Category: HISTORY

     February 6th, 2011 is the centenary of the birth of Ronald Reagan.  The internet and main stream media are abuzz with memorials to the man and his principles, his presidency and his policies.  Many of the same media commentators and politicos who considered Reagan dis-interested, detached, and by some, an outright dullard, now claim him as a leader to emulated by our current drifting president.  Reagan, the man, would have been amused by this late introspection on his finer qualities, but he never really cared what they had to say when he was alive, so I doubt he would have put any significant weight to their recent “conversions”.

     Ronald Reagan was born in Tampico. Illinois on February 6, 1911, a birth date that precedes the births of President Kennedy, Nixon, Ford, and Carter who served before him.  He was already 69, when he was inaugurated and three weeks short of turning 70, the oldest elected President.  It certainly colored  his personality and approach to issues.  He grew up and became an adult through the great defining American trials of the 20th century, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.  He was imbued with the “can do” spirit, the concept of American exceptionalism, and acknowledgement of evil in the world.  It permeated his every action and he personally interpreted all events domestically and internationally through those prisms.  A country and world change considerably over 100 years, and the battle between morphing perceptions and bedrock principles form the context for all retrospective interpretations of a great man’s ability to lead and effect events.

     How did Ronald Reagan truely do when thrust late in his life to the position of leader?  As with all great leaders, his very success produced the growth of powerful enemies and significant push back from those who wished him to fail on the basis of the type of world he was striving to create.  A look back with the clarity of time makes for an interesting and measured assessment:

Reagan as Visionary :     A visionary is usually credited with being a complex thinker, seeing subtle trends that others fail to see, and predicting a future that seems illusory and at times infeasible.  Despite the common perception of Reagan as a dullard with only actor skills and good looks, he proved to be an extraordinary visionary.  It is now hard to perceive the time when the Soviet Union was seen as an implacable foe and the future dominant societal model for most of the world, but it was every bit that and more when President Reagan early in his Presidency declared the Communist dictatorship running the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and communism as a form of government destined for “the ash heap of History”.  These were bold and completely provocative words that were uniformly felt as brash and needlessly dangerous.  Within the eight years of Reagan’s leadership the entire edifice of soviet communism collapsed and he proved to be spot on in his analysis.  Reagan additionally refused to see the decline in American exceptionalism that all were noting and claiming, as the twin hammers of Watergate and the stagflation of the Carter years shook the nation’s confidence. The visionary Reagan declared America as the “shining city on the hill” and confidently predicted America’s “best years are still ahead of it.”  Within a decade, a beaten, bedraggled, and pessimistic America stood astride the world as the solitary economic and military super power and history’s greatest productive engine and influential colossus.  Reagan as visionary – the greatest since Lincoln.

Reagan as International Leader of the Free World:      Reagan aggressively changed the role of the United States from a reactor to world events to a confrontational competitor with the Soviet Union for the world’s philosophical leadership.  The concept of detente was scuttled and a new and constant defining of the inherent flaws in dictatorial process and planned economies were unflinchingly and tirelessly put forth by Reagan and his philosophical counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain.  Confrontation ruled every decision, from the resistance to “nuclear freeze” advocates in Europe and America, to proxy wars in Angola and Nicaragua.  The result was an identification of the oppressed populations of Eastern Europe that free nations had finally found their “backbone” and the result, a spectacular, lightning quick, and fundamentally inevitable collapse of the puppet governments installed by the Soviets and the dramatic return of freedom and democracy to Eastern Europe, and briefly, to the Soviet Union itself.  For this accomplishment alone, Reagan stands as the greatest international leader since Franklin Roosevelt, and among the great liberators the world has ever seen.  His unique personality of disagreeing without being disagreeable proved an awesome weapon in negotiation with world leaders, and even Gorbachev, outwitted and outmaneuvered by Reagan diplomatically as a knowing parent does with a child, always saw Reagan as respectful and a man of peace. Now that’s an accomplishment of rare stature.

Reagan as domestic leader:      Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981 with a United States in an apparently irretrievable recession state, shackled by previous administrations with crushing stagflation and abject misery.  The unemployment rate hovered at 8 percent, Inflation at 12.5% and the prime interest rates at 21.5%.  A triad of no jobs, spiralling prices, and expensive seed money made it next to impossible for Americans to get ahead, buy a home, invest in an education, or plan for future costs.  The effect on the economy and the American psyche was defined as a “malaise” by President Carter.  President Reagan would have none of such defeatism, slashing tax rates, interest rates, governmental regulations and unleashing the greatest boom in American economic history, lasting some 20 years until the dot.com bubble burst in 2001.  In his time in office the stock market increased 321% in value, government receipts averaged over 8% increase on average per year despite the “lower” tax rates due to the spectacular economic expansion.  The downside to Reagan’s economic miracle was his attraction to increased military spending balancing any conservative aversion he had to democrat inspired increases in discretionary spending, resulting in a deficit boom that added three trillion dollars to the national debt. Subsequent presidents, excepting President Clinton in his final four years in office,  have done little or nothing to effect this pattern, making the Debt the primary challenge of our times.  The economic grade for Reagan as a result is mixed, and any credit for economic expansion may be eventually historically overwhelmed by the deficit monster he unleashed.

Reagan as Defender of the Ramparts:    Reagan identified himself with free people, and all people aspiring to be free.  Despite the cartoon image falsely placed upon him by mainstream media, he was a very learned, well read, and articulate man who wrote most of his own speeches  and framed his own philosophy in what became to be known as the Reagan Revolution.  Reagan understood freedom, and the threats to it, and spoke at all times to the historical thread that made America a bastion for freedom.  He recognized evil as primarily an evil against the individual and the individuals aspirations, free thought, and free will.  He never lost sight of the potential inherent in each man, and sought to assure the environment always be supportive of risk and production to allow all to maximize that potential.  When he stated, “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall!” he was additionally speaking of the artificial barrier put up by governments to suppress a people’s free will, as much as their movement.  He was, in short, perhaps the purest philosopher to ever inhabit the White House, and the greatest defender of the Ramparts since Lincoln.

Reagan As A Flawed Hero:     The story of heroes is always additionally a story of their humanity and resultant flawed journey.  Reagan struggled mightily at times in his presidency.  His impulsive decision to inject Marines without battle orders into the maelstrom of Beirut, Lebanon contributed to their vulnerability to their enemies, resulting in the horrid terrorist attack that left hundreds dead in their sleep, and Reagan was forced to ignominiously withdraw the troops. The defeat lead to the image of America as paper tiger by  islamists such as Osama bin Laden and seeded devastating long term problems with radical Islam we struggle with to this day.  His impenetrable decision to indirectly link hostage release with arms trade with his avowed enemies, the islamofascists of Iran, nearly led to his impeachment, and was profoundly short sighted.  He had, after all, come into office, on the day the initial Iranian hostages were released and had to have been aware of the double dealing and intolerable character of the Iranian radicals.  These blind spots compromising his purified  philosophy of interaction with evil forces significantly tainted President Reagan’s legacy as a grounded principled leader who understood the overarching historical forces at work.

     Reagan at 100 on balance seems to hold up just fine through the prism of history.  No man without foreknowledge of events can not helped to be shaped by them, for good or ill.  Reagan goes down as one of the great leaders of history for his ability to shape events as they were shaping him, not through the force of his intellect like Newton, or the force of his energy like Theodore Roosevelt, or the force of his will like Pope John Paul I, or the force of all three like Abraham Lincoln,, but rather through his grounded faith in the potential of the common man and his willingness to our story to all who would listen, again and again and again.

     Happy Birthday , Ronald Reagan.  We miss you.

     On a cold winter day in late January, 1965, my mother initiated one of my seminal moments of personal development without me recognizing it at the time. She asked me across our kitchen counter whether I knew who the gentleman was who passed earlier that day. I was just a little boy, and had no conception, but I remember in one of my first significant memories that she stated that the man with the cigar and angry face, Winston Churchill, was a great man, and was now gone. There was no way for me to know that as I defined my love of history and the story of the great achievements of western civilization, that my study of this man, whose presence in the world was announced to me by my mother at the day of his demise, would become one of my most important influences. With all Sir Winston Churchill’s achievements, I have always held most dear his sense that life was a special gift, and the opportunities presented, not to be wasted. January 30th is the occasion of the 41st anniversary of his state funeral on January 30th, 1965, and deserves a look back.

     The state funeral for Sir Winston Churchill was the first for a commoner since the funeral for the Duke of Wellington, and captivated the nation with a special solemnity. Millions lined the streets to watch in eerie silence as the cavalcade brought the coffin through the streets of London, each with their own memories of how Churchill’s will, defiance, and courage held them together when all appeared lost. Three hundred thousand more viewed him as he lay in state in Westminster Hall, and six thousand of the gratified world leadership and family participated in the funeral mass at St. Paul Cathedral, including all of the living leaders from the tumult of the world war conflict that fought at his side. The coffin was then taken by barge down the Thames like the funeral of a great ancient warrior, where even insensate machines, the cranes along the Thames, bowed in respect. Then, like Lincoln, from Waterloo station across the English countryside viewed by hundreds of thousands more, to his final resting place to the little church in Blandon, where his parents and his brother were buried.

     The enormous contribution and influence that Winston Churchill held over our interpretation of the role of the individual in western civilization is critical to our society’s spirit and intermittently a subject for this blog, but not for this particular essay. The most important memory of the purity of a nation’s love for this common man who achieved uncommon things, is inspiration for all who aspire to play their part. He remains the primary  example of how individuals sustaining personal defeat after personal defeat, can ultimately triumph if they are true to the vigorous and clarifying  defense of  overarching principle.     

      Churchill’s biographer Martin Gilbert quotes Lord Chandos, as best describing Winston Churchill’s qualities as a statesman:

“He enjoyed a conflict of ideas, but not a conflict between people. His powers were those of imagination, experience, and magnanimity. He saw Man as noble, and not as a mean creature.  The only people he never forgave were those, who, in words he often used, ‘fell beneath the level of events’. “

 

The many facets of western culture and its developed civilization are the compelling focus of RAMPARTS OF CIVILIZATION. Certainly, the defenders of the Ramparts hope to illuminate the critical people, events, and ideas that have made, and continue to make, this two thousand six hundred year story of man’s search for the zenith of individual freedom and achievement so compelling. One, however, must bow and remove one’s hat in respect when someone comes along and beautifully frames the principles that underpin our story in a perfect microcosm. Andrew Klavan of Pajamas TV, courtesy of Instapundit, has done just that in the little video essay presented below.

Klavan has distilled the entire epic of western civilization to the perceived notion that all of our society’s greatest achievements have been gleaned from the synthesis of man’s aspiration and his achievement of individual freedom in the face of the attempted suppression by the collective. I think he’s on to something, and he sells it with just the right touch of humor.

     On July 6th, 1944, the Normandy peninsula became the fulcrum of the struggle between the light of individual liberty and the dark forces of fascistic totalitarians.  The warriors of liberty were common citizens of the democracies of Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, who locked themselves in mortal combat over the tight beaches nicknamed Gold, Sword, Utah, and Omaha, to establish a foothold on the continent of Europe that would never again be ceded to the totalitarians, and to whom the preservation of the tenets of liberty and individual freedom solely rest in their commitment and sacrifice.  From the deadly beaches and hedgerows of Normandy, the race across France, the premature forward thrust of Market Garden, the steadfastness and horror of the climatic frozen battles of the Bulge, to the triumphant entry into Germany and the very home of the totalitarian at Berchtesgaden, a solitary warrior has come to optimize the selfless sacrifice of the millions who pushed themselves, looked out for each other, sacrificed all, and, with total victory in their grasp, humbly returned home to be simple citizens again. 

      In an assisted care living center in Pennsylvania last week ,  Richard Winter was called to final roll call at age 92, a victim of Parkinson’s disease.  Richard Winter returned home from Europe after two years of continuous fighting, and took on the quiet role of father and simple laborer.  Most would not know him as any form of hero in that he rarely talked of his experiences, and his family only noted his connection with the war with the intermittent process over the years of re-uniting with his fellow warriors.  In routine life, he did not seek to be anything special, he only sought to be an acceptable member of his community and a good husband and father. 

     It would have stayed that way forever, except that Stephen Ambrose the historian, chose Richard Winters as the prime example of how normal men can be called to do extraordinary things, and how liberty at its heart, has always managed to have been successfully defended by those who recognize the best and only reward that fulfills their sacrifice is the preservation of that liberty.  Stephen Ambrose saw in Richard Winters the spark of freedom that is precious to behold and immortalized his selfless acts, along with those of his comrades in  Band of Brothers.  It turned out that Richard Winters the citizen was also Captain Richard Winters, who earned the Distinguished Service Cross in the epochal twenty four hours of June 6th, 1944, leading his famed E company of the 101st Airborne division, to take the critical gun placements above Omaha Beach. In the two years of preparation and combat Winters rose from Private to Major on his extraordinary ability to inspire and lead men to do the difficult and at times horrifically dangerous actions on the pure basis of his courageous example and simple fairness. He saw it all, asked himself to do the intolerable, never took for granted the sacrifice of others, and in the end returned home, and there he stayed.  And now he is home.

     We must ask ourselves all the time. Where do such good people come from? How can those of us who live in freedom expect to continue to find such people among us, that keep it all possible – and yet we do. The generation of 16 million who served the United States in the war against tyranny are leaving us at the rate of thousands a week, and in the not too distant future they will all be gone. They will live on only in books such as those by Stephen Ambrose or mini-series by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and will progressively seem to be fictional characters as stories of their heroic battles will become fainter memories increasingly mythologic, and other worldly.

    They were, however, definitely real people, these defenders of the Ramparts.  As they go to join their colleagues, we will take the time for a final salute and playing of taps to the warriors who braved all, exemplified by the shadowed scars of shells and guns above Normandy, and in the person of Richard Winters, who last week passed into the eternal pantheon of freedom’s  heroes.

“Fading light dims the sight
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright
From afar drawing nigh,
Falls the night.

Day is done, gone the sun
From the lakes, from the hills, from the skies
All is well, safely rest;
God is nigh.

Then goodnight, peaceful night;
Till the light of the dawn shineth bright.
God is near, do not fear,
Friend, goodnight.”

   It is one of the truly amazing aspects of history that epic historical tides can irreversibly develop from the simplest, seemingly obscure,  and  remote events.   It is one of those events framed around the Christmas holiday, the American raid on Trenton December 25-26,1776, that can easily be declared as epic by any measure.  It is easy to infer that without the morning battle of December 26th,  the American Revolution would likely have collapsed, and history of the North American continent and therefore the world, would have been dramatically different.  From such fragile roots, was borne the United States of America.

    The stage leading to the events at Trenton , New Jersey, was one of almost continuous calamity for the American cause.  Early victories in Boston  had been quickly adjusted to by the British government, who had no intention of letting its prize American possessions slide away into the hands of “rabble”.  A massive expeditionary force of almost 35000 soldiers and half the British navy had been loosed upon the American continent and had crushed the American army earlier in the year in the battle for New York, the shattered remnants of the Continental American army barely escaping into New Jersey. Vigorous pursuit left the army in tatters in Pennsylvania, felt by the British to be impotent in any capacity to do further harm.   With winter approaching, General Howe, leader of the British forces saw little harm in remaining in civilized comfort in New York City, while he planned out the final offensive for next spring to trans-continentally crush the American revolt.  He felt confident enough to allow his second, General Cornwallis to leave the front lines and return to England for the winter, leaving the front in the hands of mercenary Hessian and light British forces facing across the Delaware River whatever faint outlines of an American army remained.  The British owned the towns, the roads, the supplies, and the momentum.  The Americans owned the cold.

     The American position was so perilous it is difficult to this day to conceptualize a way out from the impending disaster. The Continental army had contracted from 30,000 soldiers from the heady days after Bunker Hill to less than 3000 poorly fed, poorly clothed troops stuck in the cold wastes of the Pennsylvania winter.  The near total collapse of the army in the New York battle had left a dangerous schism in the opinion as to who was best served to lead the American army, General George Washington or General Charles Lee, the second in command to Washington and the only American leader with “European” experience.  Lee was perfectly willing to see Washington to whither on the vine, but fortuitously managed to get himself captured a few weeks before Christmas, and his residual troops were herded toward Washington.  The American governmental congress was without money and without allies, but additionally unwilling to provide Washington with the necessary support for extended enlistments of state militias or adequate supplies, and certainly no pay for the troops.  On December 31, 1776, the majority of the troops in the army were reaching the end of their enlistment and were going to go home for good. Washington himself though committed to the cause to the death, privately admitted in correspondence to his brother John Augustine , “I think the Game is pretty near up.”

     It is at such moments that sometimes desperation proves the mother of inspiration.  Washington, seeing no other choice to effect a change in direction and morale for the cause, decided to risk everything against the fortified British in New Jersey.  With a win, however unlikely, he might be able to stimulate a positive commitment from the moribund American nation; with a loss…it simply wouldn’t matter anymore.  He did what homework he could through a meticulous network of spies he had marshaled to report on British forward positions in New Jersey and determined to attack the fortified Hessian regiment at Trenton.  As he lay across the Delaware River, he would have to fashion a perlious amphibious transition of his entire army across the river, march them ten miles in the dead of night, and sustain complete surprise among the well trained and better armed Hessian troops. He would then have to accomplish a successful withdrawal with the captured supplies before superior British re-inforcements arrived.  No one gave him a chance, and no one could imagine a successful outcome.

     Washington however was a leader like no other and the perfect embodiment of the American character.  His password to his troops that night, “Victory or Death”.  In flatboats, fighting a winter snowstorm across swirling, ice choked river water, he oversaw countless transfers of men, horses, and artillery pieces in a logistics masterpiece, and never wavered, never tired, instilling a marshal spirit in previously despondent men.  He marched them to Trenton, and catching the Hessian commander Johann Rall completely by surprise, achieved a complete rout, capturing the 1500 man garrison, its supplies, and losing only two of his own men.

     Out of such moments, and with the additional victory against British regulars a week later at Princeton, Washington had completely changed the dynamic of the war.  The British, who had assumed American collapse was just around the corner, suddenly had to re-trench for an extended conflict.  The Americans, who were preparing to give up on their dilapidated army and Quixote like cause, suddenly had a reason to believe again.  General Washington had managed to invent the unique cornerstone of the American character known as American Exceptionalism, a trait we argue to this day.  Like the true father of the country, he saw the potential for indomitable greatness, before any of his”children” could see it in themselves.  Now that has all the makings of a true Christmas miracle.

     December 7th, 1941, the date of the surprise attack of Imperial Naval Forces of Japan on the United States at Pearl Harbor, is now an unknowable memory for anyone under the age of medicare or social security. The resonance of the attack, however, continues to define every argument of preparedness for a democratic power, and its stunning effect on the transformation of the United States from isolation to a military colossus makes it one of the most studied events in its history. Sixty nine years ago, at 7:48 am, a beautiful, peaceful Sunday morning at the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii was shattered by strafing gunfire and torpedoes released from a overwhelming wave of Japanese planes onto the moored battleships of the US Pacific fleet. The audacity of the attack was transcended by its brilliance in plan and execution. The head of the Japanese imperial Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, determined months previously that the only hope of a Japanese long term victory in a climatic war with the United States would be determined by “decisive battle” strategies. A singular devastating attack on the United States capacity to extend across the Pacific Ocean would be the only way to achieve sufficient military parity with the United States to make a war unwinnable for the Americans. This would necessarily involve the destruction of the pacific fleet and base facilities in one mortal blow. No scenario not involving complete surprise would conceivably be successful and Yamamoto concluded the shock and rage of an unprovoked attack would only be mitigated by overwhelming success. In a time of relatively poor communication and logistics, Yamamoto managed to secretly transition a force of 6 attack carriers and 414 attack aircraft thousands of miles across the Pacific to the very limits of Japanese logistical capacity, initiate and coordinate two waves of combined air and sea attack, and successfully neutralize both American air and naval forces with catastrophic impact. America’s sea power lay in 8 massive battleships at dock, and meticulous planning assured an almost complete devastation.

     Almost simultaneously, the USS Oklahoma, California, Nevada, Utah, and West Virginia were struck by torpedo bombers, but the colossal destruction was saved for the USS Arizona, when a dive bomber penetrated the munitions hold with a bomb that created such an explosive force that the massive ship was lifted out of the water and split in half. Of the 402 American planes maintained at the army field complex 337 were destroyed or damaged beyond flight capacity. Multiple other ships, oil depots, barracks, repair facilities, harbor docks, and runways were destroyed. In 110 minutes of sustained attack, at a loss of 55 Japanese airmen and 9 submariners, Japanese forces inflicted 2,386 American deaths and the destruction of 18 American ships, including 5 battleships.

      There are no words to describe the cumulative impact of the attack on the American psyche. Propelled by incautious feelings of superiority of American military capacity and horrendous underestimation of rival Japanese ingenuity and military professionalism, the United States was overwhelmed by the sheer capacity of the Japanese to perform such a complex and precise attack. The thin luck that allowed American carriers to be at sea and avoid the fate of their battleship brethren did little to assuage the feeling of catastrophe and gloom. The expectation that the Japanese, already nine years at war on mainland China, would suddenly be able to extend their reach to the very shores of the United States shook the country to its core.

      President Franklin Roosevelt, as he was so apt to do, seized the moment to focus the disparate tones of shock and disbelief and focus them into righteous crusading anger. In his masterful speech following the attack, he sustained like a drumbeat the “surprise” nature of the attack and its inherent treachery, He focused the energy into quasi- religious fervor with an appeal to “righteous” might and ” inevitable” victory under the auspices of a chosen people assisted by their choosing God. No element of American society, including the most extreme isolationists like Charles Lindbergh, were capable of resisting the compelling nature of his articulate oratory.

      In a time of significant pride of nationhood, the United States converted itself from an army of less than 200, 000 in the space of 20 months to 16 million, became an arsenal of democracy, and in bitter fighting crushed the Japanese in less than four years. Yamamoto himself was sacrificed in an airborne assassination accomplished by US forces in 1943.  His vision of a victory based on the decisive character of the Pearl Harbor attack proved to be ephemeral and within 6 months, the United States managed to put Japan on the permanent defensive by sinking four of the six Japanese carriers involved in the Japanese force responsible for Pearl Harbor.  Pearl Harbor turned out to be a symbol of American resolve that until 9/11 represented the biggest loss of American lives on American soil  since the Civil War.  So long ago now, the direct memories are slowly being replaced by faded newsreel and archaic pictures.  The emotions are long gone and to most Americans grown up in a time of the Japan as one of America’s most intertwined allies and friends, almost impossible to contemplate.  We will always fall short in our ability to long maintain the learning lessons of history, and will always be at some risk to succumb and be dumbfounded by the unperceived rise of the blood red sun against the peaceful dawn.

     A documentary captures the intensity of destruction that allows us to feel a small part of that horrible morning so long ago: