Stay Out of the Syrian Quagmire

President Obama’s decision to press for a “limited” military attack on Syria because President Assad’s forces apparently used chemical weapons  against Syrian civilians on August 21 (and earlier) is a terrible idea.

Some opponents of military action question the alleged extent of the chemical attack, and some even question whether it took place at all. I am persuaded that a chemical attack did take place, and that the Assad government launched it, but whether the facts of the attack are still in dispute is irrelevant. Even if all the gruesome details presented by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry are true, the use or possession of chemical weapons by Syria do not for a minute constitute a threat to the security of the United States or its allies -- the only justification for the United States to make war on another nation, no matter how thuggish its leader may be. 

Supposedly the “limited” US response to Assad’s provocation will be to attack key installations and command structures with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Firing a barrage of Tomahawk missiles at Assad’s military forces is an act of war, not the minor gesture, “sending a message,” that its proponents try to portray.

A Tomahawk cruise missile is a large and lethal weapon, a 20-foot long unmanned bomber, launched from a surface ship or a submarine, weighing nearly 3,000 pounds and capable of delivering a half-ton high explosive warhead or a package of cluster bombs with pinpoint accuracy over a range as great as 1,500 miles. (An earlier version, now withdrawn, carried a 200 kiloton nuclear warhead). It’s reasonable to suppose that Defense Department planners have been able to come up with dozens of potential targets for even a “limited” strike by Tomahawk missiles, and that these would be supplemented by aircraft attacks as well. 

Tomahawks are not a new weapon; they have been in service since the 1970s, have been used in both Gulf Wars, in Bosnia, and Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Sudan. More than 6,000 of them have been manufactured, and about 2,000 used in combat.  There are still 4,000 left for use against Syria and other targets needing to be “sent a message.”

An attack on Syria would have profoundly negative consequences for critical American objectives in the region and around the world, among them:

Defusing Iranian nuclear concerns: Seeing to it that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons is one of the United States’ paramount concerns. The non-proliferation regime is already weakened by the actions of North Korea. If Iran would turn from its present nuclear power development to bomb-making it would greatly increase tensions in the Middle East, and encourage others to follow suit.

Israel, which asserts that Iran is well on the way to developing nuclear weapons, claims an Iranian bomb would upset the balance of power in the Middle East. (It certainly would; Israel, which secretly developed an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons more than 50 years ago, would no longer have a monopoly in the region, and has persistently pressed the US to go to war with Iran if necessary, to prevent it from developing a bomb).

Despite pressures from the hawkish government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu,  President Obama has consistently declared that the way to prevent an Iranian bomb is through diplomacy, not military action.  Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani his made it clear he is ready for improved relations with the West and a resolution to the nuclear impasse. 

But an American attack on Iran’s ally Syria would almost certainly put an end to any efforts in this direction, and would be likely to reinvigorate Israeli pressure on the US to attack Iran’s nuclear installations as well. Even those skeptical of Israeli assertions that Iran is already developing a bomb believe that Iran is approaching the point where it could do so if such a decision were made. A US attack on Syria might push Iran past that tipping point.

Arab-Israeli talks: the latest round of discussions between Israel and the Palestinian authority has not gotten off to a promising beginning in the presence of new Israeli settlement-building activities, but at least the discussions are nominally going on, even though presently in recess.  It’s hard to see how peace talks could continue if an attack on Syria results in Syrian retaliation against Israel, as Assad has threatened in response.

US-Russian relations, testy for a variety of reasons, can only worsen in the wake of an attack; a wiser course would be to enlist Russia, as its president Vladimir Putin has already suggested, into finding a diplomatic approach to the issue of Syrian use of chemical warfare through a diplomatic exploration of ways to expand the effectiveness of the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention against the possession and use of chemical weapons. An obvious objective would be to persuade Syria -- and Israel, which has not joined the 1993 convention either -- to complete process of ratification.

Afghanistan:  President Obama has committed the US to withdraw all combat forces from Afghanistan next year.  He will need the cooperation of  Russia and Afghanistan's neighbors Iran and Pakistan to accomplish this. Will he get it?

The Rest of the World: A US attack on Syria would reinforce the now decades-old image of a trigger-happy America that sees war as a first, not a last resort. It would weaken still further America’s image as a beacon of hope and exemplar of democracy that increasingly is seen more as slogan than reality.  Already fading hopes that President Obama would somehow be different from his predecessors would be further eroded.

Obama’s Domestic Agenda:  Just as Lyndon Johnson sacrificed his Great Society dreams to continue the war in Vietnam, Obama risks losing what momentum he had gained on finally passing an immigration bill and perhaps even on fully implementing the Affordable Care Act, along with a long list of other unfinished business. His political opponents will take comfort in the widespread loss of support from his base that he will suffer if he presses ahead on this foolhardy plan, far more than if he recognizes it’s a totally unnecessary distraction and refocuses on what matters to him.

The Democratic Party:  Democrats seeking re-election to the House and Senate in 2014 already know their constituents overwhelmingly oppose going to war over Syria. If the President perseveres in his plans, he will further fragment the party, possibly leading to the loss of control of the Senate and making impossible an already uphill fight to regain control of the House.  And whichever Democrat is the Presidential nominee in 2016 will face a difficult time consolidating support from a disillusioned party – especially if the Republicans finally stop shooting themselves in the foot and actually nominate an electable candidate.

Finally, what would be the benefits of a US attack on Syria?  Allegedly it would deter Assad from subsequent use of chemical weapons, but exactly how or why has not been explained. Nor is anyone claiming it would stop him from continuing to fight his domestic opponents, including the civilians he is slaughtering daily by other means.

Perhaps the only party that would benefit unambiguously from the use of Tomahawks on Syrian forces would be the Raytheon corporation that manufactures the missiles. That’s not sufficient reason to unleash them.

If the United States has any legitimate objective to pursue in Syria, it is a humanitarian one, and that can best be advanced through a concerted diplomatic effort, through the United Nations, necessarily including all interested parties, including Russia and Iran.

Obama was right to go to Congress for approval of any military action, and if Congress, as I fervently hope, does not support his proposed attack, he will be wise to heed its advice and, like Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, embrace the wiser choice of a diplomatic solution.

But then, say his supporters, he would lose credibility!  Can’t a stronger case be made that he is already fast losing his credibility – with America’s allies, with the once-hopeful Prize Committee who awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, and with the many Americans who voted for him in 2008 and 2012 because they believed he would somehow be a different – and better – president than George W. Bush?  That he would turn America away from its instinctive resort to war whenever a potential international disagreement arose, and restore a national focus on bettering the lives of all Americans?

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Barack Obama was to be the president of hope and change. We are still hoping, but the change we all were hoping for appears more elusive by the day. The dwindling number of Americans who thought his presidency would be different, better, and more visionary than those of his predecessors need him to reconsider and to reverse this wrong-headed, impulsive lunge toward war. 

Surely he wants to leave behind a better legacy when he completes his term of office.

A Brush with the Past

A few weeks ago I wrote about mysterious sights at sea. Here’s another one:

My grandfather, the painter Charles Hopkinson, had a lifelong love affair with the sea and ships of all sizes. In school and college he filled his books and papers (at times including examination papers, to the consternation of his teachers) with doodles and detailed sketches of skiffs, sloops, schooners, ketches, yawls, catboats, brigs, barques, and clipper ships. Long after school – indeed,  throughout his life – he would draw little sketches in the margins of books on ships and the sea to explain how a particular part of a ship's rigging worked, or to correct an error in the text or an illustration.

He sailed whenever he had a chance. As a boy summering in Maine he learned to handle small boats, and he was seldom without a sailboat of his own after he was married and settled down at the house in Manchester, Massachusetts, where he lived and painted for the rest of his life. Racing was not his thing, and he did not go in for long cruises either. Messing about in small boats was what he loved best, and he took great pleasure in passing along this joy to daughters and grandchildren alike.

Some of us took to it more than others, for this gentlest of men ashore was a stickler for perfection at sea: we soon learned that there was only one way to tie up a dinghy, fasten a halyard to a cleat, or to “shoot” a mooring (bring a boat up to the mooring buoy by turning into the wind and letting the sails luff at just the right point so that the vessel came to a complete halt just as its bow kissed against the buoy). If you didn't manage these and the myriad other skills a sailor must know just right, he'd have you do them again and again. To a small boy (and he started to teach me to sail when I was 8 or 9), he would seem a gruff taskmaster. But I remember that when I did master one of these skills at last, he was warm with his praise.

Charles Hopkinson in his (other) element

One July day in 1945, when I was eleven, he decided I was ready to handle his 17-foot centerboard sloop, the Armada, alone (almost alone; he'd be a passenger while I rowed us out in the dinghy, made sail, and handled tiller and sheets on a short sail around Egg Rock and back). The day was bright and clear, with a gentle breeze ruffling the water, and not a cloud in the sky.

He put a couple of sandwiches in a paper bag, squashed a weather-beaten hat on his head, and took

the oars out of the hall closet. The oarlocks clanged together, bringing John Joiner, his little Welsh terrier, bounding out of his wingback chair to join us. He was not about to miss a sail.

We walked together the half mile to the cove – through the woods, past the barn, through the orchard and along the lane to Kettle Cove, where the Armada was moored. I carried a bag with our lunch and our sweaters; my grandfather carried the oars across his shoulder; the oarlocks, dangling from their lanyards, chimed (e-flat) as they swung together with each step he took.

The tide in the cove was high. The venerable rowboat bobbed at the end of its running line fifty feet off the beach. I waded out a few feet to uncoil the line from its rock and pulled in the dinghy hand over hand, the water dripping off the line and soaking the front of my dungarees. The dinghy scraped on the gravel shore, the dog leapt aboard, I untied the boat, swung it around and we climbed aboard.

Under my grandfather’s watchful eye I rowed us out, carefully feathering the oars at every stroke. We were soon aboard the sloop. I tied the dinghy’s painter to the eye splice on the mooring pennant with a bowline, finished off with two half-hitches, unlaced the sail cover and stowed it away under the foredeck, hung the rudder on the transom, lowered the centerboard, hoisted the mainsail and jib, and cast off, leaving the dinghy rocking on the mooring.

We were soon out beyond Egg Rock. My grandfather hadn't said a word about my steering or sail handling. I was aglow with happiness. Then, almost without warning we were in thick fog.

The wind died away at the same moment, and we were left to rise and fall on the oily swell coming in from the east. The sea was gray satin, with only an occasional ripple to show there was still a ghost of a breeze.

We sat and waited. After a while he took a stub of a pencil out of his pocket and sharpened it with the jackknife he produced from another pocket. The shavings curled over the side. He produced an envelope from somewhere else, flattened it out, and began to sketch: a Gloucester fishing schooner heading home from the Banks with a trip o’ fish, thrashing along under shortened sail into a sou’wester. In a few strokes he had captured the driving wind, the long dark seas, the pounding of the hull into the waves, the decks awash with water pouring through the scuppers, the struggle of the helmsman to keep a sharp lookout and hold the vessel on course.

“Time for a bite to eat?” he asked me. I started to fish the sandwiches out of the bag, then stopped. I had heard a voice, off to port.

Then another, louder, more distinct; then a muffled laugh.

Then the creak of a block as a line worked back and forth over its sheave. The sound of heavy spars rubbing against one another. Something huge was out there in the fog, just beyond our narrow circle of vision.

Then the fog scaled up, and ... O, GLORY! A huge square-rigged ship loomed up above us, all sails set and drawing in the gentle breeze, easing along to the westward. We stared dumbfounded at the sight. Could it be real? Was it a mirage? A trick of the fog? A warp in time? What square-­rigger could be still be sailing in 1945? My grandfather would know, I was sure -- but a look at his face, as open-mouthed as mine, told me that he was as astonished as I, and not quite sure whether we were looking at reality or a ghostly apparition.

Three or four men stood along the vessel's starboard rail high above us; one, smoking a pipe, leaned over the side to wave, looking real enough. The water bubbled along the square-rigger's broad flanks and rippled outward to lap against our hull, rocking us back and forth; that too was real. John Joiner, loafing in the bilges, didn't seem overly impressed.

As quickly as the ship had appeared, she passed us by to disappear into the mist once more. But we both saw her name as she ghosted by: Joseph Conrad was picked out on her broad black transom in bright white letters.

The Joseph Conrad now lies at Mystic Seaport, where's she's been moored to a dock for most of the sixty-four years since her ghostly appearance off Cape Ann.

The Joseph Conrad

The Author, 1945
Portrait by Charles Hopkinson

A version of this story appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times in 2009

Our Top Secret World

The ongoing sagas of whistle blowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have brought to the public eye the astonishing extent of secret programs run by branches of the United States government. Just the number of people cleared for Top Secret information and its more specialized, still more secret sub-compartments is mind-boggling:  since 2010, government agencies have  been required to report the number of persons holding security clearances. By 2012 the number had risen to over 4 million, nearly 1.5 million of whom were cleared for Top Secret.

But that’s only part of the story. Top Secret clearance alone will allow authorized personnel access to a large body of classified information, but there are clearances beyond Top Secret provided only to people involved with specific intelligence and other national security programs. The number of people with such special clearances has not  been made public, but it too may number in the tens – maybe even hundreds --  of thousands. And people cleared for some of these programs might not be cleared for others, thereby adding yet another element of confusion to an intelligence system already bogged down with more secret information than humans are able to handle.

I lived in this bizarre world for a  few years. In the mid-1950s I was an infantry officer stationed in the Panama Canal Zone. When my tour there was up, I was sent, to my surprise, to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, MD, to learn to be a photo interpreter. After six months of training, I reported with a few other graduates to the Pentagon, where we were informed that we had been selected to study aerial photos taken by the then-secret U-2 high altitude spy plane. We were all cleared for Top Secret, but also for a special subcategory of Top Secret reserved for people working with the U-2 photos. A special codeword was assigned to the program, and another codeword to the photographs and the reports we wrote about the installations we analyzed. But even we were not supposed to know how the pictures were taken or what aircraft was involved. For that you needed another special clearance and codeword.

When satellite photography came into service in 1961, there was yet another new family of  special clearances and code names for the various kinds of satellites and the film and digital imagery they produced.

And another to work with so-called “Special intelligence (“SI”) gleaned from communications intelligence (COMINT), and still another (“Q” clearance) if you were working on issues related to nuclear weapons design and performance. And there was yet another for intelligence derived by secret submarine missions inside Soviet or Communist Chinese waters. And those were only the ones my job required me to know about in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today there are reportedly hundreds of special access intelligence programs, each with its own code name.

An inevitable result of all this complex compartmentalization, codeword clearances, need-to-know requirements and other restrictions was to reinforce an already entrenched cult of security surrounding the users of classified intelligence: the more information to which the system granted you access, the more important you were seen to be, and therefore the more important you came to feel.

The person who had more little letters surrounding the photo on his or her CIA badge, denoting access to more categories of information, the smarter, and more powerful he or she obviously was. It was demeaning for me, first as an Army officer and then as a State Department employee, to have to be escorted around the CIA buildings—even to the bathroom—wearing a visitor’s badge on a chain around the neck.

When the CIA finally issued me a photo badge of my own in the mid-1960s (I was then working for the State Department, in a job that regularly sent me to the CIA to consult with various officials there) I finally had the freedom to roam the halls. At once I found myself looking down with condescending pity on escorted visitors with their shameful scarlet letter of a visitor’s badge hanging round their necks, slightly inadequate, not quite to be trusted.

One Sunday morning in 1964 the New York Times Magazine carried on its cover the picture of an earnest National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, standing in the White House Rose Garden explaining something to an attentive President Lyndon  Johnson. Clearly visible under Bundy’s arm was an open copy of that morning’s Current Intelligence Bulletin, a document prepared each night by the CIA and containing the latest current intelligence and brief analyses of critical issues of interest to top decision makers. On top of the visible page of the document, in bright red letters, were the sacred words “TOP SECRET DINAR,”—“Dinar” being the then current codeword used with documents containing information derived from SI (COMINT) material.

The security people must have gone wild. Here was one of their cherished secrets, flaunted around the world. The code word was changed immediately. To do so meant sending rush messages to every security agency, military unit and diplomatic post that might have access to COMINT material, reclassifying every new Top Secret SI document not yet in final form.

And the worst of it was that there was no one to punish. You couldn’t jail the President’s National Security Advisor or the New York Times photographer. Presumably some hapless NSC staffer was given a tongue-lashing. The world may never know. In due course a new codeword began to appear on the pages of the Current Intelligence Bulletin and all other COMINT documents.[1]

The uproar over the Manning and Snowden revelations may result in some much-needed controls over NSA access to telephone and internet records of American citizens and to the content of their phone calls and email messages, but it will likely do little or nothing to end the bureaucratic fascination with the cult of secrecy. 

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[1] Ironically, the printed information visible under the TOP SECRET DINAR classification line happened to be a summary of newspaper commentary on the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident— not classified at all. But the bulletin's pages were preprinted with the highest classification of any article that might be carried in a particular edition. I happened to have been the State Department representative on the interagency team that had prepared that particular day's “CIB” and remember observing the flap with wry delight. More security-conscious intelligence types were less amused.

Ghosts at Sea

Sailors are notorious yarn-spinners, but every now and then some mariner will tell a tale about an improbable event or apparition that simply can’t be explained by logic or the laws of physics.

Some, like the sightings of mermaids, can generally be ascribed to the appearance of unfamiliar marine creatures like manatees or dugongs, combined with foggy weather and an abundance of rum.  Since the advent of radar and binoculars with better optics than the spyglasses of old (and maybe tighter restrictions on the issuance of grog), mermaid sightings have become rarer; the same goes for sea-serpents, which used to be seen with some regularity, even here in my home town of Gloucester, which boasted a sea-serpent in its harbor that dozens of people reported seeing in the summer of 1817 and occasionally thereafter.  But no physical evidence was ever found, and gradually Gloucester’s sea-serpent became the stuff of far-fetched legend.

Gloucester's Sea-Serpent

Other stories of unnatural sightings, however, are harder to debunk or satisfactorily explain. In his classic account Sailing Alone Around the World, the single-handed sailor Joshua Slocum wrote of how he lay in the cabin of his yawl Spray off the coast of Africa on his epic 1895-1898 voyage, too ill to leave his bunk after eating spoiled cheese and fruit, while a strange seaman, dressed in 15^th century garb, appeared on board, introduced himself as the pilot of Christopher Columbus’ ship Pinta, took over the helm and kept the vessel on course for the next 24 hours.

Maryland boat designer and builder Pete Culler wrote in his memoir Skiffs and Schooners of a night in 1945 when he was sailing with a friend off the New Jersey coast and saw, less than a mile off, a square-rigged brig, a vessel type not in general use since the 19^th century, sailing on a parallel course. Culler was aware of no such vessels still afloat, and spent some time examining her closely with a night-glass before turning to call down to his companion in the cabin below to come up and have a look. When he turned to look once more at the brig, it was nowhere to be seen.

But he saw it; Slocum saw his 400-year old shipmate, dozens of people in Gloucester saw a sea serpent.

And I saw something too.

In the fall of 1984, Joy and I joined a distant cousin of mine, her son, and his newly­wed wife for a passage from Boothbay Harbor, Maine to Bermuda aboard the son’s 40-foot flush-deck cutter. We set out on a brisk late-October morning. The vessel was fast and a comfortable sailer, and we made good time.

The second night out, we were well beyond the Great South Channel when I went on watch at 8:00 p.m. It was a clear, cold night, with no moon, but the stars were brilliant. I barely needed the compass, as I could navigate handily by taking dead aim at Orion, which rose before us each night. There was a fair breeze out of the north, and with a favorable current we were bowling along with the wind on the quarter at better than eight knots. I did have to tend the wheel, as the skipper had managed to drop the Autohelm self-steering control on the deck while he was attempting to show Joy how to adjust its compass; but the vessel was well balanced, and easy on the helmsman.

By 9:00 p.m. we had sailed through a busy fishing fleet and were alone on the North Atlantic. The rest of the crew had turned in, and I was enjoying the stars and the smooth rush of the hull through a gentle sea, the only variable being the occasional flash overhead as a tern or gull flew through the glow of the masthead running lights.

And then I became aware that I had company. I knew without a doubt that there was a man, unseen but unthreatening, just over my shoulder, astern of the vessel. I turned my head to look, but could see nothing. It was an oddly comforting feeling, but one I knew I’d experienced twice before—once when sailing with a friend from Chesapeake Bay to Nantucket around 1970, and again a few years later, 40 miles off the Jersey shore, when I helped a cousin sail his big Friendship sloop from the Virgin Islands to Martha’s Vineyard. Each time the sensation was the same. Someone was out there, not aboard a boat, not in the water either, but just a benign presence a few yards astern. It seemed so absurd that I was embarrassed to mention it when I turned over the watch at 10:00, and yet I couldn’t dismiss it as a hallucination. It was unmistakable, vivid, and real.

But when I came on deck to relieve my cousin and stand watch again at 4:00 in the morning, I had to mention it to her. I felt ridiculous, and expected derisive laughter when I started to describe the experience. She said matter-of-factly, as though it was a perfectly normal event, that shortly after she had relieved Joy at 1:30 A.M. the man had climbed aboard up the swimming ladder (which in reality was totally inaccessible -- securely stowed away, folded up and lashed to the port lifelines), and had then gone forward to sit quietly on the deck throughout most of her watch before disappearing.

Neither of us discussed it further.

I don’t consider myself psychic, and am quite ready to scoff at other people’s stories of unexplained phenomena—on land. But maybe things are different at sea.

Why I Never Learned to Fly - Part II

In my previous post, I described my first flying lesson, an adventure that nearly turned to disaster as my nearly-blind-as-a-bat instructor lost his glasses and I suddenly had to bring the plane back to the ground. Undaunted, I accepted his invitation to go up again. I was 18, and was of course sure I was immortal. Here’s what happened next.

The next morning, Charlie told me that Lulu was repaired and ready to fly; did I still want to go for a flight? Of course, said I. So two days later I found myself following his smoke-belching Buick back to Compton and more adventures—this time less dramatic, I hoped.

Lulu was a war surplus Army Air Corps trainer, a Fairchild PT-26. Unlike the Ercoupe, she had conventional landing gear (two main wheels under the wings and a little tail wheel), and in place of the Ercoupe’s shiny aluminum skin, fabric stretched over plywood frames and aluminum tubing. Lulu was painted bright yellow. I liked her at once.

There were other differences between Lulu and the Ercoupe, reflecting the plane’s origin as a military trainer: pilot and passenger/trainee sat one in front of the other, in bucket seats. The dual controls were conventional: each seat had rudder pedals with toe brakes and a joystick between the knees to control ailerons and elevator. The canopy slid back and was not likely to jump its tracks. A six-cylinder engine (the Ercoupe had four) provided power.

Charlie did a quick walk-around inspection, and we climbed aboard, Charlie in the front cockpit, I in the rear. The wooden framework gave a friendly creak as I stepped on the wing. The airplane had a comfortable smell, like an old wooden boat.

A PT-26 (not Lulu),  in Canadian Air Force markings

“Let’s fly out to Catalina,” said Charlie. It sounded good to me. Santa Catalina Island was a short hop: about 35 miles from Compton and 25 miles off the coast. We could make it out there and back in less than an hour.

The takeoff was uneventful, and Charlie soon gestured over his shoulder for me to take the controls. Lulu seemed almost as easy to handle as the Ercoupe, though a lot of practice would be needed before I would be competent at coordinating rudder and stick. And the plane had many controls and instruments the Ercoupe lacked, but these were features I wouldn’t need to learn to use on this first lesson.

We climbed out over brown hills bristling with oil derricks, crossed the coastline just east of Long Beach, and started out over the Pacific, brilliant blue in the late afternoon light. Catalina was a tawny lump rising out of the sea ahead, San Clemente a low line on the horizon twenty miles farther out to sea. 

This was beautiful, I thought; why hadn’t I taken up flying before? Then the engine, which had been purring like a kitten, made a “Ptoo!” sound—like someone spitting out a watermelon seed. The purr changed to a hiccup. We began to lose altitude.

“Holy Mackerel!” said Charlie. “Must have blown a plug. Time to head back.” He sounded annoyed, and so quick with his diagnosis that I wondered if this had happened before.

The engine still chugged along, the propeller still spun, but we were no longer soaring in a graceful flying machine; we were strapped into a winged rock, being brought back to earth by gravity a lot faster than we would have liked (did I mention that we had no parachutes?).

It was ten miles back to the Compton airfield, and we were at about 2,500 feet altitude, but dropping fast. There were other small airstrips around, and plenty of flat open ground for an emergency landing, but Charlie seemed confident (from what I could make out from scrutinizing the back of his head) that we would make it back to our home field.

Once again, we were lucky that no other aircraft seemed to be in the vicinity. Skillfully, Charlie brought the plane around in a smooth glide, passed just over a tangle of power and telephone lines, and dropped the plane onto the runway in just the right position to allow us to coast to a stop in front of the hangar. 

“Sorry about that,” said Charlie. He unfastened and removed the inspection panel that covered the starboard side of the engine. Sure enough, where there should have been six spark plugs in a row there were only five, and a black hole in place of one of them, dripping oil.

“Guess she won’t fly on five cylinders,” I said.

“Nope,” said Charlie. “And sometimes she won’t fly on six either.”

This last remark was not comforting. But Charlie seemed so confident  (and his handling of the plane in its distress had certainly seemed skillful) that I felt reassured. If there was a problem, surely Charlie could deal with it.  Why, it was almost as though this little adventure was part of the expected everyday business of flying!

Ten days later, Charlie announced that Lulu had been repaired and was ready to fly once more. He was thinking of taking her up to the desert near Barstow, about 100 miles away. Would I like to come along? Of course I would.

Did I ask myself why no one else from the shop seemed interested in flying with him?  Or how he’d lived that long with his seeming ability to get into trouble? He was like Joe Btfsplk, the Li’l Abner character who traveled around with a cloud over his head, inviting doom. Or maybe more like the Roadrunner, who always seemed to escape disaster at the last minute. Somehow, I managed to excuse the two near-disasters I’d just experienced with him. Besides, I must have persuaded myself that the close calls we’d had were just part of the ordinary flying experience.

It did seem prudent to leave my family unaware of what I’d been up to. Best not to cause them needless worry, after all.

The following Saturday, our day off, we found ourselves flying cross-country, out over the San Gabriel Mountains and into the high desert country beyond. It was another spectacular day: we flew over and among small puffy clouds most of the way, looking down on brown desert punctuated by green where fields and orchards were irrigated by waters brought hundreds of miles from the north by aqueduct. To the left, stretching northward as far as the eye could see, stood the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada. Off to the south we could dimly make out the Salton Sea.

We landed at Barstow at about noon and stopped in the airport office to check in and pick up a sandwich. The airport manager said in passing, “Watch out for tumbleweeds,” but it was a still, windless day, and very pleasant sitting on a bench outside the hangar to eat our lunch, admiring the scenery and the collection of planes parked in the area. Charlie pointed out one that belonged to a friend of his.

“Ground-looped that one once,” he said. Not knowing what a ground-loop was, I assumed it was some kind of clever flying stunt. When I learned what it was later (it’s an uncontrolled horizontal spinning of the aircraft on the runway, just after landing. Often one wing tip will touch the ground, leading to much damage, possibly even flipping the plane upside down) it was hard to believe either he or the plane had come through unscathed. Or whether he was telling the truth.

Lunch over, we climbed back aboard Lulu. Charlie had me sit in the front seat this time, and said it was time to practice take-offs and landings.

With little coaching, I got Lulu to the end of the runway successfully, and started my takeoff roll.

As we gathered speed down the runway, out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of something moving towards the runway from the right. It wasn’t until we were just airborne, abreast of the control tower, that I realized we were about to run head-on into a swirling dust devil, or miniature tornado. Suddenly we were in the middle of it. The plane, totally out of control, spun around 180º, rose another five feet or so, and slammed down hard on the runway, facing the way we had come, its forward motion stopped cold. Both tires blew out simultaneously. Charlie killed the engine and we scrambled out of the cockpit to assess the damage.

“Holy mackerel,” said Charlie. “Whaddaya know?”

I knew. Without a word I walked the hundred yards to the airport office, went to the counter and asked when the next bus was leaving for Los Angeles. 

Why I Never Learned to Fly - Part I

In the summer of 1951, I was 17, about to enter my sophomore year at the University of California at Los Angeles. I had a summer job in a machine shop that manufactured engine parts for the F-86 jet fighters that were being built by North American Aviation for use in the Korean War. I was a stock boy, wheeling raw materials and unfinished parts around the shop from one step in the manufacturing process to the next. Every day, heavy sheets, rods, castings or billets of steel or aluminum would be delivered from mills and foundries in the area. I would transport this raw stock on a forklift truck from the loading dock to the stock room, then trundle it on a flat cart from stock room to turret lathe, drill press, stamping machine or whatever other machinery might be involved in making each engine part.

The shop was in Vernon, then a semi-rural suburb of Los Angeles (and now just another neighborhood in the sprawling city). I commuted the twenty miles from my home near Santa Monica in a 1937 Chevrolet.

The job had variety: sometimes I would deliver parts or paperwork to another North American subcontractor, using the company’s three-wheeled motorcycle. Sometimes I would be assigned to sweep the floor or get coffee. For the most part it was an interesting job for a teenager—at least for the eight weeks or so that I was there.

It was a small operation, with perhaps a dozen metalworking machines and a small administrative staff. Periodically, inspectors from the parent company or the government would come through, measuring, testing, and examining every component as it passed through the manufacturing process. Any flawed parts (and there were few; the machine operators were all experienced men and women) were tossed in a reject bin, to be melted down and reprocessed later.

As the summer passed, I began to see how the machines worked, and to understand the manufacturing process, from blueprints to finished parts. The machine operators tolerated my curiosity, letting me look over their shoulders and ask questions as they worked.

One machinist, a lanky man in his 30s named Charlie, had a photo of a yellow low-winged airplane taped to the top of his turret lathe. I asked him about it one day, and he said, “That’s Lulu. Want to come up with me in her?”

Oh boy, did I! What teenage boy wouldn’t? Furthermore, he soon offered to teach me to fly. That Charlie had just obtained his own pilot’s license (and couldn’t possibly be a rated flight instructor) didn’t bother me a bit. And the fact that he wore impressively thick eyeglasses and admitted he was blind as a bat without them didn’t faze me either.

Charlie and I were both on the 8-to-4 daytime shift, and the airstrip in nearby Compton where he kept his plane was only a short drive from the plant, so we would be able to get in several hours of daylight flying after work. We planned to have the first lesson the next day.

When I got to work the following morning Charlie looked glum.

“Can’t take Lulu up today,” he said. “I had a little engine trouble last night and the mechanic is working her over. But I have a friend who’ll let me use his Ercoupe.” 

It made no difference to me what airplane we would be in. I was going to start learning to fly, and that was what mattered. We punched out at 4:00 p.m., and were soon on the road to Compton. I followed along behind his ancient Buick, distinctive for its peeling paint and the blue smoke belching from its tailpipe. Over the noise of my Chevy’s engine I could hear its distinctive clatter: a piston rod was clamoring to break through its cylinder wall; a new muffler was badly needed. Somehow Charlie’s casual approach to car maintenance didn’t square with the tidy way he kept his tools at the shop or the meticulous care he gave to the work he performed; I hoped it didn’t carry over to airplanes.

We arrived at the airstrip in fifteen minutes. The Ercoupe, a shiny little silver bird, stood parked in front of the main hangar.

It was the kind of aircraft people had in mind when they visualized a post-World War II America with a plane in every back yard. In the 1950s you could buy one, brand new, for $3,995. It had very simple controls, only the bare essentials for instruments, and it was nearly impossible to stall it or to lose control in a spin. The plane was supposed to be so easy to fly that almost anyone could handle it.

It was a trim-looking craft, all shiny metal, weighing barely 1,000 pounds. It had a tricycle landing gear (two wheels under the wings and a third, steerable wheel under the nose)—unusual for a small plane in those days. It carried only two people, seated side-by side in a cockpit over the wing. There was a large curving windshield in front, a raised section behind with two smaller windows in it, and on each side a clear curved Plexiglas panel that slid down into a slot in the side of the fuselage. The cockpit could be closed in by sliding the panels, which rode in tracks, up to the top of the opening. For takeoffs and landings they were always kept in the lowered position, in case pilot or passenger had to get out in a hurry. On nice days you could keep them open, like a convertible.

An Ercoupe in flight, with the canopy side panels open

There was a radio, but small plane operations in those days seldom involved its use; many of the little airstrips, even within the Los Angeles city limits, had no radio-operated control tower. Pilots were expected to keep their eyes open and stay out of each other’s way.

Charlie conducted a perfunctory walk around the aircraft, pulled out the wheel chocks, then climbed into the pilot seat on the left side and told me to get aboard. I stepped onto the wing, climbed over the lip of the cockpit window, and settled into the right-hand seat. It was a tight fit but comfortable, particularly with no rudder pedals on the floor. But it didn’t seem much larger than the little planes in an amusement park ride. I fastened my seat belt.

Charlie primed the engine and turned the ignition key to the start position. The propeller turned slowly around; the engine coughed, belched out a few puffs of exhaust, caught in earnest and began to purr reassuringly. The propeller became a whirling disk. Charlie revved the engine, checked the fuel level, oil pressure and engine temperature gauges, then throttled back to idle while he checked the flight controls. He checked the windsock on the tower, taxied to the downwind end of the runway, spun the plane around, checked the operation of the elevator, rudder, and ailerons once more, then let off the brake and slowly pushed the throttle forward.

The plane started down the runway, gathering speed rapidly. All at once we were airborne, climbing eastward into a clear blue sky. (Remember, this was Los Angeles in the early 1950s. You could see for miles in those days).

Charlie saw my beaming face, grinned back and said, “You take it while I close my side of the canopy. Keep her going just as she is.”

I gripped my wheel and felt the thrill of flying for the first time. The slightest twitch to one side or the other would turn and bank the plane; pushing the wheel in or out, even a fraction of an inch, would send the nose up or down. I kept us climbing, straight as an arrow, at a steady rate. I didn’t dare touch the throttle.

Then Charlie turned to his left, grasped the handle in the middle of the Plexiglas slide, and began to pull it up, over his head.

There was a loud CRACK, followed by the sound of many hard objects crashing into the rear window.

“Holy Mackerel!” said Charlie.

Still gripping the wheel, I glanced in his direction, and saw that the Plexiglas panel had jumped out of the front track. The wind whizzing by at close to 80 miles an hour had snatched it out of Charlie’s hand, shattering it as it bent away in the rush of air. Pieces of Plexiglas littered the shelf behind Charlie’s seat. A lot of it had flown past the tail, fortunately none of it hitting the control surfaces, which might well have been damaged or even torn off.

But not just the canopy slide had gone. So had Charlie’s glasses. He couldn’t see a thing.

We both kept our cool.

“What do I do now?” I gasped.

“Just keep flying the way you’re going, and keep your eyes out for other traffic,” he said. The way we were going seemed like straight up.

I looked around. Still no other planes in sight.

“How high are we?” asked Charlie.

I glanced at the altimeter. We were at about 500 feet.

“OK, start to level off.”

I pushed the wheel forward, too far; we began to nose over. I pulled back, experimented, got the plane more or less level.

We didn’t have to discuss what lay ahead. I had to get the plane back down on the ground, and Charlie was going to have to tell me how.

And so he did. I would tell him the airspeed and general flight attitude of the plane, he would tell me what to do with the throttle, how to circle the field to start the approach, how steeply to approach the runway, when to level off, and finally how to handle the plane on the ground once it had (thankfully) touched down. There was no crosswind, and no other traffic to worry about. I was lucky.

Once we were on the ground, I taxied the plane back to the hangar (the control wheels steered the nose wheel as well as controlling the ailerons and rudder), using the throttle alone to control our speed, since I had no brake pedal on my side. When we were within about 25 yards of the hangar, and more or less near our original parking place, Charlie brought us to a halt using the brake pedal. He cut off the engine, and we both sighed with relief.

I unbuckled my seat belt, put one hand on the edge of the cockpit and the other on the shelf behind Charlie’s head to hoist myself out of my seat. My left hand closed around the unmistakable shape of his eyeglasses.

NEXT: More of the same, only different…

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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