian man with a spotless record then and now, was excoriated by the Left, called every vile name in the book.

The fact that the porn industry became a billion-dollar juggernaut during this period was not a coincidence. It was the age of Clinton. The Right-wing asked whether such a thing ever would have happened under Reagan or Bush . . . or Eisenhower. The biggest pornographer in the world, Hustler's Larry Flynt, became the de facto public relations wing of the Democrat Party.

Economic principles endorsed by a Republican Congress were leading the American economy back in 1997. The Internet was also starting to explode, and with it the stock market, but it was built on many false promises of just what the Internet could and could not do. By the time Clinton left office in 2001 it collapsed and the "dot.com" economy was lampooned as the "dot.bomb." Clinton then pardoned a series of criminals, traitors, low lifes and immoralists in his last days. His staff defaced some of the White House offices and equipment on their last day.

Muslims and distortions of history

Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, as required by the national and ethnic (völkisch) interests of the Arabs, and as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.

\- Haj Mohammed Effendi Amin el-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, in a draft declaration of German-Arab cooperation, 1941

When Whittaker Chambers Left the Communist Party and told the FBI Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy, he told his wife they were leaving the "winning side" of history for the losing side. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many conservatives were asked if indeed they had "won" the great battle of history. There was reservation. William Buckley said, "Sure, we won," but he might as well have added that the victory could be taken from them in short order.

The election of President Barack Obama, indeed the great support he enjoyed and the hard sledding the Right faced in getting their message – the winning ideology of American Exceptionalism – past the liberal media, past the kids dumbed by public schools, radical academia, and global warming as religion, has left many scratching their heads, re-thinking the hubris of Ronald Reagan's glory days. How could it all have been lost so fast?

Just as Chambers expressed doubt that his side would win, many doubted President George W. Bush when he promoted as a central tenet of his War On Terror the promotion that Arab Muslims of the Middle East were capable of self-sustaining Democracy. It was a wonderful hope. It was the least racist notion conceivable, one that placed faith in the dark-skinned peoples of a distinctly non-Christian religion that they, too, could do what white Europeans and Americans have been able to do; indeed what many Orientals and Latinos have been able to do. That there was no such thing as white superiority, that freedom yearned in the hearts of all men, that God, not man, endowed individuals with this gift if they would just fight for it and justify their lives with it.

The verdict is not in. When that will be is up in the air, but it does not look good. The Arab Muslims of the Middle East appear, instead, to be among the biggest losers of world history, and here lies the greatest cautionary tale, which is that by so being they may be on the winning side. Chambers did not necessarily believe that "Communism" would win, but he knew that he was born into a sinful, corrupt world. Chambers knew that Jesus Christ would ultimately win, and His children would share that victory.

But this victory is not an Earthly one. The Earth will be left to the wicked. While "Communism," as in an official state political party run by a behemoth such as the Union of Soviet Socialist States, was rendered to the "ash heap of history," as Reagan so eloquently put it, something replaced it. Wickedness replaced it. It was always wickedness, it just had different faces. It was slavery, it was Nazism, it was greed, lust, sadism . . .

It manifests itself as anti-Americanism. It opposes traditions, family, patriotism, courage, bravery. It tells people they are too smart, too nuanced to follow strict construction of an archaic document like the Constitution. It infuses gay people with the belief that what they do is not a sin, that no God has the right to judge the way he lives, that he may marry and cavort according to his rules, not God's, and need not pray for the forgiveness that is all God really asks. It inculcates itself into the mind of a young lady who enjoys getting drunk in clubs, spreading her legs for any Tom, Dick or Harry who comes along, and if she is impregnated, abortion is just a choice, a beautiful baby mere "unviable tissue matter." It is the devil loosed on the world.

As for the Arab Muslims, their story is instructive in understanding this. The great civilizations started not in Europe, where men lived like wolves in caves, waiting out the long winters in bearskin shawls. In the warm weather of the Middle East, the people created great empires, magnificent armies, built pyramids, devised startling architecture, made new uses of water, lit cities, devised tinctures and arithmetic formulas. They were the light of the world.

There was a reason the Romans desired Asia Minor, to give the region one of the names it has gone by before its popular appellation the Middle East, mainly a construct of Israel's creation. They did not merely attack and conquer the region as they did so many other areas. The Romans employed politics in crafting agreements with Cleopatra, Egypt, and other Arab leaders.

The Phoenicians had ruled the area. So, too, had the Persians, the first great world empire. The Greeks challenged and defeated them. Alexander the Great opened the door to the "mysterious East." When Rome overpowered Athens – albeit taking on many characteristics of republic, mythology, and religion – they considered consolidation of the region and its resources to be a central prize. It also would seem that the region was "chosen" by God as the perfect place to spread the message of His son, Jesus Christ.

Old Testament enemies

Without entering into a long religious dissertation, the Old Testament very clearly tells us the Jews were God's Chosen People. It provides story after story in which God Himself used His powers to help the Jews in battles, wars, conflicts and disputes with their neighbors, who would eventually be identified as Arabs and Muslims. God performed miracles, first and foremost the parting of the Red Sea, in which the Jews of Moses escaped Egyptian bondage, with the pursuing horsemen then swallowed up by the waters. Time after time, acts that most certainly appear to have been miraculous were performed, each time allowing the Jews to escape defeat, to attain victory, to survive.

To the non-Jew, more precisely to the enemy of the Jews, this is a disconcerting notion. What does one do with this knowledge? To conceive that there is indeed a God, that He effects the affairs of man, that He makes choices, and that He actually favors one small group of human beings over another larger group, is indeed a difficult fact to grasp if one happens to be among that other group. What to do?

One can bow down, ask God for forgiveness, and with all humbleness seek truth and righteousness, which in Biblical times would have been to freely choose to take up the Jewish religion. Easier said than done. First, this is not really human nature. Second, Satan was then as he is now loosed upon the Earth, and he most assuredly was doing all in his princely power to prevent such a thing from happening in wholesale manner. But this also does not seem to have been part of God's plan. God used the Jews to form national Israel; to teach man how to eat, pray, and live. In His eternal wisdom he did not use a large segment of society. The Jewish people remained a small minority even when they reached the Promised Land.

So there were all these "others"; Canaanites, Assyrians, Egyptians, and so forth, who were apprised that indeed God had written a book and in that book He specifically stated they were not favored, and in fact might even be enemies of an eternal Lord. This is not easy to stomach. Few chose to go to their knees in acts of humility. Pride instead ruled the day.

God gave them their chance. The Jews were a small sect, considered a strange people with a strange, single God. 2,000 years ago the world was run by Europeans, who overcame their harsh winters, mastered the arts of war and politics, learned how to build ships and roads, and in the form first of the Greeks then the Romans, were now the people who called the shots. They certainly appeared favored by fate, so why not believe their polytheistic gods of myth; one for love, one for travel, one for war, the ocean, and so on?

So it was that God sent his beloved Son, of whom He was well pleased, to save the world. He chose Israel, the Promised Land and home of the Chosen People. Christ was born one of His Chosen People. The timing was instructive. Ruled by Rome, Israel was part of a mighty empire in which roads and ships were available to transport people all over the known world. Not only the rest of Asia Minor but Europe and beyond was now quite readily accessible. It was a modern empire in which scribes and historians were actively recording the glories of Rome. What better place to give birth to the Son of God, and to begin the spreading of His message to the rest of the world? Now, suddenly, the reason the Chosen People had been a small nation became apparent. Only with Christ's message was God and the world prepared to expand, to the Gentiles, and to the rest of Mankind.

When Christ defeated sin on the cross, Satan cringed; beaten, enraged. At first Christianity seemed defeated, its leader murdered, its believers in hiding, soon persecuted not only by the Jews but the Gentiles, the Romans. For the Jews, it was a disaster of monumental proportions, for Christ's rebellion against Rome had the awful consequence of their holiest temple's destruction, the break-up of their Promised Land, a 2,000-year Diaspora now their fate. Christians hid in the catacombs of the Roman Colosseum, and were fed to the lions by a devilish emperor named Nero.

Out of the ash heap of defeat, without an army, without political representation, Christianity rose to become the dominant religious ethos of Rome, standing tall long after the empire was gone, spreading to the rest of Europe, then to the New World and beyond. This was an impossibility, except that, "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." In other words, a bona fide miracle!

So, out of this, an answer for the enemies of Israel, the "others," the Canaanites and Mennonites and all the other ites of the Holy Land. Suddenly, with Israel destroyed, they no longer needed to hate the Jews, the "defeated" people of history. In its place was a new religion, an all-encompassing, inviting Christian faith telling all people of all races and ethnicities and nationalities they, too, were chosen; freedom, salvation, truth was now theirs. Halleluluh!

Many of those "Arabs" heeded the call of Paul, of Peter, of the many early disciples and apostles of Christ, who spread the message far and wide, many of their martyrdoms serving as further incentive to accept Jesus, a Pentecostal event evidence of further miracle, the Holy Spirit spread amidst, all tongues proclaiming a single faith.

But throughout all of this, Satan waited.

Not all were then or are now children of God. "Many are called, few are chosen," Christ Himself proclaimed. There were remnants, "tares." Not all believed. Not all were chosen. Satan had his fodder.

So, new religions sprang forth, and one of their motivation was to "prove" that all that had been proclaimed, in the Old Testament, the New Testament, by the prophets, the martyrs, the disciples, the apostles and the believers, was a lie. That indeed the people who were enemies of the Good Lord, who were on the other side of miracles, who lost epic Biblical battles and struggles, who were not favored by Him; were indeed favored. New stories, new myths were written, and out of the tongue of man, with Satan whispering in his ear, tall tales of victory over the Jews instead of defeats, of miracles performed not by Christ but by man-made prophets, all the while urging revenge and war against those who had the temerity to claim God's favor. Satan was again on the march.

Crusades

Islam began approximately 600 years after the death of Christ. With the Romans gone, the Jews dispersed, and Christianity centered not in Jerusalem but in Rome. Islam took over the Holy Lands. In the 11th Century, the Vatican began to feel that Jerusalem and Israel, the birthplace and also sight of Christ's death, needed to be restored to Christianity. Thus was launched a series of battles, lasting the better part of three centuries, known as the Crusades. Ultimately, the Europeans failed to conquer the Holy Lands, which remained Muslim. This did not end the war.

Emboldened by victory in defending their homeland, the Muslims invaded Europe, a strike back to do to the Christians what the Christians originally tried to do to them. The Muslims enjoyed great success, taking over much of Spain. They did not convert apostates to Islam through peaceful methods, as Christ did, but by conquest and the sword. There are places in Eastern Europe that were conquered and forced to submit to Islam, which remain Muslim to this day. Eventually, the Muslims were stopped when they attempted to spread into France. The Christians, emboldened by Charles Martels's repelling of the Muslim hordes at Tours, re-took Spain from the Moors and restored Europe to Christianity. The entire violent experience, unfortunately, allowed Satan to infiltrate peaceful Christianity, teaching them to war and forcibly convert as the Muslims did. Thus did the Spanish Inquisition become a blemish on the faith.

The Muslims retreated to their homelands, no longer on the march. After taking Constantinople, they consolidated an Islamic empire under the Ottoman Turks. Militaristic, violent, cruel and barbarous, the Ottomans ruled most of Asia Minor until World War I. Oil had been discovered under their sands. This was the fuel of the Industrial Revolution. Whoever controlled it would control the future. They calculated that Germany was the "winner" of this new mechanized world, joining forces with them in a joint effort to conquer the globe. They failed. T.S. "Lawrence of Arabia" organized an Arab uprising among the populous, all of whom hated the Turks for their vile ways. But after World War I the Arabs were, for the most part, unable to rule themselves.

Muslim-Nazi alliance

Israel, known as Palestine, became a British mandate. Egypt became the dominant sovereign nation. The old Ottoman Empire was divided into new nations. Ancient Persia was now Iran. Babylon, or Mesopotamia, was now Iraq. The British controlled most of the region, but after World War II ceded their empire to the United States. As part of the "grand bargain" between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, the British de-colonized.

The French, who did not fight in the Middle East, were given colonies, which they "ruled" harshly, engendering more Arab uprisings, which they put down using the French Foreign Legion. Their failures in the Middle East inexorably led to the loss of Syria and Algeria which, along with the loss of Indo-China, had the effect of forcing their abdication from the stage of great powers.

The name Palestine was basically a British term for a colony secured by victory in World War I. Jerusalem and Palestine had for over 600 years simply been an outpost of the Ottoman Empire, its people nameless nomads usually escaping the harshness of the Turks without settling any real roots or identity there. There were no "Palestinians." Muslim shrines were built alongside the Jewish and Christian holy sights as counterweights

The Communist Revolution in Russia displaced many Jews from the Eastern European schtetls. Desperate, they settled in British Palestine. Within 20 years, the exiled Eastern European Jews were the dominant society in Jerusalem. They owned most of the shops, had thriving businesses, were better educated than Muslims, and were the dominant employers. It was now obvious the Jews were the most successful group in Palestine. The British created a White Paper out of the Balfour Agreement advocating that Palestine be restored to its rightful people, the Jews of Israel. The Arabs rioted and hated their ancient Jewish enemies.

Just as many conveniently choose not to remind the world that the French Revolution was a genocide and "inspiration" for the Russian Revolution, Communist Red China, Fidel Castro's rise in Cuba, and the Khmer Rouge's Cambodian "killing fields," so to has it become politically incorrect to make note of the fact the Arab Muslim world was allied with Hitler's Germany.

The Muslims, hating the Jews, saw that Nazi Germany was killing them. They believed in so doing the Germans were doing "God's work." World War II began in Muslim North Africa, with the Muslims and Vichy French allied with Hitler against the British and then the Americans. Muslim factions cooperated closely with the Nazi Army. Eventually, Muslim S.S. units were formed. Delegations traveled between Germany and the Middle East creating agreements and strategic alliance between Muslims and Nazis in opposition to the Allies. The Muslims offered full cooperation in any way they could to the Holocaust. Then the Big Three (Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin) met in Tehran to further decide how to split up the world after the Allies' seemingly by then sure victory over the Nazis.

Cold War alliances

Political elements of the Arab monarchy saw the shifting winds of fortune. Choosing to protect their royal status, agreements were reached between the Arabs and the United States. The British would de-colonize and the Arabs would allow America access to its oil supplies at cheap prices. In return, the U.S. would militarily protect the region from its own people; the hordes of dispossessed Muslims who never had anything under the Turks and now hungered for what the royal families had. Tacit protection of the status quo.

The Holocaust created the sympathy and political impetus to make the Balfour Agreement and the White Paper a political reality in the form of the state of Israel, beginning in 1948. Immediately, the Arabs went to war with the Israelis, but were unsuccessful. From the beginning, the United States was Israel's biggest supporter.

The 1956 Suez Canal crisis led to the British losing their last semblance of control in the region. Egypt revolted under General Gamel Abdel Nasser, leading to general opposition among Arab nations against the U.S. and, therefore Israel. The U.S.S.R. created coalitions with Egypt, Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries. In 1967 and 1973, the Russian-backed Arab armies went to war with Israel. Both times, in miraculous fashion, the Israelis prevailed, gaining captured territory in so doing.

Terrorism

Terrorism is as old as Mankind and was effectively used as a political-military tool by the Romans, the Chinese, the Jacobin French, Russian and Chinese Communists, the Nazis, and Che Guevara, among many others. It was a well-known form of warfare in the Middle East, employed by the Ottoman Turks to savagely keep Arab peoples in line for centuries.

31 years before the United States officially recognized it for what it was, the Muslims declared a war by means of terror against the West in 1968 when Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Robert Kennedy to protest the Presidential candidate's stance on Israel.

In 1972, Yasser Arafat organized a group of murderers and cut throats called Black September, who first kidnapped then killed many members of the Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Games. Throughout the 1970s, the Muslims hi-jacked airplanes in an attempt to free jailed murderers and gain politically what was not rightfully theirs. OPEC violated the original agreement with President Franklin Roosevelt and installed an oil embargo on the West, supported by the Communist world.

In 1982 terrorists killed Marines staying in their barracks in Lebanon in support of Israel, who had the previous year bombed an Iraqi nuclear facility. Throughout the 1980s, President Reagan dealt with various acts of kidnapping and terror. In 1986 he bombed Libya in response to Muammar Gaddafi's bombing of a disco frequented by U.S. servicemen in West Berlin. In 1988, Gaddafi successfully exploded a bomb on a plane containing numerous Americans and Englishmen over Lockerbie, Scotland.

In 1979 the Iranian fundamentalists ousted the Shah and kidnapped members of the American Embassy for over a year. In 1979-80, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. President Ronald Reagan and CIA director William Casey dismantled the Church Committee restrictions placed on them by Democrats after Watergate, giving Langley its greatest victory, a wholesale defeat of Communist forces in Afghanistan effectively ending the Cold War.

In 1980, Iran and Iraq went to war for eight years, with the U.S. supporting the Iraqis. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein then invaded Kuwait in 1990. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush led a stirring victory over Iraqi forces that freed Kuwait. In the late 1990s President Bill Clinton went so far as to bomb Christian churches in Belgrade in order to secure a military victory of sorts for the Muslim minority facing "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia. He was given actionable intelligence that Osama bin Laden was in the crosshairs of a targeted drone strike by the CIA, but chose not to eliminate him for fear he might incur "collateral damage," which did not seem to enter into the equation when he ordered the bombing of Christian churches by U.S. planes illegally camouflaged by U.N. markings. He also determined that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass of destruction, stating as official policy that removal of WMD of Iraq was an American priority.

War on Terror

On September 11, 2001, Muslim jihadists flew two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan; another plane into the Pentagon; and only quick action by passengers prevented a possible fourth plane from hitting the White House. The War on Terror was on under President George W. Bush. The enemy was Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the 9/11 mastermind.

Unlike so much past history – the Revolution, Civil War, slavery, two world wars, Pearl Harbor – the War on Terror has been experienced by most living Americans. It has been debated endlessly. Its prosecution has been argued up one side and down the other. With the possible exception of Vietnam, it has been the most political, divisive, media-driven, technological, social media-blogged conflict in this nation's history.

President Bush was nine months in office. Unpopular because his election was draped in controversy over "hanging chads" in Florida resulting in his election ratified only by a five-Republican Supreme Court and a failure to win the popular vote, the war gave him the opportunity to achieve greatness. At first it appeared he did just that. His leadership in the immediate wake of 9/11 was comparable to Winston Churchill in the dark days of World War II. He orchestrated a brilliant invasion of Afghanistan, driving out the Taliban. He killed numerous Al Qaeda, but missed a rare opportunity to get bin Laden at Tora Bora. Nevertheless, bin Laden was driven into the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, rendered near meaningless. American forces won resounding victories, captured Kabul, and restored lost freedoms and even some Democracy to the backwards people of Afghanistan.

Whether the War on Terror has or ever will be "won" is still up for debate, but in some respects it was "won" in October of 2001. In many ways, what happened then is reminiscent of World War II, and very telling of the American character. After 9/11, the American way of life ground to a halt. The stock market closed, the airlines shut down, the economy tanked. This was precisely what bin Laden wanted. The terrorist mastermind knew he could never "defeat" the U.S., not in a military manner. If he managed to explode a nuclear weapon, or unleash chemical-biological toxins on a large city, killing thousands, even 1 million citizens, it would not "defeat" the Americans. Such a very large event, in fact, would have the result of coalescing the "sleeping giant," as the Japanese once learned to their horror, into a united force against them. Bin Laden instead wanted to divide the nation, using the liberal media as the North Vietnamese did. He wanted to hit us where it hurt the most, in the pocketbook, by killing our economy. In so doing he wanted Americans to live scared, afraid to go out and do the things they liked to do. He wanted to demoralize the nation, and in so doing rally the Islamic world behind his cause. He wanted international Islam to see a beaten, depressed, "Christian America," and to gain inner strength from this.

For a few weeks, he appeared to have succeeded. President Bush made some stirring speeches, and there was some tough talk, but the country was sleepwalking. But in late September, Major League Baseball began playing games again. At first it seemed a waste of time. Crowds were small. Nobody cared. But the singing of Our National Anthem, and, in particular, a new ritual, the singing of "God Bless America" during seventh inning stretches, began to energize fans. Then Barry Bonds, an unpopular and unlikely hero, broke Mark McGwire's single-season home run record, slugging 73 in a massive display of power. Fans followed avidly, caught up in this accomplishment.

Then the New York Yankees, "dead" and trailing the powerhouse Oakland A's two games to none in a best-of-five play-off series, rallied to win the fifth game at Yankee Stadium. It was unbelievable. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who had brought down organized crime using the RICO Act in the 1980s, then cleaned up the crime-ridden streets of the Big Apple in the 1990s, symbolized a city's resurgence.

The World Series featured the Arizona Diamondbacks vs. the Yankees. After losing two games in Phoenix, the Yankees won three straight at Yankee Stadium, all with dramatic, last-inning heroics that defied description. President Bush and Mayor Giuliani were cheered resoundingly. The threat of terror - nuclear, biological, anthrax –literally hung over the heads of more than 50,000 fans each night, all watched in tense suspense on TV. But the fans were ecstatic, the games filled with joy and élan. There was a sense of miracle in all of it, the belief that God might actually favor America, this feeling exemplified by the rousing renditions of "God Bless America" sung during seventh inning stretches.

Where Osama bin Laden was during this was not entirely known. He had already been driven out of his safe harbor by the first wave of American forces invading Afghanistan, pushing the Taliban out. His access to things like cable TV and satellite technology was non-existent, but he eventually heard about the World Series. No doubt, what he heard shocked him. It truly had to demoralize him.

The quintessential opposite of what he hoped to accomplish, right there in the very city he thought he had triumphed in, just a few short miles from ground zero, his enemies, the American public, flaunted life in his face. History is filled with many lessons, and many of those lessons are not learned. The philosopher George Santayana once said, "The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it."

For bin Laden, the joy of Yankee Stadium was a grim pre-cursor of his eventual demise at the hands of Navy SEALS, no less deterred from their mission than the baseball fans whose "mission" was to live life, no matter what, accomplished in October 2001. Bin Laden failed to heed Santayana's prophecy, as so many other enemies of America have. The lessons telling him he would fail were clearly available to him, yet he did not learn them.

Those lessons could have been learned by reading of World War II, when after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt ordered that Major League Baseball not shut down, but instead should be played in order to boost the morale of the public. Those lessons could have been learned by reading of the Army football team under coach Red Blaik, which in the war years 1944-45 fielded two of the greatest teams in all of college grid history. When West Point dispatched Navy, General Douglas MacArthur sent a telegram of congratulations to Coach Blaik, informing him, "We have stopped the war to celebrate your magnificent success."

In the German and Japanese High Commands, this knowledge surely was as demoralizing as news of Yankee Stadium heroics was to bin Laden. Most likely, Hitler, Tojo and bin Laden dismissed these reports, probably thinking such a thing a sign not of American strength but weakness. In so doing these men miscalculated in a way all strategists from Sun Tzu to George Patton have studied, lessons learned by the likes George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, and Rudolph Giuliani; unlearned by our enemies.

Here were two countries (Germany, Japan) engaged in Total War, in which every scrap of their respective economies was tasked to the effort. Students were pulled from schools, colleges closed, all available young men drafted into the service, food and supplies prioritized for the army. There was no time for frivolity of any kind, yet here was a country, at the time kicking their ass, while the very school producing the officers taught how to defeat them were able to delay their entrance in the fight long enough to allow them not only to play games, but to play games as well as any team ever had! This country was making movies, its economy was humming along, its industries producing for the populous, its stock market still making its citizens rich.

The lessons of World War II and the War on Terror can be found in these anecdotes, which aside from a few sports documentaries have not been given the kind of attention they deserve, yet may very well reveal the true key to American success, and hope for the future.

Based on intelligence stretching back to prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Bush knew that Saddam, who had not been driven out of office by his father when he had the chance, had used weapons of mass destruction on his own people, probably still possessed WMD, and maybe even nuclear capability. He knew Saddam had worked in association with bin Laden and there were terrorists training in Iraq. His case for going into Iraq in 2003 was not as clear cut as Afghanistan, where bin Laden's staging grounds for 9/11 had undoubtedly been located.

Republicans, with a few exceptions, strongly supported an invasion of Iraq. Democrats, with a few exceptions, strongly opposed it. The mainstream media totally opposed the invasion. Most of America's European allies and media also opposed the war, with the exception of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. A number of Eastern European nations, grateful to America for having freed them from the yoke of Communism, allied themselves with Bush. The Republicans won tremendous mid-term Congressional victories in 2002, and the American public strongly supported the war. Congress gave him approval to invade. Bush's father enjoyed 91 percent approval ratings when he won the 1991 Persian Gulf War. His son enjoyed similar approval after 9/11 and during the Afghan War, when bin Laden was driven from Tora Bora. Bush took his case to the United Nations and won approval for the war there, albeit reluctantly and with caveats. U.N. inspectors were hindered by Saddam from finding WMD, but insisted this did not prove they existed.

While the Bush Administration said they wanted to rid Saddam of WMD, they also created a legitimate laundry list of reasons for invading Iraq. These included:

  * Saddam tried to assassinate President Bush's father.

  * President Bush felt his father made a mistake by not removing Saddam in 1991.

  * Saddam flouted U.N. sanctions and mandates against him for a decade.

  * Saddam violated the "no fly zone" the U.N. imposed on him.

  * Saddam had associated with and shared the overall aims of Osama bin Laden.

  * Saddam supported international Islamic terror.

  * Saddam allowed terrorist training centers to operate in Iraq.

  * President Clinton's policy was that Saddam had WMD and they should be removed.

  * Saddam was a dictator who murdered over 100,000 Iraqis.

  * Saddam used WMD on his people.

  * President Bush wanted to replace despotism, totalitarianism and terrorism in the Muslim world with freedom and Democracy.

  * The Muslim terrorists felt they had achieved a "victory" in 9/11; Bush wanted to "pay them back" by teaching them a lesson.

The same media that said 100,000 soldiers would come home in body bags from the 1991 Persian Gulf War (about 150 were killed) said the same thing about the 2003 Iraq invasion. Curiously, the same media who insisted Saddam had no WMD and no chemical-biological weapons also said most of the 100,000 returning in body bags would be killed by chemical-biological weapons. Many on the Left said Bush conspired to destroy the World Trade Center in order to "justify" an invasion of the Middle East. The reasons? To make more money on oil investments, to get contracts for Halliburton, and various other lies.

In March, 2003, with America at a near-hysterical "war fever," Bush invaded. Led by General Tommy Franks, it was one of the most brilliantly conceived military operations in history. American and coalition forces drove through Iraq like a hot knife cutting through butter, then attacked a softened-by-bombing Baghdad, quickly taking the capital with minimum casualties. It was total victory, which Bush celebrated a short time later on an aircraft carrier. The former fighter pilot landed on a military jet, then still wearing a bombardier's jacket, strode with great machismo to a microphone in front of a sign reading, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED."

His political detractors hated him. He had proved them all wrong, seemingly in the manner of Whittaker Chambers being vindicated over Alger Hiss's Communism. America loved him at that moment to the tune of 90 percent approvals. He was "bullet proof."

Iraq quickly became the focus of the War on Terror. In 2003 Saddam was captured, later tried, and put to death. Over the years, most of the top Al Qaeda masterminds were found. A select few were "water boarded," resulting in their giving up essential information leading to the capture and killing of others, eventually including Osama bin Laden himself. The Left said water boarding was "torture." It is not. It is psychological manipulation, and effective at that.

President Bush achieved American war aims in Afghanistan, which was to remove the Taliban and deprive terrorists from using the country as a staging grounds and training center. However, the terrorists largely moved to the mountainous, lawless region of Pakistan near the Afghan border. They continue to operate there, but their overall effectiveness is greatly reduced. Oddly, President Barack Obama chose to use drone strikes against them and, in so doing, ended up killing more children and civilians – a major accusation he and the Left made against Bush – than Bush had done. It also brought up the hypocrisy of the Democrat complaints about water boarding and enhanced interrogations. What is more extreme or in violation of a man's "civil rights," to hold him under water for 10 seconds, play loud music near him . . . or kill him, his family and 20 or 30 innocent civilians who happen to be near by?

Bush's goal of Democracy and freedom in Afghanistan appears to veer between elusive and unattainable. Corruption is so rampant, and relations between Afghanistan/Pakistan and the U.S. under Obama have deteriorated to the point where the gains made by Bush, which by 2008 could be described as "victory," have been largely lost.

The Left cheered when Bush's "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" victory in Iraq appeared to crumble. Remnants of Saddam's army and Al Qaeda terror cells infiltrated Iraq, largely supported by neighboring Iran. The 2004 Presidential election between Bush and U.S. Senator John Kerry (D.-Massachusetts) was one of the most divisive and nasty ever waged. The American and international Left allowed themselves, as they had during Vietnam, to become cheerleaders for America's enemies. Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore made a movie called Fahrenheit 9/11 that provided tremendous aid and comfort to the terrorists, depicting Bush as an incompetent liar.

The Republican National Convention featured speaker after speaker lambasting the Democrats over their lack of patriotism. The Democrats in turn found little good to say about America and her military. Then-Senate candidate Barack Obama announced that if Kerry was elected President, Arab families in America would no longer have to cower in fear at night over suspected raids from Bush's government. It was a lie when he said it just as much as later, after Bush was re-elected, when Arab families did not need to cower in fear because Bush's government never did do what Obama said they did.

The result of all this perfidy was that Kerry's approval ratings actually went down during the DNC. Bush garnered more votes for re-election than any President in U.S. history, attaining complete validation not only of his Iraq invasion but also of his controversial 2000 election over Al Gore (winning Florida decisively). The day after he won, a conservative group placed a billboard above Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood depicting Moore and actors like Sean Penn, George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, all virulently opposed to Bush, "thanking" them for the role they played in his re-election.

From a strictly strategic point of view, Iraq was a success for President Bush, who announced he would take the war to the enemy at a "time and place of our choosing." This was an important part of the plan. Prior to 9/11, Islamic jihadists were at war with the West and had been, in one form or another, since Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy (1968) and Black September murdered most of the Israeli Olympic team (1972). This war had been waged in the Ambassador Hotel; the Munich Olympic Village; in international airports and the skies above them; at a Berlin disco; on U.S. ships and military installations; and twice at the World Trade Center (1993, 2001). In other words, it was prior to George W. Bush fought on our "home field," with associated civilian casualties being Westerners. Bush's success was to identify two places that were already hellholes – Afghanistan and Iraq – draw thousands of terrorists from other locations, forcing them to spend their money and strategize not on disparate Western targets spread throughout Europe and the U.S., but instead to gather them in these two hellholes where, now all bunched together, the U.S. military killed them in very large numbers.

That said, Iraq became a quagmire. Over the next years, more than 4,000 Americans were killed. While Iraq achieved America's war aims and increased national security, it is hard to argue that it was worth that many American lives, not to mention injuries and associated damage to families, mental health, "blood and treasure," plus myriad other factors. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, "There are 'known knowns,' " and "known unknowns," which is to say that we know about the 4,000 dead soldiers and the facts of the war, but do not know what would have happened had the U.S. left Saddam Hussein in place throughout the 2000s.

Politically, Bush was embarrassed when no weapons of mass destruction, his main criteria for going to war, were ever identified. Many speculated for a long time that they were thrown into the Tigris River; spirited to terrorist groups; or smuggled into Iran. Eventually, these theories died away. Saddam miscalculated in the most disastrous possible way. He said himself he removed all the WMD from Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but maintained the fiction he still had them in order to be seen as a "tiger" in the Arab world; to counter-balance military ambitions of neighboring enemy Iran; and in the worst mis-reading of Sun Tzu's The Art of War ever, to "irritate" the United States.

An examination of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, two avowed enemies of America, is politically revealing. If both could have been given a crystal ball and allowed to look into the future, neither would have done what they did. Bin Laden was forced from a comfortable existence in Afghanistan to live in a cave in the Pakistani mountains, unable to use modern communications; forced to make an occasional "home movie" that quickly became more of a joke than a strategy; saw all his leaders and most of his "soldiers" killed, captured or turned, with all his secrets and tradecraft revealed; had all the "holy" lands he wanted the U.S. eliminated from made into American military outposts; had his cause and the image of "Muslim warriors" completely destroyed and humiliated; had the "friendly" Sharia governments sheltering him turned out in favor of quasi-American-style Democracy; lost the War on Terror; was defeated by his arch-rival, George W. Bush; and finally was forced to live in constant fear of his life until the Navy SEALS shot him dead, only to uncover and reveal his porn stash. In other words, the very opposite of what Osama bin Laden wanted to happen is what actually happened. In this respect, George W. Bush was a clear cut winner.

In Saddam's case, President George H.W. Bush spared him death, jail and humiliation in 1991. He still had access to large sums of money and treasure. He and his two sons lived like kings and most likely could have continued to do so, but he all but invited the American invasion in a disastrous game of "chicken," like bin Laden badly mis-reading Sun Tzu. His government was bombed to smithereens; his sons killed, he had to live like a dog in "rat holes" until he was captured, humiliated and put to death. His nation is now the closest thing to a free Democracy as can be found in the Arab world; the quintessential opposite of what he wanted.

So why did bin Laden and Saddam miscalculate so badly? Most of their really belligerent activity occurred under a Democrat President, Bill Clinton. They may have believed his successor, Al Gore would win election in 2000. They also did not seem to grasp the essential difference between Democrats and Republicans. Apparently both believed that America would react to their aggressions as they had under the Democrats: passively, without consequence. They found out to their complete dismay there is indeed a profound difference between the two parties. While these differences would seem to have been well known calculations in the late 1990s and 2000s, certainly understood by most U.S. voters, apparently they did not understand these calculations well enough, to their great misfortune.

Bush suffered politically, however, because more than 4,000 brave service members died in Iraq. He did not wrap up the war in a nice, neat little bow as his father had in Kuwait. The media had a field day, reporting that 1 million Iraqi "civilians" were killed. In truth, about 50,000 to 100,000 were killed, which was still a lot of "collateral damage," but what the media failed to report is that a very large percentage of these casualties were not civilians; they were Al Qaeda, terrorists, jihadists and fighters killed in action by American forces at a "time and place of our choosing." That said, there is no denying many innocents, including women and children, suffered terribly.

In 2006, it appeared "the war is lost," to quote U.S. Senator Harry Reid (D.-Nevada). Senator Hillary Clinton (D.-New York) said any military plans of victory in Iraq required the "willing suspension of disbelief." Congressman John Murtha (D.-Pennsylvania) and Senator Dick Durbin (D.-Illinois) routinely compared American military action with the Holocaust and genocide. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D.-California) was asked straight out on national TV if she really rooted for America.

The water boarding of a limited number of suspects, the worst criminal terrorists on the planet, along with the discovery at Abu Ghraib of prisoners facing barking dogs with women's panties in their presence, was compared by Democrats to the Gestapo and the gulags. They said water boarding was torture. U.S. Navy Seals, CIA agents, fighter pilots and many top-level security personnel are water boarded as part of their training. None of them call it torture. If it was torture, America would not water board those people. The fact they are water boarded and still insist it is not torture is the most irrefutable proof that it is not torture. Democrats called it torture anyway. There is a form of psychosis in their attitude; what the writer Walter Isaacson said of Apple founder Steve Jobs, which is that some people create a "reality distortion field" convincing themselves of something even when they actually no it to be untrue.

Eventually, when Osama bin Laden was killed, the actionable intelligence from water boarding was determined to have played a major role in the effort. The New York Times unfolded a headline calling General David Petraeus, the commander in charge of the Iraq Way, "General Betray Us."

Finally, in 2007 General Petraeus prevailed when "the Surge" effectively won the war. Iraq never became the "civil war" Bush detractors said, even rooted for it to become. However, it has been a hollow victory. Certainly it never came with a signing ceremony, as with Robert E. Lee surrendering at Appomattox, or the Japanese acquiescing on the USS Missouri. Bush's vision of Democracy in Iraq looks a lot more like corruption, as it does in Afghanistan. There are still bombings and acts of violence in both countries. Outside of a brief welcoming of troops when a statue of Saddam was torn down in 2003, there have never been scenes of celebrating Iraqis cheering their American liberators as in Paris, 1944 or welcome home parades as with the return of victorious U.S. troops after the liberation of Kuwait. To the most staunch supporters of the war, even to the brave military personnel who gave their all in Iraq, the question of whether it was "worth it" to lose more than 4,000 guys is somewhere between unanswerable and no. However, in the long strategic run, as years pass, the victory in Iraq will be viewed as a major strategic achievement of the American Empire and for U.S. security/strategy.

Beyond Iraq, the war effectively scared Moammar Gaddafi into giving up his weapons programs lest he end up like Saddam (in the end his own people got him). But it strengthened, or at least emboldened, Iran. They were the main monetary supplier to the terrorists killing American soldiers and never paid a price for it. They continue to existentially threaten Israel, who after the election of President Obama lived on pins and needles, not knowing if they would be aided should a major conflict with Iran and their Arab neighbors occur in like or worse manner than the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Obama's motivations in the Middle East were very suspect. His father was a Muslim and he worshipped at an Indonesian madrassa as a child. Some even claimed he was born in Indonesia and refused to reveal his college records because it would demonstrate this, while also showing he was a Muslim, admitted as a foreign student. Others were discomfited by reports he spent $2 million to prevent his birth certificate's public viewing; his perfect pronunciation of Arabic words; his Arabic-Muslim name; his bowing down before Saudi kings and princes; his "apology tour" in which he blamed most of the world's ills on his own country; Obama's rather lukewarm pronouncement of Christian faith off-set by the fact he did not attend church and seemed more enamored by Islam; the fact his own preacher (a black liberation theologist) called for the eternal damnation of America, blamed 9/11 on the U.S. ("the chickens have come home to roost"), and had made pilgrimages to the Middle East to pay homage to Muslim dictators. Obama declared water boarding illegal, choosing instead to use drone strikes to kill people. This created a conundrum. Not only did this result in far greater "collateral; damage" of civilians than occurred under Bush, worsening America's relations with the Muslim world, it also meant that the targets who were killed might be innocent, while failure to question them via enhanced interrogations left the CIA with little further actionable intelligence. Under Obama America largely fought the War on Terror "flying blind."

Morale under Obama dropped precipitously. Soldiers were not allowed to fire unless fired on first. They were given the ludicrous orders to read "rights" to fighters and terrorists captured on the battlefield. Afghan soldiers killed many Americans. Obama apologized for it. Obama Homeland Security Director Janet Napolitano refused to call it a "war" or "terror," preferring the term "man-made disasters." Despite many brave Americans dying at the altar of Barack Hussein Obama, the newspapers stopped printing the casualties every day, lest they embarrass the Democrat as they tried to do with the Republican. Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay until he learned that what he and the Democrats opposed was the only correct way of handling battlefield detainees. His plans to try terrorists in New York City were quickly exposed as a mistake. He backed the building of a mosque in the shadow of the old World Trade Center's location, until public outcry made it impossible. Here was a man who, like his party, opposed every single American effort to achieve victory in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror, suddenly in charge of the War on Terror. Only because President Bush had effectively wrapped up the essential necessities needed to achieve success prior to his Inauguration did he avoid total disaster.

The so-called "Arab spring" of 2011-12 did not relieve conservative concern over Obama's allegiance. By 2013 it was dubbed the "Arab winter," further threatening to give back all the gains under Bush. It has certainly not impressed the Israelis. For years, Bush Administration officials questioned Egyptian leaders about liberal reforms. They were always told that while Hosni Mubarak was a "strongman," there were no alternatives; that if the people were given more freedom they would riot, that Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law would reign supreme, and that American-Egyptian, and especially Israeli-Egyptian security would be badly damaged. Despite this, President Obama oversaw the overthrow of Mubarak, a great friend of America and the closest thing to a friend of Israel as existed in the Arab world. While Mubarak and his family were dragged off to live out their lives in a cage, Obama's foreign policy experts all declared Egypt was "free" and the Muslim Brotherhood, a tacit supporter of terror and assassin of Anwar Sadat, would not come to power. The very quintessential opposite of this is what actually occurred when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in 2012. It was a virtual replay of 1979-80, when President Carter said Iran's Revolutionary Guards would usher freedom, replacing the tyrant Shah. He was as wrong then as Obama was in 2011.

Oddly, while Obama allowed a friend (Mubarak) to be thrown to the wolves, he sat on his hands while a genuine enemy, Bassar al-Hassad, was allowed to terrorize his own people, apparently without consequence. President Bush's efforts at Democracy in the Middle East may not have succeeded, while the future is still up in the air, but he certainly was ambitious and tried big things to help the Arab people. Obama has done nothing while the Muslim world burns. Many questioned whether he is an agent of Muslim dictators or even terrorists, as the actions he has taken have often appeared to benefit them.

The chaos in the Middle East overshadows a strange truth with consequences that have yet to play out. The term "united we stand, divided we fall" applies there as it does in other places. The turmoil, violence and upheaval in the Muslim world, at least for the time being, has forced the practitioners of terror to deal with their own disasters rather than plan major events in America. However, turmoil has throughout world history resulted in conflagrations. The French Revolution produced Napoleonic conquest. The German humiliation at Versailles and subsequent depression gave the world World War II. The Communist Revolution spawned the killing of more than 110 million people.

Iran remained intact. It was very curious that when Egypt exploded Obama quickly removed Mubarak, but did less than zero to help remove the "Muslim Hitler," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when his own people fomented revolution in 2009. Iran is building nuclear weapons and threatens to destroy Israel in a "second Holocaust," not to mention Western targets. Obama has remained strangely silent on the issue. It almost appeared that he favored Ahmadinejad over Israel's conservative Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the long term question of "victory" or "defeat" is still an open one. While Osama bin Laden was "beaten" when Yankee Stadium roared; when the Special Forces forced him into a cave; when elections were held and women were given freedoms; and certainly when he was shot dead only to have the SEALS expose that this supposedly devout Muslim liked his porn; he did help divide the United States in a way that does not seem to have much hope of healing.

In this respect, Islamic jihad is part of a longer, more darkly spiritual enemy faced by America, the nation representing the forces of righteousness. Each of these enemies is systematically sent into the "ash heap of history," but a pernicious cancer remains. There seems no real end in sight of actual jihad. The Wahhabi sect, the most violent, radical sect of Islam responsible for highlighting and carrying out the most violent parts of the Koran – interpreted differently and in peaceful manner by most Muslims – has been around several centuries and is not going anywhere. Even the hopeful cry that "most" Muslims are really peaceful loses resonance when, given the vote, they usually prefer to vote for fundamentalists advocating freedom to women be denied under Sharia law. The only Muslim country that can be said to come remotely close to Democracy and "freedom" is Turkey, which is the only Muslim country brought officially to their knees by Allied military victory, as with the Germans and Japanese. Still, Turkey remains a vile nation; dangerous, dirty, corrupt, and untrustworthy. The mathematics of Islamic jihad offer the most frightening reality. If only one percent of the Muslim population is violent, extremist and willing to perform acts of terror, this still leaves hundreds of thousands, maybe 1 million Muslims scattered about the globe willing to perform these acts.

Osama bin Laden succeeded in carrying on where Alger Hiss, Joseph Stalin and Ho Chi Minh all left off. They divided our country. They knew that within the United States and throughout the West are liberals elements which, for many and varied psychological reasons, are anywhere from unpatriotic to downright treasonous. The treachery from these people has become so widespread that we do not call it treason anymore, lest we would have to round up thousands of actors, journalists, college professors and fellow travelers who in years past were isolated and identified, oft-imprisoned for their enmity. Today they are honored by their fellow unimpressives with Oscars, Nobels, Pulitzers, and academic chairs.

They have always been around. There were British loyalists during the Revolution. Henry David Thoreau was essentially exiled for his opposition to the U.S.-Mexico War. "Red Emma" Goldman was imprisoned for her anarchist opposition to World War I, while both Ezra Pound and various "Tokyo Roses" broadcast enemy propaganda during World War II. But the Chamber-Hiss affair and McCarthyism created unfathomable division. Hollywood and the news media became so liberal during the Vietnam War that it became impossible to really prosecute treason. Treasonable offenses occurred constantly, whether they be college protestors hoisting North Vietnamese flags, or columnist like the San Francisco Chronicle's Art Hoppe openly writing that he had finally come around to actually rooting for the Communists to defeat the American Army. While Iva Toguri D'Aquino ("Tokyo Rose"), Goldman and Pound were jailed, Jane Fonda was awarded an Oscar and Angela Davis, who should have spent a lifetime in jail for her role in the murder of Judge Harold Haley, was instead name of the "Great American Women" by some Left-wing group. Most distressing, there were by this point a significant number of American citizens, influenced by public schools, colleges, movies, and the media, who were not shamed by such things; indeed, they agreed with it. In this is an implicit, implacable problem, because if people are wrong, and the facts of their wrongdoing are plainly presented to them, but they still do not agree they are wrong no matter what, that they cannot be shamed, then there is a cancer on society which ultimately will destroy it. It happened to the Greeks, the Romans and the British, and it was now happening in America.

This dynamic became even worse during the War on Terror. By the 2000s, everything was political; movies, music, comedy, education, social media, the Internet, cable TV, talk radio . . . While it is a valid argument to state that the death of 4,000 American soldiers was not worth the Iraq War, and that the failure to find WMD greatly diminished the value of the effort, the performance of the Left – from street protestors to actors to journalists – was so atrocious as to divide the country into near civil war. It has divided the country so greatly that if one peers far into the future, one can see certain scenarios playing out in which the United States might engage in a second "civil war." The hatred and the enmity between the Left and the Right is at a fever pitch. Perhaps one "good" thing that has come out of Vietnam and later Iraq has been the wholesale exposition of the Left for what they are, which at least allows the Right to strategize against what they are dealing with while nakedly exposing the Left.

But this falls under a kind of "victory" for the likes of the martyred Osama bin Laden, who could not defeat the U.S. from the outside, but understood that an "enemy within" can do more damage than he could from any Taliban stronghold.

The treatment of the Left towards conservatives - ranging from President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and V.P. candidate Sarah Palin – has been so over the top despicable that, in the mind of revenge-seeking conservatives, no amount of vitriol is more than the Democrats deserve. The Right despised the Clintons, but considers them veritable heroes compared with the liberals who ascended to power after them.

The media is "dead," completely destroyed by their own suicidal self-immolation. The so-called "mainstream" media consists largely of the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, MSNBC, and to a lesser extent London and Paris media, along with the Public Broadcasting System. A larger complex that includes Hollywood, the comedy tour, rock and rap music, public schools, and elite universities backs them up. This dynamic has existed for decades, written about as far back as God and Man at Yale (1951) by William F. Buckley. Much of it consolidated with the Left as a reaction to Senator McCarthy followed by a love affair with the handsome John F. Kennedy. During Vietnam and Watergate, these forces were arrayed virtually all against the Republicans, a major reason President Richard Nixon first felt the need for an "enemies list," then fell into such a paranoid "bunker mentality" that he ordered the "plumbers," Watergate, and disaster.

But by the Iraq War, conservatism fought back and the Left-wing media was in decline. Major newspapers were rapidly dying, a combination of unbridled liberalism rejected by the public, Internet access, social media, and eventually mobile media, such as phone apps. Cable television gave rise to Fox News, which ascended to the dominant position over its rivals first on cable and then even the networks. Virtually all households had cable. Internet technology made it even more easily accessible. Right-wing talk radio excoriated the Left in an endless, daily barrage of opinion and collective disputation of its assertions.

Old-style Left-leaning magazines like Newsweek and Time shriveled up. Blatantly liberal magazines like The Nation and The New Republic were now thin enough to fit in mail slots but could no longer be found on newsstands. Conservative publications such as Newsmax, Human Events, and Buckley's National Review thrived. Conservatives like the Washington Times. Rupert Murdoch's papers, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, also excelled

Publishing became partisan, the New York Times bestseller lists oft a battleground for supremacy of ideas, but Right-wing authors like Ann Coulter, Michael Savage and the more centrist Bill O'Reilly thwarted their detractors with one huge hit after another, all backed up with appearances (or their own shows) on conservative TV and radio.

Public schools took a major swing to the Left, a further trend that has been going on since the mid-1960s and offers as great a challenge to the Republican Party as any single factor. College campuses, now run by liberal elites produced by the Vietnam protest era, became inflammatory Left-wings towers, another huge challenge.

Hollywood, long a propaganda wing of the Democrats, swung so far that they effectively out-did themselves, sacrificing quality for politics. Their business has suffered greatly, not just because conservatives choose not to give them their business any more, but because the quality of their product is a shell of its glory days. Music and comedy became total tools of politics. On the Left, rock stars, foul-mouthed rappers and comics think they are doing a service to the Democrats with their vile epithets. They are not. On the Rights, country music has become the last bastion of Christianity and patriotism in the entertainment industry, while a select group of "red neck" comics offer funny lines absent the profanity.

The entertainment industry is a conundrum, something few beyond conservative radio host Michael Savage seem to understand. The Left, while not wholeheartedly embracing Islam, certainly became an apologist for it. "Talking heads" like Rosie O'Donnell routinely make the morally relative statement that Christianity – because of the Spanish Inquisition – is as abusive as Islam, not taking into account the adjustments Christianity made centuries ago that Islam has yet to make. Allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church were built up by the mainstream media as to be commonplace when in fact they are relegated to a fairly short time span - the 1960s and 1970s after Vatican II's liberalizations – by a fairly small number of priests.

But the immorality of music, comedy, movies and television have created what Savage calls a "sewer hole" which, in a strange way, is one of the major complaints Islam has with the West. This creates a very strange set of circumstances in which conservatism is the major opponent of Islamo-fascism while oddly agreeing with one of its major arguments. Savage often says Muslims turn to terror because they do not want their daughters subjected to the same social deviancies that he says are embodied by "Hollywood sluts." Neither do conservatives.

Savage seems to have hit on something quite profound. Liberals trot out a laundry list of "legitimate" complaints the Islamic world has with the West. Most of it is bogus. The Crusades are, of course, made an example of, but these occurred some 1,000 years ago and were won not by the Christians but by the Muslims. The Muslim were as aggressive as the Christians, trying to capture Europe. Charles Martel repelled them at Tours, France in 732, but they still captured Spain.

Eventually repelled from Europe, Islam existed without interference until World War I and had no legitimate complaint with the West. The Americans defeated Muslim pirates attempting to steal from their ships at Tripoli early in the 19th Century. The Wahabbis formed as a violent sect of Islam for nefarious reasons, mainly to justify their own desire to kill and spread jihad spelled out in their readings of the Koran.

But the Turks freely chose alliance with Germany in World War I, hoping to conquer the world. Arabs freely joined forces with T.E. Lawrence in rebellion against them. The 20th Century offers some "justification" for Muslim belligerence, but it is limited. The British colonized them and the French Foreign Legion fought mercenary wars with them, but the U.S. urged de-colonization, sided with Egypt during the Suez crisis, and offered no resistance to Arab nationalism, even when it was aligned with the U.S.S.R.

The sticking point, of course, is Israel, an American construct to be sure. But the U.S. did not fight with Israel in 1948, 1967 or 1973. The so-called "Palestinians" might have a point when they demand "their land" be returned to them, an argument refuted by history for the most part, but still a legitimate human rights concern. But for each act of American aggression against the Arabs, there is equal American help. It is America that has protected Arab oil fields, and it is those oil fields that provide the only real source of wealth to the Arabs. Once a great people who made most of what the world used, they have contributed little and invented less in 1,500 years.

The Arabs freely rejected Communism because of its atheism. When the Soviets conquered Afghanistan, it was the U.S. who freed them. Saddam Hussein's "complaint" with the United States was non-existent. American arms helped him fend off the Iranians in the 1980s. Bill Clinton even bombed Christians to help Muslims in Bosnia, but this "help" never engendered any thanks from the Muslims. U.S. forces stationed in his homeland during the Persian Gulf War reportedly enraged Osama bin Laden, who was from Saudi oil wealth himself. They certainly were not there on "crusade" or conquest, having been invited by the Saudis to aid the Kuwaitis against Saddam, all part of the agreement King Ibn Saud sought with President Roosevelt in 1943.

The Afghanistan and Iraq Wars offer little legitimate Arab complaint with the Americans. U.S. forces certainly do not look like Julius Caesar's or Alexander the Great's armies looked like in conquest, or even the British when they had a mandate in Palestine. There is as much political will in the U.S. alone to end their adventures there as there is . . . there.

But Michael Savage's assertion that the Muslims hate Western culture, so prevalent in a global techno-world of cable, satellites, Internet and apps, totally prevalent and unpreventable from crossing their border and influencing their children, is a legitimate concern. Images of a near-nude Jennifer Aniston suggesting what she wants done to her "slutty mouth," as in the film Horrible Bosses, offers something the Muslims tangibly despise. Conservatives find no reason to disagree.

Bush's war

The War on Terror defined President Bush's legacy. Depending on how such a thing is judged, he and General Petraeus "won" with the 2007 Surge. All the intelligence-gathering and weakening of defenses that were needed in order to kill and capture numerous Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden, were accomplished under Bush. Bin Laden himself wrote in his diary, captured by the Navy SEALs, that the war was lost, a "disaster" as he called it, in which all his leaders were killed or in custody, that new recruits could not be found, that the aim of the movement had failed. All of this was in place when Bush left office in 2009.

But Bush was unpopular. Perhaps history will ultimately compare him to President Harry Truman, who was unpopular when he left in 1953 but is seen as a key player in the decades-long battle against Communism. Bush had the opportunity to be a great President. He failed in his quest to achieve this, largely in his second term. Most of his failures are to be blamed on him. His detractors lied about him and showed themselves to be unimpressives beyond conception, but Bush still has to look at his own failings.

Bush's performance in the War on Terror was stellar, to be sure. He was a leader. He was Churchillian in the dark hours after 9/11. Nobody could argue that he did not do the right thing in Afghanistan. Iraq was a Republican war, although Democrat opposition to it was not based on any virtues. It was totally supported by a large section of the American public. The military loved him. It was executed brilliantly but foresight of sectarian violence arguably was lacking. The Surge was a victory, and it left the U.S. with a major strategic asset increasing overall national security. It certainly maintained America's oil interests, a very important point despite Leftist chants of "No blood for oil!" or "Bush lied, kids died," or Code Pink wackos confronting Donald Rumsfeld with shrieking accusations of war criminality. But if Bush were told before March 19, 2003 that over 4,000 men would be killed, he probably would not have gone ahead. The cost was too terrible a price to pay, at least in the raw here and now. In 1918 and 1945, the same might have been said of the millions who perished to give America victory in these years, as well. He, and most of his advisors, honestly felt they would take Baghdad the way they did, then hold it in secure manner while grateful Iraqis saluted them.

The Democrat Left did not foresee the terrorist incursions. Neither did the CIA. The Left mostly predicted traditional military defeats when Saddam would unleash the chemical-biological weapons they also said he did not have; the result being the oft-repeated return of soldiers in "100,000 body bags," a repeat of the wrong 1991 Kuwait forecast.

In 2002, Bush presided over huge mid-term House and Senate Republican gains, a total reversal over traditional losses by the party in the White House during first terms. In 2004, while he garnered an all-time record 62,040,610 popular votes, the GOP again swept to more significant House and Senate victories. Few Presidents in history have ever overseen such tremendous party popularity and power as Bush did.

"I have political capital and I intend to use it," he told the press corp. Entering 2005, he appeared to be a President headed towards Mt. Rushmore status, greatness his for the taking. The Democrats were a party that, unless given a lucky break, were on the verge of becoming a splinter group. For Republicans, looking back on the ensuing four years resembles the viewing of a car crash in slow motion. It hearkens back to a refrain throughout modern Republican annals, whether it be the last years of the Presidencies of Richard Nixon (1973-74), George H.W. Bush (1991-92) or his son (2006-08), in which it is said the GOP "can't stand posterity." Nobody should ever underestimate their ability to blow it at just the crucial moment.

Most supporters of the Iraq War figured Bush had been holding back, not wanting to inflame the liberal media by allowing too much collateral damage. When he bragged he now had "political capital," they thought it meant "no more Mr. Nice Guy," that the powerhouse U.S. forces would quickly clean up the insurgent terrorists and restore order to Iraq. Instead, the war became a disaster, with terrible casualties incurred by America and increasing civilian deaths suffered by the Iraqis.

By 2006, it appeared the U.S. was on the verge of something resembling "defeat." The Democrats crowed that Bush had failed, allowing their sympathies to be worn too often on their sleeves, almost rooting for the enemy to win, accusing American boys of concentration camp tactics. The media jumped in with both feet. Morale took a nose dive. Even the Republicans began asking Bush to consider pulling out. But Bush went to General Petraeus, one of the unsung American heroes of all time. He devised the Surge, and in 2007 it finally achieved the war's aims.

But by then, the casualty rates were so high it could not save Bush or his party. The die was cast, Bush a modern Caesar facing the constant Ides of March in the form of treachery from his opponents, combined with little loyalty among his "supporters."

Bush's swift, sudden lack of popularity, while understandable because it took three extra years to win in Iraq and 3,000 more casualties than were deemed acceptable, is still rather hard to fathom considering his economic performance. In this, his own lack of ability to convey his message, his party's and his White House's refusal to effectively promote their success, remains astounding in retrospect.

In 1992, his father lost to Bill Clinton amid an ordinary, predictable, cyclical recession (following almost 12 straight years of Republican economic successes) that was over by Election Day ostensibly because Clinton's campaign manager, James Carville, kept repeating the dumb mantra, "It's the economy, stupid." But Clinton's economy proved to be a false Internet "bubble," and "Dubya" inherited another recession in 2001. Then came 9/11.

There is no precedent for 9/11 when it comes to the economy. It hit the symbol of capitalism actually and physically on Wall Street, or at least a few blocks away. The economy tanked so totally and completely as to threaten to turn America into a second-rate power overnight. During this period of time, Osama bin Laden surely must have felt, whether he was on the run living in caves or not, that he had won.

Bush's economic performance over the next five years must be ranked as one of the greatest, and least credited, in U.S. annals. Looking back, one marvels at how he did it, while at the same time scratching ones' head over how something so great could happen and still not result in political victories. At first it did, the 2004 GOP sweeps, but that was based on Bush's aggressiveness against terror, keeping the country safe, and traditional values, a surprise among pollsters.

In 2005 and 2006, Bush made big mistakes, failed to defend his best ideas, and suffered terrible luck. He nominated a woman named Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, and took more heat from his supporters than his detractors. Eventually he did nominate and confirm two good choices, John Roberts and Samuel Alito, but seemingly all his goodwill was sapped away by the Miers pick and the war, which was a complete quagmire.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The political fault lay at the local level, Mayor Ray Nagin and U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu (D.-Louisiana). The same hurricane that devastated Democrat New Orleans hit the rural, Republican Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast. Those people prepared for it and organized in good order to deal with its consequences. New Orleans was like a proverbial chicken with hits head cut off. Somehow the media painted a picture of a bumbling, racist Bush who cared only for the white rural victims, not the black city dwellers. Global warming was at its absolute ascendancy as a Left-wing topic. That, too, was pinned on Bush; if not for Republican intransigence global warming would not have caused the hurricane in the first place.

Bush also chose to try and reform Social Security in 2005. It was as worthy and necessary a political effort as has been engaged in over the past 20 years, since if not reformed the system will bankrupt America by 2020. The Democrats killed Bush on the issue, the media jumped on him, and the Republicans ran for cover.

Despite these disasters, the economy under President Bush soared. In 2006 it approached one of the best economies in American history; equal to the Reagan years, exceeding the Clinton years. It was based on sound economic principles, not the Internet "bubble" of the 1990s. Bush's team completely failed to energize the media or the electorate over the issue. The war dominated the 2006 mid-terms, huge Democrat sweeps, and the first wins by the Left in over a decade.

The economy continued to grow. In October of 2007 the stock market reached its all-time high of 14,164, which has never been remotely approached since. Unemployment under President Bush was only 6.1 percent. The combination of the economy and the success of the Surge had absolutely no effect on Bush's approval ratings. Too many soldiers had been killed. The American public could not look past that. But despite all these negatives, Republican chances appeared strong in 2008.

The Democrats were sure to nominate Senator Hillary Clinton. Her negatives from her years as "Macbeth's wife" during her husband's Presidency made her a major target. Apparently her negatives were too much even for the Democrat Party, who nominated young, charismatic U.S. Senator Barack Hussein Obama (D.-Illinois) instead. It was a game changer.

Senator Obama was a mystery in more ways than one. His birth certificate was an issue. The state of Hawaii, where he was born in 1961, issued a "short form," essentially an affidavit from a state employee that he had observed the original, and therefore declared it valid. But the lack of a real birth certificate for people to actually peruse with their eyes left Obama open to conspiracy theorists. Instead of producing the real certificate, he preferred to let conservatives make accusations, which served the purpose of making them a bit out there.

Obama was elected to the Senate in Illinois in the Republican year of 2004. He faced a strong Republican opponent, Jack Ryan. But Ryan was divorced from the bombshell actress Jeri Ryan, star of the TV program Boston Public. Despite being completely illegal, this was when Obama turned to "Saul Alinsky playbook," arranging to have the Ryans' divorce records opened for public viewing. It was revealed that they had attended a sex club. That was the end of Jack Ryan. Obama cruised to victory without real opposition.

Revelations that he was friends with Weather Underground terrorists Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayers, and that his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said after 9/11 "Godd---n America," infuriated conservatives. But the Democrats voted him the nomination as if he were Thomas Jefferson.

The Republicans countered with veteran U.S. Senator John McCain and his Vice Presidential running mate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Senator McCain could not gain traction and trailed all summer, but Governor Palin totally energized the ticket, lifting them to a five-point lead in September. Ultimately, George Bush was an albatross they could not shake. Bush went against all Republican economic principles in his second term. Why? He apparently thought he could make liberals like him if he spent enough money, as big a miscalculation as is possible in American politics. The debt ballooned. The budget was enormous. After reaching its apex in 2007, by 2008 the economy was floating down spiral.

Despite all of that, the McCain-Palin ticket was sailing along until the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit. This was a program instituted by President Bill Clinton and overseen by U.S. Congressman Barney Frank, an openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts who almost two decades earlier was found to have a lover operating a homosexual brothel out of Frank's apartment. This news had the effect of making Frank a hero in the Democrat Party. Using his influence, he was given key committee assignments and oversaw the sub-prime lending of money, mostly to minorities for houses, who were unable to pay it back. In 2008 – the timing remains suspect, just before the election with maximum negative impact on the Republicans – it hit with full intensity.

George W. Bush then committed what may have been the worst error in the history of the Republican Party, or at least comparable with such disasters as Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hays and Watergate under Richard Nixon. He announced he was going against tried and true capitalistic principles, signed the first stimulus package. He was told if he did not do this, the entire economy would collapse. He signed it and the entire economy did collapse.

It was disaster for McCain-Palin. They were badly beaten and the Republicans took a terrible beating at all levels. Bush left office, not a disgraced figure, but terribly unpopular. All the good things he accomplished were left in the dust. But the worst thing he did was open the door to Socialism. By signing the first stimulus in 2008, and making his party's brand so unelectable, he not only laid the foundation for Barack Obama's election but for wholesale takeover of the country by the most liberal elements of the Democrat Party.

A few weeks into his Presidency, Obama signed a second stimulus which, in one fell swoop, was said to put the United States further into debt, an amount exceeding spending in all the combined years since Christ walked the Earth! While this statistic is difficult to verify, the point is that Obama did more damage to the American economy with one signature than all previous Presidents combined. The man to blame was George W. Bush. He paved the way for this disaster.

In 2008, Left-wing filmmaker Oliver Stone directed a scathing bio-pic of Bush called W. At the end of the film Stone invents a discussion that never occurred, in which George H.W. Bush calls his son on the carpet, telling him he "ruined" things for his younger, more qualified brother, Jeb (former Governor of Florida, considered by many to be a smarter man). Stone is responsible for some of the biggest lies in Hollywood history. Among these are the proposition that all soldiers in Vietnam committed atrocities like the My Lai massacre (Platoon); that capitalism is a "zero sum game (Wall Street), a statement that literally does not "add up" mathematically; and that Right-wing militarists assassinated John Kennedy (JFK).

Oliver Stone's Jeb Bush premise has not stopped Jeb's name from being bandied about as a possible Republican Presidential candidate in the future. While the family remains tight-lipped about such things, they probably would like nothing more than to make this still another Oliver Stone lie!

Who are the Muslims?

We must reduce terrorism, or the worst threats posed by terrorism, to its bare margins. We have the manpower, the technology, the intelligence and the will to do it. Much of what needed to be done after 9/11 has already been accomplished in short order.

The second part of the equation is the tough part. That is called "winning the hearts and minds" of our enemies. We have had more success through "failure" doing that in Vietnam than we did when we were over there. This time we face 50 or 100 years, several generations, a century of conflict for our children and their children. It appears that if there was a chance to accomplish this task sooner rather than later, it was blown.

This brings us to the great problem of addressing why so many Arabs hate us. We find this an absurd premise, given the wonderful deeds we have performed on behalf of Mankind through our history.

Let us examine Western influence in the Middle East. The Khyber Pass through Afghanistan has long been a passageway of trade. As the natural resources of the region became apparent and coveted, white soldiers were sent in to subjugate the region. Russians under Peter the Great tried, and failed. The British Raj tried in the 19th Century to take Kabul. In what Rudyard Kipling called the "Great Game," they were slaughtered.

By the time World War I came around, there was no particular reason for Arabs and Muslims to fear or respect the West. The Ottoman Empire controlled much Western territory, and exerted political, social, military and religious influence over an enormous swath of geography.

During World War I, things changed with mixed results due to the work of T.S. Lawrence. In retrospect, many Arabs look back at Lawrence with disdain, feeling that he used them as a sacrifice on the altar of English hegemony. More to the point, he used Muslims to defeat Muslims, which eventually led to the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. The English carved up the region, creating Iraq, taking over Palestine, and re-making the Middle East in their image, more or less.

For Muslims, Christians, Arabs and Middle Eastern people of all stripes, World War I concluded with mixed results. The Armenians were freed from Ottoman rule after millions had died in genocide. The Feisal family in Saudi Arabia found wealth catering to the oil demands of the West. Other regions, countries and governments did not prosper.

Then came World War II, the great, shining moment of American history. Surely, everybody must love us for what we did in Europe and in the South Pacific. Think again.

First of all, with the exception of a relatively small group of Arabs who avail themselves of an education in America and really choose to immerse themselves in our glorious history; plus whatever Arabs somehow find a place in the Middle East to learn true U.S. history (such places are very rare), the average Arab and Muslim knows little or nothing of our history. What they are taught are usually distortions and lies.
This is because they were mainly by-standers during World War II. Moroccans may have understood that they had something to gain by a U.S. victory over Germany on Vichy-French held territory, but for most of the nomadic tribesmen and simple dwellers of the nation's where Rommel, Patton and Montgomery fought in North Africa, it was just a bunch of white men trying to blow each other up.

Arabs do not have a real D-Day in which Americans liberated them from the Germans. They do not have a history of fighting by the side of their American "brothers" in a just cause, like in the Philippines. The war in their neck of the woods was about property, strategy and oil.

Surely, had Germany won the war and controlled the Middle East, Hitler would eventually have come up with an "Arab Solution." The natives of the conquered lands, considered sub-human with their dark complexions and "dirty" religion by the Aryan supermen, would have been rounded up and killed in concentration camps.

The Arabs do not seem to know this, and therefore do not understand that they, too, were saved by us. In fact, many Arabs think the Nazis were the good guys. After all, the Nazis were doing "great work" killing millions of their sworn enemies, the hated Jews. Millions of Muslims, if they even know about the Holocaust, think it was a swell idea. All for it. Too bad it had to end.

Why should they love America for beating Hitler when Hitler was killing their enemies? According to this logic, we are of course the enemy because we stopped Germany from completing what many Muslims consider to be sacred work. If it was not for us, there would not be any Jews around, much less a whole country full of them right in their backyards.

The Arabs have made bad political choices for years. Whose side were they on during the Cold War? Not the Americans. The Soviets, second (if not tied or ahead) only to Nazi Germany when it comes to killing Jews, swooped in and worked hand in hand with them for years. They played on the fears and prejudice against Jews, antagonizing them by playing the Israel card for all it was worth. They did it because the Arabs let them do it.

These are the people whose "hearts and minds" we are trying to capture. We must consider whether we can ever get them to change. The only chance is not just through acts of kindness like a new "Marshall Plan" of food and humanitarian relief, but a campaign of truth. Arab Muslim children must be taught real world history, not propaganda. Nobody has to go in and paint us as perfect, but the distortions and lies that have festered like cancer amongst these people must be replaced with real facts.

It will take years. The current generation is lost in a cloud of hate, but the West must tell the real story in a way that allows these people to make their own decisions on an informed basis. Once upon a time, before the Church Committee, the Central Intelligence Agency specialized in propaganda swaying millions enslaved behind the Iron Curtain to hear news of American Execptionalism. In this new era of social media it would seem this task would be easier now than it was then, but there does not seem any concerted effort to accomplish it. Why? Is it because there are too many liberals in high places who do not want America made to look good? This sounds absurd except there is likely some truth to it.

We must not be occupiers, but we also must insist that the lies be put to rest. During the 2003 Iraq War, American G.I.s were portrayed by the Arab media as killers. The war was viewed by many as a Pan-Arab battle against Crusaders.

"The media are playing a very dangerous game in this conflict," said Abdel Moneim Saide, director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, as quoted in the June, 2003 edition of Newsmax. "When you see the vocabulary and the images used, it is actually bringing everybody to the worst nightmare - the clash of civilizations."

Gory images of bandaged victims dominated Arab coverage, creating the impression of a civilian carnage when in fact the U.S. prosecuted the war with the least possible amount of collateral damage. Arab newspapers wrote that soldiers deliberately killed civilians, and called George Bush "Shaytan," Arabic for Satan. He was routinely featured in war coverage wearing a Nazi uniform (ironic since the Arabs were happy to see Hitler kill Jews), and called the Iraq War, when the civilian death toll was only around 1,000, an "American Holocaust." Untrue stories of American bombs destroying "baby milk factories" that in fact were disguised munitions depots were routinely spread. The Arab street indeed was inflamed by this kind of coverage. News of Iraqi celebrations and Saddam's torture chambers were muted if told at all. Lying permeates Muslim culture. It is how they shop, part and parcel of their bartering for food, clothes and other items at street bizarres.

While Muslims do appear to be the "losers of history," this question again hearkens to the words of Whittaker Chambers in 1938 when he told his wife he was leaving the "winning side" for the "losing side." Addressing the Muslim side of this equation, consider that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world; that Muslims out-number other religions; and that Muslim birth rates are far greater than those in the West. The Muslims themselves often talk of a "long game" in which they do not expect "victory" in their lifetimes, but see themselves as jihadists in a long travail of the ages.

Islamo-fascism, for lack of a better term (a very realistic political depiction of most if not all Muslim nations) remains part of larger mosaic that can be called anti-American. This encompasses a very large group and includes many things that thrive within America. Chambers was not necessarily talking about Communism, per se. Rather, implicit in this concept is the idea of America, which is much more than just 50 states stretching from Alaska to Florida. America represents something wholesome, free and traditional, yet revolutionary at the same time. In this respect, it is a picture of the life of Christ, a radical concept in which freedom and truth are gifts from God, but must be fought for whether it was Christ dying on the cross, or the American Army defending Bastogne.

As for President Bush's vision of "freedom" and "Democracy" in the Muslim world, the "Arab spring" appears to be the answer to that failed dream. For whatever reason, Muslims do not appear capable of self-rule and real freedom. There will be continued efforts to help them achieve successful, autonomous societies, but "nation building" did not work. There is no viable plan in the foreseeable future. Their obvious inferiority when compared side-by-side with Israel is further humiliation.

One other discouraging factor has not entered into the body politic as yet. Oil is the single source of real income in the Middle East. Eventually, there will come a day when the West devises real alternative energy sources that are clean and cost-efficient. When that happens is not known, but if the Arabs no longer receive oil wealth, they will implode. They have nothing else.

The dominant media culture

Socialism works. Cuba might prove that. I think it's conclusive that there have been areas where Socialism has helped to keep people at least stabilized at a certain level.

\- Comedian Chevy Chase

"Progress" is often a strange thing. "Information" and "knowledge" are supposed to make people better. In theory, average people "know" more today than they did in 1787, when the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution. They actually possess knowledge of all the events that have happened since then, which obviously those men did not then know. It has been said the great advantage the American framers had was knowledge of all history prior to their time; the lessons and failures of monarchies, of the Spanish Inquisition, of state-run religion, of despotism, the nature of man and God.

It would seem that in the 226 years since that summer, the accumulated, added knowledge of Mankind would make Mankind smarter, if not "better." Surely there have been incredible advances and discoveries. Consider the trans-continental railroad, electricity, air flight, automobiles, aqueducts, medical discoveries, radio, television, computers, and a myriad other wonderful inventions. Yet, despite this, in the 21st Century we are presented with the discomfiting notion that the more we "know," the dumber we get. Much of this can be traced to the fall of newspapers, magazines and especially books in favor of iPads, apps, tweets, texts, email, and other technological "advances."

Consider also the great American art form: movies. This is the great crucible, recognized as far back as 1920 by V.I. Lenin to be the most important form of propaganda. Both the Communists and the Nazis mastered it. It became a refined industry in the U.S., employing thousands, entertaining millions worldwide, and in the most capitalistic manner possible, expanding the economy beyond our wildest dreams. An entire great city, Los Angeles was built on it, standing today among the true metropolises of the Earth.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Hollywood reached its golden age, but since that time it has steadily deteriorated. The quality of movies in 2011-13 is so far below that of 1974-76 as to be beyond compare. The industry is now mediocre.

The odd thing of all this is that all this mediocrity supposedly is being produced by the most educated, intelligent generation of all time. The journalism schools, the film schools, the drama schools, the communications programs, the graduate business institutes; everybody goes to college today. But when the "ink-stained wretches" ran newspapers they were better. When the big screen was dominated by former Marines and roustabouts like Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen, films were larger than life, better than what is being produced today by pampered, self-indulgent stiffs who have studied acting since childhood. The directors? They used to be guys who served with George Patton, like Franklin Schaffner, who directed Patton. USC, UCLA and NYU produced a golden age of film school grads that changed Hollywood, but their influence peaked by 1980, replaced by kids with all the technical skills, but no vision. They certainly are not in touch with the audience any more and have not been for years, because they no longer live in real life! Immigrants with a dream once built businesses. Today's MBAs are clones and drones, with few exceptions.

People used to stumble upon a career in Hollywood. Today there are countless seminars, classes and books offering instruction on "formula" screenplays, studying box office hits in the belief that "copying" the three-act structure of Tootsie or The Firm will result in similar success. Acting classes are filled to the brim with plastic men and women thinking there is some "method" to attaining the talents of a Marlon Brando.

Why is Hollywood so liberal?

The past 20 or 30 years or so have been down years for the entertainment industry. Films that depict angst, religious animosity and a refutation of traditional values are all the rage, despite the fact that movies like Seabiscuit elicit laudatory commentary and big business from a public thirsty for something wholesome. Rap music has merged with punk and a hard-edged "heavy metal" sound to serve a hybrid of the counter-culture, although Christian rock and especially country and western has found itself to be the most popular, with its patriotic themes of God, country and family.

Nobody does it like Hollywood. The American film is the true art form of the 20th Century. But why is Hollywood so liberal? The answer to that question is easy and complicated. First, it is not as liberal as many people think. There are "closet conservatives" in the industry, as well as some big names who lend themselves to causes. John Wayne, Charlton Heston and Frank Capra were just three well-recognized conservatives. An organization called the Hollywood Congress of Republicans meets regularly and has a web site. There are groups of writers and producers who meet in "cells" to discuss "conservative" or family-themed scripts and projects. They wistfully talk about making "our kind of movies" with others who are considered "one of us" when they wrest control of the industry from the likes of Rob Reiner, who once said, "In my perfect world, the bad Senator will always be a Republican. When the conservatives make their movies, then they can do it their way."

Many of the "little people" in Hollywood - camera operators, stagehands, grips - are Republicans, and there are plenty among the actors, writers, directors and producers. But the industry has been taken over by Left-wing activists who have created the most stifling form of "thought police" in America today. It is the closest thing to censorship. Conservatives joke amongst themselves that in Hollywood they are members of the Republican Witness Protection Program.

The first thing to address is the new sensibilities of fame. In the "old" days, actors came from the general population. Many served in the military. Guys like Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen were in the Marines or the Army, then were "roustabouts" who fell into acting because they had the looks and happened to be discovered. John Wayne became an actor because he injured himself and lost his scholarship to play football at Southern Cal. Their success was serendipitous. They certainly had egos and worked hard to get where they got, but underneath it all was a sense that they were just fortunate to have lucked into such a niche.

Too many of today's stars are narcissistic fools, although it is not all their fault. The "fame machine" of publicists, tabloids and television has created a juxtaposed "us vs. them" world in which they feel the need to insulate themselves from the great unwashed. This, however, comes at a terrible price of guilt. The fact is that very, very few actors are really that much more talented than the thousands who fail, and they know it. There are only a limited handful of stars who were destined for greatness no matter what.

Marlon Brando and James Dean had that kind of talent. Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant had screen presence. Sir Laurence Olivier was going to be a star. But for many other actors, their success was about luck, or something else. Many slept their way to the top. It would not surprise many to know that some made deals with Satan.

Jane Fonda was beautiful and talented, but was she really that extraordinary? Without the Fonda name, would she have become a star? Alec Baldwin is a handsome son of a gun with a great voice and screen presence, which goes for George Clooney, but in reality, there are plenty of unknowns who possess those same qualities. Julia Roberts strikes many as ordinary. Barbra Streisand is a singer extraordinaire, but an actress ordinaire.

So what is the point? The point is that the current crop of actors does not emanate from the populace like Wayne, McQueen or Eastwood once did. They do not come to Hollywood on leave from military service, or on their way home from an American victory in some foreign war. High school drama departments have become de facto gay youth clubs. The first gays many ever were aware were high school drama teachers and the students in their classes.

The new Hollywood studies drama at elite universities and schools like the Actors Studio in New York, immortalized by the (Lee) "Strasberg method" which emanated from a Russian drama teacher named Constantin Stanislavski. After World War II, the second half of Stanislavski's writings was discovered, revealing that the so-called "method" propelling Brando and Dean was not what the author had intended, but the style became a fixture in the American acting scene.

When a handsome young man or gorgeous woman ascends to the top nowadays, they find their world turned inside out, with sycophants, managers, an adoring public, a fawning press, and more money than they could ever have imagined thrust onto them, seemingly overnight. Unlike athletes, who face competition from teammates and opponents, hear the boos of the crowd, and are subject to the ridicules of intemperate sportswriters, the actor is a protected species. They are not allowed to demonstrate "human" traits beyond platitudes about the rain forest, Alar on school kids' apples, or other things they know little about. Amazingly, an actress will be called before Congress to testify about the conditions of some American predicament they portrayed, as if their two weeks of preparation for the role somehow qualifies them.

Our newly inducted members of the Beautiful People's Club then have to deal with a question that nags at their innards. "Do I really deserve this?" The answer is, no more than the guy in their old acting class who did not get the break they got. That is not the answer they want to hear. Wracked by guilt over their own success, they develop a phobia for things that are earned, like national greatness, military objectives, and corporate success stories.

This does not apply to everybody. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were two of life's lottery winners who happen to have grown up together back in the day in Boston. They recognize how good they have it and refuse to play the swelled head. They are exceptions to the rule, although both are total Democrats. But the biggest liberals in Hollywood tend to be utterly condescending and imperious, with little real respect for ordinary people.

Again, this does not apply to everybody. Rob Reiner is an enormous liberal, but to his credit he studies issues, puts his money where his mouth is, and has a genuine desire to help the community. Many disagree with his politics but admire his passion. Sean Penn, Madonna and Barbra Streisand are blowhards who have no concept of reality, and there is little about their personal lives deserving of genuine respect.

Many conservatives have taken the position that actors are stupid because most of them never went to college, or even dropped out of high school, but this misses the point, too. They are not stupid. Acting is an important profession. If we closed all the movie theatres and video stores, and took away movies and TV shows, the worldwide clamor would be devastating. Folks need to be entertained. Entertainment also carries social importance. Certainly, Shakespeare's works are as much social commentary as entertainment. The Greeks before him used the stage to make political points, sometimes to the playwrights' physical detriment.

It was an actor, John Wilkes Booth, who felt destiny had put him in the misguided position to "save the Confederacy" by assassinating Abe Lincoln. Actors do not avoid college because they cannot get in. They are consumed by the passion to act, which spurs them to leave for Broadway or Hollywood as soon as they are out of high school, or causes them to drop out of college because a degree is not what will open doors for them. While many live in a kind of "dream world" of sex, drugs, and parties, most are intelligent. It was that intelligence and pursuit of creativity that pushed them into high school drama in the first place, where the ability to read well is essential to an actor. Acting requires perception and social empathy that are not normal traits of the dumbellionite class.

Most educated people will admit the majority of what they learned came from independent study and reading for pleasure in the post-college years, anyway. Working actors read many scripts that enlighten them to a myriad of issues. The really successful ones can employ advisors, and have plenty of time to read newspapers, magazines, and bone up on issues.

Some of the most liberal actors are great at what they do. Tim Robbins is so far to the Left that he is almost a Communist. He does not look the part. He is tall, athletic and good-looking, and lands roles that portray him as business executives. His parents were folk singers, which may or may not explain why he arrived at an egalitarian worldview that gives no credence to America's role as peacekeeper and savior. He just sees in this country exploitation, killing machine, corporate corruption and racism. He views people with his opinions to be the only ones capable of saving the world from us.

For these reasons, people have identified Robbins as something less than a traitor, but not much more than a hare-brained activist. It would be very easy to dismiss him and never watch his movies, except that he is responsible for some all-time favorite screen moments. He co-starred in the hilarious Bull Durham (1988), and in 1992 held together one of the greatest movies ever made, The Player. That film was directed by another Leftist of remarkable antipathy towards conservatism named Robert Altman. Altman's art cannot be denied. He had the ability to create "conversations" among numerous characters that gave his films, particularly M*A*S*H and Nashville, an entertaining, documentary feel. This emanates from the French cinema verite embodied by Jean-Luc ("I have no script") Goddard.

Alec Baldwin told Jay Leno's audience that they should go to Republican Congressman Henry Hyde's house and stone the man and his family to death because they endorsed President Clinton's Impeachment. The fact that he paid little price for this statement is extremely telling. First, any conservative who said anything remotely close to that would have been drawn and quartered. The reason for that is because conservatives are known to be intelligent, educated, serious people, so when they say something it is taken seriously. This fact is understood and accepted by conservatives. People just dismissed Baldwin as a kooky actor, which is, in a nutshell, why their dumbellionite statements never get traction. However, because they live in their little "look at me" worlds, these people have actually fooled themselves into believing they matter for something other than being a pretty or handsome popcorn mouthpiece on Saturday nights. They do not.

That is not to say they do not have a platform from which to build a case. Baldwin is not stupid. He certainly is not as stupid as his "killing Henry Hyde's family" statement would have the public believing. He has passion and cares about America, and for this he actually deserves some admiration. But where he and many of his ilk fail to get it is that their high profiles come with responsibility, at least if they plan to go public with their politics.

Baldwin may read the New York Times, but he fails to gauge the political winds. To him, a conservative Republican is an evil monster. One would have to scrape layers of insulation and adulation from Baldwin in order to get to any core understanding of people that is necessary in the political world. Baldwin thinks that conservative Republicans are racists, homophobes, heartless, baby killers, polluters, exploiters and imperialists.

Now, a Democrat like California's U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein could be sat down and rationally spoken to, and with. Senator Feinstein could see that Republicans want minorities to succeed, and might even agree that personal responsibility and a reform of old line affirmative action policies is necessary. Would Baldwin?

Senator Feinstein understands that Republicans may not endorse gay marriages, but believe gays should be allowed all the freedoms under the Constitution (just not more so). Baldwin probably could not be made to see this.

Feinstein understands that tax cuts are not "heartless," and has enough knowledge of economics to know that relieving the burden on the wealthy has the potential to spur growth. Her constituency and philosophy may differ on this, but she can see the reason in the Republican argument. Baldwin appears, from this angle at least, to be blinded by his narrower ideology.

Feinstein knows American soldiers are not gung-ho to kill children or drop napalm on farmers, but Baldwin seems pre-disposed to suspect the worst. Feinstein can listen to an argument that global warming may be a natural phenomenon, and she may produce sources to dispute it, but she is capable of reasoning the issue and understanding that it deserves further study. Baldwin is the kind of guy who is closed-minded on such things, easily dismissing Republicans as uncaring polluters, as if they breathe different air and drink different water than he does.

Dianne Feinstein knows that in American history, this country has liberated millions and relieved suffering from one corner of the globe to another. Baldwin will have none of it. He will acknowledge our righteousness in World War II. Ironically, he played Jimmy Doolittle in Pearl Harbor. Doolittle is considered one of our greatest heroes ostensibly for masterminding the dropping of bombs that caused thousands of dark-skinned civilians burn alive in their indigenous land. But to Baldwin defeating Communism, and apparently terrorism, were little more than historical blips in which liberals were unfairly painted as enemies by the Right.

The difference between a solid, respected Democrat like Senator Feinstein, and Alec Baldwin, is not just that Feinstein went to Stanford, and has immersed herself in a lifetime of knowledge, reading books, policy papers, and listening to advisors. She has dealt with the citizenry, asking for their votes, and she has worked closely with members of the political opposition, all with a common goal for America.

Baldwin was born with the gift of looks and vocal charisma. Once he hit it big (also ironically playing the patriotic Tom Clancy character Jack Ryan in The Hunt For Red October), Baldwin's life changed. He became a multi-millionaire, with gorgeous women offering fantasy sex to him. Publicists protected him. Friendly interviewers promoted him. Tabloid fans adored him. Baldwin's temper, checked in his "previous life" by the norms of societal expectation, now could explode because he was no longer part of that normal society. He was a movie star. Suddenly, his opinion on matters of policy was elevated, and he believed his own importance. His story is hardly unique.

Ronald Reagan is often cited as "just an actor," but his political education was long and arduous. He cut his political teeth during the Red Scare, and Communists in Hollywood were not just a myth to him. They were real. He knew their names and he helped the government identify them. He went on the speaking circuit for G.E., and spent years learning issues and how to deliver them. He went through a maturation process, realizing that the Democrat Party he had always identified with had left him, not the other way around. Slowly but surely, year after year, he became more politically savvy. When he finally entered the fray he was ready and never turned back.

Michael Moore is a disgruntled, angry little man. He made it big with a documentary about the Detroit automobile business. His premise was, essentially, that it was not fair for big corporations to make profits, and if they did not they should not be allowed to fire employees even if they could not afford to keep them on. It was Communist sophistry.

He made another documentary about guns that the fact-checkers discovered was filled with lies. America is a country in which legal gun owners hunt, and also protect their families with these weapons. Criminals who illegally own guns commit 99 percent of gun crime. Much of the crime that is prevented is done by legal gun owners stopping illegal gun owners from using their guns in the commission of crimes. But many criminals with illegal guns are minorities. Liberals like Michael Moore would prefer to shift the focus from this fact to the fact that most legal gun owners are white Republicans. He pointed to an isolated incident, the shooting at Columbine, as evidence that white gun owners are responsible for American crime. This is untrue, and Moore knows it. He says it anyway. Webster's has a word that describes this, and it starts with the letter "l." Michael Moore should be excoriated for writing a book (the title of which describes him) called Stupid White Males just as much as somebody would be if they wrote a book called Dumbass Negroes.

Most conservatives put their politics aside and frequent movies starring these liberals, because they really do not pay much attention to their pedantics. However, if an actor is on the cusp, so to speak, they may make another choice. Take Julia Roberts, who said "Republican can be found in the dictionary after reptile," which is not true. She demonstrated the truism that one is better to say nothing and be thought stupid than to open their mouth and remove all doubt. After years of hype, people came to realize she is highly over-rated. She received industry recognition for a movie that few outside the industry thought much of, when she portrayed the trashy, foul-mouthed Erin Brockovich, a story about an isolated incident in the California desert in which the Pacific Gas & Electric Company inadvertently polluted the water supply of a tiny town. The implication, like Moore's work, is that big businesses are not the friends of the public, favoring tax cuts and pollution over the safety of kids. What is never mentioned in these portrayals is that companies like PG&E provide goods and valuable services desired by millions, at a fair price. They employee thousands, who fund dreams and families through the salaries and benefits derived through their success in a capitalist, free market system that is second to none in the world. They pay the taxes (plus make enormous charitable contributions) that provide the rising tide that lifts all boat in this, the greatest society ever conceived.

But Hollywood would just portray them as enemies. They cheer when they are slapped with billion-dollar lawsuits that result in job losses, higher prices, and help to grind the wheels of commerce down. Julia's average acting skills are now identified by many movie consumers who choose not to patronize her work.

Woody "Hemp Man" Harrelson is a Godsend to the Republicans. The fact that he is a Democrat discredits the Democrats more than Republican money can buy. Then there are guys like Mike Farrell and Ed Asner, who are washed up but try to stay in the public eye through political activism. Farrell is a sharp fellow who can give and take with the likes of Sean Hannity. Asner, however, is the old school liberal, still seething because the Communism he and his pals were associated with was identified for what it was. Asner has acting talent, but he has been known to vocally state that no Republicans would work on projects that he was involved. That was when he had enough clout to make such an outrageous edict stick. Unlike Farrell, Asner does not prepare himself for the interviews he conducts. Farrell at least has made the informed decision that, for instance, backing Augusto Pinochet over Salvador Allende in Chile was bad, and correlates that with invasion in the Middle East (??). Anyway, he at least knows some history. Asner just spouted nostrums about how we would get our heads handed to us in Iraq, which he said a few weeks before we destroyed Saddam. Asner eventually started doing interviews again, claiming that since Clinton was a liar, Bush must be, too. Farrell and even Asner, to their credit, went on with Hannity and stuck to their (misguided) guns. Liberals like Asner and Farrell are not unpatriotic. If they have hard feelings against America, it is more out of a hope to make America a better place. Generally, they are of the "fairness" school of political discourse, which unfortunately is the same one that prompted Robert Oppenheimer to share atomic secrets with Soviet colleagues/spies. The idea is that it is not fair for one country - America - to be as powerful and successful as it is. They do not trust America to handle its power. Asner, Farrell and their kind believe in a better society. They are not bad people. They are due respect for their passion and desire to live in a better world, and to use their influence in so doing. Just because they do not have post-graduate degrees does not make them ineligible to voice reasoned opinions.

What is beyond reasonable belief is the fascination, indeed an actual love affair, between Fidel Castro and Hollywood. Surely these celebrities are aware of the thousands he has imprisoned and killed. Castro has probably murdered roughly 1 million people. The real truth will not be known until he is toppled. This information is common knowledge, not hidden from Hollywood.

When Castro toured the U.S. in his early days, he was feted by the New York Broadway crowd, surrounded by showgirls who appeared to be his sex offerings, while sycophant producers, actors and other show folk crowded around him like a guru. That was before his murderous repressions were known. Still, he gets the star treatment. It becomes hard to say that this man, an enemy of freedom and of America, could be idolized by anybody who does not, by virtue of idolizing him, hate America. Do they hate freedom? Is that possible? The answer is more complicated, obviously. There is something psychological about the mindset of celebrity, capitalism and patriotism that cannot be explained. Perhaps money, fame and idolatry place these celebs in a place they think is above the norm, as if the usual rules of conduct and decency are for somebody else.

Hollywood has labeled Castro a "genius" and a "source of inspiration to the world." Conservative media critic Michael Medved says these accolades are "sickening." Dennis Hays, head of the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation, compares the Cuban dictator's "hold" on Hollywood to a "cult" following, not unlike that of Jim Jones and David Koresh.

Saul Landau, who won an Emmy, produced documentaries on Castro.

He "has brought a greater equality in terms of wealth distribution than I guess any country in the world today," said Landau. Many of his policies are "praiseworthy." This analogy has been used countless times, but Hitler cut down on crime and Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Steven Spielberg dined with Castro, then announced that it "was the eight most important hours of my life." Spielberg may be a liberal, but Saving Private Ryan is one of the most patriotic movies ever made. Are conservatives just closed-minded about Castro? Can Spielberg's dinner and comments be misconstrued?

Jack Nicholson spent three hours with Castro in 1998.

"He is a genius," said Nicholson. "We spoke about everything."

He is "a source of inspiration to the world," according to supermodel Naomi Campbell. "I'm so nervous and flustered because I can't believe I have met him. He said that seeing us in person was very spiritual." She met Castro with fellow model Kate Moss. Castro is a notorious ladies man who has slept with hundreds, probably thousands of women. One can only guess at a Campbell-Moss-Castro menage a trois.

"Socialism works," "explained" economist/comedian Chevy Chase. "Cuba might prove that. I think it's conclusive that there have been areas where socialism has helped to keep people at least stabilized at a certain level."

Chase's statement is as telling as any. If he, and others like him, actually believe this, then there is a sense that there is no hope. It has to speak to a commitment to a certain hope or ideal that these people want to be true so badly that they will believe it is true no matter what. When O.J. Simpson was on trial, psychologists posited that he had worked himself into a mindset in which he actually convinced himself of his own innocence. Perhaps liberals have done the same thing.

Finally, Michael Moore did a documentary in which he made the ludicrous claim that the Cuban health care system was superior to America's. Moore is a person who must convince himself of lies in order to believe what he wants. Che Guevara, the most famous "doctor" in Cuban history, used his medical skills a la Josef Mengele, to torture enemies of Socialism. This fact is a well-known one, yet if questioned about this Moore would likely deny it or question its authenticity. He probably wears Che Guevara t-shirts and cannot be made to accept such horrid truths about men and ideas he identifies with. To do so would be to turn his back on his own liberal religion.

When informing a hardcore liberal like Moore that Communism murdered more 100 million people in the 20th Century, the general reaction is to question where that figure comes from. Aside from the facts it comes from the . . . facts, forget for a second that it does and imagine that, say, "only" 30 million people can be "verified" as having been killed by the Communists, just as it is hard to truly pin down how many "innocent" Iraqis died after the 2003 invasion; a figure somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000. The Left uses the figure 1 million, which actually is a lie. As for the actual number of dead, how many were insurgents, Al Qaeda, or the Saddam Fedayeen? As for historical Communist crimes, if the Right were suddenly "wrong" and 30 million died under the Communists instead of 110 million, somehow the Left would paint this as a "victory" of some kind, an example of Right-wing "lies." This of course would place them along with their strange bedfellow brethren of the Muslim world who deny the Holocaust, which would be just as horrible of, say, "only" 5 million Jews died instead of 6 million.

"We have to understand that there are differences between a capitalist lobotomy and socialist lobotomies," explained Suzanne Ross in all seriousness. This talk of lobotomies in confluence with such twisted logic again leads to Michael Savage's not-outlandish thesis that an actual mental disorder is required for somebody to be a true believing liberal.

The strange conundrum of Moore and so many on the Left, exemplified by their admiration not just for Castro but many dictators, is that the liberalism they espouse is supposed to be about freedom, about personal choices, about an "anything goes" society in which neither they nor anybody will be judged for the immoral choices they make. For psychological reasons that defy explanation, however, they time after time find affinity with dictators and totalitarians. The only explanation for this, as evidenced by history – the French Revolution, V.I. Lenin, Pol Pot . . . Guevara and Castro – is that unchecked liberalism, often intellectuals fomenting theories in seemingly benign dilettante surroundings like Paris café society, will go all the way. Only Christian faith, which requires a man to understand that what is in his heart is being judged by a God who both rewards and punishes, is capable of harnessing the wickedness of humanity.

American media moguls like the president of CBS TV, the head of MTV and the editor of Vanity Fair called Cuba "romantic...soulful and sexy..." according to the New York Post.

Robert Redford, Spike Lee, Sidney Pollack, Oliver Stone, Woody Harrelson, Danny Glover, Ed Asner, Shirley MacLaine, Alanis Morissette, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kevin Costner ventured there like pilgrims.

Costner has been rumored to be fairly conservative by Hollywood standards, but he went there in 2001 for the premiere of his film, Thirteen Days.

"It was an experience of a lifetime to sit only a few feet away from him and watch him relive an experience he lived as a very young man," Costner said. This is at least was a reasonable statement.

Cultural critic David Horowitz called Redford's 1990 film Havana "grotesque," in its fawning of Castro. Harry Belafonte and Ted Turner promoted Castro as if he was Winston Churchill. The New York Times said of the 2002 film Fidel, "This is an exercise not in biography but in hero worship." In Cuba, Belafonte railed against his own country and his President. Hollywood wanted Bush to end the trade embargo imposed on Cuba since 1961, but Bush would not do so until Castro honored human rights, released political prisoners, and held free and fair elections; all events the world still waits for.

"It's very sad, and I wish Steven Spielberg and Danny Glover or any of these other guys would spend a little time with some of the political prisoners in jail before they make broad stroke comments about Cuba and Cuban society," former State department coordinator for Cuban affairs Dennis Hays said.

He said he hopes celebrities will "open their eyes" before they promote Castro's Cuba.

"Remember, this is a man who has killed tens of thousands of his own citizens," continued Hays. "He's killed over 30 Americans, he harbors fugitives from U.S. justice, he has supported terrorism and narco-terrorism throughout the hemisphere, causing untold thousands of other citizens' deaths." Castro's is a "ruthless dictatorship that denies people the freedom of speech, the freedom of press, the freedom of association . . . What is the problem here? Short of Saddam Hussein, it's hard to find a figure in the world that has caused more human misery than Fidel Castro."

Yet Spielberg, who produced the depiction of the German slaughter of Jews, dined with a man who slaughtered Cubans and Catholics.

"[Spielberg is] totally blind to gulags in Cuba. [During his recent visit to Cuba] he made no mention of the thousands of people who are harassed and imprisoned on a daily basis," Hays added.

"Part of the Hollywood mindset is an almost childlike fantasy to escape to fantasy world," said Medved, the author of Hollywood vs. America. "The one characteristic we connect most to really successful people in Hollywood is immaturity and that fits very well into utopian paradises of various kinds, like Cuba." Celebrities become "animated by guilt . . . One of the ways people deal with that guilt is they become revolutionaries, and Castro is perfect for them because he is an intellectual . . . [Castro] is a rich guy, he's always been a rich guy, he's from the elite like most of Hollywood."

Of Spielberg's eight most important hours of his life, Medved noted, "Not the hours when he met his wife, not the birth of his children, it was the eight hours he spent with Fidel."

"It just shows that Spielberg may be a talented filmmaker, but he hasn't got any moral brains," Horowitz, a former 1960s radical, said. "They say, 'isn't it wonderful, [Cubans] are all driving these vintage cars and they keep them running.' Well, it is not so wonderful because they are too poor to get anything else." It is a "national disgrace" that has "been going on for years and years." Castro is a "sadistic monster . . . the longest surviving dictator in the world," yet "[Hollywood] can't tell a dictator from a Democrat or a country deliberately and systemically impoverished by its leader. These people don't know anything. It's just depressing to even talk about it. They are useless idiots, if I may turn [Vladimir] Lenin's comment around."

"[Castro] has acknowledged that he personally slept with over 1,000 women . . . it would be fairly common for Castro to go through four or five women a day," said Medved. "For people who have invested a great deal of life proudly trying to see how many beautiful women you can conquer, there is a natural tendency to identify with Bill Clinton or Fidel Castro."

Robin Bronk was the executive director of the Creative Coalition, a liberal celebrity-based activist group whose founders included Ron Silver, Christopher Reeve, and Susan Sarandon.

"Celebrity activism is as old as [silent film actress] Gloria Swanson," she said.

"We live in a society here in the U.S. where celebrities are put out there as opinion leaders. Just as they have their agent and their manager and their publicists, they are expected to have their issue," which "if utilized the right way, there are a lot of spokespeople who are speaking on behalf of issues that are not necessarily the best spokespeople.

"Typically people in the arts tend to be more liberal and less conservative. I think it's the nature of that constituency."

Filmmaker Saul Landau disputed the "celebrities are just stupid" angle.

"How the hell is he duping them?" he said. "They've got two eyes, they've got two ears. Cuba is the king of all of Latin American countries. You don't have millions of homeless people in Cuba, you don't have 42 million people who don't have access to medical care." Cuba, he says, outperforms the United States "when you talk about the right to food, the right to shelter, the right to a job, the right to a retirement." This is tantamount to saying that the local Pop Warner team has a better football tradition than Notre Dame.

"I have not seen any evidence that he is a sadistic monster or a brutal dictator," he added. "People in Miami who are running their anti-Castro lobby, are, in my opinion, not representative of the Cubans in the country. Cuban human rights violations take the form of procedural violations. They involve legal and political rights rather than economic and social rights. They broke a lot of eggs" to achieve their goals. "It's very difficult coming from the U.S., to imagine a political leader with whom you could have an intelligent conversation. Well, I guess you could with Bill Clinton, but you certainly can't with the moron that is in there today" (George Bush).

Castro has a "religious aura" about him, he said. "When he comes into room, a wind follows him. He intimidates people by his very presence, he emanates, he vibrates power."

Dear Christ Almighty!

The actual Cubans who experience Castro never say anything nice about him. Desi Arnaz recounted how Communists came to his house in Cuba and burned it down because his family was successful, and that he "hates" Communism. Actor Andy Garcia is a Cuban refugee.

"Sometimes, you feel like what's really going down in Cuba is protected in a way by the American media, and it's a shame, because the truth needs to come out," Garcia told Fort Lauderdale's City Link. "People need to be aware of what's really going on down there."

Garcia's 2000 HBO movie, For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story, profiled a jazz musician who fled Cuba for America. "For me, there's no substitute for liberty and freedom. People die for that."

"People don't have a lot of information, and when they ask me about it, I tell them about the drama of exiles, the repression, the firing squads, the horror of Communism," singer Gloria Estefan, another Cuban refugee, told Exito Online in 1997. "My whole family paid a heavy price for freedom. My father not only fought in the Bay of Pigs, he volunteered to fight in Vietnam. He fought for these same freedoms. How could I forget that Fidel Castro was the person who did me so much harm?"

In 2002-03, Castro upped his crackdown on dissidents with the speedy. convictions of at least 74 nonviolent government opponents in nonpublic "kangaroo-court" proceedings. Rounded up were independent journalists and pro-Democracy activists, including reporter-photographer Omar Rodriguez Saludes, writer Raul Rivero and magazine editor Ricardo Gonzalez, who received sentences up to 27 years each.

The U.S. State Department called the actions "the most egregious act of political repression in Cuba in the last decade." Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa said that Castro's crackdown was the "natural progression of a dictatorship that has been oppressing human rights for years." The House passed a condemning resolution, 414-0, and Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and International PEN, among others, joined the chorus of condemnation.

Castro's "one hell of a guy," was Ted Turner's response.

He is "one of the most mysterious leaders in the world," said Barbara Walters (not considered a major liberal; she got her start in public relations under Bill Safire) on ABC's 20/20.

Castro relies on "the unswerving naïveté and obtuseness of the American Left, which consistently has managed to overlook what a goon he is," wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

He is "one of the Earth's wisest people," said Oliver Stone, who also made a loving documentary of Castro that was so fawning HBO could not run it. New York VIPs paid up to $6,500 to jet to Cuba with Yoko Ono to meet with Castro.

"It's especially ironic that press and publishing executives are paying an enormous premium to meet with a man who is busy jailing journalists and writers for being journalists and writers," Mickey Kaus commented.

The American liberals who seek out Fidel Castro's approval, Hollywood types, sometimes even executives like Ted Turner and other sycophants in the media, are not on the margins of society. What they say and do does matter because, as conservative talk host Rush Limbaugh pointed out, they made up what he called the "dominant media culture." This is the nexus of movies, TV, music and comedy that influenced the youth and, because it is anti-American, is welcomed internationally, allowing its poison to spread further.

There are exceptions. Actor Gary Sinise, who played Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, is an unabashed patriot, but the days of Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan, Duke Wayne and Charlton Heston are long gone.

Rambo and Reagan

It probably started with Jaws (1975), a blockbuster special effects movie. The Rocky and Star Wars blockbusters certainly created the idea of a "franchise," a winning formula. The more money films made, the more they cost to duplicate, creating a vicious cycle in which the purpose of the film was to make money, above and beyond its artistic greatness. But it was Heaven's Gate that can be blamed for the demise, and ultimate dumbing down, of the Hollywood movie industry. Michael Cimino's bloated Western cost $44 million to make and only brought in $3 million. It destroyed United Artists. It made the industry cautious beyond itself, unwilling to risk multiple millions on material not deemed a surefire hit.

When Ronald Reagan became the President, there was a brief shift to conservatism in Hollywood and the media. Hustler founder Larry Flynt flirted with Christianity, but it did not take. When his editors suggested that the Reagan mood should portend more "family friendly" fare, Flynt fired that messenger and went from sick and disgusting to even more hardcore porn. He aligned himself against the Republicans, who were asking 7-11s to keep their porn mags away from minors (a move since described by liberals as tantamount to Stalinist censorship).

John Milius's Red Dawn (1984) was not about Vietnam, but just as M*A*S*H (1970) used Korea as a stand-in for Robert Altman's protest of Vietnam, Milius's classic, coming in the middle of the Reagan glory years, used his World War III scenarios way to get even with Vietnam. So too did the Rambo series.

First Blood (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and Rambo III (1988) were schlocky, high-octane Sylvester Stallone action movies featuring a lot of violence. Stallone plays John Rambo, an ex-Special Forces super-soldier left to rot in an America that discards its heroes in the wake of the Vietnam war. First Blood featured Stallone pared off with small town cops, but the sequels featured a gung-ho Rambo returning to Vietnam to bring back POWs never let go by the North Vietnamese. They basically featured America "winning the war" via the movies.

1985 was Sylvester Stallone's big year. A conservative and a Catholic who usually played one on screen, he made two films dealing with Communism that year. They represented the new era; big budgets, blockbusters, simple story lines, avenging the past. They were not bad movies, but nobody was confusing them with Chinatown or Apocalypse Now.

Aside from First Blood Part II, Rocky IV featured Rocky Balboa fighting the Soviet automaton Drago (Dolph Lundgren) after he kills his friend Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in the ring. The film contrasts the glitz of Las Vegas and capitalism with the dreary landscape of Russia, where Rocky gets back to his roots training in the snow until the big day. Drago is pumped full of steroids and illegal substances, which might have made the "clean" American athletes look good until baseball's "steroid era" some two decades later. Against all odds, Rocky finds Drago's weak spot and pummels him. A Gorbachev character looks distraught at the PR disaster. The Russian crowd turns and chants for Rocky. Drago screams at his handler that he fights for himself, not the state. Rocky, draped in the American flag, tells the Russians he can change if they can change, portending the coming thaw of the Cold War.

Uncommon Valor (1983) was one of the first Reagan-era "America fights back" films in which the U.S. wins a victory over the North Vietnamese Communists on screen that was not won in Vietnam.

Another Vietnam backlash film, Death Before Dishonor (1987) followed in the and Rambo tradition, depicting buffed-up U.S. supermen gaining celluloid revenge against those pisspoor Commie rats.

The Hanoi Hilton (1987) was directed by the conservative filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd. The "Hilton" was the moniker given the infamous prison camp where American POW's were kept while Jane Fonda was flirting with our enemies. It depicted the fighter pilots (like John McCain) imprisoned by the North Vietnamese after being shot down during the Vietnam War. It does not carry the jingoistic, vengeful spirit of many of the earlier 'Nam fantasies, but rather a truthful account of Communist atrocities. It has developed a tremendous cult following over the years. Hamburger Hill was a decent movie about a particularly brutal Vietnam battle.

Sudden Impact (1983) again featured Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan, this time teamed with a woman who represents what many say is a conservative: a liberal whose been mugged. In this case, the artiste Jennifer Spencer (Sondra Locke) buys a gun and takes to vigilantism of a group of miscreants who previously raped and traumatized she and her little sister. Heartbreak Ridge (1986) depicted Clint leading a rag-tag Marine outfit to victory in Reagan's actual shooting war, Grenada.

There were some genuinely patriotic films of the 1980s that were also genuinely good. The Right Stuff, based on Tom Wolfe's great book about the Mercury space program, starred Ed Harris as astronaut John Glenn. Director Philip Kaufman captured Wolfe's stylized non-narrative style, infusing the film with a certain mystery in which actual events that occurred were presented in such a way as to appear almost adventurously fictionalized. A highly patriot movie, it was considered a "campaign commercial" of Glenn, at the time planning to run for the Democrat Presidential nomination against Ronald Reagan in 1984. Glenn, a true American hero who was a very moral, Christian man, lost in abysmal fashion to liberals Walter Mondale and Senator Gary Hart. This has been pointed to as the last vestige of patriotism really found in the Democrat Party. Glenn's candidacy might have reversed the course the Democrats were heading in at the time. Alas, it was not to be.

Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer in 1986, was a glamorous showcase film for the Navy. Actual Navy recruiters set up shop in theatre lobbies, signing up young hopefuls filled with visions of drinking beer while singing "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin', " making afternoon delight with Kelly McGillis, while tear-assing through the skies like a bat out off freedom.

Blaming America, rehabbing the Indians, Tarantino's world, and "you can't handle the truth"

While the 1980s did deliver some actually patriotic, fairly conservative films, there was plenty of vitriol, iconoclasm, revisionism and violence to go around There were also some liberal "mistakes," films like Patton originally intended as attacks against the military that ended up being too smart for their own good, and against the filmmakers' wishers became military anthems. While the era following Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull is considered a down time, some great talents have emerged. There have been great films.

Reds (1981) was a long, powerful story of the Communist Revolution from the eyes of John Reed, who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. It was Warren Beatty's magnum opus: writer, director, producer, star. Coming amid the Republican wave of the 1980s, it was a fairly courageous film to make, and while it faced some criticism for romanticizing Communism, it was still an epic look at history not unlike Doctor Zhivago. The film also featured Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson as playwright Eugene O'Neill, and Maureen Stapleton as "Red Emma" Goldman.

Missing (1982), starring Jack Lemmon, told a story about an American lost to the death squads of a Latin American dictatorship propped up by the Nixon/Kissinger government. The message is simple: America is as evil as Communism because we get in bed with bad guys who oppose Communism. It gives no credence to the torture rooms and gulags of Communism throughout the globe. For years the liberal media said that as many as 300,000 went "missing" under Chile's Augusto Pinochet. Apparently, according to records available after the peaceful governmental transfer of power about two decades ago, the figure is less than 3,000. Still human rights abuses, but not genocide that places Pinochet in the same boat with Stalin or Idi Amin.

In 1984 Sam Waterston starred as New York Times reporter Sidney Scheinberg in The Killing Fields. Clint Eastwood was offered the role, but turned it down. He said it was because he is a "Western WASP," not an East Coast Jew, but he probably ran from it because he is a Republican and knew that Scheinberg had been a biased Vietnam reporter and did not want to promote that. Scheinberg filed numerous reports advocating the message that the U.S. was not doing the right thing in Vietnam. The early part of the film promotes the liberal myth that it was U.S. bombs and U.S. aggression that created the situation in Cambodia. The perfidy of such a concept is mind-boggling. The U.S. did create the situation in Cambodia, because it was U.S. Democrats, led by Teddy Kennedy, who de-funded the South Vietnamese until they collapsed. Then they have the bluster to tell the world, using their powerful friends in the film industry, that the Cambodian Holocaust was not because they disarmed the forces of freedom, but because the Communists were incensed at American crimes, therefore justifying their rampages of mass murder against innocent civilians.

The actual truth is that the Communists already cleared most "innocent civilians" out of the border areas they set up as sanctuaries and staging grounds for hit-and-run raids on American forces and Vietnamese villages, so when the U.S. did bomb and invade, they were mostly killing Communist insurgents, not innocents. Most innocents were killed by the Communists.

However, like a fair number of films that liberals make, The Killing Fields ends up promoting a semi-conservative message when it gets into truthful events that cannot be portrayed any other way. Pol Pot's murder of Cambodia is undeniable. In putting it on film, it simply speaks for itself. There is little to conclude in walking out of the theatres that showed The Killing Fields beyond the simple conclusion that, "Communists killed millions of people," which is a fact that does not allow for much leeway. Leftists still try to find that leeway, however, but in the end the actions of Pol Pot in Cambodia stand as the very reason America was there in the first place: to stop it. The notion that these people did what they did only because they were pushed to do so by America does not make sense no matter how films try to color it.

The Falcon and the Snowman opened a window into Hollywood's motivations. Throughout American history, virtually all spies and traitors have been hardcore Left-wing Democrats. This film told the story of Christopher Boyce (Timothy Hutton) and Daulton Lee (Sean Penn), two Catholic altar boys who grow up Republican in conservative, patriotic Palos Verdes Estates, California, during a time and in a place that was at the heart of the Military Industrial Complex. Palos Verdes Estates was the home of many top executives with companies that made weaponry fueling the Cold War. Boyce's father (played by Pat Hingle) is a typical old school Republican; retired FBI, a security systems expert, and anti-Communist all the way. Hollywood never made a film about Alger Hiss, although they did create fictionalized characters who represented heroic intellectuals based on Hiss, befuddled ne'r-do-wells (based on Whittaker Chambers) and drunken buffoons (based on Joseph McCarthy). Aha, they said, a Republican spy! There's our movie; not the Rosenbergs, not Kim Philby, not Lauchlin Currie, not Robert Oppenheimer . . . the list of liberals and anarchist traitors is too long to list. The list of "Republican" traitors is Chris Boyce, Daulton Lee and maybe an FBI guys in the '90s.

Calling Boyce and Lee "Republicans" is a stretch, although the film certainly tries. Lee was a drug dealer whose Republican credentials seem to hinge only on the fact he is driven by the profit motive first to sell drugs, then to sell secrets to the Soviets.

The film never explores Boyce's real motivation. After dropping out of divinity school, which probably was as telling a factor as any, Boyce gets a job at a company based on TRW in Redondo Beach. Because of his father's background he is trusted enough to be given classified access to cables including CIA traffic concerning manipulation of free elections in friendly nations, such as Australia. Coming on the heels of CIA orchestration of the Allende coup in Chile it was a chance to make Richard Nixon look bad. Boyce decides to commit treason against the U.S. He arranges to sell sensitive satellite technology access to the Soviets using Lee as his courier. Eventually they are caught, at such time Lee offers as his defense, "I'm a Republican."

Good Morning, Vietnam made fun of militarists in the tradition of M*A*S*H, but was just as funny. Robin Williams plays Adrian Cronauer, a hilarious disc jockey whose incredible on-air antics delight the troops and infuriate some of the straight-up-and-down brass, depicted in the form of J.T. Walsh and Bruno Kirby as uncaring, unnuanced, Nixon-loving jerks.

Full Metal Jacket was the last Stanley Kubrick classic after 20 years of great filmmaking. It remains a film that defies easy identification, although ultimately it was probably an anti-war diatribe. Like the films of Terrence Malick, it is a psychological profile of its characters; their needs, motivations and fears. The story follows Joker Davis (Matt Modine) from Marine basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina during the heart of the Vietnam War. The recruits are depicted as the "phony tough," typical young Americans who would rather be enjoying civilian life, but out of small town patriotism enlist, and are turned into "killers" by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey basically playing himself, an actual Marine drill instructor). Every soldier, sailor and Marine who ever went through basic training recognizes the time worn scenes of the drill instructor in the face of the raw recruits, which goes a long way towards explaining its popularity and regular re-playing on TV, just as millions of veterans read Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead because of its realistic language. While Hartman's dressing downs are realistic, the film is very stylized. One head-scratching scene shows Hartman demonstrating that Lee Harvey Oswald and University of Texas serial killer Charles Whitman both learned their skills in the Marines. Is Kubrick saying that the Marines produce sharpshooters better than anybody else, that the Marines produce deranged assassins better than anyone else, or both?

Vincent d'Onofrio plays a fat dullard, Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence, who can do no right and is ridden unmercifully by Hartman, at least until it is discovered he has one true talent: the ability to shoot his M-16. Leonard is shepherded to completion of basic training by Joker, but goes over the edge when he famously announces, "I am in a world of S—T!" With a maniacal look on his face, Leonard shoots Hartman dead in the latrine, then blows his own head off.

The film then takes an abrupt turn, with Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made For Walking" introducing a scene in which Joker, his hair grown out, absent the constraints of Hartman and "the island," casually enjoys the sidewalk splendor of American-occupied South Vietnam. A smokin' hot Vietnamese hooker approaches Joker and his pal, offering to do "anything you want" for "long time." Joker, a writer for Stars and Stripes, finally gets some "trigger time" when he is assigned a dangerous story, a battle in the ancient city of Hue. In the scenes there, the characters make all kinds of goofy statements soldiers never would say. One says that they will miss the days when they are "jolly green giants, walking the Earth with guns," but someday would miss "not having anyone around that's worth shooting." Joker and a gung-ho "John Wayne type" jaw with each other nonsensically. Finally a sniper takes aim at them and a battle ensues. Afterwards, the Marines march off singing "Mickey Mouse," which it is doubtful Marines ever sang, particularly at Hue after pitched battle with a Communist sniper.

Casualties of War (1989) starred Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox. It possessed all the un-Americanism of Platoon without the qualities of great art. Soldiers are made out to look like brutes. If the filmmakers thought portraying one of the soldiers (Fox) as a good guy would somehow alleviate the central depiction of Americans as animals, they were mistaken.

Kevin Costner played the corpse, his face never shown, in the opening funeral scene from The Big Chill (1983). Later he became synonymous with baseball movies (Bull Durham, Field of Dreams), but No Way Out was his first really big role, and it was a superb one. Costner is Navy Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell, a golden boy whose star is on the rise, especially after he heroically saves a sailor from slipping overboard during a storm at sea. He returns to duty in Washington, D.C., where we see his career path has been guided by political forces, namely his friendship with Scott Pritchard (Will Patton), the ambitious, Machiavellian chief aide to Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman). Pritchard is gay, but so too is Brice. They are, in fact, gay lovers, but this is very carefully disguised and likely not picked up on by audiences until they have seen the film a few times (it is replayed regularly on TV). This is not unlike the "oysters vs. snails" metaphor in the at-first-cut scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Spartacus.

While Pritchard is an all-out homosexual who is "damned" if the Old Testament is correct, according to CIA Director Marshall (Fred Thompson), Brice swings from both sides of the plate. Aside from being married, he carries on an affair with Susan Atwell, played by the beautiful Sean Young. He pays for her expensive Georgetown lifestyle, but she is bored and falls for Farrell at a swank party. They carry on a torrid romance, but Brice gets jealous and demands to know details. An argument ensues and Brice accidentally kills Atwell. Only Farrell, by now working on Brice's staff, knows the truth.

Pritchard decides to divert the investigation from Brice by inventing a character called "Yuri," based on an unproven CIA theory about a child raised in the U.S. by Soviet moles to attain high military and political standing in the service of the U.S.S.R. The investigation shuts down the Pentagon and two witnesses, who actually saw Farrell with Susan touring a romantic trip to the Maryland shore, are brought in to identify "Yuri." Farrell must elude them, knowing he will be fingered if they identify him. Hemmed in at the pentagon, thus the film's title, No Way Out. Or so it seems.

Farrell must deal with a couple of Special Forces goons, who the politically astute ascertain had previously handled illegal and violent assignments dealing with Left-wing anarchists in El Salvador. Finally, cornered with No Way Out, Pritchard realizes his boss will be caught and sacrifices himself with a bullet through his brain. He is "Yuri." Finally comes the all-time greatest, most unforeseen twist in movie annals, Hitchcockian beyond Hitchcock: Farrell makes his way to a house in rural Virginia where several tough Europeans question him. We learn that indeed he is Yuri. He has been a Soviet spy all along! This film, along with The Manchurian Candidate (1962), has spawned numerous conspiracy theories about political figures with shadowy pasts and their "true" motivations.

Dances With Wolves (1990) was one of the most unlikely masterpieces ever. Costner, considered a pretty boy actor after such hits as Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, came up with the idea of an epic Western. Every rule of filmmaking seemed forgotten; a first-time, inexperienced director; desolate landscape creating difficult, expensive scenes; long periods in which one actor appears alone, sometimes only with animals, with no dialogue; foreign languages, sub-titles, and sensitive racial issues; plus it was a genre (the Western) considered passé in the post-John Wayne era.

Costner did not seem to be the man to make a sensitive, sympathetic story of American Indians. He was a completely Caucasian WASP heartthrob from conservative Orange County in Southern California known for making baseball movies largely because he had played ball at Cal State, Fullerton. Hollywood laughed at him. He was a man of ego who had stepped on a few toes, so everyone did not root for him.

The filming was reportedly a disaster, in particular the depiction of a buffalo stampede that was insane to even try in the first place. Somehow, like Jaws, things fell into place, the editing saved the day, the acting was superb, and the legendary musical score was so memorable it would be used to arouse emotions in future political campaigns.

Costner is a Union lieutenant named Dunbar, left almost for dead after a suicidal dash amid Confederate guns during the Civil War. A high-ranking officer believes he is "worth saving," and after recovering, the war over, Dunbar is somewhere between suicidal and delusional. He offers to be posted on the unexplored frontier, which at the time was like a Russian asking for Siberian duty. In a strange scene, the major who assigns him to a far outpost kills himself, presumably because he is delusional, thinking he is living in the Middle Ages, and references "the King" (possibly President Abraham Lincoln, recently assassinated). For purposes of the plot, however, he is the only man who knows where Dunbar is being assigned, which emphasizes the distance between the world Dunbar lives in and the one he is entering. A guide takes Dunbar to the outpost, but he, too, ends up dead when Indians scalp him, so Dunbar's whereabouts are unknown. The Army may presume him AWOL, or a deserter.

Dunbar lives on a deserted outpost, which he fixes up in fine military order. He lives only amidst a lone wolf who "dances" while coming close enough to get scraps of food from the soldier, thus the title. Finally Dunbar makes contact with local Indians. There are some scenes depicting Indians as brute savages, scalping the white man. Even the tribe Dunbar encounters has killed white settlers without provocation and kidnapped a little girl. But beyond that, they are shown to be clean, resourceful, intelligent, kind, loving, and spiritual. After initial hesitation, Dunbar becomes great friends with the tribe. Both sides want, indeed need, to learn more about each other, for they know that the future will rest on how they get along.

But the Indians understand that the future will not be kind to them. Even if Dunbar is a good man, he is an exception. The white man will come and take what they have from them. Dunbar falls in love with the little girl kidnapped at a very young age by the tribe that killed her parents, now grown up and given the name Stands With A Fist (Mary McDonnell). His army clothes become tatters, and he dons Indian shawls, in effect "going native" as he learns the language perfectly.

Eventually the American Army does arrive. This is frustrating to the audience, who wonder why Dunbar does not simply explain what happened, which to them seems perfectly understandable. From their revisionist perspective it gives off the appearance of a movie screaming at history, "Wait, we can change you."

Dunbar is treated as a deserter. The Indians are hated. Dunbar makes no effort at diplomacy and the soldiers appear uninterested in hearing what presumably would have been held out as a fascinating tale worth telling and hearing, not to mention excellent military intel. Instead, Dunbar is belligerent, acting as if the Americans are his enemies and indeed he has gone native. He is then put under the care of total idiots; leering, stupid soldiers without redeeming qualities. Racist, sadistic, mean; every pejorative describe the soldiers as all hell breaks loose, Dunbar breaks free, a battle ensues, and killing follows. This is apparently the allegory of the American West, the great tragedy that could not be avoided in this clash of civilizations.

Many conservatives found fault with Dances With Wolves, particularly Rush Limbaugh. While Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee may or may not have been exaggerated, the essential mis-treatment of the Indians, the stealing of their land, cannot be denied, but this was not Limbaugh's main bone of contention. The film lauds the Indians as moral superiors, as if their god is better than the "white man's God." They are shown as good stewards of the land, while the whites massacre buffalo senselessly. While the killing of the buffalo was on occasion a "political" act, meant to pacify or even terrorize the Indians, the fact is the whites made something of the land that the Indians did not. The notion that gold, silver, mercury, iron ore, oil, rubber, irrigation, dammed water sheds, and all other natural resources produced by the land extracted by white civilization, offers no benefit to society, and that Mankind would be better had the pristine surroundings been untouched, makes no sense whatsoever. Every person west of the Mississippi River watching Dances With Wolves watched it in a movie theatre built with all the natural resources extracted from the land. They arrived at the theatre and left the theatre in and amidst roads, cars and other inventions all built with and supported by these myriad resources. This liberal mindset, which Limbaugh found fault with, consisted of the notion that the Indians did not litter, were not wasteful, and did not cut anything down in order to live; all ludicrous suggestions that do not take into account human nature or common sense.

Indians are a favorite pet of the liberal establishment. Dances With Wolves is a fine movie. Most of them are. Nobody ever said these people are not brilliant. There is no real lie in Dances, but it does seem stylized. While the Indians are pictured as peaceful, spiritual conservers of the land, real-life Indians had every potential of being violent savages without anybody's prompting. Just ask the Mexicans who were systematically robbed by them every harvest until American mountain men with guns were recruited to provide a little security. While Indians certainly knew how to preserve the land, an act of necessity for them, they took plenty from it without replenishment. Whites stripped and mined the land, but they also came up with ingenious technologies that re-generated the land and re-planted trees.

A fair look at the clash of white-Indian civilization was in John Milius's excellent Geronimo (1993), the story of the last Apache captured and brought in, bringing to an end the Indian Wars in 1890. Gene Hackman plays the officer charged with negotiating and capturing Geronimo. It fairly shows brave Indians, a well-meaning government, circumstances that were beyond control of the ability to foresee, white settlers whose ingenuity made use of the land that was previously unheard of, and how these events brought about bad feelings in the Indian community. The film is even without demonizing either side.

Patriot Games (1992) starred Harrison Ford taking over Alec Baldwin's Jack Ryan role from The Hunt For Red October, based on Tom Clancy's conservative novels about a CIA analyst's role in winning the Cold War. Baldwin also appeared along with Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey and Jonathan Pryce in the all-time classic Glengarry Glen Ross, based on David Mamet's stage play about cutthroat salesmen. The Player was another classic tale of Hollywood intrigue starring Tim Robbins, Greta Sacchi, Fred Ward, Whoopi Goldberg, Peter Gallagher, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dean Stockwell, Sydney Pollack, Lyle Lovett, plus an incredible cast of big names playing themselves as "extras." Directed by Robert Altman, it provided one of the best inside looks at how the movie business is run, and became a primer for all writers, the universal "odd man out" of the industry who, in this case, is actually killed (D'Onofrio's David Kahane) by a scummy studio executive (Robbins as Griffin Mill). Typically, the bad guy gets away with it and lives "happily ever after" in a cautionary tale of Hollywood immorality.

Bob Roberts was Tim Robbins's first foray into political filmmaking. He draws on his family experience as traveling folk singers and fashions a story of a conservative, religious political candidate who sings songs on the campaign trail. The film itself is good stuff, well acted and produced, but the message is clear: white conservative Christians are just frauds and cannot be trusted. One watches it and wonders what a truthful depiction of Jesse Jackson would look like. Or an inside look at Joseph P. Kennedy pulling the strings in Jack's Congressional and Senate campaigns? Or the inside deals that kept Teddy Kennedy in office after Mary Jo Kopechne was killed? How about Al Sharpton and the Tawana Brawley incident? Bob Roberts is one of those movies that you just watch and shake your head.

A Few Good Men is another example of great filmmaking by a liberal, Rob Reiner. It is a marvelous film and a great screenplay by future West Wing writer/creator Aaron Sorkin. It borrows from Platoon in that it portrays the "little guy" as the hero in the military, but frankly plays on a theme - officers sacrificing enlisted men - that was going on under General "Back Jack" Pershing in World War I, and was exemplified in the French Army in Stanley Kubrick's Paths to Glory.

It was done away with in the Eisenhower years. Congress wanted to make for a more Democratic Army around 1900, so they stopped loading West Point enlistment with the heirs of old military families, opting for ordinary "sons of the land." The Ikes, Omar Bradleys and "Vinegar Joe" Stilwells resulting from this policy went a long way towards creating an officer corps bending over backwards to protect enlisted personnel. Reiner and Sorkin never served in the Army, however.

The beauty of A Few Good Men is in the character arc of Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise). His father is the former Attorney General of the United States, and in this capacity he was a civil rights hero. Caffey never lived up to his dad's high expectations, although he graduated from Harvard Law School. He is skating by in the Navy JAG corps to satisfy family tradition. Demi Moore (Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway) is a dedicated JAG lawyer who wants to do great things. Kevin Pollack (Lieutenant Sam Weinberg) is the guy who got picked on when he was a kid, now he is also a JAG lawyer. It would not be correct to call this film a comedy, but the first half for all practical purposes is.

The three of them get assigned to a case involving two "poster" Marines accused of murder at Guantanamo Bay. The Commander at Gitmo is Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson), in a role he did not win the Academy Award for, which is unbelievable. Jessup is about to be Assistant National Security Advisor, so he is very high up the Pentagon food chin.

Kaffee is a slacker who pleads his cases, and is offered a sweetheart deal by the prosecutor, Marine buddy Captain Jack Ross (played by Kevin Bacon). If the Marines plead out, the case goes away and after six months they are out of jail. The Marines are straight up and down, and say no. Demi, a so-so actress who rises to Oscar performance in a role she was born to play, takes Cruise to task. Normally a sexpot, she is not portrayed as anything but a professional officer and lawyer here, and she wears it well. There is sexual tension with Cruise, but nicely underplayed. The elephant in the corner is the "code red" that everybody knows Nicholson's Jessup ordered, but nobody can ask about. If he ordered the "code red," the boys are free, which leaves a slight fact discrepancy because a Marine died because of a hazing they administered. It is fair to ask why they are free if they were ordered, hung if not, since the actions are still the same.

Military justice protocol is significantly different from the free-for-all of regular criminal courts, and Jessup hides behind it. Galloway gets Kaffee to stage two of his character arc by committing him to the case and to getting Jessup to admit to the "code red," which Kaffee plans to do because he knows the colonel does not like "hiding" from him. The Jessup ego is too big for that. A huge obstacle must be overcome first when a Marine voice of conscience (J.T. Walsh as Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Markinson) commits an "honorable" suicide. He was their only real witness, and it sets Kaffee back into the pattern of responsibility avoidance. Pollack's Weinberg has been shuffling along with his "I have no responsibilities here whatsoever" act, but his role in the script is made clear. He tells Kaffee he wrote a paper on his famous dad in high school, and that he was a great trial lawyer. He tells him his father would plead this case out in a second. Then he tells him it does not matter what his father would do, it only matters what Kaffee does. He backs up Galloway's earlier faith in Kaffee as an attorney, and for the first time he realizes he has special talent and can win. The finale is a doozie with Nicholson's Jessup thundering away with a speech that Sorkin and Reiner must have really agonized over.

Nicholson's character represents Plato's "warrior spirit" protecting America's liberal peaceniks like . . . Reiner and Sorkin. He gives an incredible dissertation on what it takes to build a military and do the heavy lifting protecting our cherished freedoms. Reiner and Sorkin resisted the chance to demonize Nicholson's character into the tired old conservative boogieman; the racist white officer (one of the Marines is black), stupid, a war glorifier. Instead, they let Nicholson make a speech that has been memorized and made into legend by . . . conservatives and military officers. But Jessup makes a mistake and lets Kaffee lead him one step too far, admitting to the "code red" that wins the day. The twist, and the message, is in the final verdict in which the Marines are declared "not guilty" but are dishonorably discharged for "conduct unbecoming Marines." They are stricken, because the Corps is where they found their very essence. Kaffee tells them they do not need a patch to have honor, a line of pure gold. The black Marine, an actor (Wolfgang Bodison as Lance Corporal Harold Dawson) who seemed to have been discovered for this one role and then "disappeared," gives the film its intended meaning. He says their conduct was unbecoming because they were not supposed to follow an illegal "code red" order (given to them by a Southern racist Christian, Kiefer Sutherland as Lieutenant Jonathan Kendrick), against a weaker man, despite the consequences. Pollack's Weinberg, who identified with the weaker man and did not like the macho Marines, melts because he sees his childhood tormentors symbolically apologize to him. Kaffee has now earned his spurs and is no longer just Lionel Kaffee's son.

A Few Good Men is a barnburner. The Sutherland role is its most heavy-handed bias. When he is told Kaffee's father "made a lot of enemies in your neck of the woods" - Dixie - by letting "a little black girl" go to an all-white school, the subtle message is that he is a racist. Sutherland's character is further painted as a Bible thumper, the kind who have little patience for those who are not. Hollywood just brutalizes Christians. Nicholson's Jessup also sneers at Pollack's screen name, Lieutenant Weinberg, a point that probably worked more against the Sorkin/Reiner message than for it. Jessup is pointing out that Jews tend to be lawyers, while the Anglos do the fighting. The effect of the reference, however, causes people to make mental note of the fact that he is basically right.

Reiner was an "issues" liberal. He was definitely a man of conscience with good intentions. He gave of his time, energy and money for a variety of causes to better society, usually by helping disadvantaged kids or the afflicted. Hooray for him. He cannot get too much applause for that. He and Sorkin made in A Few Good Men one of the best films ever, but like Patton, Apocalypse Now, Wall Street and a few other movies, in doing such a great, and essentially realistic job, portrayed the opposite political message intended. Nicholson's famed speech in which he tells Tom Cruise's Harvard lawyer, "You can't handle the truth," that Marines live by the code of "honor, loyalty," tearing him down because he rises and sleeps under the "very blanket of freedom that I provide, then criticizes the way I provide it," perfectly describes modern liberalism. If the War on Terror was underway after 9/11, Reiner and Sorkin may not have even made this film, as it was complete justification for the way President George W. Bush handled the conflict. Ironically the bone of contention – Guantanamo – is the place Nicholson's colonel commands.

Philadelphia (1993) made Tom Hanks a great dramatic star. Prior to that, he was seen as a comedian, good for light romances. The film told the story of an attorney who dies of AIDS, and the discrimination he endures in so doing. It came at the political elevation of AIDS as a disease considered more "important," worthy of greater compassion than cancer, or Lou Gehrig's disease, or the other diseases people do not get as a result of their lifestyle. Magic Johnson's announcement that he was HIV-positive in 1991 focused the "AIDS lobby," part of a strong pro-homosexual establishment centered mainly in the Hollywood film community, to propose the notion that AIDS is not a "gay disease," but rather one that heterosexuals can get through "straight" sex. Johnson has always strongly denied that he engaged in homosexual sex, but strong rumors to the contrary have always swirled around him.

The tennis star Arthur Ashe died of AIDS but he, along with a number of others, received it via a blood transfusion during surgery at a time before doctors screened blood for the HIV virus. In the years since, AIDS has afflicted virtually no straight males. Heterosexual women have been inflicted after having sex with bi-sexual men, and of course drug users get it from sharing dirty needles.

The one puzzling area is the number of supposedly straight men who get, and spread, AIDS in Africa. This seems to be something that happens to large numbers of men in one place, but nowhere else. Some explanation is in order. Eventually it was discovered that many, many cases of "AIDS" in Africa were not AIDS, but other diseases. Health organizations and gay rights groups promoted the news that men were dying of AIDS in order to draw political attention and most importantly, money to their causes. This partially explained the "explosion" of AIDS in Africa. Other factors have still made AIDS a real problem in Africa, but drug use, malnutrition and other factors play a far bigger role than heterosexual male-female sex. While its cannot be verified that no man can receive AIDS from a women, such a thing is very rare and not the common occurrence the "gay lobby" wanted people to believe.

The film played on common stereotypes of uncaring white men, corporate indifference, greed, and general antipathy towards homosexuals. In the years since Philadelphia, homosexuals have become not just a "protected species," but a preferred class.

One of the most egregious "gay movies" was The Birdcage (1996). Robin Williams plays Armand Goldman, the owner of an outrageous drag night club in Miami's South Beach. His long-time lover Albert is the star of the show, nightly dressing up in the most glaring, flamboyant, sexually-provocative costumes. He is a complete diva. Armand had a brief heterosexual fling 20 years earlier, which produced a son named Val (Dan Futterman). Dan is a perfectly normal straight male, quite conservative actually, who falls in love and plans to marry Barbara Keeley (a young Calista Flockhart). Barbara is the daughter of U.S. Senator Kevin Keeley (Gene Hackman), a conservative Republican depicted as being very hateful toward homosexuals.

The parents must meet before the wedding, so the Senator and his wife are invited to meet Val's "parents." Val asks Armand and Albert to hide their homosexuality. Albert dresses up as a woman, Armand's "wife." The Keeleys arrive and much comic charade ensues, but eventually Armand goes off, spouting vile diatribes against Republicans, moralists, conservatives, whatever. What was actually a fairly well done Mike Nichols comedy becomes stupid.

Movies and TV shows routinely promote the idea not just that gays are "equal," but that they are in some strange way "superior." They are portrayed as cooler, hipper, wiser, more "with it." The gay character is the one who gives the most sage advice, the "best friend" whose wisdom is indispensable. They are promoted as being at least as viable an option when it comes to adopting children as straight couples. After a long battle, they are now free to openly serve in the military. Gay marriage is a huge battleground in the long "culture wars," with Hollywood using all their powers to convince the public such a thing is morally acceptable; to oppose it to be a bigot infused by "hate." Promotion of gay adoption of children is the most pernicious issue. The television program Will and Grace was a perfect example of Hollywood glorifying the gay lifestyle.

Another program, Murphy Brown, featured a single professional woman raising a child not only without a father, but without the need for one. This fit in with the ultimate agenda of feminism, which at its core was not about women's rights nearly as much as it was about lesbian women being viewed as equal (including child-rearing). The idea of gays raising children was particularly powerful to their agenda because they knew that the future of any movement, from the Spartans to the Nazis to the feminists, is with the indoctrination of the youth.

But a closer look at the gay agenda is alarming. Gay bath houses offer orgy sex for all comers, with all inherent spreading of disease. All over the world "gay parade" parades provide "in your face" demonstrations not just of happy gays in love, but pornographic depictions of the worst order. One observes these scenes and thinks of Lot's wife from Genesis, who after being ordered by God not to gaze upon Sodom does, and is turned into a pillar of salt. Bill O'Reilly once showed a particularly outrageous scene from a "gay pride" parade and openly wished God would turn them into pillars of salt on television. But the term "gay pride" is what is ultimately most disturbing. This is an open, glaring declaration that homosexuality is not a sin. Pride, as in pride and vanity, are two of the oldest, most egregious sins, listed in the Seven Deadly Sins. To be prideful is to believe that ones' chosen way of life is better than God's; that it is not necessary to obey God's commandments. God has declared throughout the Bible, with tremendous admonition from Paul and other apostles, that man is not capable of obeying God; "There is not one righteous, not even one" (Romans 3:10). Or, to use an Old Testament term, man is a "stiff necked people," the picture of national Israel being of humans in rebellion against the Lord.

This is perhaps the most tragic aspect of homosexuality, for in seeing only "condemnation" from the Christian Right, they fail to understand that every Christian freely admits to his or her sins. Getting drunk: a sin. Watching porn: a sin. Picking up a chick in a bar on Saturday night: a sin. Being disrespectful to you mother: a sin. All sins, all forgiven courtesy of Christ's grace, or to again use an Old Testament picture of Israel constantly forgiven by God despite the fact they never stopped rebelling, right up to rejection of the Messiah.

The bigger sin: being disrespectful to ones' mother, but refusing to admit it to be sin. Giving oral sex to a guy in the bathroom of a club but refusing to call it a sin. The Christian, even the morally loose, the young and the horny, the wild and the wicked, still knows he or she is being watched and judged, and in the sober light of morning must at least in some small way admit it was wrong. But when gays not only refuse to admit their way is sinful, but take it one very dangerous step further, to take pride in it, then they are truly "playing with fire," and not metaphorically.

The promotion of gays has tracked in similar lines with the promotion of blacks by the media, but advertising provides an interesting window into this issue. Gays are generally not used as figures in commercials, because the advertisers know that a majority of the public is still not convinced homosexuality to be a sinless act. Racism, on the other hand, is sinful. Therefore, while there are few gay characters in commercials, blacks are a staple. Not only are blacks de rigueur in virtually any group scene, they are often elevated beyond that. For years now, many commercials, whether for some technological gadget, investing, or many other products, feature the clueless, dingbat white being schooled by the put-upon, all-knowing, wired-to-the-nth-degree black fellow calmly explaining how it all goes down.

Think of the Michael Jordan Hanes underwear commercials. The black basketball superstar smiles bemusedly while a host of stupid white males (including Charlie Sheen) genuflect before him, smiling like retards, pulling their underwear out of their pants like schoolyard boys, and other dumb acts. In other commercials, the white man has no clue how to invest his money; his black neighbor looks on with pity, presumably willing to lift his neighbor out of the depths of ignorance via the investing vehicle thus being advertised. These are just a few of many examples. Movies often feature the wise, tough-as-nails black police chief reigning in a rogue white officer. Think of the 48 Hours and Lethal Weapon vehicles.

Two top drawer films marked 1994, but they could not have been more different. Like Patton and M*A*S*H, two 1970 movies that emphasized opposing points of views, Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction competed for audience attention, box office receipts, cultural significance, and end-of-the-year awards.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis, Forrest Gump was based on the novel by Winston Groom, a Vietnam veteran, hardcore Republican, and in recent years author of a loving tribute to President Reagan. It was set in Groom's native Alabama, where he attended college and be-friended coach Paul "Bear" Bryant. Gump (Tom Hanks) is a simple lad, not really retarded, but slow. However, he is a firm Christian, a good athlete who makes All-American playing for the Bear, and throughout his life always seems to be on the periphery of famous events (Elvis Presley, the Kennedy assassination, the Ted Offensive, Watergate, the AIDS epidemic). It was considered a fairly conservative film, but it certainly does not advocate any "good Republicans" vs. "bad Democrats."

Pulp Fiction was director Quentin Tarantino's modern paen to his hometown of Los Angeles. Based on two philosopher-hit men (John Travolta's Vincent, Samuel L. Jackson's Jules), it breaks all the standard screenplay rules of three act structure and flashbacks, tying in disparate stories of the hit men, a black gangster (Ving Rhames's Marsellus Wallace), his sexy white junkie wife (Uma Thurman's Mia), a boxer on the run (Bruce Willis's Butch), a loving couple-robbery team (Amanda Plummer, Tim Roth), with disparate characters and over the top situations including the attempted male rape of Marsellus and Butch by two "red necks," Vincent accidentally shooting the head off an informer, and Tarantino playing a white suburbanite apparently so hip and friendly to the black man he can get away with using the n-word every other sentence. The movie was wildly foul-mouthed and violent to the point of excess. Tarantino, still in his 20s, was compared to Orson Welles, a boy genius who created an entirely new paradigm, every bit as significant to his world and his art as Marty Scorsese's mob depictions.

Dumb and dumbed down in the era of the Clinton apologists

Dumb and Dumber (1994) had the effect of simply stating: "Look at us. We are what Hollywood has become. We are dumb beyond dumb, stupid beyond stupid. All we can do are fart jokes and the like. We give up."

Starring Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, normally an actor of substance, it was unbelievably . . . dumb. The sad fact is it made a lot of money. If evidence existed after a decade of Rambo and Rocky re-makes that the movie industry was a pale imitation of its 1960s-70s glory, this was it. As for re-makes, all those creative execs from all those film schools put their collective minds together and managed to produce one re-make of old 1960s and 1970s television programs after another, most of them far less funny or good or dramatic than the originals.

But this was the era of Bill Clinton. The old "Reagan movies" were in the . . . ash heap of history. No more "Vietnam revenge" action movies. The Right despised President Bill Clinton and his friends in Hollywood decided to fight back. A screenplay was written called A Murderous Campaign. Based on Clinton, it was the story of a Democrat Senator from Louisiana who has an affair with a high-priced porn star/call girl. When the girl finds out the Senator is planning the assassination of several political rivals who stand in the way of his plans to run for President, and he knows she has heard the conspiracy, she is forced to run away. The story then evolves into her hiding from the Senator's killers, hooking up with a reporter, and eventually exposing the Senator before he is elected President. Various creative executives enjoyed the pitch. Pamela Anderson's name was bandied about as the perfect porn chick, Denzel Washington as the reporter, and Gary Busey as the Democrat Senator. There was only one problem: creative execs who loved the verbal pitch when simply describing the "politician" as a "candidate" or the "Senator" all passed when they read the part in the script that identified him as an actual Democrat.

What was made was a film called The Pelican Brief (1993) in which a young woman named Darby Shaw (Julia Roberts) hears about a conspiracy in which Supreme Court Justices are being killed. She goes on the run, finds a reporter (played by Denzel Washington), and exposes the conspiracy, which is not about a Democrat who kills his rivals, but about greedy Republicans protecting a business venture being threatened by environmentalists who want to stop development of land occupied by endangered pelicans.

The film Dave was similarly forced to change in order to meet the Hollywood paradigm. The story of a Presidential look-alike (Kevin Kline as Dave Kovic/President Bill Mitchell) who fills in for the secretly deceased real thing, the original idea featured a Republican who brought his skills as a small entrepreneur to the job. Hollywood turned him into a Democrat, but kept his GOP common sense, such as when he and his partner look at the Federal budget and balance, using methods any small businessman would use. Naturally, pet liberal projects are all interjected while "Republican priorities" are given the heave-ho.

Falling Down plays on the idea of a "peace dividend," created when the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1989, leading to job losses in the weapons tech sector, mostly centered in Los Angeles (the biggest factor in Clinton's 1992 election absent Ross Perot). Michael Douglas is a caricatured Republican with a crew cut named William "D-Fens" Foster, whose license plate D-FENS conveys the Military Industrial Complex. After years of loyal service helping to "keep America safe," he has been fired. Divorced from his wife Elizabeth (Barbara Hershey), separated from his kid, he lives with his mother, but gets up every day as if still working so as not to worry her. Stuck in traffic one day he breaks down, leaves his car, and sets out by foot on a trek across the depressing L.A. landscape, his destination being the idyllic little Venice beach cottage he once lived in with his family. Along the way, he meets every sort of nefarious figure ranging from black and Latino gangbangers, neo-Nazi surplus store owner Nick (Frederick Forrest), and a rich golfer (representing the wealthy who take all the good land). Ticked off by a fast food joint that will not serve him breakfast a few minutes after the cut-off point, he goes off the deep end. He is not really violent, but each confrontation gets him deeper into trouble. He holds "hostage" a man house-sitting at a Beverly Hills mansion, then expresses shock that he was perceived as threatening to the man's family, only making him more violent. The rich golfer dies of a heart attack, so startled is he at the sight of Foster in military garb, weapons in tow.

Prendergast (Robert Duvall) is a henpecked detective on his last day on the job. He hears of Foster's escapades, puts two and two together, and figures he is heading to his wife's house. She expresses fear that he is dangerous, a clue that he has been Falling Down for some time. Foster finally reaches Venice, where he realizes the hopelessness of his situation and commits "suicide by cop" when he reaches for a supposed gun in front of drawn L.A.P.D. officers. Depressing, and also somehow Hollywood's vision of the modern white Republican!

The American President may go down in history as the single most blatant attempt to prop up a President (Clinton) as any film ever made. This re-united A Few Good Men director-writer team Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin. It was their answer to the Right's disgust with Bill Clinton's womanizing. They created a near-perfect chief executive (Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd, obviously a name meant to evoke the image of the good shepherd leading a wayward flock). A widower, he falls in love with political operative Sydney Ellen Wade, played by the attractive, very Left-wing Annette Bening. The Republicans are racists, homophobes, bigots, narrow-minded, unfair and mean; par for the course. The Democrats are hip and beautiful, the Republicans' physically repellant. President Shepherd graciously lets it all roll off his back like water off a duck's back, as opposed to Clinton, who used every mean and dirty trick up his sleeve to avenge his rivals.

Hollywood continues to break down culture, values and societal norms. Because film emanates most often from the creative minds of writers residing in L.A. (occasionally San Francisco), New York or Europe, who are usually liberal, more likely to be gay than the average citizen, and seem to encourage breaking things down more than building them up, films often have a sour taste to them. While there is nothing openly politically conservative, there is much that is a quasi-endorsement of the Democrat National Committee. When Hollywood endorses traditional values, they attempt to purport the myth that it is the Democrats who are the traditionalists. Sorkin became a de facto Democrat speechmaker, very talented, but so wrong, so in the clouds as to beyond the ken.

The American President was amazing hubris. It was a direct attempt to portray a Democrat in the White House as all that is upstanding and decent. The film actually made the ballsy effort at convincing the American public that the "Douglas Presidency" was pretty much the same as the Clinton Presidency, and that it was only a vast Right-wing conspiracy saddling the man with problems, all of which were overcome in the Hollywood version by goodness and honesty.

There was no word about dead kids on railroad tracks or White House aides who knew felonious things about first ladies who walked across the grass to shoot themselves but had no grass stains on their shoes. Stuff like that. The "Douglas President" is just perfect, his only sin being that he is a widower who dates a woman. Sorkin serves this up with full GOP indignation, as if the Republicans would care. In so doing he tries to differentiate from a man pursuing some happiness in his life with a man giving interns cigars to stuff in their orifices, jizzing all over the Oval Office, lying about it under oath, then saying that it is what the meaning of is is.

The natural extension of The American President was the TV success The Left Wing, er, The West Wing. It differed from the screen version somewhat, but attempted to do the same things. Martin Sheen plays the President (Jed Bartlett) this time. It is a very instructive show about how government works, the "inside baseball" of politics, and the pressures of the job. It occasionally semi-advocates a conservative position from a Dick Morris "New Way" slant demonstrating the need for moderation and compromise. But the show portrays idealistic Democrats who never sleep; workaholics who make Dick Nixon look like a piker. When push comes to shove, traditional liberal views on education, welfare, affirmative action and the like win the day. The Democrats are utterly dedicated to Democracy, freedom and America, and this is just not something that, in light of the Clinton era that the show shadows, possibly rings true.

The West Wing gives no credence to their party being venial, corrupt, immoral, or the other things that the Clintons laced it with. Over time, its ratings plummeted for the very reasons that people stopped watching it. Being a fan of politics, many ate it up at first, accepting its liberal bias because they chose to be entertained by the medium of film and TV. But the contrast between all these perfect Democrats saving the country and the world from bad guys and Republicans every Wednesday, with the real thing, became too much to bear. When George W. Bush became President, the show could not stand on credible legs any more.

Another "Clinton movie" was Primary Colors, based on a "novel" about Bill's 1992 Primary campaign for the Democrat nomination. It is hard to say what it was, somehow mirroring Clinton himself. It came off as smarmy, cheesy, and apologizing for Bill, portrayed in "fictitious" manner by John Travolta.

Strip Tease was typical. In it, Burt Reynolds was depicted as so many Republican politicians are depicted: stupid, immoral, greedy, corrupt . . . When the Monica Lewinsky affair hit the headlines, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt spent all his money to uncover a few Republicans who had affairs, splashing it all over his "publication." The fact Flynt was a partisan Democrat was about as beneficial to the Democrats as the fact Bill Maher is one, too.

The Cider House Rules (1999) was one of those "sweet" movies trying to put a "happy" face on the subject of abortion. American Beauty was given tremendous acclaim and, while well done, typifies Hollywood. It portrays suburban angst and ennui, then happily tells us that gung-ho Marine Colonel Frank Pitts (Chris Cooper), who rides his son unmercifully lest he turn out to be "queer," is himself a closet gay who yearns for nothing more than to blow Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey). The end.

Rob Reiner jumped on the anti-tobacco bandwagon, which is real hypocrisy. First, Hollywood always displays macho men and femme fatale women smoking cigarettes and looking cool. Tobacco has been around for centuries. It is a legal product that people want. The fact that it is bad for you is simply common knowledge, yet trial lawyers, the biggest Democrat special interest group, file nefarious multi-million dollar class action lawsuits and tort claims against tobacco companies, as if some plaintiff who smoked for 50 years before getting lung cancer was forced by the company to do so.

During the Clinton years, the Democrats jumped on this issue like there was no tomorrow, actually making government ads against legal American tobacco corporations and the tobacco industry in a move that cannot be legal, civilly and maybe Constitutionally. These ads typically showed a couple of (always) white tobacco execs plotting to poison kids, then laughing about it. Turn this ad around and direct it at anybody else and the hue and cry would be endless. These companies contribute enormous taxes and employ thousands. Many have been addicted, knew they had to quit, tried several times, but went back to it. They knew the dangers, that it was a disgusting habit. Nobody dragged their arms, they chose to do it, then chose to quit, girded their will power and accomplished this task. Period. Just like George W. Bush when he quit drinking.

Speaking of alcohol, this is worse than tobacco. It causes drunk driving deaths and has to be as unhealthy as smoking cigarettes, but it is not a target. On top of that, the real kicker is that if you go to Hollywood parties, or hang out at certain industry hot spots in Studio City, Universal City, Beverly Hills, or Santa Monica, you will find movie executives puffing on huge cigars like the one Bill Clinton asked Monica to use as a phallic. Such hypocrisy.

Russell Crowe played tobacco exec Jeffrey Wigand opposite Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) in The Insider (1999), a film that never got anywhere. The crux of the film was that Brown & Williamson, a tobacco road company with a long, venerable tradition in old Carolina, had . . . shock . . . hid the fact that cigarettes are bad for people. For decades.

Really? Bad for people?

Basically they went out and advertised their product like any other capitalist organization, in an effort to get people to buy it. People buy tobacco for the same reason as any other product. They know it is bad for them. They joke and call them "cancer sticks." Oh, but kids are being duped, they say. There is no group of individuals on Earth more acutely aware of the danger of smoking than kids. When they are six or seven they are all over this issue. These same anti-tobacco crusaders are the same ones who will argue six ways from Sunday that marijuana should be legal, too.

After Tim McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building, the Left went berserk, although their own Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) beat them back. What has emerged in the years since is that if a real bad guy looks like McVeigh, he does the "perp walk" and is displayed for the cameras. If he is black, a black Muslim, a Muslim, or some such thing, he gets the hidden suspect treatment. Arlington Road is Tim Robbins as a Right-wing wacko who plans to blow up the government. The message is that the Right in this country is dominated by white racists who think nothing of killing many, because they are Fascists. It is heavy-handed and compared with truth fails miserably. In real life, Clinton tried to blame the Oklahoma bombing on Rush Limbaugh (?).

The Hurricane featured Denzel Washington as boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a poster boy for white guilt. Convicted of triple homicide, apparently his case had holes in it. Bob Dylan sang a folk song about Carter and white liberals backed his innocence. Eventually he was released from prison. While his innocence is likely, it is not as cut-and-dried as many believe, just as cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, another favorite of the Left, most likely is guilty.

Three Kings starred the ultra-liberal George Clooney in a convoluted story of U.S. soldiers trying to get rich in war torn 1991 Iraq, possibly re-creating the theme of Clint Eastwood's 1970 film Kelly's Heroes. Kings is not a highly political story, but leaves little doubt that it views the first President Bush's war in Iraq, particularly the Kurdish uprising that he encouraged and did not back, as a cynical American lie.

The Contender (2000) was made by former West Pointer Rod Lurie, a liberal, a rarity in and of itself. It does not take a highly liberal position, but it is not conservative. The film's message is that the right's overarching investigations into Clinton's sex life were intrusive, although it does not examine the fact that his lies came under legal oath.

The V.P. dies and a woman, Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen) is nominated to replace him. A rumor circulates that while in college she was "gangbanged" by a fraternity. Some old frat boys go on the national airwaves joking that the event was known as "life in the 'sex Laine.' " She refuses to answer the allegations. Conservative Senator Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldham, who is actually conservative and later expressed dismay at script changes to make conservatives look worse than originally planned), opposes her because of her alleged youthful promiscuity. He is also in league with Senator Jack Hathaway (William Petersen) who he wants to get the nod. President Jackson Evans (Jeff Bridges) sticks by the nominee and after a few twists and turns she gets in.

In the climactic scene (probably the one Goldman objected to), President Evans fulfills ever liberal fantasy of a public rebuke of all real-life conservative figures, whether they are Rush Limbaugh, Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, or any of a dozen others. He destroys Senator Runyon in a highly public and embarrassing manner; in other words, in a way that has never actually happened. Not even Senator Joseph McCarthy or President Nixon at the end of Watergate ever took such a dressing down.

The charges are never publicly refuted, which is the film's message. She reveals privately that the "gangbang" story was false, and the moral is that politician's personal lives are not open season for the press. This resonates to an extent, but the timing of the film, in light of the Clinton scandals, makes it obvious that the purpose is to dissuade the public that Clinton's immorality is our business.

Thirteen Days re-created the Cuban Missile Crisis, upgrading the ABC TV movie The Missiles of October (1974), which all in all probability still remains the better film. Certainly William Devane's John Kennedy is better than Bruce Greenwood's, while Martin Sheen's Robert Kennedy is better than Steven Culp's.

It was obviously not a reflection of the Clinton Presidency, but this event elevated the Kennedys to virtual sainthood while painting General Curt LeMay as an advocate for nuclear Holocaust. JFK was Clinton's idol. It was a fantastic picture, like many of them, but in it is an interesting scene in which Kenny O'Donnell, played by Kevin Costner, tells a Navy plot to lie to LeMay about being shot at, because LeMay would supposedly have ordered a strike if he had been. The film paints this lie as the right thing to do because it advocates the Kennedy's position, which was to maintain level heads and a calm demeanor. However, in 1987 Ollie North was excoriated by the Left for lying about the funding of anti-Communist guerrillas, which was Reagan's position. There is also no reason for the film to advocate such a thing, but obviously the fact that if Nixon were President there likely never would have been a Cuban Missile Crisis is never stated.

While A Murderous Campaign was never made, there actually were a few "push back" films made in response to President Clinton's activities. Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power and Murder at 1600 (both 1997) did somewhat resemble A Murderous Campaign, playing on the public perception that the President (Clinton at the time) might just be a murderer. Neither of the two film Presidents bear resemblance to Clinton, and neither film takes a partisan tone, although Alan Alda in Murder at 1600 seems to be a caricatured Right-wing militarist.

Wag the Dog was straight out of the Clinton files, even more directly than Murder at 1600 and Absolute Power. The President (partially shown, but apparently not resembling Clinton physically or politically) defiles a girl scout on a White House trip and it becomes public. In real life Clinton lobbed bombs at Iraq and Bosnia to get the Monica Lewinsky story off page one. In the movie Bob Evans-type movie producer Stanley Motss (Dustin Hoffman) is asked to create fake footage of a war with Albania, in order to get the girl scout story off page one.

Bulworth (1998) was one of those unique Warren Beatty films in which the actor's stamp is found in every single aspect of the movie (not unlike Reds). It was based on Beatty's disappointment not with President Clinton's womanizing, but oddly in the fact that he adopted most of House Speaker Newt Gingrich' economic policies, resulting by 1998 in a strong economy and much success. Beatty's Senator Bulworth decides to speak only the truth, but the result is a hodge-podge of rapper lyrics and disjointed non-sense.

Hollywood goes to war and comes to Jesus

Starting in the mid-1990s, Hollywood actually made some patriotic, even Christian films. Some were made by liberals, others by the few conservative and Christians emerging in the industry. There were message movies that were by no means Right-wing, but as with A Few Good Men, perhaps by accident allowed a conservative voice to be heard. Some of the films depicted the ultimate Big Government projects: space flight and war. Perhaps there was some desire during the Clinton Presidency, when he ironically announced, "The era of Big Government is over," in which filmmakers wanted to place forth the notion that an admirable space project or war victory was comparable to welfare or food stamps, but this is probably stretching the ideology too far.

Apollo 13 (1995) was Ron Howard's excellent, patriotic re-enactment of the 1970 moon shot that went awry. The Soviets offered their assistance, but NASA said they would handle their own house, and they did. It is virtually impossible to conceive that any other country on Earth could have produced astronauts and ground crew that could have gotten that ship home safely. Howard makes a film that has you waving the flag when you walk out. At least you should.

Braveheart moved Mel Gibson from star to mega-star, as a director as well as an actor. It was the tale of a medieval Scottish rebellion against the British Empire, but its theme of freedom was straight out of the American Revolution, and of sacrifice directly from the life of Christ. Gibson was beginning to reveal himself as a devout Catholic but still kept his politics close to his chest. Five years later he actually did depict the American revolution in The Patriot.

Dead Man Walking stayed on an even keel. Starring Sean Penn in a bravura performance as murderer Matthew Poncelet getting ready for his execution, it takes a surprisingly Catholic point of view, in which Susan Sarandon plays Sister Helen Prejean, who makes him take responsibility for his actions, ostensibly to save his soul. It could be interpreted as being against the death penalty, but this is actually a stretch.

L.A. Confidential tapped into the noir world of the City of Angels in the late 1940s and 1950s. Based on James Ellroy's book it removed the shine from the Los Angeles Police Department, revealing corruption and racism.

The Devil's Advocate, directed by Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) did something Hollywood rarely does: admit the existence of Satan. The Exorcist did that, although many Christians found fault with the obscene language and imagery. The Devil's Advocate really gets into Lucifer's ways: temptation, lust, and greed. The Apostle similarly was a simple tale of Christianity and redemption: a preacher who in a fit of rage kills his ex-wife's new love interest, then goes on the run, spreading the message of Jesus Christ as atonement for his sins.

Saving Private Ryan (1998), along with Empire of the Sun, was Spielberg's best work ever. Anybody who walks away from this 1998 account of America saving the world on D-Day, without a glowing respect for what we sacrificed, is an idiot or a useful idiot. While Saving Private Ryan was the highest-grossing hit of the year, some believed Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line was a better war picture. Based on the James Jones novel about the bloody World War II battle for Guadalcanal, it is one of the most allegorical films ever made. The title comes from the notion that English soldiers (wearing red uniforms) are The Thin Red Line separating the British Empire from the savages they rule over. In Malick's title the color "red" depicts the blood they shed.

Private Witt (James Caveizel) is first seen AWOL on a native island. All the islanders are happy and prosperous. Later, he returns to the island. This time, they are sick and argue with each other. This is a picture of Original Sin. Witt is a Christian who somehow still believes in God no matter how terrible the battle. 1st Sergeant Edward Welsh (Sean Penn) is an atheist worn down by war. He considers Witt a "mystery." The film depicts a squad of soldiers sent up the hill to take out a Japanese gun emplacement. They are scared out of their wits, but the fear creates adrenaline and craziness that manifests itself in heroism. Courage and cowardice ride side-by-side throughout the film, often looking the same.

Perhaps the film's most telling confrontation is the one between Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) and Lieutenant Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte). This is very possibly Nolte's greatest performance, but sadly he did not capture any awards for it. His Lieutenant Colonel Tall is an older officer passed over throughout his career for younger men. John Travolta was chosen to portray a general who gives him his orders aboard a ship en route to the action. Travolta was purposely made to look slightly ridiculous and puffed up in order to accentuate the fact that less experienced, less qualified officers have passed Tall in rank over the years.

Tall tells a young officer, Captain Graff (John Cusack) that he considers him a son to him, revealing the indelicate fact that back in the States his real son is a "bait salesman." Graff constantly tries to tell Tall that the men are being pushed too hard, not given enough water, and are in danger. Tall does not want to hear it, giving Graff platitudes to mollify his complaints. His inner thoughts, revealed by several of the main characters, a trait of Malick's films, reveals Tall's insecurities and desire to achieve glory before it is too late. He is willing to sacrifice soldiers in order to get ahead, to attain the rank of general, to be a hero.

This plays itself out in his struggles with Captain Staros. Staros is pinned down in a heavy artillery exchange, but Tall, after inanely reading Homer in Greek over the radio, bragging how they did it like that back at "the Point," tells him that his attack was "beautifully conceived," as if by saying it he could achieve a self-fulfilling prophesy. But Staros's inability to push up the hill enrages Tall, who spits and mutters, furiously ordering what the audience can see are suicide charges.

Staros returns to base camp, where Tall has been willing to order the death of men from relative safety, and they have it out. Tall points to a tree, its trunk twisted and gnarled, enveloped by vines seeming to choke it to death, and tells him that "nature's cruel," a theme of the movie (at one point a soldier touches a leaf, which withers and dies the second his finger comes in contact with it). This is a metaphor for the whole war, for the attrition of war, and the sad fact that glory and bravery take a back seat to a much baser fact of life in determining who indeed wins and who loses such conflicts. Caviezel's Witt in particular infuses the film with his thoughts, voiced out loud in what can be described as searching for the meaning of life. John Savage plays a crazed soldier, his head gone probably forever, who talks to himself in the middle of battle, wondering why he is still alive while all around him are blown to bits.

Finally, the Americans push to victory in a literal "fog of war," the fierce Japanese revealed as starved, crazed and scared out of their wits. The theme throughout is, "What does it all mean?"

American History X may not have accomplished what it set out to accomplish. The film centers on a white supremacist in the once-pleasant, now-crime stricken Los Angeles beach enclave of Venice. Edward Norton plays the racist (Derek Vinyard), but the dialogue is sharp and intelligent. Norton previously played wimpy types, retards and scholars, but totally pulls off the role of a buffed, fearless, athletic hero of the white race. This may have been the film's first "mistake," since Hollywood racists have always been depicted as stupid, slovenly and without redeeming value. In this regard, director Tony Kaye was doing what David Lean did in The Bridge On the River Kwai, and other movies, which humanize the "enemy."

While there is no question that Vinyard (his name is symbolic of vines reaching out in different directions) is not in the right, and that his racial hatreds have taken him down a perilous personal path, he makes certain biting commentary about race and society that are entirely true and worth agreeing with. Whether the filmmakers wanted whites (and blacks) in the audience nodding in agreement with a guy they would like to show to be a monster (he has a huge Swastika tattooed on his chest) is not known. He is charismatic, and intelligent enough to see the light after being stigmatized in prison. With the help of black teacher Dr. Bob Sweeney (Avery Brooks), he turns his life around, but sees the damage he has caused to those around him (brother Danny, played by Edward Furlong). Heavy-handed political bias cannot be helped. Norton's sidekick, Seth Ryan is an utterly reprehensible, stupid white racist of the worst stereotype (played by Ethan Suplee), who blathers about those who do not agree with him as "Democrats." Stacey Keach plays the racial instigator Cameron Alexander, who presciently tells Derek how powerful his message is now that it is going out on the Internet. But Derek knows Cameron let him take a prison fall while he skated hard time, leading to an argument and his split from racist ideology. With sides drawn, Derek's life is now in danger, but it is Danny who ultimately pays for his sins.

Remember the Titans (2000) was a heartwarming true story of "tough love," featuring Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone, the black high school football coach who, through what probably was court-ordered affirmative action, takes over the program from respected Coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) when T.C. Williams High School in suburban Virginia is forced to integrate in 1971. All the black players who played under Coach Boone at a previous all-black school are now at T.C. Williams with him, causing enormous headaches ranging from race mixing to, most important in the minds of many, playing time.

The blacks and whites are terribly divided. Coach Boone faces stiff resistance from the whites, including the white assistants he is forced to keep on his staff. Through "color blind" discipline and hard work he pushes his team in a training camp that bonds them together, but upon returning to school they face the same old prejudices. Eventually, winning solves all problems as T.C. Williams rises above the petty differences to forge an unbeaten season and the mythical national championship of high school football.

One key element is when Ronnie "Sunshine" Bass (Kip Pardue) arrives from California. He is a free-spirited surfer type with long, flowing blonde hair, and the Southern girls go wild over him. His Marine father has been transferred to the area and, after interviewing with another school that does not allow blacks, enrolls his son at T.C. Williams so he can broaden his horizons. There is a nebulous scene in which Sunshine feigns the possibility of being gay, which is clumsy and does not work as a plot device. It was probably forced into the screenplay to score some "gay points," but eventually Sunshine is made the starting quarterback, where his skills are just what the Titans need to achieve greatness. The film is held together by the friendship between white All-American linebacker Gerry Bertier (Ryan Hurst) and his equally talented black counterpart on defense, Julius Campbell (Wood Harris). At first they hate each other, but shared passion and will to win bring them together like brothers, causing much angst with others who fail to understand this bond. Bertier must cut his best friend and his girlfriend (played by Kate Bosworth) loose. Cutting a girl loose who looks like Kate Bosworth did as much to get the point across as any factor in the movie. A telling scene is when Julius comes to his home and gives Gerry's mom a hug. 1960s folk songs about brotherhood are the perfect backdrop to this great film.

Glory Road (2006) was a more pedestrian look at similar subject matter; the 1966 college basketball season, in which Texas Western University (now UTEP) became the first team with an all-black starting line-up to win the NCAA title.

Pearl Harbor (2001) was a fast-paced Jerry Bruckheimer vehicle directed by Randall Wallace (Braveheart). This was one of those odd films that are occasionally made in which liberals Ben Affleck as Rafe McCawley and Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle, happily do all the things in a film war they hate real service members from doing in real wars. World War II is somehow off limits to their critiques, apparently because a Democrat (FDR) was in the White House.

Baldwin-as-Doolittle is especially hilarious, since Doolittle planned and orchestrated incendiary bombing raids in which thousands of Japanese civilians were turned into fire, much of it meant to terrorize the populous as an act of war strategy (not unlike the Dresden fire bombings of 1945) and revenge.

Training Day was so astoundingly great as to be almost beyond description. It simply is one of the greatest films ever made, Denzel Washington as awesome in it as anything Olivier or Brando or ever did. Directed by Antoine Fuqua, it probably describes the gritty inner city streets more realistically than anything before or since. Whether it was based on corrupt L.A.P.D. cops recently indicted for running roughshod over the mean streets, stealing drugs and money mostly from gangsters, is not really explained, but it follows rookie Detective Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) on his first day under Detective Alonzo Harris (Washington). Alonzo is terrifying, comical, charismatic, sexy, and exploding with boundless, unpredictable energy. He quickly demonstrates that he is the meanest animal on the mean streets, that whatever horrors the underworld threaten the world with, he is twice as horrific right back at them. The problem is that he is corrupt, dishonest, unpredictable and not loyal.

He puts Jake on the defensive immediately, jeopardizing him through intimidation to make bad choices with bad consequences, all of which he blames on the rookie afterwards because, after all, he did make those choices. It is all designed to put Jake within the palm of Alonzo's hand, so that when the time comes to join his nefarious criminal operation, he would be primed to do so.

Early on Alonzo manhandles citizens, steals their drugs, and uses them as a personal ATM. Jake comes to the rescue of a young Latina being raped. He saves her, but instead of reporting the incident Alonzo, who knows her Sureno gang cousins, leaves the incident to street revenge he knows they will carry out. She forgets her wallet, which Jake holds onto.

The audience squirms because the cops, the longtime friends of the public, are people they normally can feel safe around. Not these guys. Alonzo's world opens up. We see him at a fancy restaurant where what appears to be ex-cops and judges gather, all rich from a career on the take, with Alonzo their apparent go between The tension is so thick it can be cut with knife, the discussion between Gursky (Tom Berenger), Rosselli (Harris Yuklin) and Jacobs (Raymond Berry), all neck tied gentlemen, and Harris, dressed like a gangsta, filled with double entendres and warnings from these seen-everythings that Alonzo is in over his head on some unexplained deal already, it seems, gone bad. All that is revealed is that some Russians were backstabbed by Alonzo, a very bad situation but one the cop laughs off as one he can handle. Jake catches some of this but is incapable of grasping the severity of it. The underlying hostility each of the white men has for the black Alonzo is palpable, but not racial. Each, through his eyes and body language, demonstrates deep loathing of Alonzo Harris.

We all also see a terrifying scene with Alonzo and his longtime friend and now retired partner Roger (Scott Glenn). It is never explained, but it seems Roger is in so deep and so over his head from past mistakes with Alonzo that death is his only option, which he welcomes with a smile that must be an act, until Alonzo kills him. A group of nefarious, unclean, unfriendly, dangerous bastards – all cops, probably undercover – are all in on the reconstruction and cover-up of the crime scene, with Jake flatly told he is now part of it or he will be blamed for everything if it goes wrong. In a few short hours Jake has gone from a naïve rookie with a lovely wife and little baby to support to an inside member of a notorious crime gang "disguised" as cops.

Next comes a bone-chilling scene in which Alonzo brings Jake to the home of Mexican gangsta "Smiley" (Cliff Curtis). Jake is induced to play poker, where the conversation is extremely tense, filled with hidden homosexual rape references, all indirectly threatening to Jake. The actors who play the Mexican gang members are astonishingly good, and incredibly frightening. Each second the tension is heightened, all exacerbated by the gang member's sister counting money Alonzo brought them, which might well mean that, once accounted for, some act of violence can occur. A phone call further heightens the atmosphere, and then Jake is grabbed and dragged into the bathroom, to be drowned in the tub. Jake has authorized them to kill the "white boy," no doubt because he has not reacted with enthusiasm to the "invitation" to join his crime syndicate.

But what saves Jake is the wallet from the Latina girl he saved from a raping. He produces it and the gangster's are amazed, seeing it as some kind of sign. "Smiley" confirms the fact Jake saved his cuz with a phone call to her and he is let go.

Jake then goes after Alonzo, tracking him down in a scene filmed in a real south-central Los Angeles housing project that is as realistic as dangerous as it gets. Surrounded by hardcore black gangbangers, Jake marches right in, his life turned upside down, too freaked out to be scared of anything any more. He corners Alonzo, who thought he was dead. Alonzo then "orders" the gangbangers to kill the "white boy," but he has been running roughshod over them using the color of his authority for so long, they turn against him. Alonzo goes ballistic, declaring "I'm the po-lice . . . I'm King Kong," over the top, exaggerated pronouncements that only an actor of Denzel's skill can pull off.

He is like a black, street-corrupted version of Jack Nicholson's Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men, startled to see he has let his all his cards out in public, then adjusting himself, pulling it together to walk out with whatever dignity he has left. Off Alonzo goes, until his car is cornered by cars filled with the Russian Mafia, who execute him.

Training Day does something very rare, especially considering its star and director were both black. Perhaps only blacks could have the courage and commitment to the truth to tell a story like this, but it was a movie demonstrating as its hero a white man (Ethan Hawke), while all the bad guys are either black or Mexican (Washington, the Surenos). Most as astonishing was the incredible performance every single actor gave; not just the stars, but the bit players: the neck-tied white men in the restaurant; smiling, doomed Roger; the corrupt members of Alonzo's crew; the uber-frightening Surenos playing poker; and the black gangstas in the housing project, so dangerous a place it almost seemed other-worldly.

It was as if the makers of Training Day, after decades of Hollywood lies, B.S. and political correctness, decided to finally tell the truth. The film did big business and won an Oscar for Washington, but did not start a trend away from political correctness in the industry.

Training Day set the stage for a ground-breaking television series called The Shield (2002-08), starring Michael Chiklis as over-the-top, corrupt L.A.P.D. Detective Vic Mackey. Featured on a national cable channel called FX, it was unlike anything seen before. FX, unlike pay channels like HBO and Showtime, was part of basic cable (ESPN, Fox News, AMC). The station broke previous rules in displaying nudity, graphic violence, and raw language. The scenes were often shaky, making use of the hand-held camera technique popularized by Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan. Based on corruption discovered in the Rampart Division of the late 1990s, it featured Mackey leading a wild and wooly group of rogue cops who steal from the criminals they arrest, filled with politically incorrect tension between the mostly-white cops and the assorted black, Latino, female, bi-sexual and honest white cops always breathing down their throat, but never quite able to nab them in the act.
Ali featured Will Smith as Muhammad Ali. Focusing on the 10 years between his victories over Sonny Liston (1964) and George Foreman (1974), it featured Smith as the loud-mouthed, arrogant draft-dodger who, despite having grown up in the Bible Belt well aware of Christ's divinity, freely chose to reject the One True God. The film failed to answer one of the most enduring of all mysteries, which is why Ali rose to heights of popularity above all other athletes.

While the quality of Hollywood films undoubtedly slipped from its glory years in the 1960s and 1970s, there were still occasional classics. Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, plus the likes of Robert Altman, Taylor Hackford. Terence Malick, and others, all did some great work.

In 2007 there were some excellent films. No Country for Old Men starred Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell in a Coen brothers adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel. It was also metaphysical in its sparseness, not unlike another film that year, Atonement. However, the sparseness of Atonement more describes the novel.

Set in 1980, McCarthy's vision was almost Apocalyptic, using violence, mayhem and a lack of human empathy as metaphors for a fallen world in which many and varied "signs and wonders" of its end abound everywhere.

There will be Blood was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia), based on the riveting Upton Sinclair novel Oil! Anderson also likes to use religious metaphors. In Magnolia he provides a climactic scene in which frogs land all over the streets of Los Angeles, an event straight out of the Old Testament.

The searing musical score of There Will be Blood seems to emanate the feel of evil, of Satan's approach. The novel was an evisceration of American capitalism written by a hard-left Socialist. To those who wish to understand Socialism and Communism; not just its economic theories, but the cultural zeitgeist that infused it, resulting years later in such disaster as the hippies, the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, the professional protest industry, and the race extortion business, then Oil! is the best primer there is.

Anderson's film is less political. The Sinclair novel excoriated oil as a tool of the Republican fundraising machine with Teapot Dome financier Edward Doheny the model for Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis). The University of Southern California (Southern Pacific University), which plays no role in the film, received vast criticism from Sinclair for being an elite, private institution catering to a wealthy upper crust of have-it-alls. Sexuality, not a major aspect of the film, was shown to be a kind of "tool" of the Communist Left, who equated the freedom of nudity, and the removal of moral judgment from physical love, as touchstones and recruitment tools of the party.

Like No Country for Old Men, the movie depicted the "big sky country," in this case the open spaces of Southern California. While the events depicted mostly happened in the 1920s, the film for varying reasons pushes them back 10 years or more into the past.

The landscape is sparse, the oil is literally "crude"; slimy, all-encompassing, again kind of a stand-in for Original Sin. Once staining a man it cannot be wiped away. No man can be made clean again. Money is the root of all evil. Rape of the landscape must be paid for with men's souls. Eli Sunday (Paul Dano) is a false prophet of the Christian Bible. Exactly what Anderson is trying to convey is hard to explain. On the one hand, he depicts a fallen world, which is a caution for man to repent and ask forgiveness. On the other hand, an apostle of Christ is shown to be a fraud, although this seems to play into the first premise; man is fallen, only Christ is pure.

A number of excellent war films were made prior to 9/11. They seemed to have set the pace for a number of movies and TV shows reflecting the tense War on Terror following the bombing of the World Trade Center.

Black Hawk Down, directed by Ridley Scott based on Mark Bowden's book, introduced the world to a bevy of new stars in the new century (Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana) along with veterans Tom Sizemore and Sam Shepard. It came out right around 9/11 and was immediately viewed as a primer on the War on Terror. The book plainly pinned blame on President Clinton, who cut and ran in 1993, leaving Somalia to fester as one of the worst Islamic hellholes on Earth, a breeding grounds for terror and hatred of the West used as an example by Osama bin Laden. The film does not concentrate on the politics, instead infusing the screen with their incredible "warrior spirit," which Hoot (Bana) tries to explain while getting some quick chow after escaping a harrowing firefight, only to go back out and get some more. He explains he is not a "war junkie," that killing is not fun, and that people back home can never understand that he does it for his buddies; he does it because it has to be done and nobody else will do it. It is one of the greatest, most patriotic American films ever made!

24 debuted on Fox in 2001. It was planned prior to 9/11, but no program could possibly have shadowed the War on Terror over the next decade better than this. Starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, a "kick ass" special agent tasked with protecting the President, the city of Los Angeles, and America, it does not shy away from the fact it is Islamic terrorists who are at war with America, not nebulous "neo Nazis," or "Right-wing extremists," or "Russian militarists." The show was a hit with conservatives but its tremendous ratings made it obvious that a large majority of America sided with its view on the struggle. Bauer is forced on several occasions to inflict "torture" (far beyond anything we know America has actually done to terrorists) and "enhanced interrogation" techniques on suspects when faced with "ticking time bomb" scenarios threatening the President, his own daughter, and huge population centers. The program was so realistic some feared it gave away too many trade secrets. It also featured the black actor Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer (whose wife is shown to be a power-hungry Lady MacBeth type). This came on top of Morgan Freeman and other blacks portrayed as the President in the 1990s and 2000s, which some suggested "prepared" the country for Barack Obama in 2008.

The Sum of All Fears (2002) was based on a Tom Clancy novel, but sublimated itself to political correctness in a way 24 refused to do. Starring Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan (a straight conservative in Clancy's novels), it furthered the notion of black political leaders via Morgan Freeman as CIA Director William Cabot (Freeman has played the President, the head of the CIA, God twice, and Nelson Mandela once). Clancy's novel was based on Middle Eastern terrorism, meant to create a conflict between the Russians and the U.S. ultimately aimed at destroying any chance at peace between Israel and Palestine. The film, not wanting to make Muslims look bad a year after Muslims killed 3,000 Americans in New York, substituted Right-wing neo-Fascists – the old stand-by – as the bad guys instead.

We Were Soldiers was a refreshingly patriotic true war film that makes no effort to portray U.S. service members as racists, rapists, or white extremists. Starring Mel Gibson, it re-united him with Braveheart screenwriter Randall Wallace as Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, who in 1965 led American forces into Vietnam's Ia Drang Valley. Lieutenant Colonel Moore tells his men they are entering the "valley of the shadow of death," where they will survive only by fighting together as one force, not separate tribes, races or religions. He vows to be the first to step onto the battlefield, the last to leave.

The action juxtaposes between Moore with his men, and their wives and families back home, demonstrating the tension and strain of war. The battle is intense, with close air support creating gruesome "friendly fire" casualties. Barry Pepper plays journalist Joseph Galloway, who ventures from the fleshpots of Saigon to see up close what the still-young Vietnam War is all about. The film is based on his book. We Were Soldiers was a kind of cautionary tale told after the fact, painting a vivid picture of just how tough Vietnam would be, instead of the easy victory so many predicted at the time.

Seabiscuit (2003) was good old-fashioned entertainment, the kind the movie industry, particularly Walt Disney, once specialized in but had seemingly stopped making in favor of films about ennui and the break-up of the family (American Beauty). Based on Laura Hillenbrand's bestseller, while it was about a race horse inspiring America during the Great Depression, it was really about broken things that, through tending (a subtle Christian message Hillenbrand specializes in) can be made whole again. The horse, his trainer Tom Smith (Chris Cooper), and his rider Red Pollard (Toby Maguire) are all broken, and all are made whole in the end, mainly because horse owner Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges) believes in them.

The Last Samurai (starring Tom Cruise) was one of those strange films the industry occasionally makes glorifying violence (by Japanese rebels, against Japanese government troops trained by American advisors) that, if committed by Americans, would be called war crimes.

The Recruit was an entertaining but far from a realistic view of the CIA. Directed by Australian spy movie expert Roger Donaldson (No Way Out), it features several memorable lines. Young "NOC" recruit James Clayton (Colin Farrell) expresses dismay with the Central Intelligence Agency, which he describes as a bunch of "white guys" who let the country down on 9/11. Al Pacino's veteran spy hand Walter Burke tells a roomful of trainees they have joined the Company not because of sex, fame or money, but rather because they "believe," that "our cause is just." The film is also well worth watching because it features the lovely Bridget Moynahan, who bore Patriots quarterback Tom Brady's child before he left to take up with supermodel Gisele Bundchen.

One lonely conservative voice tried to shout out from the "wilderness" for years. Lionel Chetwynd was a writer/producer who made The Hanoi Hilton, which actually described the North Vietnamese as the evil torturers they were. In 2003 Chetwynd produced DC 9/11: Time of Crisis. It stars Lance Bottoms (The Last Picture Show, Apocalypse Now) as President George W. Bush. Liberal film reviewers criticized it, of course.

Walking Tall was slightly political, featuring The Rock, also known as Dwayne Johnson, in the role originally made famous by Joe Don Baker in 1973. Johnson, former University of Miami football player and WWF fan favorite, was a solid conservative who plays those values to the hilt in a cautionary social tale. An Army hero, he returns to his hometown only to find a peaceful, nice place has been turned into a casino, with strippers, a brothel, an adult book store, a thriving drug business, with general immorality, run by a corrupt government. Using very forceful techniques, he returns it to its once-proud self.

National Treasure was one of a number of films that people watched and, afterwards, scratched their head, then exclaimed, "Hey, wait a minute; is Nicholas Cage conservative?" Do not look now, but he has made a number of movies that certainly make it seem that way (including his earlier The Family Man). National Treasure is a film that actually credits the U.S. Constitution as being a great document! Miracle, one of the best sports movies ever, describes how the U.S. Olympic hockey team's upset over the Soviet Union was the only thing Americans could smile about during the Carter years.

For a brief time in the Reagan '80s, Hollywood made "conservative" movies, but they were little more than schlocky action war pictures like Rambo. The basic premise behind these movies was to show macho heroes like Chuck Norris or Sylvester Stallone "returning" to Vietnam to "re-win" the war and rescue buddies imprisoned as POWs.

In truth, Hollywood provides a lot for just about everybody. Cable and pay TV have created romance channels, family channels, true story channels, history channels, and there is a lot of content that does not fit the traditional liberal profile. Christianity takes a lot of hits. A lot of TV shows love to make the perp white Christians, militia guys and the like. But there are movies that portray Christianity in a loving manner. Family values, patriotism, honor and virtue get their occasional due. Conservatives will rail against Hollywood, and listening to them you get the idea that everything is a liberal conspiracy. Not always so.

While there are a lot of high-profile films like American Beauty where the message is that the family is dysfunctional, morality and convention are a thing of the past, and homophobes are probably military rocks who secretly want to get it on with other men, Seabiscuit was a beautiful tale of redemption, telling a patriotic story of how in this great nation people can pick each other up, work as a team, and inspire a country.

Mel Gibson was considered a conservative. He was a devout Catholic, and came under intense criticism for daring to portray the Savior, suggesting that he is who millions believe He is. Rarely if ever has a movie created such controversy and political/religious division as The Passion of the Christ. The fact it came out in the Presidential re-election year of 2004, running side by side with Fahrenheit 9/11, only exacerbated it. Conservatives, Christian by nature, were identified as the supporters of George W. Bush, one of the most openly Christian Presidents in history.

The film became a referendum on Christianity, with people taking political sides. The conservative media, in full bloom by 2004 and led by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, openly embraced Gibson and his film. Facing hostility from previous "friendly quarters," Gibson understood that suddenly Fox News and other Right-leaning organizations were the only places he could get a fair shake, but in the middle of the Iraq War he found himself lumped in with all of Bush's war supporters. Hannity interviewed him and assumed he was a big fan of Bush and the war, but Gibson said he did not like the way it was going.

Gibson was discomfited by it. The son of a devout American Catholic who moved his family to Australia so his sons would not have to fight in Vietnam, Gibson developed a slight accent but returned to the U.S. after making cult hits in Australia. Incredibly handsome and extremely intense on screen, he married and started a family of his own. He drank heavily but was devoted to Christ, a lifelong Catholic. He made some of the biggest movies ever, among them the Lethal Weapon films and the mega-hit Braveheart. By 2004 he had the wealth to call his own shots. Gibson decided to make a film about the last day of Christ's life. The title alone, The Passion, evoked controversy as "passion plays" stoked anti-Semitism during the Spanish Inquisition, and were said to have been used by the Nazis to stir hatred of the Jews. Word leaked out that Gibson's father, Hutton was anti-Semitic, which did not help his cause.

Gibson was spurned by Hollywood studios, which did not fund the project. He used his own money, which meant if it hit he would attain wealth like few ever do in a business that "shares" risk. While Gibson was a conservative, so to speak, and a nominal Republican, he was really a conspiracy theorist, making several films based on them. He disliked Bill Clinton, believed many of the rumors about his criminal acts in Arkansas, and found nothing good about his womanizing. Mainly, however, he distrusted the Establishment. So it was that he chose to go outside the movie establishment to make a movie about the ultimate revolutionary anti-establishmentarian.

The film starred James Caviezel (The Thin Red Line, The Count of Monte Cristo) as Christ. It broke many film conventions, especially in its use of sub-titles as the actors spoke Aramaic, apparently the language of Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. This surprised many, who assumed the Jews spoke Hebrew, while the Romans would have spoken Italian or Latin. Caviezel, also a Catholic, constantly had to defend himself against slurs of anti-Semitism for his role in the film, and saw a very promising career largely dry up in the years since.

The film starts with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, imploring God that, if possible, "let this cup pass from me," sparing Him the agony of the cross. Just as quickly, he realizes his destiny and duty cannot be avoided. Then Judas arrives with Jewish guards to haul Him away. He is brought to trial, where first the Jewish Sadducees and Pharisees excoriate Him, then take Him to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

The story closely follows the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, using word-for-word language to the closest extent possible, but the fact the Jewish leaders and rabble in the crowd wanted Him crucified, while completely accurate, seemed too terrible a fact for many modern Jewish leaders, if not admit to, simply allow to be shown!

Pilate, as the Gospel's plainly state, finds "no fault" in Christ, and is inclined to set Him free. But the crowd is furious with hatred, demanding His execution. Pilate asks Christ what His purpose is, and when told He is the "truth," asks, "What is truth?"

Finally, Pilate - warned by his wife after a dream that Christ was innocent and not to crucify Him – gives the Jews one more chance, offering as part of a Passover tradition the choice of letting the prisoner Barabbas or Christ go free. They demand Barabbas be freed and Christ die, the very picture of His mission. Barabbas is a sinner, a murderer and violent soldier who plotted a revolution against the Romans. Christ's substitution for his death sentence mirrors how He substituted for the death sentence of all Mankind brought about by Eve's temptation in the Garden of Eden.

From there Christ is hauled off, scourged, tortured, nailed to the cross, and hung up for all to see until He dies. Gibson offers the tantalizing figure of Satan, in the form of a creepy man-woman who walks about the crowd, his spirit pushing them to further demand Christ's death, but when He passes after stating, "It is accomplished," Satan cries out in agony, realizing he has been beaten. Man has not been left to him after all!

Many Jewish religious leaders deemed the depictions of screaming Jewish political leaders, thirsty for Christ's blood, over the top. A lot of them stated Gibson's portrayal was a lie, untrue, but a reading of the New Testament plainly demonstrates that it happened like that. The entire episode showed clearly how powerful religion can be, and how carefully the Jews are to protect their image; understandable in light of centuries of persecution based on these very images.

Gibson was criticized very harshly, but flew off the handle when Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote that Gibson's father was a "Holocaust denier," one of the most egregious of all modern sins. Apparently there was something to the rumor, although how utterly true was never confirmed. But it became the template to describe Gibson, and therefore the meaning of his film. Instead of Christ dying for the sins of Mankind, his critics argued it was largely replaced by the notion of "Christ killers."

Regardless of any controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ, it was one of the most successful movies ever made. All the money a studio would have made out of it went instead to Gibson and his production company, Icon. Its success at the box office became very political in a very, very political year. It was seen as a sign that President Bush would win in November (he did).

God's involvement in the affairs of man, whether they be wars, opening up oceans, revealing truths, or cautionary tales, are too often not paid attention to by . . . man. But what happened to Gibson in the years following The Passion of the Christ should serve as a true picture of man's relationship with God. Conservative and Christian media held his triumph up, along with George Bush's, as a big fat example of "their" victory over the secular Left. Just as Bush's second term was a terrible disappointment, his legacy swallowed up by a Socialist successor who blamed all ills on him and turned back all his policies – with the exception of some of the ones needed to defeat terrorists – Gibson was a victim of hubris; his and his supporters.

He made the triumphant rounds, accepted the congratulations, but there was something gnawing just below the surface. For one, the Bible commands that man not display "graven images." This might be open to interpretation, but there are many who believe it is based on the fact that mortal man is not worthy, or capable, of gazing upon the sight of God. While Jesus Christ did come to earth as flesh, nobody really knows what he looked like and there seems a reason for that. We are not supposed to, and implicit in that, we are not supposed to depict him, in the visage of James Caviezel, Catholic statuary, or Renaissance art. Gibson obviously did depict him.

Then there is the issue of money, the "root of all evil" according to Christ Himself. Gibson made inordinate volumes of cold, hard cash ostensibly off of Jesus Christ! Whether these factors drove him to self-destruct is not known, but the man did just that. Always a heavy drinker, he somehow managed to get super intoxicated in a Malibu bar, and despite having enough money to buy a limo company, chose to drive home, was caught for drunk driving, then went after the Jewish patrolman who stopped him. Unbelievable.

This was followed by other incidents, but Gibson, happily married with lots of kids, suddenly up and left his wife for a Jezebel straight out of The Holy Bible; a Russian hottie with giant fake breasts, the very epitome of the plastic, soulless woman out to destroy men and take all they have. She then did precisely that, in the most public, embarrassing manner possible. How a reasonably intelligent man could make such mistakes defies belief. It certainly was every bad thing his detractors could have wished on him as punishment for making The Passion, but the sight of Gibson so thoroughly beaten, his money useless to him, made him a sorrowful figure even to them.

United 93 was about how the passengers on the plane hi-jacked by terrorists and headed for the White House managed to courageously rise up and overcome their jihadist adversaries, steering the plane to a crash that may well have prevented it from landing on the capitol.

Charlie Wilson's War was one of those movies liberals will make occasionally, thinking nobody really notices the hypocrisy, or at least the irony, thus demonstrated. Directed by Mike Nichols (The Graduate), it starred Tom Hanks as U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson (D.-Texas) and Julia Roberts as Right-wing Republican socialite Joanne Herring. Roberts was quite pretty back when she made Pretty Woman, and while still attractive, nevertheless lost much of her sex appeal as she got older. Her acting was never much to speak of. She was always highly overrated. An outspoken critic of Republicans, it is ironic that in this film she plays one to the hilt. It is more ironic that in so doing she looks better than in her previous 10 roles, and gives probably the best performance of her career. This is not that unusual. Sandra Bullock, another liberal and nobody's idea of Joan Crawford or Katherine Hepburn, lifted her career from slightly mediocre to Oscar status when she played a beautiful, Christian, Republican woman in The Blind Side (2009).

Charlie Wilson's War was written by Aaron Sorkin, who loves politics and portrays it on screen in the most intelligent manner of any modern filmmaker. It was based on a fascinating book by George Crile. A true story, Charlie Wilson was a moderate Democrat representing an east Texas district in the heart of the Bible Belt. He was, in fact, a holdover from an earlier era – of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn – when Texas still voted Democrat. Today he would not be elected a Democrat and, in fact, would be a Rick Perry Republican, but the film is set in the 1980s.

Spurred by Joanne, he takes up the cause of the mujahidin, the "freedom fighters" battling the Red Army in the mountains of Afghanistan following the Soviets' 1979 invasion. Almost single-handedly, Wilson arranges for money and weapons to be filtered into the mujahidin, while successfully fending off the Communist threat. Wilson received much publicity for his role in the Soviets' defeat, which along with the fall of the Berlin Wall was their "Vietnam," resulting in the break-up of the U.S.S.R. and America winning the Cold War.

This is where Sorkin gets a little too bright for his britches. Wilson indeed was a heroic, very colorful figure. He deserves his share of the credit. But the film makes no mention of President Ronald Reagan and CIA Director William Casey, who made this their raison d'être every bit as much as Wilson did. Not only does the film pretend President Reagan and Director Casey lacked existence, it actually depicts political elements, presumably outlets of the Reagan Administration, opposing Congressman Wilson.

Gust Avarakatos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) was probably a Democrat, opposed to Iran-Contra, who was pushed out by the CIA but takes on the Afghan cause as much to gain personal redemption in a battle with his higher-ups as out of patriotism. If the real Avrakatos was anywhere close to as smart, cunning and freaky knowledgeable as the Hoffman character, he was the greatest secret agent since James Bond.

This was a film Hollywood made because Democrats were heroes. There seems little doubt of this, regardless of protests to the contrary (the subject never seemed to come up, in actuality). Sorkin was not about to make a movie about Bill Casey turning back the Church Committee, or bragging how a Soviet operative was left to be found with his genitalia stuffed into his mouth as a message to the bad guys that America was willing to fight on their terms in the Reagan era.

On the other hand, the Wilson story was wholly unique. Wilson was a good-looking, single ladies man and the film is chock full of stunningly beautiful women, many the romantic apples of his eye. Scenes of Playboy models and strippers in a Vegas hot tub give this film a sexy vibe, uniquely American really. The Russians must chafe at the knowledge that one of the men most responsible for their demise was all the time having about as much fun as Hugh Hefner.

Rambo (2008) was Sylvester Stallone's re-make, this time ferrying Christians upriver and fighting dangerous pirates. It earned Stallone an interview on The Savage Nation. The Dark Knight (2008) was a wildly successful Batman film starring Christian Bale. Rush Limbaugh tried to paint it as a portrait of George Bush fighting against public opinion in Iraq, but by then the war - despite the fact General David Petraeus turned the tide and was winning – had been going on too long. Bush was too unpopular for any movie to help him.

Despite President Bush's lack of popularity, in his last year of office the industry finally made a realistic, pro-soldier movie about the Iraq War. Director Katherine Bigelow's The Hurt Locker starred Jeremy Renner as William James, a slightly psychotic munitions expert who diffuses roadside and car bombs. It did not particularly take a political side, in that it did not advocate American involvement in the war, but it did depict soldiers as wanting to help the Iraqis. They were very brave and skilled. James represented something that Eric Bana's Hoot spoke to in Black Hawk Down, which was the "adrenaline rush" of being a so-called "war junkie." James enjoys his work. He knows it is dangerous and is not suicidal, but he is addicted to it, to war. Such men do exist, and in larger numbers than the public realizes. Many such men populated the American military during the War on Terror; heroic, macho men who volunteered not just to sign up the first time, but to keep asking for multiple tours. The media tried to turn them into a victim class, men manipulated into doing something against their will; by George Bush, Don Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, but this was not true.

It was quite interesting that The Hurt Locker won the Academy Award, which was held in 2009, early in the Obama Presidency. Had President Bush still been in the White House, this film never would have been so honored. It was only after Obama now occupied the Oval Office that suddenly some nobility could be attached to the Army, which only then was suddenly a "government program." But Bigelow seemed to foreshadow something in her acceptance speech, when she honored what Plato called "the warrior spirit" of America's fighting men. Coming six years after Michael Moore called the same war "fictitious" from that very same podium, a shift appeared in the offing. President Obama was riding mighty high in that late winter of 2009, but perhaps the first tiny remnants of backlash against him could be felt in this film's being honored, for in so doing the whole effort was being honored whether the Academy liked it or not.

John Adams proved that while HBO produces some of the vilest filth in all of the entertainment world, they also produce some of the best. It is quite a parallel. The fact it was good comes with no greater endorsement than Rush Limbaugh's praise. Starring the excellent Paul Giamatti as the statesman and Founding Father from Boston, it was a great tribute to the framers of the Constitution who forged victory over the British on behalf of liberty. It detailed Adams's long rivalry with Thomas Jefferson (Stephen Dillane), but perhaps its most telling part was Adams's visit to France with Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson). At an ornate dinner party, Adams is discomfited by fancy Frenchmen, including dolled up women seemingly primed for any and all sexual adventure, which Franklin apparently avails himself of. But Adams resists the overtures, even referring to his own sir name in reference to Original Sin. Laura Linney plays his wife, Abigail, and she was great, but in accepting an award for her performance later made the laughable comparison between the great John Adams and Barack Obama, running for President in 2008. Adams, she stated, was a "community organizer." The notion that somehow a man who helped fund and propel victory over the British Empire, then through his vision helped create the single greatest legal and political document of all time, is reduced to comparison with a race extortionist who specialized in getting money from companies in return for not calling them racists, is as absurd a notion as exists, or at least tied with all other absurd liberal notions.

Gran Torino may have been Clint Eastwood's most politically incorrect movie ever. It was quite entertaining but at times he may have gone too far in portraying himself as a craggy old white man (Walt Kowalski) who uses many and varied racial slurs, which he demonstrates are not necessarily signs a man is a racist. While well done, successful and a typically entertaining Eastwood vehicle, the film also plays on the occasional theme of white fantasy, placing Kowalski in a series of happenstance scenarios where he is able to demonstrate the strength and guts of his white character in the face of stupidity, violent threat and criminality on the part of minorities, namely a scene with some sidewalk blacks and the main "bad guys," a Hmong gang. Thao (Bee Vang) suffers Walt's slurs more than one might reasonably think, but over time gains the old man's respect. Walt, knowing he is dying after a lifetime of smoking, sacrifices himself to save Thao and his family from the gang. Shot and killed at the end, having set up the Hmong gang to commit the murder that is the only thing that can send them to prison, Walt is sprawled on the grass in front of his house, arms spread in the manner of Christ.

Eastwood followed Gran Torino with the disappointing Invictus (2009). This featured his old pal, Morgan Freeman again playing a man of great political importance, in this case Nelson Mandela. Based on a real-life rugby squad that captured the world Cup shortly after Mandela's ascension to the South African presidency, it brought the whites and blacks of a nation together, but Eastwood's forced movie fell short of capturing the glory of it.

Interestingly, another movie of the same year was set in South Africa, and in a strange, sci-fi kind of way, it symbolized the failure of the Mandela presidency and the nation post-Apartheid. District 9 was the story of South Africa some 20 years after an alien colony was stranded there without any way of returning to their home planet. Suddenly, the tables are turned. The aliens are ugly, horrid creatures called Prawns. They are utterly hated and despised, especially by the blacks who seemingly would have sympathy for an oppressed minority, as they once were. The politics of South Africa are politically correct times 100. Everything is a Big Government boondoggle of rules, regulations, affirmative action, welfare, mandated fairness, and assorted stupidity. Naturally, nothing works right, but each failure is categorized into some other rule, passed on and never quite categorized as a failure. The whites bend over backyards to accommodate the blacks, who hate them even more for it. The only ones with any gumption or power are neo-Nazi-type militia who "can't believe I get paid to kill these f----n' prawns."

The Book of Eli (2010) featured the Christian Denzel Washington as Eli, who apparently holds the last remaining Bible left on Earth after an Apocalyptic war destroys civilization, leaving only a few stragglers to fend for themselves in a ravaged landscape. Apparently, all Bibles were destroyed by whatever militia has grabbed power, aware that its message of hope will stir the populace to believe in something other than their despotic rule. The marvelous Gary Oldman plays Carnegie, the leader of a raping, pillaging mob. He is old enough to have known of The Holy Bible, to have read it and understood its power. Evil incarnate, he is determined to stamp its existence out lest it interfere with his Earthly power. He discovers Eli has it and orders him killed, but God, apparently, protects him. He makes his way to San Francisco Bay, where a special, heavily guarded government tries to resurrect Mankind. The film ends with Eli dictating the Bible from the Book of Genesis on, having committed it to memory. The book he carried all along had blank pages, which Carnegie discovers to his horror after confiscating it.

Devil, like The Exorcist (and its sequels), The Devil's Advocate, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, and a few others, actually acknowledges that the devil is real. The Debt was an astonishing re-make of an Israeli film flashing back and forth between the 1960s and 1997. Three Mossad agents are sent to Communist East Berlin to assassinate Dieter Vogel (Jesper Christensen), an infamous Nazi concentration camp doctor who escaped justice, now living with a new identity. He is successfully captured and brought to a safe house, awaiting a difficult escape to Israel and a worldwide trial. He escapes from agent Rachel Singer's (Jessica Chastain) control and the mission is lost, but the three invent a lie, that in the course of escaping he was shot and killed, his body destroyed, the agents able to make a quick getaway. They are accorded hero status in Israel and so it remains until 1997, when agent Rachel Singer's (played as the older Rachel by Helen Mirren) daughter Sarah (Romi Aboulafia) writes a book telling the story. Rachel's ex-husband, also one of the agents, Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkinson) is now in a wheelchair, but is a popular political figure. He informs Rachel that the third agent, David Peretz (Ciaran Hinds) has come across information that Vogel is still alive and living in the Ukraine. This caused Peretz to commit suicide. He tells her she still has a "debt" to Israel, that she must finish the job she failed. Despite having not been in the field for decades, she agrees, finds Vogel in the Ukraine, and kills him.

Battle Los Angeles (2011) is sci-fi adventure that certainly elevates the Marines as they battle aliens in a War of the Worlds-style invasion.

Homeland is a Showtime TV series begun in 2011 based on the question whether Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), a Marine sniper captured by Al Qaeda and held for years before his rescue, has been "turned" into an agent of jihad. Apparently his Marine partner, Tom Walker (Chris Chalk) was, but despite CIA agent Carrie Mathison's (Claire Danes) conviction that Brody is an "enemy within," the first season did not fully conclude this. It certainly looked that way when Brody apparently managed to make it into a Vice Presidential bunker with a bomb strapped to his chest, stopped from blowing up half the U.S. government only by a desperate cell phone call from his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor). But the show has so many twists and turns it is not reasonable to believe this tells the whole story as it heads into its second season.

Boss is a Starz original series also begun in 2011 starring Kelsey Grammer as Mayor Tom Kane (as in Abel's evil brother?). It is rife with references to Satan, fully recognizing that evil infiltrates it way into politics. While Mayor Kane is undoubtedly based on infamous Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, the conservative Grammer, its executive producer, does not hide the fact he is shedding light on the corrupt "Chicago way" political machine that spawned President Barack Hussein Obama.

The Hunger Games (2012) was called "conservative" by some who saw in its dystopian future a world controlled by totalitarian forces resembling previous real and imagined enemies, ranging from Brave New World to 1984 to Animal Farm to actual Malthusians, Margaret Sangers, Nazis, Communists and, some say, the Big Government Socialists that would form absent Right-wing forces bent on stopping what they become left unchecked.

41 (2011) was a loving HBO documentary about President George H.W. Bush, who still has not forgiven Ross Perot for costing him re-election in 1992.

Diatribes

George W. Bush was elected President in 2000. Hollywood immediately set out to do him dirt. That's My Bush! was a Comedy Central TV program from the makers of South Park that was so stupid simply possessing knowledge of its existence threatens to render one idiotic. Will Farrell also depicted the new President in a series of Saturday Night Live sketches. Prior to the sketches, there was a question as to whether Farrell was a dumbellionite. Then he did the sketches, and the fact he is became . . . the thing known about him.

After 9/11 the comedy assassinations mostly came to an end until President Bush and General David Petraeus won the War on Terror in 2007. Once Bush rendered the enemy fairly impotent, the entertainment industry felt free to make fun of him again.

Curb Your Enthusiasm, however, never ceased trying to make Bush, the Republicans and the War on Terror a laughing stock. Their creator Larry David, and the entire program, were the living embodiment of the Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) speech from A Few Good Men, for they were truly laughing and yucking it up while living under the "very blanket of freedom" President Bush was providing them then "criticizing the way" he provided it.

Curb Your Enthusiasm was everything 24 was not. David was a complete liberal whose wife was one of the most hardcore environmental activists in the world. The show was so blatantly over the top in its hatred of anything Republican as to completely destroy its humor, which it did on its own after a couple of funny seasons. David, a Jew from New York, features one Muslim woman character who never is scene from behind her burka, which we eventually find out hides the fact she is incredibly ugly. This does not satisfy anybody.

Coming all the years George W. Bush was in the White House, when terror alerts were routinely issued, the program does all in its stilted power to convince viewers the threat was made up. In one episode, Larry hears of a major terror threat in Los Angeles. Somebody knew somebody who knew somebody in the CIA, and somehow it got to Larry, who parcels out this "warning" not to save anybody's life but as a favor to people he owes something to, or wants something from. The event never takes place and is made to look like a big joke.

David's most egregious sin, however, is his depiction of Jews, which is straight out of the Woody Allen joke book. Larry himself is so physically repulsive that he could argue he is "the reason for anti-Semitism," a joke he actually uses at the expense of his on-screen cousin during an on-stage comedy show. He is completely reprehensible, dishonest, immoral, unreliable, and without shame; all traits anti-Semites attribute to Jews, yet here is a Jew seemingly confirming them. Just as if the KKK sat around and tried to figure out the best way to make blacks look bad they would invent rap, if Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels were trying to make their Jewish stereotypes come live, they would produce Curb Your Enthusiasm.

This Jewish self-loathing was borrowed from Curb Your Enthusiasm in a 2004 film called Meet the Fockers, when married couple Bernie Focker (Dustin Hoffman) and Rozalin Focker (Barbra Streisand) play every immoral Jewish stereotype to a hilt. We have reached a point in society in which conservative Christians, according to myth at least the people who supposedly despise Jews, are in fact the only ones aghast at how they tear themselves down all on their own.

All of that is bad enough, but David's lack of courage and frail physical fears are so transparently stereotypical of the "weak Jews" as to be despicable. At the first sign of any challenge of any kind his face is contorted in fear, and he slinks off like a fairy afraid of everything. For Israelis, who have built their nation against all odds using strength in the face of hatred, such attributions must be particular loathsome. Talk show host Michael Savage, who grew up Michael Weiner in New York with Jewish ancestry, was particularly incensed with David's caricatures of immoral Jews, particularly the Hoffman-Streisand pairing in Meet the Fockers. But David's portrayals are nothing compared with that of Susie Essman, whose role might just well be "the worst Jew in history" if not "the most despicable human being of all time."

She fulfills every possible Jewish stereotype, seemingly all that Adolf Hitler told Nazi Germany the Jews were and needed to be hated for. She is ugly, sexually cold/repulsive, brassy, loud, demanding, foul-mouthed; the list of pejoratives could go on for pages and virtually no negative evades her character, which is the wife of Larry's manager Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin).

Larry takes another page from the Woody Allen repertoire by making his character attractive to women. The lovely Cheryl Hines plays his wife. Larry David is so ugly that no matter how much money or power he has in Hollywood, it is not believable that any women who are the least attractive, or even any ugly woman, would touch him. Watching Cheryl kiss and even feign "love scenes" with Larry is skin-crawling and surely must come only with a special bonus for such distasteful acting duties. But Larry goes beyond Cheryl, creating dates and sex scenarios with various good-looking women, the least believable being with the luscious Gina Gershon, perhaps the hottest Jewish actress ever in her hey day. But the kicker is when a nice-looking actress invites Larry for sex. Larry sees that she has a photo of George W. Bush in her room, and after expressing shock that any decent human could be a Republican, he is too turned off to get it on with her at that point. This scene, like most of Curb Your Enthusiasm, is projection at its fullest.

The Jews are by no means the only religion skewered. Christians are destroyed in this stupid TV series. At one point Larry accidentally pisses on a depiction of Christ hanging in a bathroom. The Christian householder later sees it and thinks it miracle, Christ shedding tears. Another time, Larry disrupts the baptism of a Jew who must convert in order to marry Cheryl's over-zealous sister Christian. All the Jews congratulate him on his guts. It was an accident but he takes "credit" for it anyway. When the Jewish groom-to-be refuses to go through with the baptism in a second attempt to get it done, the Jews and Christians end up at strident odds with each other; a typical disaster created by Larry David in many of the show's scenarios.

Larry even manages to offend the blacks in various awkward attempts to show the "misunderstanding" and of the races. So clueless is he that in an effort to show them in a good light, he continuously shows them to be fat, lazy, stupid, put upon, semi-violent, threatening, foul-mouthed, and any number of other unflattering things.

While the show had some genuine funny moments for a few years, by its third or fourth season it was a disaster of hackneyed tripe. For some reason it stayed on the air; apparently somebody liked it, or the right person with enough power was pulling the strings, but it was unwatchable for the better part of seven bad seasons.

The only explanation for this is that it has lived on Home Box Office (HBO). Not every single show on HBO is Left-wing, foul-mouthed dirt; it just seems that way. The people who run the network simply must be vile. There is no other explanation for the things that are allowed on the network. That said, there are some great programs (The Sopranos, Entourage, some of the best sports documentaries going), but much of their content, especially what passes for "comedy," is just plain filth.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, ABC aired a program called Politically Incorrect, hosted by Bill Maher. It was, like most mainstream network fare, Left of center, but reasonably funny and entertaining with a political twist. Then, after 9/11, Maher basically got on the air and announced that the terrorists were courageous fellows, for all practical purposes freedom fighters. He was fired and sent to obscurity, television hell. Then he emerged a few years later on HBO with a show called Real Time. As host of that program, given the freedom that a pay station allows that a network like ABC (which relies on advertisers) cannot, Maher seemed to take this opportunity to avenge everything every conservative and patriot ever said about him.

During the Bush years, he excoriated the Republicans with the worst slime and vitriol imaginable. Despite that, the show was occasionally watchable. Sometimes he even had conservative voices on, who would make valid points silencing his crowd, which must be handpicked from a focus group of dummies. When Barack Obama was elected, however, the show lost whatever it had. It never had credibility, but it at least had entertainment value about 10 percent of the time. Maher became so disgusting that it was out of control. Not only were his opinions terrible, his personal life was immoral. He was a "dirt bag," in the words of writer Michelle Malkin. In truth, he was the best thing the Republicans could ask for. They would never want somebody like Maher rooting for them. Millions of decent citizens saw that Maher was against something and, after applying some wisdom and common sense, concluded that if Maher opposes it they were for it; and vice versa.

Maher's attacks against the 2008 GOP Vice Presidential candidate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and her family, were over the top, totally villainous. Again, they only strengthened conservative resolve not to let the Mahers of the world win. Maher's attacks against conservative women like Palin and U.S. Congresswoman Michele Bachman (R.-Minnesota) were indicative of a trend extending from Maher, comedian David Letterman and other Left-wingers, in which it was okay to say anything about women on the Right.

In the mean time, President Obama "announced" that his family was "off limits." This was particularly galling since Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in 2004 by destroying the family of Republican rival Jack Ryan. For reasons that defy logic, neither Obama nor his minions were ever prosecuted for this crime.

Bill Maher gave President Obama $1 million for his 2012 re-election campaign. When conservative talk host Rush Limbaugh called a law student named Sandra Fluke a "slut" because she demanded $3,000 from the Federal government to pay for rubbers she apparently needed to give to various dudes, Limbaugh apologized within days. Maher and a host of liberal comedians, talk show hosts, pundits and politicians, on the other hand, routinely called Republican women sluts, slutty, a "slutty airline stewardess look," whores, and every other foul pejorative. They openly rooted for conservatives to die, to have heart attacks, to be assassinated (making one movie blue printing how to do it), to commit suicide, and dozens of other pleasantries. The response to all this was President Obama demanding that conservatives tone down their rhetoric.

No Left-winger apologized because they cannot be shamed. Shown prima facie evidence of their wrongdoing, they somehow convince themselves they are justified, or that these bad acts are actually good acts! This dynamic served as a contrast, with millions of decent Americans making comparisons of the way the Right acts as opposed to the way the Left acts. After applying some more common sense, they determined whatever the Left was for, they were against. The fact that an immoralist (Maher) was President Obama's biggest fan served to say all that need be said.

Res ipsa loquitur.

The Majestic (2001) was another in a long line of movies Hollywood likes to make depicting themselves as poor victims of that mean ol' Joe McCarthy. Peter Appleton (Jim Carrey) is a Hollywood screenwriter of the 1950s being hounded by a Republican Congressman who accuses him of Communism. Of course, Appleton is not a Communist and the accusations are a "witch hunt." Naturally, the film is fictitious and each character made-up, because in real life such obviously innocent writers did not exist. The Hollywood Ten in real life were card-carrying Commies carrying out John Howard Lawson's directives, which came on high from Moscow.

The Reagans (2003) was originally scheduled for network television until conservative groups found out that James Brolin, portraying the Gipper, is "confronted" by Nancy (Judy Davis) about the AIDS epidemic and, in a conversation that in actuality lacked existence, quoted scripture in reply, as if to say he had no duty to "do" anything for homosexuals since their plight was God's judgment. It was moved to a cable channel and died the usual liberal death.

Then came 2004, one of the most political years in American history. That was the year Ronald Reagan passed away. His old detractors were forced to sit back in awe at the sight of enormous crowds lining the highways of California as his casket was transported to his final resting place at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. Here was probably the greatest of all 20th Century Presidents given an outpouring of love not seen since Dwight Eisenhower.

Reagan, being of Hollywood, stirred up much discussion of what his beloved "business," as he always called it, had become. U.S. Senator John Kerry (D.-Massachusetts) snagged the Democrat Presidential nomination. He was then confronted by the Swift Boat veterans who served with him in Vietnam. They almost all came out against him, a terrible refutation of him as a man and especially of his supposed war record. It turned out he was given medals for bare scratches, all orchestrated in political manner because he had connections; chased down a near-naked Vietnamese kid and shot him from behind in what he in his autobiography described as a "war crime"; arranged for a camera crew to capture his exploits for future campaign commercials; and worst of all made untrue allegations about his fellow soldiers and sailors in the Winter Soldier hearings, which prominently featured Jane Fonda, too. It was the re-playing of this constant footage, of a young, arrogant Kerry with a clipped New England accent, asserting the American military was no better than Genghis Khan, whose name he may or not have mispronounced, that sealed his doom.

Naturally Hollywood loved Senator Kerry, who at one appearance said they represented the heart and soul of America, which was news to the heart and soul of America.

But 2004 featured the running battle, which in truth more resembled the British Army destroying the IRA, between The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. Mel Gibson's epic ranks among the highest-grossing films in history, a success of unprecedented proportions. Released at the Cannes International Film Festival in May of 2004, Fahrenheit 9/11 was received enthusiastically by a largely French audience that hated America, despised Bush, and adamantly opposed the Iraq War. It is hard to really describe what exactly the documentary was. It was obviously a diatribe against Bush and Iraq, but it was so incoherent as to be difficult to review.

The Academy Awards bestowed an Oscar on Moore for his previous documentary, Bowling for Columbine, a rag-tag, questionable film that tried to blame Charlton Heston and the National Rifle Association for two crazed teenagers' mass shooting of a Colorado high school in 1999 (inspired not by the NRA but their shared fascination with Adolf Hitler, who ironically banned guns in Nazi Germany). When Moore went on stage to accept his Oscar, which was held right as the Iraq War began, he called it a "fictitious war." Many in the audience cheered; some booed.

At that moment, millions and millions of patriotic American citizens turned their TVs off, and have not turned them back since. The Oscar ratings went down and down and down after that. Movie attendance has suffered terribly. Much of this is because the films are not as good, but most of the reason is because Hollywood is so liberal. Moore was the face of that. It was not a good face to symbolize something. If it possible to be more physically repellant than Larry Davis, Moore is.

Moore's film was similarly given the Palme d'or. A Fox News correspondent who watched the premier told the audience it was "compelling." Many Republicans got nervous as Moore's documentary became a hot topic of conversation ("Have you seen Fahrenheit 9/11? You have to see it.") However, for many Bush supporters, the moment they realized Bush would win in November was when they saw Fahrenheit 9/11. Like much of Moore's work much of it bordered on cartoonish. There were some violent depictions of weapons exploding, but the premise of the film, which was that Bush lied about the weapons of mass destruction that were not found; that Saddam had no ties to terrorism; that Bush froze in fear when informed of the twin towers going down; and that the war played no role, nor furthered the American cause, in the War on Terror; these allegations were false. The only people who "believed" them were Democrats who wanted to believe it. Despite honors, awards and praise from the liberal class, Fahrenheit 9/11 helped re-elect President Bush.

The Left crowed at how "successful" the film was, but Rush Limbaugh gleefully informed the world that while The Passion of the Christ broke all-time box office records, Fahrenheit 9/11 was "just behind Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," an average film that did average business.

The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 were not the only political films of 2004. Denzel Washington, who appeared to lend himself to a conservative point of view, allowed himself to be drawn into a film with great potential that, in trying to denigrate the Republicans, lost any chance at greatness. This was the re-make of the classic 1962 Frank Sinatra-John Schlesinger classic, The Manchurian Candidate. The original was set in Korea, with an American Army unit captured by Communist forces, then forced to undergo "brainwashing" resulting in a lack of memory. One of them, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) was programmed to become an assassin of a Presidential candidate.

The re-make was set in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. The Frank Sinatra role of Captain Ben Marco was now played by Washington, with Raymond now played by Liev Schreiber. The facts were substantially changed. In the first version, Shaw never is a political candidate. In the re-make he is elevated to candidate for Vice President. While his political party is not identified, it looks to be the Democrats. His mother, U.S. Senator Eleanor Shaw (Meryl Streep), is a dead-on imitation of Hillary Clinton, at the time the Democrat front-runner for President in 2008. In a stirring address to the party hierarchy, she explains that her only son, a war hero and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, can help turn the electorate in their favor. The give-away they must be Democrats is when she explains that the whole South is unwinnable, a constant Democrat predicament.

But Raymond did not really save his unit, which was how he came to be awarded the CMH. Marco has weird dreams in which the truth is revealed to him; they were captured and forced to undergo "brainwashing." It is explaining who did the brainwashing where the film goes off the rails. The "bad guys" are not Communists, terrorists, or even "neo Nazi Right-wing extremists," Hollywood's catch all for all that is bad in the world. Instead, they are a creature of the American Military Industrial Complex, a weapons defense company called Manchurian Global, which is made to look lust like the Halliburton Corporation. Halliburton was the company that once employed Vice President Richard Cheney, and was heavily involved in servicing the military needs in Iraq. Of all entities in all the world, few had more lies told about it by Democrats than Halliburton, which in truth was one of the few companies that had not just the ability to operate in a war zone, but employed the kind of patriotic, brave people willing to place themselves in that kind of danger. The fact they actually turned a profit in so doing was somehow viewed as an immorality and corruption.

The Day After Tomorrow was a blatant attempt to place forth the notion that global warming is an impending disaster of doomsday proportions, entirely caused by man. Perhaps the film's depiction not of a heat wave but a cold wave was a reaction to conservative snickering over global warming advocate Al Gore's comedic appearances in heavy snow and ice. The thinking, it would go, is that global warming can and will cause both an ice age and a heat wave at the same time. This theory does not make sense, but to possess knowledge of it is somehow a failing by those with . . . common sense. The movie itself was ridiculously bad, but the end was another in a long line of fantasy scenes the Left loves to depict on film: the kind that never actually occurs in real life. This one depicted America as destroyed by weather and forced to go to Mexico, hat in hand, and ask that they please let us into their country, where presumably the weather is better for reasons that do not really make . . . sense (Mexico's better pollution standards?). Then the film shows the U.S. Vice President, a thinly disguised Cheney stand-in, apologizing to the world because America (not China, not Europe, not Russian, not Asia), caused this disaster.

Brokeback Mountain (2005) will forever be remembered as the "gay cowboy" movie. It took the last bastion of unrequited American manhood and draped them with the veneer of homosexuality.

Syriana was a convoluted film from Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) with an all-star cast (George Clooney, Christopher Plummer, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, Matt Damon, Amanda Peet). It attempted to tell a number of inter-related stories, all revolving around the issue of Middle East oil from every viewpoint: Washington lobbyists, politicians, Saudi sheiks, CIA spies, Muslim oil field workers, and U.S. oil tycoons. It was one of those movies that can be watched 10 times and the full plot will still be muddled. In the end, the essential message was that the problems in the Middle East are America's fault; that America still calls reformers and "good guys" Communists; that the kind of CIA drone strikes that later became a staple of the Obama Administration are a major mistake that kill the wrong guys; that the black Washington lawyer Bennet Holiday (Wright) is the only honest voice amongst a sea of corrupt whites; that the West neither understands nor respects Arab customs and ways; and that American meddling forces disaffected Arabs to commit acts of terror they would otherwise not do. Oh, and America is all to blame.

Kingdom of Heaven was serviceable look at the Christian Crusades into Muslim countries some 900 years ago. The film made a big point of showing that the Islamist military commander Saladin showed some compassion in dealing with his Christian opponents. According to history, apparently he did, to some extent at least.

Good Night, and Good Luck was a black-and-white, nourish look at the respected journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn). Directed by George Clooney, it delved into Murrow's increasingly uncomfortable position with U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's accusations of Communism during the 1950s. Murrow, who delivered iconic radio broadcasts from war torn Europe in the dark early days of World War II, saw his popularity and credibility slowly wither away until he was forced out of his job. Clooney took the usual Hollywood position that McCarthy was a malevolent force who propagated a huge lie on the American public. However, Clooney is due some props in one regard. Most movies about McCarthyism were fictional, featuring slimy, mean Republicans destroying decent, righteous folk. The reason they were fictional was because most of these scenarios never actually happened. To tell the true story would force filmmakers to actually depict admitted, card-carrying Communists, many of whom took money from Moscow and were legitimate enemies of the United States. This fact is of no value to filmmakers who want to place forth the fiction that there were no Communists; it was all dirty Republican tricks. But at least in Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney was willing to put it on the line and depict actual figures of history. In so doing, he had to, if not twist the facts, use certain facts and omit others to advance his ideology. All in all it was a decent movie.

War of the Worlds as one of the first films to get a dig in at President Bush and Iraq. With Martians now occupying Earth, Harlan Ogilvy (played naturally by Tim Robbins) tells Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise) that "occupations never work," which might be news to the Japanese under Douglas MacArthur, the Germans under American post-war rule, not to mention the Filipinos who were loyal enough to join arms with us against the Japanese.

Hollywood's liberalism has never been popular, but the people who make up the industry often fail to see their hand in front of their face. Going back to John Wayne, whose patriotic films were huge box office winners in comparison with all kinds of dark, edgy, often anti-family films that bombed, they have somehow not been able to help themselves. Frank Capra's wonderful stories live today as a testament to the power of wholesomeness. Clint Eastwood followed John Wayne, making Right-wing films liberals hated, then laughing all the way to the bank. The comparison between The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 is laughable.

But President George W. Bush and the Iraq War took things to new heights. The liberal media did everything in their mortal power to hurt the war effort, all but giving aid and comfort to Al Qaeda and the jihadist insurgents in an effort to help them beat back American resolve. Michael Moore's "fictitious war" statement at the 2003 Oscars, followed by his documentary, were the first salvos in this effort. By 2006-07, the industry was in full anti-war mode. Of all the examples that can be given of their lack of patriotism, and of America's rejection of their values, few if any are more obvious than the complete failing of the anti-Bush, anti-war movies Hollywood made in response to Iraq.

A cable TV program called Generation Kill showed soldiers in Iraq. It was based on reports from a Rolling Stone reporter who chose to characterize the men as stupid Right-wingers who masturbated in their socks. The show went off the air into the dustbin of history.

Naturally it took a few years before the movies could be conceived and made, but in 2006 the first of them was released. Home of the Brave was forgettable and failed to make money. It was like the Vietnam War movies that always wanted the audience to believe the My Lai massacre was the "norm." It focuses on a soldier who kills a civilian Iraqi woman, then on the veterans who come back home only to find angst and despair, their lives apparently ruined by George W. Bush.

In the Valley of Elah (2007) starred the great Tommy Lee Jones but made only $6.8 million. Rendition, despite starring the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, garnered a mere $9.7 million. This featured the time worn notion that all Arabs, as Barack Obama attempted to say in his 2004 keynote speech at the Democrat National Convention, were subject to unfair persecution by the intelligence services, which could drag them out of bed in the dead of night and send them to any hellhole where they would be tortured beyond belief. Apparently some Muslim teacher from Oregon was investigated for terror activities and later exonerated. There may be more cases. There might not be. As with Vietnam movies (and John Kerry's Winter Soldier testimony) attempting to paint My Lai as a daily occurrence, this was Hollywood's effort to make torture and un-Constitutional Rendition appear to be something happening every day to your neighbors. Actual events as depicted in Rendition either lack existence on Earth, or are so few and far between as to almost lack existence on Earth, leaving the neighbors of Arab-Americans to ponder whether their neighbors were spared, were some kind of exception to the rule . . . or whether the rule is that Arab-Americans live free lives just like they do.

Redacted, like Rendition, could not even be found on BoxOfficeMojo.com's web page listing all 2007 films' receipts. Lions for Lambs only made $15 million. Featuring Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise and other top-notch talent, it was a convoluted story that may have been somewhat based on another Democrat speech, this by Senator Kerry, who while running for President in 2004 tried to tell young people to stay in college because if they did not they might end up "stuck in Iraq," which essentially painted all the guys fighting their as dumbellionites not smart enough to go to college. It, like the bad seeds Christ used as a picture of the unsaved in the New Testament, fell by the wayside.

The Kingdom, starring Jamie Foxx, did fairly well at $47.4 million, but only because it was an action film without much political message except at the end, when apparently we were supposed to think jihadist terror is the moral equivalent of American aggression. Had it not added that little message it might have made another $20 million.

Stop-Loss (2008) was another one of those films that tried to make Hollywood look like they, as with Jane Fonda, were the ones looking out for soldiers. Nobody watched that, either. Green Zone (2010) was a vehicle of anti-war lib Matt Damon, but was barely watchable.

Of all the truly hideous lies offered in movies during the contentious Bush-Obama years, several since 2010 take the cake. One was Fair Game, which starred Sean Penn as Joe Wilson, Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame; a star-crossed Washington couple. Plame was supposedly "outed" by Vice President Dick Cheney's office as a "CIA agent." It was literally dripping with lies from the first frame to the last, and did very poorly. Of course. Plame was not a "CIA agent." She was not undercover, so she therefore had no "cover" to be "blown." She was an employee of the CIA, which was not hidden, at least among the Washington intelligentsia. The fact that one of her neighbors, who probably sold insurance, was unaware of this is supposed to be "proof" that she was "undercover."

Her husband, Wilson, seems to have been an out-of-work, sort of freelance "diplomat" she recommended go to Africa to "investigate" the Bush Administration claims that Saddam Hussein had access to materials that could be used in a nuclear bomb. This was apparently one of the justifications for Secretary of State Colin Powell's U.N. speech urging a resolution authorizing American use of force against Saddam, which was passed.

Wilson went to a place called Niger, where he probably sat around the hotel, had a few cocktails, chatted up some pin-striped diplomats, basically did not find what he came their looking not to find, and returned to write an op/ed declaring the fact he did not find something called yellow cake meant no possibility existed within the framework of human conception that Saddam Hussein, known user of WMD, had WMD. Wilson wanted the public to believe he was something between Indiana Jones and James Bond or something, having dug under every nook and crevice against terrible, dangerous odds in Africa to not find what he did not find. What perfidy.

Naturally, the liberal press bought every inch of it hook, line and sinker. This may have been the final nail in the coffin of the very notion of a balanced media. Then the conservatives unearthed the fact that neither Vice President Cheney nor his aide, Scooter Libby, were the ones who "outed" Plame, who was so worried about her "undercover" status that she first posed with Wilson on the cover of the most-appropriately named Vanity Fair for a glowing Bush-bashing article; not to mention happily signing on to a Hollywood movie "exposing" the whole thing. Real Navy Seal stuff.

In fact, she was "exposed" not by the Bush Administration but by a long-time Democrat in the diplomatic corps named Richard Armitage, who told columnist Robert Novak. So well known was Plame's pedestrian job at Langley that Novak did not think twice in writing that it was Plame who sent Wilson on his nefarious "fact-finding" mission. Apparently it was only because Novak wrote for a Right-leaning publication that a "crime" had (not) been committed.

If Casino Jack was supposed to sway the electorate to vote against Republicans in the 2010 mid-terms, it had the opposite effect.

Eventually the Iraq War was won via General Petraeus's Surge, and Hollywood also apparently got tired of losing money. The Hurt Locker (2008) reversed the trend towards anti-Iraq films, but Left-wing messages kept rollin' right along.

This got back to the old story of treason, which in American and British history is the story of one Left-wing fellow traveler after another. Other than The Third Man (1949), starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, a couple of forgettable Commie spy thrillers made in response to the Blacklist (including one with Edward G. Robinson trying to re-hab his image), a recital of films about spies largely produces the sound of crickets chirping in the night.

But no sooner had Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee been convicted of passing secrets to the Soviets than the industry got all excited to make The Falcon and the Snowman (1985). Boyce was apparently a Left-winger rebelling against his FBI father, but Lee' s so-called "Republican credentials" were trotted out in the Sean Penn role.

So, the decades passed. The Good Shepherd (2006) pretended Kim Philby and Alger Hiss did not exist. The Venona Project (a true story of military intelligence as heroes, by the way); FDR's Communists; American treason resulting in Eastern Europe being sold out at Yalta and the U.N.; "who lost China?"; nah, nary a word. The Nazis, Right-wing extremists, militia, racists; always white criminals, usually branded "conservative." But no Communist spies.

So, along comes Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper). Whether he was really a Republican or not is not entirely known, although he probably was. The film certainly wants us to believe he was, which does not mean he was, since his disapproval of Hillary Clinton wearing a pants suit is the apparent give-away of his politics.

He was a pervert who enjoyed the fantasy of his wife being sexually handled by some large group of men, although this fantasy was never acted out. It was "fleshed out" in on-line chat rooms. Eric O'Neill (Ryan Phillippe) is a young FBI agent assigned by his boss, Kate Burroughs (Laura Linney) to spy on Hannsen, whose office he is assigned to share. His discovery of Hannsen's perversions angers O'Neill, who questions why FBI resources are wasted on investigating a few strange personal peccadilloes. Burroughs then informs him that Hannsen is passing secrets to the Russians, still enemies even after the end of the Cold War.

De-bunking Hannsen's Republican orientation is far less interesting to the filmmakers than destroying him as a Catholic, since he was a devout Christian who promoted his faith to everybody he associated with. His motivation in supplying the Russians with classified material is also very murky. I app[ears that he was mad at being passed over for promotions, mostly because he had a very prickly personality, and did what he did not out of ideology but, if he is to be believed at least, to teach the FBI a lesson; that the breaches in security he long warned them about were real, and his breaching them was the proof.

Recount was naturally produced (HBO) during the 2008 elections to shed the worst light on the GOP. It starred Kevin Spacey as Ron Klain, Al Gore's man after the 2000 Presidential election came down to "hanging chads" in Florida. While it did not come right out and say George W. Bush stole the election, it certainly did not want the audience to know that the New York Times, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and numerous others, all did exhaustive research, determining beyond doubt that Bush won.

Milk was a complete joke. Harvey Milk, a gay politician in San Francisco, was shot to death by – of course – by a conservative fellow supervisor. Aside from the fact Milk was killed, he accomplished nothing and was no hero.

Body of Lies was a convoluted CIA "thriller" that, as evidenced by its title, attempts to distort the mission of the agency, of America, of our purpose in the Middle East and the world, all with the idea of making Americans question its history and righteousness.

Doubt was another of those movies Hollywood loves to make, demonstrating that Catholics are rigid and unbending, lack empathy for gays, are probably racist, and as per the title, are not actually as sure of their faith as they say they are. Satan likes it a lot when people make movies like Doubt.

The Girls Next Door ran several years in the late 2000s on E! Entertainment TV. The image of the reptilian Hugh Hefner with his three "girlfriends," all spectacular beauties in their 20s, caused the viewer to scream at the television begging the parents of these wayward chicks to come to the Playboy mansion and rescue their kids from further embarrassment.

Avatar (2009) was basically a cartoon promoting the message that America is a colonizer, and therefore bad. Only the wise indigenous peoples can save us from our racist selves.

Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday in 2011 engendered several retrospectives, most of which gave him all due credit. But HBO, well known for much Left-wing clap-trap, offered Reagan. It started well, but somehow, it was led most disturbingly by his own son, the liberal homosexual Ron Reagan. The documentary actually tried to stretch Reagan's 1980s deficits, which were used to defeat the Soviet Union, past the budget balancing of the Clinton years, all the way to the 2009 debts increased by $5 trillion with one swoop of Barack Obama's pen. How did they make this connection? Was Reagan's ghost whispering in Obama's ear to do the very thing he advocated against over the course of 50 years in the public limelight?

The Ides of March was a total clunker starring George Clooney as Governor Mike Morris, a Presidential candidate. Occasionally the show biz Lefties allow their fantasies to run wild. This oft manifest itself in conversations that have no possibility of ever happening because they never have happened; a Republican mea culpa in which the Right-wing fellow, in a fit of "honesty," confesses that the GOP is racist, homophobic, that tax cuts hurt the country, that Nixon killed JFK, or any number of other horribles.

The Ides of March, however, goes in a different direction, one Warren Beatty may have tried to take Bulworth but got lost in the doing. Governor Morris is a mouthpiece for loony Clooney, who early on makes a speech saying his "god" is not Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, or any of the visions of deism. His god is the Constitution, which certainly is a head scratcher, because his political brethren have done more to tear that document down than anybody else (how killing unborn children falls under a right to privacy in Roe but killing your neighbor in actuality does not still confuses). No Presidential candidate can make this speech, not even a Democrat speaking to Democrats, especially not in a Bible-thumping state like Ohio (where the scene is, a key March Primary state).

But a later speech reveals the whole Democrat fantasy, when the Governor announces a litany of things that will happen if he is elected. This reflects then-Senator Obama's 2008 assertion that his anointing will result in the ocean levels (which are supposed to be rising due to global warming except people who live near the water don't see it happening) will be turned back if he is given the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. He was but the oceans didn't.

Anyway, Governor Morris explains to an audience waiting with baited breath on each syllable that his election will mean "electric cars for everyone," that oil will be obsolete, among a litany of liberal hopes and dreams not unlike Obama's assertion he can turn back the tides, all of which fall under the category of things that will not happen in our lifetimes at least. The movie bombed, but perhaps its most lasting statement comes from the campaign manager of his opponent, Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti), who says, "The Republicans don't have dick." For many who watched this on-demand in 2012, they could not help juxtaposing Duffy's put-down of GOP chances with the fact the same week Mitt Romney opened up a lead over President Obama in 2012 polling.

J. Edgar is the worst Clint Eastwood movie ever. What got into this guy is a mystery. It is as if he wanted to apologize for making Right-wing hits for 40 years-plus and offers a cheap set of unproven rumors purporting that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was the cross-dressing gay lover of Clyde Tolson. Now, Hoover may have been gay, or bi, or most likely asexual. The allegations of his sexuality and propensity for women's clothing, while possible, nevertheless come from some of the least believable people traipsing about the planet. For Eastwood to buy their stories, then put it on screen is unforgiveable. But what is even worse is this is the highlight of the film. Here is a guy who protected America and fought Communists for over 50 years. Nothing on Hiss. Nothing on Venona. Nothing on Lauchlan Currie. Eastwood of all directors was the guy to right all the years of Hollywood revisionism, but alas he blew it.

The Iron Lady similarly missed an enormous opportunity. Meryl Streep was brilliant as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but the film half-pretended the Cold War did not exist, much less credit Thatcher and President Reagan with seeing it through to the benefit of the West. Instead, the movie concentrates on the fact Thatcher had Alzheimer's disease at the end. Is this some kind of news flash, that human beings get sick and die at the end of their lies?

Bridesmaids and The Hangover Part II (both 2011) were not political, but nevertheless said much about how far society has sunk to. Effluence jokes, graphic sex, subject matter that almost should be outlawed. Will Hayes must be rolling over in his grave.

In 2012 a poll revealed that Americans believe 25 percent of the population is gay, when it is really between two and 10 percent. This is similar to the now-debunked theory that AIDS affects straights as much as homosexuals. All of this is due to popular media such as Will and Grace, which Vice President Joseph Biden attributed to being a big part of it in the wake of President Obama's assertion that he had "evolved" into believing gay marriage should be legal.

Many images of gay couples raising children, a huge propaganda with a big pushback from the Tea Party beginning in 2010, are propelling "values voters," who promise to offer a voice in the 2012 election as they did in 2004. The Showtime TV program Californication offered a character with "two moms," one a butch, his biological one feminine. The character, Hank Moody's (David Duchovny) daughter's boyfriend, is very handsome, a good writer, a real happening ladies man. The opposite of what many might fear would result from the dysfunction of growing up with two lesbian women.

A PBS documentary on ex-President Clinton was a real head scratcher. As expected, it was fawning until it got to Monica Lewinsky and Impeachment. The makers must be lauded for not cutting all the interviews, which were scathing indictments from friends and associates describing how disappointed they were, how he lied to their faces . . the word "liar" was bandied about over and over. Clinton must have watched and seethed.

What is the most outrageous, politically biased movie ever made? This is a discussion that requires time and alcohol, but Game Change simply must be included on the list. This was another HBO film which, like Fair Game was dripping with lies so cartoonish and comical as to be embarrassing. Somehow or other, the industry does not understand that when they make movies this bad and untrue, they are not just hurting Democrats but, more amazingly, legitimately helping Republicans.

Julianne Moore plays 2008 GOP Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The first noticeable thing is that the real life Palin is actually prettier than the actress Moore. A porn spoof was also released featuring a woman named Lisa Ann "playing" Palin. At least Lisa Ann was exceptionally beautiful.

One of the things that made Game Change so comical was the stupid way Moore spoke. The audience, however, only needed to watch Fox News, which regularly featured Palin, to see that the actual Palin did not speak that way. Ed Harris played U.S. Senator John McCain (R.-Arizona). He is shown to be reasonable and measured – the good, "sacrificial lamb" Republican the Democrats wish the GOP would always offer up for slaughter – who refuses to go after the Reverend Jeremiah Wright because to do so would be "racist." He also tells Palin that she has a future as a Republican leader, but not to listen to Rush Limbaugh and the unreasonable conservatives of the Right-wing. Senator McCain denied this conversation occurred, as did former Alaska Governor Palin . . . because it did not occur. Interviews with McCain right after the show's airing only left viewers to conclude, "Hmm, so it's a pack of lies, huh?"

Then there was the casting of Woody Harrelson, one of the all-time Left-wing nut jobs ever, as McCain's campaign manager, Steve Schmidt. Schmidt and his staff personally managed to lose a campaign for President in which their man was a decorated war hero, one of the most respected political figures in the world, to an unknown, unqualified nobody. Instead of taking blame for this amazing failure, he deflected responsibility onto Palin. The film of course bought Schmidt's version wholesale.

Senator McCain was in fact losing badly until Governor Palin was named as his running mate. This energized them to the point where they quickly moved into a lead. One poll exaggerated an 11-point McCain-Palin lead, but the most reliable polling had them up by five in mid-September of 2008.

The film tried to say Palin's "gaffes" caused the lead to slip, when in fact it was Barney Frank and the Democrat sub-prime mortgage debacle, originated by President Clinton, which of all times it was ever going to blow up, happened to blow up just in time to inflict maximum damage upon the Republicans. Whether George Soros orchestrated this event was, naturally, not addressed in the film.

Finally, the filmmakers do what they always love to do, which is the infamous "fantasy conversation" they wish Republicans have, but never do. This one involved Schmidt and his other campaign guys sitting around the hotel bar the night before the election, lamenting the defeat they know they will suffer. They put down Palin as mere fluff. There are no more Thomas Jeffersons, they conclude. Then Schmidt/Harrelson gets in the zinger every Democrat had an orgasm over, when he says that while Palin could not cite a single meaningful Supreme Court decision (he somehow "forgets" she cited the infamous Dred Scott decision), Obama was a "Constitutional law professor," which is also a bit of a stretch. He was an adjunct on staff for affirmative action purposes, hardly an expert on the United States Constitution, the author of zero cases, reports, theses or dissertations on Constitution law. Whether he actually taught students is not known. He is certainly not published on the subject. Despite liberal cover-ups, Obama made major mistakes when asked about varying decisions. But, according to Game Change, he might as well have been Felix Frankfurter.

Another HBO program truly revealed the Left's real feelings. The Newsroom (2012), written by Aaron Sorkin, featured Jeff Daniels as a "weak Republican" anchor of a major CNN-style national news network. In the first episode, his character, Will McAvoy, lists a number of statistics about America's low ranking in health care, education, literacy, and other areas. Then he lists all the things we used to be good at, but are not anymore. Then he flatly states that no, America is not "the greatest country in the world" anymore, but does not say who is (China? England? France? Belgium/ Canada? Australia?). What Sorkin did not write into the script was that the rise of liberalism directly correlates with all of the failings outlined by McAvoy. All the things he says we were once good at represent an Eisenhower-JFK-Reagan past in which we stood up to Communism, landed on the moon, and won the Cold War, most of it swept aside by the 1992 "Year of the Woman" elections, political correctness, and Bill Clinton. Sorkin apparently was not far enough removed from the forest to see the trees, or more precisely, to realize that half the audience was staring at the TV, saying that if we ever held these notions of greatness dear, the Obama Presidency was certainly trying to hammer the last nails in its coffin. But he no doubt thought enough "sophisticated" viewers would get his point of view.

But that was not the half of it. The show's first episode was the network's response to the 2010 BP Oil spill. Somehow, someway, Sorkin managed to revise history and, this time, the bad guy was not British Petroleum or President Obama's poor response to the crisis, but the old Republican boogeyman, the Halliburton Corporation (former Vice President Cheney's one-time employer). Unbelievable.

Then suddenly, by some sort of "miracle," once Barack Obama became President, Hollywood decided it was okay to make "muscular" films about the War on Terror. Katherine Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) was virtually enlisted by the White House to make a movie about the killing of Osama bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty). The event took place in April of 2011. Normally, a full length motion picture would not be ready for theatres for five years. In this case, the Obama Administration broke numerous national security laws and policies, providing valuable trade secrets about the Navy SEALS to be exposed to the world by the filmmakers, all to make him look good just in time for the 2012 election.

Senator McCain, however, began an investigation, claiming the President was willing to give up sensitive national security secrets that could jeopardize clandestine operations, and actual CIA and other intelligence agents, just to make himself out to be a "tough guy." This came on top of the "Fast and Furious" illegal drug smuggling operation that earned Attorney General Eric Holder a contempt of Congress citation. Zero Dark Thirty was pushed back to after the election.

However, the exposition of national security, dangerous exposition of Navy SEALS' identities, and trade secrets by Obama to enhance his political reputation contrasts with the Valerie Plame episode, when for all practical purposes unknown events and facts were made known only by Plame complaining that they were . . . now known, in order to gain publicity.

There are a few Hollywood celebrities who are conservative. Actor James Woods keeps his Republican views to himself. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a moderate Republican. Comedian Dennis Miller switched over after 9/11. But the dominant media culture is very liberal. What is important to note is the velocity that one side (the liberals) are allowed to create, vs. the other side. A look at pop culture talk shows, comic acts and the like demonstrates that conservatives may be placed on shows, but usually in a token manner, outnumbered by liberals (the one exception: Fox News). The conservatives generally play it straight, are a little apologetic, quite polite, and are forced onto the defensive. The audiences seem to be liberal, which considering the fact that the country is much more conservative makes it obvious they are recruited and steered into cheering and backing the liberal point of view.

Comedians like David Letterman and Jay Leno softly chide the Democrats, keep it in the middle, and avoid vitriol. Dennis Miller never could help himself. He was a liberal in the Clinton years but the President was such a target that Miller lambasted him. He finally realized he was not a liberal.

But most comics who do politics are hatchet men (and women). Liberals actually come out and say with a straight face that it is conservatives who are vicious and closed-minded, but Chris Rock, Jeanine Garafolo and Bill Maher are obviously examples that this concept is a pure lie. Liberal comics cut Republicans to shreds, using the foulest possible language, which Republicans could never in one and one half million years get away with. Maher called George W. Bush a "little a-----e." Is there some way to justify this? Answer: No.

However, what these liberal comics fail to realize is that in so doing, they do the Democrats the worst possible service. Their hate speech may play for a hand picked audience steered to a TV laugh track, but out there in the living rooms of America are millions of ordinary people. These people hear advocates of the Democrat Party swearing, promoting all manner of foul behavior, showing little in the way of morals or scruples. They are not hearing this from Republican counterparts. What happens is that (a) the immorality of Democrats becomes subliminally known to them, and then (b) the immorality of Democrats becomes actually known to them. This does not help the Democrats any more than it helps blacks associated with cop killing, "ho-banging" rap music. The final reality is that the great advantage the liberals have, which is control of most of the TV stations and film screens, is not just wasted but made to be a disadvantage. This helps explain why, despite this advantage, they are losing the political battle for the hearts and minds of America.

If the liberals then want to ask what they can do to win this battle, they are provided an answer that many suspect already, but is really not what they want to hear. The answer is to be more like the conservatives. Is there any other way to tell it? This answer is bad news for the Democrat Party either way. If they become more like conservatives, they eventually become Republican. If they become less like conservatives, they marginalize the Democrat Party.

What the liberals will discover, if they have not already, is that people vote with their feet. At some point, sooner rather than later, Hollywood will realize that if they make movies that realistically, occasionally show Republicans to be "good guys" and Democrats as "bad guys," which reflect actual political events, audiences will be stunned in a good way. Many conservatives stay away from films because they are sick and tired of the liberalism. This is the heart and soul of America; people with families and discretionary spending income. If they tap into this market, Hollywood will revive itself from the moribund industry that it is today.

In the future, Hollywood owes it to one of their own, Ronald Reagan, to make a big-ticket bio-pick about how he saved the world from World War III. These kinds of movies are not easy. A true movie capturing his life has never really been made.

Oliver Stone vs. America

How to explain Oliver Stone? First of all, he may have been the most talented director in the game, even though he no longer is the hottest of properties. Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese are linked along with their association with Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, John Milius, Taylor Hackford and other film school pioneers of the mid-1960s. But Stone ranks right with them, or any other auteur. He has a knack for telling stories through symbols, metaphors, light and color, expressions, black-and-white imagery, sound effects and cuts that is truly revolutionary. Stone has been described as a personally repugnant human being; a liar, a cheat, a drug addict, an evil and brutal personality, somebody who may have invoked the devil to give him his fame and fortune. Meg Ryan came home every night she filmed The Doors and told her mother Stone was "the devil." If so, he made a good deal in terms of creating product, because like him or hate him, Stone's work is first rate.

His interviews reveal an erudite, cosmopolitan man who can turn on the charm, which belies the stories of repelling sex harassment that is really molestation. There is no question that he is intelligent, and there is also no question that unlike most of his colleagues, he can walk the walk as an Army infantry grunt, having served in Vietnam. His background mirrors the Charlie Sheen character Chris Taylor in Platoon. This is supposed to be what authenticates him, and it certainly is a bona fide, but his fellow vets have, at the very best, mixed feelings about the message he conveys.

Stone came from affluence in New York City, went to Vietnam presumably out of patriotism, and was devastated by the experience. He became a total radical, driven stark mad by drug use, and fell hook, line and sinker into the counter-culture while at NYU's film school, circa 1970-71. Stone regularly talked about attaching a long scope to a rifle and "taking out Nixon," but apparently the Secret Service never heard of his Travis Bickle-like fantasy.

He broke in writing the screenplay for Midnight Express (1978) about a drug smuggler named Billy Hayes (Brad Davis), probably material Stone knew about all too well. It is a great film. An American college student is imprisoned in Turkey for trying to smuggle heroin. It is a dark tale about human depravity that played to its 1970s audience of dropouts and drug abusers. It can be argued that it justified drug smuggling, but that would not be entirely accurate. It was just a strong piece about the will to survive, with a triumphant Hollywood ending.

In 1986, Stone made Salvador, which was an amazing feat. It was political commentary on America's "evil" backing of Right-wing oppressors stomping poor Communist agrarians, naturally during the early years of the Reagan Administration, but it was also a comedy, allowing for tour de force performances by James Woods and Jim Belushi. Woods is down-and-out photo/journalist Richard Boyle, who captures the story. Belushi is his drinking companion, urged to go to El Salvador not because a story is begging to be told, but because "you can drink and drive there."

Then came Platoon.

Stone shopped Platoon around for years in various forms, advertising it as the experience of someone who had been over there. It was not an easy sell, since the story was too raw for a country trying to overcome the Vietnam syndrome, then fueled by the Reagan patriotism. It finally was made in 1986, and was hailed for its realism. It made stars out of Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, and Willem Dafoe. The realism is apparent in the language, the scenery, the heat and bugs, the sweat and toil, the "Cox's army" adherence to what was left of Army uniforms and equipment, the danger of night patrols and firefights, and the courage and the cowardice of regular guys doing one-year draft tours of "the 'Nam."

The essential story is only true if it describes William Calley and My Lai, or what that could have been if the villagers had not been saved by a messianic Sergeant Elias (Dafoe) instead of being gunned down by a Satanic Barnes (Berenger as a Calley knock-off). If Stone had simply made it the "My Lai Massacre," it would have been historically accurate, but what he did was pernicious. He wanted to convey to millions of moviegoers that My Lai was the norm. This was the same thing John Kerry had done during the Winter Soldier hearings. He cast this ordinary platoon of grunts as driven to a My Lai-type war crime by the very nature of his view of our illegitimate role in Vietnam.

Stone was in Vietnam, but the history of that war is not a history of ordinary units run amok in racist killing sprees. Stone infuses the story with humanity and heroes. Sheen plays Chris, an idealist, based on Stone's vision of himself. This seems very self-serving. Oliver Stone is not in the same league with the idealized Chris character.

Chris is a hero and a survivor. Dafoe, as Elias, is a Christ-like figure who protects his "brothers" and shows no fear, even when chasing "Charlie" into that most dangerous of places, the underground tunnel system. His death, portrayed on the posters, is a wide-armed crucifix. It is avenged by Chris, his disciple who takes to the challenge with the passion of the converted. A final battle also shows something that rarely, if ever, happened. North Vietnamese regulars overrun the Americans. In actuality, the U.S. won all the battles against the NVA. Then, the commander, Captain Harris (Dale Dye) has to make a call and have the whole "pod," friend and foe alike, napalmed in another stretch on history.

Barnes and his "super lifer" pals (John McGinley as O'Neill, Kevin Dillon as Bunny) are shown to be corrupt, have a taste for death, and little accountability in a situation that lets them kill "gooks" with racist impunity. This is not out of the question. Soldiers are trained killers, and combat de-humanizes them. The Audie Murphy characterizations are not true, either. But Stone has created a vision of the Vietnam experience that is not portrayed as a special circumstance, but rather the average, the every day. His political message is very clear, and it is to discredit the objectives of the war. He also discredits a lot of his buddies who fought with him. He does demonstrate the inhuman behavior of the Communists, which as a combat infantryman he saw for himself, but strongly urges the viewer to buy into the sickness of America.

In 1987 he again starred Charlie Sheen, this time as Bud Fox, along with Martin Sheen (Bud's father Carl) and Michael Douglas (Gordon Gekko), in Wall Street. Stone, like Coppola's Patton, tapped into a part of America he really wanted to discredit, but instead glorified. Based on the go-go stock markets of the Reagan '80s, it is loosely based on inside arbitrageurs and junk bond kings like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken. Fox is an idealistic, ambitious young stockbroker, his father is his conscience, and Gekko is pure tantalizing temptation. Fox must violate SEC laws and get inside information in order to do business with the "big elephant" Gekko. Gekko's star fades when a big deal-gone-bad has personal ramifications. Fox turns a dime on him. The film is supposed to show that America is a greedy place that "produces nothing" in a "zero sum game" in which the rich only make money on the backs of the poor. Gekko's statements (Stone desperately wanting to convey this message) about economics are pure, unadulterated economic lies.

While Stone may be partially correct in deducing that stockbrokers do not produce the goods, services and companies they buy and sell, it would be stupid to believe such things just materialize. It would be like saying a man who raises funds to help elect Barack Obama does not produce anything, theoretically impugning him unless he himself gets in the arena and is elected himself, in which case he still has not produced anything other than a title. What does Stone expect, that all the employees of Blue Star Airlines will work for free to create a company and only in the end all split the profits equally? Who pays them and for their equipment in the beginning before they make their profits? In fact he even invents a scenario whereby the union does make some major concessions that half-resemble this Socialistic principle. Any company or product must have capitalistic money behind it.

But the term "zero sum game" is comedy. This implies that for ever dollar made by somebody, it is taken from another. This is the heart of the Communist rant, found in a million revolutionary speeches railing against "the man," imperialists, whites exploiting natives, and so on. Even Gandhi's "salt march" lacks reality. He marched native Indians to the sea to collect salt, which the British were using to cultivate and sell for profit. Gandhi said it was natural to his nation's land, and he was right, but it was useless to them unless they knew how to collect, refine, package, sell, ship and collect profits from it. The British could do that. To the Indians it was just stuff on the ground. It is not out of the realm that the Indians could learn; they were not stupid, but if the British never taught them how, would they have figured it out? Eventually . . . maybe.

John Milius tackled this subject in Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) when American Indians confront whites mining the land. The whites tell them they made something of the land out of nothing. It was rock and dirt to the Indians. The Indians kill them. If the Americans never mined the land, the Indians probably never would have learned how to do it. Then the environmentalists would complain that the whites never teach the Indians anything.

But the Gekko/Stone premise is even dumber. If it is true, then a rich man must go to a poor man, lead him to a bank, get him to pull out a credit card, probably help him lie on a credit application to get or increase the limit on the card, then force him to cash advance the card, and have him then hand over the money. Or think of it this way: one man with $100,000 over five years turns it into $1 million, while another man with $10,000 now has $15,000. Has the first man somehow robbed the second man, of $985,000? Obviously a "rising tide has lifted all boats," even if the second man only gains $5,000 and the first man $900,000 (or increased the wealth gap). Even if the poor man loses his $10,000, it makes no sense to believe it was "stolen" by the $1 million man. But, that's the logic of the Left, and as most conservatives will say, that is why they are not on the Left!

Where Stone may have had second thoughts was the reaction the film got. As the years went by, he and others were approached countless times by Young Republicans and Wall Street execs who told him the depiction of the exciting world of finance led them into that very career, which they thanked him for! Stone had hoped to create an egalitarian class. Instead, he created a decade full of Gordon Gekkos. They in turn fueled the dot-com boom. It was not unlike the Democrats who hoped to expose Oliver North and the Republicans in the Iran-Contra "scandal," only to discover that millions thought Ollie and his White House pals were doing God's work in fighting Communism.

Res ipsa loquiter.

Stone's 2010 re-make Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, tried to convey his true message. The result was boredom and a confusing script.

In 1989 Stone came out with Born on the Fourth of July, the true story of Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise), a gung-ho Marine who is paralyzed in combat in Vietnam. The film is realistic and compelling. Stone is a master and Cruise gives one of his best-ever performances, proving him to be a bona fide acting talent. The film depicts the heartbreaking American experience in Vietnam, and the character arc of Kovic is as complete as any ever captured. He returns home, desperate to believe that his sacrifice was in a noble cause, but this is chipped away by the well-known elements of '60s radicalism. The "generation gap" between longhaired youths and crew cut, religious parents is profound. Kovic sinks into the depravity of drugs and alcohol, but battles back to become a "hero" of the anti-war Left. He wheels into the 1972 Republican National Convention, where he tries to tell the clean-cut, well-heeled patriots that they are wrong and he is right. The idea is that they are all warmongers who have not fought, while he is a pacifist because he has. While there is truth to the premise, in choosing to tell this story, Stone establishes Hollywood as the home of solidly liberal ideas. In 1972, Nixon won 49 states over the anti-war McGovern. The idea that all those Americans, subject daily to reports from Peter Arnett and Dan Rather, the bias of Walter Cronkite, and the hate of the New York Times and the Washington Post, chose Nixon because they were bloodthirsty imperialists is just malarkey. Furthermore, Nixon had made 18-year olds eligible to vote. The concept that all of American youth protested in the streets is a myth. The anti-war movement was propped by TV that made pockets of outrage look like a widespread movement. The Silent Majority spoke out in '72. Big time.

Stone's depiction is fair in and of itself, but he takes advantage of the power of his medium in creating a mindset that such horrors as Kovic experienced are just part of the "Vietnam experience." Kovic's life mirrors soldiers going back to the Roman Legion and beyond. The Left has taken Vietnam as one of those core issues and stuck to it, just as they found themselves wedded to Alger Hiss, Bill Clinton and during the Bush years, the losing argument of the War on Terror. McCarthy was going after genuine Communists, and genuine Communists were trying to enslave South Vietnam. It took some fighting to stop them. Nixon and Kissinger had the best plan available to them at the time, and the public recognized it. Watergate killed them and the Democrats used it to abandon our allies. Millions died because of them. Democrats will have you believe that we "created" the "killing fields." They have to say things like that, to cling to this nebulous theory, somehow unable to blame the rabid haters and murderers of Communist history, apparently because they are wedded to McCarthyism. Their movies are their best tool in perpetuating their lies.

In 1991 Stone made his great bid, created a masterpiece, but in so doing laid himself out. A career that could have been the best ever was short-circuited, although one can give him begrudging credit for "trying." The movie was JFK. It was an artistic achievement of light, shadow and hidden meaning, told through the symbiosis of different film styles. A great filmmaker could only have accomplished the mood it creates. It is a spiritual work.

But JFK's conspiracy premise is so over-the-top that it created a cartoonish cloud used to box Stone in. Stone did a lot of research and packs a mighty wallop in his attempts to "solve" or "answer" the Kennedy assassination mystery. He took some huge risks, came fairly close to pulling it off, but in the end did something to himself he must regret. He made himself uncredible. What he thought would happen is anybody's guess. Stone probably was so flush with success, Hollywood panache and faith in the power of film (V.I. Lenin called it the most important art) that he thought he could replace the legitimate historians. JFK's lesson is that a movie is still a movie - two or three hours of persuasive imagery, yes - powerful and compelling, but not fact. For years, Hollywood has promoted their causes in this manner, and yet the populace has shifted back to the Right. This frustrates them because they have no answer to this "problem." The proof of this is that the movies are and always will be the province of entertainment. When the Oliver Stone's try to rise above that they face a precipitous fall.

What really has set the Left back is not just the failure of the film medium to accomplish their goals, but also the lack of faith accorded college professors, school textbooks, and mainstream news. So who is left to tell the real story? The Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, the Hoover Institute . . .

As for JFK, it is a complicated piece of fiction that would require some real research to effectively discredit all of its lies. What it did in the theatre was have one asking, "Jeez, did that really happen?" or "My God, is this true?" or "Holy cow, I can't believe this could be." It is major sensory overload. Innocent civilians who knew things are killed. Deception and murder are used to cover up the sordid deeds. The film requires several viewings, and frankly time, probably years, to unravel it. What happens is that various reviews, reports from historical figures and historians are read and pieced together. After a while the discovery is made that a particular "witness" never existed, a certain "police officer" is a figment of Stone's imagination, smoke in the trees, conversations, special ops guys with the inside scoop (particular "Major X" played by Canadian Donald Sutherland) are invented out of whole cloth. A proposition is one thing, but JFK is Alice in Wonderland, a "riddle wrapped inside an enigma, tied by a puzzle" or whatever it is Joe Pesci says. It is exhausting.

So who killed JFK? Oh, maaaaan! Stone's answer, as best one can tell, was Lyndon Johnson, in league with the joint chiefs, because Kennedy wanted out of Vietnam and they wanted in (because American industry needed the war?), working with Right-wing Birchers, who were part of rogue elements of the CIA (?), who were a "track," whatever that is, that could not be stopped because it was an inexorable connection starting in Guatemala ("good"), Iran ("good"), and Bay of Pigs ("not so good"), that had become dominated by Cuban exile "Republicans," working in league with the Soviets (KGB?), who recruited Lee Harvey Oswald, who learned to shoot in the Marines, who lived and married in Russia then came back, who promoted Marxism but was funded by Birchers (?), who was a patsy for the Dallas Mafia, who had Oswald-lookalikes say incriminating things, who worked with JFK, who worked with La Casa Nostra (who turned on him?), who were tied to Naval Intelligence (?), who operated out of a corner in New Orleans in which the Feds, the NIS and somebody else all had offices, who were tied to right wing homosexual businessmen, defrocked priests, gay prostitutes and guys with tempers like Ed Asner, whose activities were known by corrupt New Orleans lawyers and politicians, who were in league with the New Orleans International Trade Mart or something like that, protected by Dallas strip club owners, who hatched a plan that involved Cubans training in the Florida swamps or Latin America by gay militia commandos, who bought a bad Italian rifle with a bolt action release via mail instead of purchasing a better weapon through the black market or a store, who gave it to Oswald, who may or may not have fired at JFK but could not possibly have hit his mark from the Texas Book Depository, who with Secret Service agents working to kill the President had assassins disguised as police officers and bums in the bushes, a car wreck lot and a grassy knoll, and created a triangulated cross-fire that killed the President then got away.

Now, friends and neighbors, after all of that, at no time does Mr. Stone suggest that the assassination was the work of a fellow he later visited and said was a great man, named Fidel Castro, who is the most likely suspect.

Res ipsa loquiter.

Castro and the mob? Maybe. The confusion of Stone's plot twists is highly, precisely and to quintessential effect that with which the real killers want. Stone's film vastly hurts the attempt to learn the truth. He raises plenty of legitimate questions, mainly regarding the so-called "magic bullet," and he operates on at least one fairly solid foundation, which is that the Zapruder film seems to show more than one shooter. Saying Oswald was not a lone gunman is a premise one can give credence to, but beyond that God knows.

One thing is puzzling, and that is that in all the years since nobody has "stepped forward." Every so often somebody shows up on Larry King Live and says his father, usually a "Dallas cop," was the shooter, but these stories always have the crackpot feel to them. A deathbed confession from a Cuban, one of Sam Giancana's guys, something solid, has never occurred. When all the smoke clears, you still have a Communist sympathizer, Oswald, killing a President who just humiliated Khrushchev over Cuba, is a threat to Castro and is building up troops to fight Commies in Vietnam. It is plausible he had help and they were on the grassy knoll, they got away and Jack Ruby killed Oswald to shut him up. Maybe a little too convenient. The Warren Commission report came out only one year later, not enough time to sort out everything. The Church hearings were too open to get the real stuff beyond salacious sex. Secret CIA/FBI investigations might have been the only real answer, and who knows, maybe they were conducted, and maybe the gullible public cannot handle the truth. Who knows? Not Oliver Stone.

In 2007, Vincent Bugliosi wrote Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Bugliosi was one of the best criminal investigators in the world. He was the man who helped prosecute the Manson killings. No Right-wing Republican apologist, he did numerous interviews in which he demonstrated himself to be one of the worst critics of the Iraq War. His book took years and was 1,648 pages long. It is not possible to do a more thorough job of investigation, of every single thread of evidence. He concludes Oswald acted alone. A Communist killed Jack Kennedy.

The Doors (1991) may be Stone's best work. Val Kilmer's performance as Jim Morrison was as good a depiction of a real person as any ever, and should have earned him an Oscar. Heaven and Earth starring Tommy Lee Jones as Steve Butler was more of the tired America-is-racist-and-hates-the-yellow-Communists stuff. Natural Born Killers (1994) was an ambitious vision that Stone was unable to pull off. It was based on the notion of man-woman serial killers going across the country on a murder spree; the nature of tabloid journalism in glorifying it; and the obsession of law enforcement in not only capturing them, but achieving fame in so doing. It was in the end unwatchable.

Nixon (1995), starring Anthony Hopkins, was a pleasant surprise. When word came that Stone was making a biopic of Nixon, everybody assumed the worst. The former President died in April, 1994 and Stone's film was in theatres by Christmas, 1995. The first puzzlement was the casting of the Englishman Anthony Hopkins in the role of a man from suburban (in his day, rural) Los Angeles. Hopkins pulled it off brilliantly, as did Stone.

Stone actually said that in researching Nixon, he came to "admire" him, a fairly common refrain among his biographers, including the late, respected historian Stephen Ambrose, and Tom Whicker, who wrote One of Us. Nixon accomplishes what few biographies accomplish. It entertains while telling a complete story without being boring. This is a great challenge to filmmakers. MacArthur, starring Gregory Peck, was dull, yet Patton was vivid. Numerous TV movies have failed to do much with the Kennedys. The only films about them were about short-lived events (two Cuban Missile Crisis films, and Stone's assassination thriller). A TV movie about Dwight Eisenhower starring Robert Duvall was a clunker. Randy Quaid tried to be Lyndon Johnson. Not. Nobody has ever gotten much mileage out of Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt, or Hitler or Stalin (except for the German-made Downfall). Gandhi worked very well, but various Winston Churchill efforts sank of their own weight. Why? There is no "answer" to that question.

Nixon worked creatively. Financially it did okay but was not a blockbuster. It was one of those movies that folks returned to, though, especially to study President Nixon. What made it work was the Stone specialty of "theme." The average viewer easily misses it, but Stone infuses Nixon's life with the premise that dark forces aided him. It can be inferred by this that he means Nixon was evil, or the tool of evil, but he juxtaposes this with enough of Nixon's basic humanity to make him more of a pawn, pushed by something that "helps" him . . . or does it? The ironic twists of the Nixon-Kennedy rivalry are fascinating, and Stone truly does exploit it. His theme is not a patriotic one, because he infers that there is a Beast that cannot be controlled. He infers that the Beast is embodied in the Central Intelligence Agency, which in turn controls the U.S. A sequence showing Nixon visiting CIA Director Richard Helms (Sam Waterston) was mostly cut out of the original film, but the DVD shows it in its entirety in the special features. Helms and his agency are virtually said to be the devil. Flowers in Helms's office are shown to bloom and wilt in supernatural ways, presumably depending on Helms's evil whim. Waterston's eyes are shown to be coal black. He is Satan!

Nixon asks himself the rhetorical question, "Who's helping us?" while staring into a fireplace flame under a portrait of Kennedy. The theme is first brought forth in Nixon's college years, when his older brother dies, and apparently this frees up money through an unexplained source (an insurance policy?) that allows Nixon to go to law school. In light of two Kennedy assassinations, the answer to Nixon's question seems to be the same one that Mick Jagger gives in "Sympathy for the Devil."

"After all, it was you and me," Jagger sings, and Stone would have you believe it was the devil in silent concert with Nixon and his brand of . . . something. Jingoism, patriotism, xenophobia, bloodthirstiness? Nixon is seen on a couple of occasions shadowed by a devil-like winged creature (the Beast), and his conversation with a female college student at the Lincoln Memorial ends with her identification of the Beast as the controlling force in American politics. Presumably the girl is able to see this clearly because her heart is pure. There is in all this a sense of hypocrisy. There is zero evidence Stone believes in God, and therefore the devil, yet he uses this malevolent spirit to make a political point. This is playing with fire.

Stone invents secret cabals that never happened between Nixon and John Birch Texas businessmen, racist to the core, who along with a smirking Cuban are there to tell us that because Nixon was in Texas on November 22, 1963 he was somehow plotting JFK's murder.

The conspiracy link between JFK and Nixon exists in this reference, and the CIA "tracks" like the one Agent X talks about in JFK, apparently tie Guatemala, Iran and the Bay of Pigs to subsequent events. The Bay of Pigs tie-in, led by E. Howard Hunt (Ed Harris) and his Cubans, Bernard Barker (Lenny Vullo), Eugenio Martinez (Kamar de los Reyes), et al, is real enough, but the assassination is one Stone insists is part of the same "track." Something on the list of "horribles," which Nixon discusses with H.R. Haldeman (James Woods), who then talks about "bodies," references to something that has never been figured out after watching the film 15 or 20 times. The Kennedy's bodies? Vietnam dead bodies? Abe Lincoln's body? Civil War bodies?

Stone gives Watergate its due, but lets the actual events speak for themselves without embellishing it with more hate towards Nixon than that era produced of its own accord. He actually does a solid job of demonstrating the semi-legitimate reasons for creating the "plumbers" in the first place, which was to plug leaks in light of Daniel Ellsberg's treacherous Pentagon Papers revelation, in concert with the bunker mentality caused by anti-war protesters threatening, in their mind at the time, a civil war like the one that forced Lincoln to declare martial law.

Stone also makes it clear that Nixon and his people were convinced that Kennedy stole the 1960 election, and he does not try to deny it (without advocating it, either). Murray Chotiner (Fyvush Finkel) represents the realpolitik Republicans who, Stone wants us to know, pulled the same fraudulent tricks, when he says, "They stole it fair and square."

Nixon is depicted as foul-mouthed and quite the drinker. His salty language apparently was learned well into adulthood, and he did occasionally imbibe after years as a teetotaler, but his associates insist it was by no means a regular thing. Woods's Haldeman is no friend of the Hebrews, and Paul Sorvino, doing a big league Henry Kissinger, finds himself constantly at war with the inside Nixon team, put down for his Jewishness. Powers Boothe is a cold-blooded Alexander Haig, representing the reality of Watergate's final conclusion.

It never would have happened under J. Edgar Hoover (Bob Hoskins), Nixon says, and Haig agrees that Hoover, who died just before Watergate, was a "realist" who would have kept it locked up. Nixon discusses suicide with Haig, who eases him out of that but never really tells him not to. When Nixon asks for any final suggestion, Haig says something the real man probably never said:

"You have the Army. Lincoln used it."

Sure.

Nixon breaks down, incredulous that for all his accomplishments, he can be brought down by such a nothing event. Stone allows Hopkins to infuse this scene with Shakespearean irony, likely why he chose the English thespian for the role. Stone gives Nixon his due in many ways. He demonstrates that he was utterly faithful to his wife Pat (Joan Allen), turning down a Right-wing lovely served up by the Birchers, while telling the girl that he entered politics to help people. His hardscrabble youth is nicely portrayed, with Mary Steenburgen playing his long-suffering Quaker mother. Young Nixon is utterly faithful to her and the honest, religious ethic of the family. But in a later scene, Steenburgen looks questioningly at his Presidential aspirations, saying he is destined to lead, but only if God is on his side. It is a telling statement playing to his theme that dark forces are the wind at Nixon's sails. He enters politics as an idealist, and becomes something else because he discovers he has the talent for it. He is industrious, in contrast to the Kennedys, and will earn everything he has simply by out-working everybody.

An entirely loving portrait of Dick Nixon would have no credibility. Stone does a great job with the movie, which is as balanced as it could be with a side of liberal righteousness.

Stone produced Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995). In 1996, he produced The People vs. Larry Flynt. These two choices are a telling sign of liberal taste. The McMartins were accused of child molestation in the 1980s, ultimately absolved, but Stone may have wanted to go beyond just telling the story of how innocents were unfairly accused. He may have been trying to shed some sympathy on the act of adult-child sex. There is a group called NAMBLA, protected by the liberal ACLU, which promotes the legalization of such a thing. They certainly want it de-stigmatized. Stone is so liberal, so wildly immoral that it is not a stretch to believe deep down he thinks "man-boy love" is legitimate.

Flynt is a pornographer who has made millions doing just that. Most people accept that pornography exists, that he makes millions off it, and that the First Amendment protects it. But pornography is what it is. Like homosexuality, it is a sin that does not deserve to be justified or called something that it is not, namely art. Those who engage in pornography have every right to do so, and it would be hypocritical to state otherwise. The point is that they are not engaging in moral activity. God will forgive pornographers, like homosexuals, if they ask Him (one can pray) to forgive them for what they do. One cannot say what happens to them if they do not ask for forgiveness.

The choice of a pornographer as the source of a glorifying Hollywood film, starring Woody Harrelson as Flynt, is not something that needs much commentary. It just states what it states. The liberals justify their endorsement of Flynt by pointing out that a former KKK leader named David Duke ran for office as a Republican in an election that lasted a few minutes, which he lost, over a decade ago. The media made a big deal of it. The Republicans disowned him and then nailed him for income tax evasion.

Flynt tries to make a point that somehow porn is art when he creates a slide show of obscene scenes of war dead and racism, next to stylish photos of hot girls. The fact that war and racism is obscene does not mean porn is not obscene. The fact that talented photographers and videographers portray beautiful women in alluring manner does not mean they are not making the devil smile. Stone's choice of a pornographer-as-"hero" is typical of the Left-wing mindset.

The Last Days of Kennedy and King (1998) was of course Stone's documentary pro-occupation with assassination theories. Most assassins of history are Left-wing anarchists, which like the fact virtually all spies are liberals and Socialists discomfits the liberals and Socialists, so they, like Stone, try to invent the notion that many of these acts are carried out by Right-wing cabals.

Among Stone's other work includes Any Given Sunday (1999), as good and realistic a sports movie as has ever been made. It features an over-the-top performance by Al Pacino as veteran pro football coach Tony D'Amato, who can still motivate his over-paid, over-sexed, over-drugged, slightly thuggish, mostly black (except for a few White Aryan Brotherhood linemen) mercenaries with a speech that sends Knute Rockne to the bench.

The Day Reagan Was Shot (2001), co-produced by Stone, allowed Richard Dreyfuss to make fun of former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who when President Reagan was shot in 1981 declared pending the return of Vice President George H.W. Bush, "I am in control here . . ."

Alexander (2004) insisted that the Macedonian King was gay, one of the great goals of liberal revisionists who also want to say Michelangelo swung from the other side of the plate, as well. Charlton Heston, who played him in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) said his exhaustive research did not uncover such a thing. World Trade Center (2006) was a pedestrian film about a police officer played by Nicholas Cage on 9/11.

W. was trotted out just in time for the 2008 election in order to make the Republicans, and by implication John McCain, look bad. The film looks good in the beginning; a lively re-telling of young George W. Bush (Josh Brolin) connecting with his fellow Skull and Bonesmen at Yale; unable to find himself in his youthful, hard-drinkin' years; and scolded by his father, George H.W. Bush, at the time a rising Republican political figure with clout, played by James Cromwell. Young George is actually a pretty charismatic figure. The choice of Brolin, who is incredibly handsome, certainly did not make Bush look bad. He was a scoundrel who loved to party, loved baseball, and loved beautiful woman who loved him back. If Stone was trying to paint a negative portrait he did not really succeed. He was not Presidential timbre, but rather a likable, modern Rhett Butler figure. He gets drunk and angers his parents, but we learn he has been admitted to the Harvard MBA program. His father says he has arranged it, which may well have been made up by Stone. Old man Bush finally corners him about his failure to stand on his own with a great line, "You're not a Kennedy, you're a Bush."

Again, whether Bush ever said this is not known, but one wonders how Stone felt about using this line, considering his hero worship for the Kennedys. Old man Bush is saying that the Kennedys are immoral and illegitimate, while Bush's – and by implication, Republicans – are moral and on the side of righteousness. They are held to a higher standard by their own doing, one of the party's key selling points.

There is also reference to Bush's supposed "failure" to uphold his duty in the Texas Air Guard. The film never goes into his acceptance into flight school and subsequent earning of his wings. This criticism, led most loudly by Michael Moore and, in the end, a source of embarrassment when CBS anchor Dan Rather ran a false story trying to castigate W., remains one of the most blatant pieces of liberal hypocrisy.

First, old man Bush may well have pulled strings to get George into Yale and maybe even Harvard, but definitely did not have any influence over his acceptance into the U.S. Air Force jet program. The Air Force does not just let any old affirmative action spoiled child fool with multi-million-dollar equipment. Even if he was admitted with a little push, he most unquestionably did not make it through and earn his wings on anybody elses steam. Only about 20 percent of those even admitted actually graduate. The military definitely does not let somebody fly a Tomcat or a Hornet unless they are totally qualified, a fact accentuated in films like Top Gun and An Officer and a Gentleman, movies that the Left must do all they can to hide describing the very thing George W. Bush, in actual life, did. So W. was a fighter pilot. The next terrible question for his detractors is to list all the fighter pilots – Marine, Navy, Air Force, Israeli – they have known whom they were not impressed with. A minute or so into this exercise comes further realization that some how, some way, the only unimpressive fighter pilot in the history of Mankind is George W. Bush. Next, we are led to believe that his missing a couple of drills in 1973 to work on an out-of-state Senate campaign is similar to that of the soldier who defected to the Communists during the Korean War, returning to the States in 1996 and, when asked why, replied "To vote for Bill Clinton."

Stone cast Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush. Again, he chooses a very attractive, appealing actress to play a Bush. W.'s marriage to Laura straightens him out. Stone deserves credit also for not going down the Bill Maher road of making complete fun of W.'s sudden Christian epiphany and consequent turning away from alcohol, which changed his life at age 40.

Bush comes under the tutelage of Karl Rove, played by Toby Jones. While nobody is confusing Rove with Tom Cruise, the choice of Jones, a pipsqueak, is meant to make the political consultant as unappealing as possible. Bush beats Ann Richards for Governor of Texas, one of the great Republican slaying-of-dragons in history. In 1988 Richards spoke to the Democrat National Convention with one of the biggest personal put-downs of all time, a fawning speech in which she states in the most horrendous tone imaginable of Presidential candidate Bush, "Poooooooooooor George . . . HEEE can't . . . he'p it . . . he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth."

Indeed Bush was born rich. Then he went off to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Navy, and was twice shot down. Then he turned down the family offer of a cushy Wall Street future to make it on his own as a Texas oil "wildcatter." Governor Richards's words had no validity, so when the son beat her in 1994 it was the sweetest possible redemption for the family and their supporters.

From there, a fairly interesting movie just goes off the rails. The story is a well worn one: a mistaken invasion of Iraq, led by a group of clowns and bumblers. It includes, as usual, a string of Democrat fantasies, the familiar conversations Republicans never have in real life about our "real aims" in the Middle East, and the like. Brolin's W. is just an idiot at this point, totally unsophisticated and stupid. The movie ends with a scene that the Bush family will never acknowledge, but they have long memories and will try to turn into a lie some day. This is, again a fantasy, the conversation George H.W. Bush never had with George W. Bush in which he blames everything on his stupid son, ultimately destroying the Bush name so thoroughly that younger, smarter brother Jeb, the former Governor of Florida, will never be able elected President.

As it stands, Jeb's name is constantly bandied about and he may well run for President, and he may well win. For Bush haters, there is also George P. Bush, Jeb's 37-year old son. A former Army officer and University of Texas-educated lawyer, he looks like a movie star and is, oh no, Hispanic on his mother's side! The Bush's knocked back a lot of liberal icons: Ann Richards, Al Gore, Bill Clinton's legacy, John Kerry, the media . . . they would love to add Oliver Stone to that list.

Between 1986 and 1999, Stone may have done the best directing in Hollywood history. Since then, his work has taken a downward turn, but he remains a force in the industry. Reportedly his documentary of Fidel Castro was so complimentary even HBO had to pull it, which is hard to fathom. He reportedly was working on the story of the 1934 Republican industrialists who recruited Marine hero Smedley Butler to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt, which was the genesis of Seven Days in May. We are still waiting for Tinsel Town to take on the movie about Kennedy stealing the 1960 election.

Truth, lies and the great American divide

Kids today don't know about history, which is strange because supposedly they live in the "information age," everybody goes to college, yet the more they learn the less they know.

\- Linda McCoy-Murray, widow of famed Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray

In the Book of Genesis, when God sees that man has built a pagan tower ascending to the Heavens, He is angered because the people have elevated and glorified their intellect. He renders their speech unrecognizable. Suddenly, people are "babbling" fools. Now, more than ever.

Americans have always been contrarians, starting with the Puritans who, rather than adhere to English religious laws, chose to plant stakes in a forbidding New World where they could practice the kind of Christianity they desired. The Industrial Revolution followed on the heels of Westward expansion. The mindset of the American citizenry was one of Manifest Destiny, a God-given exceptionalism that "justified" our wars with Mexico and the Indians; our increasing military empire in the Pacific; and the Spanish-American War that put Latin America into our sphere of influence. Some intellectuals opposed our use of power. Mark Twain became a loud voice of protest, but most Americans were of the Rudyard Kipling school, which was a semi-racist attitude that the "white man's burden" was to replace chaos and ignorance with enlightenment, sometimes at the point of a gun.

Nobody could have predicted the upheaval of the 20th Century, a 100-year period that saw more change, more chaos, more evil and more goodness than perhaps had occurred throughout all of Christian history. World Wars I and II brought America together in a way we never had before, and very likely, hopefully in fact, never will again.

"Hopefully" because if America is ever "forced" to come together again as we did during World War II, that will mean that we are facing a deadly challenge to rival that with which we faced when the Nazis and Tojo's Japan were on the march. The U.S. ended those threats and created conditions that promise a thousand-year period of relative peace, the anti-dote to Adolf Hitler's vision of a "thousand-year Reich."

Anarchism and Communism shadow the American Left

This is not to say that there was not dissent in the ranks. During World War I, a Russian émigré named Emma Goldman fueled the anarchist movement. The Michael Moore of her time, she argued that America had no business fighting a war in Europe, which she said was not to "make the world safe for Democracy," but rather was a (successful, as it turned out) effort to make America into a global power. Goldman excoriated President Woodrow Wilson for lying in his 1916 re-election campaign, when he promised to keep the country out of the Great War in Europe. Six months later the first Doughboys were signing up to fight.

Goldman represents something that has never gone away in America, and in fact is here to stay. The question is whether her ghost will prevail or continue to be shunted as part of the "lunatic Left." She was everything that the Left has come to embody. A woman raised by a totalitarian Russian father, she despised men as patriarchal despots. A non-practicing Jew, she saw religion as the worst kind of oppression. She advocated "free love" decades before Dr. Timothy Leary came along. Few realize that this was a tool of Communism, who saw sex and immorality as key ingredients in the engine of anti-capitalist values. In America she saw only oppression and indecency.

The question one might ask of Goldman might have been, "What is your complaint?" After all, here is a woman from Czarist Russia who found a country that gave her a platform and a place in history. In any other nation on Earth, Emma Goldman would have been imprisoned for her views. In America, she became a folk hero of the anarchist movement, which had been met with armed resistance by the Europeans who dealt harshly with their own 19th Century revolutions.

What Goldman hated was American power. She saw the future. It was a future in which America would become the dominant military, social and cultural influence of this Earth. She saw a country forged by victory in the pivotal wars of history, inculcated with Christianity and family values, fueled by a capitalist system she saw only as exploitative and racist. At the heart of the Goldman question, certain truths emerge as self-evident. American values are, at least in the view of most patriots, values of goodness and decency. They are the values behind the laws and social movements that have confronted our worst traits - slavery, segregation, inequality - and defeated them. This leaves us in a sticky corner, confronting the emerging reality that if America is truly good, then Goldman and her ilk, by opposing core American values, are the anti-good. For those of us who believe not only in a loving God, but believe that forces of good and evil battle each other on Earth - in the media, the fields of military strife, the courtrooms, the salons of politics and intellectual argument - then Goldman is more than just an anti-American kook. Rather, she becomes an apostle of evil, which is much more dangerous if you are pre-disposed to believing that evil is manifest in its existence.

Furthermore, like a good lawyer who uses history to weave a case together, this leaves us looking at what is called proximate causation, the "but-for" theory that fuels tort and criminal law. If Goldman is "evil," then those who follow her, practice her form of "religion," and pay homage (even without knowing who she was) to her memory through decades of imitation, are "evil." Whether the practitioners of this form of evil are witting or unwitting is something only those who practice Emma's religion know in their hearts.

Emma's ghost has hovered over several movements over the years. Her own anarchism became dangerous in the eyes of the law after Sacco and Vanzetti were caught trying to blow things up. In light of this, Emma was no longer tolerated. In a move that pre-cursors the Patriot Act, she was re-patriated to her native Russia. At first Emma said she was thrilled to find herself in the Leninist-Stalinist "utopian paradise" of the new Soviet Union, but after a short time she discovered, to her horror, that everything she had stood for, advocated and trumpeted was a lie. The U.S.S.R. was hell on Earth. Emma died a broken woman. If she saw Communism up front and was appalled by it, that at least gives credence to the possibility that she herself was not evil, but a tool of evil, a useful idiot as V.I. Lenin and Joe Stalin identified her kind.

Emma's legacy, however, lived on. It lived on in the voices of Ezra Pound, "Tokyo Rose" and "Hanoi Jane" Fonda, American citizens who broadcast treasonous messages from our enemies' capitals during World War II and Vietnam. Communism replaced anarchism; before, during and after World War II. Anarchism was amorphous. Communism had a manifesto, a growing number of countries utilizing it as a governmental system, and it had faces to symbolize it. What really jangled the spurs of anti-American Americans, however, was the fact that it was the exact opposite of America.

The Left paints their image of the new America

Goldman's ghost was right there, urging the Communist spies and provocateurs that infiltrated Democrat administrations, the State Department, the United Nations, American colleges, and eventually the protest movement of the anti-Vietnam War 1960s. It was a way of allowing Communism to morph into the American mindset. Whereby real and actual Communism looked far too harsh, too militaristic, too rigid and unsexy to average useful idiots, the anarchist ideology did not. McCarthyism and the clumsy political machinations of the Republican Party in the 1950s created a backlash of unprecedented proportions. In the new anarchism, the Left found the kind of chaos and upheaval they were looking for all along. When one views footage of Woodstock and violence on campuses from Berkeley to Columbia, one sees just that.
"Tear it down, man," was an analogy for their anti-American sentiment, a desire to destroy all that America had built. It was the anti-Establishmentarian theme, and to those who found solidarity in its message, a new set of heroes emerged. These were the "little brown brothers" of the Third World, embodied by the Argentinean terrorist, Che Guevara.

The Left watched in increasing frustration as events unfolded, exasperated by the fact that their greatest victories were snatched away from them just when they thought they had prevailed. Democrats controlled the White House from 1961 to 1969. They controlled, for the most part and for much of that period, the Congress, and symbolized the political sentiments of the New Frontier. They watched gleefully while American power was rendered impotent in Vietnam, and embraced détente with Communism, which supposedly made the term "Cold War" obsolete. They deposed that most hated of anti-Communists, the prosecutor of Alger Hiss, Richard Nixon. They exposed the CIA in the Church hearings. They legislated the Great Society, which after 20 years of rollbacks brought back the New Deal. They cheered when the Civil Rights Movement resulted in a nation of guilty white liberals, full of self-hate.

They cheered the new "uniforms" and morals of the Left; hippies, long hair, tie-dyed t-shirts, dirty rags, unwashed bodies immersed in the smells and excesses of mindless sexual deviancy. Here was the most spoiled generation in American history reacting to the sacrifices of their forefathers, the Greatest Generation that had won World War II. En masse, a psychological backlash had occurred. Baby Boomers realized they were totally incapable of being nearly as good as their predecessors, and instead of nobly struggling to live up to their fathers, they rejected them completely.

Drugs became the New Sacrament of these losers. Christianity and traditional values were the enemy. Rock concerts became the new church choirs of Leftist rant, deviancy and immorality. Hollywood and the entertainment industry rejected the old patriotism of Darryl Zanuck and John Wayne, replacing it with pent-up liberalism and post-Watergate conspiracy movies. The media, its members now graduated from the elite Leftist colleges where professors had spouted their anti-American nostrums since before William F. Buckley's God and Man At Yale, were now dominating the newsrooms of the New York Times, the Washington Post and CBS. A malaise overtook our economy, our military and our youth. We watched in impotence while Communism spread to the Third World, terrorism emerged, and our children became myopic, longhaired ne'r-do-wells. America was in decline, and this was highly, precisely and to quintessential effect that with which the anti-American Left had fought for, hoped for and desired since Emma Goldman's time.

The 1960s and '70s, on its face, might have appeared as the "end of history" for triumphant liberalism, the endgame in which they could congratulate themselves on a job well done and a victory won. They were wrong. What they saw as a final conflict was really the impetus for the greatest backlash in American history, a period in which all that the Left hated most came to fruition. Like Osama bin Laden, who set off the opposite of his political goals through 9/11, the Left came to see that their actions had resulted in a near-polar opposite of the America they had envisioned and falsely thought they had achieved.

Start with the 1968 Presidential election. The nation was in turmoil, shocked by the anti-military media's images of the Tet Offensive. They were propelled by the martyrdom of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Bobby Kennedy became their anti-war standard bearer, and when he too was murdered the Left had a Eucharist of saintly heroes giving spirit to their calls for "peace, love and dope." In retrospect, it seems almost impossible to believe that in the midst of all of this, the buttoned-down, totally uncool Dick Nixon could become, after so much angst and high anxiety, the President of the United States. Not only did this happen, but after four years of unprecedented hatred expended against him, it happened again. Nixon never gave in to the Left. He bombed the hell out of the Communists and called the protestors "bums."

In 1972, Nixon was escalating a brutal war in its eighth year. The Pentagon Papers had exploded, and all the major media - the Times, the Post, the networks, Hollywood, the colleges both in the classrooms and on the plazas - opposed him with every ounce of vitriol available in their over-intellectualized arsenals.

Nixon did not have talk radio or Fox News.

The result? Nixon won the biggest victory in U.S. Presidential history. He garnered 49 states and 62 percent of the vote. The shock and awe of the liberal Left was embodied by New York Times film critic Pauline Kael, who exclaimed, "How could he have won? I don't know a single person who voted for him."

What happened after that election is instructive in order to apply historical lessons to our modern polarization. Watergate hit. Here was a "third rate burglary" and wiretapping, no different than the ones authorized by Democrats Franklin Roosevelt and Robert Kennedy. The Democrats played it strictly for political gain, and in so doing sacrificed our allies in Southeast Asia. Unseating and de-clawing Nixon became more important to Ted Kennedy than protecting our interests in the Cold (and hot) War.

The Nixon-Kissinger peace, one of the most beautifully crafted acts of triangulated global diplomacy since the post-Napoleonic era, was sacrificed, and along with it millions of South Vietnamese and Cambodians. The very essence of why we were right to be in Vietnam in the first place was embodied by the acts of Pol Pot's murderers in the "killing fields," but without Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, this nation's liberal media almost pretended it did not happen. To the extent that they eventually did acknowledge it, they attempted to proffer the lie that it was "blowback," a violent reaction only to our own imperialistic endeavors. The Left alternated between loving the chaos in the world and becoming insulated with defeatist isolationism.

America's new Manifest Destiny

Then along came Ronald Reagan. The Reagan '80s refuted everything the Left had stood for over decades of American history, totally, thoroughly, and completely. Reagan was the "right man at the right time," and a product not only of the American spirit he embodied, but he was right wing "blowback" against the Left. He had emerged as an anti-dote to Communism in Hollywood. The stern Reagan who opposed the Black Panthers and college anarchism in the 1960s was not the same kindly older gentleman we remember from his White House years. He was a symbol of conservative anger mixed with a healthy dose of optimism. We wanted back this beautiful nation that we had built and turned into the greatest country on Earth. Reagan was the anti-liberal. His success in the '80s, the love felt for him, his enduring legacy and ascension to Rushmore status, is the single greatest weapon that puts the lie to the Emma Goldman wing of the anti-American Left. Every lie was spouted against Reagan. Every means was used to discredit him. The truth about Reagan, and about America, was never tarnished. To paraphrase his words, "the turkeys never got him down."

The ultimate refutation of the Left, the high quintessence of their perfidy and the exposition of their historical lies, came with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Communism was defeated. Reagan, allied first and foremost with unrelenting conservative Republicans, had won the Cold War. This fact sheds light on some very distinct realities. The 1990s and early 21st Century has become the age of what George H.W. Bush called the New World Order, and others have termed the "end of history." Above and beyond all other developments, it has seen America emerge from superpower status to a lofty position above all previous countries and empires. We are now the most powerful political entity in the history of the world. To those of us who believe in American Exceptionalism, we view this status as the direct result of God shedding "his grace on thee." The Left despises such religiosity.

To understand the Left in the post-Cold War era, one must have some understanding of psychology. Some have even gone so far as to deem liberalism a disease. To the extent that some diseases come about by virtue of experience, the experience of liberalism in the 20th Century helps explain why this theory may have some credence. Defeat, frustration and humiliation fuel the emotions of revenge and hatred. Whether it is a child-turned-grown-up who thirsts for retribution against long-ago tormentors, an athlete on the losing end of a bitter high school rivalry, or an entire race of people, such as the Islamo-Fascists dealing with the fact that they are on the losing end of modernism and religious tolerance, the psychology of defeat leads in one of two directions. The "loser" can accept his situation graciously, see the light, and join the tide of progress. Or, the "loser" can withdraw into bitterness and delusional hatred.

Take two of history's biggest losers, the Germans and the Japanese of World War II. Both of these countries were wiped out, their defeats so thorough and undeniable that they were left with no alternative than to accept their fate and refute their past. But America is not a vengeful place. The "defeat" of liberalism never saw a shot fired. There were no concentration camps uncovered. Their foot soldiers were left to live and to stew.

Which brings us back to the ghost of Emma Goldman. Her legacy, transferred from the relics of anarchism to Westernized Communism now, with the fall of the Soviet Union, needed a place to hang its hat. In the film Fallen starring Denzel Washington, evil never dies. It transforms itself. So too does anti-American Leftism.

While America's increased power came about from 1989 to 1991, when the wall fell, Apartheid died in South Africa, the Sandinistas lost in Nicaragua, and "peace broke out" in every corner of the globe, there were chinks in the jingoistic armor.

America's victory march was slowed down by recession and the resultant loss of the Cold Warrior George Bush. President Bill Clinton, with his "feel your pain" attitude and distinctly isolationist approach to terrorism and international diplomacy, assuaged Leftist fears of American global power. British Prime Minister Tony Blair seemed to symbolize a kinder, gentler approach with his widely hailed "third way." The Left took a few shots here and there. Their mobs rioted global capitalist conferences, such as in Seattle. The Unabomber sent a few mail bombs to technology gurus, but the right had their kooks, too, namely militias in Idaho and Michigan, plus Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Oklahoma Federal Building.

In the 1990s, the Left found itself in an uneasy state. On the one hand, their people, the Clintons, were in the White House, but Bill Clinton represented something they could not come to grips with, the new Democrat. Worse, a Southern Democrat. The South was a place the Left despised as bigoted, Christian and jingoistic. The fact that this region, husbanded for the most part by the GOP, had made the greatest positive social change of any geographic region in the world in the 20th Century, did not play right with their perceptions. Not unlike the Right, who needed Communism as an enemy, the Left was discomfited by a genuinely moral American South, transformed as much as anything by their collective Christian conscience. In addition, liberals had to reconcile the Clintonian success with the fact the Reagan/Bush triumphs had paved the way for the peaceful world they ruled. A Republican Congress had kept their feet to the fire. Displaced Military Industrialists fueled the "information superhighway." Officially identified lies and Impeachment robbed them of their bragging rights.

The 2000 election was all about domestic American politics, and George W. Bush expressly asserted that he had no ambitions for increasing our power in an increasingly interdependent world. As it has been said many times, 9/11 changed all that. At first, the bombing of the World Trade Center made us look sympathetic in the eyes of the world. Everybody "was an American now." In retrospect, this attitude is telling in its psychological repercussions. People enjoyed seeing the superpower humbled and brought down. However, and let us face the facts, this is not the real America, it never will be, and for the sake of the world, it cannot be. We cannot be the Yankees going through a prolonged bad stretch, which is bad for baseball. A weak America is bad for the world.

George Bush was forced to transform himself from a "humble" internationalist into a "big stick" President reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt. Afghanistan went over well enough. It was necessary and anybody, Republican or Democrat, would have followed that course. But Iraq was a different story.

When George Bush invaded Iraq, our forces accomplished their mission in a month, killed the Hussein spawn and captured the old man, all the coalesced fears of the Left, not just in America but throughout the world, were realized. The U.S., for over a decade, had been the elephant in the corner, the reluctant empire. Now there was no question that we were asserting a power that this globe has never seen before. Whereby the 20th was the American Century, hopes that the 21st would be something else were now replaced by the reality that we were experiencing the relatively early period of a new, albeit very different style of Roman Empire. An empire not of colonization but of liberation, yes, but in so doing it provided America a sense of legitimacy that the rest of the world felt overshadows them.

Oddly, the Cold War and the War on Terror produced as much division as alliance. While this is a frustrating state of condition, it is again a by-product of American success. We won the Cold War, and in winning the War on Terror, we are left with a battles of words, which are annoying but are far preferable to battles with guns. What brought the Left out of hibernation was not the razor-thin George W. Bush victory in 2000, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but rather, the belated realization that Bush 41's promise of a New World Order had come to fruition, and its corporate offices were in Washington, D.C.

Old Europe

Internationally, this fact was jarring. England, once the most powerful empire on Earth, was now a junior partner and a welfare state. Germany had to contend with their guilty past. France's revolution had faltered after ours succeeded, their Napoleonic wars had failed, and they were a country with a scarred history of bail-outs at home and in Vietnam, not to mention the little-said reality that their bungling of Arab colonization after the Sykes-Picot Treaty probably explains the Middle East predicament as well as any other factor. Russia? How would you feel if your sworn enemy now dictated the terms of the world they allow you to live in? Spain? If their Inquisition was not enough, they were silently aligned with Hitler. Canada has to live with the fact that they were handed many of the same advantages as we were, but have to ask why we do so much better. The answer to that question is one that does nothing for Canadian self-esteem.

An interesting further development seems to feed the strange notion of European liberalism. American success (and the fact that our world war victories have been on the road, leaving no damage at home) has created the impression that God favors us, and for this reason, Americans are decidedly religious (and mostly Christian) people. Christianity and conservatism have fit each other like a glove.

It is different in Europe. Two world wars have stripped them of idealism. They have seen the worst of humanity, on their home soil, committed by their own against each other. The 20th Century has left them favoring Socialism over entrepreneurialism, devoid of Plato's "warrior sprit." They drink too much. They like their drugs. Sex is not sacred any more. After seeing the Holocaust and the Blitzkrieg, Europeans just do not believe in God much. They live with a collective guilt and shame, their histories rife with racism, religious intolerance, Papal political intrigue, Catholic corruption, revolutions, monarchical abuses and the rest of their past. They are a people who were blessed by God with intelligence and natural resources, yet seemed to have squandered it all. They look at America with envy, and many feel we will make the same mistakes they did. This attitude misses the essential point of America, which is that we were given the biggest advantage possible: Europe's history lessons as a primer on how to form "a more perfect Union!"

Emma Goldman's ghost

But the American Left is even more frustrated. The Europeans can at least excuse their anti-Americanism on national identity. American Leftists are left with no straws to grasp. They have only the ghost of Emma Goldman telling them to stir up trouble, to feel resentment, to complain and wine and accuse, to fill their void with lies and conspiracy theories. They are like those odd New Yorkers who hate the Yankees. Anarchism as a political philosophy is no longer viable. Communism is in the ash heap of history. For now, they find themselves loosely affiliated with terrorism, but of course they cannot hold onto this too tightly. They do rail about Israel asserting their power in order to exist, and ignore France's role in the Middle East in favor of worn-out theories that conclude that a few CIA operations have created the "blowback" of 9/11. Horse manure.

The Left just plain hates American success and power. They do not trust America to use its power wisely. They consist of natural born losers who cannot identify with the success ethos that is at the heart of the American Dream. Does this mean they are un-patriotic and hate America? This is a general concept and cannot be answered using all people lumped into "the Left" as a single bloc. It certainly applies to many of them, but not all. They want an America that acts a certain way, but if they got what they wanted, hook, line and sinker, would they be happy? Happiness does not seem to be their natural state, so the answer to that question is, probably not. Their frustration is not helped by the fact that when one of their "own" occasionally holds power, they tend to actually govern to the Right because that is the only realpolitik approach to actual problems.

The fact that Bill Clinton was found not just to be an accused liar but an official one has not helped. After Florida 2000 and the suddenly muscular Dubya, Bush's critics were desperate to assert that he, too, was a "liar." This was the buzzword of the New Millennium, and it created a terrible conundrum. It created a conspiracist philosophy on the Left. This thinking has long permeated the lunatic fringe of the Right, who were given no credence by the rest of the Right because they always had Truth to turn to. The Left does not have that option, and therefore they could not be talked to. They would not believe Truth. They would not accept the facts. Their blind, unsparing efforts to "get" Bush fueled a cottage industry, a vitriolic campaign of hatred, lies, exaggerations and misrepresentations that were unprecedented in this nation's history. This time, however, there was a thriving conservative media that refuted them.

In showing their hand, the Left was doing themselves no favors. During Vietnam, their atrocious hatred of returning soldiers left them so unpopular that they were crying in their tofu during 12 years of the Reagan/Bush Administration. Any façade of moderation and patriotism was again being scraped away by their own unruly hands during Bush political seasons. The American public was left with the realization, and this was by no means the first time they have reached this conclusion, that the Democrat Left does not root for America; that they, in fact, will root against American interests if it increases their chance at attaining power; and that American failure is the only way they can achieve that power!

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss: The Left in the 21st Century

All of these historical forces came to a head in the middle of a relatively brave new world of Internet, talk radio, and cable news competing with the traditional media. Into this world, enter the lies, the conspiracy theories and the shrill accusations of the anti-American Left. What we saw was the Democrat Party bereft of official spokespeople, and replaced by surrogates of wild-eyed liberalism. Within their ranks, Ted Kennedy had lost any semblance of patriotism out of frustration at his, and his families', loss of their supposedly royal power. Howard Dean was a bona fide member of the Far Left, but in actuality, being Governor of Vermont was not a position of real influence. Dennis Kucinich was never taken seriously.

So who was carrying water for John Kerry and the Democrats in 2004? In 1998, Hustler pornographer Larry Flynt assumed the role of de facto public relations firm for the party. Michael Moore said he was an independent, not a Democrat, but this was exposed as just one of his lies when it was shown that he in fact was a Democrat. In 2004, he veered from plain ol' anti-Americanism to Kerry's best hope (as well as a millstone around his neck). Then there was Howard Stern, who out of retaliation for FCC rulings that pressed fines on him for indecency, decided to campaign against George Bush.

These people were all part of the "new religion" of modern media technology. They were also very much examples that work against their own themes, which is that they are censored artists, silenced by a Big Brother of corporate Republicans. In fact, since 1998 Flynt expanded his empire further into the Internet, going from disgusting porn to a more artistic, European style of hardcore fare. He was hardly silenced.

Moore said Disney censured him by not distributing Fahrenheit 9/11, but this was another lie. Their agreement was to help him produce it, never to distribute it. He used that line only to further the myth that corporate interests were restraining him, found a huge distributor, Miramax, and was hardly silenced. It was all part of his plan. Disney released another documentary, The Heart and Soul of America, which came out the same time as Moore's. Heart made no attempt to discredit or mention Fahrenheit. It simply was an affirmation of true, good facts about this great nation. Moore called it the work of "Right-wing extremists," which is like calling the reporter who wrote the article describing the Yankees fourth World Championship in three years in 2000 a "Yankee propagandist." Speaking of things in New York, Moore expressed anger at the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center. That made sense, but wait. He was frustrated that they chose to kill New Yorkers, since the Democrats were strong in the Big Apple. He would have preferred Osama to have killed people in a Republican stronghold. Is commentary really necessary?

FCC fines levied against Clear Channel, who carried his radio program, in fact burdened Stern. They dropped him, and he claimed that Bush would eventually get him off the air. This lie is contrasted by the fact that he continues to be on the air, He, too was hardly silenced.

Flynt, Moore and Stern were, in reality, examples of how, as America has become the dominant power in world history, our themes - freedom of press, of expression, of dissent - are not censured but allowed to magnify.

What the Left did not understand was that the likes of Flynt and Moore (Stern learned his lesson and completely backed away from the political) did damage to the Democrats, and ere of great value to the Republicans. They forgot that their anti-war protests in the 1960s did not win them any elections but gave them instead Nixon and Reagan landslides. Actually, they may understand it, but they are obsessive-compulsives who cannot control their impulses.

While Flynt, Moore and Stern were not part of mainstream Hollywood, they were certainly part of the dominant media culture that the film industry embodies. Flynt's biography was told in a 1996 film produced by Oliver Stone. Moore's documentaries got bravura responses from Hollywood and Cannes.

What Hollywood just does not understand is what kind of economic windfall they would reap if they made conservative-theme films. If they depicted the bad politicians as actual Democrats, the word of mouth among conservatives would fuel boffo box office. On the few occasions when they stray to the right, as in the Dirty Harry franchise, they reap a whirlwind of success.

What Democrats did not grasp was that Flynt and Moore were terrible role models, and that true knowledge of who they were, combined with the fact that they were spokesmen for their party (whether they owned up to it or not) was simply a negative reflection of that party. This fact is obvious on its face.

Flynt specialized in the most disgusting form of racist pornography. Discrediting him has nothing to do with discrediting porn in general. One could argue that there is such a thing as "classy" or "artistic" porn, and in fact Flynt later featured this kind of work on his videos. However, for decades his work was the filthiest possible kind of degradation.

For years, Moore's work was discredited, whether it be his documentaries or his books. Those who seriously studied his work consistently found him to be a liar in the main. He was a propagandist who took 15 percent of truth, 70 percent lies and 15 percent exaggeration, attempting to foist it off as journalism. The fact that he was a darling of the Left was as telling a true statement of their wacko views as any. Moore, more than Flynt, was the torch-carrier of Emma Goldman. He wished he was Hunter Thompson, a gonzo journalist and a real talent, but he was a pale imitation.

To believe Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (the title stolen without permission from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451), one must accept the fact that George Bush knew about 9/11 ahead of time; allowed it in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and the Saudi royal family in order to justify the long-desired American invasion of the Middle East; spirited bin Laden's legitimate family out of the country because they were part of the plot (which would be done to bring oil profits to the Bush family while satisfying their personal vengeance against Saddam for attempting to kill Bush 41). The fact that Bush 41 invaded Kuwait to oust Saddam in 1991, then left without the so-called oil grab, combined with the fact that Bush 43 never made the so-called oil grab (again), are just the first two pieces of factual evidence that have been determined by the world to discredit Moore's work.

After Fahrenheit 9/11's first weekend, the liberal press hit us with big headlines telling us that it "broke records," but it played in a limited number of art houses. The fact is, it made $21 million. The Passion of the Christ made $117 million in its first weekend. The truth is that Fahrenheit finished with the 228th best opening weekend ever. They were right about one thing, though. It influenced the election. In favor of Bush.

Still, Moore was a hero of the Left. Because of all the historical reasons cited herein, because they were desperate and saw their only source of joy, political power, being pulled away from them more and more each day, they were beyond Truth. They lie, and we have little choice but to be merciful for those who lie. This charade, however, was tiresome.

The bottom line becomes a self-evident set of truths that emerge when one simply observes the facts of the American landscape. On the one hand we have conservative Republicans. This is a party that, of its own accord, sheds itself of undesirables not deserving of membership within its ranks. Aside from the ousting of David Duke, when separatists and militia groups, tainted by the whiff of racism, tried to leach themselves to the party, they were distanced. When Trent Lott made intemperate remarks, it was the Republicans who took him down a peg. When Republicans are caught in adulterous affairs, they are removed not by their opponents, but by their own party, intent on upholding their high standards.

This is a party that has learned lessons from its past mistakes, and in so doing they have put these lessons into practical effect. The result, above and beyond all their great accomplishments, has been husbanding the American South, as sportswriter Jim Murray eloquently wrote in 1970, "back into the Union." The premise is that religious people who go to church are more likely to be good and decent than those who do not. These people are more likely to be conservatives. Conservatives are more likely to be family people, hard-working taxpayers, law abiders, and all other empirical criteria that average people use to determine "good" vs. something else.

Now, take a look at the Democrat Left. We have examined two of their most prominent mouthpieces, Flynt and Moore. An honest appraisal of their character - their activities, morals, honesty - reveal portraits of people who, using standards of decency that average people would apply, show that they were men who either approach, or are actually of, low moral character. Still, they were held up as the face of modern Democrats.

This is not a new development. Ted Kennedy had a long history of womanizing and alcoholism. These were not descriptions of his Harvard youth (when he paid a classmate to take his Spanish exam for him), or his cowardice in the face of Mary Jo Kopechne's demise. The image of Kennedy wearing only a shirt looking for some action while his nephew sexually assaulted a girl in his Palm Beach mansion did not deter his hero status in the Democrat Party.

Between 83 and 200 human beings who had close associations with the Clintons, in Arkansas and Washington over many years, died of mysterious causes in their relative youth. Many were said to know damaging facts about them. Compelling evidence exists that Bill sexually assaulted and may even have raped women. These women were subjected to the Hillary/James Carville destruction machine. One Leftist media woman's response was that she would happily blow Bill just to thank him for maintaining the legality of abortion, which of course is to suck a living baby out of the womb of some girl who, more than likely, let her morals slip during a drunken one-night stand.

In the 1980s, Al Sharpton orchestrated the lie that Tawana Brawley had been assaulted by white racists gone wild in New York City. It was all a hoax. If he were a Republican, he would be sharing the same Siberian dog house as David Duke. He is not only a Democrat star, but a standard-bearer and "black leader."

Jesse Jackson once said Christian things about black responsibility. Now, he is a charlatan who blackmails, greenmails and shakes down corporations into silencing his false accusations of racism. His brother was convicted of murder, which the press says nothing about even though he was on the RAINBOW PUSH payroll. A couple years ago, Jesse used his influence in corrupt Chicago to help a nightclub avoid the bureaucracy of a fire permit. When fire broke out, many were burned alive. The press remained largely silent.

When Hillary Clinton defeated Rick Lazio for the New York Senate in 2000, a post-election study determined that her voters came from a preponderance of high-crime precincts. Those who lived in decent neighborhoods were more likely to vote for Lazio. This evidence seems to reveal something that cannot be plausibly argued, which is that law abiding Americans prefer Republicans, while drug dealers and criminals are all for the Democrats.

Congressman Barney Frank once ran a gay prostitution ring out of his apartment. Had he been a Republican, he would have been removed from any official association with the party, by Republicans who, upon deciphering the true reports of his activities and for this reason, would have concluded that he was a man of low morality. He was a national spokesman of the Democrat party.

U.S. Senator Robert Byrd (D.-West Virginia) was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Had he been a Republican, he would never have been allowed to continue to be one. Is commentary really necessary?

Comedian Al Franken wrote a book called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. It was about the Fox News Channel, which is a fair, balanced news organization that roots for America. The Left says they are conservative. Compared to the liberal CNN, CBS, and most of the other network and cable stations (except for MSNBC), fair and truthful analysts have concluded that Fox is the most believable and trusted news organization. Fair and truthful analysts concluded that Franken's book was, like Moore's books and documentaries, filled with lies and half-truths. Franken was fed information by the Democrat-leaning Kennedy School of Government, and funded by George Soros, a socialist billionaire, who started Air America. Air America failed immediately. The Democrats awarded Franken by electing him to the Senate from Minnesota.

Conservative talk radio succeeds where liberal talk radio fails because conservatives, like Christians, are starving for truth and decency in a world of anti-Americanism, religious intolerance and negativism. Conservatives are more likely to be educated people who prefer to improve themselves by learning about the world by listening to talk radio. Liberals are more likely to be old '60s rockers who prefer to listen to Santana and The Grateful Dead on FM.

Throughout the Cold War, does anybody really doubt that, all else being equal, the Communists "voted" for Democrats over Republicans? Is their any doubt that terrorists prefer Democrats to Republicans?

Take the two great political dynasties of the post-World War II era, the Kennedys on the Left and the Bush's on the right. Consider the royal snobbery of the Kennedys, then compare it to the down home values of the Bush family.

Hollywood, rap and the rock 'n' roll world are solidly Democrat. This is a world of drug abuse, alcoholism, adultery, divorce, homosexuality, atheism, misogyny and immorality. The country 'n' western community is overwhelmingly Republican. This is a world of religion, family values, patriotism, respect for the military and overall morality.

Finally, a forgetful world is reminded of the struggle between the forces of freedom, represented by the Right, and the forces of Communism, represented by the Left. Unlike the Holocaust, most Communist atrocities were never subject to the full light of disclosure. Time has forced many of the facts to recede in our collective memory, replaced by a fuzzy kind of Leftist thinking that has even romanticized Communism among our youth, who do not always know the complete facts. How else to explain the popularity of Che Guevara t-shirts and posters? Of celebrities like Chevy Chase, Oliver Stone, Steven Spielberg, to name just a few, traveling to Cuba, meeting with Castro, then returning with glowing reports about the Cuban dictator's "charisma" or some such malarkey.

Based on the undeniable truths of empirical evidence, one is left to determine the simple fact that those aligned with the Right are more likely to be good and decent people, while people aligned with the Left are not. To deny this is to be a sophist and rely on various and sundry lies, identifiable by those who can read, write, see and have access to facts.

History is on the side of the Right. Whittaker Chambers said he was choosing the "losing" side when he switched from the Left to the Right in the late 1930s. In the West, most of the media, public schools, academia, the entertainment industry, and the culture are solidly liberal, yet despite this, polls consistently say only 18 percent of the populace identify themselves as liberal, some 40 percent as conservative. Or, as Winston Churchill said to Dwight Eisenhower as they prepared for D-Day, "If God is for us, who can be against us?"

The history of America, and more recently, the Cold War, is a history of people of all persuasions coming together to achieve a common goal. Winning the Cold War was an achievement of both the Republicans and the Democrats, because administrations of both parties battled Communism for 45 years. A Republican White House "officially" conducted the War on Terror until 2009. The Democrats, whether they understand this dynamic or not, felt left out. Did the election of a Democrat administration (Barack Obama's), fighting this war in their time, invest the Left in this noble struggle?

Are liberals less patriotic?

Innocence does not utter outraged shrieks, guilt does.

\- Whittaker Chambers

Conservative author Ann Coulter asks in Treason whether this question is legitimate. She points out that liberals claim they are the ideology of the environment, minorities, women's rights, and a host of other special interests. She then posits the notion that if they can claim the "moral high ground" on these social issues, then is it out of bounds for conservatives to claim that they are more patriotic? Patriotism is a subjective word. If one reads Webster's or most mainstream dictionaries, and applies the meanings they give for "patriot" and "patriotism," it is not a big leap to arrive at the conclusion that the word fits the traditional concept of conservative more so than liberals.

However, many people would disagree with the Webster's meaning, and argue that it is based on old-fashioned, jingoistic concepts that, they might say, have been changed by new social notions based on modern perceptions of race, war and other events. It might be argued that to embrace old traditions is to give acceptance to notions that are unsympathetic or intolerant towards minorities. Or it fails to take into account new notions of appropriate military combat, and how these notions differentiate between old identifications of "enemies," "enemy combatants," civilians, and new versions of these groups.

To "protest" American policies is viewed as "patriotic" by many. In and of itself it very well may be. Americans take pride in the fact that they do not march in "lockstep" with the President (differentiating us most obviously from totalitarians like the Nazis and the Soviets). We have a "loyal opposition" that operates with a two- or multi-party system. Dissent breeds compromise and moderation. That this is exactly how the Founding Fathers wanted it to be.

Certainly, Republicans "dissented" against President Clinton. Much of the "unpatriotic" label is attached to liberals who protest wars that Republicans lead us into. In 2003, many found fault with President Bush's premise that war in Iraq was the right thing to do. Conservatives pointed to many in the entertainment industry who howled about Iraq, and pointed out that they had not raised a ruckus when Bill Clinton bombed Bosnia, among other smaller engagements. This is not entirely true. Some (not all) of the liberals did protest Clinton's "war," but the notion of liberals dissenting with a Democrat is not big news in the media. A lot of the protest found little coverage. The press does like to publicize liberal complaints about conservatives, not vice versa. It is part of the news cycle.

Coulter's notions are strident and confrontational, although she does not consider all "liberals" to be traitors. If we lived in a country in which all the people were conservative, it would be one heck of a boring place. Unrestrained by the Left, the Right would tend to get heavy-handed socially and too militaristic. While conservatism is the winning ideology of history, conservatism is best served blended with a diversity of thought, religion, race, military ethos, and a host of other temperances.

Dwight Eisenhower may have been the greatest man of all time, with the exception of the Lord Jesus Christ. Ike tended towards the Republican Party, but was not a true conservative. He defeated one, Bob Taft, in order to get the party's 1952 nomination. Ike voiced skepticism about "extreme" notions of the political spectrum, in the military, the Military Industrial Complex, and in the Republican Party, until the day he passed away. Ike lived in more moderate times and responded to those times. His philosophies will always ring true. It is a difficult dividing line sometimes, separating conservatism from moderation. Often, it is only defined by particular circumstances that can change.

What Coulter did do successfully was identify historical facts that can be disputed, but not successfully (for the most part). She did not expose every little old lady or man who considers him or herself to be "liberal," and state that this automatically means they are "traitors." Just as "patriot" has its dictionary meaning, so too does "traitor." It is not an easy definition to attach to people. Actions must occur in relation to events, by and large, usually with certain results or near-results.

Opinion is not treachery. Private and public discussions do not represent treachery. What Coulter set out to do was demonstrate events that had an effect, or a possible effect, on national security, during a time of war, crisis or even "preparation" for war, and show that certain actions (or inactions) had the "whiff" of treachery. This is dangerous territory. It comes close to moralizing, finger pointing, and has the enormous potential of biting conservatives in the back in the future. We have always been judgmental, because we feel some issues are important and require judgment in order to frame them properly.

Perhaps her version of "treason" might be called the "political" one, which could be equated with the "civil" requirements needed to "prove" a case, as opposed to the higher "criminal" requirements of "proof beyond reasonable doubt." Coulter is a partisan political animal. She views these issues as part of a "political war." She is out to win it, and she has taken no prisoners in this endeavor. She is divisive, has accepted this and all that goes with it, in the context of being a national media figure.

But Coulter, by being honest in her assessments (whether one agrees or disagrees with her), separates herself from, say, Hillary Clinton, who liked to take her shots but couched them in a political vein meant to get her points made without the kind of backlash that Coulter's books engender. True, Hillary was an elected official, and Coulter is not, but "truth in advertising" among the political classes is a worthy trait indeed.

Al Franken said that what he hates the most are conservative accusations that liberals love America less. In this, he has a point . . . to a point. Franken loves America but to use an Al Campanis phrase, lacks the "necessities" to offer expert opinion. But he has all the right in the world to offer opinion, then take his chances. Franken compares liberal "love" and conservative "love" with children and adults. Conservatives, he says, love America "like a child loves his Mommy." It is the child's whole world and can do no wrong. Liberals, he says, love America like adults love their parents. They know the mistakes they made and want to learn from them.

Franken is off the mark. He claims that one can turn to any page and find a lie in Coulter's books, then pointed one out. Upon read it several times one could not see where the lie was. Besides, it was a very obtuse and off-hand reference. Coulter's book puts the lie to Franken's "child" vs. "adult" argument, because her books are carefully researched and very, very little is ever shown to be untrue. Liberals think that if they call something a lie it is a lie, which does not make it a lie. Unfortunately for them, it too often reflects accurate portrayals of things they would rather have people not be aware of.

Liberals fail to realize that conservatives have been listening to these portrayals of them, and of history, and spent decades slowly, painstakingly, building a brick-by-brick case for their positions. Conservatives knew the only weapon they really had was true facts. Accusing them of lying at this point is like accusing an athlete who was not very good in high school, but through really hard work and desire became a professional star, of not having natural talent.

Franken's "child" analogy does not hold up to scrutiny. Conservatives do not hide from the most devastating facts about America's darkest adventures: the Phoenix program; CIA-orchestrated coups in Guatemala, Chile and Iran; 100 years of brutal Jim Crow laws; and many other facts about us that are subject to public scrutiny. It is certainly not analogous to a little kid who loves his flawed parents without seeing their flaws. We are a flawed people, a flawed nation, and a flawed ideology that has been guided as the world's last, best hope by a loving God, and is the worst country on the face of the Earth with the exception of all other countries on the face of the Earth.

Furthermore, all subjects throughout history could be hung on a giant dartboard. Wherever the dart hits, Franken can discuss whatever that subject is. We can do that 100 times. 99 percent of those subjects are ones he possesses little knowledge of. Then we can talk about who the children are, and who the parents are.

"Liberals have a preternatural gift for always striking a position on the side of treason," says Coulter. "Everyone says liberals love America, too. No, they don't." Liberals are more likely to side with treason, but not always. Her blanket statement that liberals do not love America cannot be justified, either. But a small group of conservative writers and historians are striking back. They have grown up reading the textbooks, seen the movies, listened and viewed the news broadcasts, the specials, the documentaries, listened to their college professors and read the books, all too often slandering and lying about the land they love. Liberals have written history since World War II. Not anymore.

Coulter may be a bit "ripe," but conservatives have decided that they the academic credentials, the smarts, the common sense and the wherewithal to tackle a domain that liberals have for too long tried to say only they are qualified to occupy. For decades, conservatives have operated on a certain amount of instinct. The average American has spent a lifetime hearing the liberal point of view. It has long ago ceased to pass the "smell test." The "little voice" that told us thousands of times, "I don't think so" or "that sure doesn't sound right" has resounded enough. Now we are armed with the facts.

History wars

The past 55-60 years have brought us to a point of division. The old enemy, Nazi Germany, was easy for everybody to hate. So was Japan. Communism seemed to be that way at first, but we never fought a war with the Soviets. We fought small wars with the Chinese and Soviet client states, but these wars did not materialize into the Armageddons the militarists warned us the Communists were itching for. Because they lacked the kind of clarity of WWII, a fair number of Americans began to question the premise of who we were, what we stood for, and most importantly, why we fight. A large number of people in other countries began to ask the same questions, but they were not "burdened" by the patriotic loyalties that are in-grained into most of us in this country. When the U.S. won the Cold War, a funny thing happened. Psychologists, and just plain folks, could identify with the mindset.

It is the feeling one gets at the end of the school year when a rival or a bully has been beaten, or they are suddenly shown to be something other than what you "feared" them to be all along. They become humanized.

"He wasn't so bad," you say to yourself, although that feeling you had is still there. This kind of thing worked on our psyches all through the 1990s. Now terrorism has replaced Communism, but Osama bin Laden looked a lot different running scared than he did right after 9/11. Slowly but surely, our fears about terrorists waned a bit. It is a natural tendency. Eventually he met the same fate as Hitler and Che Guevara.

None of this changes the historical fact about Communism, and terrorism, too. More than 20 years after the Berlin Wall crashed down, it is time to take an honest assessment of who the Communists were. If we can arrive at the conclusion that they were evil and they were a threat, then it is fair to ask who helped them, who failed to stand up to them. Because that side has been writing the history, and they do not want to credit McCarthy, Nixon, Reagan and Bush. They want you to think George Kennan, Adlai Stevenson, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy won the Cold War. With all due respect, that dog don't hunt.

History is important. The winners usually write it. The first drafts are influential but over time they are replaced. We must learn from history. From the standpoint of politics, Democracy, military strategy, and national security, history ranges from the really important to a matter of life and death.

Whittaker Chambers said in the 1950s, "In this century, within the next decades, <it> will be decided for generations whether all Mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed."

Chambers was a witness to the two great faiths of our time, God and Communism.

"Communism," he said, "is the vision of man without God." Coulter writes, "Liberals chose Man. Conservatives chose God." What is prescient in Chambers's statement is that Communism, despite its evil, and despite the hatred so many heaped upon it, is and always will be enticing. It was unavailable as a practical political outlet for Americans, but many in this country were drawn to it. They could not resist it. In so doing they did its bidding in secret, on the quiet. But Chambers posits that somewhere in the middle, between freedom and Communism, is a third choice that threatens to destroy us. What he was getting at, perhaps without really knowing it, is that there is this third way called ambivalence, and that this ambivalence is the slipshod, the fissure, the crack in society. This is where the "enemies" of freedom, who cannot call themselves Nazis, or Communists, or even nationalists, are able to operate. The devil works that way. Today, this is readily identifiable as terrorism, in the name of Fundamentalist Islam, which is a particularly devilish ploy. It uses a mainstream religion to further the works of Satan. Someday it will be something else, something that foments in Africa most likely; disease, anarchy, starvation, famine, hopelessness, racism. It will have another name some day.

The battle for the American soul since World War II (and there were battles prior to that) has turned on pivotal moments of triumph, failure and revenge. Hiss, McCarthyism, Kennedy over Nixon, Vietnam, Watergate, the Berlin Wall, and the Clinton Impeachment are the various watersheds. In 2004, conservatism was riding high. Conservatives were out to exact a certain amount of revenge for the lies of history. The Left counter a string of Right-wing books. It will go on until society has either inexorably surged to a higher place, or a "big event" moves us there.

What irks the Left most is that Vietnam and Watergate failed to score them the winning touchdowns. A political scientist like Alexis de Tocqueville might have surveyed the American landscape of the 1960s and '70s - literature, music, politics, culture - and said, "The Left has won." Musicians like Jim Morrison were singing about triumphal revolution, how "their side" had won. Then Nixon won 49 states in 1972. Everybody was shocked. But Watergate seemed to be the final nail in the coffin. What the Reagan Revolution said were two things: conservatism was the wave of the future, nothing could hold it back, and the Left never had enough gravitas to hold onto to the top slot in the corporation in the first place. Liberals differ on this because they think it was a freak occurrence, a setback, a sidebar.

Since 9/11, liberals have slyly went from capitalizing War on Terror to "war on terror." Before the 2003 Iraq War, the "usual suspects" formed another wonderful organization called Not In Our Name, calling Bush's proposed fight "unjust, immoral, and illegitimate." They said 9/11 compared to "similar scenes in Baghdad." Their members included Jane Fonda, Ed Asner, Susan Sarandon, Casey Kasem, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Edward Said, Ben Cohen, Kurt Vonnegut, and a guy who killed a cop, named Mumia Abu-Jamal.

This group is easily dismissed as "unpatriotic," and Coulter thinks close to treasonous when considering the War on Terror, but were they? They offered the opinion that invading Iraq was immoral and illegitimate. They had little standing to call it illegitimate. The U.N. provided guidelines for Iraq to meet for weapons inspectors, and they failed to meet the guidelines. The U.N. did not spell out a "use of force" justification, but it was well assumed that the underlying power of the resolution was to justify such force if worse came to worse. Congress absolutely authorized force, and many Democrats signed on to it.

The "moral" question is key to this argument, and should not be dismissed lightly. Real military men like Douglas MacArthur said they could not even describe war. George Patton "loved" it, reveling in its "g(l)ory," but he was something close to crazy, to the point of worrying for his mortal soul because of the way he felt about it. Movies like Saving Private Ryan are considered realistic, but can never really capture what it is.

War is about people burning to death, having their limbs and extremities blown to bits, experiencing agonizing pain. Innocent women and children die in wars, sometimes caught in burning buildings that they cannot escape from. Soldiers returning from Afghanistan, which was by no means a major conflict comparable to Korea, Vietnam, or even the Persian Gulf War, were glazed over from the experience.

Bush framed the issue around Saddam's WMD. A great deal of the pre-war hype and "justification" for it centered on Saddam's human rights abuses, which should have been elevated to the level of the WMD danger. Not In Our Name made the compelling argument that killing so many people (and their predictions were of horrible civilian death tolls, certainly far more than what happened) could not be justified. It is not fair to simply call them unpatriotic for not backing Bush.

But where these people were off the mark was in their blatantly political agenda. They were against the war on a number of levels. They (a) did not trust American power and (b) hated the idea that a Republican President would gain political clout by prosecuting a successful war. There was a lack of honesty in their protest. It was not about innocent lives. It was about a Republican President. Ed Asner may have "protested" Clinton killing 2,000 civilians in Bosnia, but his protests and those of others lacked the vociferousness of the one directed at Bush.

The Iraq War was in American interests. This gets to the heart of what Coulter argues is either unpatriotic, treasonous, or somewhere close. Liberals seem to have a big problem with winning American military campaigns that advance our agenda. They think we are too powerful, and our agenda should not be advanced any more than it already is. Coulter defines this as treason.

On the other hand, when America is at war, many factors come into play that are forgotten by history. The morale of the country, the safety of the troops and the support for their cause, are all things of worthy consideration. It may be unfair to heap the "unpatriotic traitor" label on people who protest, just because they discourage fighting men, and perhaps the enemy is comforted by them, but these factors are extremely important at the height of the conflict.

When President Bush exposed and identified Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the "axis of evil," liberals went ballistic. These people cannot call something evil because they do not think America is righteous. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a very telling article that came closer to backing Coulter's assertions than perhaps Coulter could make. She wrote that Democrats would have to fake enthusiasm for the War on Terror out of fear of being labeled McGovernites, a losing political reality, and lie. What a novel concept for Democrats!

On the other hand, some things were really simple. Saddam was a bad, bad man leading a murderous regime. The U.S. was in prime position to take him out. All the machinations, which might go into taking out some other maniac in the world, were already hurdled. Bush was the checkers player, not the chess master. He took him out. Democrat failure to see the simplicity and goodness of this act, then or now, is worthy of some hard questioning.

Ann Coulter devotes a fair amount of time and research to the controversial character Alger Hiss. Whittaker Chambers's accusations may well have been unheeded except for the Venona Project. After the Hitler-Stalin pact, Chambers had a revelation. He realized what he believed in, Communism, was evil. He decided to inform, and spoke with Adolf Berle, President Roosevelt's Assistant Secretary of State. He provided the names of two dozen spies in the administration. This included Alger Hiss and his brother, Donald. When told, FDR told Berle to go "f--k himself." Hiss was promoted, given more responsibility, more trust and more power. The espionage accusations began to float about Washington. Dean Acheson took up the cause of defending Hiss. But through Venona, Hiss's work on behalf of the Communists was confirmed.

What happened over the next years s actually quite simple. Republicans knew Hiss was a Communist and wanted him. Democrats either (a) knew he was a Communist and liked him because of it, (b) knew he was a Communist but did not care, or (c) refused to believe the prima facie evidence of Venona. Naturally, it became political. When Chambers was called before HUAC he named Hiss as a Soviet agent. There is little use arguing the point of Hiss's Communist work. It has been detailed, he was convicted, honest historians knew he was a Communist, and after the Soviets imploded their archives proved it, just as they proved most everything conservatives had persuasively argued for throughout the Cold War.

The question then comes down not to whether Hiss was a traitor - he was - but whether his defenders were traitors. The Democrats went after Chambers with all their strength. The American public believed him. Throughout the 1950s, the U.S. agreed with the Republicans, Nixon and McCarthy. Truman was virtually thrown out of office, with three out of four believing Truman's administration was infiltrated by Communists, four out of five supporting HUAC, and even 71 percent of Democrats refuting the Truman charge that Communist espionage was "playing politics" on the part of Republicans.

Hiss did not want to sue Chambers for libel for the reasons that are now obvious, which was that he knew he would lose. But the Democrats shamed him into it and paid for his Harvard defense team. They slandered Chambers (who was married) as a homosexual who had been the gay lover of his brother, which was false. Even if it had been true it had nothing to do with Hiss. Hiss's defense apparently was to keep calling Chambers a "queer." Chambers simply provided loads of documentation, State Department summaries, letters he had secreted away for years, and various other irrefutable proofs. Hiss's libel case was down the tubes. A reluctant Department of Justice was forced to step in. Had Hiss just backed off the libel claim (which the Democrats forced him into) he may have been home scot-free.

Truman's lawyers at Justice tried to spin the case as an investigation of Chambers. Republicans at HUAC, realizing Democrat lies were in danger of winning the day, wanted more proof from Chambers. Chambers had feared for his life from the Communists and hidden the most damning evidence in a pumpkin patch in Maryland. Over time, he had come to realize that the Democrats were almost as dangerous to him as the Communists. For that reason he had not played his entire hand at the libel trial. He had anticipated being hailed in to criminal court by the Democrats. He wanted a final "weapon" to prevent this. Thus were the "pumpkin papers." They were "definitive proof of one of the most extensive espionage rings in the history of the United State," wrote Perjury author Allen Weinstein. Hiss's guilt was no longer in doubt.

Hiss evaded and lied, claiming that Chambers had gotten into his house to use his typewriter to type up his letters and spy directions. To this day, the New York Times and The Nation "believe" Chambers broke into Hiss's house to write the voluminous documents, all on Hiss's typewriter and in his inimitable communication style. Of course they know the truth, but lie about it.

The Hiss case raises serious questions about the Roosevelt/Truman Administrations, and the Democrat Party in the succeeding years. The troubling sell-out of Eastern Europe, the "loss" of China, and the U.N. charter favoring the Russians cannot be ignored. The attempts by Hiss and his defenders for 60 years to uncover "new evidence" that never went anywhere begs the question not whether Hiss was a traitor, but whether Democrats had a problem with him being a traitor. The heart of the matter is that, apparently, certain acts of treason against the United States of America, if committed by the right person with the right pedigree at least, are considered good policy by Democrats.

Certainly Truman kept Hiss on at the State Department. FDR-appointed Supreme Court Justices Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed were Hiss's character witnesses. 1952 and 1956 Democrat Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson vouched for him. All of this happened after it was proven that Hiss was a Communist agent.

After McCarthyism, the dominant media culture in the U.S. became, more and more, overwhelmingly liberal. This was in response to the Hiss/McCarthy era. The twin towers of media paganism were that McCarthy was evil because there were no Communists, and Hiss was innocent because there were no Communists. It became the overriding theme of schoolbooks to this very day. It dominates the thinking of a majority of the press, in all its forms. When the Soviet cables further proving Hiss's guilt were made available in the 1990s, the Washington Post ran it on page three and still said there was "no evidence." The New York Times, who championed Hiss and trotted him out whenever Nixon met political defeat (California in 1962, Watergate in 1974), now just said the "distressing episode" was "over," and wanted it to go away. In the past 15 years, the "grey lady" failed to write the final truthful chapter on Hiss; defended Clinton in the same manner Democrats had defended Hiss in the 1950s; were identified as a "big-time" a-----e by a Presidential candidate who gained points from a public that agreed with the assessment; hired an unqualified affirmative action writer who exposed the paper's lack of credibility; and continued to see its reputation besmirched by various other acts of journalistic irresponsibility. Now they wonder why the New York Post, the Washington Times, Newsmax and Human Events have so many subscribers.

Chambers wrote his autobiography, Witness. Like so many books by conservatives who tell the truth, it was a huge bestseller. He needed the money. None of the liberal newspapers or magazines would hire him.

Dean Acheson, the man as responsible as any (with the exception of Communist spies working in the Truman Administration) for letting China go Red, evoked scripture in his defense of Hiss. The liberal Left seemed to be breeding a new kind of radical. England's version of Hiss was the dashing secret agent Kim Philby. Only the conservatives (and the American public) seemed to care. As Ann Coulter wrote, "Some of their young men would grow up to be poets and some would grow up to be Bolsheviks . . . Salon liberals foolishly indulged their infatuation with Communism to the peril of the country."

Modern liberals would call that hogwash and cite Walter Cronkite's statement that a Soviet world takeover was virtually impossible. They do not give any credence to the notion that the Communists were prevented from taking over by the likes of Chambers and McCarthy, by the brave boys who fought at Choisin Reservoir and Hue, and by Reagan's hard line on SDI. To say that a system that killed 1010 million human beings in a relatively short number of years was no "threat," that they had no desire to dominate the world, and that they would not do anything they could to attain those goals, is a basic failure to recognize the facts.

Worse than that, it is recognition of the facts and, in more than just a handful of cases, a desire to aid in the enemy cause. That is treason. Liberals could not live in comfort in this great nation if they actively supported Communism. One could be a member of the party, but the public would not buy their books, their newspapers, listen to their broadcasts or go to their films. So they had to hide themselves, and attempt to convince a gullible country that Communism was not a domestic threat. Millions of others were not so gullible as to believe them. Book after book announced, "there were no spies," "accusations of Communism were baseless," and "charges had no grounding in fact." Meanwhile, Chambers and other ex-Communists like Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz, Soviet defectors and their documentation, the "pumpkin papers," confessions in the Rosenberg case, numerous arrests, and decades of CIA intelligence and counter-intelligence, puts the lie to this proposition.

One of the greatest heroes in U.S. history was Colonel Carter Clarke, chief of the Army's Special Branch, who heard rumors that Stalin was cutting a separate peace with Hitler. He informed Roosevelt, who said "Uncle Joe" would not betray him and left the matter uninvestigated. Clarke understood something. He understood that someday FDR would not be President. He understood that the Democrats had a different . . . attitude about national security. Or, as Coulter writes, "The Democrats could not be trusted." So, cloaked in secrecy, he set up a special unit to listen in on Soviet cables. By war's end, the cables showed numerous Soviet agents in the Roosevelt/Truman government.

Hoover knew about it. Very few others did. McCarthy probably did not know about it. Certain friends in the intelligence community may have given him hints. It is amazing, but the Republicans, and surely most of the people handling Venona were Republican, yet never used what they had against the Democrats. Is there any chance that the Democrats ever would have sat tight on such a thing if they held this over Republican heads? JFK, on the other hand, let the cat out of the bag with the Bay of Pigs and Democrat Watergate politics derailed arms control agreements, leading to genocide in Southeast Asia.

As John Earl Harvey and Harvey Klehr point out in Venona, there was "a fifth column working inside and against the United States in the Cold War." It was entirely associated with the Communist wing of the official Democrat party. Not every American Communist was a spy, but hundreds were. Deciphering who the fellow travelers were from the dangerous plants, handlers and saboteurs was imperative. It required asking questions, and one of those questions was, "Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" Hiss and Harry Dexter White may just have been two of the highest-ranking Communists, but this did not mean there were not others above them, or that those below them were not a major security threat.

The Communist witness Elizabeth Bentley was called the "Blonde Spy Queen." Both then and now, liberals discredited her as a "neurotic spinster . . . hardly a reliable informant," and in 1994 The Nation thought her naming of almost 150 people could not be counted on because she drank and made a few mistakes spelling names and remembering dates. They never said a peep over Hillary's numerous "I can't recalls" in relation to the various crimes she committed. Venona, however, confirmed Bentley's testimony while Whitewater eventually led to Bill Clinton's Impeachment.

Ann Coulter makes a phenomenal comparison in Treason (written in 2003) that demonstrates just how deep the Communists were into the Democrat-led government.

"To understand how deep were the Soviet tentacles in the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, try to imagine a parallel universe today.

"Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defense, would be a member of Al Qaeda taking orders from Osama bin Laden.

"Alger Hiss, Assistant Secretary of State under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Identified as a Soviet spy in Venona."

Coulter goes on to compare Harry Dexter White, FDR's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, who conspired with Soviet spy Frank Coe and Solomon Adler to kill "critical" loans to Nationalist China when they were desperately fighting Mao Tse-Tung, to a Treasury Department employee who might block a key loan to Israel that allowed them to fall to Al Qaeda terrorism or Arab invasion. Hoover knew all about White but was restrained from going after him by the Democrats.

Lauchlin Currie, FDR's administrative assistant, would be compared to Bush aide Andrew Card. Duncan Lee, head of the Office of Strategic Services, and like the others a Venona spy, would be compared to an assistant to CIA Director George Tenet. Harry Hopkins, identified by former agent Oleg Gordievsky in K.G.B.: The Inside Story, by Anatoly Akhmerov as a spy of "major significance," held chief of staff Karl Rove's position.

FDR's Vice-President Henry Wallace said, "America's main enemy was Churchill and the British Empire." Peace would come about "if the United States guaranteed Stalin control of Eastern Europe." Wallace backed Stalin's seizure of Czechoslovakia, the blockade of Berlin, and described the gulags as "a combination TVA and Hudson Bay Company." Wallace was actually a Communist who, had Roosevelt died just a year and a half earlier would have been President, running for four more years as a war time leader in 1944. The Wallace story is about all we really need to know about Communist espionage and the Democrats. It answers the fundamental question. They were tolerated because they represented a political viewpoint that the party endorsed. Coulter compares Wallace to Vice-President Cheney being "star struck" by Saddam Hussein.

Owen Lattimore was a roving strategist during the Roosevelt years, surrounded by Communist spies. His position would be comparable to Richard Perle surrounding himself with Al Qaeda operatives. Joseph Davis, FDR's Ambassador to the Soviet Union, told the AP in 1946 that, "Russia <note that liberals always called it 'Russia,' as in `Mother Russia,' never the 'Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' or other totalitarian monikers> in self-defense has every moral right to seek atomic bomb information through military espionage if excluded from such information by her former fighting allies." This was Robert Oppenheimer's view. It was carried out by the Rosenbergs with the help of their brother. It can be compared to defense of Saddam's gassing of the Kurds, and frankly might explain why the Democrats seemed to be doing all they could to discredit and make sure we did not find Saddam's nuclear program.

Harold Ickes, FDR's Interior Secretary (his son was Clinton's Deputy Chief of Staff), was a member of the Stalinist League for Peace and Democracy. Coulter compares him to Gale Norton being a member of the Al Qaeda front, Benevolence International Foundation. Roosevelt calling Stalin "Uncle Joe" would be like Bush referencing "Uncle Osama" or "good ol' Saddam." Truman called Stalinist Russia "our friends," which is like calling Hitler, Mao or Pol Pot a fine man. Stalin had killed 20 million when Truman said what he said, and Truman knew about it. Stalin's reasoning was that, "One death is a tragedy but a million is only a statistic." Hollywood loved that, letting Jon Lithgow say in Cliffhanger, "Kill 10 people you're a murderer. Kill a million and you're a conqueror."

The Communists, you see, thought they could not make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. One can only read this stuff and thank a benevolent God that a nation called the United States became extant and powerful enough, despite the traitors in her midst, to end such horrors.

Rehabilitating McCarthy

McCarthy identified it as "a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man. A conspiracy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of honest men." Truman liked "old Joe" Stalin, not McCarthy. McCarthy's "conspiracy" statement has been lambasted for decades. "Conspiracy" theories have since been associated with nutcases. In Dr. Strangelove, Sterling Hayden's General Jack Ripper goes completely off the deep end, believing the Commies have conspired to steal his "essence" through fluoridation. The intent is clear: make people laugh at the absurdity of militarists and conservatives, and for God's sake remind them of McCarthy. For years conservatives have sat in darkened movie theatres, heard such comparisons, insinuations, outright lies and utter biases, and whispered, often not so quietly, "Bulls--t!"

Other top FDR Communists included Laurence Duggan of the Latin desk at State, Frank Coe (IMF representative), Duncan Lee (OSS) and atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs. Hoover constantly sent memos on all of the above-named people. The Prime Minister of Canada warned the Americans. Soviet defectors warned us. Ex-Communists warned us. Only the Republicans listened.

When Ike took over, he had Attorney General Herbert Brownell reveal Truman's appointment of spies to top positions. Truman said he had not seen the FBI report. Hoover produced the copy he had sent Truman. This is not "news." It is not revelation. It has been known for years. But the liberal information founts that tell you what they think you should know have made it necessary for you to be a researcher and an archivist in order to find it out.

Lauchlin Currie warned the Soviets that their code had been cracked. Coulter pointed out that despite this they made few changes, attributing this to "Soviet work ethic" and stating that had they had a "profit motive" they might have done a more efficient job. Currie eventually fled like a rat to Colombia. Coe ended up in Red China. Another Communist, Noel Field, went to Hungary. Duggan committed suicide. White died of stress. Liberal historians and college professors would have you believe McCarthy drove them to their deaths or lives in various "Communist paradises." Eleanor Roosevelt, poet Archibald MacLeish, Drew Pearson (and his protégé, Jack Anderson), and Edward R. Murrow were just a few of the useful idiots who spent years and a great deal of energy defending these dead, disgraced and defected Communists.

McCarthyism is the name attributed to all of this. Even many of the spies were identified long before McCarthy's Wheeling, West Virginia speech. The Rosenbergs, for instance, had nothing to do with McCarthy. They were cause celebes among liberal elites, writes Coulter, who also disproves much of the myth about McCarthy and Hollywood. The "horror," the "Gestapo tactics," the "totalitarian atmosphere," the "Nazi police tactics" of McCarthyism can be summed up in Coulter's description of what happened to the tiny number of affected writers:

"You mean he couldn't do screenplays under his own name and had to fire the gardener and clean his pool in Bel Air by himself? No! That is shocking!"

Actor Humphrey Bogart summed up it nicely when he referred to the Hollywood Ten as, "Uniquely untalented," explaining that those whose careers were "ruined" owed it more to bad scripts than bad politics. The liberals, who for some reason are made up of an inordinate number of Jews, took to the Rosenberg case as their own. They wanted to use it to show that the U.S. was "Fascistic" like the country we had just finished sending to the ash heap of history, and that we were bent on executing nice Jewish folks from the Bronx. As Coulter pointed out, the smiling personage of Ike, who had led the Crusade in Europe (the name of his book), did not allow this image to add up. Mountains of evidence convicted the Rosenbergs then, and in subsequent years reams more corroborated guilt utterly and absolutely without doubt. The Left still protested on their behalf with great fervor.

They were "total Communists or complete idiots," according to Coulter, who demonstrates that they tried to equate Stalinist tyranny with McCarthyism. If you want to count a couple of suicides, then the score on this one is still Stalin 25 million, McCarthy three.

An engineer in the Soviet spy ring, Joel Barr, fled to Russia the day the Rosenbergs were arrested, with all his belongings still in his Paris apartment. Another, Alfred Sarant, left his wife and child (but took his neighbor's wife) just as fast. The Russians put them to work on radar-guided anti-aircraft artillery and SAM missiles, used to shoot down John McCain and his fellow pilots in Vietnam. In 1992, Barr came to the States to collect his Social Security benefits (once a New Dealer always a New Dealer), and Ted Koppel interviewed him on that bastion of fair and balanced news shows, Nightline. Despite the above evidence, Koppel said Barr's espionage was still in question, and that being a Communist was okay during World War II (of course Barr fled during the Korean War against Communism). The Left always tried to equate our "deal with the devil," alliance with Stalin, as endorsement of his ideology. Churchill had advocated "crushing" him in the 1920s. Imagine how history would have changed had Communism been snuffed out in 1927. Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover refused to recognize Stalin. Roosevelt did. Coulter wrote that in 50 years Nightline will (unless conservatives have changed the nature of the medium, which they just may) air a special on American Taliban John Walker Lindh, shedding doubt on what he did in Afghanistan.

Barr was allowed to vote again. He liked Clinton.

Coulter saves her greatest revelations of Truth to McCarthyism, a term she disparages and compares to grouping the "violence of the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, SDS, and drunk drivers under the name 'Kennedyism.' " The fact that HUAC is linked with McCarthyism is an example, since HUAC was an organ of the House, but McCarthy was in the Senate.

Oscar Shaftel was a Communist who was fired from his teaching job in New York when people found out he was a Communist. Did he go to jail? No, he just became a journalist like all the other liberals, who in turn wrote the misinformed history of McCarthy for years. His fate was the result of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which McCarthy was not associated with, but he is just one example of a man who was called for years a "victim of Joe McCarthy." McCarthy was "associated" with the Smith Act. Communists liked the Smith Act at first because it was used aggressively against Fascists and rounding up Japanese. They disliked it when it was used against them. McCarthy had nothing to do with it, either.

McCarthy did identify and have removed dozens of Soviet operatives working in sensitive government jobs. He also attempted to use discretion in his investigative techniques. But the liberals turned this against him. A case in point was the Democrat foreign policy wonk, Owen Lattimore. McCarthy suspected Lattimore but had not yet gained proof. He chose to keep Lattimore's name confidential until proof, one or the other, could be delivered. Drew Pearson (whose lies about Truman's Secretary of Defense, James Forrestall, had driven the man to suicide) then leaked Lattimore's name as proof that McCarthy was ruining people's reputations. Pearson ended up telling the truth by way of his lie, because eventually Lattimore was found to be Red.

McCarthy chose to refer not to "named Communists," but to "security risk number one" or "case number two" and the like. As early as 1948, Truman was saying it was the Republicans (who had formed HUAC and were being led by Nixon) who were "friendly" to Communists and who were comparable to Fascists. Meanwhile, hundreds of Communists formulated Truman's foreign policy, at a time when he let China go Red and the Soviets went nuclear.

"Anyone with liberals views" was called a Communist, said Helen Silverstein in 1947. Soviet cables proved her liberal views ran to Soviet espionage. Her husband was a spy, too. He was actually awarded a medal by the Soviets while in the employ of the Roosevelt Administration. McCarthy has been vilified for "destroying" people and investigating their "personal lives" by the same people who think it just fine that Hillary Clinton and James Carville could go after and attempt to destroy Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey and other women for having the temerity to have been sexually harassed, assaulted and raped by Bill Clinton. Liberals who call the 1950s a "frightening period" have a point only in the way terrorists might refer to the Bush Presidency as a "frightening period." If you were a Communist, you darn well should have been frightened that a real American like McCarthy was finding you out.

Ethel Rosenberg's children described being called "Commie" by their classmates. The San Francisco Chronicle compared these everyday taunts of school kids to American "totalitarianism." What Coulter points out about McCarthyism and its aftermath is that the liberals, knowing that Hiss, Rosenberg and association with 110 million murders, if admitted, documented, and exposed in the kind of thorough manner that Germany and Nazism were associated with the Holocaust, would end the Democrat Party. They had to cling to their lies. Over time, conservatives moved on, ceding the matter to them. Not anymore. In the 1990s, Democrats were up against the wall with Bill Clinton in much the same way.

" 'Blacklist survivor' Norma Barzman described her 'exile' in Paris thus," writes Coulter. " 'We had dinner with Picasso every Tuesday night when we were at our country house in Provence. Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, Jacques Prevert were all friends. Plus we got to work with all the amazing European directors including Vittorio De Sica and Constantin Costa-Gavras. It was hard, but it was also the time of my life.'

"Meanwhile, back in the country they preferred people were being whisked off to Soviet gulags in the dead of night . . .

"10 Hollywood scribblers who subscribed to an ideology responsible for murder by the million refused to admit their membership in the Communist Party to a House Committee. All they had to do was 'fes up. But they felt they had the right not to tell the truth, so they were briefly jailed for contempt. This created a slight setback in their dinners with Picasso. The horror."

The Blacklist of the 1950s is in no possible way comparable to the current "blacklist." Elia Kazan, who named Communists and is one of the greatest directors of all time, was long on the outs because of it. Openly conservative Republican screenwriters, directors and even actors are faced with de facto "conservatives need not apply" signs up and down Sunset Boulevard. Guilty By Suspicion (1991), starring Robert De Niro, was the closest Hollywood film to telling the truth about the Blacklist. It involved a real director named Robert Merrill who had attended Communist meetings in the 1930s. The film naturally takes the position that even though he attended, and his friends attended, none of them were actually Communists. Their motivation was to feed starving Russians.

Eventually, the director was named. The studios asked him to cooperate and name the others who had attended the meetings. The director refused to "rat" on his friends and colleagues. His career dried up for a few years. It assumes that he was talented and in enough demand to maintain a position as an A-list director in a business that chews people up and spits them out regardless of political ideology. Guilty By Suspicion at least does not paint Merrill's case as being the direct result of Joe McCarthy's investigation, since his and almost all Hollywood people dealt with HUAC, not McCarthy, prior to Wheeling anyway. It addresses the legitimate question of whether it was fair to ask suspected Communists to name other suspected Communists.

HUAC and others did lay a heavy hand on some of these people by taking the position of forcing them to choose between themselves and their colleagues, although it is a common police tactic used long before and since then. What the Communist apologizers fail to understand, however, is the urgency and importance of national security. After the fall of Eastern Europe, the loss of China, the atomic explosion in Russia, American boys fighting in Korea, Communist expansion in Latin America, what we knew about Communist espionage in the West, and what the few who knew about Venona further knew at that time, asking people to cooperate in an effort to secure American safety and way of life was not unreasonable. As Coulter further points out, being a Communist was not illegal. Being identified as one just hurt careers in Hollywood, just as murdering ones' wife, getting caught masturbating in a theatre, or molesting kids would.

"They could still go to Paris or sell real estate . . ." writes Coulter. "They just couldn't work in the movies <for a few years>. That was the only price they paid for shilling for a mass murderer."

In all the years since World War II, there has never been a real film depicting Communist atrocities. Films and TV shows about the Holocaust abound. There have been depictions of Stalin and others, but they have always focused on the war, the strategy, and usually the suffering of the hardy Russian people. Nothing memorializes the 100 million dead, however. Not even Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago was made into a movie.

Some years ago a conservative producer wanted to make a film about the life of Josyp Terelya, who had been held in the gulags for years, but survived because of his strong Christian faith. Terelya described 20 years in the Soviet prison system in a book called Witness (the same name as Chambers' autobiography). The horrors of his captivity match anything that happened at Auschwitz. The difference is that Terelya was not held in this hellhole for three or four years, like most Jews, but for two decades. Hollywood never bought it, just as they never produced the Chambers version.

Later, evidence surfaced that the decision by many Communists to take the Fifth was an order from Stalin, since they did more value to the "cause" as martyrs. On the home front, Owen Lattimore said that Stalin's show trials might be excessive to those on trial, but that it was okay because it encouraged others to tell the truth.

The mythmakers say that McCarthy caused people to commit suicides. It is not true. Dustin Hoffman's father in Marathon Man was supposed to have been driven to such an end, although to screenwriter William Goldman's credit he does not directly attribute the death to McCarthy. A man named Ray Kaplan supposedly committed suicide before testifying after he said he was happy to do so. It had nothing to with McCarthy accusing him of Communism, but on the Senate floor a Voice of America employee stood up and shouted at McCarthy, "You murdered Ray Kaplan." The liberal press ran with it and turned it into "fact." McCarthy suspected Communists murdered Kaplan because he was going to expose their ring and its plans regarding the VOA. McCarthy biographer David Oshinsky was just one of many who built on the "driven to suicide" notion attributed to McCarthy.

"It would be as if Linda Tripp had turned up dead during the investigation of Bill Clinton, and liberals decided to blame Ken Starr," wrote Coulter.

McCarthy was not after Hollywood or "little guys." He suspected what all of us have suspected, that in the elite salons of the liberal establishment, "sedition always held a strange attraction for Ivy League types," wrote Coulter. Coulter "blames" George C. Marshall and even Dwight Eisenhower as part of an Establishment that tolerated this sedition. A chair born, striped-pants State Department desk chief, or a pampered Hollywood playboy, does not deserve the benefit of the doubt that attributed to the likes of Marshall and Eisenhower, however. Marshall's supposed lack of vision regarding his own Marshall Plan and various accusations regarding Marshall's WASP standoffishness being the reason he failed to stop China from going to the Communists do not measure up to the sterling words of praise that every world leader had for his steadfast performance during World War II. While he may have allowed himself to "go Establishment" after years surrounded by the Democrats, there will be berating of General Marshall in these pages.

Ike was possibly the greatest single man this world has produced other than Christ. He and Marshall were attacked by McCarthy, which was stupid on McCarthy's part. McCarthy was feeling intense pressure by then from his liberal enemies. He had begun to drink heavily, and he made mistakes. Failing to respect Marshall and Eisenhower were his two biggest ones. Ike called him on the carpet and reamed him out up one side and down the other, the way only military men can do. There is an almost regal splendor to their use of swear words as cutting edges. Ike did so not because McCarthy was going after Communists. He spoke to Hoover and knew about Venona. But as titular head of the Republican Party, facing re-election in 1956, trying to hold the fragile Republican majority that existed for those short years together, he saw McCarthy as hurting the cause. McCarthy's purpose was valid, but his methods had swayed from their original course.

In determining who "lost" China, Marshall is not the one to blame. Owen Lattimore, on the other hand, swayed Truman's policy away from Chiang Kai-shek in favor of Mao Tse-Tung. When McCarthy went after him for it, he coined the phrase McCarthyism. When called before McCarthy, Lattimore said he did not work at the State Department even though he took phone calls there, had an office there, and answered mail sent to him there. He regularly gave a State Department extension as the place to reach him. It was as if the liar James Carville or the infamous Thomason (Clinton friends Harry, Linda) said they "never worked at the White House," which they did.

Lattimore's lies resulted in perjury convictions. The New York Times consistently lies and says he was acquitted, when in fact they were later dropped on technicalities. Lattimore was a political gadfly, never assigned specific duties under FDR but used as a special advisor on foreign affairs. His hands were all over China. His own numerous writings were rife with apologist Stalinist propaganda. His own lack of official status with the White House was precisely what allowed him to work so closely with Communist spies. Whether FDR actually knew what he was and encouraged it is not really known. Perhaps FDR felt it was of value to have a fellow traveler working with Communists, who felt they could trust him. Maybe it started that way and became a dedication to the Soviet way. Maybe, and this may be a fair assessment of some (maybe not a lot) of the American Communists, they "loved" America but wanted her to change to Socialism. They knew it would never happen Democratically. Since they felt they were the elites who were charged with thinking for the rest of us, they decided to take it upon themselves to do the "brave" work of letting the Communists into our world, for our own good, of course. Maybe they did not want the Soviets blowing us up with atomic bombs or attacking our cities, and they trusted "Uncle Joe" not to do that. The fact that they were useful idiots and worse, and Stalin would have bombed us to the Stone Age if he could have gotten away with it, is what makes them such historically dangerous figures.

To this day, however, liberals say that Lattimore resisted a "reign of terror" that in their minds is worse than the guillotines of 1790s Paris. All who believe in freedom are in Lattimore's debt, according to the Left. In reality millions who died under Mao should on their graves have the words, "Owen Lattimore sold me out."

Graduate students who attempt to research the truth about McCarthyism find themselves facing academic blacklists. I.F. Stone had advocated suppressing Fascist speech. Certainly anything opposing civil rights uttered by a white man was worthy of being made illegal, according to Stone. McCarthyism caused him to, uh, change his mind regarding free speech. Stone was a darling of the joined-at-the-world elite academia and journalism. He backed every Communist from Henry Wallace to Ho Chi Minh. In 1992 declassified Soviet cables identified Stone as a paid agent. A few years later, more Soviet archives confirmed it. He had an NKVD handler. Victor Navasky wrote, "if you accept the Venona documents, then you have to accept that I.F. Stone . . . was a Communist agent."

Stone's Communism raised the greatest firestorm among liberal reviewers of Coulter's book, which is interesting. Stone's identity was discovered and made public 11 years prior to Treason's publication, and re-confirmed nine years prior. Coulter's fairly short treatment of Stone was not new or revelatory. It rehashed known facts. Yet it has been used by more than any to discredit her book as "lies." Two things are striking about this. The first is that calling known facts lies is as credible as stating, "California is not a state in the American Union," or "There is no such thing as the Pacific Ocean." More telling, however, is the emphasis on Stone, who was not as big a name as Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow. Stone was hailed as a "giant figure," but he really was only a giant figure among a small group of liberal elites. His treatment by reviewers shows that the reviewers are all liberals, and that Coulter stepped on some sensitive toes.

It is, sometimes, an uphill struggle, but a worthy one.

Just as the Left protects Stone's place in history with particular vigor, so to is David Horowitz vilified. Horowitz outrages liberals in the manner that Clarence Thomas outrages the black lobby. Because unlike Ann Coulter, a Connecticut WASP blonde who effects the airs of the upper crust, she is therefore "easy" to hate. But Horowitz is a New York Jew raised by Communists. He was weaned on Communism, spoon fed it, and knows it because he grew up with it, the way Bill Clinton was raised in the underworld of Arkansas' political Mafia. Horowitz knew where all the bodies were buried, who was on the take, the role of unions in the C.P., and how New York Jews used their identity in the post-war years to raise a moral front in the face of McCarthyism.

Horowitz's parents were fired from their job as New York City schoolteachers because they were Communists. In the subsequent years, these kinds of firings have been dredged up and reported as the worst kind violent, forceful hatred inflicted by the Right on the Left.

"What actually happened to my father and American Communists in general bears little resemblance to these lurid images," Horowitz says, and in telling the truth he is called the worst kind of traitor to his "people." If "his people" are Jews, then it stretches credulity that a system that killed millions of Jews because they were Jews, particularly when Stalin initiated a specific anti-Semitic plan in the early 1950s (for reasons that are not clear, targeting Jewish doctors), could be condoned by Jews.

Horowitz woke up to the radicalism all around him before it was too late. He had been part of the horrid world of Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal. The hatred these two vipers of the Left spew for Horowitz today leaves many with the feeling that, if they could do it without leaving evidence, they would kill Horowitz after torturing him. Is this surprising since they shill for a system that did just that to so many?

Even though we now know that over 300 Soviet spies worked for the U.S. government (which is probably a very low figure), and McCarthy was going after them, he was beaten up beyond comprehension. Every insinuation and innuendo was made against him. His top investigator, Roy Cohn, was homosexual, but it is by far not confirmed whether his aide, David Schine, was. McCarthy was a bachelor until relatively late in late, but he dated women (including one of the Kennedy sisters), and married an attractive woman in the 1950s. The Communist playwright Lillian Hellman, who was portrayed lovingly by Jane Fonda, called Cohn, Schine and McCarthy "Bonnie, Bonnie, and Clyde." The Las Vegas Sun called McCarthy a "disreputable pervert." These attacks were very hurtful. The Left learned from them, using the "gay smear" campaign against J. Edgar Hoover's memory.

The amount and vociferousness of the lies against McCarthy piled up beyond comprehension, worthy of an entire book. Drew Pearson, who Coulter called the "Larry Flynt of his day," threatened blackmail on McCarthy's supporters. The New York Post ran a 17-page series of untrue charges. McCarthy began to sue the papers and won libel damages and apologies. McCarthy was accused of having the postman spy on the mail of a fellow Senator, exposing personal peccadilloes of opponents (alcoholism, adultery, homosexuality), and various other charges. Despite the allegations of criminal activity, slander and libel against McCarthy, nobody ever succeeded in proving anything in court, despite every possible advantage in gathering such facts if they had in fact been facts. McCarthy never paid a dime in defamation charges.

James Reston, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, despised McCarthy and assigned a reporter who had once been a member of the C.P. to cover him. Reston refused to concede that the reporter was biased.

McCarthy's war record had indeed been glorified somewhat beyond what it really was. This was completely normal among the post-war political class, but the press attempted to paint his Marine flying career as a total lie. They never went after Lyndon Johnson, who never actually joined the Navy but flew some junkets to the war, orchestrated paperwork that made him look like he was in the Navy, and then awarded himself the Silver Star. Later, Johnson manipulated FCC rules in order to assure himself of millions in radio stations in Texas, but the press let him slide on this, too. Meanwhile, McCarthy flew combat missions.

". . . He took enemy fire from savage Oriental beasts and fired back as a tail gunner," wrote Coulter. Those Oriental beasts would have tortured him savagely if the plane had crashed and he had been taken as a POW.

The most lasting memory of McCarthyism is a bow-tied attorney named Joseph Welch berating him during the Army-McCarthy hearings with the famous utterance, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

The Chicago Sun-Times declared Welch's speech was in reference to McCarthy's "investigations into phantom Communists in the Army." Two such "phantoms" included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Julius was an Army engineer. Ethel's brother was in the Army Signal Corps and worked with them on obtaining the secrets they gave to the Communists. It was precisely because of them and hundreds of other real and actual "phantoms" that McCarthy had gone after the Army. Cells had been discovered in the Army.

Ike and Marshall were both sensitive to these charges, for obvious reasons. McCarthy's mistake was in going after the Army, and even after them, in a blatant, public manner. He should have taken the matter to Eisenhower, presented the President with the evidence he had, and a smart decision on how best to handle it should have been made. Ike probably never told McCarthy to "Go f--k yourself," as FDR did when presented with evidence of Hiss's espionage.

Further inflaming the situation was Schine's special treatment after he was drafted, ostensibly so he could finish his work with the committee while going through basic training. Cohn had a crush on Schine, and the matter was largely his fault, not McCarthy's. Cohn was convinced, probably correctly, that Schine had been drafted specifically as "payback" for their investigation of the Army. It has been assumed that Schine was Cohn's gay lover, but most of the evidence actually points the other way, towards Schine being something of a ladies man.

Drew Pearson was apparently responsible for Schine being drafted, but Schine had a slipped disk that normally would have exempted him. Pearson maintained the pressure. Schine entered training, and the press hounded every step of the process. McCarthy was loyal to Cohn, who he believed was indispensable to his work. When the media went into overdrive, McCarthy began to drink heavily. Democrats "behaved like animals - sneering, interrupting, and catcalling . . ." during hearings, writes Coulter. Welch was the attorney for the Army. In a two-hour harangue of Cohn he portrayed the McCarthy-Cohn-Schine team as homosexual lunatics. Liberals, the great champions of gay rights, love to demonstrate the perversions of gays if it can be applied to Republicans. Welch went on and on, speaking in sing-song. He asked Cohn detailed questions that would have required him to refer to notes and documents. If Cohn did not have the answer at his fingertips, Welch patronized him, laughed at him, and made fun of the very notion that any Communists existed in America.

Cohn held firm, answered, "Yes, sir," or "no, sir," or "I will try, sir," and attempted to use common sense. The Democrats who lined the gallery were laughing at him. It was a "show trial," a "kangaroo court." Welch kept returning to a familiar theme, which was, "Where are the Communists? . . . who are the Communists . . . name me some Communists," and the like. Cohn gave some names but was never allowed to finish his sentences. Welch asked about some suspected Communists, insinuating that Cohn had made false accusations without facts. Cohn attempted to explain that some people under surveillance by the FBI or under committee investigation were not proven to be Communists - yet - but that was the purpose of the investigation, to determine one way or another if they were, and what kind of security risk they might be. Cohn tried to reasonably point out the difference between a Communist and a Communist spy, and why a Communist in a sensitive government position was more dangerous than an average citizen who happened to be a member of the C.P.

This was the heart of the truth about McCarthy. He had not gone after Hollywood, because they were not government employees. HUAC and others had indeed gone after Hollywood because they had influence over society through the power of their medium. But McCarthy's concerns were not with Communists, but with Communist spies and saboteurs who were in a position to do real damage. These explanations were met by jeers and sing-song interruptions by Welch. However, in asking Cohn to name Communists, he walked right into it.

McCarthy interrupted at this point and said that in Welch's own law firm was a "Mr. Fisher," who was still an employee at that time. McCarthy knew Fisher's name. McCarthy had not identified Fisher publicly, along with numerous other suspects, because the investigation was not complete and he wanted to name only true Communists, not shed suspicion on those who might be innocent. But Fisher's status was rock solid: he was a Red. He had been identified as one not by McCarthy or Cohn, but by Eisenhower's Attorney General. Fisher was a member of an organization that the U.S. government had determined was the "legal bulwark of the Communist Party."

"I have hesitated bringing that up, but I have been rather bored with your phony requests to Mr. Cohn here that he personally get every Communist out of government before sundown," McCarthy told the flabbergasted Welch. "Therefore, we will give you information about the young man in your own organization."

Welch had asked for Communists, and now he was being granted his request. They were in his law firm. McCarthy, knowing such a bombshell was best exploded in private, where the facts could be absorbed and pride did not have to be ruffled out in the open, had wanted to keep the information out of the discussion. Welch's badgering had gotten the best of him. Now Welch was placed in the position of having all that he stood and argued for fall apart in his face. Red with embarrassment, at that point Welch's response was really quite normal. He had been taken apart in front of God and everybody by a man he loathed and did not think had what it took to best him intellectually (this has always been the "secret weapon" of conservatives). Welch needed to, as the Japanese say, "save face." Admitting then and there that McCarthy was right on was not an option.

Fisher had been a big problem for Welch, who thought he had taken care of the matter the "liberal way." Welch said McCarthy was "cruel" and "reckless," and explained that Fisher had gone to Harvard Law School, which in Welch's view made him innocent of all wrongdoing, but told the commonsensical that the chances he was a Communist were greater due to his schooling.

Welch had indeed found out that Fisher was a Communist, who had worked for the National Lawyers Guild, the C.P. "legal bulwark" in question. Welch's method of "fixing" the situation was indeed telling. He had gone to the New York Times and told them about it. In return the Times had written a sympathetic story "explaining" that Fisher had been a member of the guild. Officially, Welch had named Fisher, but the blow had been softened by a liberal story that for all practical purposes forgave Fisher for his indiscretion and painted him as a fine American. It seems in the Times' world, being a Communist was the best example of being a fine American.

McCarthy and Cohn had not jumped on the Fisher case. They did not have all the facts and chose to wait until the case, like all the cases they investigated, were locked up tight. Now McCarthy was "naming" a man who Welch had already named. Welch was calling McCarthy cruel for naming him the man he named! Naturally, the New York Times excoriated McCarthy for naming Fisher after the Times had named him first.

"Little did I dream you could be so reckless and cruel as to do injury to that lad," Welch said to McCarthy. Apparently, stating that Fisher was a Communist (true) was cruel. Telling the New York Times that Fisher was a Communist but (wink, wink) we all know that made him a good fellow, was not cruel.

Welch went on to say that he could not forgive McCarthy for providing the information that Welch provided. McCarthy pointed out that Welch had named Fisher first, and that Welch had "baited" Cohn. Realizing that McCarthy had logic on his side, suddenly Welch said, "I mean you no injury, sir," and "let's move on." Liberals always want to move on after their lies have been identified and exposed. The Clinton's way of doing it was to explain that they had to "move on so I can get back to work for the American people." Either that or they said that only conservatives prevented them doing their good deeds on behalf of "the children."

Welch looked at McCarthy and said, "Let us <us, he said, as in both of us, as in me, he should have said> not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

Few knew the details of this exchange until they read Treason by Ann Coulter. Reporters, who had seen the exchange as it has been explained herein, but who were rooting for Welch, began to applaud. They built upon their own applause to create an imaginary victory for Welch; a desperate re-structuring of the truth, a denial of what they had just seen. McCarthy's identification of a tried-and-true Communist had answered Welch's question. Welch had defended this Communist, which was no different than defending a Nazi. The climate of liberalism had pervaded the media and the Democrats in the post-Hiss years. It was hateful and unpatriotic. It was so desperate to score points against McCarthy, the Republicans and conservatism that it had lost all honor or sense of truth. The question Welch asked McCarthy was blatantly applicable to their own sad state of affairs. Communism was better (to them) than being on the losing side of history, especially when the winners were the likes of Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. In a way, it is understandable. A psychologist could surely name a syndrome that describes the mindset. But the Hiss/McCarthy era was the dividing line of American politics. Since then, the Left has reserved so much hatred for the Right that they have never been able or willing to own up to their own perfidy. The Kennedys came along and provided illusions of grandeur. Vietnam and the counter-culture actually made them think they had won, or at least were winning. Tet had changed the dynamic in a lasting manner. Nixon took 49 states, but Watergate - surely, Watergate - was the final nail in the Republican coffin. But the GOP was like a football team that keeps falling behind, and led by brilliant quarterbacks (think Roger Staubach winning the Heisman at Navy and the Super Bowl for Dallas), refuses to quit and, through sheer force of excellence, continues to surge forward with touchdown after touchdown.

Reporters are supposed to be professional. In sports, very often an announcement will be heard or posted on the wall in press boxes, "No rooting." In 1975, the Boston media broke this rule when Carlton Fisk hit his "body English" home run to win game six of the World Series against Cincinnati. That day in 1954, they did the same thing, rooting for Welch with cheers, boos, catcalls, hissing at McCarthy in a shameless display.

Welch had put on the performance of a lifetime. He cried and sobbed for the victim Fred Fisher, then as soon as the cameras were off of him perked up and asked an assistant, "Well, how did it go?"

Bill Clinton must have seen this act, because years later at Ron Brown's unreal he came in laughing and telling a dirty joke. When he saw that the cameras were pointed at him his face went somber and he wiped an imaginary tear from his eye.

The New York Times then went into high gear to rehabilitate Fisher. The National Lawyers Guild became, in their subsequent articles, an organization that worked with unions and civil rights organizations. This was similar to the "rehabilitation" of Saul Alinsky when Barack Obama became President. Suddenly he was being defended by the angel Bill Maher as just a fellow trying to "help blacks." Attorney General Herbert Brownell had identified them as the C.P.'s law firm, much like The Firm that Tom Cruise worked for in John Grisham's novel/movie was the mob's law firm (that film could be used to explain how Southern pols like Bill Clinton get away with what they get away with). Brownell did not say that the Guild "might" be Communist, or was "thought to be" Communist. The investigative powers of the United States Justice Department had conducted their investigation, done the analysis, and reached the conclusion that they were Red. The Times still called them allegedly subversive, which was like saying that the New York Giants, who won that year's World Series in four straight over Cleveland, were allegedly the World Champions.

The victim Fisher, the target of McCarthy's "assassination," one of those whose lives were "ruined" by the witch hunts, was made partner at a prestigious Boston firm, became president of the Massachusetts Bar Association, and made a ton of dough. Only in America.

McCarthy had revealed the truth. He had stumped Welch in open court, surprising him with a witty, think-on-his-feet riposte, the secret weapon of so many underestimated conservative minds. But in winning the battle he had lost the war. It was as if the New York Times told the Giants, after beating the Indians, that their official scorer ruled it for Cleveland.

If ever the O'Reilly Factor was needed it was then.

"What did I do?" asked McCarthy of his aides. They had no answer. The press played Welch's soliloquy, leaving out all the context of McCarthy's answers and remarks. Television portrayals forever after showed only Welch "shaming" McCarthy without the Fisher revelation. Certainly nobody ever pointed out that it was Welch, not McCarthy, who named Fisher.

Coulter wrote that in the 1950s there was "no Internet, no Fox News Channel, no Rush Limbaugh. Nothing but Nina Burleigh gushing to the Washington Post: I'd be happy to give Joe Welch oral sex just to thank him for attacking McCarthy." (Actual July 1998 quote about Bill Clinton from former Time magazine reporter Nina Burleigh: "I'd be happy to give <oral sex> just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.")

It seems odd that Nina was so concerned with abortion since she could not get pregnant swallowing what Sterling Hayden referred to as "my vital bodily fluids" in Dr. Strangelove. Hayden's General Ripper seemed to have the contraceptive plan down pat.

"I deny them <women> my essence, Mandrake," he tells Peter Sellers.

The McCarthy myth became one of good (liberals) triumphing over evil (conservatives). It has given birth to a million (and that figure might actually not be an exaggeration) stories in every conceivable form of media depicting liberalism as the better idea, and conservatism as the dark underbelly of human existence. Despite this going on for decades, a huge number of honest, hard working, tax-paying, play-by-the-rules, non-racist citizens have chosen conservatism in a free society. This fact drives the Left batty.

One of the first films to paint McCarthy with the brush of liberal treatment was The Sweet Smell of Success, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. It is a classic, like so many of them, and like many, conservatives must grit their teeth through its politics while enjoying it anyway.

Lancaster plays a heavyweight New York gossip columnist based on Walter Winchell. Winchell was the staccato-voice of The Untouchables, a friend of J. Edgar Hoover, and a staunch anti-Communist. He wrote about Reds and they did not like it. Supposedly the film was based on the true story of Winchell and his sister. The implication, hinted at on screen but more than hinted at among the liberal press, was that Winchell had an incestuous relationship with her. When she falls for a musician, Lancaster plants a false story that he is a dope-smoking Red. The film does not directly depict McCarthy or his Senate hearings, but the idea conveyed was that innocent "musicians, artists and poets" were unfairly victimized by accusations of Communism. Even though most of the beat-poets and Communist sympathizers among the Greenwich Village crowd looked like Alan Ginsburg in those days, in Sweet Smell of Success the musician is player by Martin Milner. Remember him? Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, clean-cut, he was the embodiment of All-Americanism, cast perfectly as the veteran L.A.P.D. cop in the 1960s hit TV series, Adam 12.

As for the real Winchell, the Left drove him out of New York. He moved to Hollywood, where his gossip columns single-handedly turned a journeyman left-handed pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, Bo Belinsky, into the biggest playboy in baseball history.

McCarthy's drinking became acute during the Army-McCarthy hearings. In another encounter with Welch, a similar demand was made of him, to produce the name of a government whistle blower who had outlined Communist infiltration at Fort Monmouth. McCarthy had promised the source anonymity. He explained to Welch that sources would dry up if they were automatically exposed. McCarthy told Welch he was careful not to expose the names of suspected Reds until the investigation was conclusive, but Welch hounded him unmercifully.

McCarthy clashed with Eisenhower when he tried to hale the President into the Senate for questioning. Ike replied that he and the Army had conducted their own screening methods to keep Communists out of the Army, and invoked "executive privilege." Used against McCarthy it was brilliant. Used 20 years later by Dick Nixon it was devious. Going against Dwight Eisenhower was a bad tactic. McCarthy should have worked with the President behind closed doors, but it is entirely true that he was a publicity hound. Now his public style had gone too far.

"McCarthy's real threat to American Democracy <was> the fact that he has immobilized the liberal movement," Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey said. In John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, a Senator who is shot and killed bore some resemblance to Humphrey. He stated in the film that while the anti-Communist accusations by the McCarthy character may have led some to believe he was a "buffoon," he himself felt that if he were a "paid Soviet agent" he could not have done more damage to America. The Humphrey and movie quotes are telling, and prescient.

In a way both of them are right on, although neither would know nor understand why. Humphrey was right because hate for McCarthy did indeed wake up a sleeping giant. The New Deal was considered archaic by the 1950s. Macho Republicans and their patriot, flag-waving militarism were the order of the day. Truman was disgraced and the most popular man on Earth led the GOP, which for a brief period held both the House and Senate. Then along came McCarthy. The Left banded together in a way they never have since. They created a culture of media hatred that has hung over this beautiful nation like a nuclear winter. The movie Senator was correct, and Ike knew it in his way.

McCarthy may have been right, but in becoming the lightning rod for criticism all the focus of Communism was shifted away from espionage, sabotage, the Sino-Soviet pact, military expansion into Latin America, Cuba, and Eastern Europe. If McCarthyism had not occurred, perhaps a unified country would have been better prepared for Vietnam. This is just a theory and must be stated in accordance with the understanding that John Kennedy was a staunch anti-Communist. But the liberals may have been emboldened to go beyond the usual dirty tricks in stealing the 1960 election (again, however, the Joseph Kennedy influence is over and above all the usual complaints against Democrats).

Eisenhower was furious at McCarthy for his handling of the situation. He viewed him as having led himself and the country down a dangerous path that, circuitously, did damage that a "paid Soviet agent" could not have done. The point of this, however, is the damage done to America went hand in hand with liberal treachery, revenge and a desire to inflict more pain on the right than on Communism. Eisenhower knew the nature of these Democrats. He was a moderate and he knew how to work with them. After McCarthy even his prestige could not contain them.

The Left turned Communists who had been investigated by McCarthy into national heroes. Edward Murrow ran a brutal CBS special on McCarthy. The Senate voted to censure him. Interestingly, McCarthy had originally been a Democrat, but he was exposed to their corrupt machine. He also opposed segregation, which was entirely prosecuted by Democrat minions, so he chose the GOP. His politics were considered rather moderate.

"Only later, when it became clear that McCarthy strongly opposed a regime that sought the total destruction of the United States, was he reclassified a 'conservative,' " wrote Coulter. He was accused of being homosexual despite the fact that the woman he eventually married was described as a "ravishing beauty" who had been a bridesmaid of President Truman's daughter, Margaret. He employed women, gays and Jews when such a diverse staff was unheard of, and was popular with black voters. The segregationist Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, Bill Clinton's mentor a decade later, attacked him relentlessly. McCarthy called him "Senator Halfbright."

The nation turned on McCarthy, and it affected him brutally. This is a telling fact. McCarthy drank himself to death. Richard Nixon became deathly ill in 1974, had to be hospitalized and was thought to be near death while muttering incoherently how "insane" it was that he could be hated so much after having done so much to help make the world safer. Nixon recovered and gained a measure of revenge as an elder statesman, but these two Republicans, broken by their Leftist critics, were men of conscience. Their hearts never mended. They were consumed by questions of guilt, wondering where they had gone wrong and whether they indeed had deserved their fates.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, never showed a sign of wear and tear. He just bluffed his way through, grinning and joking as if he had not a care in the world. The possibility remains that Clinton was able to handle the heat precisely because he (and his wife) have no moral conscience to burden them whatsoever. Or worse.

"They're murdering me, they're killing me!" McCarthy said weeks before his death. The successful anti-McCarthy playbook became the blueprint for numerous character assassinations, most recently launched against Linda Tripp, Newt Gingrich, Ken Starr, and led by Hillary and Carville, against all the women groped, assaulted and raped by Bill. The difference between McCarthy, Nixon and most conservatives accused of wrongdoing is that they get "caught" and punished. The Clintons just got away with it!

After McCarthyism, as Humphrey aptly pointed out, the Left became emboldened. The Sulzberger family, longtime publishers of the New York Times, were the boldest of the print media (Hollywood took the cake, both in terms of on-screen content and off-screen remarks).

The cancer spreads

The current publisher of the Times is Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger. In the early 1970s, like Bill Clinton he evaded the draft and protested the Vietnam War. His father asked him point blank who Pinch would rather see shot and killed in a face-to-face confrontation, an American soldier or a North Vietnamese regular.

"I would want to see the American guy get shot," said Pinch. "It's the other guy's country." Of course Pinch would want the American boy to be killed. He would not have been one of his fraternity brothers. Calling it the "other guy's country" is, of course, a lie. The U.S. did not take the fight into North Vietnam. They were defending South Vietnam, where the Communists were invading "the other guy's country," or Cambodia, where they were running and hiding and using "the other guy's country."

Technically, Pinch did not commit treason when he said what he said, and even expressing such views in years of scathing Left-wing editorials may not be treason. Ann Coulter was attacked by liberal reviewers and interviewers who tried to pin her into a corner, narrowing the definition of treason to its tiniest parameters. But Pinch's words, while not enough to land him in Ft. Leavenworth Prison, are treasonous. They are beyond contempt.

Despite popular misconceptions about the 1960s, Americans under the age of 35 supported the Vietnam War. At the time of U.S. withdrawal, only 20 percent of the country opposed the war. But the media ignored the Silent Majority and portrayed - to the world, particularly to the Communists in Moscow, Beijing and Hanoi - a nation bitterly opposed to the effort. It was a lie, and this lie cost thousands of American lives and,

eventually, millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian lives. Technically, these misrepresentations on the part of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Dan Rather, Morley Safer, Walter Cronkite, Peter Arnett, and CBS News, were not acts of treason. They had the right to express their opinion. But to those who paid the price for their perfidy, it was treacherous, and with deadly results.

In Oliver Stone's Nixon, there is a scene on the Presidential yacht Sequoia, which Nixon liked to take out on the Potomac River. In this scene, the subject is Vietnam, and the question is whether the U.S. can win. Nixon, and one or two other voices shoot back, in the fastest possible response, "No," then go into a discussion of the "Kissinger plan" of linking Soviet and Chinese détente with an honorable withdrawal from Vietnam.

First of all, the part of the conversation in which Nixon instantly said "no" to the possibility of winning in Vietnam never happened. The larger point is that by the time he took over the White House, the popular press had changed the paradigm in Southeast Asia, convincing millions it was in fact unwinnable. Nixon might have been able to aggressively win in 1962, but by 1969-70 he had to undo the mess created by Johnson. He and Kissinger did the best they could with what was left, and managed to turn lemons into lemonade though triangulated global diplomacy. For his efforts, Stone shows Nixon's steak during the Sequoia dinner scene dripping with blood, as if to suggest that Nixon was Pontius Pilate.

The concept that the country was entirely against stopping Communism in Vietnam simply does not hold with the most accurate polls of all, the elections of 1960, 1962 1964, 1966, 1968 and 1972. In 1960, JFK took an aggressive stance on the Indo-China question to avoid the "soft on Communism" label. Nixon had served under a President who had prided himself on keeping the country out of conflicts. Both candidates, however, were popular because of, not despite, their anti-Communist credentials.

In 1962 the Democrats made gains after having stood up to Communism in Cuba, and Kennedy's creation of the Green Berets was a popular, even romantic, vision of America taking the fight to Communists. In 1964, Johnson was elected after having started the war at the Gulf of Tonkin. The revisionists would have you believe he was elected as a peacenik while Barry Goldwater's "extreme" military policies were rejected. Actually, Johnson had portrayed Goldwater as an Arizona version of Dr. Strangelove, but conventionally defeating Communism was still highly popular.

In 1966, the Republicans, led by Nixon's tireless campaigning, won huge off-year electoral victories not opposing the war, but offering a better plan to defeat Communism than the one Johnson had, which was already showing cracks. In 1968, Johnson announced he would not run during the Primaries. Johnson's decision was not based entirely on an overwhelming mandate by the Democrats to pull out of Vietnam. While the Eugene McCarthy and later Robert Kennedy factions of the party indeed were made up of a large anti-war constituency, the party was divided. Many Democrats continued to support the war, which was the nexus for the Chicago riots. Nixon (and George Wallace's popularity) in the '68 general election certainly shows that the U.S. was not one big anti-war rally. In 1972, Nixon won big. The country was convinced that peace, not a Bull Run-style withdrawal but an honorable result that saved South Vietnam from the ravages of the Reds, was at hand, and it was. The 1972 Democrats were divided because many of them had honor and disagreed with George McGovern's withdrawal policy.

All of this occurred despite the best efforts of the slanted media to convince the country that we were losing in Vietnam, had no hope of winning, and that "everybody" agreed that this was the scenario. One cannot watch documentaries about the "killing fields" without rehashing the words of Pinch's dad, Punch Sulzberger, who said in 1964, "I am not sure that what we offer the Vietnamese peasant. . . is any better than what the Communists offer."

Tell that to the thousands of boat people who went through every possible kind of hell to come to our shores during and after the Democrats turned the Nixon-Kissinger victory into genocide.

President Eisenhower had said he could not "conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved" in Vietnam, but events of the early 1960s most likely would have forced his hand. Nixon was aggressive. Goldwater's words speak for themselves.

"I would have said to the North Vietnamese, by dropping leaflets out of B-52s, 'You quit the war in three days or the next time these babies come over they're going to drop some big bombs on you.' And I'd make a swamp out of North Vietnam . . . I'd rather kill a hell of a lot of North Vietnamese than one American and we've lost enough of them."

This rhetoric is considered the essence of Right-wing militarism, but in light of short, completely successful Republican wars in Grenada, the Persian Gulf, and even in Iraq = insofar as Saddam's Republican Guard was wiped out between March 19 and May 1, 2003 – is it so inconceivable that a massive strike early could have cut the war off before it escalated? Opinion on this matter is divided, but the opinion of the New York Times, CBS and even the estimable David Halberstam is not the final, expert analysis on the subject.

The Vietnam experience was described as a "quagmire," a word the liberals fell in love with. They trot it out every time this country goes into conflict. We never invaded the north or occupied Hanoi. Today, we face no prospect of Communist monoliths from Russia and China joining the fight, which was a big part of the Vietnam equation. The success of the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the lightning-fast taking of Baghdad in 2003 may be a sign that America should have bombed, invaded and occupied Hanoi, dictated winning terms, and done it early on.

When America swept aside the Taliban in about five minutes in 2001, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times wrote, "Many who came of age during the Vietnam War, wincing at America's overweening military stance in the world, are now surprised to find themselves lustily rooting for the overwhelming display of force against the Taliban."

First of all, the only people who "winced" over American militarism were liberals. The victory in Afghanistan surprised nobody on the conservative side of the aisle. Dowd and her cohorts were rooting against us, but jumped on the bandwagon in time for the parade.

J.W. Apple of the New York Times admitted that George Bush's prosecution of American forces on the side of good made him realize Vietnam could have been won, too. The Gulf War had been rife with images of civilian casualties and Red Cross buildings shot by American ordnance, but even in a country whose propaganda was controlled by Saddam, post-war analysis determined light civilian casualties and damage. All the editorials that warned of overarching American military might seemed to be preceded by dire warnings about our "humiliating withdrawal from Vietnam," which was something like Neville Chamberlain's ancestors referring to "Winston Churchill's humiliating entrance into World War II."

Prior to the Afghan conflict that followed 9/11, a Berkeley professor named Mark Danner predicted an American defeat in the style of the British and the Soviets. His reasoning was based on certain events that, upon analysis, state all we really need to know about who is better at handling defense of this country. He cited the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, the Iranian hostage crisis, the Beirut bombings, and Mogadishu. Maybe Danner thought he had a bi-partisan list because he included Beirut in 1983, which was a terrorist act, not a war. The other events had little in common with each other, except they were all Democrat follies, and could be added to other wars that started badly because of Democrats. This included the Civil War (Democrats-turned-Confederates); World War I (the Germans waited nine years until the U.S. Republicans were out of office to attack); World War II (Roosevelt left the U.S. dangerously unprepared then let thousands die at Pearl so we could enter the war, instead of just showing leadership in the first place and joining with Churchill from a position of strength); Korea (Truman's loss of China gave away much of what we had gained and encouraged Communist adventurism); and of course Vietnam (LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin lies).

Danner went on to say that "defeating Al Qaeda would "require much greater power than America has shown itself to posses." Bush obviously disagreed with Danner's faulty assessment. But was Danner's analysis faulty, or something worse? Was their treachery in his dire predictions?
Ann Coulter may be criticized for suggesting as much, and while technically Danner did not "commit the act of treason," he and many like him abet the shadowy hope of it in their continual barkings, their open antagonism of foreign policy that not only is in America's best interests, but frees thousands, sometimes millions of people from slavery.

Afghanistan was nothing compared to Iraq, however. Jimmy Carter and his crew came out of the woodwork to criticize the prospect of removing the worst despot on the face of the Earth from the Middle East, and giving freedom a chance to reign where only darkness heretofore had fallen. Carter's expert analysis on the Middle East was based on the Iranian hostage crisis (which some college historians had recently blamed not on him, but Eisenhower) and naming Andrew Young as Ambassador to the U.N. Young said of the Ayatollah Khomeini that he would "eventually be hailed as a saint." We are still waiting on word from the Vatican. In the mean time, Khomeini's grandson, a respected Muslim cleric, came to Iraq to praise the United States, pledging to coalesce moderate forces, work with us, and create a Democratic country.

American victories in the Middle East could be traced to Richard Nixon, who according to Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy had presented a "direct moral challenge" to the Soviet Union. Reagan had abandoned the "gradualism" of the Cold War and presented a "why not victory?" approach that form the backbone of the New World Order in this century.

When Reagan hard-lined Gorbachev over SDI at Reykjavik, the Left was shown to be quite clueless. Flora Lewis of the New York Times was astonished that Gorby had "concentrated practically all its propaganda on space defense," and that he "must have his own reasons." Time's cover story read, "Sunk by Star Wars." Countless liberal editorials and analyses referred to Reagan's mistakes, fumbles, errors, debacles and the general conviction that the greatest peace treaty since Appomattox had been lost because of a "colossal failure of leadership." These opinions, while not "treachery" in and of themselves, nevertheless reflected direct opposition to the stated aim and goals of the elected government of this nation. Given that a mere two years later those goals were shown to be the winning formula in one of the greatest victories ever achieved, an analysis of these analysts concludes that they were clueless, unpatriotic, or both.

When the Soviet archives broke open, along with the Venona cables demonstrating spies in the Communist wing of the Democrat party, reams and reams of confirmation came from the top Russian political, military and intelligence people answering Flora Lewis's question about Gorby's "own reasons" for letting SDI dominate his policy. The Soviets knew it could work, and Reagan used it to press our advantage all the way to the end.

Liberals who assess that Gorbachev won the Cold War for us are making an argument that makes about as much sense as saying that Robert E. Lee won the Civil War for the North. Ex-Communists and resistance fighters know better.

Reagan "is one of the most important figures of the 20th Century," said Ladislav Jakl, the founder of the Czech Society for Ronald Reagan. "My life in the last 10 years in a free country, it's mainly due to the work of Mr. President Reagan."

The film MacArthur, starring Gregory Peck in the title role, begins with text stating that over 1 billion people were affected by MacArthur, his policies, leadership and military victories. In the song "Abraham, Martin and John," a liberal anthem of the 1960s, Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King and John Kennedy are credited with "freeing a lot of people." Lincoln and King certainly freed their share. How many JFK freed is debatable. But Ronald Reagan deserves songs and movies about him, because he is responsible for the freedom of millions, too. Whittaker Chambers had predicted that Communism would triumph because Americans could not match their passion, but his analysis was wrong, too.

Communist "passions" ran amok during the Cultural Revolution and in the "killing fields," just to name a few. Its faults were too exposed to too many to be excused. Reagan and the conservatives matched the passion of the Left with an abiding love for freedom, and were convinced that they were doing God's work in defeating Communism. When Reagan began to talk about God, morality and the absolutes of good and evil, reporters wanted him to "clarify" his remarks. He came at a time in which the Soviets had been led to believe, by the liberal media, that the kind of "cowboy jingoism" of Reagan, which was precisely what was needed to defeat them, had died with Watergate. Just as the Democrats were surprised time after time by the Silent Majority, so too were the Communists.

Chambers was prescient in his statement that if America could prevail, it would not be through war, but through a belief in God. This is utterly anathema to liberals, and as long as they choose not to invest some faith in the prospect, they will never get it and they will never sustain electoral winning streaks.

Eleanor Clift of Newsweek was one of those liberals. She said the Cold War as some kind of CIA cover-up, implying that the Soviets were on the verge of losing all along. Langley had propped them up because we needed an enemy, concealing the facts from the doddering Reagan until the appropriate time (apparently when ex-CIA Director Bush was in the White House). She also said that a child was better off in Cuba than in the United States. Shortly thereafter, she shipped her own children to school in Havana. Not.

It was the liberals who were wrong. They had been propping up the Soviets through their loving tributes for years.

"The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with very stable, conservative <italics added>, immobile government . . ." stated 35 Sovietologists assembled for a 1983 Harvard/Columbia/Cornell study. "We don't see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."

But liberals like Walter Laqueur, chairman of the International Research Council at the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown said there was "no real solution" to the East/West "dilemma." Reagan infuriated these people by veering from their prescriptions both on the domestic and foreign policy fronts. He made a speech denouncing "Keynesian economics," which made the Left gasp, then moved beyond George Kennan's containment policies, which made them roar. Guys like Keynes and Kennan win the Nobel Peace Prize. Guys like Reagan won the Cold War.

When the Contras became a force in Central America, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas suddenly found new allies: American liberals. In an act that really and actually comes close to being worthy of a prison term for treason, Mike Farrell and his Hollywood pals hosted Sandinista Marxist leader Daniel Ortega at a star-studded Beverly Hills fund-raiser. They were willing to overlook his tirades against Zionists.

"I don't consider them a threat to my way of life, or the United States," commented Mrs. George Slaff, the wife of Beverly Hills' mayor. Of course not. Brave Americans had long ago died to secure America for Mrs. Slaff, but Communism was just fine for the "little brown brothers," as Ann Coulter wrote in Treason. The usual Hollywood suspects at the Communist fund-raiser were praised for putting their careers on the line, when in fact the industry had gotten so Left-wing that their actions could be interpreted as helpful to their careers. It was opposing Communism that put one in jeopardy by the 1980s.

The Sandinista-Contra conflict of the 1980s framed the beginnings of the Leftist statement, oft-repeated, that to oppose a Republican President is "not unpatriotic." They have been repeating this over and over for 20 years. To paraphrase Shakespeare, "The Democrats doth protest too much!"

The former Ku Klux Klansman, U.S. Senator Robert Byrd (D.-West Virginia), would go on to become the most powerful Democrat in the U.S. Senate. He did so on the basis of hate speech directed against Reagan and his efforts at fighting Central American Communism. Byrd was a typical example of how a filthy human being rising to great heights in the Democrat Party, while actions that are not one-50th as bad will sink a Republican by virtue of strict GOP self-policing.

Mary McGrory, who surely has no love for the KKK, could find nothing bad to say about Byrd, but when conservative commentator Pat Buchanan weighed in favor of the Contras she denounced his "ugly" tactics, such as urging that an ideology that killed 100 million (they had not gotten to 110 million at that point) be stopped. The Democrats just accused the right of "Red baiting," which is the same as "Nazi baiting" or "racist baiting." Telling the truth about liberal pet projects is "baiting."

The Reagan Administration's brilliant Iran-Contra operation bedeviled the Left. It ranked up there with Hiss, McCarthy, and Nixon; popular events that the American public supported but had to be destroyed by the Left. This time, the Left came close, and again inflicted some real damage to American foreign policy and prestige, but Reagan was too far along. He was winning and not even the liberals could beat him.

Liberals used Iran-Contra to denounce all of Reagan's anti-Communist policy. It was as if the mishandling of Chiang Kai-shek in China in 1942 was just cause for dropping out of the entire Pacific war. Flora Lewis attacked U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick for stating in 1984 that, until Reagan, the Communists had major expansions.

"Where?" Lewis asked.

Answer: South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, South Yemen, Libya, Syria, Aden, Congo, Madagascar, the Seychelles, Nicaragua and Grenada. Somehow these people labor under the myth that conservatives do not acquire facts, or more likely, that their dominant position in the media will overshadow said facts.

Surely all the millions of people who lived in these countries "chose" Communism. Of course, nobody ever "invited" Communist takeover, no Communist government had ever been Democratically elected, and wherever Communism gained a foothold it created their number one export, refugees to non-Communist countries. Walter Mondale said fighting Communism had "undermined our moral authority." Liberal protesters referred to Reagan as "Ronald Ray-gun," and made the point that "Russians love their children, too."

Anthony Lewis of the New York Times thought Reagan was unable to handle "complex" issues, despised his "religiosity" and his "black-and-white characterizations." Would Lewis have despised Patton's "black-and-white" strategy of stopping the Nazis, at any cost, at Bastogne in December of 1944? Somehow, the answer to that question is not as simple as it might seem. If a Republican were President under modern political circumstances, Lewis might well have found criticism of it. The point is that Lewis and others like him, in voicing these un-American platitudes, may not have been committing treason, but they were providing cover for it. History has exposed them on this.

Lewis hated the fact that we outspent the Soviets and built up an enormous arsenal. Simply having it, in his view, was as bad as using it. He had no grasp of the "peace through strength" concept. Reagan's plan worked and nobody was killed, but that does not matter to Lewis. It would be like criticizing a student for studying too much for a test that demonstrated the person to be the best student in the class, because it was embarrassing to the rest of the class.

Reagan won the Cold War by ignoring decades of liberal advice and strategy. He did it, as Frank Sinatra would say, "his way." Liberals never wanted to win the Cold War in the first place. It might prove embarrassing to the Communists. Norman Mailer came out and said that in 1984, while researching Harlot's Ghost, he traveled to Moscow and roamed freely, extolling the churches and the "inexpensive working economy" he saw during his stay. He stated that he saw no evidence of a police state, and used his short stay as evidence that Reagan's "evil empire" speech was mere propaganda. A guy as smart as Mailer would seemingly have realized that he was an international figure, known by the Soviets to be a liberal and at the time writing a book about the CIA that they hoped might be embarrassing to the Company (it really was not). Mailer walked around downtown Moscow, a tourist haven that was hardly representative of the gulag archipelago. He could not say he was not tailed and spied on, or that what he saw was not orchestrated for his benefit. Either way, a few days as a Moscow tourist did not make him Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This desire to not to embarrass our enemies continues. In 2010, President Obama's NASA chief, Charles Bolden told Al-Jazeera the space agency's goal was to make Islam feel better about itself (?).

The Nobel Peace Price went not to Reagan, but Gorbachev. Not winning the Nobel has become a badge of honor among conservatives. Apparently an American President would have to lose a war and get a ton of people killed in order to be eligible for one.

Bush derangement syndrome

Coulter wanted to know if Democrat non-support for the 2003 Iraq War was unpatriotic. It certainly was political. Congress authorized Bush to use the military in Iraq in October of 2002, and plenty of Democrats voted with the Republicans. But once the November elections were over (and they were soundly beaten), the Democrats became the "loyal opposition." There were exceptions, like Joe Lieberman, but the lead-up, the actual war, and its aftermath seemed to usher a new era of spin and deception on their part.

The 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2001-02 Afghan action were splendid successes, and nobody could deny them. The Democrats who opposed these actions faded into the woodwork, and many tried to jump on the bandwagon during the victory parade. But Iraq was different. The best explanation is that George W. Bush and the Republicans had strung together so many popular, successful accomplishments that the Left simply could not take it anymore. It was like the Hiss and Clinton affairs. If they admitted they were wrong (or at least that the Republicans were right) on this one, it would be the proverbial "final nail" in their coffin. It would hand one too many political victories to Bush. It would make him impregnable. It would make them irrelevant. When the war turned bad after 2003, the Left cheered. U.S. Senator Harry Reid declared, "The war is lost." Then General David Petraeus orchestrated the Surge and, in 2007, the U.S. "won" it. How stable an accomplishment it is still remains open, but it sure was not the disaster the Left not only predicted but seemed to want.

So the Democrats, as if the October, 2002 Congressional resolution did not exist, refused to come on board. The ones who had voted for the war, unlike the 1991 Gulf War aftermath, tried to deny Bush (and America) any victory. The directive, written or not, was that the war had to be opposed even in its wake, because the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" theory only strengthened the Republicans (and America).

The Democrat strategy points to a fundamental aspect of what their party has become. This truth has existed for decades, but it is more pronounced now than ever. The party only benefits when America fails under a Republican. When a Republican is in the White House, the Democrats oppose victory in battle, which furthers U.S. interests, because it does not further Democrat interests. The Democrats oppose a good economy, which furthers U.S. interests, because it does not further Democrat interests. Defeat of Communism, which furthers U.S. (and the world's) interests, is opposed by the Democrats because it does not further Democrat interests. Only when a Democrat holds office do they show any enthusiasm for advancing U.S. national security causes.

Is this treachery? Is this unpatriotic? In a free country people have a lot of leeway. Calling it treason or unpatriotic is not helpful. Just pointing to it and saying res ipsa loquiter is more instructive, and gets the point across more thoroughly. It is a losing philosophy. In 2004 they rode this philosophy to the most complete political defeat in American electoral history.

The Left pointed to European countries, namely Germany, France and Russia, who opposed military action, and to the U.N., who of course opposed it, and sided with them. They ignored the fact that these countries had sold arms and armaments of WMD to Iraq, that they had supplied Iraq with technical and political espionage, and that their opposition to the war was about protecting these secrets and continuing to make money doing business with Saddam.

"They have good reason to hate us," former President Clinton said of Muslim terrorists. "After all, we sent the Crusaders to try and conquer them." For a smart historian, this was one heck of a stupid remark. First, it fails to address the reality of the Crusades, which was ended in 1290 after "a bunch of Europeans responded aggressively to the sack of Jerusalem by a mob of Muslim savages," who "spent the prior several hundred years grabbing a lot of territory that wasn't theirs," wrote Coulter.

Furthermore, the Crusades had nothing to do with the U.S., and the U.S. was not "imposing" Christianity on them. Finally, what ever happened to the "rule," which George H.W. Bush adhered to in deference to Clinton, that former Presidents abstain from political criticism of their successors? Clinton and Carter obviously decided it does not apply to Democrats speaking ill of Republicans. Al Gore fell in love with the tired old terrorist-domino theory while ignoring the other "rule" which keeps losing Presidential candidates from criticizing the winners.

"What we represent to the world is empire," said Gore, and he was partly right. But Gore referred to the "old" empire of Britain and Rome, not to the spread of freedom, Democracy and market opportunity that is inherent in the New World Order. Gore said that in responding to terrorism aggressively, we were only making more enemies, and that we were inviting more terror as backlash. This ignores the fact that the U.S. under Clinton had done little to thwart terror. Bush certainly seemed to have more of a domestic agenda on the table than a big anti-terror military campaign planned. But Gore and the liberals seem to think that we were supposed to have shut it down after the 9/11 funerals, ride the sympathy of Europe, and let the guilty roam free. He seems to think that letting Osama bin Laden skate, and to tell Saddam that he could build his weapons and orchestrate with terrorists with impunity, would not have resulted in further attacks against us because we would have been seen as nice guys. The most hypocritical side of the liberal argument, however, was that if Bush had not responded as he did, the Democrats would have been on him even worse than they were.

When Bush linked Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the "axis of evil," a brilliant move inspired by Reagan's "evil empire" speech, his critics complained that the three countries had little in common with each other. This made as much sense as saying that the Axis Powers of World War II, Germany, Japan and Italy, were not threats because they had little in common with each other. Or that only two of the Central Powers of World War I, Germany and Austria, but not Turkey, had much in common. When the question of war in Iraq came to a head, the Left then said that if we were to attack Iraq, then we should attack North Korea. When it suited their purposes, they found something "in common" between Saddam and Kim Jong-Il.

The liberals made fools out of themselves, essentially saying that, "Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction and if we attack him he'll use his weapons of mass destruction." They chose to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt on WMD over Bush. In this they come very close to treason, and very definitely exhibited lack of patriotism. A great American victory is hateful to these people.

They never give any credence to the numerous possibilities long existed regarding WMD in Iraq, choosing instead to brand Bush a liar and hope the issue stayed alive until 2004. Saddam knew if he used WMD the Americans would still defeat him and he would lose his edge with his Leftist allies. The theory was that he hid them, first from inspectors, then from American troops, in places that would take a long while to find them. He could have destroyed them. What he definitely wanted to do was embarrass George Bush, knowing Western liberalism would not let him down, and they did not. In the end he misc-calculated, wanting his Muslim neighbors (Iran) to think he had them as a balance of power.

Either way, it is not a very impressive liberal performance, and the voting public was watching. Robert Scheer, who was not just liberal and unpatriotic, but genuinely favored North Korea over the United States since the 1970s, had been their biggest defender. Clinton and Carter offered absolutely no helpful advice, and continually offered their hopes and dreams, which any thinking strategist could quickly identify as not being in the best interests of the nation they once took oaths to "protect and defend." Teddy Kennedy said we should concentrate not on Iraq but North Korea.

Woody Harrelson once backed weekend traffic up on the Golden Gate Bridge for hours so he could demonstrate the value of pot smoking. He glorified hardcore pornography as the most important of Constitutional freedoms. His brother is a murderer (which gives he and Jesse Jackson something to talk about). He came out and said he was "tired of lies," as if he lived in some of alternate Universe. He claimed that the attack on Iraq were part of a conservative conspiracy to wipe out "non-white" nations.

Harrelson described Christopher Columbus as the spreader of white genocide, racism and European diseases (giving no credit for spreading the greatest religious and philosophical ideas in the history of the world), while saying Americans were "stupid" for being so mad about 9/11. Yellow ribbons and flags were a "scourge" on the countryside.

Actress Jessica Lange denounced it as "un-Constitutional, immoral and illegal" war. Whether it was immoral or not could fall under the rubric of "opinion," but the fact that it was Constitutional and legal simply falls within . . . the facts.

"I hate Bush, I despise him and his entire administration," said Lange.

Susan Sarandon predicted that "thousands" would die. She questioned what the plan was, and said we were going in "blind." "Shock and awe" was followed by a quick, decisive victory, the overthrow of Saddam, and the taking of Baghdad. The very hard work of turning Iraq into a secure, Democratic country in the Middle East was not fully and may never be accomplished, and in this case at least Sarandon was actually correct when she said thousands would die. Bush and his planners were mistaken in this aspect of the plan. The loss of American life may well not have been worth it, but no Churchillian heroism is accorded Susan Sarandon.

It would have been nice if people support the tough job we endeavored to undertake instead of undermining it. Treachery? Probably not. Unpatriotic? Janeane Garofalo said, "Dropping bombs on the Iraqis is not going to disarm Saddam." It sure did not do him any good. Later she said Afghanistan was a "failure" (apparently other than freeing Kabul, sending Osama on the run, plus all the other good things). She said there was no reason to go after terrorism (other than 9/11, the USS Cole, the Khobar Barracks, and other acts). She said there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (other than Saddam wanting the world to believe he had it).

Singer Sheryl Crow said war is not the answer (other than, as Ann Coulter points out, "ending slavery, Fascism, Soviet totalitarianism, but other than that it has a limited repertoire.") The "best way to solve problems is to not have enemies," Crow announced.

Sean Penn's ad in the Washington Post begged Bush to "help save America before yours is a legacy of shame and horror." Penn recounted the "bitter experience" of his father dealing with McCarthyism, which ravaged his career and family so much that he went on to a long career while raising his sons, Sean and Chris, in the exclusive Communist enclave of Malibu.

Various celebrities like Madonna spoke of Karma and "cycles of violence," as if the 9/11 hijackers had nothing to do with cycles of violence. George Clooney claimed to have inside CIA information. What a surprise, it was not favorable to Bush. Richard Gere asked why their was so much "personal enmity" between Bush and Saddam (other than Saddam's attempt to assassinate his father in Kuwait in 1993). Dustin Hoffman was one of those guys who got it kind of right without realizing it when he said the war, aside from being "reprehensible," was about "hegemony, money, power and oil."

In reality, the answer to that was, "You say that like it is a bad thing." Of course it was, along with many other reasons. The Iraq War was very much about American hegemony, which is the only good kind in the world. We must be powerful, influential and have prestige in a part of the world where, if we are not, it can explode and have terrible ramifications in every corner of the globe. To say that oil is anything less than highly important is completely insane. Hoffman's statement is the crux of liberalism. He recognizes the truth. He just does not like it. Liberals do not want America to be powerful and in control, but offer no alternative. If the U.S. were to lose its power and prestige, many of the victories of the 20th Century would be lost. The Left simply fails to see things from the standpoint of global realism. Viewed from that lens, the world is a dangerous, radically disordered place. The United States has emerged as the single country best able to maintain stability. Furthermore, and this point cannot be made more plainly, America wields its power more wisely and with greater judiciousness than any power ever has.

Michael Moore could only say that the U.S. has orphaned thousands of children with "taxpayer-funded terrorism." Moore does not seem to want or is able to see that America has done more for orphaned, poor, starving kids than any country ever has. He simply is not able to, or is unwilling to (although he is not actually stupid) understand the context in which American bombs have orphaned many kids. He would view the "Christmas bombing" of 1972, for instance, as a wholly terrorist act. He is unable to view something like that in light of the need to keep Communism from spreading to South Vietnam. He places no blame on the mass murderers of history, saying only that they did what they did, and apparently were justified in doing so, because America "made them do it."

Many conservatives who dismiss them as idiots or, of course, useful idiots, put down Moore and his mindset. The former term does not apply. The latter does. The Hollywood Senator in The Manchurian Candidate says Johnny Iselin (the McCarthy character) is not a buffoon, but rather a dangerous person. Moore and those who think like him, are perplexing. How dangerous is he? Basically American purpose and resolve is too great to make the Michael Moores a real threat. There was no evidence that people who think like him were close to getting power. Then came Barack Obama, who may have thought more like Moore than Moore. Jimmy Carter, in his later years, expressed views that were not far from Moore's, but he was unable to act on these instincts as President. It has been the Right forcing him, and realization that if he actually did what he wanted to do, chaos would ensue, that has pushed Obama to semi-following Bush's lead in the War on Terror. Oddly, his drone strikes killed more civilians than Bush's conventional war strategies. All the various, sundry and disparate dovish voices of peace who screamed like hyenas at Bush sat on their hands, hypocritically watching Obama kill the families, the children and whoever else happened to be anywhere close to a variety of drone-targeted Al Qaeda leaders.

This is an important point. Power and the practical necessities of governmental politics made Moore's style of liberalism all-but impossible to practice in an official capacity. That is the good news. Carter had people like Andrew Young, who were fellow travelers of Moore, but Young had to be fired. When liberals govern, they quickly learn that all the things they hated about the Establishment are essential. That is why conservatives govern better. They come in with open eyes and are not pre-disposed to hate what they are in control of.

Conservatives also govern better because, in America, they view history as a beautiful story. What perplexes many is how liberals can see the same story and react with such disdain. The study of anarchism, as embodied by Rousseau, Thoreau and Emma Goldman, is a powerful strain that will always run through society. Why it is powerful is an existential mystery. Nazism and Communism appealed to a mass psychosis. They were pure ideologies carried to extremes. Their messages were aimed at populations that wanted to be told that they were better, were not to blame, the enemy had been identified and would be punished, and that government would solve all their problems. Hitler and Stalin believed that man would give up freedom for security. They both offered that.

But anarchism offers no practical solutions. Goldman thought a government run by anarchists would consist of volunteers who would do good deeds because human nature was inherently good. In some respects, this is part of the liberal mystique, and in a way it is sweet. It is dangerous, however, because it allows for such gullibility, and within the framework of politics and the two-party system, the liberals, oft-frustrated and marginalized, felt the need to create an enemy. Their enemy is conservatism. Seeing that the world is not and apparently never will be one big Peace Corps, they became embittered anarchists, and hell hath no fury like an embittered anarchist scorned.

Dissecting liberalism puts liberalism down. Just looking at the overweight Moore, dispensing his vitriol at all that is dear to so many, requires reaching down and finding the Christian center to feel something other than hate for him. In the end, one sees that at some level he means well. There is no value in demonizing him. Trying to "understand" him involves the study of moral relativism, which breaks down throughout history. But Moore is not a terrorist. Former baseball manager Leo Durocher once said: "I might disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death you're right to say it."

The problem is that a lot of good Americans have died to defend Moore's right to speak, and he seems not to understand or appreciate it. When good Americans die for the right of foreigners to be free, Moore sees only darkness and deceit. He hides behind the Constitution. The Constitution may have been written just for that purpose, but it distasteful nevertheless.

But when Moore laughed at people on the hi-jacked 9/11 planes, calling them cowards for not fighting back (at least aside from United Flight 93), expressing horror that the terrorists had killed Democrats (the majority in New York) instead of, say, Republicans at the Mutual of Omaha building in Nebraska, he crossed the line. The author of Stupid White Men became his title. For somebody to write a book with that title in a world kept safe precisely because white men are smart enough to create the technology that makes us powerful and safe is ridiculous.

Norman Mailer was introspective and honest. He got in trouble shooting from the hip, saying during the Iraq War that the destroyed World Trade Center was "more beautiful than the building was," that we were the "most hated nation on Earth," and that we fought the war because white males needed to win something after years of seeing blacks and Latinos dominate sports. When questioned on these comments, he demonstrated that he was being satirical. Mailer said Bush planned to make "China the Greece to our Rome." Not a bad idea, Norman.

Washington's Democrat Senator Patty Murray said that Osama bin Laden was popular because he built schools, roads, day care, infrastructure, and "made their lives better. We have not done that." Is there anything to say to that?

Harry Belafonte was such a victim of McCarthyism that he went on to become a multi-millionaire. He used that status to rant against the Right for years. He was shilling for terrorists and dictators as much in 2003 as he had been for Communists in the "good old days."

Ann Coulter described a psychiatrist's evaluation of the anarchist Ezra Pound, the anti-war protestor of World War II: "What is unquestionably the most outstanding feature of his personality is his profound, incredible, over-weaning narcissism." This seems to be a very simple explanation, yet the evaluation of Pound is so easily transferred to these Hollywood stars.

As the country prepared for war, celebrities described how their voices of dissent were being stifled. They described this on Entertainment Tonight, Sean Hannity's program, Leno and Letterman, and in any and all other forums of free expression. When the American Legion did not throw them a parade they acted as if being worshipped was their Constitutional right. They determined that sensible people disagreeing with them was tantamount to accusations on un-Americanism. Tim Robbins congratulated himself on his courage. Was Sean Penn allowing himself to be used by Saddam as a photo/op treason? Was Woody Harrelson talking about "American lies" unpatriotic?

The bad news is that unpatriotic liberals dominate the dominant media culture and all aspects of the education system. The good news is that this is changing. As Satchel Paige used to say, "Don't look back, somethin' might be gainin' on ya." Well, conservatives were making their moves in the media, and there is no stopping them.

Pejorative

If you're afraid of the future, then get out of the way, stand aside. The people of this country are ready to move again.

\- Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan once said that ex-Socialist candidate for President Norman Thomas stated, "The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

The 2008 election of Barack Obama could arguably be an example of Reagan's warning coming true. However, the vociferous reaction by the Right to President Obama's policies indicated that while the country may have been fooled, they had not been cowed. The future of America is very much up in the air, the question being whether a corner has been turned toward liberalism, or whether liberalism has been turned back by conservatism. Of such things do movements, media and communications revolve themselves are. This promises to be a battle for many years to come with no "winners of history" emerging soon. An understanding of the past is the only road map of the future. But it is instructive to consider the world "liberal," turned into a pejorative by the Right. Indeed, the Left must resort to code words. They are progressives. Taxes are "investments."

In 1964, the Democrats and their allies in the media thought the world was going their way. In the wake of the shining March on Washington (1963), when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famed "I have a dream" speech, a golden moment had arrived. The murder of JFK was a shattering blow. A year later his memory, however, propelled his party to astounding victory. It seemed at that point that his inspiration would carry the nation, and the world, in his vision. He had plenty of enthusiastic family members to carry his mantel.

They also had the press. There was no "conservative media." Regnery Publishing produced conservative books and a magazine called Human Events. William F. Buckley had a magazine called National Review and was a TV personality. Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged threatened to split the Republicans, forming libertarianism. Otis Chandler's Los Angeles Times took a major swing away from their old partisan Republican roots. The South was Jim Crow Democrat. Bob Hope was a patriotic comedian, Duke Wayne an outspoken conservative actor, and Paul Harvey a conservative, but not partisan, radio personality mainly warning people of "what the devil would do." Even Bob Grant was not around yet.

Henry Luce lost control of Time. They swung to the Left. The New York Times and the Washington Post were the big newspapers of Eastern opinion, both liberal. Conservatives just lived with it. They had a fuzzy, vague notion that the forces of media control were arrayed against them, but could not put their finger on it. Movies were becoming liberal, making fun of the military, downgrading the Communist threat, and telling them that Right-wing militarists with their fingers on nuclear weapons were the real danger.

In the mid-1960s TV sit-coms were non-political: The Beverly Hillbillies, Hogan's Heroes. They kept waiting for the episode of the Andy Griffith Show in which Aunt Bee came shrieking with the admonition, "Andy! Andy! There's a Klan meeting in Mayberry!" but it never happened. The Twi-Light Zone ever-so-slightly pushed a social agenda, but talk show hosts like Johnny Carson did not. Comics like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce were pushing the envelope, but you had to go to Greenwich Village to be a part of that scene. Rock music arrived from England, but nobody thought The Beatles were Communists or The Rolling Stones were Satanists . . . yet.

There were three networks – the average TV only had about seven or nine stations, period – CBS, NBC and ABC. Nobody really understood that any of them were partisan or swung to the Democrats. They had nothing to compare them to. Nobody called them on anything. The most respected and trusted anchor was Walter Cronkite of CBS. He teared up when Kennedy was killed, showed unabashed pride when the astronauts conquered space, and seemed fair. Then came the Tet Offensive, 1968.

The Communists mounted a national aggression against U.S. and ARVN barricades beginning on the Lunar New Year. They all failed. American forces prevailed. The only trouble was that Walter Cronkite did not report it that way. Instead he stared into the camera and informed Americans that in his considered opinion, the American effort in Vietnam, not the Tet Offensive, had failed. He advocated a pull-out of Southeast Asia. President Johnson knew immediately that when he lost Cronkite, he lost middle America. He announced he would not run for re-election in November shortly thereafter.

That's the way it was.

After his eventual retirement, Cronkite was free to air his political opinions. He was a liberal, and almost a Soviet apologist, but in his day there was nobody to challenge him. The two other networks followed his lead, as other newspapers followed the lead of the New York Times. There was no Rush Limbaugh, no conservative talk radio, certainly no Fox News or blogosphere to research, find fault with, dispute his assertions. He was America and he was a Democrat.

This dynamic did not change in the 1970s. Any semblance of fairness went out the window with Watergate. Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 with absolutely no media support. He left in 1989, when Limbaugh was just beginning. There was still no Internet. George H.W. Bush did have Limbaugh, but nobody else except the Washington Times, lampooned because it was founded by the Reverend Syun Myung Moon, who was not exactly William Paley.

Print media declines

When Otis Chandler was forced out at the L.A. Times, that seemed the "final straw." With the Times went the last vestige of mainstream "conservative" press coverage, and with it the state of California. Won by Bush in 1988, it gave its vast electoral votes to Bill Clinton in 1992 and was lost to the Republicans forever. The city of Los Angeles surrendered its longstanding place in the power hierarchy of West Coast politics, replaced by two liberal Jewish Democrat women from San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

Shelby Coffey III came along with a lists of words that dare not be spoken or written at the L.A. Times. A new term in the lexicon made its way into the zeitgeist: political correctness. The only serious cable television station was CNN, owned by the unabashed Soviet admirer Ted Turner. People lauded its marvelous coverage of the 1991 Persian Gulf War; 24 hour-a-day news coverage. It was also dubbed the "Clinton News Network."

The Internet certainly seemed to be the province of the Left. Dubbed the "information super highway" by Clinton, creation of its very existence sort of claimed by his Vice President, Albert Gore, it consisted mostly of liberal web sites and porn. Left-wing all the way.

But there is uniqueness to America. Serious readers of Alexis de Tocqueville understand it. Amazingly, it does not die. It slowly but surely rises to the top while political correct fades into the distance. Out of the ash heap of the 1992 disaster the Right slowly began to re-group.

By 2000 it was established orthodoxy that newspapers and magazines were losing a battle they could not win against the World Wide Web. Over the next years, however, a debate ensued. Did print media lose circulation because of the Internet or because it was too liberal? While there is no doubt the web played a significant role, its liberalism, now firmly pitted against the forces of a conservative media that, in the second of the 1990s, exploded like a comet, was the biggest reason for its downfall.

Liberal newspapers and magazines ranging from the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, and The Nation all became thin, scrawny shells of their once thriving selves. The lofty San Francisco Examiner, the first in the William Randolph Hearst empire, folded.

Meanwhile, the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, American Spectator, National Review, Human Events, The Weekly Standard, Newsmax and a host of other conservative print publications continued humming right along. They lost some circulation to the Internet, but not the wholesale loss of readership the Left-leaning papers did.

It was a very serious concern for people in the publishing game, whether it was daily papers, magazines or books. The Internet did not completely reduce the power of papers. In many ways they increased them, because articles could be read on-line anywhere in the world. For the writers of the articles, they found a certain amount of prestige and influence came from this. Within seconds an article written in the Los Angeles Times could be sent as a link by email to a person in L.A. to a person in Jakarta, who could read it within a minute or so, and then email comments to the writer via email a few minutes later.

One need not be the chief of staff to the President, with a subscription to 10 major papers to be pored over every morning in the Oval Office, in order to be informed. It was egalitarian and Democratic in scope.

As for the L.A. Times, as with so many other papers, many, many people read the paper regularly, only without paying for it. They tried to charge for on-line use but it went over like a dead weight. Too much was free on the Internet to pay. Forget LATimes.com. If you just wanted to read of the Dodger game or the press conference from Heritage Hall, it could be found at Dodgers.com, OCRegister.com, USCTrojans.com . . .

But for major newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, circulation, subscriptions, income went gone down in the 1990s and 2000s. The future is not bright. There is no guarantee the bottom has not been reached, and that does not take into account the "next big thing," some new technological innovation that further erodes the old print versions of the news, information and books.

But there remains a debate, a question. The premise of the Rush Limbaughs of the world going back to the late 1980s has certainly been that newspapers have failed because they are too liberal. In the 2000s, Michael Savage unquestionably said it was so. The conservative media gleefully touted the premise. It was to them a Holy Grail, a premise, a justification proving that they were right about the Left, they were riding the whirlwind, they had the numbers, the influence. Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity routinely crowed about their high ratings compared to the poor ratings of rival MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post . . .

The Right could be right, but it is not a decided issue. It is not the whole picture. Maybe the whole picture has not been painted as yet. But what is absolutely unquestioned is that the Los Angeles Times was, if not conservative, certainly fair and palatable to the right as late as 1990 or 1991. People who did not share Otis Chandler's worldview were brought in. They imposed their opinions within the paper's pages. Criticism ensued, and circulation dropped.

While Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly and their like railed against the New York Times and CNN for years, generally they did not criticize the L.A. Times. Perhaps it was just a left-over perception, the memory and influence of Chandler, but they were, you know, the Times. The Times was not . . . liberal? Were they?

By the 2000s they were. By then the Tribune Company owned them. Chicago Tribune politics were now L.A. Times politics. When the Right found bias, they no longer relegated complaints to the East Coast publications. The L.A. Times backed Clinton, opposed Impeachment, backed Gore, opposed George W. Bush and Iraq. Jim Murray's contemporary, Bud "the Steamer" Furillo, was an unabashed liberal, a "New Deal Democrat." He was undoubtedly to the left of Murray. Interviewed in the mid-2000s, he was disgusted with the media's treatment of President Bush and the Iraq War.

"I hate the war, but the way these people oppose the President, I mean, it's almost treasonous," he stated.

When moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger – hardly a reactionary - ran for Governor against Gray Davis in 2003, they not only backed Davis, they got in trouble, crossing journalistic boundaries in order to protect the Democrat when they printed a nebulous story about Arnold's past actions with women. It was sad. They did not even have much influence any more. Schwarzenegger coasted to victory. National conservatives routinely lump them in with the New York Times as an example of left-wing bias. In the Southland, the conservative Orange County Register has managed to hold a competitive line, which many would point to as proof that liberal bias is bad business.

It is still a relatively good paper in an age in which good papers are rare, mostly a thing of the past. There simply are no newspapers in the world today comparable to Otis Chandler's L.A. Times. Comparing newspapers in the 2010s is a relative matter, not a historical one. It is not an all-consuming liberal rag. It is not nearly as partisan as the New York Times, which in the 2000s took major hits such as the Jason Blair scandal, part of a wide-ranging series of events in which several East Coast publications were found to be untruthful, printed false stories, and provided shoddy journalism, more often than not in an effort to favor a liberal cause or discredit a conservative one.

The L.A. Times tries for fairness. There are still talented scribes, hard-working editors. It still represents Los Angeles and all that means, but it has gone downhill. It gets worse, not better. For those who grew up with it in its hey day it is a sad shell of its old self.

Perhaps the Times is merely a victim of the partisan divide which goes back to the Founding Fathers and the Civil War, but which became irreparable with the Alger Hiss conviction. The left went all in with the likes of Hiss, Ted Kennedy and the Clintons, but was forced to scramble when these politicians turned out to have feet of clay. They backed Clinton against all odds, then were stuck with him during Impeachment and proof of his lies. The same corner that painted them into an anti-war corner even when 1.5 million Cambodians died in a demonstration of "why we fight." The same corner that forces a Harry Reid to declare, "The war is lost" just as the Surge succeeds. The Right just says, "Keep saying it."

To those who think psychologically, who ask, "Why would somebody go against their better interests, cost themselves money, lose customers, annoy their base?" the answer might just be, "They can't help themselves."

But things go in cycles. The media used to be generally conservative, a la the Hearst papers. Hollywood was once patriotic. Perhaps over time it will swing that way again. If so, the uniqueness of conservative media will be lost as it all morphs into the mainstream.

Or maybe not. The future will determine whether indeed the Times will be a-changin' still again.

"Grey lady" down

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat, coming in confluence with the Clinton Presidency and, in those pre-Fox News days, the monopoly of CNN ("Clinton News Network") set the tone for a downward, liberal shift in the mockingly called "lame stream media" in the 1990s. The L.A. Times, down and out, now part of a Chicago syndicate. The Democrats? In league the pornographer Larry Flynt. The Academy Awards? Now just a modern version of pagan worship, the Oscar a "golden calf" used to honor each other for their "courage," this and other stages platforms for Michael Moore and other nefarious winners of prestigious honors, combined with a review of liberal reaction to the Iraq War, all coming as this revived interest – and outrage – in Walter Duranty's legacy.

In 2003, the year of the Jason Blair scandal, the venerable old "grey lady," the New York Times reviewed Duranty's Pulitzer Prize for 13 articles he wrote in 1931. They hired a Columbia University professor of Russian history to review Duranty's work, Professor Mark von Hagen. They determined this Pulitzer should remain.

The Times lost any vestige of its old self, if in fact it ever was a truly legitimate organ of news reporting after its 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, an act of treason they did not pay for because the Nixon Administration was too busy fighting Vietnam and then Watergate.

But the Iraq War exposed the Times and other news organizations. It created a tremendous fissure in the body politic. The wound was already there, a terrible one that started with Alger Hiss, then McCarthyism, then Vietnam and Watergate.

Reportage from Iraq was telling indeed. Peter Arnett was already controversial. In 1968 he quoted a U.S. officer saying a Vietnamese village had to be destroyed "to save it." The quote was eventually expanded to, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," a metaphor for the quagmire of Vietnam. Arnett changed the quote from the original statement, which was that the Vietnamese had destroyed the town, and the officer said that had been a "shame." Arnett and his handlers shaped it and changed "town" to "village." Ben Tre, the town, was in fact a multi-storied town with buildings and paved streets, not a "village." They ran a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a screaming, naked child running from a napalm blast. Later, it was discovered the photo of the girl was taken after most U.S. troops had left. The napalm was dropped not by the Americans, but by the South Vietnamese, who called in the attack when her village was raped and pillaged by Communists. The girl, Kim Phuc, eventually fled the Communists to Canada. She expressed only hatred for what the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had done to her people. Despite prodding, she refused to badmouth America.

Arnett had a checkered career, reporting in the 1991 Persian Gulf War that American forces bombed a baby milk factory when it in fact was a biological weapons facility with a crudely pointed "Baby Milk" sign on it. He found himself on assignment for NBC and National Geographic during the 2003 Iraq War, claiming the U.S. was "trying to write another plan" because the original one was apparently a failure. A huge firestorm of protest ensued. American forces quickly won the battle for Baghdad in lightning fashion, the plan carried out perfectly, completely disannulling Arnett's thesis. Arnett's firing came around the same time New York Times reporter Jason Blair was fired for blatant lies in his articles.

In the past, Arnett's and Blair's faux paus' would have blown over, but by 2003 conservative talk radio, Fox News and the Internet created an entirely new paradigm of conservative criticism which hit where it hurts the most, with advertisers. Suddenly the liberal was a target, with Right-wing historians happy to dredge up 100 years of Left-wing bias that had never really been allowed to completely surface in the first place. Walter Duranty's name suddenly was bandied about talk shows and web sites as an example of the "bad old days" before the Right came along to save the day.

The unreal stance of the New York Times, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, one Hollywood movie after another lambasting Bush, none making money; it all motivated the Right to vote and win. The liberals and their allies in the so-called mainstream media spawned the very things that defeat their causes and cause them to lose influence: among them, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement that, in 2010, resulted in the most total repudiation of their ideology and its face – Barack Obama – in memory, if not history!

Still, as if in a psychological daze, the Left could not stop. They could not help themselves. Theirs is an odd psychosis, but we have seen it before. The Left is motivated on their side as Henry Luce once was motivated on his side. Luce was convinced that he was doing God's work, that American propaganda, even if it meant tamping down Theodore White's reports from China, was an imperative on the side of righteousness.

The Left reacted to Luce, William, Randolph Hearst and the Los Angeles Times pre-Otis Chandler; to Alger Hiss, HUAC and McCarthyism; to Vietnam and Watergate. In their view, past excesses by the Right imbues them now with a new kind of "moral authority" to promote their liberal agenda, even if it requires lying, but this is their god! As with Hiss and Clinton and Cambodia, they determined there is a thing called global warning, that it is man-made, and that Socialism is the only way to destroy it. In sticking to this stance against all facts, they dig their own grave.

Dan Rather, one of the most "respected" voices in broadcast news, destroyed his career by going with a totally false story about President Bush's attendance at drills when he was a fighter pilot in the Texas Air Guard. This was a strange delirium, aside from the fact the documents were easily proven to be forged. Aside from that, however, what made Rather and his cohorts think that a pilot missin' a couple of drills in 1973, when the Vietnam War was over anyway, meant anything? Furthermore, every time these people referred to Bush's military service about the only thing they did was remind the nation, "Wow, he was a jet pilot!!"

They will keep making the same errors and paying for it all the way to bankruptcy. William F. Buckley, Jr. pointed it out as far back as God and Man Yale, but still they persist. It is in their nature.

The Rush Limbaughs of the world were their unintended beneficiaries. If ratings were supposed to be the slightest indication of who was telling the truth, Fox News appeared to be the ones doing that. The Left said, no, that was not it. It was jingoism, false patriotism, war mongering. America did not buy that, either.

The newspapers say their lack of subscriptions, sales, advertising revenue, are not the result of political opinion. It is the Internet. It is failure to harness the Internet's potential. Maybe, but if they are unwilling to look at themselves they will continue to fail. Something is very, very wrong in the mainstream media today. The Orange County Register hangs in there pretty well. The Wall Street Journal is a powerhouse, as great as ever. The Washington Times has a specialized Right-wing audience, but a big one. The old powerhouses, however, are all shadows of themselves.

Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Mark Levin, G. Gordon Liddy; they are media giants. When they go on vacation a host of talented newcomers demonstrate their future is strong beyond them. Savage in particular . . . savages the "liberal media," particularly newspapers like the New York Times, and magazines such as Time, Newsweek and the ultra-left The Nation. He rubs salt in their wounds, calling them out, saying they are going out of business because of their politics.

Savage and others who air similar views, like Bill O'Reilly, may be exaggerating or making the point in order to advance both their agendas and their shows. The Left pointedly refuses to listen to them because in the case of Savage (not really O'Reilly) at least, these "noise machines," as the Left derides them, are just that, not to be trusted or given credence. In dismissing them, the left do themselves no favors, because no matter how uber-partisan the conservatives are – and they are – within their rhetoric is the kind of truth the liberals are not listening to and need to in order to survive. It is the ancient story, "The emperor has no clothes." It is the same as any battlefield commander, who needs truthful intelligence in order to make the best decisions. Hoped for information, the death knell of the commander, is having that effect on the liberal media, and if they are not careful, the Democrat Party sooner than they suspect.

The Internet, blogs and social media

Air America is in the "dustbin of history." The Left has completely failed to make a dent in talk radio. Wherever people "vote with their feet," making decisions usually involving how they choose to spend their time and money, in the "marketplace of ideas" the Right defeats them. Since the Left still captures half the vote, this leaves the prospect that they must rely on the dumb, the uninformed, possibly even the criminal and illegal, in order win at the ballot box. The great question in the 21st Century is whether America is a nation of knowledgeable patriots or dummies who do not really what or why they vote the way they do.

The Right wins in the competition of newspapers, magazines, television news, talk radio, and to a lesser extent, non-fiction books. The Left has a monopoly on movies, rock and rap music, and to a lesser extent, novels. These industries have faced major challenges in the past 10-15 years. They mostly dominate the comedy market, but so-called "red neck" comics, while fewer in number, are successful. Country 'n' western music, the province of the Right, has caught up with rock 'n' roll, unthinkable in the hey day of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin and The Doors.

During the 1992 Presidential election, Democrat candidates Bill Clinton and Albert Gore,

Jr. used effective, futuristic language in describing the World Wide Web. The Internet is too monolithic, too all-encompassing to say now what it all meant. It changed the world. Politically, the Left and the Right have used it with equal force, venom and deceit. Eventually it created something called "blogs," which had a profound impact on the media. It rendered newspapers literally "yesterday's news." Its greatest impact has probably been pornographic, both "mainstream" as well as the insidious ability to easily watch children having sex without borders. In this regard, the religious among us are not disabused of the notion that it is a tool of Satan, but it has been used for much good and efficient use by those on the straight and narrow, too. There is no question, however, that the Internet had a negative effect on newspaper circulation.

The World Wide Web, the blogosphere and social media are difficult to pin down, but appear to be the future of communications. Blogs are so varied, from the filthiest, vile, foul epithets, conspiracy theories and harebrained notions to genuine talents, left behind by the competitive, shrinking journalism and publishing world. There is one constant in the world of writers: the printed word will always be needed. It cannot be replaced by talk or images. Those who explain and chronicle have been around since the Greeks and the Romans, and are here to stay no matter what form they appear.

The Internet, of course, is more than just written words. It combines words with pictures, video, sound, and other sensory information, but without words to detail events, it is the blind leading the blind. Other forms of communication, such as music and motion pictures, are more glamorous, but the written word is the final arbiter of history. A good example was Oliver Stone's JFK, a sensory overload of images blowing past the viewer at warp speed, leaving him gasping and wondering, "Who killed JFK?" Slowly but surely, starting with a few op/eds and leading to Vincent Bugliosi's 1,648-page epic Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2007), the lie was eventually put to Stone's premise.

Web sites like RedRoom.com allow writers to self-publish, literally creating a little electronic empire of their own. If they have something to sell; a magazine, freelance work, a book, or a myriad other things, this is a way to advertise it. Whether it catches on with the public is up to the talents, aggressiveness and savvy of the writer. A writer may attract up to 2,000 or 3,000 hits a day at RedRoom.com, accumulating 500,000 hits over time, or more. Much of this is happening without a lot of interaction in the form of "reader feedback," but silently, slowly, yet surely, the dogged Internet journalist develops a following. While exploiting this following into monetary gain is tricky, what it does is create a setting in which the writer prepares for the day he gets some kind of break, writes some kind of important book or article or opinion piece, and suddenly discovers an army of readers familiar with years of his or her work.

LittleGreenFootballs.com and PoaerLine.com were two of several blogs credited with exposing some of Senator John Kerry's negatives in the 2004 Presidential campaign. The blog is a true soap box of Democratic opinion. A writer can publish an entire book electronically on his blog, in one piece or via chapters. Smashwords.com is a site that allows writers to self-publish their books electronically for free. Whether actual eBooks will catch on is still an open question, but the purpose of them is not customer satisfaction, but cost-control for publishers. It is cheaper than binding, ink, paper and all the infrastructure of traditional books.

Email and social media are ways to drive traffic to such blogs and web pages. A savvy writer might cultivate 10,000 or 15,000 email addresses, and add another 2,000 or 3,000 friends at Facebook.com, 2,000 followers/following at Twitter.com. They can then use these tools to post links to their blogs, Amazon.com pages of their books, or any of hundreds of other places they wish people to go. It is all done in the blink of an eye and generally for free. Electronic fax systems like efax.com allow somebody to send notices to 200, 300, any number of fax numbers – of magazines, newspapers, media outlets – advertising something (books, products) in the course of a few emails. This entails the cost of the fax, about $.10 or $.20 a page, but is far cheaper and more convenient than old style fax machines that require feeding paper and dealing with busy signals.

Nobody has really figured out a formula when it comes to these Internet opportunities, but the possibilities are endless based on creativity, talent and willingness to work. At first, there might have been a slight liberal slant to the Internet. After all, it was heavily promoted by President Clinton and claimed by Vice President Gore. Google.com is notorious for creating algorithms in its search engine that steer users to their preferred ideas, away from more conservative ones, but searching is so wild and woolly that any creative web surfer can find what they really look for. AmericaOnline.com has a loving page devoted to Barack Obama and his family when users go to their home site. Whether it is paid for by Obama is not readily known.

A liberal named Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook.com. In 2008, he made extra special use of his site's technology to help Barack Obama raise funds, get his message out, create excitement and crowds, and generally campaign. However, the many and varied wonders of Facebook.com were quickly learned by conservatives, and there is no reason to believe they cannot master its nuances as well as the opposition.

There are an untold number of legitimate web sites. Facebook.com and Twitter.com have done a phenomenal job of making themselves part of these web sites. People visit a site and, with a click or two, can convey a link on their Facebook.com or Twitter.com pages; "like" anything ranging from a porn star to a President, and of course reach however many followers and friends they may have. The cultivation of friends, followers and likes on these sites is usually a matter of dogged persistence. One person may have a Facebook.com page simply for personal friends he or she wishes to stay in touch with. Somebody else may actively search and add thousands of "friends," many identified as members of groups or organizations they have some kinship with (alumni of a school, fans of a baseball team, Republicans in Pennsylvania, conservative women, Christians). It is almost endless.

Pornography and, most pernicious, child pornography, are extremely big on the Internet. Child molesters not only get images, but infiltrate their way into the lives of youngsters through chat rooms and other electronic means. There are arguments that say porn, particularly easy-to-find Internet porn, has the affect of reducing rapes, since men can "satisfy" themselves in the privacy of their own homes instead of taking to the streets to assault the innocent. There does not seem to be much evidence supporting this, but also little real research one way or the other. Serial killer Ted Bundy, however, warned the world before his execution that pornography drove him to do what he did.

On-line dating is also enormous. The ability to find attractive singles is huge, although the Internet can lead to fraud in the form of an adult disguising his identity as a child; a 43-year old man wooing a 19-year old girl with false photos showing him to be a buff young Marine; plus increasing the chance to cheat on spouses. The Internet, like modern phone technology, makes it very difficult to hide activity. Wives and husbands with a little savvy and a suspicious mind can easily trace their partners' on-line history. The Internet also can lead to a lot of negative information about a person; false accusations, lies, and the like. However, a smart Internet user can drown out the bad stuff and create a positive image, often using Google.com, creating their own web pages, Amazon.com pages for writers, and many other tools. It is the "wild West," the tool of Satan as much as the tool of God; the tool of Democrats as much as Republicans; the tool of the Yankees as much as the Red Sox.

Politically, there is no evidence that one side dominates, but Internet journalists are as legitimate as print journalists. They often are one and the same. The Internet has increased the exposure of a writer or columnist, previously seen only by print readers of a newspaper generally in the region it covers; now spread virally and oft-promoted on TV talk shows. TV has led to many journalists being young, attractive and female. They also are responsible for up-dating their blogs, Twitter.com and Facebook.com pages sometimes hourly, increasing their exposure but also their work load. There is little difference anymore between a writer for the L.A. Times who also blogs and is published at LATimes.com, or a writer at TownHall.com or politco.com. The quality and length of much of the writing, however, is below what it used to be both on-line and in print. HuffingtonPost.com and MediaMatters.com are among liberal web sites. WorldNetDaily.com is a popular conservative site. Individuals likes Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage all have web sites where they draw traffic via their broadcasts.

Mobility is now a tremendous tool. People basically bring their Internet with them courtesy of iPads and iPhones. They can access Internet media that way. This technology played a major role in organizing Egyptian youth rallying to end the rule of Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Obama used it to organize rallies in 2008. It is not determined whether any one political party will gain a major advantage in its use in the near future.

Battleground: public schools and academia

The United States is engaged in what Patrick Buchanan correctly termed a "culture war" in 1992. Bill O'Reilly calls himself a "culture warrior." The reason the Left has stayed even with the Right; indeed the reason they could even forge ahead in the battle for the hearts and minds of future generations, is in the area of education. Liberalism dominates virtually all areas of education, from kindergarten to graduate schools. The only place the Right competes is in the relatively narrow parameters of private, mostly Christian schools and high schools; a few specialty colleges like Hillsdale and Bob Jones University. Among "major" colleges, there are a few that range from "conservative" to fairly moderate without being radically liberal.

The University of Southern California was once a Right-wing, Republican institution. Not anymore. It is not liberal, but now probably tends to moderate. Brigham Young is a conservative Mormon college. Notre Dame, despite its wealth and strong Catholicism, tends to the Left, certainly amongst it faculty. Most of the big Southern schools, especially those with leading sports programs ranging from LSU to Alabama to Oklahoma to Georgia, are pretty conservative. But that is about it.

The Ivy League is rabidly liberal. Washington, Oregon, Cal-Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA: liberal. Michigan and Wisconsin: liberal. Even Texas is located in a liberal city, Austin. The old days of college rioting are in the past, but the protestors of those years are the tenured professors (who cannot be fired) and administrators of today. Radicals like Ward Churchill, Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Maulana Karenga, Henry Gates, and the deceased Derek Bell were allowed to teach at exclusive universities. Some of these people were not virtual, but actual criminals (attempted murder, rioters, race extortion).

But the greatest stranglehold liberalism has is in our public schools. The teachers' unions have complete control, and they are in the pocket of the Democrats. Kids are taught global warming as near religion; heavily indoctrinated with pro-gay propaganda; left to the bad devices of political correctness; and face a heavy scythe for any form of racism or misogyny, even if it is "innocent" or normal school yard joshing. Many teachers are gay. Adult gays often reveal affairs they had with gay teachers. In the  
"nature vs. nurture" argument, this brings up the question of "lifestyle choice." While unquestionably many gays are "born" that way, choices or pressures drive many there in their youth. Jack Kerouac, for instance, was said to have fallen under the sway of Allen Ginsberg, who tried to indoctrinate him into a homosexual lifestyle under the guise that it was "artistic." Barack Obama was given mythic status in public schools, god-like imprimatur in black schools. American history is given short shrift. The Founding Fathers are just "dead white males." Most unfortunately, really, is the lack of attention paid to the notion of American Exceptionalism. Children have no concept of entrepreneurial capitalism, the nature of free people accomplishing great things absent heavy government intervention. They are brainwashed into thinking all they have and benefit from is based on taxes. While James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. are idols in public schools, nobody knows who Alexis de Tocqueville and Teddy Roosevelt are.

Backlash

Feminism was established to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream.

\- Rush Limbaugh

Charles Grodin hosted a television talk show during the height of the Clinton years. Grodin was a liberal. He was handsome, smart and funny as all get out. His movies were a blast: Beethoven, Midnight Run, Foul Play. Surely this man was the answer to a new phenomenon of conservative talk hosts who had achieved spectacular success and audiences in the mass millions. Grodin brought in friendly Clintonistas and other smiling faces from the liberal establishment in Hollywood, New York and Washington. His show was watched by nobody and went the way of the Dodo bird. How?

This is not all that easy a question. It begs the larger question, will liberals ever compete with conservatives in the political talk show market? There is not the slightest indication that it will happen soon. Grodin found himself defending Clinton and attacking conservatives. All of the charismatic qualities he brought to his film roles - smiling discourse, charm and humor, a disarming self-deprecation - disappeared.

Grodin could never get traction because he had to battle against the grain of Truth. Defending Clinton was the defense of a political reprobate. Grodin just found himself digging holes he could not get out of. Attacking Clinton's attackers forced Grodin to try and discredit common sense notions of law and politics. It was a tricky game, one that perhaps only Clinton himself had the ability to navigate. But what really kicked it for Grodin were general liberal notions, which juxtaposed with simple facts about America. In telling true stories of America, one is at the same time promoting conservatism. Grodin could not do this. He had to steer and veer to avoid this. It was exhausting to see him try. Promoting liberalism leads one to the inexorable path of describing what is wrong with America. Grodin could sense this, and his ability to read the tea leaves told him it was not flying. He ended up being sour and dour. Adios.

If anybody could have starred at it, it was George Stephanopoulos. He was young, decent-looking and charismatic (albeit about five feet ye tall to a grasshopper). He was smart, knew all the players and the "inside baseball." He had gotten out without being tarnished beyond his efforts to discredit women assaulted by Clinton. In the Democrat world, that is a pretty good track record. He never made it.

Clinton himself was discussed regarding taking over a talk show. What a disaster that would be. If actual callers called in he would get verbally assaulted. Efforts to control the calls would be obvious. He would be defending himself and getting in hot water. If he tried to branch out, he would just be digging holes.

Once upon a time, before cable was big, before talk radio, Phil Donahue was a powerhouse. He dispensed liberalism, and he got ratings. Surely this meant America was a liberal country. After dropping out of the game and returning, Donahue discovered that the only reason people turned to him was because they had no choices. Now, with competition, the choice was conservatism. Bye Phil.

Mario Cuomo was supposed to be a big liberal hit on talk radio. He had a reputation as a great speaker. He was a man of the people; the humble Italian Catholic, the immigrant's son, his story was the story of New York. Problem: liberal positions, stated in a talk radio format over two or three hours, have to be explained, and sense must be made of them. See ya, Mario.

Actor Alec Baldwin gave it a try. He asked listeners to call in. Crickets. He could not think of anything to fill the time. For about five of the longest minutes ever, he fumbled around, mystified that the world was not falling all over themselves for the chance to speak to his eminence. The only reason anybody heard Baldwin at all was because Sean Hannity, who Baldwin lambasted with vicious attacks, happily played Baldwin's embarrassment over . . . and over . . . and over again.

Rich liberals have for years tried to fund a network to overshadow conservative talk radio. CNN devoted a program to the premise of "combating" conservative radio. In 1996, the DNC tried to establish a speaker's bureau designed to create alternatives. It never went anywhere. They trotted out Alan Dershowitz, Lowell Weicker, Jerry Brown, Gary Hart and Doug Wilder. Nobody will argue that the conservatives are smarter than these guys. The only explanation for why liberals draw as big an audience as a Carol Moseley-Braun for President rally is that their ideas are not as good. Some things are just empirical evidence. People do not want this liberal jargon shouting at them in their car radios any more than they want to be a character in George Orwell's 1984, listening to Big Brother on a speaker system. It makes one wonder whether they would have chosen someone other than Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite had they had a choice, which they did not. Magazines like Mother Jones urge readers to call their radio stations and demand a change, but the only calls these stations get is, "When are you going to put G. Gordon Liddy on?" Conservatives constantly called CBS, NBC and ABC, demanding that Dan Rather and Katie Couric get the axe. Their departures did not come courtesy of conservative pressure. Rather was caught in a flat-footed lie over President Bush's military records. Couric's rating were abysmal.

Air America went bankrupt, a complete failure. The citizenry only heard a blowhard named Ed Schultz when he said something stupid enough to be replayed by conservative media. In fact, much of the liberal media, the "talking heads" of CNN, MSNBC and NBC, half-owed whatever ratings they had left to those occasional times when a Right-winger would laughingly play some clown thing they said on their programs.

So who is out there? In San Francisco a liberal talk host succeeded for years. His name was Bernie Ward. He was strident and argumentative. Frankly, a pain. But he was in San Francisco, a bastion of liberalism, so he survived. This city must be the one place where conservative talk radio finds no audience? Where the liberal Ward would beat the conservatives, right? Think again.

A man named Dr. Michael Savage arrived at Ward's station, KGO, with zero experience. He was a conservative. Ward immediately called him "sheets," a KKK reference. Ward told his audience – night zombies, druggies, reprobates – what Dr. Savage's home address was, tasking them to go there and make life bad for his family. A funny thing happened. Dr. Savage ascended to the heights of political-media success. Ward was discovered to be a perverted homo-pederast, arrested and forced to sit in a jail cell while Dr. Savage made sure police evidence of his masturbations in the presence of an underage boy were played, over the course of months, to several million American citizens. More San Franciscans listened to Savage in one night than Bernie Ward in half a year.

Conservative talk radio

By Steven Travers

In 1984 a pudgy disc jockey from Cape Girardeau, Missouri named Rush Limbaugh was given the chance to air his Right-wing political commentary on a local radio station in Sacramento, California. It was the year Ronald Reagan swept to victory over Walter Mondale. Angry phone calls and letters ensued. Limbaugh was almost fired until the station's ratings began to show steady improvement. By 1988 he was syndicated nationally. He moved to New York City, where he broadcast to millions during the George H.W. Bush-Michael Dukakis campaign. Pundits have tried to dissect how Bush rose from 17 points behind that summer to a comfortable eight-point margin of victory. They could do worse than analyzing the effect of Rush Limbaugh.

He was a huge hit in Sacramento and on KFI in Los Angeles. In liberal San Francisco he enraged listeners, but he made KNBR the biggest ratings winner in town. Left-wing commentators were weeping and gnashing their teeth, relegated to the midnight time slot while Limbaugh dominated drive time first in California, then in New York, then everywhere, including the Armed Forces Radio Network. By the 1990s he was a phenomenon. He was featured on 60 Minutes, in all the major publications, had a TV show in addition to his radio program, and wrote bestselling books. He was extravagantly wealthy. His influence among Republicans and the conservative base was beyond all previous figures with the exception of Reagan. The Left said Limbaugh lied, and ipso facto, because he lied, therefore his show would not last very long.

More than two decades later, the results are indisputable. If in fact lying will catch up to somebody in Limbaugh's position, causing them disgrace, firing, dismissal, low ratings, and all other manner of public failure, then either Limbaugh does not lie, or he has gotten away with lying, never having been actually caught despite protestation from his enemies that what he says is not true.

This set of circumstances leaves the left in a discomfiting position, forced to contemplate a Platonic fact of political science, as with analysis of the South. In all the years they were "ignorant" and "racist" they voted Democrat. Over time as they modernized, became educated, acquired knowledge, facts and actual information, they were husbanded into the mainstream by the GOP and, therefore, voted Republican. This is the sort of straight-forward bit of pure information that is not opinion but rather manifests itself as the thing one knows when they learn all there is about it!

So too with Limbaugh. If the Left was correct, that a liar will be caught, disgraced and humbled, then sent away never to be heard from again, then ipso facto, the fact Limbaugh thrives more now than ever verifies their most horrid reality, which is that he is right, they are wrong, and worse yet, millions of patriotic citizens who register and vote possess this knowledge.

Republican winning streaks cannot be solely attributed to Rush Limbaugh. Conservatives at least think the Founding Fathers were basically . . . conservative. Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, if read today by somebody not knowing it was written in the 1830s, would probably be called a "conservative manifesto" placing too much of America's success on Christianity. The GOP dominated after the Civil War, from Abraham Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt. They presided over the Roaring '20s and the 1950s. They won big 1966 mid-terms, and Richard Nixon won by an astonishing margin in 1972. Reagan won big in 1980 and by massive sweeps in 1984, when Limbaugh was unknown outside Sacramento.

But the Republicans held power more regularly, and recovered from disaster faster, during the age of Limbaugh than they ever hoped to before him. Bush defied historical odds going back to 1840 when he succeeded his boss in 1988. The 1994 GOP mid-term sweeps were almost beyond comprehension. George W. Bush defeated a sitting Vice President with the wind at his sails in 2000, saw his party totally buck historical trends to win in 2002, and won more votes than any President in American history in 2004. Limbaugh's influence on the '94 mid-terms and all of young Bush's successes is impossible to deny, but perhaps most distressing to his detractors is the fact that he always reaches the apex of his popularity, power and influence when the Democrats are in power. He rode the Bill Clinton Impeachment like a Colossus, and in 2010 unquestionably led the repudiation of Barack Hussein Obama, possibly the most complete, jarring, tidal wave of rejection any sitting President has ever endured.

The Powers That Be, the likes of Bill Paley, Arthur Sulzberger, Otis Chandler, Phil Graham and Henry Luce profiled in David Halberstam's marvelous 1979 epic on the American media, were now the powers that were. A new wind blew a new sheriff, an entirely new culture, into town. In the shifting history and impact of communications, movements and the media, the powers that are had arrived. These powers would take on different guises and names. Call them Rupert Murdoch, News Corporation and Fox News. Call them the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Call them the Christian Right and Matt Drudge. But before any of these powers, there was Rush Limbaugh and conservative talk radio. The influence and change ushered in by this single individual can be compared to few things in history. It was a seismic shift in the landscape of politics, the media and, as Limbaugh calls it, the "dominant media culture" of liberal-leaning news and entertainment. For the likes of Luce, Graham, Paley and so many of the old guard it certainly would have been impossible to predict and less possible to believe that so much influence could emanate from a single "golden E.I.B. microphone," as Limbaugh joked of his self-proclaimed "Excellence in Broadcasting company." This kind of empire required an investment of millions of dollars. It required infrastructure, "A building for work," as Luce called the Time-Life skyscraper; modern equipment, cameras, sound machines. It required a huge staff of Yalies and Skull and Bonesmen to branch out across the world, bringing stories from the exotic locales of the growing American Empire of Democratic ideals, back to the homeland in this, Luce's self-proclaimed American Century.

While Murdoch's News Corporation would be that and even more, reaching farther and wider than any of Halberstam's Powers That Be had done in their years, it could well be argued that this path was paved first by Rush Limbaugh. Looking back, Limbaugh's rise seems inexorable, but to predict it before it happened would have been folly of the highest order.

The editors, publishers and executives running major newspapers failing in the 1990 and 2000s would have done well to listen to Limbaugh, to his complaints, and glean lessons from him on what not to do. From the beginning, Limbaugh leveled some of his harshest criticisms at the dominant media culture. He railed against Left-wing Hollywood making anti-American films, depicting Republicans as bad guys, creating the fiction that no Communists ran amok in Tinseltown during McCarthyism, while making movies like Oliver Stone's Platoon (the American experience in Vietnam could be encapsulated by My Lai), Dances With Wolves (Native Indians were all just peaceful environmentalists of no threat to settlers), and JFK (Right-wing industrialists, Pentagon brass and the CIA, not Fidel Castro or the Mob, killed Kennedy).

At the time, there was no Fox News or MSNBC. Limbaugh railed against the bias of CBS in particular, but also NBC, ABC and new cable station CNN. But his biggest peeve was reserved for the print media. Time (now thoroughly removed from the influence of Henry Luce), Newsweek, The Nation, the Washington Post, and in particular the "old grey lady," the New York Times, were on the receiving end of his wrath, all heard by 20 million people a day. Limbaugh had broken the cardinal rule of public commentary: never criticize any entity that buys ink by the barrel. The fact that he thrived on this criticism led to what can only be another inescapable conclusion, which is that a huge number of Americans agreed with his assessment.

Having failed to prove him a liar, the Left took to calling him a homophobe, a racist, and fat. Limbaugh just laughed all the way to the bank, or the nearest golf course, losing 40 pounds while at it.

But in the early 1990s, a battle was begun. Nixon had his "enemies list," but he was paranoid. It was a given, really. The New York Times was liberal. Some called then anti-American, especially when they agreed to publish the Pentagon Papers. After Watergate the Right quietly asked where was Woodward and Bernstein, Katharine Graham and Ben Bradlee, the power and resources of this great newspaper, when JFK stole the 1960 election from Nixon in plain sight? These were just facts of life, to be lived with. The GOP was willing to live with it, like a West Coast baseball team that knows their home games won't be seen by Eastern viewers at night. Rush Limbaugh would not live with it!

So what is conservative talk radio, and why is it so important? There have been conservatives on the radio for years. Paul Harvey was popular with his homespun American style, telling populist tales of religion and small town values, giving his audience "the rest of the story." Bob Grant was a hit in New York. But in the 1980s, talk radio was mostly the forum of the sports world. In Los Angeles, KABC introduced Dodger Talk, giving fans non-stop baseball news and interviews. Fans could call in and offer their two cents worth. In New York, sports fans called in to WFAN to opine about the Knicks, the Yankees, and the Rangers. Also in the 1980s, the cell phone became popular. With the economic upturn, more and more people were working in the cities, living in the suburbs, and listening to radio in their cars.

But Paul Harvey was on his last legs and that was about it. When people thought of "conservative radio commentators," they thought of Father Charles Coughlin, whose anti-Semitic rants marked the pre-World War II years. Such men were depicted as extreme and overripe, as with the man who introduces Burt Lancaster's General James Mattoon Scott in the Right-wing conspiracy film Seven Days in May (1964).

But two things favored conservatives off the top. First, people who drive their cars to and from work, by virtue of having jobs, are more likely to be Republicans. But what really fuels the conservative talk radio engine is the fact that conservatives are more civic-minded and value knowledge more. Liberals tend to listen to music. They are more likely to be on the FM side of the dial. Conservatives usually have more education, and desire to better themselves and their communities. Part of that is to acquire more information. While others may be rockin' out to the Stones, conservatives want to make better use of their time and learn things.

Next, conservatives for years had been listening to spoon-fed media bias. They were tired of it. Conservative talk radio offered them something else after years of garbage. As a result of all the Left-wing bias that conservatives put up with all their lives, in newspapers, magazines, school textbooks, college classes, Hollywood screens, and network news, conservatives had this little feeling in their guts. Dan Rather, Peter Jennings or Walter Cronkite would tell them something, conservatives would hear it, and a little reactor would go on telling them that what they were being told was not quite right. Doesn't add up. Off kilter. Now just hold on there, buddy. I'm sure that's wrong. Can't be. Are you sure about that?

It goes on like that for years. So the conservative has these feelings, but everything around him tells him he is in the wrong. Hollywood tells him he is wrong. Cronkite says he is wrong. His college professors definitely told him he was wrong. Before, those high school and junior high texts sure had some weird stuff in them. But the conservative is not liberal. Something keeps him from becoming that way. Something about those opinions does not make sense. This feeling sticks to him, and the feeling is that, hey, I still think I'm right.

Well, being a smart guy (or gal), and wanting to do the right thing, to stand up for what is right, the conservative begins to sort things out in his head. He starts to gather knowledge. He needs to arm himself with facts to countermand all this stuff which, as he gets older, wiser and more responsible, makes more and more difference to him. Facts.

The conservative makes a discovery. It can be epiphany. It is like a religious experience. It may start with something small. Then it builds and grows. The bigger it gets the stronger it becomes. Truth.

The conservative comes to the marvelous, beautiful realization that the facts favor his way of thinking.

This is power. Now it is no longer just opinion or emotion. Now he is on the right side of things.

Then one day he turns on Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh changed everything. There is no more powerful force in American culture than Rush Limbaugh. He has moved mountains. He is responsible for a huge shift in popular attitude. It cannot be emphasized too strongly just how huge this guy is.

Nobody is denying the importance of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. They came before Limbaugh and set the stage for him to do what he did. Goldwater and Reagan were, as Teddy Roosevelt put it, "in the arena," battling for the votes, putting themselves in front of a steamroller of public opinion armed only with their intellect and confident knowledge of their righteousness. Limbaugh's hero His was "Ronaldus Magnus," his humorous term for Reagan. He freely admitted that Buckley paved the way for him.

Limbaugh would be the first to admit he was only a part of what moves conservatism. He worked hand in hand and in between the mediums of entertainment, government and business. If he is not entertaining, he fails. If he does not succeed as a business entity, he fails. If there is no corollary between his opinions and the electorate, he fails. He triumphs, in brilliant fashion, in all three areas. His very worst detractors cannot possibly deny this.

Limbaugh was born into a family of Republican lawyers in suburban Missouri. He failed to meet the academic expectations set by his family, but not for a lack of intellect. He went to a small college in Missouri and made fair grades, but dropped out to pursue what he had always wanted to do: radio. He had strong conservative opinions and wanted to express them on the air. There was virtually no radio forum in those days to allow for that. About the only thing for him to do was disc jockey work, but he got in trouble for airing politics and was fired several times. Straight news did not interest him. He wanted to be part of a cultural medium. He sensed all the things that conservatives sense, which was that he was right, he was not alone, and others wanted to hear him. But how?

Limbaugh drifted from job to job, in and out of radio. He worked for the Kansas City Royals baseball team, where he did public relations, making a pittance salary while surrounded by wealthy superstars. One of them, George Brett, shared his philosophy and they befriended each other. Limbaugh maxed out his credit cards and bought groceries at 7-11 because they would accept cards the grocery store would not.

Slowly, he began to establish himself in the radio business. He ended up at a station in Sacramento, California, where he was allowed to be a full-fledged conservative. Liberals called in, infuriated at the very idea that some such opinions could be allowed on the air. Aw, free speech. This went on for a while, and the hate was brutal. Several times, the station told Rush he was about to be fired.

Rush told his audience what was happening. He said that unless those who agreed with him made their presence known, he was gone. Liberals kept calling in, spewing with vitriol. Then the conservatives started to call. They kept calling. Rush's job was saved. For now. It was touch and go, but word of mouth spread.

Then, the beauty of capitalism kicked in. Rush began to beat the other stations in ratings. Advertisers wanted to do business with him. The best part of it was that advertisers discovered they got more bang for their buck from Rush's conservative audience. They hung with him through commercials, as they tended to be the kind of upright, tax-paying citizens who needed and purchased the goods and services they advertised. Rush was a hit in Sacramento.

In the summer of 1988, the big experiment began. Rush was brought to New York City, where he would be syndicated nationwide. Reagan was still the President, but Bush was running and Michael Dukakis had a 17-point lead. From one end of the "Fruited Plain" to the other, unsuspecting voters turned on their radios and heard Limbaugh extol the virtues of America, capitalism, freedom, conservatism, and the Republican Party. In direct correlation with the early rise of his show, Bush rose in the polls. By November he was elected President, and Rush was a national sensation.

The Democrats despised him. Over the next four years, he drove them out of their cotton pickin' minds. He had up-dates on animal rights, Ted Kennedy and other liberal gods, skewing them with hilarious voice imitations, fake songs lampooning their nostrums, and other sacred cows. But what made him successful was that he knew what he was talking about. Limbaugh did his homework and argued persuasively. He knew history and he had the facts in his favor. Filling three hours a day, five days a week, year after year, Rush occasionally exaggerated claims, and sometimes his predictions were not right. But he stated that he was right "99.9 percent of the time," and he was a lot closer to that than he was wrong.

The Left went after him with everything they had. They tried liberal talk shows, but their dismal failures just made Rush's success more obvious, like the old West Berlin's capitalism overshadowing East Berlin's Communism. Rush was overweight, so they made fun of him. A member of the dumbellionite class, Al Franken wrote a book called Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot. The book sold pretty well. Then Franken wrote another book, which was read by nobody. It turned out his first book only sold because Rush's name was on it. Then Rush lost weight and looked terrific. Franken realized the only books he could write that would sell would have conservatives in the title, so he wrote a book using Fox News' "fair and balanced" moniker.

The liberals desperately tried to find something wrong with Rush, in his personal life, his family, his formative years, and his hard-luck period. Anything they could pin on the man. They found out his family was as upright as the one Beaver Cleaver grew up in. Rush never broke laws, never got in trouble, and did the right thing in every aspect of his life. He was as straight an arrow as they get. In 2003, the Left thought they "got" him when Limbaugh's addiction to painkillers was made public. Limbaugh simply took personal responsibility, never complained, and dealt with the results of his actions. When he returned to the radio, he was as big as ever.

In 1992, Rush went after the Clintons hard. When they won, it looked to be a major refutation of his power. Rush had become an icon of the Right, a man that President Bush and the Republicans took very seriously - as did the Democrats. Criticizing him was not easy, since he had so many defenders and he possessed a platform. What Rush did more than anything was to expose the Left-wing bias in the dominant media culture, which he said was all of the media other than him. There was the media and the Left, all together. Then there was him.

Democrats complained and proposed Federal laws giving them equal time.

"I am equal time," Rush responded.

If Rush had three hours, they should have three hours to respond to him. Naturally, this meant that radio stations far and wide, who were making money hand over foot with Rush, were expected to put some boredom liberal on the air and watch their profits sink from a lack of listeners. Rush won in the marketplace of ideas, the freest possible example of choice. Conservatism was the winner.

Rush never blinked with the Clintons in the White House, stating that his show would be stronger than ever because now he had so much material, courtesy of their scandals. He was right again. He devised faux news reports describing "America held hostage" by the Clintons, and created hilarious songs bastardizing their lies, with a Hillary sound-alike responding "I don't recall" in Hillaryious fashion. A Sonny and Cher takeoff of "I Got You, Babe" turned into Hillary and Bill turning state's evidence on each other. He aired an Elvis impersonator singing a version of "The Ghetto," only it was a "liberal guy and a liberal gal" driving a Yugo to save mileage and do their part for the environment because "don't you know those SUVs are rapin' the land . . . ?" only the liberals in the tiny Yugo are smashed by a Mack truck on the interstate. It was insane. He got a Teddy Kennedy sound-alike to do a parody of "The Wanderer".
"I'm a philanderer, yes I'm a philanderer," replaced "I'm a wanderer, yes I'm a wanderer," and "I sleep around and 'round and 'round," replaced "I get around and 'round and 'round." He did an unbelievably perfect imitation of Bill Clinton, absolutely skewering him with humorous, outrageous commentary. His up-dates on "femi-Nazis," gay activists and "environmentalist wackos" were spot on. He destroyed the Left with comedy and sarcasm. He made fun of feminists, mostly ugly lesbians who wanted to downgrade the importance of child-bearing. The despised him for it. His audience grew to 20 million people.

Everybody recalled the first time they heard Rush. He wrote two bestselling books and had his own TV show. He spawned conservative magazines and newspapers like the Washington Times. People who filled in for him as guest hosts became stars in their own right.

Left for dead after the "Year of the Woman" elections of 1992, when Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush and, led by Californians Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, ushered in a wave of liberal women, leading to Democrat sweeps of the House and Senate, it was accepted knowledge that Limbaugh's time had come. The day after Bill Clinton's victory, Rush went on the air and said only now had his time come; that going after the Clintons in the White House would be his finest hour.

In 1994 Limbaugh was the driving force behind an enormous conservative comeback. The Democrats ran an illegal check-kiting scheme, a blatant example of special privilege. Limbaugh ran a series of hilarious skits mocking them. Teamed with U.S. Congressman Newt Gingrich (R.-Georgia), who offered the popular Contract with America, Limbaugh led huge Republican sweeps of the House, Senate and every area of elected office in all of the land.

Prior to 1994, the Democrats ran the U.S. House of Representatives for all but four of 62 years. The Republicans picked up 54 seats to take control of Congress, 230 seats to 204. They captured eight U.S. Senate seats to take control by 52-48. The GOP swept a large majority of Gubernatorial elections and took over most of the state legislatures, including huge majority gains in Sacramento, which also voted overwhelmingly to limit government benefits to illegal aliens. Republican Richard Riordan was Mayor of Los Angeles, while a moderate Democrat, Frank Jordan, was Mayor of San Francisco. It appeared that he had "won." Clinton was called "irrelevant," assumed to be a loser for re-election in 1996.

Limbaugh flummoxed President Clinton, who publicly complained that every day he made a pronouncement or proposal, only to have Rush Limbaugh go on the air and tear it to shreds within hours. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Clinton tried to pin it Rush. That failed miserably.

Limbaugh led the charge in the Impeachment of President Clinton in 1998. When George W. Bush ascended to the White House, Limbaugh pointed out every single unpatriotic thing the Left did to undermine him and the war effort. Regardless of whether invasion of Iraq was good policy and "worth" the lives of so many great young men, the total hypocrisy of the so-called "loyal opposition: was astounding. Rush Limbaugh duly pointed it out to 20 million American citizens daily.

Limbaugh further rebuked the Left by creating a "character" he called the "New Castrati," a blistering description of "castrated" Left-wing "males" who lack any manly qualities. He trots this New Castrati out to "argue" the liberal point of view.

When Barack Obama was elected President, Limbaugh said he "hopes he fails," meaning he did not want all of Obama's Socialist policies to pass. Obama did not fail; indeed with full Democrat support his first two years, Obama passed all the legislation; all the hopes and dreams of a generation of Democrats. African-American "comic" Wanda Sykes said she hoped Limbaugh's kidneys failed. She was not heard from again.

When a law student named Sandra Fluke testified she needed national health care to cover the cost of her contraception needs to the tune of $3,000, Limbaugh added up the math. For somebody to require $3,000 a year to cover condoms, abortions and other sexual-medical "needs" meant that she had a lot of sex, and since she was single, either that meant her boyfriend had to perform prodigious work in this regard, or she slept around like . . . "a slut."

Limbaugh was roundly criticized and within days apologized. Many, many times the Left felt they had "gotten" him, and indeed a few sponsors pulled their ads. Within a week new sponsors who paid more replaced them. Then the old sponsors returned. The effort to drive him off the air failed, as had numerous previous tries, all to the enormous consternation of the Democrats.

Limbaugh and his longtime collaborator, musician and comedian Paul Shanklin, created a whole new set of songs and parodies making fun of Obama, including one called "The Magic Negro," taken directly from a Los Angeles Times editorial that called then-candidate Obama that. They made fun of Obama's sing-song talking style.

While Bush was a friend to Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43, it has been his opposition to Democrat Presidents Clinton and Obama where he has shown his greatest power. When Obama took office in 2009, he seemed impervious. His popularity, star power and charisma seemed overwhelming. He won with a huge plurality (as opposed to Clinton, who never passed 50 percent of the popular vote), his party swept passed token opposition, and pundits said it was the "end of conservatism," that Reagan's America was a thing of the past. If so, then this meant Limbaugh's America was a thing of the past, too. It was undoubtedly Limbaugh's greatest challenge. On top of that, he faced personal challenges. Despite his "family values" stance and professed Christianity, he was married numerous times and had no children. He had overcome an addiction to pain killers but still had health problems, including a hearing disorder, especially difficult for somebody in his line of work. He constantly battled weight issues, but when he lost 40 pounds it was an "in your face" move against his enemies who called him "fat."

But Obama was his biggest obstacle. He was no spring chicken anymore. He had all the money he could need and could just retire to golf in Florida. The nagging accusations of racism leveled at Rush were exacerbated by the winning presence of the first African-American President. Criticizing this new "sacred cow" of American politics was very tricky, as he discovered when he said he said, "I hope he fails."

But Limbaugh never backed off. Limbaugh, who not only challenged how smart the President was, but intimated the man had just a touch of the dumbellionite to him, lambasted Obama's star power and glowing descriptions of his "intelligence". His spotlighting liberal hypocrisy was dead-on; criticism of Bush for things Obama did and worse. Mistakes and stupid remarks Obama made that, in Bush's case, were national headlines, hidden now by Obama's protectors in the press.

Limbaugh was a phenomenon of a new media age. His syndicated radio program reached 20 million regular listeners. The Internet, the Armed Forces Radio Network, his web site and newsletter, regular appearances on Fox News, constant mention by his detractors on other networks; this was a man getting his direct message to millions, unfiltered by editors. He had no desire nor premise in being "balanced' or "fair." He expressed his opinion and did not need to check his editorializing as even Henry Luce, surrounded by less-conservative associates at Time magazine, once had. Nobody ever reached so many, three hours a day, seven days a week, replays on the Internet easily obtainable around the globe at all hours. Not Paley's CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post during Watergate; no voice in Hollywood or the government had this reach, this audience, or this influence. Clinton, two Bush's, Obama; they all would come and go. Rush Limbaugh outlasted them all.

Nobody could possibly have predicted the decline of Obama, but Limbaugh correctly did. In 2010 the Republicans won 29 state Governorships, came from behind to now control half the state legislatures, gained 680 state legislative seats, 63 Congressional seats, and six United States Senate seats. It was arguably the greatest win one party ever won over another in American history; at least close to it. It was a total shock to Barack Obama, and it seems impossible to believe it could have happened without Rush Limbaugh.

President Obama, who once had approval ratings around 70 percent and the popularity of a rock star or movie idol, lecturing losing Republicans that the time to listen to Rush was over, now found himself facing the election challenge of a lifetime against Republican challenger Mitt Romney in 2012. In the film Game Change, Ed Harris playing Senator John McCain warned Julianne Moore as Governor Sarah Palin that she was a party leader now, and not to be persuaded by the likes of Limbaugh.

Of course, this conversation never actually happened, and Palin continued to espouse the same Constitutional conservatism as Limbaugh. Limbaugh's influence on the GOP and, to larger extent, the philosophy of conservatism, grew larger than ever. The result was a 2010 mid-term win of astounding proportions with the prospect of total repudiation of Obama and all he stood for in 2012.

Rush is the singular responsible entity for conservative media today. His influence is what has created the paradigm shift that has changed the political landscape of America. He is as much a part of the Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Republican majorities that today dominate legislative, judicial, statehouse, state legislatures, and Congress, bedeviling President Obama, as any other factor. He is a force of nature, he is an American, and he belongs to us.

For six years, between 1988 and 1994, Limbaugh toiled as the sole conservative voice.

In 1994, when the Republicans pulled out a huge win, it was a major repudiation of the Clintons and the longstanding Democrat hold on both the House and Senate. In 1995, conservative talk radio spread. Ken "The Black Avenger" Hamblin, G. Gordon Liddy, Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, and a host of other local and national shows suddenly replaced music, sports and often liberal opinion on radios from coast to coast, most syndicated nationally.

Ken Hamblin called himself the "Black Avenger." Operating out of Denver, he represented the new "black conservative" movement, which unfortunately has never materialized among blacks, but in a weird twist on affirmative action has become extremely popular with whites. Hamblin proposed a book with the questionable title Please Don't Feed the Blacks, and was excoriated by the "brothers" for selling out. In the mean time, he doled out intelligence, patriotism, decency and common sense in huge doses, not concerned with any lack of so-called "street cred." Larry Elder followed Hamblin's lead as a black conservative on KABC, the former L.A. sports station that has been conservative ever since.

G. Gordon Liddy drove the liberals as batty as Rush, because he was an official Republican "bad guy," the man behind Watergate. So what did he do? He drove a fancy sports car with the license plates, "H20GATE." Liddy, like Oliver North, made no effort to hide behind his official actions, and was elevated to high status by the opinion of millions of American citizens who felt what he did was actually good. In Liddy's case, people view Watergate as something Kennedy and Johnson had done, and in light of the "civil war" atmosphere in the streets, and the desire not to let the Kennedys steal another election, the break-in was almost justified.

Liddy played to highly macho sensibilities, was extremely sexual, loved guns, had a Pattonesque view of warfare, and took on a conspiratorial, partisan view of the Clintons and Obama. He was nobody's fool, speaking several languages, and his education was first rate. He also had his pet peeves, such as "prison guards," who he had low regard for because they were his overseers when he served time.

Rush gave Sean Hannity his start, when he filled in for him. He was the most traditional, straightforward of the Republican hosts. Hannity was a good Catholic boy from Long Island, very strict and proper in his views regarding language, religion, morality, family values and the proper treatment of women. He was not afraid to have liberals on his show, and he was respectful towards them, drawing them in and, frankly, learning from them. His show lacked the fireworks of Savage or Liddy, and the factual evidence presented by Rush or Michael Reagan. It became slightly bland at times. Hannity co-hosted a Fox News program called Hannity and Colmes, with liberal counterpart Alan Colmes, then just The Sean Hannity Show. He is well suited for TV in appearance and smooth delivery. Colmes is a good man, but one felt a little sorry for him because, especially during the height of the Bush Presidency, the conservatives were winning most of the battles. His attempts to oppose them, to meet the show's debate-style format, left him grasping. Hannity needed to tone down his gloating just a little bit, but he was a gentleman (as was Colmes).

Michael Reagan is the former President's adopted son. Unlike his offbeat brother Ron, he is rock solid. Michael was totally unflappable, and loyal to his father in the manner of a true believer. His greatest trait was research and total knowledge of issues, including the most arcane policies, legislation, budgetary matters, and the like. He managed to dispense this while staying interesting, although he did occasionally go over his listeners' heads.

Bill O'Reilly is a TV star on Fox News. His foray into talk radio was met with mixed reviews. O'Reilly may be the most opinionated of all the opinionators (with the possible exception of Rush). He is an Irish Catholic from the Boston area. His views are less conservative and more oriented towards common sense. He bills himself as an independent or a libertarian, which is the official line of Elder and Savage, as well. Like Savage, he criticizes the Republicans and makes a point of not walking in lock step with the party, which Hannity does and perhaps Reagan appeared to do. O'Reilly's "non-partisan" assessment of himself is the party line of Fox News, which is accused of conservative bias. Like Fox, O'Reilly's approach walks a relatively new line. He calls his TV show, The O'Reilly Factor, a "no spin zone," asserting that only facts are allowed no matter how it plays out. O'Reilly is definitely conservative, but he is also right most of the time, which begs the question, If something that is right is considered conservative, then is it conservative or just right?

Some conservatives got irritated with O'Reilly because he calls it against the Republicans when he sees it that way. One can imagine that he would have jumped all over Nixon during Watergate. His show coincided with the Clintons, who were such easy targets. The Bush Presidency was easy to support, but when things went south O'Reilly found fault with them. O'Reilly was by no means a supporter of President Obama, but amid great vitriol and anger expressed by conservatism towards him, O'Reilly remained the most temperate.

What sets O'Reilly aside from Rush in particular is his attachment to non-political issues, especially involving children. He is seen as the champion of ordinary people, which fits with his blue-collar background (although his education, which includes places like Harvard, is top notch). O'Reilly is a bit full of himself. He takes himself way too seriously. Of course, there is no doubt that he is a power in this country.

Laura Ingraham is an attractive blonde whose good looks make her a regular substitute on Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, but her droll humor, grasp of issues, and unabashed patriotism shines through on radio.

Mark Levin was an attorney in the Reagan Administration and a genuine Constitutional scholar who authored the finest books on conservative legal principles. Men in Black (2005) unmasked terrible Supreme Court rulings like Roe V. Wade. Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America (2012) stripped all veneer of respectability off political move after move by President Obama. However, if Obama is beaten in 2012 and the conservatives ever ascend to heights of power and popularity comparable to Levin's hero, President Reagan, Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto (2009) and Michelle Malkin's Culture of Corruption (2009) will stand out as a modern "Battle of Midway" in this longstanding struggle. Both books came out with the new President astride the world like a liberal colossus. At the time, despite being cutting and brilliant, both seemed like John the Baptist crying in the wilderness. But one by one, the accusations and truths pointed out by both these intellects of the Right exposed the Obama Administration, coming to light more and more leading to the 2012 election.

Levin is particularly irritating. He has a bombastic style and cutting, scratchy voice that, if aimed at liberals is filled with partisanship, absent any good feeling or curbing not only of criticism, but of mocking, outright attack. However, his academic credentials are so extraordinary that he is hard to fight against. Levin uses facts as his anvil, the courts of law his special battleground. He posed a particular challenge to President Obama because he would propose a law, a mandate or a policy in the morning, only to have Levin that very afternoon use history, law, precedent and common sense to totally cut it to shreds. Liberals complain that they have nobody like Levin on their side. Conservatives counter they have nobody like Levin because Levin is right and, since liberals are not right, this is why they do not have somebody in the right on their side. Consequently, that is why conservatives, of their own free will, choose not to be liberals.

Dennis Miller "converted" to conservatism after a lifetime on the Left following the 9/11 attacks. He was a particularly erudite, sophisticated comic and actor, with a very foul mouth. Miller did a stint as a color commentator on Monday Night Football, adding tremendous wit and cultural reference to his analysis. He seemed to literally "see the light" after 9/11 and became a regular guest on The O'Reilly Factor, even touring the country with Bill O'Reilly. He did occasional comedy specials to conservative audience on HBO, which despite its penchant for Left-wing fare was almost schizophrenic in its balancing this with sometime conservative views. Miller's radio show is political but filled with cultural references, particularly films and music. Only The Savage Nation is as varied, straying from straight politics, as much as Miller's program.

Glenn Beck is a very Christian fellow who constantly advocates that people "return to God" in seeking answers to the world's problems. He uses history as well as anybody and seems to see things from a very spiritual perspective. He warns of a return to Communism, which he does not see as a threat in the old Marxist mold, but as a pernicious evil manifesting itself in different guises. He points out liberal malefactors of the past, including the Darwinian off-shoots of Margaret Sanger, Malthusianism, and George Bernard Shaw, who advocated before Adolf Hitler that "undesirables" should be euthanized. His exposition of Obama aides Van Jones and Anita Dunn (who called Mao Tse-tung her "hero") got those people fired and stirred up a huge controversy. The Left despises him and mocks the fact he seems to find Marxism everywhere, but carefully demonstrates that policies of modern day Left-wingers parallels economic policies of . . . past Marxists. He also compared Obama to Hitler, a very dangerous and, at first at least, seemingly crazing idea. Then he compared the propaganda techniques of Joseph Goebbels to those used by the Obama team, finding chilling parallels of demonization win the Alkinskyite tactics. MediaMatters.org particularly went after Beck, but efforts to silence him have not worked. He frustrates his enemies by always emerging stronger.

While conservative talk radio has played an enormous role in the post-Reagan years, it has also created a backlash against it. The nation is terribly divided, more so than any time since the Civil War. While the medium has undoubtedly created many conservative converts and "Rush babies," as Limbaugh refers to kids who grew up listening to him and others, crediting these voices with their political development, it must be pointed out that some were turned off by their angry, loud vitriol. It has enlightened many who did not understand how they were being affected by liberalism, almost like being in a pot of hot water, not realizing it was boiling until they were too numbed to get out. Its greatest affect has probably been in turning people away from the liberals, more so than galvanizing a big Republican constituency. However, it has mirrored some of the GOP's greatest electoral triumphs (1994, 2002, 2004). While it did not prevent President Clinton from winning twice and the election of President Obama, it coalesced opposition to them better than any previous force. While it cannot be verified, conservative talk radio is probably the biggest reason Obama might not be not re-elected in 2012.

It is by no means a monolith, however. Intense criticism of Republican policies, officials and candidates, particularly President George W. Bush and 2012 candidate Mitt Romney, frustrated many listeners who say such talk hurts GOP chances. Many also wish there was some coordination between the different hosts. O'Reilly and Miller work together. Limbaugh gave Hannity his opportunity. Hannity and Levin are close friends. O'Reilly has promoted Beck, but appears to consider Limbaugh a rival. Savage is on the outs with almost all of them, except for Laura Ingraham (the only woman, she gets along with them). Limbaugh once called Savage "a nut." Savage, who paid some fealty to Rush before that, did not hide his disdain for him after that. Hannity and Levin apparently conspired against Savage in some capacity, and Savage despises both of them. There is rivalry over ratings and book sales, particularly between Savage, O'Reilly and Levin. Savage constantly complains how O'Reilly, Hannity and Fox News do not interview him to promote his bestsellers. Many Republican officials will not go on some of these shows, most notably Savage's. One wonders why there is not a convention or coordination of some kind since, in the end, they all wanted the same thing: conservative ascendance and power, liberals out, Obama defeated.

Savaged!

"Paranoia, the destroyer." The lyrics come from a band Dr. Michael Savage apparently likes, because he uses a song by The Kinks, "Living on a Thin Line." It is about how the British Empire, after all their struggles, wars and sacrifices, are now a shell of their once proud self. A caution for a great nation called America.

Dr. Savage is paranoid. There are mighty forces arrayed against him. Shadowy conspiracies, enemies plotting his demise, and all he holds dear. He does not want his picture taken. He calls you, you do not call him. His phone number is blocked. He does not want his email address shown to anybody. Nobody knows what his wife looks like. He owns several residences and rotates where he lives, apparently to confuse those who might seek to harm him. Where he broadcasts from is a mystery. He might be in San Francisco, Marin County, possibly in Florida? Oregon maybe? There is really not even a public mailing address for his radio program. Even his show's producer goes by a literary name, Beowulf.

Oh, one more thing: his paranoia is totally valid. This is a man who if his descriptions are only 50 percent accurate is the most qualified man not to be hired by academia. A man who once had his home address broadcast on air by a radical Left-winger who told his listeners when Savage entered the same studio, "I hear the white sheets rustling," a KKK reference, and then told his audience to go to his house and make life bad for his family. This is a man targeted by Islamic "thought police" at the height of the War on Terrorism; considered enemy number one (or close to it) by political factions trying to get the FCC to institute a "fairness doctrine" forcing him off the air; fired from a TV gig at MSNBC after approximately 10 seconds because he failed to bow at the altar of the gay lobby, which views him about the way a certain sailor named Ahab viewed a certain large white mammal of the seas; is considered an official enemy of blacks and Latinos, the sacred cows of modern American politics; lives with an entire political party (the Democrats) who if left to their own devices would go all Pol Pot on his you-know-what; is barely more tolerated by the Republican Establishment; is persona non grata on Fox News, left out of the fraternity of conservative talk show hosts, and oh, one last thing: is actually banned from America's best friend and ally, the nation of Winston Churchill and the "special relationship," Great Britain, his name put on a list, like something Laurence Olivier would come up with in Spartacus, along with skinheads, murders and the lowest kind of scum.

Yes, he is paranoid, you would be too, and Dr. Michael Savage, who "meets stress head on," has gotten the last laugh. His enemies are left to weep and gnash their teeth.

"I'm a shunned figure in the media, yet I have a very powerful radio show and I'm a bestselling author over and over again," says Dr. Savage. He likes it that way. It is in many ways the key to his success; like his literary hero Jack Kerouac, the misunderstood outsider who shuns much of the material trappings his success has brought him in favor of pedestrian pleasures; good spaghetti, cold beer, a great movie on television. He is an Everyman who is also so complex his life story should be a full-length biography, a documentary, maybe even a movie if Hollywood would dare (which they will not, at least not until they get to the H.L. Mencken bio-pic first).

He is brusque, hard to like, pushy, very impatient; then seconds later formally polite and cooperative to a fault. He suffers fools badly (seemingly assuming all are fools?), is easily exasperated and put upon; then just as quickly, efficiently fulfills all requests. At once he protests that he has no time, then gives of his time with generosity of spirit. He is very shy, yet robustly self-important with a huge ego he readily admits to and says he could not succeed at his profession without. He is right. He hides details of his life then, a few hours later on the air, lets it all hang out for millions of listeners.

Rome of the New Republic. "Everyone walked around knowing that New York was the center of the world and that America was the center of the world; New York was the center of the center," Dr. Savage says of his childhood as Michael Weiner, in the Bronx and Queens. "That was the attitude then . . .

"I'll never forget it personally as long as I live," Dr. Savage says of the Atomic bomb. "I ran down the street with the newspaper screaming, 'The world is coming to an end, the world is coming to an end.' Somehow it affected me deeply. Some probably thought I was a nut. Some thought, as I have described in the Bible, ' . . . your young shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams.'

"I hope I wasn't a prophet but the fact of the matter is that ushered in again an existential cloud of the world ending over us in a few minutes, which we've all lived with ever since. Think about that one. Prior to the Atomic weapon, nobody perceived the entire world could end in a few seconds, in a few minutes."

His father was an immigrant shopkeeper without a formal education, but he read the newspaper every day and was astute on political affairs. He told his son he voted Democrat because they looked out for "the little guy."

"My father in his little store, I mean, without using words such as honor, told me never to cheat on anyone, and if somebody didn't like something, take the object back and give them their money back, that kind of thing," Dr. Savage recalls when asked when he first grasped the meaning of "honor." "I think you have to teach it through actions, let's put it that way; or learn it through actions."

New York in the 1950s was "Sinatra swank," an era of big bands, jazz, Yankees dominance, mob "wise guys," racial awakenings via movies like West Side Story, blues music, and the like. These cultural touchstones created a huge melting pot of ideas and common perceptions that play out on his show.

"That period of time was quite unique, and it produced vibrant men – the ones that came home, the ones that survived – full of life, full of zest," says Dr. Savage. "America was a nation that had just produced a major victory, wasn't it? So the nation was tremendously confident in itself, tremendously confident in its vision for the future, and look at the amazing things that were produced in the post-World War II era, from design to inventions, I don't have to list them. Look what burst forth on the scene."

Michael Savage attended Jamaica High, near where Shea Stadium was eventually built.

"When I was in high school, you know, I was in with the typical crowd of kids," he recalls. "They were all kind of driven in some way, in one way or another, in that many of them were the sons of immigrants . . . you know, I was the son of an immigrant, I don't think they were, but they were driven and were severely hard driving kids."

From there it was on to Queens College. On his show he discusses the education at this average public university then as being better than what Left-wing "ethnic studies" majors are receiving at Harvard today. Considering the average college education is often taught on-line at Cambridge the same as College of Marin, he is probably not far removed from reality.

At a young age, Dr. Savage was motivated to write when he read about a vivacious French teenage girl who wrote a blistering bestseller that sold enough for her to buy a black XK120 Jaguar (semi-modernized in the French film Swimming Pool and the Showtime series Californication). From there Jack Kerouac influenced him. A classmate described On the Road as "this crazy wild story where somebody just drives across America and has a lot of fun and has a lot affairs, so we all read it," he recalled. "You know, we didn't know quite what it was about, other than having escaped responsibility and getting stoned and driving around in a car across the countryside, and meeting beautiful women, and having affairs in Mexico."

Kerouac was "the same type of character" as Savage, "introspective, loner, outsiders, but not shunning action when necessary," who's influence on him was extended later in his writings of Marin County, California, a far away land that Dr. Savage romanticized as a place where deer, unheard of in Queens, wandered into backyards. Kerouac was a devout Catholic who tried to have his deceased brother beatified. Savage ascribed the same saintly qualities on his own brother, Jerome, who passed away young. He also pointed out that Kerouac, "who had been a great, great role model of mine," was a former football player and Navy man, supported President Richard Nixon, "shunned the entire, the entire Left-wing (B.S.)" and "was a die-hard anti-Communist, anti-liberal."

Ernst Hemingway's "heroic" characters further shaped the young man, still known as Michael Weiner, morphing with his sense of himself as a New Yorker who lived in a city representing the greatest of all empires.

"Again, there was a sheen of bravado in his persona that appealed to me greatly as a young man; the safaris, women in the tent, the khaki clothing, you know what I'm saying?" Dr. Savage says. "That kind of whole imagery, of the heroic imagery . . ." There was another aspect of their influence.

"Now remember, a lot of those guys in that era, whether they be Hemingway, Kerouac or <Henry> Miller, they were all heavy, heavy drinkers, and they boasted about being alcoholics," he says. "That was the thing of the literary '40s, '50s, the drinking, right? . . . Again, that was a negative influence in that regard: 'Oh, I'm gonna be a wild writer, I'm gonna get drunk in bars.' But it was stupid, just stupid."

The same appeal as Kerouac: "there was a nobility in Hemingway's writing, and a nobility in his characters, the heroic male who was usually a loner, usually misunderstood, somewhat introverted or, shall I say, introspective, was extremely appealing to me because it matched my character. So I was drawn to that same type of personality."

J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye spoke to his generation, but Dr. Savage is quick to point out that Salinger, like Kerouac, was a World War II veteran of both D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge; facts the liberal literary establishment omits because "it would make him look too American."

Perhaps more influential was Henry Miller; not Tropic of Cancer, the graphic sex of which was mostly made up, but Black Spring, "and if you read Black Spring, you read one of the greatest books ever . . . I read that book over and over again. As I got older I read it again, especially when I was stranded in Fairfax for many years, I came to understand Black Spring even better, because I lived through a gigantic Black Spring."

"Allen Ginsberg was very influential on me, because I confused him as a prophet," says Dr. Savage. "There he was, the rabbinic figure, Jewish voice, Jewish name, right? Deep, sonorous voice, he was devil incarnate, probably one of the most evil men in modern American history, like a Rasputin of the literary world. Not that he personally hurt me in any manner, but I got to know him very well in the East Village. I thought he was kind of a demi-god rabbi."

Kerouac "hated Ginsberg as the devil incarnate – said he misled him in his early life," says. Dr. Savage. He did not address the issue, but according to literary gossip, this era of which is plentiful, Ginsberg tried to turn Kerouac into a Communist, and after plying him with drugs and alcohol, had some kind of sexual tryst with him. William Burroughs was also alleged to be homosexual, as was Gore Vidal. According to many who insist homosexuality is not a trait all gays are 100 percent born with, these men tried to ply young writers to "their side" through homosexuality, which apparently Kerouac hated Ginsberg for. There is further rumor that a well-publicized on-air fight between the conservative William F. Buckley and the liberal Gore Vidal was over this issue.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the famed City Lights Bookstore in North Beach that influenced many of the Beatniks of this era, was "another fraud, one of the biggest fakers in the world, another one who makes believe he's down with the people."

A.E. Housman wrote very dark poetry: "On your midnight pallet lying . . ." Savage reads from A Shropshire Lad. "When I was one-and-twenty, I heard a wise man say, 'Give crowns and pounds and guineas, but give not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies, but keep your fancy free.' But when I was one-and-twenty, no use to talk to me.' How's that for a poem? It was very much like Plato wrote about in his Dialogues, where he takes a slave kid and through logic shows the reader that the reader knew mathematics in a previous life, because he had logic, okay? So I read poetry in a previous life type of thing," not unlike one of Dr. Savage's heroes, General George Patton.

"Nobody's ever heard of the Housman story, that's an important part of this interview," continues Dr. Savage. "That's because as a young man, who had a sense of mortality, I was going through the sufferings of young angst, where you over emphasize your own value, where we're all so tragic, because we're gonna die one day, right?"

Norman Mailer never touched him, but instead Dr. Savage later felt "he was a seminal figure for the same self-promotion I'm famous for. I mean, I'm pretty clear on that, because if I don't promote myself, Steve, who will?"

He calls Democracy in America "over discussed," a sign of how much better read he is than most of the "experts." Lastly, the young Weiner was an associate of famed LSD guru Dr. Timothy Leary. It was the local prosecutor, G. Gordon Liddy, who gained initial fame by busting Leary before his own Watergate imbroglio and later, like Michael Savage, a successful career in conservative talk radio.

Dr. Savage's tremendous literary expertise is matched by his love of great classical painting, sculpture and music - which he readily compares to rap music, letting the comparison speak for itself - movies, and television dramas. This, along with his great knowledge of history, ability to quote the Bible extensively, and far superior academic credentials, separate him from most of the conservative talkmeisters like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, G. Gordon Liddy, Glenn Beck, and many others. These men tend to be policy wonks whose expertise is politics or the law. Dr. Savage's eclectic interests draw a much wider variety of erudite, educated listeners to his show. The Left places forth the fiction that Right-wing audiences are troglodytes or "hillbillies," but that is untrue. Only Dennis Miller's variety of interests is comparable.

The Beatniks began America's degeneracy, which Dr. Savage has "long played with the idea of writing a long essay on . . . who destroyed America's psyche . . . and it was a troika; it was Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and in the legal sphere, he made the law into a mockery, it was William Kunstler." When Dr. Savage refers to 1960s civil rights frauds that were in it only to "meet girls," he means Kunstler.

"Now you could also enter into that troika the women's movement, because it was not based upon equality, it was based upon hating men. There's a difference between equality, which we are all for, and hatred of the male. Those elements shifted the nation from optimism and production into something entirely different; looking over your shoulder, questioning yourself, doubting the history of the nation, that's the result of only a very few people, a handful of revolutionaries."

But none of the influences effected him nearly as much as what happened in the late 1970s. He rejected Ginsberg and Leary, but was still probably a "liberal" by the standards of the day. He worked as a social worker, where his "clients" made more money on government welfare checks than he did on government pay checks. He became active in the growing field of herbal nutrition, becoming a legitimate pioneer on the subject who lived and studied on South Pacific islands, providing valuable research and writing six books.

Married with two young children, he earned two master's degrees, in medical botany and medical anthropology, which he points out were not "in ethnic studies, or Chicano studies, or black studies, or women's studies, where they grant degrees in such rubbish."

The professors told him he needed a "union card," a doctorate, in order to become a full-fledged professor. He earned one in three years from what he called "the greatest university in America," the University of California, Berkeley. What happened next defined now-Dr. Michael Savage. Whether there is any exaggeration or hype to his description, it is immaterial, for it describes a time and new way of thinking in America that has divided this great nation like few other issues.

Getting a Ph.D. in three years, he says, is almost impossible, which may or may not be true, but to Michael Savage's perspective – no scholarship, not originally a California resident, not a rich man, the pressure of supporting his family - it was. He claims he received 200 rejection letters

"Why?" he asks rhetorically. "Certainly not because I didn't have the academic credentials. I had committed the greater crime. I was not born a black, a Hispanic, and I was not an illegal or a preferred minority. And I wasn't a woman. Because 'affirmative action' had clicked in, where 'white males need not apply.' And I must tell you, Steven, when your . . . 36 years old, and you've killed yourself to support yourself without scholarships to get two master's degrees and a Ph.D., and you have two young children, and you're not hired because you're of the wrong race, or sexual orientation, it tends to make you think very hard about your society, and then you find out that society is all twisted. I'll never forget as long as I live what the ACLU published in those years, the darkest years of my life: 'some people will have to put their lives on hold so that others may advance.' That was the ACLU's writings on the issue of not hiring white males. I think that pretty much defines when I became a conservative."

Few issues – Alger Hiss vs. Whittaker Chambers, McCarthyism, Vietnam – have created a greater schism. Before this time, blacks, Latinos and minorities got the relative shaft in the United States. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society attempted to rectify that. There is a very large political element at work then and now that simply says the Michael Savages of this world – whether WASP, Irish Catholic, Jewish – had it made once and they must now be forced to the proverbial back of the bus so the ancestral sons and daughters of the dark-skinned, impoverished and plundered can take their place. To the white men suddenly denied what they believe to be their American birthright, no amount of logic, compassion or guilt over past injustices can legitimate this policy. Some even go further and point out that a black man who was never captured and enslaved in America either died of war or disease in Africa, or his ancestors, if they survived, is probably in the torture chambers of a Robert Mugabe, or an Idi Amin . . . while the ancestor of the slave became a jazz singer in New Orleans, or a basketball player in New York, or a welfare recipient in L.A. A simplified view, but not an invalid one.

"I should add a footnote to that little story; I've done very well in life, financially," states Dr. Savage. "But I've crawled over broken glass, I've rolled over hot coals, I've had people scar my body and my soul, but I've done well. But what about the millions of white men who haven't been as fortunate and didn't have as much drive as I had, who are fine people, who have the degrees and have the brains, but were locked out, permanently underemployed, so that lesser qualified, lesser talented, lesser intelligent people can fill the ranks of bureaucracies, academia, and corporate books. Take a look at America today, as a result. Just take a look at it."

The Bakke Supreme Court decision of 1978 slightly alleviated the burdens of "affirmative action," but apparently did not prevent Dr. Michael Savage from entering his "wilderness years." Having read Kerouac's Dharma Bums, he gravitated to Marin County, where the writer spent some formative years, and whose scenes of deer in backyards enticed the man. Oddly, while Kerouac influenced Savage from a conservative point of view, his Bay Area connection, which infuses, most of his work, is credited in large part for the area's tilt to the Left.

A loser. Bitter. An angry white male. These might describe Dr. Savage during these "wilderness years," but the facts do not agree. He is a fighter. He struggled like a character out of Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot, or Hemingway; any of a number of the many books that formed his character. Like his father, the little shopkeeper who died young, broken down by hard work and stress. While this unknown man would someday be sought out by Presidential candidates like Mitt Romney for advice, consultation and even approval, it was his academic record, the books he wrote on nutrition, that make him the proudest.

Unhired? He pursued his profession anyway; studying, writing and becoming published. In granting an interview for this story, and in his daily radio show, his political views, his opportunity to lash out and stomp on the memory of the many losers who once posed obstacles to his success, do not dominate his thinking. Instead he insists on literally reading, word-for-word, from one of his theses on the healing power of plants and natural alternatives for the prevention of disease.

"So, that important, that's a big part of my life that someday somebody will remember," he states.

When Bill Clinton was elected President, a tremendous conservative backlash swept a tsunami of Republicans into elected office during the 1994 midterms. Much credit for this was given to a chubby former disc jockey with no college degree, fired multiple times, a one-time Kansas City Royals employee who made so little he "shopped" at 7-11 because they accepted his credit card, kept alive via minimum payments. His name was Rush Limbaugh. This certainly seemed a strange conundrum to Michael Savage, Ph.D., M.A., but something clicked and he created a tape of a proposed conservative talk show, not unlike Limbaugh's. He sent it to some 200 radio stations. Local San Francisco station KGO hired him. Challenge number one, coming up.

KGO's star was a lapsed Catholic named Bernie Ward, who hosted something called God Talk, which did not attempt to dissuade atheists from not believing.

"That S.O.B. tried to kill my radio career from the day I started," states Dr. Savage. "I'd be on the air and I could smell him, he stunk so bad in the other studio at KGO, and he'd say, 'I hear the white sheets rustling,' that S.O.B. He personally stank. I don't know if you know that, but nobody would go in the studio after he had been in there, until a cleaning crew had been in there, and deloused the room. He was physically, and this is an important point; you know they say cleanliness is the closest thing to Godliness! This man stank; he would leave garbage, food on the floor, no one could be around him, and look how he wound up. I have found that people who are physically repulsive are spiritually degenerate as well. It doesn't mean that everyone that's clean is good, but this whole Occupy Movement is filled with Bernie Wards."

The story of Bernie Ward and Dr. Michael Savage mirrors his entire career, his life. First, Ward gave out Dr. Savage's home address on the air, urging his listeners – night zombies, druggies, degenerates – to go there and "protest" his . . . existence. But Savage ascended to the heights of power and prestige on the American political-media stage. Ward continued to "preach" to his night zombies, druggies and degenerates, until a few years ago he was arrested, tried, convicted and jailed for lascivious, pornographic acts involving minors.

Ward's scandal received scant attention in the Bay Area media, which covered it up. Dr. Savage pointed out that had this happened to him, or any conservative anywhere, it would have been broadcast from the mountaintops with the full force of whatever voice CNN and the New York Times have not lost to Fox, the Wall Street Journal . . .and Michael Savage. Thus did Bernie Ward have to sit in a jail cell knowing that the man he accused of being in "white sheets" (KKK) was single-handedly making sure that, over the course of a few months, some 10 or 20 million American citizens were clearly hearing the details of his home-pederast phone calls to a sex mistress and his lewd chat room postings, mainly about how he masturbated while watching the male friend of his son.

Beginning in 1995, conservative talk radio exploded. Joining Limbaugh was Ken "the Black Avenger" Hamblin, President Ronald Reagan's son Michael Reagan, G. Gordon Liddy, Larry Elder, Sean Hannity, and Dr. Michael Savage. The competition was harder than academia, but this time, absent "affirmative action" politics, allowed to thrive in the free marketplace of ideas, the only judge the American public and the advertisers who wanted to air commercials on his show, Savage exploded to the very top. By 2001 he was one of the most popular, most controversial, most-listened to talk hosts of all time.

After 9/11, Dr. Savage found himself at "war" with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), who he and most on the Right consider a front for jihad just as Sinn Fein was a front for the IRA's bombing campaign against Protestants. For those who do not listen and understand Dr. Savage, he is castigated as a man who hates Muslims. This is fiction. He gets a fair number of Muslim callers who agree with much of what he says.

"What they hate most about this country is cultural degeneracy," explains Dr. Savage. "A Muslim family man who is religious and is not a fanatic does not want porn, does not want his daughter to end up like Britney Spears, or his son like Jeffrey Katzenberg, tries to limit the effluence of the Hollywood sewer pipe, detests Western culture, which has become the antithesis of Western Civilization. He might embrace the ideals of Western Civilization, such as religious tolerance, but all he hears is degeneracy, and does not want his daughter to look like a Hollywood slut."

Next on the litany of liberal accusations is that Dr. Savage is a racial bigot who hates blacks because he was denied a professorship in 1978. Again, it requires somebody to listen to him over a long time to get the whole picture, but that picture clearly says he is not. It requires a suspension of disbelief also since he is an unabashed admirer of African-Americans Herman Cain, Congressman Allen West, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He is not immune from criticism of so-called "Uncle Tom" black conservatives, finding former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to have been out of her depth.

However, this brings up a very interesting point applying to Dr. Savage's views not only of Islam, but of blacks, gays, illegals, and liberalism. His detractors use the words "bigotry" and "prejudice." Consider, however, that bigotry is defined in part as "devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices," and that prejudice is based on the concept of "pre-judging." Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."

Basing Dr. Savage on these definitions, consider first that he is listened to daily by some 13 million human beings, only to grow and gain popularity. Obviously great "light" shines on what he does, and certainly has not "contracted," as his nemesis Bernie Ward did when the light shone upon his activities. But bigotry and prejudice require a person to be stupid, to lack knowledge, to judge thing before he learns the truth about them. Nothing could be further from Michael Savage's truth. He provides astounding dissertations on the history of Islam no other talk host comes close to, so he certainly is not ignorant of them.

Asked if in the history of the world, are dark-skinned, indigenous people better off for coming into contact with white Europeans, or worse off, Dr. Savage replies this is "a loaded question," but answers with facts and knowledge, not ignorance or "pre-judging."

"Look at Haiti," he says. "Is Haiti the most impoverished island nation in the Western hemisphere? Yes, is that correct or incorrect? Yes, look at the history of Haiti. Haiti is the only nation, island nation, to have successfully fought against colonialism, and successfully evicted the colonialists, their slave masters from the island. That's a fact. What happened after they evicted the white man from their island? Take a look at Haiti today. They did not have the capacity to support themselves, sustain themselves. The same is true in ex-Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe under Mugabe. They kicked the white man out of this nation called Rhodesia, which was once a food exporter, and is now the basket case of Africa. Can't raise enough food to feed its own people. Sorry."

Facts are . . . facts. They exist and are much different from "pre-judging" and ignorance, which is the basis of real bigotry.

Liberalism? Unlike Limbaugh, Levin, Hannity, Beck and others who are lifelong "true believer" conservatives, Dr. Savage – like David Horowitz – lived in the "belly of the beast," and experienced the philosophies of Ginsberg, Leary, San Francisco, and Marin County up close and personally. "Affirmative action" was not a theory to him; it was a scythe cutting down the hopes and dreams of his lifetime.

Gays? Only regular listeners really know Dr. Savage is almost a social liberal, in that he could care less how people live, but does care when they force him to call Mike and Tom Mr. and Mrs.; force their way into his home via TV shows that glorify the gay couple as the wise folks, the ones to turn to for relationship advice, superior child-rearers, more tolerant, and above his traditions. He says he is not religious, yet has devoted his life to seeking God and knows the Bible – which he quotes at great length on air – back and forth.

"I once read a book 30 years ago called Peace of Mind, by a former rabbi, who wrote that if he believed God was omnipotent, he would cease believing immediately, because there's so much tragedy on Earth, right?" he says. "So he said if you believe God is omnipotent and controlled everything, he would cease believing in God . . . So he definitely believed that God was omni-present, not omnipotent, meaning he's everywhere but he doesn't control everything. What's the good of a God like that, you may say. . .

"Evil exists so we know what goodness is. That's what the mystical rabbis teach, that without evil there can be no good. So the evil exists in order for us to understand what good is. And we should not shun evil. We should understand it, in order to understand what goodness is," pointing out the "evil impulse" is in every man, "And the object of the evil impulse is to overcome it." Man is in "bondage" to God. Atheists are wrong to call Christians "hypocrites" for sinning, since all men are sinners and a Godly life is an "ideal" to be strived for, not attained.

"But what if you never try to reach that ideal, then what are you? Then you're the Left, they're the ones who defecate in public places, so that's not hypocrisy, that's depravity. Who teaches these things any more, Steven? No one teaches these things any more."

His stance on illegal immigration can be summed in three words: borders, language, culture.

All of this landed Dr. Savage on a list of rapists, murders and brutallions actually banned from Great Britain, a country he greatly admires. His many legal attempts at removing his name from their "no fly zone" have, despite the election of the conservative David Cameron, gone for naught. There are few more egregious examples of liberal antipathy towards actual free speech than this ban, which has lasted for years now, possibly emanating from Dr. Savage's tirade against a gay criticizer who he told should, "Get AIDS and die, you pig." Sometimes he, as Dennis Hopper said of Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, "goes too far," and perhaps as with the Kurtz character is "the first one to admit it," or not. As wrong as it might be to say such a thing, Michael Savage exists in a world in which Bill Maher calls conservative women "sluts," "whores," "c---s," and worse, while Leftist filmmakers make movies detailing how to assassinate George W. Bush; all merrily traveling about in willy-nilly manner, while he cannot legally visit Big Ben.

Dr. Savage has many Southern fans that share his "world view of how the world really should be," because of the way "the media shapes our mind into that world. Look at what just happened with gay marriage. They wanted us to believe that, 'Oh well, that's Neanderthal, everybody's in favor of gay marriage' . . . oh really, what happened in North Carolina, what happened every time it's been voted on in 31 states? No it's quite true that most of the world doesn't see the world the way the media portrays it, and so the guys in the South like an outspoken man whose willing to speak his mind in a clear, strong voice."

So Michael Savage is a darling of the Republican Party, right? Not so fast, Johnson. Dr. Savage excoriates many on the Right, including President George W. Bush, when he finds fault in them. His attitude towards Mitt Romney ranges from tepid hopefulness to outright frustration. He says the GOP establishment wants Barack Obama to be re-elected because their money all comes from the same place, their "bread buttered" on the same plate. His attitude on this and many like issues is cynical to the extreme, the view of a man who knows he lives in a world that can produce the Nazis and the Communists within a few years of each other. When the establishment wanted President Barack Obama's birth certificate issue to fade away, Dr. Savage interviewed people who said hospital officials in Hawaii covered up his birth in Kenya. Recently, he revealed a pamphlet from Obama's literary agent in 1991, stating the young author-hopeful was born in Kenya, then raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. Dr. Savage doubts it will be taken seriously, knowing nobody wants to call him a prophet. He likes the Tea Party, and loves to compare how they abide by laws and pick up after themselves, while the Occupy movement gets arrested, breaks thing, defecates in parks, rapes women, and spreads disease. The Tea Party has "self-respect." When he looks at Occupy he sees Bernie Ward, who he said literally had feces dripping from his orifice in the studio.

Dr. Savage finds great fault with other conservatives in the media. He calls Limbaugh "the golfer" after he said Dr. Savage was "a nut." Bill O'Reilly is derided as "the leprechaun," Sean Hannity as "the wall banger." Glenn Beck's academic credentials are pitiful, he states, and his animosity towards Mark Levin is palpable (from all accounts he is friends only with Laura Ingraham). There is some frustration among conservatives over these rivalries and jealousies, since the ultimate goal is to defeat President Obama and re-establish conservatism as the winning ideology of history. If all these powerful voices got together would that not further this goal? It does not seem likely to happen soon.

Speaking of defeating President Obama, Dr. Savage's latest book, Trickle Down Tyranny: Crushing Obama's Dream of the Socialist States of America, is his latest bestseller. It provides a blueprint first of President Obama's perceived failings and, worse from the conservative standpoint, successes; and then how to defeat him in November. Dr. Savage hopes it helps accomplish this goal as his last non-fiction bestseller, Trickle Up Poverty: Stopping Obama's Attack on Our Borders, Economy and Security, helped the Republicans win crushing mid-term victories in 2010. The Left despises Dr. Savage's success. He claims the New York Times manipulates their bestseller list so Dr. Savage's works are not rated as high as they actually are. Callers constantly tell stories of liberal booksellers who hide his books from major shelf placement, which he compares to the Nazi book burnings as an example of liberal hypocrisy against free speech. None of it matters. His success is the mote in their eyes, the pebble in their shoes.

He calls man-made "global warming" a hoax orchestrated by a "fraud," former Vice President Albert Gore, all to enrich himself. He compares the Nobel Prizes, Oscars, and Pulitzers that liberals honor each other with to the golden calf of the Old Testament. He agrees, with some hesitation, that Hugh Hefner is a pornographer who ruined men by "airbrushing" the "shiksa in the Vermont cabin, who was perfect and had perfect breath, right? Who smiled all the time . . . and never had a bad moment in her existence. Who could lift you out of your despair with one wink!" But Playboy centerfolds were "angels" compared to the "craven" sluts Larry Flynt created; silicone-breasted chicks whose only need is a roomful of men with "gigantic" equipment to anoint her with the devil's "holy water."

Perhaps his greatest complaint is corruption and liberal hypocrisy. He rails on and on about California's U.S. Senators Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi entering politics as middle class, leaving as "the wealthiest woman in Congress" (Pelosi). Nobody in the media comes close to capturing their essence like Dr. Savage when he quotes Isaiah in describing how, "The women of Zion are haughty, walking along with outstretched necks, flirting with their eyes, tripping along with mincing steps, with ornaments jingling on their ankles . . . As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths."

Dr. Savage despises Communism because 55 million were killed by Mao Tse-tung, 110 million by the ideology since 1917. He's funny that way. He is well-versed in Venona, which when Soviet archives were opened in the 1990s, revealed that many top Democrats in President Franklin Roosevelt's administration were paid Communist traitors.

He, like many on the Right, have a sense that while Communism was "officially" defeated by Ronald Reagan with the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and subsequent break-up of the Soviet Union, it continues in other forms: the ACLU; 1960s Communist fronts supported and financing much of the anti-war movement from Vietnam to Iraq; Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama and the cottage industry of race extortion; "global warming" as a perfect international mantra. He has devoted his career to exposing how their organizations are tied to each other; and how Communism, whether Soviet-controlled or home grown, has morphed into something that never dies, a kind of cancer on society opposing all traditions like Christianity, family, patriotism, military valor, and rugged individualism.

Asked to define it, he uses the word "rebellion," an interesting term that Biblical scholars often use to describe man's sinful nature in turning from God. Asked to explain further he insists he is not "religious" and does not "want to talk about metaphysics because I don't have an answer for any of that. I mean, I live in this world. I leave that to God and the experts. I have no answer. I mean, why does evil exist?"

Civilizations erode because of "comfort" more than decadence and "not paying attention to what's going on around you. Why struggle if you don't have to? Everybody seems to want a life of comfort and plenty. That seems to be the goal of civilizations," which he uses his in studies of animals – like Charles Darwin – as examples of.

He is probably a millionaire several times over from bestsellers and his number three-rated nationally-syndicated program, but he seems most proud of his Ph.D. and the obscure academic books he wrote in his "wilderness years." Instead of hob-knobbing with the rich and famous, he watches HBO and, therefore, provides the most concise cultural analysis of anybody on the air. He is a film expert who loves The Godfather and thought the acting in Training Day (Denzel Washington, 2001) was "astonishing." He loves noir and spy thrillers (Munich, The Good Shepherd). He despises Bill Maher and Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, decrying the "weak Jew" destroying a great religion by practically being what Hitler said they were. In this respect he speaks with knowledge because he has seen these programs. He loved the early years of The Sopranos and accurately predicts a show's demise after one or two episodes (Luck). He interviews ex-gangsters and "wise guys" (not just low level muscle but actual "button men"), CIA experts and movie directors.

He dispenses "life advice" and talks as much about nutrition and child rearing as politics. It is perhaps his greatest "last laugh," the Ph.D. unhired because "white males need not apply" discussing his chosen medical expertise to an audience of 13 million.

He is not always right, his predictions do not always come true, and he changes his mind constantly; savant-like in his train of thought, a stream of consciousness, some times synapses in the air. He has tapped into something substantially different from most of the other conservatives in the media, a fascination not just to Right-wingers but also to literate people with a love of history.

We live in the "information age." Today it seems everybody goes to college. People who study filmmaking from their youth make movies. Still, it seems the more we "know," the dumber we are. Movies are not as good today as they were when they were made by people who almost seemed to fall into the business by accident (think of roustabouts like Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen). Michael Savage is a throwback, when people read books and thought issues through instead of tweeting or posting.

"I'm an enigma within an enigma," he says, laughing (he has under layers of great seriousness a sparkling sense of humor). "I am the double Chinese fortune cookie. I am the DNA inside Rubik's cube. I hold the key to Houdini's locker. 'The key to Houdini's locker . . .' I am an enigma within an enigma."

He laughs more uproariously. "That's funny. Those are the bullet points."

Cable news takes over

During the period between 1994 and 1996, "conservative media" swept America. Before that, there was Rush Limbaugh vs. the world. All by himself he daily battled the New York "slimes," the Washington "compost," the Atlanta "urinal and constipational," meet the "depressed . . . slay the nation," the "Clinton news network," and all other forms of liberal media he blasted using humor and sarcasm, making fun of their solemnity. He was "having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have."

The Left figured they could wait him out, he was a phenomenon, a flash in the pain. He would get old, retire, depart for a retirement of golf and football. Limbaugh refused to go gently into that good night. He never went anywhere. But if his enemies felt he was just a Right-wing voice crying in the wilderness with a very loud bullhorn, alone, they were astounded to discover he created a vast new industry that could only be described as their worst nightmare. By 1994-95 the radio airwaves were filled with conservative talk show hosts, most of whom drew big ratings and were quite effective. Ken "the Black Avenger" Hamblin, Watergate figure G. Gordon Liddy, Sean Hannity in Atlanta, Michael Savage in San Francisco, of all places, were the beginning of a huge surge: conservative media. The left countered with Air America. It went bankrupt. Conservative talk radio got bigger and bigger and bigger, its ratings exploding wherever it was tried. A juggernaut.

Over time the Right consolidated an empire. Successful publications either slanted to the Right or fully doing its bidding ranged from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, Newsmax, the American Spectator, and others. Rupert Murdoch, a conservative Australian mogul, created Fox News in 1996. Limbaugh's influence was the greatest, and his personality remains so. Murdoch most likely would not have been able to do what he did without Limbaugh. He may not even have been inspired to do so. Limbaugh paved the path he trod, but once he trod it, Murdoch became the most powerful, influential mogul in the history of media.

At least in the beginning, Fox was "fair and balanced." Detractors said they were conservative, but that was because they just sounded that way after being dulled by liberal news since Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, who thrived when little competition was offered. Later Fox actually took a distinct right turn, but that was not until well after the start of the Iraq War in 2003, then more so in reaction to Barack Hussein Obama.

Fox became a ratings juggernaut. Cable television changed the whole dynamic of news delivery. It was a 24-hour stream. Viewers need not wait until six o'clock to sit down with a martini in time for a one-hour showing of the ABC World News. Murdoch eventually bought the New York Daily Post, HarperCollins Publishing, Fox studios, and numerous other media holdings. Whatever William Paley, Henry Luce, Katharine Graham, Otis Chandler, Arthur Sulzberger; whatever The Powers That Be once described by David Halberstam were, Rupert Murdoch now was times 10! An openly conservative man had power and was willing to use it to express a political point of view. The Left exploded in indignation. The right just replied that they had been doing it from their angle for decades, and it was all just a matter of "winning in the marketplace of ideas."

Fox News was a source of controversy, especially during the Iraq War. Fox came about in part because of the success of Rush, who exposed liberal media bias. In turn, various conservative publications, like Human Events, Newsmax and sister book publications like Regency sprouted up (or emerged from obscurity). Conservative writers became superstars, authoring bestsellers. The Clintons became a cottage industry of books detailing their crimes and alleged murders in Arkansas, their White House corruption, their sellout to China, illegal fundraising, and various derelictions of the public trust. Conservative writers and authors were matched with conservative magazines, newspapers and publishers, giving them a forum on conservative talk radio. The next step was to elevate them to the television screen.

By the mid-1990s, liberal media bias was no longer a "myth" or a complaint, but simply that with which was known by people who recognized facts. The conservatives had obviously shown themselves to be the driving force of American politics, first through Reagan, then in the post-Persian Gulf War period when George H.W. Bush had 91 percent approval ratings, and in the 1994 GOP sweeps. Clinton was President, but he was so divisive and the source of so much political criticism that he helped Fox more than hurt it. In fact, he made it what it was.

Conservative talk radio was a hit, so TV seemed to be the next logical step.

Murdoch bankrolled the operation and put the brilliant Republican media strategist, Roger Aisles, in charge. It was a hit from the beginning, with O'Reilly ascending to star status quickly.

The question has always been whether Fox is "conservative," biased to the Right, or "fair and balanced" journalism, as they advertise themselves. This again goes to the question not necessarily of politics, but of common sense. If a sports columnist covers the New York Yankees and writes "the Yankees are the greatest sports franchise in history," is he biased toward the Yankees or simply stating a fact? After all, all empirical evidence and fact backs up the claim. Fox covered the lies and abominations of Bill Clinton, the failure of the Democrat Party, and the contrast of successful Republican events. In simply stating the truth, which favors the conservatives, are they biased? Obviously, it is more complicated than that. But all things considered, the accusation of bias against Fox does not easily stick.

Like O'Reilly, the final judgment of Fox did not come until a Republican Administration really screwed up and deserved to take a beating. When that did happen to the Bush Administration, the network freely criticized its actions, mainly the expansion of Big Government and subsequent expansion of the debt.

What seems to have happened is that for decades, the media in all its forms was liberal. It was so liberal that the liberals in the media thought of themselves as moderate. After McCarthyism, and then again after Watergate, liberals dominated the journalism schools. They were out to right conservative "wrongs," and in the tradition of Woodward and Bernstein to bring down Republican big shots. Where the bias became obvious was when it contrasted with the country itself. In 1972, members of the New York media establishment were astonished that McGovern lost 49 states. Some said they did not know a single person who voted for Nixon. This was as telling as it gets. They operated in a bubble, a vacuum, completely unaware of what middle America thought.

Liberals promoted Democrat agendas and Democrat candidates, but despite their best efforts found themselves, almost to their astonishment, with Reagan. Reagan then actually used their medium, television, to take his case time after time to the American people, instead of using Congress or the media. Aisles was working for Reagan at that time. The Fox brainchild started then. Reagan could make a direct speech instead of submitting himself to the tender mercies of a de facto Democrat press conference or interview with a liberal media personality, all of which semi-resembled the "blame sessions" that British Prime Ministers have to give, by law, in Parliament.

The liberals realized their bias was not winning them the country. In fact it was working against them, but coming to this realization was not easy to accept. Like admitting the truth about Hiss, it was too ugly. So Murdoch and Aisles decided to simply make this fact known on its face. Thus Fox was born.

Fox has consistently kept themselves fair. They present both sides of issues and bring in a variety of guests from all sides of the political spectrum. Where the bias accusation comes into play is from the skewed perspective of liberals, who have been so far to the Left for so long that when they see moderation, it looks conservative to them. Their longstanding inability to connect with the American public is a symptom of the same liberal sickness that does not let them see Fox as balanced.

A perfect example was Hannity & Colmes. Liberals saw Hannity and decided the show was conservative, as if the liberal Colmes, who got equal time, and the guests, who were as likely to come from the Left as the right, were not even there. For years, typical forums on CBS News, or the morning talk shows, consisted of one conservative surrounded by liberals, like a Roman gladiator battling lions and swordsmen in a noble, losing effort. Suddenly Fox evens such forums out 3-3, or God forbid puts four conservatives and two liberals in a room, and they were, as Tim Robbins called them in a voiceover attempt at sounding like FDR, "19th Century Fox." When Colmes left the show, probably because of ratings and viewer complaints, Hannity took over. The show did, at that point, became demonstrably conservative.

O'Reilly was accused of conservative bias, but perhaps to combat this he has gone out of his way to criticize the GOP. Still, the man is conservative and nobody can deny it. The show also features a bevy of very attractive women, which taps into something that country music fans have known forever. Beautiful, patriotic women are sexy as hell. After year and years of mean-faced, clipped-haired liberal women pursing their lips in agitation and outrage against evil Republicans, lovely, intelligent American women who dig this country is the freshest breath of air to sweep this fine land in a long, long time.

Many of the news commentators and reporters were accused of Right-wing bias, but the Iraq War revealed a basic truth that differentiated Fox from its competitors. CNN and other stations long advocated that they were not American news organizations. They made the decision that to maintain journalistic integrity, they must not favor the U.S., or advocate for the U.S. Conservatives regaled them for this, and it was easy to do. There is a modicum of value to this approach. After all, they were charged with providing straight news, know matter how it plays out.

However, two things have discredited them. The first is history. America is not an infant country anymore. It has reached the point where it has a track record. There is no realistic way to look at that track record and not conclude that the U.S. is the one country that has done more to help the world, to save the world, to protect the world, and to make the world a better place, than all other nations in recorded history put together. But liberals are like New Yorkers who hate the Yankees, not because of their occasional failure but because of their constant success. The Oppenheimer mindset has pervaded them; they admit America is good, but its overwhelming goodness offends the sensibilities of fairness. It does not play into their notion of "equality," which they want to mold into an outcome in which all are given credit, even if credit is not due. Liberals deny history. Worse than that, they slipped, in Vietnam, during Watergate, and during the Reagan years, to not simply endorsing a neutral stance, but to an opposition stance. The conservatives were aligned with America. Liberals, in aligning against conservatives, therefore stood against America. They began to lie. When Rush Limbaugh came along, their lies began to be identified and exposed, en masse, for the first time.

While Fox openly rooted for the U.S. in Iraq, the other networks were exposed as friendly servants of our enemies. An example was CNN, where it was revealed that news chief Eason Jordan admitted that he had learned "awful things" of Iraq (torture, murder, assassination plots) but did not report them, because he had access to high-placed sources in Saddam's government. He was allowed to maintain a large staff in Baghdad, who became Saddam's de facto mouthpiece in America. Memos and faxes from CNN employees warning that Saddam was using them went unheeded. Instead, Bernard Shaw, CNN's anchor, chose not to "antagonize" the Iraqis by reporting truthful facts about them. CNN somehow deemed it more important to maintain a presence in Baghdad, as if they were able to report scoops from there. When they did learn inside things, they did not report them. They could have embraced the banal silence of evil from anywhere.

Fox does not deny history. They embrace their Americanism, and in so doing they embrace patriotism. They made the decision, which came to a head when the U.S. went into Iraq to rid the world of Saddam, not just to cover the war, but to root for America. This nation's citizens do not want to see commentators on their screens that want Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong to win. They are funny that way.

During the War on Terror, Fox News personalities and other conservative media voices regularly visited Afghanistan and Iraq, leading rallies and concerts for the troops. It was obvious that the military men watched and listened to them regularly, overwhelmingly voted Republican, and loved Fox News.

All of this had the direct affect of making Fox News the ratings leader by a large margin. Not only that, it made cable television virtually exclusive. By the late 2000s, old style TVs with "rabbit ears" were all but gone the way of the horse and buggy. The last advantage held by the likes of ABC and NBC had been the fact it could be aired on any TV without cable, but the prevalence of all-encompassing cable ended even that slight edge. Fox became not merely the cable news ratings leader, but the television ratings leader. Its other networks – Fox, Fox Business, FX, Fox Sports, Fox.com – all ascended to number one or close to it. Fox's entertainment programming was at or near the top. Fox Sports, along with Fox Sports regional stations, attracted the biggest sporting events in the world (All-Star Games, World Series, Super Bowls, BCS championship games, and much more).

But nothing more starkly contrasted the failure of liberalism than the failed liberal cable stations. Al Gore started a station called Current TV. 99 percent of America does not know about it or where to find it on their televisions. It became a monumental joke. MSNBC, the most Left-wing of the cable stations, was a pejorative and symbol of futility, attracting no ratings.

But most notable was the fall CNN, Ted Turner's jewel, once the only cable news network and a behemoth propelled by coverage of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Hollywood laughably used CNN whenever they depicted news broadcasts, but seemingly this was the only time they were actually watched, unless Limbaugh or Fox highlighted some particularly dumb thing said on their programs. In 2012, desperately trying to promote President Obama, they dipped to all-time ratings lows. An incredibly tiny 446,000 average viewers were watching CNN in June of 2012, but even worse, only 129,000 in the key 25-54 age demographic, down 35 percent and 41 percent respectively from the second quarter of 2011. Fox, with 2 million viewers, combined with Limbaugh (20 million), and other conservative talk radio hosts and stations (ranging from 3 million to 10 million apiece), meant that, unbelievably, the great "advantage" liberalism gained in capturing the hearts and minds of public school children was being lost as they, like Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians, "put away childish things."

This enormous dynamic promised to be the worst thing that could happen to President Obama. His supporters were not tuning into stations promoting him. They were tuning in to stations exposing many of his failures, along with his detractors. The film industry was experiencing precipitous decline. The overall media made a concerted effort to be fair during the 2000 Bush-Gore campaign. In 2004, they openly rooted for Gore, and in 2008 the bias for Obama was overwhelming. Fox unquestionably did not favor or give Obama good coverage in the 2008 campaign or during his Presidency, but as with Limbaugh's claim that "I am equal time," they were really just doing the job for the rest of the press.

Obama enjoyed huge popularity with most of the media in 2008, as detailed in a book by Bernard Goldberg called A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media (Sarah Palin's appellation the "lame stream media" was widely repeated). Interviewers cowed before him, not even asking questions but placing before him premises based on his righteousness and superiority. MSNBC's Chris Matthews famously said Obama's election gave him a "thrill up my leg." This kind of fawning coverage blanketed the non-Fox News media through 2008 and 2009, but by 2010-11 panic was setting in. Limbaugh constantly played a 2008 conversation between Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose in which the men freely admitted they knew nothing about Obama; what books he read, what his school records were, his friends, his personal life, his true politics. They described his majestic loneliness, the strange cult of personality surrounding him, sounding as if describing a Soviet leader of the 1940s. Almost nobody had actually asked these questions during the campaign They added a spooky description of Obama on Election Night, the first elected President to address his supporters by himself (absent his family). Then he disappeared, staring at a huge TV screen, where he was "watching them watch him." It all sounded like something from a movie, or Orwell.

Brent Bozell regularly appeared with Hannity, as Goldberg did with O'Reilly, constantly exposing pro-Obama bias. Hannity took to calling the President "the anointed one." After the mid-term Republican sweeps, however, by 2011 it had gotten so bad that a round-table discussion on The Charlie Rose Show sounded like a post-mortem, with one reliable liberal after another offering varying excuses on why Obama would not win re-election. By 2012, something else had manifested itself. Firmly ranked at the top of the ratings game, its competitors in its wake, Fox news was now the mainstream.

"Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue"

During the height of the Great Depression, Kate Smith went around America and on radio singing Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." It was uplifting to the country at its lowest ebb. Woody Guthrie, a Left-wing folk singer with Communist ties, did not like the reference to God. He created his own "anti-dote" to Smith's song, called "This Land Is Your Land." While popular to this day, few people really understand the nature of its lyrics, which proffer the notion that "land" is not owned by anybody (not even the land owner). Land, according to Guthrie, is owned by "you and me." While a fun, seemingly harmless song, like John Lennon's "Imagine," it was virtually a Communist manifesto.

Country 'n' western music, grown from folk music with roots in Ireland and other rural places, was by the 1950s peculiar to white Southerners and country folk. When rock music became popular, country music was made into a pejorative, considered racist, or dumb, and certainly not hip. But it was always popular.

Johnny Cash toured with rockers and infused his country melodies with rock sensibilities. His social pathos diffused the old "red neck" racist connotations many tried to pin on country music. While Elvis Presley was a rocker, he was also a country boy. A hint of country blues could be found in his songs. Strangely, country shared lyrical qualities with black blues music, too. Garth Brook was for a while the biggest name in country music. The genre focused on good times, hot women, cold beer, partying, and sad song that became a catch-phrase about how ones' dog died and wife ran away with yer best friend."

Country 'n' western music grew in popularity in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. When the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, it became the voice of America. There is little evidence if any that rap music, rock 'n' roll, or foul-mouthed comics particularly took a patriotic turn. Hollywood certainly did not. After the invasion of Iraq they undermined the troops every chance they got.

But at the 2001 Country Music Awards, with the nation still in shock, Alan Jackson sang "Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)." The crowd was almost entirely in tears as Jackson's soulful, resonant ballad described the terrible sadness and reaction to that awful day. It was not political and was not a call to arms. The lyrics plainly stated Jackson's personal views, which were not particularly worldly; he did not know the difference between Iraq and Iran. He suggested watching old I Love Lucy episodes to find comfort, and certainly did not chastise Islam. But it was a call to arms for country song writers and artists, who suddenly understood that this was their time.

Many of the soldiers deployed were small town fellows, many from the South, and country was the music of the military.

Lee Greenwood had emerged from obscurity with his anthem "God Bless the U.S.A." repeatedly played on The Rush Limbaugh Show during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. His songs were resurrected and he played concerts to grateful troops. But one artist came to symbolize the politicization of this form of music, the new anthem of the Right. His name was Toby Keith. A former high school football player from Oklahoma, he was in fact a Democrat, although he felt by the 2000s the party left him. His father had served in the Army and lost one of his eyes in an accident, although not in combat. He had achieved success in country music with a series of albums, but was no Garth Brooks, Johnny Cash or spring chicken, either.

After 9/11, something drove Keith. A combination of anger at Osama bin Laden and patriotism based on the memory of his dad who served was the impetus behind one of the most controversial songs ever produced. It was called "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)." It was a tribute to American freedom and our way of life. America had been "sucker punched" by bin Laden, but when we drove the Taliban out of Kabul, "Uncle Sam put you name at the top of his list, and the statue of liberty started shaking her fist." The song then described in highly militaristic terms the heavy ordnance poured from American weaponry at the enemy, graphically and in triumphant tones further telling how Taliban and al Qaeda fighters were getting killed in large numbers, all "courtesy of the red, white and blue."

"This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage" he sang, warning bin Laden – who by October 2002, when he was sent out of Tora Bora, forced running into the hills, that if he thought he was messing with the same policies put forth by President Clinton, who had him in his sight but did not pull the trigger, he was mistaken. There was a new sheriff in town named George Bush. The message of these lyrics was almost as hard-hitting to Democrat doves as to bin Laden. Then Keith emphasized the whole point of things by singing, "We'll put a boot up your ass, it's the American way."

This infuriated the Left, who felt it was going beyond patriotism and instead emphasizing bloodthirstiness. There was almost a strange feeling of "unfairness," in that we had the heavy weapons and the enemy did not.

But "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" was not released to the general public. It was a song Keith wrote and performed for troops, as he visited military installations to cheer them up, buck them up. The troops went absolutely wild over it, rejoicing in the jingoistic lyrics. Nothing could fire up soldiers and Marines to fight more than this song. The military brass quickly understood this. It was one thing for Keith to perform before a few thousand troops at a military installation, whether in America or even near a combat zone. It was quite another to mass produce the song for any soldier or Marine in the field to listen to. It was a new war, a new era of high tech in which the soldiers had laptop computers with Internet access, and listened to music with portable devices. The music they listened to played a major role in their mental preparation for combat. Many chose heavy metal, aggressive, hard-edged stuff to get them in a combat frame of mind.

But the commanders who heard Keith's song, and saw the reaction it got from the soldiers, knew this was a motivational tool like none other. It was suggested he produce it into an album. Keith demurred, worried that such an aggressive song would attract criticism from liberal elements, but the brass convinced him this was his patriotic duty. He owed it to these kids.

In 2002, with U.S forces winning victory after victory in Afghanistan, and debate over a possible invasion of Iraq the political subject of the day, "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)" was released to the general public. It had the desired affect, and more. It immediately made Keith a hero to military personnel. It sold in record numbers among the general public, making him a superstar. It peeved the Left no end.

Over the next few years, Keith was the face of the new country 'n' western music scene. He had politicized country. They were the music of conservatives, of the Republican Party. To listen to country was to identify ones' self as a conservative. It was a badge, a statement. His song was considered a major exponent in the public's strong backing of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Congress authorized use of force in 2002, the United Nations a few months later. America was gripped with war fever. Many were literally itching to get after Saddam Hussein, to get payback, to teach the Islamo-Fascism a lesson and let them know, as Keith sang, "This big dog will fight when you rattle his cage." Keith's music was a huge motivating force in this public sentiment, played regularly on country and popular music stations; as part of political talk programs; at karaoke bars; and on TV. Keith toured constantly, pumping up the troops.

The United States attacked on March 19, 2003 using a strategy called "shock 'n' awe,'" meant to dismantle enemy resistance through sheer force of destruction and the realization that fighting back was futile. As far as taking Baghdad was concerned, it was one of the most brilliantly conceived military invasions ever. The U.S. took the Iraqi capital in a few weeks. A Fox News camera captured a military truck freely driving into the heart of the downtown district, while Sean Hannity comedically played an Iraqi propagandist nicknamed "Baghdad Bob" declaring that Saddam's forces would destroy the "infidels."

On May 1, Bush declared "major combat operations" were over underneath a large sign declaring, "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED." At that moment, his approval ratings were similar to his father's, who enjoyed 91 percent approval after winning the 1991 Persian Gulf war. His re-election seemed assured, the GOP draped in glory, and the Democrats – who despite voting to authorize the war opposed every move – an endangered species. The nation was gripped by a fervor patriotism that is difficult to describe unless one actually experiences it; an existential love of country, spiritual in nature, which grips a person's very soul. Tony Keith's music exacerbated this feeling times 20. It was indescribable.

Keith then released Shock'n Y'all, which played to the name given the invasion, "Shock 'n' Awe." It was an anthem of patriotism and tribute to the soldiers, a celebration of victory in Baghdad, but there were apologetic tones to it. He was not happy being despised by liberals. Despite the nature of his songs, he was not a warmonger or Right-wing zealot, and uncomfortable being adopted by those elements of conservatism. The featured song, "American Soldier" was a straightforward tribute to the guys in uniforms absent politics or warmongering. "Courtesy," however, continued to get played over and over, the anthem of the Right. When insurgents and Al Qaeda fighters emerged to combat the troops in the streets, there were divisions in the country, all exacerbated by Keith's music.

In the succeeding years, Keith produced a series of big-selling albums, but for the most part they were not political or military. He sang of girls, of honky-tonks, and even about a preacher's daughter who runs away with a wild motorcyclist, only to "save" his soul by introducing him to the Bible.

Women came to prominence in country as never before. It had generally been a male-dominated industry, with women usually singing about their men, not their independence. Sara Evans was given a lot of play on Hannity & Colmes. Hannity's radio program opened each day with Martina McBride's "Independence Day." Originally released in 1994, the song was about a woman beaten by a violent husband who, finally, kills the man. However, the lyrics, at least most of them, coincided with the American reaction to Osama bin Laden. "Independence day" was the day we fought back after 9/11 in this new view. Martina was happy to have her song promoted, and regularly appeared with Hannity. She, like Sara Evans, was a Republican who supported the war effort.

Other women emerging on the country scene included but were not limited to Carrie Underwood, Faith Hill, Shania Twain and Taylor Swift. The country girls were all exceptionally beautiful in wholesome ways, and very talented. There were few if any women in any other form of music as beautiful. This, along with the "eye candy" provided on Fox News, played a huge role in the cultural boost of conservatism, now literally scene as something beautiful vs. the "ugliness" of Larry Flynt, Bill Maher and Michael Moore

The only exception were The Dixie Chicks, seemingly cut out of the same mold as the other cowgirls of country, until they went to London and informed an audience there that even though they hailed from Texas, they by no means supported Bush's war. It may have engendered some cheers in Europe, but they were hit hard in America. Their audiences were patriotic country music fans, and they were badly hit in the pocket book.

In 2003 Darryl Worley released "Have You Forgotten?" It was a tribute to the memory of the 9/11 victims asking if only two years later the nation no longer cared as much. The War on Terror was not over and done with as the 1991 liberation of Kuwait had been, and it was beginning to splinter the country. Worley was on with Hannity and others promoting his theme of "never forget." When Saddam Hussein was captured in December, 2003, many felt the tide had been turned, but it had not.

Bush ran for re-election in 2004 promising to win the war, but he had been in Afghanistan three years, and Iraq was increasingly violent. He chose as his campaign theme "Only in America," a 2001 Brooks & Dunn song from Steers & Stripes. Brooks & Dunn was a veteran country duo that specialized in songs about pulchritudinous girls, with party-party videos to prove it. "Only in America," however, told the story of the nation's promise. It was not about the war. It has consequently been picked up by other conservatives and is considered a modern anthem of the Right, even more so than "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," which has faded as the war receded and the troops began coming home.

In 2010 Bill Gentry wrote "19," an emotional telling of a high school athlete who turns down a football scholarship to Tennessee, joins the Marines, and is asked to "take one for the team" when a fallen comrade must be rescued. The 19-year Marine indeed rescues his fallen friend but dies in so doing. The meaning of the song could not have exacerbated the Right-Left division more acutely. To the liberals, the Marine was dumb, duped into believing a lot of Semper Fidelis hocus-pocus. To the conservatives, he was a man of honor who understood sacrifice as Christ exemplified it.

Other popular acts included Tim McGraw, Brad Paisley and Kenny Chesney. They all sang simple ballads about the American way of life: high school football, beer, buddies, girls, first loves, growing up, faith, responsibility, kids. Most were regulars with Hannity, Mike Huckabee and others. Many would thank Jesus Christ when they won awards, something never seen at the Oscars.

While there are not any accurate polls available, the stereotype of country performers being Republican is probably very accurate. There appears little resistance to the notion. The industry is heavy on Christian faith and American patriotism, but is by no means uptight. Country music is every bit as much about partying, even wild partying with wild, half-dressed chicks. This juxtaposition with Christian values reflects the duality of man. It is about belief in the country and its promise. It celebrates it. It could not be more different than most other forms of entertainment. It stands alone, yet at this point appears to be as popular as any musical genre in the world.

The comparison is stark. Comics, for instance, are vile, appear drunk, drug-addled, swear a blue streak, show contempt for the Bible, Republicans and any kind of traditional value. Rappers are misogynistic and appear to be the brainstorm of white racists who, in 1975, decided to invent the music to make blacks look as stupid as possible, not unlike the old theory that the CIA invented AIDS, or infiltrated the ghettos with drugs, to wipe out African-Americans. Rap, aside from lacking any musical qualities, generally isabot whors, drugs, gang viuoilence, police killing, and other horrors. It has done more damage to blacks than 100 years of KKK night riders.

Hollywood, obviously, disdains the tradition of country, but the comparison with rock is startling. Once the great post-war artistic invention, it is now dominated by narcissistic drug abusers and psychotics in a world so immoral and rebellious against God as to practically invoke the devil with each guitar lick. Only Ted Nugent among main stream rockers of the ages is well known to be clean and patriotic. The Who's Peter Townsend is not outspoken about it, but by all indications he appears to be a man who used his art to search for spiritual meaning. Others, like Jim Morrison, who were searchers, found death as a result of their excesses. The African-American Jimi Hendrix, the greatest guitar player ever, was once a member of the elite 101st Airborne Division rumored to vote Republican, but the rock lifestyle killed him in the early 1970s.

Perhaps the greatest example of contrast between the rock music scene and modern country 'n' western can be found in comparing most of the country men; many ex-high football players, generally clean-cut, All-American, aw shuck types. Rock is well represented by the actor Russell Brand, who is not a musician but played one in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek, and kind of in Rock of Ages. Brand is English, heroin thin, straggly and scraggly, looks to be on his deathbed, spews filth from his mouth, regularly plays nudity, sexually and morally depraved characters, and has been seen strolling about in a t-shirt reading, "Heroin killed the radio star."

Social justice

O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth; O god, to whom vengeance shew thyself.

Lift up thyself, thou judge of the earth; render a reward to the proud.

Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?

How long shall they utter and speak hard things? and all the workers of iniquity boast themselves?

They break in pieces thy people, O Lord, and afflict thine heritage.

\- Psalm 94: 1-5

When President Bush, adorned in a flak jacket, announced triumph in Iraq in 2003, the Republicans felt, as the Democrats may have felt in 1964, 1976 and 1992, that they were the "winners of history." An unknown Asian-American Washington state legislator named Gary Locke was offered as the Democrats' sacrificial lamb to "rebut" Bush's State of the Union speech. When Bush and his party swept aside all opposition, winning with a record number of votes in 2004, hubris marked their victory.

How did they blow it? In short, instead of annihilating the terrorists of Iraq in a major display of force in 2005, they fought, almost Vietnam-style, with their "hands tied behind their backs." A war that could have been handled by 2005 dragged on and on. Even though the Surge effectively "won" it in 2007, it was not a satisfying victory. Violence continued. Nobody was happy with the outcome. Nation-building failed, and it cost the country so much money that one of the great economies ever achieved, reaching a crest in 2007, was lost after the Democrats took over Congress.

Illegal immigration was not handled properly. Bush also spent tremendously, falling into the age-old corruptions of D.C. budget temptations. When the sub-prime crisis caught him by surprise, he opened the door wide open for Barack Obama and the Left when he signed the first stimulus package. He was practically telling them to bring Socialism to America, and in so doing signed a death sentence for the McCain-Palin ticket.

Barack Obama emerged out of nowhere. The first time most Americans ever heard of him was when he spoke at the 2004 Democrat National Convention. Even Rush Limbaugh announced after his speech that "he's got it," the charisma a winning candidate must have. The old, tired Hillary Clinton was shocked first to see Obama had a chance, then actually losing to him in the 2008 Primaries. No man had ever been elected President whose name was unknown to 99 percent of the public a mere four years before their election. Teddy Roosevelt had risen in similar fast manner, but he had been a crusading New York politician, cleaning up Tammany Hall in the 1880s. He disappeared to "find himself" on a Montana cowboy ranch after his first wife died, but returned to the scene.

Barack Hussein Obama arrived with the mother of all agendas. At the heart of his goal was the concept of social justice, which on the surface sounds . . . cool, but is not the same as military justice, criminal justice, or just plain justice. It is based on the notion that world history is dominated by white males. At one point, Asians and Arabs were the world dynasties, while white Europeans were still living in caves, wearing animal skins. Warm weather played a major role in historical development. The peoples of the Middle East, once the Persian Empire, lived in warmth, allowing them to freely move about, invent things, and engage in commerce.

The warm weather Europeans, Greeks and Romans, were the first to emerge as empires of intellect, philosophy and military conquest. After the birth of Christ, the religion spread to Europe but was largely rejected by dark-skinned peoples in Asia Minor. The Renaissance ensued, with Europeans at the head of the new world order. But the Catholic Church, according to the accusations of social justice, imposed racist, violent doctrines on indigenous peoples, namely through the Spanish Inquisition. Colonization ensued. America was born with the "original sin" of slavery. Even after a fighting a war to free blacks, they were subjected to another 100 years of prejudice before the country won two world wars and finally, as Dr. King said, "lived up to its creed" and embraced civil rights for all throughout the land.

But for many blacks, Latinos and others, it was not enough. Victimology spread. Race extortion, reparation, a desire to repair past wrongs by extracting from the modern day white man, whose ancestors had committed these crimes, became the driving force of a new ideology called social justice. At the heart of this philosophy is the belief that whites, particularly males and those who espouse pride in past accomplishments, whether it be Western Civilization, the Constitution, even winning World War II, were racist, corrupt, immoral, illegitimate, and needed to be replaced by history.

Many have argued who Barack Hussein Obama is. Where he comes from, what he has read and believes, what drives him. Many argue that he is not one of those "victims" who holds this grudge against Caucasians, that he himself is half-white, and that he is not an advocate of this particularly virulent brand of social justice; indeed, that social justice is not a pejorative in the first place, as the term liberalism has become. After a review of four years of his Presidency, there are a large number of citizens who have come to believe that he does believe in this philosophy. This leads to the great question, to be answered in 2012 and in subsequent culture battles for the soul of America: what side will win?

Obama, Alinsky and Communism

It does not start with Barack Obama. He is a product of something that was around long before he was even born, yet he is, despite the mocking of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and his numerous detractors, "the one" the Left has long been waiting for, a messianic figure of liberalism who is to them what Jesus Christ was to the Jewish prophets. He is their hopes and dreams, imagined in their minds for over 100 years, this vision manifest in flesh and blood to fulfill their goal of rebellion.

The Jonas's, the Samuels, the Ezekiels, the John the Baptists of the Left were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Immanuel Kant, Henry David Thoreau, Emma Goldman, Jean-Paul Sarte, Albert Camus, Che Guevara, and Noam Chomsky. They looked for their North Star not in Heaven, but in the seeds of revolution in Russia, China, Cambodia . . . Kenya.

His father was a Kenyan. Obama wrote two biographies, both before he accomplished much of anything. There was a sense that because he was half-black, and came also from a mixture of racial identities including Islam, Indonesia, American hippy culture and the plains of Kansas, this made him unusual and interesting enough to publish books about himself. Apparently, for somebody with this background to be smart enough to write a book, to be educated and advance in the world, led back to the affirmative action notion that such a person should be given a publishing deal while so many others faced rejection.

He is not always a truth teller. He invents scenarios and stories to further his view of himself. The first evidence of this comes in his books. He writes of a grandfather who was tortured by the British for fighting on the side of the Mau Mau rebellion, but evidence uncovered by his biographer, David Maranis, disputes this. He writes of official discrimination and prejudice faced by his father, who ran out on his mother. This premise has many holes in it, including evidence that it was his mother who wanted out as much as his father abandoning the family to return to Africa, seeking a political career.

There is an odd psychosis in inventing stories to enhance prejudice against his father, since he was an African-born black man married to a white American woman in the early 1960s. Unquestionably, there was plenty of prejudice against such a pairing, even in a place like Hawaii, but Obama felt the need to go beyond the ordinary run of the mill taunts and looks, enhancing it to a more political level of discrimination, possibly to "justify" his father's decision to leave.

His mother, who had some education and was a capable woman, was left to fend for herself. A single mother with a half-black child, there was scorn directed at her. It is in reading Obama's views of his mother and her parents that we begin to see the formation of his character. His mom was a hippy girl, a flower child of the '60s. Her decision to marry and bare the son of a black was not merely physical lust or love, but a political act of white guilt, a form of reparations against age-old injustice. It was difficult for her. Obama was raised in large measure by his grandparents, white folks from the Midwestern plains, and all that entails. He was "colored," but he was their flesh and blood and they loved him. He loved them back.

Yet, in his biographies, he finds complaint with them. First, he belies a lack of real respect for his mother, the guilty hippy child. There is anger in Obama, and not the kind of anger that identifies with guilt, his mother's or his. He cannot identify with the plainspoken Americanism of his grandparents, who he apologizes for because they lacked, in his view, true enlightenment. The prospect of black criminals in his grandmother's proximity frightened her. His mother's approach likely would have been to reason with them, make them love her, and if they robbed, even raped her, to consider it small reparation for her "guilt." The grandmother understandably wanted to avoid them. Neither approach was satisfactory to Obama. He oddly found himself identifying not with his guilty mother or accusatory grandmother, but with the black criminals, the real "victims" in his emerging world. In his writings he declares allegiance to blackness, and a definite rejection of whiteness. He finds and enters in these and subsequent years membership in a victim class of the oppressed, the plundered and the exploited. All he has, all people like him ever had, has been stolen by the white man, and in his world the white man, "the Man" is America. He does not find the lack of logic in this any more than Oliver Stone does in his "zero sum game" argument, given to Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko, who makes the faulty analogy that for one man to get rich, he must steal from a poor man even though the poor man has nothing than can be stolen. This is the nebulous notion of the rich man making the poor fella get a credit card and max it out so he has something that can be stolen. Or, the Indian thieves who always left enough in the Mexican village's they plundered so the Mexicans could survive to grow harvests the Indians could steal from again the following year.

Obama was born in Hawaii. Neither of his parents could know that his middle name (Hussein) and last name would be the same or nearly the same as the two greatest American post-Cold War enemies (Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden). Many have said he was not born there, and the evidence is somewhat sketchy. He never produced real birth certificates, which is apparently the way Hawaii does it, but it was confusing. An announcement appeared in the paper, but his mother could have placed that there by sending in a note. Despite Right-wing arguments to the contrary, however, it appears he was born in Honolulu in 1961, shortly after statehood, and therefore he is an American.

But there was also Indonesia. His mother re-married an Indonesian Muslim man who moved the family to Indonesia, where he apparently set out to raise his step-son under the auspices of Islam. He attended a madrassa. Muslim madrassas are filled with political hatred against the United States. To the extent that they were in the 1960s, and that the one Obama attended was one of those; this can only be speculated on. Maranis's research indicates that while he learned much about Islam, came to admire its beauty and even grandeur, he remained an American, returning to his home country while still young, not a fully formed religious person.

The marriage failed and his mother died of cancer. Obama was left with his grandparents. He attended Punahou School in Honolulu, one of the most prestigious private academies in America. It was expensive and academically arduous. How he got in and who paid are unanswered questions. Perhaps he had the grades and his grandparents forked over the tuition money. The conspiracy theorists offer the scenario that he was "sponsored" by some nefarious political organization, not unlike the "Yuri" character who turns out to be Kevin Costner in No Way Out. These are the people who look at Bill Clinton in like manner. Clinton was the son of a woman who was likely a "gangster's moll" in the mob town of Hot Springs, Arkansas. She paid her gambling debts via "favors," and had children by different men. The thread on Clinton is that these criminal elements recognized his academic and political potential early, then decided to pay his way up the ladder of an elite education, supposedly so he would be their guy in power down the road.

Just as likely, Obama benefited from relatively new affirmative action policies kicking in to full extent by the late 1970s. Being black and probably unable to pay, he was what affirmative action was all about. His own biography describes not a good student, as Bill Clinton was, but a lazy slacker and drifter who smoked reefer, sniffed blow, drank copious amounts of beer, hung out with ne'r-do-wells, druggies, dealers, low lifes and criminals, was part of the notoriously skanky Waikiki beach scene, and whose only "healthy" interest was basketball.

This does not describe the kind of academic over-achiever who against all odds makes it to Occidental College or Columbia University. From all indications, affirmative action was his ticket from Punahou to Occidental to Columbia to Harvard Law School. Others see Muslim handlers, or even Communists behind his rise, but there is no evidence. Others argue that even though these scenarios may not be true, his political formation was as if it was. Each school was ludicrously expensive and incredibly hard to get into. Each was in a big city that cost a lot of money to live in. Each featured a social scene in which wealth and prestige were keys to advancement. There is no evidence he worked his way through college, but he always had money to wear the right clothes, attend the right parties, and ingratiate himself with the right people.

Nobody knows his grades, how he was accepted, or who paid the bills. Some speculated that he applied as a foreign student and declared his religion to be Muslim. Possibly there were affirmative action slots for students of this background and this was how he entered, via a lie. Without actually producing the records, the speculation continues.

Acceptance to and even graduation from Columbia is one thing, but acceptance to Harvard Law School is quite another. No matter how much preference he received, he surely was a student of promise and accomplishment. Still, he was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review, a very political position very likely awarded him so the powers that be could feel good about themselves for givin' it to the black fella. Most editors of the Review have a long paper trail of theses, papers and opinions. Obama does not.

His wife, Michelle apparently received the same kind of preferential treatment in the Ivy League. Her response to every possible benefit and benevolent gift bestowed on her by America was to write a thesis claiming the world made it extra tough for her because she was black. The main argument backing up her claim was that being surrounded by intelligent whites put her at a disadvantage (?).

Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, but the mystery continued. He spent a short amount of time working at a private company, which he described as being "behind enemy lines." At a young age, he undoubtedly sees only Big Government as worthy. Private enterprise is the "white man's world," and this is the world of the colonizers and immoralists of an illegitimate history. He was an adjunct professor at Harvard. Nobody remembers much about this. There are no students who step forth and recall him. He may have been a glorified teacher's aide. He wrote nothing; no books, theses, opinions. An adjunct is a nebulous hanger-on from semester to semester at any college. This period has been described as one that makes him a "Constitutional law professor." He came under the auspices of professor named Derek Bell, a radical black liberation theologist, typical of ethnic studies programs by this time. He also associated with Professor Henry Louis Gates, whose Left-wing view of black victimhood influenced him. Professors like Bell and Gates were singularly responsible for the huge liberal turn that had long marked Harvard, which by this time was in full swing.

In the early 1990s, Obama attempted to embark on a career path that says as much about him as any other factor. He wanted to be a writer. Nobody really knows who his influences were. They likely were not Hemingway or Kerouac, but rather James Baldwin. This was a particularly conspiratorial period in African-American history. The CIA was said to have invented AIDS so as to wipe out blacks. They were said to have planted drugs in the ghettos (according to The Godfather, the mob did that). The existence of liquor stores on every street corner was the white man's doing, to keep the brother's down, or so said Laurence Fishburne in The Boyz in the Hood. So many Africans were thrown overboard in 400 years of the slave trade that it changed the migration habits of sharks. A great "university," the "University of Luxor," was supposed to have been the center of world knowledge before the white man came along and filled the world with lies. The devil was a blue-eyed white man called Magog, or something like that; an invention of Louis Farrakhan, who came up with some kind of "Creationist" story along these lines. Jews and Koreans would not hire the blacks pimping and prostituting their women in front of their stores, thus giving "cause" for riots in New York, L.A. and elsewhere.

Blacks were looking for self-identity. They had joined cause with the radical forces of the Anti-War Movement, but that was over, the white hippies now in corporations, academia and suburbia, but many blacks were still in the ghettos. The Black Panthers were all but over with. Many blacks deserted that way of thinking for traditional Christianity. But what of those left behind? Like Germans willing to believe Hitler's lies, to believe that somebody else was to be skapegoated for their failings, they needed to invent scenarios and paradigms favoring their point of view.

Barack Hussein Obama looked around and decided on his paradigm. In 1991 he landed a literary agent, who created a pamphlet including a short Obama biography. It stated that Obama was born in Kenya. Why did it state that? He was apparently not born in Kenya, which of course, if he had been, would have made him ineligible for the Presidency. But it was in lying about his birthplace in the early 1990s that Obama reveals his true nature, and not just the fact he is a liar. In trying to establish his identity as a writer, he decided – no doubt felt his best chance at getting published – was not to identify himself as a patriotic American citizen, but as a native, an African, a Muslim, an "other," a victim, one of the colonized, the oppressed; somebody who had a story to tell of hatred, of white racism, of a struggle against a landscape of exploitation not just against him (non-existent), but against all he represented (the world). Thus did Obama begin to see even then that he was this messianic figure, "the one we've all been waiting for," the child in a ghetto manger (or at least a beach manger near Waikiki), Rousseau and John Reed and Upton Sinclair and Camus and Chomsky the proverbial "wise men" gathered to pay homage to the arrival of a new age long prophesied.

The writing career initially did not work out, but Obama came to Chicago, where he became a "community organizer." Apparently this "job" paid well enough for him to buy an expensive home, which reminds one of the Copa scene in Goodfellas when young Ray Liotta explains his display of wealth and power with the breezy declaration, "I'm a union delegate."

As for his wife, Michelle, she road Obama's coattails all the way to a job paying around a half-million dollars a year as a "hospital coordinator." So vital was this job that when her husband was elected President and they went to Washington, nobody replaced her. She had ascended to a new status within America, beyond affirmative action, to the high-priced professional black woman. This is a high-paying job large corporations pay to some educated minority not to work or actually accomplish tasks, but to fill out a new quota system, long established by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. It was a job created in large measure by the work of her husband. Something to trot out and display to the world as "proof" they are not racists.

Obama never met Saul Alinsky, who died in 1972. Alinsky dedicated his books to Sirhan Sirhan, assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, and to Lucifer. He seems to be a real-life figure straight out of The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil." Obama dedicated the book he eventually did write to Alinsky.

Alinsky was a community organizer. He was, in fact, a street protestor, an extortionist, a rabble-rouser, an anarchist, and a Communist. Street protest had been around before America and, of course, manifested itself as "the Terrors" during the French Revolution. There were draft riots in New York in response to the Civil War. Emma Goldman and the anarchists organized riots during World War I. Communists and union organizers routinely stirred up riots during the Great Depression. Ronald Reagan faced these same people, now tools of Moscow, during his time as SAG president in the 1940s and 1950s.

After relative peace during the Eisenhower '50s, a confluence of events turned the 1960s into a boiling hot cauldron. The Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, and the free speech movement gave rise to the feminist movement, the environmentalist movement, and the gay rights movement. Reactionary Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Duke Wayne, and anti-Communist Southerners like George Wallace, argued that this nexus of protest, riot and rebellion was funded, or connected in some way, to international Communism. The liberals laughed and mocked this assertion. What, exactly, was international Communism? The Communist world was just that, internationalist, with varying headquarters, directions, money and orders coming from Moscow and Peking, to Vietnam, to Cuba, to Latin America, Asia and Africa; the Third World. The liberals said this was too disparate an "enemy" to be identified. They wanted to own the protests, to take credit for it, to believe it was the new America. They had taken it to the streets, they had "taken it all down, man." The sentiment of these protestors was the sentiment of the youth, or so they believed.

David Horowitz, who was one of those protestors, indeed was one of the protest organizers, was also one who later turned on them and divulged their secrets. A series of carefully-hidden front organizations, many from Moscow, funneled through fellow traveler middle men organizations, were indeed funding the 1960s street protests. Red-faced from revelations of the Blacklist, when the Hollywood Ten were exposed, and John Howard Lawson identified as taking direct orders from his Communist handlers, the enemies of America became adept at banking, money laundering, and the tricks of financing revolution. Aside from Horowitz, others left the movement, as Whittaker Chambers had done, and in the 1990s the Venona Project confirmed it. Despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, dogged pursuers like Michael Savage identified some of these same fronts, using new names and new personnel, as the backers of anti-war protest during the Iraq War.

Alinsky was at the heart of this disguised Communist movement. His official cover, still naively repeated by apologists like Bill Maher, was that he was out to "help black people." He was an anti-American enemy of the U.S. out to hurt the country during the Vietnam War. He was a traitor, and he was a hero to Barack Obama.

Alinsky tapped into something that lay dormant for a long time. Left-wing sentiment found nothing in traditional American values to cheer. Christianity, capitalism, entrepreneurial freedom, even athletic success, was considered bourgeois. Even President Obama, when asked during the 2009 All-Star Game to list some good memories of Chicago baseball, spoke of Cominsky Park. Even while discussing Our National Pastime, the man could not help a Freudian slip that Communized and Alinskyized the name of the venerable Comiskey Park, old home of the White Sox.

Alinsky discovered that corporations could be shaken down for money to avoid accusations of racism; that business people would pay criminals not to break things and commit crimes. It was not a coincidence that Alinsky operated out of the Windy City, and that the 1969 Chicago riots – largely funded by third party Communist fronts – was the worst protest in American history. This was the world Obama admired and aspired to emulate, to be a part of, and to lead. He accomplished his task.

It was also no coincidence that Obama's race extortion work was in Chicago, first the home of Saul Alinsky, later of Jesse Jackson. With the Vietnam War over, the Persian Gulf War over almost before it was started, the only place to protest any more was in corporate America. Jackson and Obama found a lucrative race-baiting business, essentially promising not to march crowds of angry unionists and blacks in front of corporate headquarters buildings. They mixed this with environmental protest, aimed mainly at so-called Big Oil, shaking down large companies they accused of polluting the green environs. They railed against a steel company for perceived injustices.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, former Weather Underground criminals and American Communists, discovered Obama's work. Somehow, despite attempts to blow up the Pentagon, police stations, cops, and other symbols of America, they were allowed not only to freely walk about the Earth, but also to teach at the college level. Unable to be truly public figures, they needed a man to do their dirty work. That man was Barack Obama. They recruited him and launched his political indoctrination into the infamous Chicago Way, the single most corrupt Democrat organization in America.

Obama needed to prove his bone fides with the black revolutionaries, so he joined the largest black liberation theology "church" in the nation, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United. It was there that reverend Wright declared after 9/11 "no, no, no, not God bless America . . . Godd—n America." Obama sat in his pews and soaked it all in for years. He claimed that under Reverend Wright he found Jesus Christ. Nobody can truly know what is in a man's heart. God works in mysterious ways.

Obama was elected to the Illinois state Senate. He rarely attended, usually voting present. He had no accomplishments. He spent most of his time writing his two biographies. With the backing of Ayers and his connections with the Annenberg School of Communications, Wright and the Chicago Way, he had enough name recognition to justify publication of two biographies despite not having done much of anything. He was the "angry black man with something to say," the great voice of the Left.

In 2004 he decided to run for the Senate. His opponent was eliminated using tried-and-true Alinsky techniques: illegal, criminal, immoral. Having ruined Jack Ryan's family by opening his sealed divorce records, which was against the law, he cruised unopposed to victory, a major staple of the Alinsky playbook. The Left saw in him a rising star. At the 2004 DNC he proffered the fiction that Arab-American families cowered in the night because of President Bush. Only the election of John Kerry would free them from cowering. No Arab-Americans were cowering, and when Bush was re-elected, they continued not to cower.

For four years he was "bored" in the Senate, as described by colleagues. He offered no legislation, accomplished nothing, and opposed all GOP initiatives that resembled what he later did as President. In 2008, he entered the Primaries. U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton (D.-New York) was the odds-on favorite to capture the Democrat nomination. Sean Hannity was running what he termed the "stop Hillary express."

But Obama captured the hearts and minds of fanciful liberals. Then Rush Limbaugh stepped in. One of if not the most influential man in media history, what he did in 2008 may have been his most influential moment. It also might have backfired, and in so doing, the great irony is that Limbaugh may be the reason Barack Obama was elected President.

When Obama won a few Primaries, Limbaugh instituted what he called "operation chaos." Many of the state's opened their Primaries to all parties. Limbaugh urged Republicans to vote for either Hillary or Obama, depending on who was winning or losing during the course of a topsy-turvy Primary season. It truly did create chaos within the Democrat Party, with Limbaugh laughing at them from on high. Then the Reverend Wright tapes hit. They had been hidden, but his 2001 assertion, "no, no, no . . . not God Bless America, Godd—n America," surfaced. Limbaugh and the conservative media played it over and over.

Senator Clinton tried to take advantage of it. Rumors that Obama was not born in America surfaced. Senator Clinton tried to take advantage of that, too, but she was walking a thin line. Criticism of a black man's black preacher and assertions that a black man, who had a Muslim name and might be a Muslim, might not be an American . . . she was quickly charged with racism. Her husband fumed, telling former Vice President Al Gore that a few years ago Obama "would have been serving them coffee."

Then a funny thing happened. The Democrats analyzed Reverend Wright's "Godd—n America" remarks, and the accusation that Obama had anti-American attitudes and . . . decided they kind of agreed with that way of thinking. He pulled ahead and was nominated at Denver amid statuary meant to depict him as like a Greek god.

Throughout the summer, surprise Republican nominee John McCain, a Vietnam war hero once held by the Vietnamese Communists, trailed in the polls. He decided on a "game changer," Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. At first unknown, her movie star good looks and common sense conservatism quickly buoyed the campaign. After the Republican convention, one poll favored McCain-Palin by 11 points. The general lead was actually five, but in mid-September they looked like winners.

Then the sub-prime housing crisis completely destroyed the economy. President Bush told the country he was going against all his capitalist principles in signing a stimulus bill, which conservatives said was the first step towards Socialism. It was McCain's death knell. He lost badly, his party falling with him.

The anointed one had arrived.

Soros, ACORN and the politics of race extortion

Obama worked closely for ACORN, a race extortion organization that was exposed by intrepid journalists to be illegal. They specialized in talking women into having abortions, or getting pimp-prostitution teams government benefits. They stirred up protest over "disenfranchisement," placing forth the notion that the black vote was suppressed because conservatives tried to suppress the ability of illegals to vote, or for minorities to vote multiple times. In the mean time, the ability to vote remained as easy as getting an absentee ballot, voting, affixing a stamp, and placing it in a mail box. They worked with the New Black Panther Party, who on Election Day in 2008 suppressed the white vote, deemed not a crime by Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder. After working hand-in-hand with ACORN for years, making numerous speeches on their behalf, praising their vital work in the rise of his career, and using them to help win, after their crimes were exposed by Fox News he no longer mentioned them.

It is hard to really say who the most evil man in history was. Pontius Pilate gets some "votes," but he was forced by the Sadducees into ordering the death of Christ. This was really pre-ordained by God as vital to man's salvation, so in a strange way he was doing . . . God work? This borders on blasphemy so the subject is best dropped. Besides, we all killed Jesus. His death is our collective responsibility. In the 20th Century, there is of course Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse-tung; take your pick. But among "non-criminals," so called "respectable" men of politics and business, at least in the U.S. Joseph P. Kennedy is as good a candidate as any. His life and fate is cosmic. He orchestrated and pulled the strings in the rise to power of the Kennedy clan, who came this close to achieving monarchical status for generations, but in the end were felled by assassin's bullets, scandal and immorality. In this Shakespearean drama, Kennedy's sons were each felled by the stars that once favored them, but most ironic of all, the old man himself was felled by a stroke that forced him to sit, mute, and watch all of it unable to say a word. The unlikely Bush's of Connecticut and Texas achieved far greater lasting power and impact than the Kennedys.

In the 21st Century, we have George Soros. He is at least as evil as "Old Man Joe" Kennedy. He is the modern backer of the Democrat Party and of Barack Obama. He does it in the shadows, but his money and his manipulations are the strings this puppet master uses to plot the course of the Left. He is the final culmination of centuries of hatred, all the combined terrors wrought upon the Earth by what the narrator in the Ronald Reagan documentary In the Face of Evil calls "the Beast."

When Obama was elected President, some Christian fundamentalists asked whether he was the anti-Christ. This question has dogged Christianity for many years. Some felt Napoleon was for forcing the Pope out of the Vatican. Hitler and Stalin looked to be candidates, but Hitler committed suicide in the wake of defeat, Stalin's nation was dismantled. World War II certainly made many think of Armageddon. The creation of national Israel has stirred the greatest "end of the world" talk. It clearly states in Revelation that this event is a necessary pre-cursor to Christ's return. While the Bible is not clear on the existence of an anti-Christ, the history of man has definitely stirred within the spiritual the notion that a malevolent force exists, changing form, stirring up bad things, always rebelling against God.

Movies like The Omen, its sequels, and the Left Behind novels further propelled the popular idea of an anti-Christ, a final battle between good and evil. The New Millennium had many on the lookout for "signs and wonders." The Mayan calendar ends in 2012. A radio preacher named brother Harold Camping convinced many that the world would end on May 21, 2011. Many felt Obama's election and ascendance just before that date meant that he was the man who would emerge from the "world of politcs" to lead Satan's armies. Hi looks discomfited some. Here was a multi-racial "man of the world," which is the province of the devil since the Garden of Eden. He possessed a strange, almost trans-gender quality to him, equal parts feminine and masculine. Patriots felt no, an American would not be the anti-Christ. He would be a Communist, a Muslim, even a Jew. America was the new Promised Land. How could this righteous country be the place where such spawn rose, yet only the power of America, home of Wall Street, Hollywood, Washington and the United Nations, would give this man the forum to take over the world. Nobody can know. The believers must remain vigilant, on the watchtowers, watching, but the true nature of Obama, despite what he has done, is still mysterious. Talk that he is the devil is of mocked by his legion of supporters.

Many said America was no longer righteous. How could a country that aborts as many babies as people died in World War II, and elects Barack Obama President, still call itself righteous? Most of Europe and the rest of the world seemed far gone, no longer good, decent, and Christian, if ever they really were. America stood alone, it seemed, and within America a shrinking, marginalized Christian faithful fights to stem a tide that seems overwhelming and unstoppable. Only God can save us from ourselves.

The many faults of the Left are exposed, but the Left cannot be shamed. Once these revelations resulted in people changing their minds, not voting for the immorally exposed, but the age of Obama revealed the terrible dilemma that perhaps the Left is in the majority. Polls say 18 percent of the people call themselves liberal, 40 percent conservative, but this does not reflect itself in elections. America is totally divided, and the question is who will get 50 percent plus one. After four years of Obama, he still stands strong. This never would have happened in past generations, but it now appears that all the bad thing exposed by the Right, by Rush Limbaugh, by Fox News, are things the Left likes and supports! When this happens, a tipping point is reached. The question in the 21st Century is whether this tide can be stemmed and turned back. Once upon a time a Reagan turned it back, but will a Reagan emerge? It seems only God can see us through. Or, will Soros be the dominant force of this century? Will the forces he unleashes, the power he hopes to attain, drive the world?

Soros was a non-practicing Jew who helped the Nazis round up other Jews. His excuse was that if he did not do it, somebody else would. An atheist, after the war, he rose to great heights and power in the media and the financial world. In the 1990s he personally brought down the British pound, and orchestrated the Asian financial meltdown, not unlike the way Joseph P. Kennedy helped unleash the market forces of the Great Depression. Like Kennedy, Soros bet the other way and became wealthy beyond comprehension. He engaged in philanthropy, funding billions of dollars worth of money to "public causes" meant to make him look charitable. These ere Lefty-wing organizations meant to empower his causes and therefore Soros himself. Always he remained shadowy and nefarious.

He opposed Republicans and George W. Bush. His organization MoveOn.org was originally created in response to President Clinton's Impeachment, when the mantra of the Left was to forget about it and just "move on." When the Internet became the new tool of politics and innuendo, he formed MediaMatters.org, among other organizations designed to "fact check" Republicans and, like, Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, expose embarrasing things about conervatives and Christians.

When the McCain-Palin ticket surged to a five-point lead in mid-September of 2008, magically, seemingly out of nowhere and at precisely the worst possible time to hurt the Republicans the most, the sub-prime housing crisis hit. Subsequent blame has been fixed on President Clinton, who started the policies that started it, and Congressman Barney Frank (D.-Massachusetts), the politcian who advocated and led its implementation, most notably to make it posible for minorities to own homes even if they could not afford it. After years of papering it over, when and only when Senator McCain appeared to be winning, did it fail. Those who somehow saw the black hand of George Soros – the man who bragged he broke the bank of England and sent Asia into financial crisis in 1997 - behind this were laughed off as conspiracy theorists.

He remains behind the scenes. He avoids scandal or criminal prosecution. His money, power and international tentacles make it impossible to get to him. Efforts to expose him for what he is leave the accuser shouting in the wilderness, looking like a nut. Presidents and prime ministers come and go, but Soros remains, pulling the strings in a world so complicated and global no ordinary man can comprehend it. Whether he is a tool of a malevolent spirit, or just another bad guy; no man can pin such a thing on him, only suspect it, probably until it is too late. Such malevolence can be battled not with guns, as with Hitler, but with prayer.

What was wrought

All of these forces of nature, more than 200 years of Left-wing efforts at establishing the "social contract" of Rousseau, were embodied in a single event. President Bush committed the worst act in the history of the Republican Party when he signed the first stimulus package, in response to the 2008 sub-prime crisis. In so doing, he destroyed McCain, handed the election to Obama, but worse yet, told the Democrats – elected en masse on Obama's coattails – that America was now a Socialist country, so have at it.

But Bush's mistake was nothing compared to the second stimulus, signed by Obama a few weeks after his Inauguration, in February of 2009. Suddenly, over night, $5 trillion of new debt – Republicans claimed more money than all governments spent since the birth of Christ – were laden upon the United States of America. This will go down in history as the single worst thing any political figure ever did to the U.S. No amount of sunny, Reaganesque Republican optimism, can truly belie the notion that nothing can overcome this event in our lifetimes.

So monstrous, so terrible has been the stimulus debt, that if Republicans were elected to all high offices for 20 years it, built upon the backs of President Roosevelt's New Deal, then President Johnson's Great Society, institutionalizing Big Government, entrenched it so thoroughly that it cannot be turned back.

This event leads one to ponder further. If a man were a spy, a traitor, an undercover agent working on behalf of America's sworn enemies, whether those enemies were international Communism and its post-Berlin Wall progeny; Islamo-Fascism; George Soros; or a combination of all these evil forces combined into one package; and if that man ascended by the strings of this nefarious power all the way to the White House; and if once there desired to hurt the United States to the maximum effect; what then would he do?

Would he use his power to explode nuclear weapons on our soil, killings millions? If the President so ordered such a thing, his orders would not be obeyed. The military powers that be would refuse, but if somehow he did manage to explode such weapons, it would fire up the patriotic elements of this country to such extent that there would exist the political will to simply turn into fire all foreign enemies. This was the power we alone possessed after World War II, but chose not to use, until the Soviets exploded their first atomic weapon. Thus would the Arab world and anybody else we deemed our enemy be bombed "back into the stone age." No enemy-President would want to unleash such forces. The last time this nation came together in such common purpose, Adolf Hitler's armies were destroyed and the U.S. ascended to heights of power eclipsing Rome, Alexander's Greece, or the British Empire. Furthermore, a destroyed America, its landscape an Apocalypse of devastation lacking infrastructure, would be of no value to those who would desire to use American power and institutions against her.

To create the fullest impact of damage to the U.S., one would need to discourage her, reduce her power and place in the world, to weaken her from within. Osama bin Laden tried to do that by destroying the Twin Towers, but President Bush led a rally to all-time stock market highs in 2007. A TV program about the CIA some years ago posed the theory that the 1987 stock market crash was a last-ditch KGB plot, its failure when the Reagan economy could not be stopped the final death throes of the U.S.S.R.

The stock market can rebound. People will need to work jobs. But debt, the all-strangling debt that ended the British Empire, ultimately creating the failed Common Market, European Union, and other vestiges of a beaten-down Europe; debt is the way to destroy a country. The high essence of what a dedicated enemy of America would do to destroy her is precisely what Barack Obama did in February, 2009. The destruction wrought on America by the stimulus package will not be overcome in our lifetimes, and maybe not in our grandchildren's.

It started right after the stimulus bill was signed. A CNBC economic reporter on the floor of the stock exchange had an on-air rant calling for a "tea party" revolution against it. At the 2009 All-Star Game in St. Louis, half the fans booed President Obama.

The conservative media ramped up a daily exposition of criminality on the part of the ACLU and ACORN. Fox News ate up the ratings like a hungry lion. They featured conservatives like Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, day-by-day dismantling the Obama myth. The "lame stream" media that made up the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and news programs on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, all watched and read by nobody, not to mention the zero-ratings Air America; all these were failing in one way or another. Their excuse was the Obama economy, which saw the Dow Jones fall to a 12-year low of 6,547 in response to the stimulus, or the Internet, but these business factors did not have an effect on successful operations like the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, Human Events, the Weekly Standard and Newsmax. Keith Olbermann was eventually fired. Rachel Maddow and a host of lesser lights simply got no ratings.

Obama's supporters, including Jimmy Carter, began to state that his detractors were racist. In October, 2009 Obama "won" the Nobel Peace Prize. His nomination for the Nobel came within weeks of his January inauguration and he had accomplished zero in the months since. It served to mock him further when he traveled to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics in Chicago and was turned down.

Obama made a speech at West Point. The soldiers were falling asleep, and liberal commentator Chris Mathews called the U.S. Military Academy "enemy territory" for Obama. Millions of patriotic American citizens . . . made note of this.

While Democrats consider great young people in the military to be the "enemy," Obama bonded with anti-American Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Communist genocidalist Fidel Castro expressed great admiration for Obama.

Obama failed to attend ceremonies for D-Day, the fall of the Berlin Wall or Pearl Harbor, preferring instead trips to places like Copenhagen to honor himself. Instead of watching the returns when Democrats got killed in the November elections, he was glued to a documentary about his "greatness." A global warming summit failed despite Obama's plea to achieve "something."

The Democrats attempted to ramrod socialized medicine on an American public that opposed it, 70-30. They attempted to bribe and buy votes, breaking numerous ethical laws. They tried to sneak everything past the public in the dark of night. Obama's campaign promise of transparency, of televised hearings on C-SPAN, was revealed instead to be a lie.

Obama's approval ratings head towards 40 percent, the fastest drop in the quickest amount of time in the history of polling. In November, 2009 Republican Chris Christie roundly won the Governorship of New Jersey and Republican Bob McDonnell wiped the floor with the Democrats in Virginia; both after Obama made personal appearances on behalf of his chosen candidates.

Senator Kennedy's death opened the door for the election in early 2010 of Republican Scott Brown for "Kennedy's seat" in the "Boston Massacre," winning by six points. It was an astounding event. These were the first shots fired in a conservative reaction to President Obama, the first indication maybe America would repudiate him, and possibly all the Democrats long stood for in the form of the Kennedys, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, Barney Frank, ACORN, MoveOn.org, Michael Moore, Code Pink, Bill Maher, Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, "black liberation theology," the legacy of the 1960s counter-culture, Hollywood, the "lame stream" media, the "blame America first" crowd indoctrinating our young from grade school to graduate school, man-made global warming, socialized health care ram rodders, displaced Communists, Socialism in America, and the "black hand" of the George Soros.

Meanwhile, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin spoke of a "fallen world," of man's true relationship with God, and why the Founding Fathers favored limited government because they recognized the inherent corruption of men's souls. She was elevated to "rock star" status, her book selling in such extraordinary numbers as to be beyond mere phenomenon. Karl Rove exacted revenge on his detractors every day with words of wisdom in the Wall Street Journal and on Fox News.

The growing Tea Party Movement was besmirched as "tea baggers" by CNN's Anderson Cooper, who two years later revealed he was homosexual and, most likely therefore, an actual tea bagger, a term applied to gay male sex. Congresswoman Pelosi said the Tea Partiers were not a "grass roots" campaign, saying instead it was "Astro turf," just like Hillary Clinton's "vast Right-wing conspiracy" consisted of millions of patriotic American citizens who had the temerity to register and vote!

Senator Brown's victory in Massachusetts denied the Democrats the vaunted 60th vote, the filibuster-proof number needed to pass nationalized health care. Hillarycare had failed in 1993, and Obamacare was no more popular, but Brown's win secured its failure . . . except that Obama and Pelosi pushed it through using Congressional technicalities, not an actual Democratic vote. In 2012, the Supreme Court surprisingly upheld it as Constitutional. Health care reform mirrors, as Ann Coulter wrote in Demonic, "why the history of liberalism consists of replacing things that work with things that sounded good on paper." Or, as Pol Pot once said, "It seemed that the only thing needed was sufficient willpower, and heaven would be found on Earth."

But the Right was suddenly energized in 2010. Could it be that the unbeatable Obama was human after all? Could the Congress be taken back, and after that, was it possible that Obama himself could be defeated, a prospect that seemed unthinkable on Election Day, not to mention Inauguration Day?

In the 2010 mid-terms, the Republicans won sweeping victories. Obama himself described it as a "shellacking." Obama's old Illinois Senate seat, sold by Democrat Governor Rod Blagojevich, and never actually "won" by Obama (he used an illegal court ruling to steal it from Jack Ryan in 2004), was won by Republican Mark Kirk, a huge repudiation in the President's home state.

With the Middle East in flames while Obama "led from behind," and the economy in the tank, Obama tried many tricks. He granted amnesty to illegal aliens and declared his support for gay marriage, acts meant not to bring the nation together, but to divide her While nuclear weapons were no longer the huge issue they had been during the Cold War, Obama cut the American arsenal by alarming numbers, to the point of literally leaving the country unable to defend against a full-scale attack. Some went so far as to describe this act as "treasonous."

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney won a spirited Republican Primary campaign. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's big win repudiated public unions, setting the stage for a 2012 Presidential election that probably had more riding on it that any since Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860. Every electoral indicator favored the Republicans, but the hidden influence of Soros, the prospect of another "September surprise," kept the GOP on its toes.

The truth about health care

Health care is the great pet issue of Democrats; of liberals and the Left; and of non-Americans (Canada, Cuba, et al). It is an emotional issue and easy to exploit. After all, everybody can use health care. Getting sick is something that happens to all people, so health care affects us all, right?

That is the point. In assessing the issue, we must use history as a template. Let us consider that there are many bad things that existed throughout Mankind's existence, until America came into being. The existence of America was not compatible with the existence of these bad things. America was stronger than the bad things, and therefore squelched it from existence. First and foremost, consider slavery, a thriving international institution that propelled trade between legitimate nations going as far back as history can recall. Along came America. Four score and seven years later, America was too strong for slavery to continue to exist as a legitimate enterprise. America is where slavery came to die.

Now, let us apply this method of causation to health care. Depending on whether you believe the Darwinians or the Creationists, man has existed on this planet for millions of years or 13,000 years. Either way, for all the time that man lived on the planet, our relationship with God or with mortality or whatever you wish to call it has been the same: we are born, we live a few years, we get sick, and we die. Some people died from other causes, but by and large, for thousands and thousands of years, life expectancy was roughly 20 or 30 years.

By 1787, the year the U.S. Constitution was written, the average lifespan was probably a little bit better, about 50-60 years. Anesthetics did not exist. "Surgery" was little more than butchery. It was not until the Civil War that doctors discovered that using dirty scalpels caused infections. Doctors were still "bleeding" patients. Leeches were still used. Strange home brews and elixirs of little value were all that could be offered.

If a person came down with cancer, it was a virtual death sentence. Heart attacks were fatal most of the time, as there was little to combat them beyond rest and bad care. Little was known about nutrition, exercise and other elements of good health.

Over the next 200 years, America happened. Everything that we associate with America occurred: freedom, Democracy, capitalism, entrepreneurialism, investment. The Left views many of these concepts as evil, but the co-existence of these concepts with human progress is impossible to discount.

There are a number of reasons why medical progress has made progress by leaps and bounds beyond all conception since 1787. Christianity certainly plays a role, since missionary zeal and charity have propelled much of this progress. However, Christianity had been around a long time prior to America, and during much of this time doctors were little more than barbers.

Obviously, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Great Awakening; whatever we want to call scientific discovery occurred mostly in Europe prior to America, although it should be noted that great discoveries and invention occurred in Asia Minor while Europeans were still cave-dwellers. Then came Islam, and since then little progress in these areas happened in that part of the world. What does this mean? No commentary is offered. Arrive at your own conclusions.

While we marvel at the work of Galileo, Da Vinci and Copernicus, the pace of advancement in their day was a snail's pace compared with the pace of advancement once America arrived on the scene in all its glory. Why has America accomplished things that the rest of the world did not even dare to imagine; in all areas of discovery? Why, in little over 200 years, has a single nation, starting out as a few agrarian colonies separated by oceans from the salons of commerce, politics and culture, eclipsed previous empires and powers? Frankly, the answer to that question is quite obvious, but it is best to discover it on your own, not at my prompting.

As America grew, medical breakthroughs took place at breakneck (pardon the pun) pace. Polio, vaccines, childhood diseases, dietary discoveries, cancer, heart disease, lately AIDS research; through these advancements, mostly in, inspired by or privately funded by America, life improved. Life span and quality of life got better and better and better. People now live until they are 90, even 100 years old. 40, as they say, is the new 30. 50 is the new 40. 60 will soon be the new 50 . . . and on and on and on. Seniors no longer retire. They are active, healthy, vibrant, and enjoy themselves in all ways. A 72-year John McCain is running for President and did not seem to be the worse for wear.

Why has health care improved so much in America? Is it because the government mandated that it be so?

No!

The reason, boiled down to its barest essential, is because smart people who could be anything choose to enter medicine. Why? If you think that it is all about benevolence, you are wrong. They do it because they can make a great living from it. This is the reason most people choose any career.

Why, once these smart people get through medical school, survive the boards and rigorous internships, do they discover great things? Why do they produce great new pharmaceutical drugs? Why do they invent new products and services that help people live better and longer?

Is it because the government funds them, prompts them, and inspires them? Okay, the government sometimes gets involved in research and development, but to fool ones' self into believing this is the driving force behind medical advancements is tomfoolery.

Health care improves mostly because of the profit motive. The profit motive drives individuals and corporations. The profit motive is most effective in the United States of America. Now, this is established. Next, we get to the result of all these health care improvements. Things that were unheard of 20 years ago are now available. Miracle drugs, stents, new technology, brain function, knowledge; it goes on and on.

How does this affect people? Well, ailments that 20, 30 years ago either killed them or left them in comas, bedridden, paralyzed, or in a state of recluse, can now be cured. Children can run free. Women can live without pain. Elders can hit the golf course. All is well.

But wait. There is a catch.

Let us get back to those smart people who, 20 or 30 years ago, decided to enter medical school, and who later on work in R&D, in cutting-edge hospitals, corporations and pharmaceutical companies.

Well, how did they accomplish all these wonderful things? First, they had to pay their way through medical school. Maybe they were on scholarship, financial aid, or whatever, but those professors' salaries, the books, the classrooms, the labs, and all the daily accoutrements of existence had to be paid for by somebody.

Then, when they became doctors and researchers, somebody had to pay their salaries. Somebody had to pay for their staffs, their equipment, their offices; somebody needed to pay for the time it took to accomplish excellence! Did this money come from the government? 90 percent always has and always will come from private industry by virtue of the profit motive.

The Apostle Paul in the New Testament states that greed and money is the root of all evil, and this may be so, but God does work in mysterious ways. There is a difference between greed and making an honest living in an honorable profession. Being a doctor is an honorable profession. Are there evil, greedy doctors? Yes? But lumping them all together because they mostly make a good living providing valuable services is not effective public policy. Yet nationalized health care is to do just that.

Let us get back to the incredible pace of medical advancements over the past 20 to 50 years and how that affects the average person. In 1970 a woman brings her child to a doctor with a severe malady. The doctor diagnoses it and says that, sorry, there is little that can be done. The child dies, or lives a shortened life, or a life of severe pain and reduced quality.

38 years pass, and some $1 billion has been spent on this particular affliction, with the result being that the malady, which sidelined a child in 1970, can now be cured. That $1 billion has been spent on the educations of thousands of doctors, plus all the ancillary costs associated with arriving at the cure in question.

Let us, for a minute, remove this question from the medical arena and make it something else. Let us call it an automobile. In 1970, the 18-year old kid would like a hot rod car worthy of Le Mans. This car, however, is not available to the public. It is a specialty car available only to race car drivers. He is not a race car driver, cannot afford it and therefore does not own it. In 2008 the 18-year old kid still wants that car. Now, it is a luxury car that only the richest of the rich can afford. The auto industry has figured out a way to streamline this car so that people other than race car drivers can have it, but the 18-year still cannot afford it and still does not own it. Is it society's responsibility that he have it? Of course not.

Apply this logic to anything: real estate, boats, high-tech equipment. By and large, people buy what they can afford and it is to the benefit of the economy that the government not interfere. This is the basic concept of supply and demand that drives the marketplace, and to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it might be the worst form of economic policy known to man, with the exception of all other forms of economic policy known to man.

So, to break it down, diseases that for thousands of years killed or sickened people can now be cured, only it costs a lot of money to accomplish this task. People, however, want to be cured. If they are sick and know that a cure is available, they want it . . . at all costs, especially if somebody else absorbs those costs. If the cost is $1 million, just to use a round number, obviously this is unaffordable to all but maybe five percent of the populace . . .but they want it anyway. In the old days, they were told they would not survive the malady. They accepted this prognosis because it was just the way it was. Now it is different. Why? Because, mostly in America, the prognosis has changed. They know that a cure is available.

Ah, therein lies the Shakespearean rub. In America. These medical breakthroughs take place mostly in America. Sure, there are good doctors and some fine research that takes place in England, France and maybe a small handful of other nations, but let's face it: 90 percent of this kind of advancement is, like 90 percent of everything good that has happened for 200 years, something that happens, as they say, only in America.

Well, it takes little in the way of logic to see where this is going. If it can be found only in America, they all will come to America. Thus we see that America's great health care helps to drive illegal immigration, among other things. We see that Englishmen leave England and Canadians leave Canada to seek medical care in America that is available . . . only in America.

Leftists will state that Cuba's socialized medical care, for instance, is the best in the world. This is not true, but they say it anyway. There is a world in Webster's dictionary that defines such a thing.

Okay, so we have established that the best health care is in America; that the profit motive is the driving force behind it; and that because it costs a lot of money to achieve the advancements, it therefore stands to reason that it costs a lot of money to purchase it.

Okay, we now arrive at the moral equation.

Health care is not the same as buying an auto, or a luxury boat, or a hot new stereo system. To be healthy is much more important to the five-year old, the 18-year old, the 50-year old and the 85-year old, than a mansion or sports car.

So, how do we make it available and affordable? Well, according to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, we make it a government program. Since the founding of America, successful government programs are few and far between. What is the government good at? Well, a few things. Keeping Communists from invading our shores. Defeating Hitler. Building highways and bridges. There is zero evidence that government ever has been or ever will be good at providing health care, which as I have so expertly demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs is successful when the private sector engages in it for profit.

Okay, fine. But we still get back to the moral equation. Do we stand around and watch the poor black kid, the illegal Mexican, or the average white blue collar guy, get sick and die because the treatment he/she needs costs too much?

Well, the world is not fair. Advancement and technology outpaces need. People live and die. This is our relationship with God. It cannot be prevented. Democrats want you to believe that but-for greedy health care providers you too will never die, The serpent said something similar to Eve in the Garden, too. All people cannot be treated and made whole all the time, especially when so many are poor and from other countries only because the health care they seek is only found here. This is a basic fact of life . . . and death.

What about volunteerism? A fine concept, well embraced by Biblical principles. Take Doctors Without Borders, for example. It is a noble ideal, to give of ones' time in order to help the needy. Nobody should dissuade against the notion. But consider also the cause-and-effect of preventive medicine, or preventive technology. Consider on the one hand one doctor treating one patient at a time in, say, Guatemala or Ethiopia. Consider also a large corporation that creates, via technology, some device that feeds thousands, or prevents thousands from getting sick in the first place. Both concepts have their place. The volunteer will always be necessary. The corporation that prevents disease or starvation will invariably succeed because . . . the profit motive. There is an ideology - liberalism - embraced by a political party - the Democrats - that will have you believe the myth that the profit-driven corporation is evil. They know it is not true. They say it anyway.

Finally, let us re-visit the cost of health care. Sure, it is expensive because the training, research and development is costly, but it is mostly expensive . . . because of trial lawyers.

It is mostly expensive because of trial lawyers like John Edwards. This man represented the essence of what is wrong with the tort system in America. He took corporations to trial, played to the fears of mis-led juries, and got super-wealthy extracting enormous sums from the very corporations that discover and produce the very treatments they need to get healthy. One has to admit, however, the man had chutzpah. Despite his complicity in making the system what it is, he with a straight face would stare into the camera and state the lie that only the government can reduce the health care costs he is responsible for making so expensive.

Of course, since medical advancements are so far ahead of the economic curve, the high costs of cutting edge treatment cannot entirely be avoided, but how many billions of dollars have the trial lawyers cost the medical industry? Doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals; they all factor these costs into their products, their services and the insurance policies that must absorb the brunt of the John Edwards's of the world.

This is the truth about health care.

Occupy Wall Street vs. the Tea Party

Occupy Wall Street, which merged into the larger, so-called Occupy Movement, is a protest that began on September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district. It is in the tradition of the "direct action" that fused the 1960s protest movements, in the tradition of Left-wing activists Saul Alinsky, Tom Hayden, the SDS, Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, the Chicago Seven; all funded in part by Communist fronts. It is supported by the Left and the Democrat Party in order to lay the groundwork for President Obama's enormous expansion of taxes on the wealthy and middle class set to take place when President Bush's 2001 tax cuts expire on January 1, 2013, 100 years after the institution of the Federal income tax instituted by the Democrats in 1913. They were heartily supported by Congresswoman Pelosi, and represent modern day liberal radicalism.

They espouse "social justice" by dividing the nation between the wealthy one percent and the remaining 99 percent, attempting to steal from the middle class and arouse class envy towards those who have more money than they do. They are at the heart of President Obama's lifelong philosophy.

Occupy Wall Street followed on the heels of British student protests of 2010, as well as Greek and Spanish anti-austerity protests of (2011–2012), and the "Arab spring,' saying "America needs its own Tahrir." The internet group Anonymous created a video encouraging its supporters to take part in the protests. The U.S. Day of Rage, a group that organized to protest "corporate influence,' also joined the movement. Sociologist Dana Williams argued that "the most immediate inspiration for Occupy is anarchism," and the L.A. Times identified its "controversial, anarchist-inspired organizational style.

Some media label the protests "anti-capitalist,' while others dispute the relevance of this label. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times noted "while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a 'mob' trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability.'

In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, pollster Douglas Schoen0.0. wrote that polling of the protesters revealed "a deep commitment to Left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth . . ."

The Occupy Wall Street Movement spread and quickly became a mob of homeless and criminals that had to be broken up by law enforcement. They consistently left public squares filthy, defecated in public, committed crimes and vandalism, and regularly raped women in their midst.

"In lieu of class crimes and counter-revolutionaries, American liberals have given us 'hate crimes,' 'disparate impact' rules, 'sexists,' and 'bigots,' " wrote Ann Coulter. "Acts are irrelevant; your motives are on trial. You are presumed guilty and acquittals are rare." The mob, she added, "is Satanic and Satan can only destroy." In the John 8:44, Jesus says to the crowd following the devil, "and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth. Because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies." The gravest problem faced by modern humanity is that we have reached the points where these words, which used to shame the sinners, are now heard and dismissed by an enormous portion of the American population, who dismiss it as gibberish. The great question is whether we have reached the point in which there are more of these people than those who will vote against Obama.

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck writes in People of the Lie, the psychology of these crowds is "only powerful for destruction." Occupy Wall Street merely carries on the tradition of Saul Alinsky, and are "shrieking oppositionists, braying, abortion-obsessed feminists, SEIU thugs, Earth Liberation front loons, Bill Maher audiences, and querulous dissidents" who "mock all that is good – America, religion, patriotism, chivalry, the rule of law, truth, the creation of wealth, life – while hysterically attacking those who oppose them," writes Coulter. Confronted with facts they cannot be made to see truth. Radical environmentalists, for instance, can be told that the banning of DDT is responsible for 3 million malaria deaths per year in Africa; or that a particularly ravenous beetle destroys twice as much forest land per year as Amazon rain forest clear cutting, but refuse to listen. DDT is "bad," and saving forests from beetles might improve the economy. They cannot have that.

The Tea Party Movement began in 2009 in support of the United States Constitution, adherence to an originalist interpretation, reduced government spending, reducing taxes, reduction of the national debt and Federal budget deficit. The movement is generally considered to be conservative, libertarian, and populist. It has sponsored causes and candidates that, with few exceptions, have been popular and successful at the ballot box, therefore offering the prospect that they will have a long, successful sat in American politics. If the Republican Party is to attain a position of strength, it will be because of the Tea Party.

The first organized event, called a "Porkulus Protest," was held in Seattle on Presidents Day, February 16, the day before President Barack Obama signed the stimulus bill into law. Attendance doubled within a year, with events held nationwide. According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, the bailouts of banks by the Bush and Obama Administrations triggered the Tea Party's rise.

"They think Federal spending, deficits and taxes are too high, and they think no one in Washington is listening to them, and that latter point is really, really important," pollster Scott Rasmussen said. After CNBC reporter Rick Santelli's calls for a new "tea party revolt," 11,000 people a day began joining. Fox News and conservative Republicans embraced it.

The Tea Party is credited with spurring the huge Republican victories in 2009, 2010, the 2010 Congressional mid-terms, and Governor Scott Walker's giant 2012 Wisconsin recall vindication. They are noted for maintaining order, are friendly with law enforcement who generally encourage them, clean up after themselves, and commit no crimes.

Postlogue: hope, but keep the change

Man will not only endure, he will prevail.

\- William Faulkner

The United States of America is the greatest country in the history of Mankind, but why? To merely boast such a statement is empty unless it is backed by a solid premise, and this is the basis of any historical analysis how this nation came to become the greatest, most dominant empire in world history.

It did not happen pure chance. The Christian worldview, centering on the concept of the United States as a "Christian nation," looks at our advancement as the result of a "guiding hand" defying denomination. Perhaps it is not meant for us to understand why we are the "chosen nation," but rather to focus on the evidence that we are without probing into a spirituality that is beyond our ken.

The first evidence of divine guidance comes during the Revolutionary War, a time in which men with much to lose chose, for reasons more often than not against their personal interests, put themselves on the line against King George's England. This war could have been lost during many periods, yet somehow fate drove us to victory. To consider the intelligence of the resulting Constitution and its lasting importance without believing that it was a Godly document is almost impossible.

The lack of self-preservation that lies at the heart of our Founding Fathers lies at the heart of America's history. Herein we discern the difference between all other countries and us. While certain diplomats such as Henry Kissinger practiced a European kind of realpolitik, our ultimate purpose has always been one of benevolence. How else to explain that we have achieved unprecedented power so benignly? The U.S. possesses the ability to dominate all others, to turn the globe into a Pax Americana, to enslave and conquer beyond the realm of all previous conquerors. Can one envision the Romans, the Chinese Dynasties, the Soviet Bloc, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, even the British Empire, possessing our weapons and also our restraint? What about modern countries like Iran and China? The question is impertinent in the face of what we know.

So how did we get that way? While the hand of God cannot be discounted, one must consider that timing and the quest for human knowledge has been the weaponry of our good fortune. The wonderful hindsight of world history has been ours to study and determine what mistakes had been made, and how to improve on the performance of our predecessors.

Using as a model the study of politics endeavored by Dennis Dalton, Ph.D. from Barnard College and Columbia University, we start by examining the Hindu vision of life. At the heart of Hinduism is a four-part "life education" centered on the value of property (capitalism), sensual pleasure, religious duty, and spiritual enlightenment. The study of Hinduism, embodied in the 20th Century by Mohandas Gandhi, contrasts with the study of the Muslim religion. It is impossible not to note this in light of current affairs.

Next, we analyze the cradle of Democracy, Greece after the Peloponnesian War. War is said by the Greeks to be a "violent teacher." It is a peculiar fact of Mankind that our worst mistakes have allowed us to gain our greatest knowledge. Socrates proposed ideas that were so radical he was given the hemlock, and his students, Plato and Aristotle, expounded upon the lessons of the losing battle with Sparta and the Hindu vision of life. The result, in short, is a view of politics that conservatives can relate to in the modern era.

First, the Greek philosophers disagreed with the Hindu "fourth step," which was to find personal enlightenment. The Greeks felt that personal enlightenment, while admirable, should be used for the purpose of political contribution. This can be found in the concept of noblesse oblige, and can be contrasted with the Machiavellian concept of power.

Plato argues that politics should be a science that, like Hippocratic medicine, trained professionals to eschew personal ambition and, like doctors, desire to do only good. He felt that Greek Democracy was too widespread, fomenting the mob mentality that Americans, by forming representative government, sought to avoid.

His study of war teaches us that the liberal creativity at the heart of the Athenian military was not a match for the strict discipline of the Spartans, a lesson worth remembering when we contemplate our military as a social experiment instead of a bulwark against our enemies.

The study of Machiavelli is important in trying to understand those who have opposed us over the years. Like the Greek thinkers, Machiavelli arrived at his conclusions in light of military disaster. Italy was in the throes of despair in the years after their empire had been broken up, and it was the lessons of that fall Machiavelli applied to his view of political power. We find Machiavelli's ghost whispering in the ears of Hitler, Stalin, and. The Republicans have not been immune to the Machiavellian creed. McCarthyism and Richard Nixon's paranoid "enemies list" carry the Machiavellian touch, and from these periods we find cautionary tales that we must heed or face disaster.

Contrasting the Greeks with Machiavelli allows us to get to the heart of unique American designs, which are to do good. To do good, often at great sacrifice, is a concept perhaps still too novel for those not fully understanding of American values to grasp. In that regard we can offer only patience and continuing example.

International politics co-existed with the United States. This includes the French Revolution and how it was inspired by the American Revolution, but veered so far from that concept. Next, the English transformation from royal to parliamentarian embodied by their Jewish Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. The U.S. influence, embodied by Theodore Roosevelt, is studied as it applies to the eventual break-up of the British Empire and its resulting racial implications.

No study of America is complete without an unflinching look at slavery, and it is here we study a revolutionary, bold model called "America: Where Slavery Came to Die." Plato determined that slavery was a natural result of the human condition, and the British colonial view did not veer far from this concept. These values were thrust upon America. Yet somehow, in four score and seven years, the U.S. managed to address a thriving institution that had existed for thousands of years and, effectively, end it. This was accomplished on our shores, using our laws. No foreign power came here, defeated us and told us what to do. Considering slavery's economic benefits in the South, and the cost of the Civil War, the ending of the "peculiar institution" might be the most compelling example of how we changed the politics of self-interest into the politics of better interests. This is a premise meant to cause some controversy and plenty of discussion, always a healthy result of philosophies and critiques.

How did Communism rise and why was it opposed in America? What did we learn from Gandhi? What lessons did we apply in the post-World War II years? Throughout history, conquering nations had enslaved and colonized. We left Europe and Japan with a legacy of goodwill never seen in the annals of Mankind. Contrast Doug MacArthur with Napoleon, just to start the discussion.

What were the results of McCarthyism? Here we see the true fruition of American liberal bias. It was a backlash against McCarthy that lies at the heart of a Left-wing dominant media culture, embodied by millionaire actors racked with guilt over their good fortune, and a "gotcha" journalistic ethos spawned by Watergate. But why should the Left be the sole disseminators of correct political thought? To study liberal bias carries with it a study of how talk radio, cable television, the Internet and social media have finally brought about a sea change in the way Americans receive their information. Because of it, the world will never look back.

The "Reagan theory" is based first on an observation of World War II. In that war, over 50 million people perished from the Earth. Some 358,000 Americans died. Yet the country and the world agree that the cost was worth it, to purge society of Hitler and the Japanese warlords. The theory then delves into a scenario worthy of a Tom Clancy novel. The U.S. and the Soviets enter into World War III in 1983. The war lasts until 1989. 50 million people die. 360,000 of them are Americans. Better technology and divine intervention bring victory to the U.S. The political result of W.W. III is exactly the same thing that actually did happen! The Berlin Wall falls. The U.S.S.R. is broken up. The Eastern Bloc crumbles. Communism is relegated to the dustbin of history, leaving rogue regimes in North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba to live out their miserable, meaningless existences until attrition takes its inevitable toll. The "Reagan theory" asks the question, Would such a result be worth the lives of 360,000 Americans? and posits the notion that a post-World War III world would, like its World War II predecessors, agree that it was.

Except that Reagan and his faithful followers believed, endorsed and fought to achieve this without the loss of life. Is anything more telling? Still, this notion has never been put forth.

Finally, we must ask ourselves who we are today, and what the post-9/11 challenges are. We see history repeating itself. America has often stood, seemingly alone, ready and willing to do the heavy lifting necessary to rid the world of terror, while Europe, long the benefactor of our protection, reverts to its old notions of self-interest. As Santayana once said, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to re-live it."

Which leads us to our present day predicament. President Barack Obama was elected promising to be "transformational" leader. He promised "hope and change." He has delivered on his promise of change. For 20 years we a were nation that came in under budget and in debt, but our economy was a match for what we owed. Not anymore. President Obama's stimulus bill, his health care revolution, and his promise of high taxes in 2013 unseen since World War II, have vaulted us either to full-fledged Socialism, or the precipice of it. We have never been a Socialist country. This is obviously his goal. Just as a reading of Mein Kampf plainly told readers what Hitler's intentions were, a reading of Obama's books, speeches and more important, his actions, tell us in no uncertain terms this is his plan.

The Occupy Wall Street Movement, the forces of liberalism arrayed in the schools and the media, in the entertainment industry, in the indoctrination of the young; we are faced with the daunting prospect that this way of thinking is the new majority. It is the great question, and therefore the great goal of conservatism, to answer this question, and to do what is necessary to beat it back into, as Reagan called it, "the dustbin of history."

At the heart of this task is an examination of President Obama's famed promise of "hope and change." If America actually is the greatest nation ever; if our traditions from the Founders to Lincoln to the "greatest generation" to Reagan are a template for continued greatness; and if Obama's idea of "change" is to dismantle that template because he believes it to be inherently racist, immoral, corrupt, exploitative, unfair, politically incorrect, plundering, violent, not outcome based and too capitalistic; then does he not propose decline?

America is willing not only to remember the past, but in so doing, we willingly take on the task of shaping a hopeful future. But change? Change just for change sake? If we still clung to slavery, or to Jim Crow; if we still polluted our air and water as once we did but do no more; yes, change would be in order. The best kind of change would be to change from a nation whose media culture is dominantly run by Barack Obama's Left wing. But when it comes to the things that make us great, no, keep the change. Maintain age old traditions.

Lastly, as you read this book and some of my ripe conservative views, I have a message for liberals, conservatives and everything in between and beyond: there is love in my heart for everybody, do not take the politics personally, and in the U.S., we are all Americans.

"United we stand," Abe Lincoln once said. "Divided we fall."

And ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free.

\- John 8:32

Interview with conservative talk show host Dr. Michael Savage

He has just published another bestseller. He is one of the most powerful voices in media and politics, yet he is a misunderstood loner. He is banned in Britain. He tells it like it is, is brusque and hard to like, yet underneath the rough exterior is a Teddy bear who loves his dog . . . Teddy. Millions hear him every day, but have not quite heard Dr. Michael Savage like this.

TRAVERS: You grew up in New York during a time that might be described as "Sinatra swank." It was an era of big bands, jazz, Yankees dominance, mob "wise guys," racial awakenings via movies like "West Side Story," blues music, and the like. These cultural touchstones created a huge melting pot of ideas and common perceptions that plays out on your show. Is this a time that we will never see again?

DR. SAVAGE: The answer is simply no because this was a post-World War II era, which was dominated largely by men who came back from fighting for our freedom, and so men were much different then. Everybody was involved in the war one war or another. Either men had been in the war, profiteering from the war, dodging the war, having relatives who had been killed in the war. You see, everybody in that era had been affected by World War II, and the children, such as myself, of that period, having been born in '42, were all products of World War II, of Hitler, especially of the threat of Nazism, which was just around the corner. Had the Germans won World War II I wouldn't be speaking to you, and the fact of the matter is it was an existential reality that was imposed, excuse me, that was imparted upon everyone. So, the short answer is no, how could it ever happen again?

So, I'm basing this in part on a period, the post-World War II period, I'm talking the '50s I guess is what your asking . . .

TRAVERS: Well, basically we're talking 1947 to 1963.

DR. SAVAGE: That's a long period of time. I was five years old in '47, so I have no recollection of it then . . . of the Atomic bomb being tested, I'll never forget it personally as long as I live. It was in the New York Daily News, I think, and it showed "the Bomb" dropped on Japan, or something to that effect, and I ran down the street with the newspaper screaming, "The world is coming to an end, the world is coming to an end." Somehow it affected me deeply. Some probably thought I was a nut. Some thought, as I have described in the Bible, " . . . your young shall prophesize, and your old men shall dream dreams."

I hope I wasn't a prophet but the fact of the matter is that ushered in again an existential cloud of the world ending over us in a few minutes, which we've all lived with ever since. Think about that one. Prior to the Atomic weapon, nobody perceived the entire world could end in a few seconds, in a few minutes.

TRAVERS: Only from a Biblical standpoint.

DR. SAVAGE: How many walked around fearing that the Earth would tilt off its axis? That didn't happen until Al Gore came along, trying to scare everybody along with his friends at the National Geographic channel, forever again showing a catastrophe and a meteorite hitting the Earth and wiping out all life, but the fact is nobody thought about that. Anyway, that period of time was quite unique, and it produced vibrant men – the ones that came home, the ones that survived – full of life, full of zest. America was a nation that had just produced a major victory, wasn't it? So the nation was tremendously confident in itself, tremendously confident in its vision for the future, and look at the amazing things that were produced in the post-World War II era, from design to inventions, I don't have to list them. Look what burst forth on the scene.

Then, along came the degenerates, and I've long played with the idea of writing a long essay on this, on who destroyed America's psyche . . . and it was Allen Ginsberg, a troika; it was Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary and in the legal sphere who broke the (ILLEGIBLE) in the law, who made the law into a mockery, it was Kunstler, William Kunstler, the freedom riding bus guy who went on the buses in order to get laid. Believe me, he was a straight Jewish lawyer who discovered the Civil Rights Movement, and it was said that he loved the women. That's one of the reasons why he rode the buses so frequently to Alabama.

Now you could also enter into that troika the women's movement, because it was not based upon equality, it was based upon hating men. There's a difference between equality, which we are all for, and hatred of the male. Those elements shifted the nation from optimism and production into something entirely different; looking over your shoulder, questioning yourself, doubting the history of the nation, that's the result of only a very few people, a handful of revolutionaries. That 's my opinion, so that's the answer to that question I think . . . do you wanna go the next one?

TRAVERS: The New York you grew up in was thought of in many ways as the New Rome, America at its epic heights of power after World War II, New York the center of everything. Is this something that only makes itself apparent now, looking back, or did this permeate the consciousness of people at the time?

DR. SAVAGE: I'm looking at that: America at its epic heights . . .

TRAVERS: Is this something people think about only in retrospect, or did you realize at the time that we are now the most powerful country, or did this permeate the consciousness?

DR. SAVAGE: We didn't even think about it. Everyone walked around knowing that New York was the center of the world and that America was the center of the world; New York was the center of the center. That was the attitude then. Now, as you well know, liberals still have this attitude, as evidenced by their chauvinism incidentally. They claim they are people of the Earth, people of the world, citizens of the world rather, right? But look at their regio-centrism.

TRAVERS: What's that word again, Dr. Savage?

DR. SAVAGE: Regio-centrism, meaning their region is the center of the Universe, meaning they still think New York is the center of the world, the snobbism, the same thing you might find in a Parisian today, still walking around like that's the center of the world. Anyway, so yeah, we all knew that New York was the greatest place on Earth. At the time, we all knew it. That doesn't mean it was correct.

TRAVERS: Let's move on to the next question. You have many fans with Southern accents who call your show. On the surface they would not seem to have a lot in common with you, but when you talk with them there is much common ground. What is that common ground and how do you so easily find it?

DR. SAVAGE: I think it's a world view of how the world really should be or is, as opposed to the way the media presents it and it really isn't; the way the media shapes our mind into that world. Look at what just happened with gay marriage. They wanted us to believe that, "Oh well, that's Neanderthal, everybody's in favor of gay marriage" . . . oh really, what happened in North Carolina, what happened every time it's been voted on in 31 states? No it's quite true that most of the world doesn't see the world the way the media portrays it, and so the guys in the South like an outspoken man whose willing to speak his mind in a clear, strong voice, and whether or not they agree with everything I say, I cannot say. Who knows? I think they like the outspokenness of the man, the forthrightness. I can't speak for them because we're talking generically, I don't know.

TRAVERS: I've lived in the South, and still deal with many of them, and a lot of them are fans of yours . . .

(CALL CUT OFF)

TRAVERS: How old were you when you first grasped the meaning of the word "honor," and what circumstances led to this revelation?

DR. SAVAGE: I was a cub scout. It was drilled into us, that there was such a thing as self-respect, I think you'd call it. We didn't use the word honor. I think, respect yourself and respect others, we were taught by our scout leaders, that was the answer, I think. But my father in his little store, I mean, without using words such as honor, told me never to cheat on anyone, and if somebody didn't like something, take the object back and give them their money back, that kind of thing. I think that self-respect was in the words we would use, without even using them, nobody even used those words. I think once you use words like that you lose the meaning of them. I think you have to teach it through actions, let's put it that way; or learn it through actions. I think you learn such things through the actions of mentors, whether it be your father or your Cub Scout leader, or your teachers, or your preacher, whoever it may be. That's where it comes from. It's not thinking about it, but doing it.

So the next one is the Mailer-Salinger question?

TRAVERS: Yeah, exactly. You grew up during a post-war, literary renaissance with writers like Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, even Allen Ginsberg. How did you react to these writers and their books? Did their writing shape you at the time, or did you have to read them again as an older person to gain understanding?

DR. SAVAGE: Not really, because I've never re-read them, I read them as a younger man, and some of them influenced me positively, and some of them influenced me negatively. And you look at Mailer, he was all over the map when I was very young. He was the literary lion, and he was (ILLEGIBLE), he ran for Mayor, notorious sexcapades, he tried to imitate shooting an apple off his wife's head, which he copied from William Burroughs, I think that's where he got that shtick from. He was very much a fair promoter along the lines of many of the literary, political movie star type people of today. Whether he was as great a writer as he thought he was and people made him to be, I don't really know. I was more influenced by Mailer's shenanigans than I was by his writing. I never quite understood why he was considered such a great writer, in that his writing never touched me; in that he was a seminal figure for the same self-promotion I'm famous for. I mean, I'm pretty clear on that, because if I don't promote myself, Steve, who will? As you well know.

TRAVERS: Right.

DR. SAVAGE: I'm a shunned figure in the media, yet I have a very powerful radio show and I'm a bestselling author over and over again, so I'm not ashamed to say to you that without self promotion you can't survive in this society, because no one's gonna do it for you.

TRAVERS: As a writer I know that.

DR. SAVAGE: And there's no shame in that. If you can pull it off, God bless you. It's business. Mailer's self-promotional activities in that sense inspired me, but not his writing. Now, more influential as a writer was Hemingway.

Again, there was a sheen of bravado in his persona that appealed to me greatly as a young man; the safaris, women in the tent, the khaki clothing, you know what I'm saying? That kind whole imagery, of the heroic imagery . . . in fact I spent a lot of money in protecting elephants, the poor creatures that they are, to protect them from the evil Chinese who use their tusks for aphrodisiacs. If I could I'd donate a million dollars for Viagra for the old bastards in China to get stop them from having poachers killing elephants in Africa. So don't get me wrong, I didn't hunt for that reason, but again the imagery, the Hemingway imagery . . . Now remember, a lot of those guys in that era, whether be Hemingway, Kerouac or Miller, they were all heavy, heavy drinkers, and they boasted about being alcoholics. That was the thing of the literary '40s, '50s, the drinking, right? Of course, it's absurd; you can't write when you drink.

TRAVERS: Absolutely you cannot.

DR. SAVAGE: It's impossible, you can't do anything when you drink, but they said they could do anything. Again, that was a negative influence in that regard: "Oh, I'm gonna be a wild writer, I'm gonna get drunk in bars." But it was stupid, just stupid.

Hemingway was an influential writer. His writing was sparse, he had been a journalist first, as we all know. So his writing was not adorned with a lot of flowery language, and as a trained scientist, as I grew older I learned the Cardinal rule of science writing was to be as succinct as possible. And it appealed to me, you know. The economy of words, so to speak, so there was a nobility in Hemingway's writing, and a nobility in his characters, the heroic male who was usually a loner, usually misunderstood, somewhat introverted or, shall I say, introspective, was extremely appealing to me because it matched my character. So I was drawn to that same type of personality.

The same goes for Kerouac, the same type of character; introspective, loner, outsiders, but not shunning action when necessary. So Kerouac was probably . . . Hemingway was probably more influential initially because there was an adventurous side to him. As a kid I read Boys' Life. I'd say Boys' Life influenced me more than Hemingway or any of the other writers. I loved Boys' Life. I loved shows such as Sky King, which showed airplanes flying into the Alaskan outback, so I loved adventure stories, always.

Then I heard about On the Road. I was in college, and there was this fat kid named Harold, who went back to college when he was older, at 19, and he told us about this crazy wild story where somebody just drives across America and has a lot of fun and has a lot affairs, so we all read it. You know, we didn't know quite what it was about, other than having escaped responsibility and getting stoned and driving around in a car across the countryside, and meeting beautiful women, and having affairs in Mexico, but On the Road led me to the incredible books he wrote, you know: The Subterraneans, Dharma Bums, which were set in Marin County as you well know. We both live in Marin County; you live here full time, I live here part time, but a lot of Kerouac's writing was centered around Mt. Tamalpais, and the whole concept of it was so beautiful, with the deer coming down into the backyard, and I never encountered that in New York. There were no deer in Queens, and the idea of deer coming down and munching on your vegetables sounded quite romantic to me.

Little did I know that if you wanted to shoo them away, if they ate your tomatoes . . . but Kerouac, I think the fact that Kerouac also had a brother who died young resonated very deeply with me, and my situation, with my brother Jerome. The way he felt about his dead brother was the same way I felt about my own brother, and still feel about my brother, which was that he was a saint, because he never really tarnished himself on this Earth. I'm trying to think through Kerouac before I go on, because Henry Miller was as influential as Kerouac on me. Why? Was it just the depraved sex that he wrote about? In part. But Henry Miller invented most of those sex scenes. That's the interesting thing as I got to know about the man, which is most of his affairs were fictional. "He threw her down and he penetrated her." I mean that was all Henry Miller's cartoonish fantasies, not reality. But if you read Henry Miller, you had to have read Black Spring, and if you read Black Spring, you read one of the greatest books ever. Fiction, fiction. Modern fiction. And then you got to understand the true nature of his genius, so the Tropics books . . . how many people read Black Spring from Henry Miller I don't know, but I read that book over and over again. As I got older I read it again, especially when I was stranded in Fairfax for many years, I came to understand Black Spring even better, because I lived through a gigantic Black Spring.

Now you mentioned other writers in that little list; I added Hemingway to that list. Allen Ginsberg was very influential on me, because I confused him as a prophet. There he was, the rabbinic figure, Jewish voice, Jewish name, right? Deep, sonorous voice, he was devil incarnate, probably one of the most evil men in modern American history, like a Rasputin of the literary world. Not that he personally hurt me in any manner, but I got to know him very well in the East Village. I thought he was kin of a demi-god rabbi, and then I got to know Ferlinghetti, another fraud, one of the biggest fakers in the world, another one who makes believe he's down with the people, owns massive real estate holdings in San Francisco and Paris, and pretends (EFFECTS STONER VOICE) "I'm down with the people, turn Left, you know, more power to the people," so that whole scene, that whole scene . . .

TRAVERS: So would you say the literary aspects of these people; their fraudulent activities, and the fact they were not what they made themselves out to be, kind of turned you to the Right?

DR. SAVAGE: No. I became a conservative after I got my Ph.D., killing myself. Remember, I earned a Ph.D. from one of the great universities of the world - UC Berkeley, and I earned this Ph.D. in three years, which is kind of a world record. I earned it. It was not just that I earned a Ph.D. unpublished. I have an earned Ph.D., which I'm proud of, because I worked my ass off for it. And it was after I got the degree . . . you see I have a master's prior, not "Kellogg's Corn Flakes on the bottom of the box" degrees. My first one was a master's in botany that yielded a published study that was so fabulous it was entirely published in its entirety in a journal published by Harvard University, which was better than most master's degrees written.

This is an interesting question you raise, Steve, because why did I get two master's degrees, why did I bother? You want to hear about this, because this is an interesting story?

TRAVERS: Go ahead.

DR. SAVAGE: I never talked about it. When I was in high school, you know, I was in with the typical crowd of kids. They ere all kind of driven in some way, in one way or another, in that many of them were the sons of immigrants . . . you know, I was the son of an immigrant, I don't think they were, but they were driven and were severely hard driving kids, and I remember we always looked at role models; I mean look at him, we'd look at a professor's credentials, and I remember one kid said to me, "Look at him, he has two master's degrees," before he got his Ph.D. I thought that was amazing, and that became a goal, to prove how good you were, right? Then, as I got into academic work, I read that a master's degree can be a major monumental accomplishment if you do a real master's degree, and I believe it was Herbert Hoover, one of our Presidents, obviously, who had gotten a mining degree. I could be mistaken. I believe it was Hoover who had designed the Brooklyn Bridge after his master's thesis, you better check on that, because I'm not sure what President it was, Steve, but one of our Presidents had designed the Brooklyn Bridge as a master's degree thesis, can you believe it?

(CONSTRUCTION OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE BEGAN IN 1869 AND WAS COMPLETED IN 1883-84. PRESIDENTS IN OFFICE DURING ITS PLANNING, CONSTRUCTION AND COMPLETION INCLUDED ANDREW JOHNSON, U.S. GRANT, AND OTHERS. ITS OFFICIAL ARCHITECT WAS JOHN ROEBLING. HERBERT HOOPER WAS BORN IN 1874, FIVE YEARS AFTER CONSTRUCTION BEGAN. HOOVER WAS A MINING ENGINEER CREDITED WITH THE HOOVER DAM, NAMED AFTER HIM. THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE STARTED UNDER HIS GUIDANCE. HE WAS AN ENGINEER AND VISIONARY, BUT NOT OF THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE. A GOOGLE SEARCH DID NOT REVEAL WHICH PRESIDENT DR. SAVAGE REFERRED TO AS DESIGNING THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE AS PART OF A MASTER'S THESIS, BUT DEEPER DIGGING MAY WELL REVEAL THE ANSWER.)

To show you the degree between that and a degree in ethnic studies, or Chicano studies, or black studies, or women's studies today, where they grant degrees in such rubbish? So, I said, "Wow, if a master's degree could do that, I'm gonna do that," so my master's degree could do that, I said "I'm gonna do that," so my master's degree was the equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge in the field I was studying, which was botany. I was way ahead of my time in that. So, okay, that's why I got two master's degrees. Now, why am I a conservative?

So, despite all these phenomenal achievements - accomplishments rather, real master's degrees – I got another one in medical anthropology, again based on real research – and then I got a Ph.D. from Berkeley in three years, I figured that's my "meal ticket." All these old professors told me, "In order to be a professor you need a 'union card.' The 'union card,' Michael, is the Ph.D." So I told myself, well, okay, I'll get a Ph.D. from the greatest university in America, so I got one. I had six books published by that time. So guess what? Two young children, "union card called Ph.D. from great university," I was 30 something years old – 37, I don't remember – unhired. 200 colleges rejected me. I don't even know how many colleges. 200 rejection letters. Why? Certainly not because I didn't have the academic credentials. I had committed the greater crime. I was not born a black, a Hispanic, and I was not an illegal or a preferred minority. And I wasn't a woman. Because "affirmative action" had clicked in, where "white males need not apply." And I must tell you, Steven, when your - 42, 52, 62 . . . when you're 36 years old, and you've killed yourself to support yourself without scholarships to get two master's degrees and a Ph.D., and you have two young children, and you're not hired because you're of the wrong race, or sexual orientation, it tends to make you think very hard about your society, and then you find out that society is all twisted. I'll never forget as long as I live what the ACLU published in those years, the darkest years of my life: "some people will have to put their lives on hold so that others may advance." That was the ACLU's writings on the issue of not hiring white males. I think that pretty much defines when I became a conservative.

I should add a footnote to that little story; I've done very well in life, financially. But I've crawled over broken glass, I've rolled over hot coals, I've had people scar my body and my soul, but I've done well. But what about the million of white men who haven't been as fortunate and didn't have as much drive as I had, who are fine people, who have the degrees and have the brains, but were locked out, permanently underemployed, so that lesser qualified, lesser talented, lesser intelligent people can fill the ranks of bureaucracies, academia, and corporate books. Take a look at America today, as a result. Just take a look at it.

TRAVERS: Yeah, I agree, your "preaching to the choir."

DR. SAVAGE: (LAUGHING) I'm sure.

TRAVERS: You know, my dad always noticed these things just as you did. He saw all the same things.

DR. SAVAGE: It's going on in the military.

TRAVER: Sure.

DR. SAVAGE: They're throwing fine white men out of the military to promote lesser qualified, if qualified at all, individuals. Let's not go in that area, because it's gonna turn this into a bitter conversation, which is certainly not where I want this to go, certainly not from my point of view, because I'm not really embittered at all.

TRAVERS: I'd like you to take the next very simple question: is Hugh Hefner -

DR. SAVAGE: We missed an old book, by the way. I just opened an old bookcase. You remember those old paperbacks with the cute covers . . . oh, here they are, right in front of my eye: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, right? Now, strangely enough, you wouldn't believe it, Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan influenced me. You'd say, what? Why would Bonjour Tristesse, "the sensational bestselling novel about an 18 year French girl," why would that influence Michael Savage? Simple answer. Because when the book came out in 1950 or '51 I think, I didn't even know if anyone even knows the book . . .

TRAVERS: I don't.

DR. SAVAGE: It was written, published by Dell Publishing, 1955. Because she was a young French girl who wrote a bestseller, and she was then seen in PR photos with a brand new black XK120 Jaguar convertible roadster rather. So I figured if writing could lead you to owning a Jaguar, I'd better become a writer. I mean, what influences young people? I'm giving you the honest truth here.

TRAVERS: I completely understand where you're coming from, and had similar experiences. I gotta ask you a completely different question, and I'll encapsulate it to a very simple question, which is –

DR. SAVAGE: I have to give you one more book. A Shropshire Lad. You ever hear of that poem?

TRAVERS: No.

DR. SAVAGE: I read it in college. Can I tell you that story, it's fantastic?

TRAVERS: Okay.

DR. SAVAGE: A.E. Houseman. A period, E period. H-O-U-S-M-A-N.

TRAVERS: My daughter read a similar poem at my dad's memorial.

DR. SAVAGE: Oh jeez, A Shropshire Lad. What did she read, "To an Athlete Dying Young"?

TRAVERS: No, but it was similar: "I carry your heart with me," by E.E. Cummings.

DR. SAVAGE: "On your midnight pallet lying" - See, he wrote very dark poetry. " . . . When I was one-and-twenty, I heard a wise man say, 'Give crowns and pounds and guineas, but give not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies, but keep your fancy free.' But when I was one-and-twenty, no use to talk to me." How's that for a poem?

TRAVERS: That's incredible.

DR. SAVAGE: Anyway, I was introduced to poetry when I entered college and took English 101 at Queens College, the university of New York. We had a professor named, I forget his name, but I'll never forget how he looked, though: shocked white hair, piercing blue eyes, and remember these were working class kids including myself, so called working class kids. It was not working, but lower middle class kids, with no cultural background to speak of, right? So when he introduced poetry, we all squirmed kind of nervously, we thought it was "faggy," right? You know, c'mon, fruits listen to that stuff. That's how we kind of . . .

But when he read Housman, he set off so many different things within me, and it was very much like Plato wrote about in his Dialogues, where he takes a slave kid and through logic shows the reader that the reader knew mathematics in a previous life, because he had logic, okay? So I read poetry in a previous life type of thing.

TRAVERS: Like George Patton.

DR. SAVAGE: So anyway, A.E. Housman, and in college this guy introduces me to poetry, which I think introduced my interest in writing altogether.

TRAVERS: That's where I see your personality.

DR. SAVAGE: Nobody's ever heard of the Housman story, that's an important part of this interview.

TRAVERS: I'll look into that further and make sure I get that right.

DR. SAVAGE: Especially his poem, "To an Athlete Dying Young."

TRAVERS: Well, that's his famous poem.

DR. SAVAGE: That's because as a young man, who had a sense of mortality, was going through the sufferings of young (ILLEGIBLE), where you over emphasize your own value, where we're all so tragic, because we 're gonna die one day, right?

TRAVERS: Please read and comment on the following statement: Hugh Hefner represents a unique cultural figure in American history. For centuries, when armies won battles, soldiers were paid the "spoils of war," which meant to pillage the countryside and have their way with available women. This was the way of the Romans, the Vikings, and was still part of war as recently as the Russian treatment of German maidens in World War II. Hefner's Playboy magazine represented the modern "spoils" of war in a civilized society, the "winners of history" rewarding themselves with lavish homes, fast cars, fancy food and drinks, and beautiful women. His magazine represented the "good life" that the American male desired after winning the biggest fight ever fought. His introduction of gorgeous girls was a rite of passage for millions of young men, in many ways a healthy appreciation of sex described as common to any "red blooded American kid." However, Hefner's depictions were like marijuana, a gateway to hard drugs, in that they were a gateway to pornography and its addictive powers. He created an image of perfect women who performed sex acts that average girls could never match, thus elevating male expectations to unattainable status. The result is that marriages fail half the time, and sexual perversion is now common.

DR. SAVAGE: Oh God, yes in one sense only, by airbrushing women he destroyed the minds of millions of men. Turned them into something they weren't. Created Barbie dolls instead of women, so men kept looking for the shiksa in the Vermont cabin, who was perfect and had perfect breath, right? Who smiled all the time . . . and never had a bad moment in her existence. Who could lift you out of your despair with one wink! (LAUGHS)

TRAVERS: The seduction, of course, that's exactly what he did. The other thing I think he did is, throughout history, armies would rape and pillage the countryside, and America is a civilized country that doesn't do that, and I think he provided a form of that; the spoils of war though his depictions of the good life, mainly through beautiful women and fast cars. What's your feeling about that?

DR. SAVAGE: Well, that's your observation. I can't comment, I never thought of it that way. It's certainly a valid observation if that's how you see it. I couldn't even see it in the global picture, in that sense that truthfully I think he fictionalized women. Remember the pornography that preceded him was all graphic of real people, right, okay, some were misshapen but they were real. These were not real. None of these women were real. We're in the age now of the (ILLEGIBLE) breast where it's so many women have mutilated their bodies with silicone, and he mutilated their bodies with airbrushing. He was the first female mutilator, modern American mutilator. He made a fortune by mutilating women in the pictures he showed.

TRAVERS: Did he ruin men? Did he ruin men's lives?

DR. SAVAGE: I don't know what he ruined. I don't know what he did for people. I know he screwed up the American mind. Both for men and women. No woman could ever be like that, so they gave up and became gay. No man could ever find a woman like that, so they gave up on marriage. I don't know. If you want to blame him for everything I guess you can!?

TRAVERS: You're right about that, people do look at it of their own free will.

DR. SAVAGE: Look, you can look at a person's influence on culture, and you can make him into anything you want. Some would say he's a great liberator, I would argue the opposite. But it's too late, but it's way past that, the point of no return. Look what's followed it. Look at Larry Flynt, with what he followed Playboy with. Okay, he went from the airbrushed to the super-graphic, remember? Larry Flynt came along and reversed it from the airbrushed woman to the super-graphic. Again, what did that do for womanhood? He debased womanhood forever, by taking their most intimate part, and making it almost macroscopic instead of microscopic, blowing it way out of proportion to the overall being, making a woman into one gaping (female genitalia) instead of into a human being. So if you want to blame one person for the demise of women it would be Larry Flynt, not Hugh Hefner. Hugh Hefner turned women into angels, right? Larry Flynt turned women into craven sexual whores, that all they ever wanted was a gigantic (male genitalia). They had no other needs. They'd forego food, water, shelter; to Larry Flynt all women ever needed was a gigantic male member. (LAUGHING)

I'm sorry, you start me off, I'm gonna give you the full truth and answer you in the most graphic way I can.

TRAVERS: I get it. I totally get it. I agree with you.

DR. SAVAGE: This is the kind of question that should have been asked of me by that schmuck from Playboy magazine. I was asked by that (deleted), I gave him eight hours of my life, he sat in my house, made believe he was my friend, then the (deleted) publishes an interview which starts by saying, "I've never disliked anyone in my life more than Michael Savage." Not once did he indicate he didn't like me, he was such a lying weasel.

TRAVERS: Well, for one thing, you're talking to a person who's listened to you, on average, 40 minutes a day for 16 years.

DR. SAVAGE: Oh Jesus.

TRAVERS: So I know your work, and have not always liked you, and have not always agreed with you, and sometimes even turned you off, but I keep coming back. I think that probably describes a lot of your listeners.

DR. SAVAGE: Ho can you can believe and like anyone for 16 years?

TRAVERS: Because we've always, for 16 years, had a common complaint, which is that liberalism has really done such horrible things to the world, not just America.

DR. SAVAGE: We've only just begun what they're going to do, it's worse than ever.

TRAVERS: I know. It's awful.

DR. SAVAGE: It's gonna get worse than ever under this gangster regime.

TRAVERS: Please read and comment on the following statement: God created man, who was corrupted by Original Sin and therefore sentenced to eternal damnation. He so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son so that it might be saved. Christ died to pay for our sinful natures, but we still are born into sin whether we believe, ask for forgiveness, or try to live perfect lives. Perfection is impossible for man. Therefore, sin is natural and in fact many good Christians do many sinful things. Many who do not believe point to this and call it hypocrisy, but Christians never said they are perfect, just saved.

DR. SAVAGE: I'll tell you another hypocrisy. You see that's where the bastards get it all wrong (ILLEGIBLE) holy, don't they understand it's an ideal? Judaism and Christianity present an ideal for man. It doesn't mean you're a hypocrite if you fail to reach that ideal. But what if you never try to reach that ideal, then what are you? Then you're the Left, they're the ones who defecate in public places, so that's not hypocrisy, that's depravity.

TRAVERS: That's a very interesting point.

TRAVERS: You came to the Bay Area to attend the University of California, Berkeley, which in the 1960s allowed itself to become the de facto staging grounds of American Communism. You settled in San Francisco, which was transformed by the Berkeley riots and the Summer of Love into one of the liberal bastions of the world. Still, you choose to stay here and profess much love for the City, and admiration for Cal as a great university, despite tremendous political differences. What is it about these places and experiences that drew you and made you love them even when you found yourself in the minority view?

DR. SAVAGE: I'm on the verge of leaving almost every day because of Jerry Brown. He makes it almost intolerable to live here. We don't have any newspaper, that's the truth for a long while. We don't have any leadership. He's the leader the unions and the illegal aliens. It's almost intolerable to live here if you're a successful working person. You know, 100 companies, top CEOs just voted California the least favorable state in the nation to create and run a business. That's what this man has created. Tax and spend. Out of control taxation, and spending, and incidentally the Hollande victory in France; it turns up, it came out yesterday but was hushed up in the papers . . . the so called anti-rich candidate Socialist owns three houses on the French Riviera.

TRAVERS: Of course, that's par for the course.

DR. SAVAGE: That didn't get published in any American newspapers. Somebody ought to investigate how much "white liberals" in San Francisco and the state capitol own, like who's the wealthiest woman in Congress? Nancy Pelosi.

A "women of the people," Barbara Boxer, our dear friend Barbara from Marin County, her husband Stew the lawyer and her son the lawyer. How about her zoning games here in Marin County, re-zoning agricultural land into re-development sites while screaming about the environment, and how much have they profited while they've been in office? And how about Dianne Feinstein and Dick Blum, how much has her wealth increased since she's become a Senator? It's beyond belief, how gullible people are. But I know why, and I know how this game works: by feeding the radical Left, their social meat, the politicians can get away with the most grotesque robbery of the public treasury imaginable, because otherwise intelligent people who would be on the side of justice, are so oriented only around their doxy, and their single issue, whether it be gay marriage or whatever their pet project may be, that they pay no attention to the overt thievery of their political henchmen. That's the game, how it's cleverly played.

TRAVERS: It's amazing. It is.

Communism traces back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French Revolution, 19th Century European uprisings, Marxist writings, and then the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the U.S., "Red Emma" Goldman and anarchism represented the earliest stirrings of this sentiment, recognized from the beginning by J. Edgar Hoover. Many of FDR's staff were paid Soviet spies, all confirmed by Venona. Sides were taken when Alger His was convicted despite the Left insisting on his innocence, with revenge taken after McCarthyism by a Left-wing backlash in movies, the media, and the Democrat Party. Despite so much carnage of history, and so much evidence that Socialism fails, many refuse to turn away from it.

Many know they are opposed to Communism but have not seen it up close like you. You often refer to children who grew up in New York under radical parents, often attending NYU, and many of whom went into the ACLU. In the 1960s, Communist fronts supported and financed much of the anti-war movement. Saul Alinsky was one of the early organizers. This became a cottage industry, with Barack Obama one of its leaders. After the Berlin Wall fell, many took up "global warming" as a perfect international mantra. Please help me understand who these people are; where their money comes from; how their organizations are tied to each other; and how Communism, whether Soviet-controlled or home grown, has morphed into something that never dies, a kind of cancer on society opposing all traditions like Christianity, family, patriotism, military valor, and rugged individualism. Please describe the psychology behind this phenomenon and give some allegorical examples of it. Is it Satan?

DR. SAVAGE: Rebellion, I don't know. I don't know about Satan, I mean that's beyond me. I don't want to talk about metaphysics because I don't have an answer for any of that. I mean, I live in this world. I leave that to God and the experts. I have no answer. I mean, why does evil exist?

Evil exists so we know what goodness is. That's what the mystical rabbis teach, that without evil there can be no good. So the evil exists in order for us to understand what good is. And we should not shun evil. We should understand it, in order to understand what goodness is.

Within each man in Jewish teachings there is a thing called the evil impulse, and the evil impulse is within every man. And the object of the evil impulse is to overcome it. In other words, not to deny its existence, because it exists.

As one rabbi said to me once, he said, "Michael, do you think I'm made of stone?" He said, "Don't you think I see I see beautiful women, that I don't see all the temptations of the world?" Then he said, "I do." But he said the object is to deny them, not to cater to them. That's the whole bondage to God, and believe me it's a bondage. You know in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, and I'm not religious, but they wrap phylacteries. What they are is leather thongs with two rings inside a little box, and they put them on their head every morning as they pray to God each day. What does the ritual mean? It means your bonding yourself to God each day, to try to keep you on the straight and narrow. Right. Why? Why would a mean need to bind himself with a leather thong around his arm each day in a certain way with a little box with the teachings of God in it? Why? So he remembers which way to go that day.

Another rabbi once taught that life is like a gigantic carnival, with a central walkway down the middle, and on each side there are booths. And each booth has something more tempting than the other, and as you walk down this long, long walkway, each booth has something beautiful beckoning you to enter. And he said your object is to stay on that path down the middle of the walkway down past the booths, and not go into any of those booths. How's that for a metaphor?

TRAVERS: That's it.

DR. SAVAGE: Who teaches these things any more, Steven? No one teaches these things any more. The booth operators, the hawkers, have taught us that's the way, come into this booth, I own my friend's booth, I own the circus, and by the time you walk out the end there's nothing left.

TRAVERS: I went to my church and we had a round table discussion and I wanted to talk about the nature of sin, and my own guilt for being sinful, and the pastor, a woman pastor who once compared Abu Ghraib to the Holocaust -

DR. SAVAGE: Oh Jesus.

TRAVERS: . . . And she just looked at me like I was out of my mind, like what are you talking about?

DR. SAVAGE: A lesbian preacher?

TRAVERS: She's not lesbian, but -

DR. SAVAGE: She's worse. What denomination?

TRAVERS: Lutheran.

DR. SAVAGE: Lutheran? Is that liberal?

TRAVERS: It's pretty liberal. I've got friends at the church so I go, you know.

DR. SAVAGE: Is that in Corte Madera?

TRAVERS: No, it's in Fairfax.

DR. SAVAGE: There's a small Lutheran church in Corte Madera, near the Bank of America.

TRAVERS: Have you ever read Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville? Would you agree that beyond great victories in war, Wall Street big business, or grandiose accomplishments (like building a national railroad, the Hoover dam, or water aqueducts), the simple act of organizations like Lions and Rotary, which allow competing businesses that in Medici Italy created cut throat vendettas, to in this country help each other in a "rising tide that lifts all boats," represents true American Exceptionalism? Please elaborate.

DR. SAVAGE: I did but I'd rather not refer to it because I think he's been over discussed. Everyone refers to deToqueville in that regard and I think it's kind of done.

TRAVERS: Much of your background is counter-culture. Based on this assessment, would you consider yourself to be an enigma?

DR. SAVAGE: (LAUGHING) No, I'm an enigma within an enigma. I am the double Chinese fortune cookie. I am the DNA inside Rubik's cube. I hold the key to Houdini's locker.

TRAVERS: I think we've just gotten the epitaph quotes that will appear in a box at the top of the story.

DR. SAVAGE: "The key to Houdini's locker . . . I am an enigma within an enigma." (LAUGHING)

TRAVERS: Somewhere in that.

DR. SAVAGE: That's funny. Those are the bullet points.

TRAVERS: Well, my editor came up with this, and he said, "Here's a guy who came up in the counter-culture, and was influenced by Ginsberg and Kerouac and-what-have-you, and yet he's a so called Right-wing guy, and he said, that's an enigma."

DR. SAVAGE: Let me answer that, because you raise a key point that we missed on Kerouac that should be added and put in somewhere. A key point on Kerouac was that he was conservative. Does anyone know that?

TRAVERS: So was Salinger, too, to some extent.

DR. SAVAGE: I didn't know that political stuff, but I knew that Kerouac, who had been a great, great role model of mine, was a supporter of Nixon, hated Ginsberg as the devil incarnate – said he misled him in his early life - and shunned the entire, the entire Left-wing (B.S.), and wound up living with his mother in Florida, where he died, as you know.

TRAVERS: From alcohol.

DR. SAVAGE: Well, okay, but he was a die-hard anti-Communist, anti-liberal.

TRAVERS: I know, I know, I read his biography.

DR. SACAGE: But they don't teach that in the colleges.

TRAVERS: He's viewed as this, you know, new age type; he shunned that whole Beatnik, hippie thing.

DR. SAVAGE: He saw right through it.

TRAVERS: Well you know, there's a great song, "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who, and The Who had come up out of the '60s, the British rock invasion, and went to Woodstock, and were part of that whole anti-war thing, and at Woodstock everyone was dirty, and filthy, and stupid, and they wrote this song, "Won't Get Fooled Again," which you should play on your show, which basically is, "We were fooled by the Left and the anti-war crowd as being idealistic," and it's not what it is. And that's what that song is about, and you should investigate it; you play a lot of great songs.

DR. SAVAGE: Before you go, since this is an interview, I'd like to read you something. There's a big part of my life, of collecting medicinal plants, in the South Pacific, that's unknown completely. I want to read you the back of a little pamphlet I published on herbs and immunity, a paragraph. You can use it if you wish:

"Michael A. Weiner, Ph.D. and author. We are just beginning to tap the vast healing power of plants. We can bring the world highly effective natural alternatives for the prevention of disease. Michael A. Weiner, M.S.A. Ph.D., is the only person ever awarded a Ph.D. in nutritional ethno medicine from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978, based on many years of research on the use of plants and medicine, the studies of human nutrition and studies of medical botany. This degree was granted. He also holds an M.A. in medical anthropology and an M.S. degree in botany from the University of Hawaii. He has studied traditional medicine for over 20 years conducting plant-gathering expeditions to islands in the South Pacific, the Middle East and throughout North America. For many years he provided plant samples from the Fiji Islands for the National Cancer Institute anti-GMO screening program. He is credited with starting the herbal revolution."

So, that important, that's a big part of my life that someday somebody will remember.

TRAVERS: I absolutely see that.

You played a song by The Kinks that tells the tale of how England, after all their wars, sacrifice, and struggle to form a great civilization, is a shell of its once-great empire. What causes civilization to erode?

DR. SAVAGE: Comfort, security.

TRAVERS: What a conundrum, because those are the things you fight for.

DR. SAVAGE: Comfort is the road to . . .

TRAVERS: Serfdom?

DR. SAVAGE: " . . . Not decadence so much, but not paying attention to what's going on around you. Why struggle if you don't have to? Everybody seems to want, a life of comfort and plenty. That seems to be the goal of civilizations, every animal, and plenty. Elephant seals I watched on the island of the Farallons want to dive out and get the seals, so it's okay to hang out and fornicate like a hippie in the '60s. The only thing to look out for are the sharks, like the hippies had to watch out for the cops so they'd not be busted for drug use.

TRAVERS: In the history of the world, are dark-skinned, indigenous people better off for coming into contact with white Europeans, or worse off?

DR. SAVAGE: Well that's a loaded question. I'll answer it this way. Look at Haiti. Is Haiti the most impoverished island nation in the Western hemisphere? Yes, is that correct or incorrect?

TRAVERS: Yes.

DR. SAVAGE: Yes, look at the history of Haiti. Haiti is the only nation, island nation, to have successfully fought against colonialism, and successfully evicted the colonialists, their slave masters from the island. That's a fact. What happened after they evicted the white man from their island? Take a look at Haiti today. They did not have the capacity to support themselves, sustain themselves. The same is true in ex-Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe under Mugabe. They kicked the white man out of this nation called Rhodesia, which was once a food exporter, and is now the basket case of Africa. Can't raise enough food to feed its own people. Sorry.

TRAVERS: Are you familiar with the legend that the Haitians did a deal with Satan to get rid of Napoleonic forces?

DR. SAVAGE: I didn't know about that. I've heard about that, but I don't get into the metaphysical.

TRAVERS: Well, look into it.

DR. SAVAGE: Again, I'm not into the metaphysical. So, Satan punished them in this way?

TRAVERS: Well, you have to look into it.

DR. SAVAGE: I'd rather not have that in the interview, I'd rather not get into it. It would put me into an area that I don't feel comfortable with, Steve.

TRAVERS: Pleas read and comment on this premise: God involves Himself in the affairs of Man.

DR. SAVAGE: I've had this discussion with others and with myself all my life. I once read a book 30 years ago called Peace of Mind, by a former rabbi, who wrote that if he believed God was omnipotent, he would cease believing immediately, because there's so much tragedy on Earth, right? Little children crushed under refrigerators, people suffering violent deaths from disease, so he said if you believe God is omnipotent and controlled everything, he would cease believing in God.

TRAVERS: You know, that's actually what Norman Mailer said.

DR. SAVAGE: So he definitely believed that God was omni-present, not omnipotent, meaning he's everywhere but he doesn't control everything. What's the good of a God like that, you may say.

TRAVERS: Well, the answer to that comes down to the question of Original Sin, and that's a longer -

DR. SAVAGE: That's for somebody who does God Talk. Talk to Bernie Ward. (LAUGHTER)

TRAVERS: That guy drove me crazy for years.

DR. SAVAGE: No, that's an opening to a funny little side note I'm going to mention . . . You said, talk to Savage, and he said, "That's beyond me for somebody who does God Talk, and he said talk to Bernie Ward, and you laughed because blah blah.

TRAVERS: I know that whole story, I know about that and you don't even have to talk to me about it, because I know that whole story . . . he gave away your home address . . .

DR. SAVAGE: That S.O.B. tried to kill my radio career from the day I started.

TRAVERS: Didn't he give your home address and tell people to show up at your house?

DR. SAVAGE: I'd be on the air and I could smell him, he stunk so bad in the other studio at KGO, and he'd say, "I hear the white sheets rustling," that S.O.B. He personally stank. I don't know if you know that, but nobody would go in the studio after he had been in there, until a cleaning crew had been in there, and deloused the room. He was physically, and this is an important point; you know they say cleanliness is the closest thing to Godliness! This man stank, he would leave garbage, food on the floor, no one could be around him, and look how he wound up. I have found that people who are physically repulsive are spiritually degenerate as well. It doesn't mean that everyone that's clean in good, but this whole Occupy Movement is filled with Bernie Wards.

TRAVERS: Exactly. You see it wherever the Left protests. They leave a mess, and wherever the Tea Party goes they pick up after themselves.

DR. SAVAGE: That's right, because they have self-respect. It goes back to your first question. By the way, what magazine is this? Is this an on-line magazine?

TRAVERS: It's called Gentry magazine. It's a regular magazine that will be on newsstands. It's the same magazine I wrote an article for, about the athlete Barry Zito that you so kindly interviewed me about on air, but it will also be available on-line.

You mention cleanliness, and I'm reading Steve Jobs's bio, and you mention an interesting point; this is a guy who lived on fruits and nuts, and died of pancreatic cancer at age 56?

DR. SAVAGE: How long did he eat fruits and nuts?

TRAVERS: Very early, from Reed College on.

DR. SAVAGE: Oh, he went to Reed?

TRAVERS: I don't know if he did it all the way to the end or not.

DR. SAVAGE: People don't understand that there are natural plant toxins, number one. I'm an expert in this field, and there's a misnomer that if it's natural it's good for you, but there are many toxins occurring naturally in food. I read this in grad school and was shocked by it. I thought what, if it's natural it's good for you? But you start with the obvious. How about plants that contain natural amounts of strychnine or kirari?

TRAVERS: You talked about this the other day with some dingbat who said marijuana was natural.

DR. SAVAGE: You can kill yourself with plants pretty good, too.

TRAVERS: Sure.

DR. SAVAGE: I don't know what plants the poor man ate. We're certainly not doing a book, a doxie on Steve Jobs, but peanuts . . . peanuts if they are not properly stored have a very potent carcinogen called aflatoxins, so people who eat great amounts of peanut butter or peanuts, are not aware that some of these food could be carcinogenic because of the aflatoxins, so God knows if he ate peanut butter that was contaminated, I don't know. I'm giving it to you off the cuff if, certainly not a scientific analysis.

DR. SAVAGE: You say something about Muslims that nobody else does; that many of them hate the West because we are immoralists who abort our children, turn from God, embrace homosexuality, and make sexuality our "god." You get a fair number of Muslims call your show and agree with much of what you say. Please comment on this dynamic.

DR. SAVAGE: What they hate most about this country is cultural degeneracy. A Muslim family man who is religious and is not a fanatic does not want porn, does not want his daughter to end up like Britney Spears, or his son like Jeffrey Katzenberg, tries to limit the effluence of the Hollywood sewer pipe, detests Western culture, which has become the antithesis of Western Civilization. He might embrace the ideals of Western Civilization, such as religious tolerance, but all he hears is degeneracy, and does not want his daughter to look like a Hollywood slut.

Steven Travers is a USC graduate, ex-professional baseball player, and former columnist for the San Francisco Examiner who has authored 20 books, including the bestseller Barry Bonds: Baseball's Superman, and his latest, The Last Icon: Tom Seaver and His Times. His web page is redroom.com/author/steven-robert-travers/ and he can be reached at USCSTEVE1@aol.com.

QUESTIONS NOT ADDRESSED

Clint Eastwood said as he got older he was "not afraid of doubt." Does age and life experience toughen you, or make you doubt yourself less, when you face criticism?

We live in the "information age." Today it seems everybody goes to college. Movies are made by people who study filmmaking from their youth. Still, it seems the more we "know," the dumber we are. Movies are not as good today as they were when they were made by people who almost seemed to fall into the business by accident (think of roustabouts like Robert Mitchum and Steve McQueen). Please comment on this, or disagree with the premise.

You are considered a "Right-wing" or "conservative" talk show host, but your program and your audience is substantially different from most of the other conservatives in the media. What have you tapped into that makes you so darn fascinating not just to Right-wingers but to literate people with a love of history?

One-on-one with former Los Angeles Times sports editor Bill Dwyre

Q: Did Murray and Otis Chandler have a good relationship?

A: Yes, Otis was in on the general hiring of Murray. It was down to Murray and Mel Durslag, then with the Los Angeles Herald-Express. He liked something about Murray. Durslag was better known as a writer. He was syndicated whereby Jim was with Sports Illustrated, but not featured as a "star" yet. Durslag was under contract and getting him to come over was problematic, which was a reason he was not hired, but as I recall Otis Chandler settled on Jim Murray and got him.

A: The sports section separated the paper from other papers. This may sound self-serving but it was - and still is, relatively - an incredibly good product. It's not as good as it once was. We all know that. What we did was not to be arrogant about sports. We were intelligent. The section never looked down its nose upon sports. We spent money on sports. In the hey day, the New York Times did not spend money comparably, but our attitude, our approach separated us from them.

This was one of the ways Otis Chandler, a former jock, saw the growth of the paper. I did the 1984 Olympics. That's why they brought me in. The New York Times thought our approach was excessive, but Otis didn't care. I lived during the golden age of that paper. We were not provincial, while everything about the New York Times sports section, ironically, was provincial. They were living in the past, thinking of New York City as the sports capitol, but that was a thing of the past and the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics symbolized that. Otis knew it and spent money to take full advantage of that. It was our finest hour.

Today, the paper worships at the altar of the Dodgers, Lakers and USC. There is no space now to add what we used to do. We've reverted to being the opposite of what we were then. We currently do that but in the old days we covered all that and more, we covered all sports. The '84 Olympics was our masterpiece. We set the agenda. Every day in that era we produced a massive volume of sports information every day. Daily for years we produced the best sports stories anywhere with little regard for length or space or money constraints. Otis just said, "Keep going, kid."

Q: In your honest opinion did the L.A. Times ever ascend to being the "best newspaper in the world"?

A: Yes. In the world? I can say for sure we were the best in the country. I guess I'd say it had to be in the 1980s and early 1990s. Maybe the London Times. I can't say because of the language barrier, who knows, maybe some of the Chinese papers were equal . . .

There's one more story. It was 1986-87, the Super Bowl played at the Rose Bowl between the New York Giants and the Denver Broncos. In those days the Super Bowl was played at the Rose Bowl regularly, and we were spending money like there was no tomorrow. We wanted something different, so I was authorized to hire a prominent non-sports writer to write articles from the Super Bowl, a prominent, world-class author. I hired Leon Uris, who wrote Exodus about the creation of the state of Israel. I think we paid him $5,000 apiece for 3,000 words each.

So we send him down to Newport Beach where the teams trained, and we brought in his young wife to shoot photos, and he wrote some advance pieces. Now we get to the day of the game. Uris is sitting in the press box. We've got 15 people covering every angle. Uris is sitting next to Jack Smith and Jim Murray, two esteemed writers. The Broncos lost big to the Giants.

I'm running around, making sure I don't have guys writing the same thing. Everything's running smooth except for Uris. I look over and I see him over there next to Murray, typing and humming away. Murray and Smith, two pros in their element. Finally, the game ends, the interviews are conducted, and it's getting towards deadline. Smith and Murray are finished and packed. I go to Uris, I ask how he's doing. He's got three or four graphs. He just looks up at me and says, "I can't do this."

This guy wrote long novels that took years, two or three years in some cases, research and contemplation, but he was too intimidated by Jim Murray. Murray had trouble seeing, the game was boring, and Uris sat next to him all game while Jim tried to come up with a column. Then all of a sudden when the heat was on Jim just pounded one out and Uris is sitting there, unbelievably intimidated. He spent two or three years to write the kind of stuff he did. I had to write the last 18 graphs for him. Considering his normal material, and Jim's penchant for historical and Biblical references, he should have written something like, "As with the parting of the Red Sea the Denver Broncos' defense opened up while the New York Giants proceeded to pass through, but when John Elway and Denver tried to advance they were swallowed up by waves of Bill Parcels' defenders . . ."

Q: What was the general attitude at the Times after the Chandler admonition over the Staples deal, and especially after the sale to the Tribune? Was there a feeling that something was lost that could never be regained?

A: We did not think that way at the time. We were so used to success and unable to imagine the horrors ahead. Now we're living them, but at the time we had no frame of reference as to what might come up when we were purchased.

Leigh Steinberg

On Tim Cook

To expect in the mind's eye, that a Steve Jobs whose no longer with us was a brilliant visionary, but to say he never made a mistake, that he never had problem with employees, there's a tendency of euphoric recall, to deify the person whose no longer there, this is a very difficult standard to live up to, that Steve would have done this and would have done that . . . Jobs had plenty of flaws, so my advice is he has a fresh opportunity to reimagine what Apple is as a company. To find future potential markets and bring a fresh look to that, Cook ought not be intimidated by past successes because the world of innovation is a world where every form of how they dispense content is continually updated. The world of creativity has to imagine the next 10 years instead of being stuck in the past heritage and success of the company. Cook must strike his own path. I understand he;s in an unenviable position. His predecessor was on the cover of Time and his his passing has been glorified, deservingly so.

What Cook requires is the internal fortitude and self confidence to chart one's own path while being sensitive to the legacy of his predecessor, but still be deferential. But the point is in the tech field innovation occurs so rapidly four months pass and it's ancient history. If Jobs lived he'd have faced the same challenge.

On the future of sports media

If someone had looked at sports media 25 years ago, and fallen asleep like Rip van Winkle, they'd have awaken to a world scarcely recognized. The multiple platforms of content and supply have proliferated, starting with the fact 20 years ago there were just three TV networks. Now Direct TV offers 300 stations and more sports on TV, many more games, and therefore more analysis, highlights and discussion. We've also seen the emergence of print writers crossing over to TV personalities.

The menu of sports options is stunningly large now, but print will have the burden of dealing with the next generation that essentially receives all their information over a computer screen or a mobile phone. What happens to newspapers? What about breaking events on the Internet, on talk radio; how will they maintain that role?

For many people the exodus of print writers going to the Internet, the audience is much larger. In this office none of my interns or young lawyers read daily newspapers. I get the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, and others. But traditional media is not getting better. There are no great writers any more. There are no Jim Murrays. The confusion of papers that had standards of accuracy has been morphed into opinion from objectivity intermingled in a cacophony of information flow. It's extraordinary the number of blogs, web sites and independent "news organizations," and who knows their accuracy? There are few superstar sports journalists anymore. Many have no validity, who knows who they are?

TV will become a computer track, a delineation on how people take sports in. People born before 1965 want to watch it on TV with advances on HDTV, big screens. TV means games that are sharper, crisper, more real than before. The younger generation just wants content and will watch it on a mobile phone. Their definition on how they receive information is different.

The technological innovations are so that Direct TV will make a sleight of Sunday games that can be watched; one game at a time or four games in four sections, the station making them all available on a singlescreen.

Fans can text and talk "smack" with the friends on the screen, defining the game and the relation of the fan's levels of interactivity. They will continue more innovation and different ways to enjoy sports programming.

Why does sports make so much more money today than in 1975? Sports right fees are loss leaders with no ability to recoup in advertising to what they spend in rights fees. The overall goal is to increase the overall stock evaluation of the network, sp there is more fractionalization on the TV dial. It's harder for TV networks to find an audience. Fox was The Simpsons and Beverly Hills 90210. Rupert Murdoch decided to make NFL football showing promotions for all their programming and shows, and were able to get large numbers of viewers to tune in to the Monday-to-Friday broadcasts, making them profitable. Fans were used to tuning to that station for NFL games, and in very fractionalized market tended to tune in to the shows on that station. They needed something, some factor, to attract that audience.

The NFL in its purest form is at this moment by two-to-one the most popular sport in America. Five of the top 10 Nielsen rated shows were night NFL games. Of 100 entertainment options, football wins hands down. Fan attendance is something else. In 1994 attendance dropped 40 percent after the strike. When Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, and later Barry Bonds brought enhanced statistics, attendance increased dramatically. Since 1994 gross receipts of baseball have quadrupled as well as marketing, memorabilia, the baseball network, and ancillary revenue soruces.

Baseball brought itself back through clever marketing but football, like it not, is the most popular. There's been a shift in people's attention spans occasioned by people looking at big screen color TVs, texting, tweeting, multiple sources of sensory stimulation; it all has had a subversive effect on attention spans, this "McPaper" type of focus. A sport like football was built and grew with action in tighter quadrants as a once a week event, perfect to capture this paradigm.

Baseball comes through the prism of father-son relationships over years of following the game. The mind's eye is seeing team's from before that; thereof it is hard to explain to a European the emotional attachment of baseball.

When you realize way people take in information in sports, there are so many niches and new ways to experience sports; new angles, playing out on the Internet . . . the Internet has the most power.

I once imagined something called the "sports exchange," where we would hire beat writers from all sports teams who would write daily ruminations on the teams, personnel moves; What it meant was you could sit in SF having grown up in Boston and get all the information on the Red Sox and the Patriots, as if you lived there. This was a new and creative idea that is now reality. New and creative ideas will continue to change the sports landscape.

We will always have content needs. Today there are women in sports media. When I was growing up there were no women on the TV news, no women on radio. The feminine voice was not as great as the deeper male tones. The first block against them was the locker room argument that there were naked bodies, but the truth is interviews are done in interview rooms so the cultural taboo is dropped. Men like looking at pretty women and vice versa, women like looking at muscular men.

People will always be reading books. They may read them on Kindle, but there will always be a need for chroniclers, historians, storytellers, and content. Interest in good writing will always exist. Words and perspective on history will be necessary. People will always want depth on things. Things that are more difficult to present will need to be looked at, all sorts of things. My advice to any writer is to get your words on web sites that get a lot of eyeballs, a lot of hits. Blogs, commentary, links; however it is done, this is the only way to market writing in this environment.

Lionel Chetwynd

The largest group in Hollywood would be "no stated preference." People who come to Hollywood are not there to be political. They come in search of a specific mutant of the American Dream. Their politics are shape by the experience when they get here. The difference between grips, stage hands and actors is actors are narcissists.

Hollywood before the 1960s they had a "Founders ethos," that this is an amazing country. People had lived in dire circumstances, and now they were blessed. Careers in Hollywood embraced that idea.

The only reason the Communists were so successful in subverting of the industry was simply because the central idea open to you, was how you would express love of the system and the country, and became largely liberal but not Leftist, ranging from the Fonda speech in Grapes of Wrath to even Capra, but the formula was this is a good and decent and fine country, and what will cure it is good old American goodness and common sense, not professors. In Capra's Wonderful Life Lionel Barrymore is the banker brought down by good ol' American Jimmy Stewart taking back to the default position of the good old American Way

Gary Cooper filled this role. Cary Grant, maybe even Bogart filled this role. The stories were that things were wrong, but were corrected by good old ordinary Americans. In the 1960s, all way to Syriana, the default position is now that we are evil and ordinary guy today is George Clooney, killed by our own CIA. The old consent decree diminished when the power of studio moguls was diminished, staring with Davis v. Warner Bros. Artists took over from studios.

If you wanted the youth market you empowered stars with the defective, diseased ideas of the Baby Boomers, undermining traditional views. By the time Clooney gets here this is the standard

I know John Milius but I don't know that he was denied work because he's conservative. HBO actually told producers not to hire me, Conservatives could not write "caring" characters. I finally had lunch with the head of HBO. I said won't sue and he relaxed. I said, "It's your candy story, but don't kill my career." That was in the 1980s. There was an actual Blacklist of conservatives, but nobody's Blacklisted today.

I'd be hired to do things as re-writes, and I'd be paid at the re-write level for what was an original script. I won Emmys for people, first Emmy for re-writes but were really page one screenplays.

John was a wild, independent spirit. I was a movement conservative who chaired the arts and entertainment committee for Reagan/Bush. I was later appointed by George W. Bush.

As for Patton, Wall Street and A Few Good Men:

When you make a movie you really make three movies. There's the one you say you're going to make; the one you make when you're making it; and then the movie you do make. That's always true, and actors will make a difference. If something is well written the characters will be truthful being in it.

The scene that pumps people up in A Few Goo Men is distinguished from every other theme of the movie, and is seen as different for the audience. A good writer gives the character's truth. In beginning Sorkin was a very fine writer and he's speaking his truth.

The other two films were different. I don't admire the historical Patton from my own military service.

Sometime after his stroke I met Bud Schulberg, who was looking to do a re-make of What Makes Sammy Run? because he said he gets letters from college students saying "Sammy is my hero," and how could this guy, the epitome of how society destroys the soul, be a hero? And I need to get him out there with modern clarity.

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Index

About the author

Steven Travers, a former professional baseball player with the St. Louis Cardinals and the Oakland A's organizations, is the author of 20 books, including the best-selling Barry Bonds: Baseball's Superman, nominated for a Casey Award as Best Baseball Book of 2002; and One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game that Changed a Nation (a 2007 PNBA nominee, subject of the CBS/CSTV documentary Tackling Segregation, and soon to be a major motion picture). He pitched for the Redwood High School baseball team in California that won the national championship in his senior year, before attending college on an athletic scholarship and earning all-conference honors. A graduate of the University of Southern California, Steven coached at USC, Cal-Berkeley and in Europe; served in the Army; attended law school; and was a sports agent. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and was a columnist for StreetZebra magazine in L.A., and the San Francisco Examiner. His screenplays include The Lost Battalion, 21 and Wicked. He has a daughter, Elizabeth Travers, and lives in California. He can be reached at USCSTEVE1@aol.com. His web site is redroom.com/member/steven-robert-travers and he is represented in Hollywood by Lloyd Robinson of Suite A Management; in New York City by his literary agent, Ian Kleinert of Objective Entertainment.

Books written by Steven Travers

One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed A Nation (also a documentary, Tackling Segregation, and soon to be a major motion picture)

A's Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!

Trojans Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!

Dodgers Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!

Angels Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real Fan!

D'Backs Essential: Everything You Need to Know to Be A Real

The USC Trojans: College Football's All-Time Greatest Dynasty

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Los Angeles Lakers

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly Oakland Raiders

The Good, the Bad & the Ugly San Francisco 49ers

Barry Bonds: Baseball's Superman

Pigskin Warriors: 140 Years of College Football's Greatest Games, Players and Traditions

The 1969 Miracle Mets

Dodgers Baseball Yesterday & Today

A Tale of Three Cities: New York, L.A. and San Francisco During the 1962 Baseball Season

What It Means To Be a Trojan: Southern Cal's Greatest Players Talk About Trojans Football

The Poet: The Life and Los Angeles Times of Jim Murray

The Last Icon: Tom Seaver's Town, His Team, and His Times

God's Country: A Conservative, Christian Worldview of How History Formed the United States Empire and America's Manifest Destiny for the 21st Century

Angry White Male

The Writer's Life

The USC Mafia: From the Frat House to the White House to the Big House

Ambition: My Struggles to Fail and Succeed in Baseball, Politics, Hollywood, Writing . . . and the Rocky Path I've Walked With Christ

What Is Truth? The Powers That Were, The Powers That Are

Praise for Steve Travers

Steve Travers is the next great USC historian, in the tradition of Jim Murray, John Hall, and Mal Florence! . . . the Trojan Family needs your work. Fight On!

\- USC Head Football Coach Pete Carroll

. . . Steve Travers tells us all about the exciting and remarkable football . . . . that not only changed the way the game is played; it . . . changed the world.

\- Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump

Steve Travers combines wit, humor, social pathos and historical knowledge with the kind of sports expertise that only an ex-jock is privy to; it is reminiscent of the work of Jim Bouton, Pat Jordan and Dan Jenkins, combined with Jim Murray' turn of phrase, Hunter Thompson's hard-scrabble Truths, and David Halberstam's unique take on our nation's place in history. His writing is great storytelling, and the result is pure genius every time.

\- Westwood One radio personality Michael McDowd

Steve Travers is a great writer, an educated athlete who knows how to get inside the player's heads, and when that happens, greatness occurs. He's gonna be a superstar.

- San Francisco Examiner

Steve Travers is a phenomenal writer, an artist who labors over every word to get it just right, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of sports and history.

- StreetZebra

Steve Travers is a "Renaissance man."

\- Jim Rome Show

He is very qualified to continue to write books such as this one. Good job.

\- Marty Lurie/Right Off the Bat Oakland A's Pregame Host

Steve's a literate ex-athlete, an ex-Trojan, and a veteran of Hollywood, too.

\- Lee "Hacksaw" Hamilton/XTRA Radio, San Diego

You've done some good writin', dude.

\- KFOG Radio, San Francisco

[Travers is] one of the great sportswriters on the current American scene.

\- Joe Shea/Radio Talk Host and Editor

Travers appears to have the right credentials for the task.

\- USA Today Baseball Weekly

A very interesting read which is not your average . . . book. . . . Steve has achieved his bona fides when it comes to having the credentials to write a book like this.

\- Geoff Metcalfe/KSFO Radio, San Francisco

This is a fascinating book written by a man who knows his subject matter inside and out.

— Irv Kaze/KRLA Radio, Los Angeles

Travers . . . established himself as a writer of many dimensions . . . a natural.

— John Jackson/Ross Valley Reporter

Steve Travers is a true USC historian and a loyal Trojan!

— Former USC football player John Papadakis

Pete Carroll calls you "the next great USC historian," high praise indeed.

\- Rob Fukuzaki/ABC7, Los Angeles

You're a great writer and I always enjoy your musings, particularly on SC football – huge fan!

\- Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane

Steven Travers is one of the most accomplished sports journalists in our nation today and One Night, Two Teams is his defining work to this point.

\- Strandbooks.com

Travers, a USC grad, portrays the game and USC's victory as a tipping point in the integration of college football and the South, a triumph for the forces of equality . . . his larger view of the game hits home in most respects, and he provides a compelling account- drawing from dozens of interviews with participants, coaches, drawing from dozens of others - of a clash between two schools with decidedly different approaches to the composition of their football rosters . . . All in all, an intriguing premise and a well-told story.

\- Wes Lukowsky, Booklist

The book is not just about sports but how sports and that September 1970 game in particular relate to the intertwining of sports, race, politics, history, religion and philosophy.

\- Harold Abend, In Scope

One Night . . . is a tour de force.

- Marin I.J.

Travers combines wit, humor and historical knowledge in his writings.

\- University of Southern California

Wow what a great job!!!! . . . I love the book . . . It's one of those you look forward to reading at special times . . . I can't say enough!

\- Lonnie White, Los Angeles Times

This is a book about American society. It sheds incredible light on little-known events that every American must know to understand this country . . . In 20 years, people will say of this book what they said about Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer.

\- Fred Wallin, Business Talk radio

Steve is the USC historian whose meticulous attention to detail is a revelation. He is the best chronicler of USC ever.

\- Chuck Hayes, CRN Sports Corner

This is fabulous, just a terrific look at our history. Travers is one of the best writers around.

\- Rod Brooks, Fitz & Brooks Show, KNBR/San Francisco

You have created a work of art here, an absolutely great book. We love your work.

  * Bob Fitzgerald, "Fitz & Brooks Show," KNBR/San Francisco

When it comes to sports history, this is the man right here.

\- Gary Radnich, KRON/5, San Francisco

Author Steven Travers discusses his new book . . .

- Orange County Register

. . . Join Steve Travers . . . at the Autograph Stage . . .

\- ESPN Radio

. . . Steve Travers, author of One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation . . .

\- Los Angeles Daily News

Steve Travers, a sports historian . . .

- Los Alamitos News-Enterprise

Hear this dynamic speaker tell how this famous game changed history.

\- Friends of the Los Alamitos-Rossmoor Library

This is a fabulous book.

\- Michaela Pereira/ KTLA 5, Los Angeles

Travers presents this particular game in 1970 as a metaphor for the profound changes in social history during the emancipation of the South.

- Publishers Weekly

. . . Explored in rich, painstaking detail by Steve Travers.

\- Jeff Prugh, L.A. Times beat writer who covered the 1970 USC-Alabama game

You're a prolific talent.

\- Curtis Kim, KSRO Radio, Santa Rosa

Is there anything you've not written?

- Vernon Glenn, KRON/4, San Francisco

You are the Poet Laureate of the USC Program! Please keep writing.

\- Tony Pattiz, USC class of 1980

A's Essential: Everything You Need To Be a Real Fan offers a breezy history . . .

\- Bruce Dancis/Sacramento Bee

What A's Essential does give us in heaps is the history specific players and other A's personnel . . . Travers manages to dig up plenty of interesting quotes and his knowledge of other writings about the A's is voluminous. He finds enough fascinating material . . . interesting and add(s) to the reader's experience with the book . . . A's Essential can be a useful source to those who are students of A's history

\- Brian James Oak/www.atthehomeplate.com

As an Oakland fan, I was therefore interested to find A's Essential when browsing on Amazon recently

\- Matt Smith, MLB.com

(The chapter in One Night, Two Teams) on Martin Luther King - the description of the civil rights movement - your insights, the research - what an education I received from reading it. It should be required reading by every student in America! Every citizen. No wonder there were so many African Americans on the Mall a week ago! . . . I am sure there are many blacks who would say it is impossible for a white man to really understand the struggle. And, in one sense they are definitely right because you are not black. But, wow - I think you did an excellent job in bringing it together - telling the story and making me think!

\- Dwight Chapin, former Nixon White House appointments secretary

Book description

"To this end was I born, and for this came I into the world, to bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth hears my voice."

"What is truth?"

This exchange between the Lord Jesus Christ and the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate, on the day of the crucifixion as found in John 18:37-38, forms the basis of What Is Truth? The Powers That Were, The Powers That Are. It creates a central premise: Christ is divine, Satan is real. Together, they both elevate and debase the human spirit, affecting everything, including politcs and the media.

Pilate's question, which the United States Declaration of Independence addresses by unequivocally stating human rights are "endowed by their Creator," and "these truths remain self-evident," has been the source of philosophy as long as man has trod the Earth. The ancient Greeks believed in a truth that could not be denied; that there was an eternal, divine truth that simply existed regardless of whether 1 million people denied it and none acknowledged it. Truth is truth whether it is known by man or not.

In 1979, the famed historian David Halberstam wrote The Powers That Be. This big American book told the epic tale of the great movers and shakers of 20th Century American media: Henry Luce's Time-Life; William Paley's CBS; Philip and Katherine Graham's Washington Post; Otis Chandler's Los Angeles Times; and Arthur Hays Sulzberger's New York Times.

The author surveys the landscape and sees vast changes since that book's release, seeking to fill the gap in between and understand it. In trying to navigate the vast lies, propaganda and disinformation found in newspapers, magazines, movies, documentaries, talk radio, the Internet, the blogs and social media, he attempts to steer the question, as best as humanly possible, to the only real Truth that exists in this fallen world.

Taking a cue from the Ronald Reagan documentary In the Face of Evil, Travers believes a "Beast," an ancient evil, exists in the affairs of man, dominating the Earth. Ours is an eternal struggle with this Beast; seemingly defeated by a righteous army, a long ideological struggle, the ending of slavery; always rearing its ugly head with a new face, a new cause, playing on the ancient fears, hatreds, and prejudices of a corrupt Mankind. At the heart of this on-going battle between good and evil are essential questions haunting our existence. Among them: does man desire security or Freedom? What is the "cult of personality" and how can it be identified? What is Friedrich Nietzsche's The Will to Power and how is it used not only by Adolf Hitler but by many others to control the populace? How has cinema become the greatest crucible on Earth? Freedom is a fragile thing, but is it really true that evil is powerless if the good are unafraid?

The author takes us on a sweeping drama through history, with the focus being American power and the role of the media, a veritable modern Tower of Babel. He gives us the epic confrontation between Time-Life publisher Henry Luce, one of the most powerful men in history and the man who coined the 20th the American Century; and his ace reporter in China, Theodore White. This battle of wills had profound consequences, the reporter seeking truth, the man of God, the son of Christian missionaries (Luce) seeking propaganda, purportedly in the name of God. In what may have been the greatest mistake in history, the results were that China was ultimately lost to the tender mercies of Mao Tse-tung, to the tune of 55 million murdered human beings.

"History," as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "is written by the winners."

True enough, but perhaps only the rough draft of history. In a highly politicized world, history has become a battlefield, fought in public schools, college classrooms, politics, and the varied forms of media. The author leads us from Greek philosophy to Christ; from the successful American Revolution to the failed French Revolution; from the social upheaval of Europe leading to Communism to the rise of America to unprecedented heights of power; from William Randolph Hearst's role in the American Empire to anarchism, the strange love affair with Communism espoused by Emma Goldman, John Reed and Walter Duranty, and the use of cinema in both Nazi and Russian propaganda.

From there he details history through the prism of politics and the media, studying the dizzying affect of the social novel, popularized by Charles Dickens in England to the "Lost Generation" in France; the role of radio in turning sports into an American obsession; the great dividing line of post-war politics: Alger Hiss vs Whittaker Chamber, and subsequent McCarthyism. Of the struggle between Democracy and Communism, Chambers was a pessimist, telling his wife when he broke from Moscpw, "You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world." Travers gives us a look at the subsequent history some 47 years after that statement. When facing the most vicious of accusations, Chambers said, "There is nothing louder than the truth teller's silence in the face of the liar's shouts."

The Blacklist led to the liberalization of Hollywood. Advertising became a god. Playboy fed the sexual revolution. In the 1960s, the lines were further divided by the Vietnam War and a host of movements. In the 1970s the great propaganda arm of America, the CIA was exposed by the Church Committee.

From there the author describes the astounding change in journalism post-Watergate, the backlash of the Reagan Revolution, the rise of conservative talk radio, New Media, politicization of music, and the polarizing nature of cable television's post-mainstream monopoly.

Travers studies history at all times trying as best as possible to adhere to the words of the Quaker Robert Barclay: "Of which I myself, in a part, am a true witness; who not by strength of argument or by a particular disquisition of each doctrine, and convincement of my understanding thereby, came to receive and bear witness to the Truth, but by being secretly reached by that life. For, when I came into the silent assemblies of God's people, I felt a secret power among them, which touched my heart; and, as I gave way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me and good raised up . . ."

The world has changed drastically since David Halbertstam wrote The Powers That Be. It requires a sweeping understanding of all that came before to understand where we are headed in the 21st Century. It promises to be a wild ride. "Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted Mankind," Ronald Reagan once stated. The question before is whether this still rings true.

