The Real Scandal of American Politics

Every now and then my email inbox – and probably yours -- disgorges a new version of a chain letter proposing a “28^th Amendment” to the Constitution that would impose term limits on Members of Congress and eliminate alleged special privileges they supposedly enjoy.
           Most of the email’s alleged special Congressional privileges never existed or were eliminated long ago, and the presumption that a massive email campaign will bring about change is naïve. Term limits would force out competent and effective members along with the less deserving. A better mechanism to limit terms is the ballot box.

Furthermore, if voters want to unleash their frustration about congressional abuses, their principal target should be the very real threat to democracy embodied in the increasing costs of political campaigns, and the disproportionate influence of large donors on the process of government, not the presence of perceived special privileges.

In all its guises (sometimes it claims Tea Party authorship, sometimes it appears to originate from the progressive camp), the email campaign against perceived Congressional abuses is a fantasy concocted by authors who don't understand the mechanism for amending the Constitution and the hornet's nest that would be opened up if anyone actually tried to implement this idea.

But readers are asked to send the message on to twenty others, promising that in three days’ time everyone will have seen it. At least that part of the message seems to be working.

Multibillionaire Warren Buffett is quoted in most versions of the email, telling a television interviewer that "I could end the deficit in 5 minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election."  Why lawmakers would ever pass such a law is not explained.

In another version of the email, Buffett himself leads the charge. The email  states, implausibly, that “Warren Buffet is asking each addressee to forward this email to a minimum of twenty people on their address list; in turn ask each of those to do likewise. In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.”

“Buffett” didn’t explain why anyone in Congress would want to vote for such an amendment -- and that’s what’s absurd about this and similar proposals to amend the Constitution.

Unhappily for the email’s hopeful author(s), even if members of Congress implausibly ever wanted to vote to reduce their own powers, the Founding Fathers made it very difficult for something like this to come about. 

The Constitution provides (Article V) for amendment through a purposely difficult process: any proposed amendment must be approved first by the Congress (2/3 of each house) and then by 3/4 of the state legislatures. This amendment would never pass stage one. Would 290 Representatives and 67 Senators willingly vote to eliminate their own jobs or Congressional perks?

Article V prescribes a second way to amend the Constitution, which has never been tried: two thirds of the state legislatures may request that Congress call for a constitutional convention, which then can propose amendments which must still be approved by three fourths of the states. 
           And of course, once such a convention is assembled, every hot button issue could be on the table for possible inclusion: religion; abortion rights; gun control; gay marriage; immigration; voting rights; social security; Medicare; "Obamacare" -- somewhere there'd be a zealous clique ready to push forward its idea of "reform."  Some people might welcome this, but I suspect it would be a nightmare.

Just maybe the Founders were smart to make it hard to change the system. "Be careful what you wish for" may have been one of their watchwords as they cobbled together their (and our) Constitution.

The Founders did not anticipate the instant mobilization of sizable segments of the population through email, of course, but far more significantly, they anticipated neither the emergence of political parties (they called them “factions”), of lengthy election campaigns, or of the vast sums of money needed by politicians to influence voters.

The disproportionate influence of money in politics is the real scandal voters should be addressing, not some fancied and outdated lists of abuses of privilege. As the cost of campaigns – particularly the multimillion dollar cost of television time -- continues to increase, and campaigning politicians are forced by necessity to turn to large donors to meet those costs, the likelihood that legislators will be called upon to vote for measures to advance those donors’ interests, even when they run counter to those of the majority of their constituents, is bound to grow as well.

I was a legislative assistant to a United States Senator in the 1970s, and well remember how one big donor after another would buttonhole me to tell me how my boss should vote. They weren’t asking me; they were telling me. And they were used to having their way. After all, they had paid for it.

Forty years later it’s much worse. On one critical domestic issue after another, be it the defense budget, environmental regulation, abortion rights, gun control, drug policy or immigration reform, and on international affairs from opposition to arms control treaties to support for overseas wars to adherence to the International Criminal Court to resolution of the Arab/Israeli conflict, the positions taken by too many legislators reflect the views of big donors, not those of their constituents. But money talks, all too effectively. 

All this was true even before the outrageous 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision which declared a corporation to be a citizen and its political contributions to be free speech, protected by the first Amendment to the Constitution.

And that’s the real scandal of American politics today.

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The Sailor King and I

My grandfather, the painter Charles Hopkinson (1869-1962), was a contemporary and  friend of the English essayist, novelist, and Poet Laureate John Masefield (1878-1967). The two shared a love of the sea (as every schoolboy knows, Masefield wrote “Sea-Fever,”  which begins “I must down to the sea again,” though almost everyone who quotes it thinks he meant to write “I must go down to the sea again...” Wrong).  

Hopkinson proposed a fourth verse for Masefield’s poem “Cargoes,” which contrasted the glamour and beauty of an ancient Phoenician galley and a Spanish galleon with the grime and grit of a “dirty British coaster.” Hopkinson’s addition celebrated the “Saucy Yankee schooner with her high-peaked mainsail, thrashing down to Gloucester in a Northeast gale.”  Masefield loved it.

 In August 1919 Masefield gave Hopkinson a handsome house present, a leather-bound copy of the 1784 edition of William Falconer’s An Universal Dictionary of the Marine. I acquired the book, which I had long admired, from Hopkinson’s estate some 30 years after his death.

The dictionary, commonly just called “Falconer,”  was first published in 1769, the year of Falconer’s death in a shipwreck. It went through four major revisions, the last greatly expanded in 1815.  Facsimile copies of the book have been made, and there are now several digitized versions.

   

The book was immensely popular among sailors, shipwrights and naval architects, and routinely carried aboard British naval vessels throughout the age of sail. It not only provided thousands of definitions of nautical terms and tactical maneuvers; it contained many fold-out plates, illustrating marine equipment and armament, diagrams of naval maneuvers, navigation methods, and construction details. My edition has a dozen such plates, filled with exquisite drawings, charts and diagrams. Those plates have been cut out of many of the other existing copies, perhaps by shipwrights needing them as guides for construction details, but, happily, mine is intact.

The book also contains a glossary of French nautical terms, and scattered throughout, amplifying various definitions, are comments reflecting the prevalent attitude of Britons toward their neighbors across the Channel, with whom they had been almost continually at war since 1756. Here’s an example:

“RETREAT, the order or disposition in which a fleet of French men of war decline engagement, or fly from a pursuing enemy.”

A footnote helpfully adds: “As it is not properly a term of the British marine, a more circumstantial account of it might be foreign to our plan.”

I have spent many pleasant hours flipping through the pages of my copy, admiring the feel of the paper, enjoying the definitions, and fascinated by all the detailed drawings.

But the most interesting distinguishing feature of the book, aside from Masefield’s gracious inscription to my grandfather, is the old bookplate glued to the flyleaf. I had admired it at once; it depicts the seal of the Order of the Garter, a belt inscribed “Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense;”  (Evil to Him who Evil Thinks). Within the garter are the initials, “W. H.” and above it is a royal crown.

This whetted my interest, of course. I knew of the Order of the Garter, established in 1348 by King Edward III and still one of the world’s most exclusive clubs today. Its members are the King or Queen of England, the Prince of Wales, no more than 24 Knights or Ladies Companion of the Garter, Royal Knights and Ladies (members of the immediate Royal Family), and “Stranger” Knights and Ladies (Kings or Queens of other countries).  There are currently 39 in all categories. But I didn’t think the insignia of the Garter included a crown, unless its holder was a member of the British Royal Family.

Presumably all of the members of the British Royal Family have been and are members of the Order, but how many would own or want a copy of Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine?

Careful students of the swashbuckling sea-stories by Patrick O’Brian will at this point raise their hands and cry “I know! I know!” because in many of the series’ 21 volumes appears the figure of Prince William Henry, Duke of Clarence, fourth son of George III. In fiction and in life he was somewhat of a rake – and an Admiral. “Prince Billy” actually served at sea, commanded Naval vessels, and would certainly have wanted a Falconer’s in his cabin and on his nautical bookshelf ashore. When he was crowned King William IV in 1830 (he was succeeded by his niece Victoria upon his death in 1837), he became known as “The Sailor King.”

William IV, The "Sailor King." Note the Order of the Garter on his left  arm and leg

 For years I sent fruitless inquiries to various experts in heraldry and English royalty: is this The Sailor King’s bookplate? Nobody seemed to know.

Then I did the smart thing and asked Greg Gibson, an antiquarian bookseller, purveyor of all sorts of maritime arcana, and one of the smartest people I know, if he had any idea how to find the answer to this question. Of course he did. While we were chatting in his cozy, cluttered office, he swung around in his chair, typed out a query to a group of his colleagues on his computer, and five minutes later handed me this:

Thanks, Billy. I'll take good care of it.

A Watergate Memento

A few weeks ago the progressive advocacy organization Common Cause held a meeting in Washington, DC to commemorate the 40^th anniversary of Watergate. Shortly thereafter I received this handsome certificate in the mail: 

Of course I was tickled to be so honored, though by the time I learned I was on the list, it almost seemed that there were more people on it than off it.

I had saved an old Washington Post article, dated December 21, 1973, that contained the list of 490 names of new Nixon enemies, on top of an earlier list of 216 names, and after rummaging through many old files, I found the clipping, yellowed and brittle, but still legible.

The headline caught my eye then, and still amazes me now. It declared, “Shultz, IRS Ignored Dean Bid for Audit of ‘Enemies’.” George P. Shultz, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury, simply told White House Counsel John W. Dean and, in effect, President Nixon himself, to stuff it after Dean had presented the list to the IRS Director Walters in September, 1972.

By the time the story came out, both the IRS commissioner, Johnnie Walters, and John Dean had resigned. But what was interesting was that Shultz himself had ordered Walters to ignore Dean’s request for a special IRS audit of Nixon’s enemies. I don’t recall anyone saying at the time that  this was a act of courage, or at least of integrity, but it certainly was a reason to admire George Shultz, and to be grateful that the IRS wasn’t poring through my tax records.

Why was I on the list? In the 1960s and early 1970s I was the director of a small lobbying organization that played a role in the congressional effort to deny the Nixon Administration funds for a nationwide antiballistic missile system. We almost succeeded; the Senate vote was a 50-50 tie, which was not enough to win but sent a clear message that the program was in trouble.

Then, in 1972, I was on a defense advisory task force for Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern.  One day a Washington Post photographer showed up at McGovern’s house to record a meeting of the task force – clearly a photo op designed to show he was educating himself on important national security matters. The photo that appeared next day in the paper was pretty clearly posed, and columnist Joseph Alsop, as I recall, ridiculed the whole affair as a farcical staged event.

 

When the second enemies’ list came out, almost everyone in the picture was in it, more or less in the order listed in the caption. That’s me, third from the right, listening to Sen. Frank Church. (If I’m not mistaken, everyone else in the photo has since died, though I haven’t kept in touch with McGovern’s secretary Pat Donovan – who was spared by the list makers).

As news continues to unfold about IRS workers examining the applications of right-wing organizations for non-profit status – seized upon by Republican critics as “auditing” them – it’s worth noting the distinctions between Nixon’s transgressions and Obama’s supposed involvement in the current brouhaha. There are plenty of them, not least that while Nixon not only knew of but ordered many of the Watergate abuses, President Obama was not aware of the possibly improper actions of a few misguided bureaucrats until he read about them in the papers, long after the mistaken actions had been found out and corrected. Were it not for the blood lust of the Obama-haters in Congress and the right-wing media, there would have been no reason for him to know that a few low-level bureaucrats had made a mistake.

Whether the so-called “Watergate Reforms” that followed the scandal have endured, and whether the political landscape has improved markedly in forty years is another question.  You could argue that the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, for instance, has done far more damage to the American political process than Nixon and Watergate ever did. 

Don't Give Up the Ship?

From the Boston Globe, May 19, 2013, Page K2     Don't give up ... oh, never mind Behind the iconic American slogan, a military loss - and a PR win By TOM HALSTED       200 YEARS AGO, on June 1, 1813, in the midst of a bloody sea battle between an American and a British frigate a few miles north of Boston, one of America’s most memorable wartime slogans was born. As the mortally wounded Captain James Lawrence of the US frigate Chesapeake lay dying in his cabin, his crew locked in hand-to-hand combat on the quarterdeck above, he is alleged to have uttered the memorable words: “Don’t give up the ship!”       His rallying cry, published a few weeks later in a Baltimore newspaper, became the unofficial motto of the US Navy for decades thereafter, long predating “Remember the Maine” or “Remember Pearl Harbor.” Just two months after the battle, a bright blue banner emblazoned with Lawrence’s words flew at the masthead of a namesake vessel, USS Lawrence. Its captain, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, won a decisive victory on Sept. 10 over British naval forces in the Battle of Lake Erie.       Given the way it has echoed through the years, you might think Lawrence’s memorable plea marked a heroic moment in the history of American armed forces. It didn’t. Not only did Lawrence’s surviving crew give up the ship almost immediately after his exhortation; historians and military analysts would later conclude that Lawrence had disobeyed orders to avoid combat in the first place, then committed a series of tactical blunders that all but guaranteed he and his ship would lose.      Rather than a heroic stand, what took place that day and after was one of the most spectacular—and fraudulent—public relations coups in American military history. It was carried out with the full support of the public. And to look back on what really happened, as it has been pieced together by historians since, is to appreciate how little has changed about one aspect of war: our need to transform even the most pointless losses into a noble, defiant message.      IF TELEVISION had existed, the battle between the Shannon and the Chesapeake would have been a prime-time event. The skirmish took place about a year into the War of 1812, which had broken out over several grievances with Britain, including onerous trade restrictions imposed by the British and the illegal boarding of American vessels in search of British deserters. Once war was declared, the British Royal Navy began hobbling American trade by blockading ports, including Boston, with warships based in Nova Scotia.       In late May 1813, Captain Philip Broke sailed the HMS Shannon, flagship of the blockading British squadron, into Massachusetts Bay alone, knowing the Americans had only one frigate ready for sea in Boston. On June 1, the Chesapeake rose to the bait.       Unlike most sea battles, which take place far from land, the whole encounter seemed made for public consumption. Spectators lined the rooftops in Boston and along the North Shore, and commanders of both ships repeatedly had to warn a boisterous spectator fleet of yachts and small boats to stay clear.      The first shot was fired at 6 p.m., the last at 6:11. The colors were struck at 6:15. The roar of cannon fire, the stabbing flames from the cannons’ mouths, and the smoke of battle could be heard and seen all along the coast.      Nearly every American observing the preparation for battle was confident the Americans would win. American ships had astonished the world in recent months by repeatedly defeating supposedly superior British naval forces, starting when the US frigate Constitution defeated the HMS Guerri?re. In Boston, plans were laid for a banquet to celebrate the anticipated victory of the Chesapeake over the Shannon, including places at the table for the defeated British officers. But none of the guests ever arrived.      It should have been clear at the outset that Lawrence was terribly outmatched. He had taken command of the Chesapeake only two weeks before, and that reluctantly; he had wanted and felt he deserved command of the famous Constitution, then in drydock for repairs, and had no experience working with the young officers, who were new to the ship. Half his crew was also new, untrained in working together, and all were angry that they had not been paid for weeks. Some reports asserted that many in the crew were drunk on June 1.      Broke, by contrast, had had command of the Shannon for more than seven years. His crew knew him so well that they could work the ship with scarcely a command being uttered. Their gunnery, enhanced by special sights designed by Broke himself, was among the best in the fleet. So, despite the Americans’ confidence, the stage was set for their crushing defeat. Broke provided it, but he got plenty of help from the American captain. Broke brought the Shannon within a few miles of Boston, and then hove to, waiting for the Chesapeake to come out. Lawrence came down upon the near-stationary Shannon from upwind, and, in what can only be interpreted as an act of bravado, swung the Chesapeake around to lie parallel to the Shannon, giving both ships an opportunity to exchange lethal broadsides.       The carnage was enormous. In less than 15 minutes, 40 members of the Chesapeake’s crew were killed and 96 wounded, while the Shannon had 34 killed and 56 wounded.       The Chesapeake’s headsail sheets and wheel were quickly shot away and she drifted helplessly downwind toward the Shannon, where sharpshooters in the Shannon’s fighting tops could rain down fire on the American frigate’s deck. A shot felled Captain Lawrence, who was taken below, where he uttered the famous words, according to the doctor who was attending him.       As the ships collided, Broke seized the opportunity to lead a boarding party onto the Chesapeake’s quarterdeck. In the hand-to-hand fighting that followed, Broke, too, was badly wounded by a saber cut to his skull. But the Americans’ colors were soon hauled down, the Royal ensign raised above them, and the battle was over.       BYANY NORMAL measure, Lawrence should have been held responsible for a costly and unnecessary defeat. He had had strict orders to avoid contact with the enemy and instead to slip through their blockade in order to harass enemy merchant ships in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. These he totally disobeyed, losing a frigate and his life in the process.       His famous exhortation, too, was breached immediately. With no American officers on deck to formally surrender, the British officers now in command of the Chesapeake’s quarterdeck simply declared the fighting over, raised the British colors over the American flag, and imprisoned the surviving American crewmen below decks. The two ships sailed off in tandem to the British naval headquarters in Halifax, Nova Scotia, leaving the American spectators dumbfounded.       No American heroes emerged from the engagement. The first and second lieutenants were wounded, the fourth lieutenant killed. Third Lieutenant William Cox was never able to regain the deck after taking Lawrence below, and was therefore made the scapegoat, convicted of leaving his place of duty, and dismissed from the Navy in disgrace. (His family and descendants tried for years to clear his name. Finally, in 1952, President Truman pardoned Cox and posthumously restored him to his former rank.)       Lawrence died en route to Halifax. Having committed a succession of bad decisions that all but guaranteed the loss of his ship and many of her crew, he should have been disgraced. Instead, he was lionized: given a funeral in Canada with full military honors, buried there, then disinterred and brought back to Boston for another funeral, reburied in Salem, dug up once more, and finally buried for good at Trinity Church in New York.       Though the true disgrace was Lawrence’s, the American public would not allow it. They had wanted a victory on June 1, and if they could not have a victory, at least they wanted a hero—and a story that helped them find nobility in defeat. The details of the war might seem distant, but the impulse to create heroes in the wake of pointless loss is as familiar as Custer’s Last Stand or the saga of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Two centuries ago, we were already seeing the picture we wanted—and, in that spirit, Lawrence’s failures were forgotten and his memory reshaped to position him as the hero he always wanted to be.          Tom Halsted, a Gloucester writer and sailor, is the great-great-grandson of James Curtis, a midshipman who, as a 15-year-old, was Lawrence’s aide-de-camp on the Chesapeake.

Those Damn Nor'easters

Every weekend since mid-January we have had a snowstorm. One of them was a whopper: the TV weathermen called it Superstorm or "Blizzacane" Nemo. The winds blew hard from the northeast, and of course the papers and television reports were soon full of reports of the damage done by the dreadful "nor'easter."

Now, I am one of a vanishing breed that thinks the term "nor'easter" is an abomination. I grew up on the New England coast, knowing practically from birth that the only proper pronunciation is "no'theaster" or maybe "no'theasta." You can say "sou'wester," "nor'wester," or "s'utheaster," but NEVER "nor'easter. It just isn't right.

A few years ago I wrote an indignant op-ed about it, for the Gloucester Daily Times. It had legs. Soon I was getting requests for rewrites for other communities, ranging from New Jersey to Maine. I was interviewed by National Public Radio.

But then the Gloucester Times got a new editor, who promptly started using the hateful word. The Boston Globe started using the abomination. I called someone there and was told "Oh, we use the AP stylebook. That's the way they say it."

Then for a long time I took solace in the fact that the New York Times still eschewed the term, faithfully writing "northeaster" even though all others seemed to have abandoned that sturdy appellation. But now I've learned that while the paper has not fully abandoned its policy, it tolerates the use of the term within its pages. I'm not sure I understand this fudging, but it looks like the prelude to total capitulation.

I hate it and will fight it till the day I die. But I may be pretty much alone, a latter-day Canute trying to hold back the tides that incessantly pound the shore in a northeast storm.

Death of a Friend

My friend Henry Myers died on New Year’s Day, at his home on Peak’s Island, Maine, just a month short of his eightieth birthday. The following Saturday, Joy and I drove to the Portland Quaker Meeting House for his memorial service. Nearly two hundred of his friends and former colleagues showed up to remember him and to console his wife Mary. Speaker after speaker reminded us of Henry’s basic decency, his endless curiosity, his love for Mary, his enjoyment of sailing, and his undying impatience with fools, liars and incompetents. More than one summoned the image of Diogenes in search of an honest man.

Henry was dismayed  by the demands of politics that led otherwise decent human beings to compromise on matters where they really knew better. And of course he had no patience with politicians whose moral or ethical standards fell short of his own, or whose beliefs and principles he did not share. Henry was not a prig; he was just a very decent, honest man. He must have written thousands of letters to those politicians, and to the editors of newspapers and news directors of television and radio stations, expressing his concerns about perceived wrongs. If he learned that a subject he cared about was to be discussed or a political figure was about to be interviewed on a television or radio show, he would send penetrating questions to the interviewers or news directors to be put to the scheduled guest. Almost invariably he would be disappointed that his questions were never asked, or that the interviewer never came up with the follow-up question he would have asked. Every now and then, however, an interviewer would follow his advice and rattle off the questions he had suggested. The subject of the interview might not be as obliging, however.

Henry produced an email newsletter, the Casco Bay Observer, which he mailed to dozens of correspondents, expounding on his concerns over the shortcomings of public figures or depressing developments abroad, particularly in the Middle East. Articles about deteriorating Israeli-Palestinian relations were headlined “On the Edge of the Abyss.” He would often fly an idea past me (and I’m sure many others) before launching it as a CBO mailing. Almost always he hit the mark. All too often, nobody in a position of power noticed.

I met Henry in Washington, in 1962. A physicist, a graduate of MIT and CalTech, he worked on nuclear weapons testing issues in the Science and Technology Bureau of the newly formed Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. I was in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, where I looked after the Arms Control Agency’s intelligence needs, keeping its senior officials apprised of breaking developments abroad and assisting key staff members like Henry. Later I left the State Department and joined Henry in the Arms Control Agency. We shared an office whose inside door opened behind the desk of the agency’s chief scientist Herbert (“Pete”) Scoville. None of us, Pete included,  cared much for bureaucratic protocol, but Pete’s secretary Julie Krenzel did, and it used to drive her wild when Pete would open his door to consult with Henry – and sometimes me – just as she thought he was supposed to be in a meeting somewhere else or entertain an important visitor. (Pete also kept bottles of gin and vermouth in a wall safe behind his desk, and  would occasionally violate State Department rules by breaking them out to observe with other privileged officials what he perceived were important ceremonial occasions. Sometimes we were included as well). 

Working with Henry was a treat. As noted, he had little patience with pompous bureaucrats or dissemblers, and was forever looking for the Honest Man who too seldom appeared on the scene. But he was endlessly polite, if not always patient, with fools and incompetents. He strongest criticism of sloppy work was often “it isn’t clear” what  a writer of an endless report or a briefer at a conference was saying, when what he really meant was “this is pure crap.”  But when he set out to perform a study and produce a useful report of his own, he was always thorough in setting forth the points he was trying to make. His arguments were carefully documented, and his conclusions seldom challenged.

Working with him was fun, too. Channelling Shakespeare, Henry one day announced that working for the government was akin to being in an endless theatrical performance, and would often allude thereafter (at least to me) to “another act in The Play”  in response to particularly absurd events in the daily routine.  In 1967 the magazine “Scientific American” sponsored a “Great Paper Airplane Contest,” and Henry was quick to respond. He and I tinkered with many designs in our office, but finally concluded that the most aerodynamic and interesting design already existed in a Styrofoam coffee cup. We would poke holes in the cups, add and remove fins, but the best and most capable flyers turned out to be the basic unadorned cups themselves. Henry (or I) could get impressive performance out of one by holding it at arms length, dangling down from the shoulder, then rapidly flinging it forward with an underhand throw, releasing it with a spinning motion. We got a satisfying amount of distance out of our various designs, even if they did not go into elaborate acrobatic maneuvers.  Neither Julie nor Gladys Cleek, our ever-patient secretary, were amused, however, particularly when our contrivances flew out the door and into the corridor, startling important bureaucrats on important business.

After we both left ACDA, Henry first tried consulting on his own, establishing “Myers Associates” in his tiny Georgetown living room. Joy designed a brochure for it, but it did little business. In the tumultuous 1968 Presidential election campaign, Henry joined  Scientists and Engineers for McCarthy and helped develop position papers and press releases for the candidate. While he was in Chicago for the infamous Democratic convention, he wisely stayed out of the streets when Mayor Daley’s police went on a rampage, beating up McCarthy supporters.

Henry then worked for the US Congress, on the staff of the House Interior Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, concentrating on nuclear energy. He was at the center of investigations of the Three Mile Island and Brown’s Ferry reactor accidents, and endless debates over nuclear waste disposal. He was frequently at odds with accepted wisdom on nuclear policy, both domestic and foreign, particularly when the latter involved the Israeli nuclear weapons program. He became convinced, and argued persuasively, that Israel had received clandestine shipments of enriched uranium from a Pennsylvania plant, but domestic politics complicated all his efforts to expose the diversion.

When he left the Interior Committee, he moved to Maine, and to the surprise of his friends, bought a lot on Peak’s Island, just outside Portland Harbor, and built a house there. Then, to the even greater surprise (and delight) of all his friends who had became accustomed to the likelihood that Henry would be a bachelor all his life, to the age of 65 he married a wonderful Island dweller, Mary Lavendier. They settled in on the island, though they also bought and restored two old houses in Waldoboro, on the mainland.  In Portland, Mary, an accomplished artist, maintained a studio while Henry rented office space on a wharf where he went each day to crank out his occasional newsletter, The Casco Bay Observer. He and I were in email correspondence almost weekly, usually to explore how he might turn his latest grievance into a pithy CBO editorial on war and peace, the endless impending disasters in the Middle East, the laudable (a few) and incompetent (many) politicians, from the Maine State House to Capitol Hill to the White House, and a wide assortment of economic, political, and environmental outrages. There was never a shortage of material on which to comment, and Henry did it well.

Henry loved to sail. Early in our acquaintance he became the joint owner with other friends of an ancient 26-foot wooden yawl named “Voyager.” “Old V,” as he called her, was fun to sail, and I had the pleasure of many good day-sails on Chesapeake Bay, both with Henry and on my own with my family (his partners seldom seemed to use the boat, and were happy to let it be used, even if one of the owners wasn’t aboard). Old V leaked a lot, and the engine was persnickety, but she was fun to sail.

Henry also developed a fondness for a succession of cantankerous cars. The first one I knew was a green Triumph TR3 sports car. He called it “Old Green”,  and when it gave up the ghost it was followed by a gray SAAB – “Old Gray”, of course.  When “Old Green” was retired, Henry fantasized that it might be nice to take it to a wrecking yard, have it compressed into a cube and use it for a coffee table. Wisely, he never did.

After he moved to Maine, Henry found he had not shaken the sailing bug, and a few years ago bought a fiberglass Cape Dory sloop that he kept in Rockland, down the coast from Peak’s Island. His co-owner told me at the memorial service that Henry would often get great pleasure out of just sitting in the cockpit, enjoying the day, without bothering to leave the dock or hoist sail. I could identify with that.

There was a lot to love about Henry Myers. 

Henry Richard Myers,  2/1/1933 - 1/1/2013

Memorial Day

The first Memorial Day parade I remember was in Dedham, MA, probably around 1938 or 1939, when I was 4 or 5. There were the doughboys with their flat dishpan helmets, Springfield rifles and puttees, and the marching band from Dedham High School, but most of all I remember the open car going slowly by, with a frail old man in the back, wearing a Civil War uniform, and gently waving a transparent, bony hand at the crowd — the last local survivor of the Grand Army of the Republic. 

And I remember my own active duty Army service (1954-1961 — a rare period when Americans were not at war somewhere), which began with my feeling that my personal qualities were being recognized at last in a way I had never felt before, either in my family or in school, and ended much too long after I had recognized that as an Infantry officer my job was to lead men to kill one another up close and personal. 

Those memories came back when I was a selectman in Manchester, MA (1986-91), and each year marched at the head of a parade through town, stopping at each cemetery in town, ending at one where each year the same rituals were performed: a high school student (who might soon die in Iraq or Afghanistan, but didn’t know it yet) reciting the Gettysburg address, a gray-haired former Army nurse from the American Legion Auxiliary reciting the maudlin “In Flanders’ Fields,” someone else reading a war-glorifying “Reply to ‘In Flanders’ Fields’,” a bugle blowing taps, and a ragged volley fired in salute by a squad of portly legionnaires who the other 364 days of the year were recognizably the Fire Chief, a grocery clerk, a plumber and a policeman. Then we all went to the harbor where the Auxiliary Legionnaire threw a bunch of poppies into the water (if it was low tide they lay in the mud until the tide came in). There were no GAR veterans or World War I doughboys, but a handful of WW II and Korean War veterans, and few more from the Vietnam War. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “so it goes.” But Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, right?

A few days ago I read an obituary of Paul Fussell, Jr.,  a clear-thinking military historian whose work I admire. He too had recalled how much he had enjoyed the infantry (he was a lieutenant in combat in France just after D-Day), until he became aware that the purpose of the infantry was to persuade young men like him to kill as many other young men like him as possible. He went on to write The Great War and Modern Memory and many other books and articles that I wish many politicians would read before they send young men and women off to yet another war.

Love and long life to all. Maybe even a few years of peace.