David Hackworth: The Disgraceful Story Of America's Most Highly Decorated GI

Hackworth (right) with S.L.A. Marshall in Vietnam (1966)

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN MAY 2008)

There's a guy in nearly every organization who is a pop-off, and David Hackworth fit that description perfectly.

But unlike most pop-offs, this man – the most highly decorated soldier in American military history – was reliably on target. So much so that his career ended with the threat of a court martial because of his scathing criticism of the Vietnam War, but his legacy as an eccentric but fearless and brilliant officer and motivator of soldiers has lived on.

* * * * *

Hackworth escaped a rough childhood and juvenile delinquency by joining the Merchant Marine at age 14 as World War II was winding down, and at age 15 had a wino sign an affidavit stating the he had his father's permission to join the Army. He was a sergeant by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.

In Korea, Hackworth fought with the 25th Recon Company, 8th Rangers, and then the 27th Infantry Regiment, 25th Light Infantry Division, winning a battlefield commission as a lieutenant and the first several of the many medals he would win for valor. Within a year, he was promoted to first lieutenant and then captain, picking up several Purple Hearts along the way.

Hackworth later famously remarked of the that "[General] MacArthur had said we had be home before Christmas; I guess his supply people believed him, because the Chinese caught us with our pants down and they were summer trousers."

He was demobilized after Korea but grew bored after finishing two years of college and reentered the Army in 1956.

He found that the Army, preoccupied with the Cold War, had become a rather different place, and spent several years on garrison duty in Germany sharpening his leadership skills before volunteering for the advisory company that President Kennedy ordered sent to South Vietnam in 1963. His request was denied on the extraordinary grounds that he had "too much" combat experience for the mission.

But within two years the Army was desperate for people like now-Major Hackworth and he was deployed to South Vietnam as an operations office and battalion commander, becoming the leader of the 101st Airborne Division's first Tiger Force. It was in this role that his notoriety as an eccentric but effective officer grew, in part because he figured in several books written by S.L.A. "Slam" Marshall, the famous combat historian and commentator.

After a stateside tour at the Pentagon, now-Lieutenant Colonel Hackworth co-wrote The Vietnam Primer with Marshall after returning to Vietnam in the winter of 1966-67. The controversial book recommended using some of the same tactics as Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, as well as the Viet Cong guerrillas who were giving the U.S. military fits despite its ever growing presence -- and number of casualties.

Inevitably, Hackworth soured on the war but refused to resign, feeling that it was his duty as a field grade officer to wage the campaign as best he could.

Hackworth put his theories about guerrilla warfare into practice in 1969 with a battalion of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta. He turned an underperforming unit largely made up of draftees into the counterinsurgent "Hardcore" Battalion (Recondo), but felt that the Army was not learning from its mistakes and was being undermined by a corrupt South Vietnamese Army officer corps.

In early 1971, Hackworth was promoted to the rank of full colonel and received orders to attend the Army War College, a stepping stone to a general officer-grade promotion. Utterly fed up with the war and the Army, he declined to go and in a June 1971 television interview on ABC’s "Issues and Answers" strongly criticized U.S. commanders in Vietnam, said the war could not be won and called for the U.S. to withdraw.

The interview enraged senior officers at The Pentagon and Hackworth was nearly court-martialed. Beset with personal problems, including a divorce, he retired and moved to Australia in an effort to rebuild his life.

In an improbable turn, Hackworth invested in a duck farm and popular restaurant near Brisbane and soon made a fortune through real estate investing, but he again grew restless and returned to the U.S. in the mid-1980s to work as a contributing editor on defense issues for Newsweek. He also made regular television appearances to discuss military-related topics, notably the shortcomings of the U.S. military, and was among the first people to speak out about the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder based on his own experiences in overcoming it.

In 1989, Hackwork published About Face: The Odyssey of An American Warrior with Julie Sherman.

The lengthy book is a must-read for any serious student of the Vietnam War (see the post below for other recommendations) and sheds a great deal of light on the enormous conflicts and complexities in the life of a man who was a natural-born killer yet abhorred war, could be a raving egomaniac yet humbled himself before his soldiers, decried the "perfumed princes" who rose to the top of Army yet was himself exceedingly ambitious.

In the mid-1990s, Hackworth investigated Admiral Jeremy Michael Boorda, then Chief of Naval Operations, questioning Boorda's wearing of potentially unauthorized V ( for valor) devices on his Navy Achievement Medal and Navy Commendation Medal. Boorda committed suicide before he could be interviewed by Hackworth, and questions later arose as to whether Hackworth had earned some of his many medals.

Hackworth was a frequent TV news talking head in the early days of the Iraq war. He was criticized for his declarations that too few U.S. troops had been committed and that they were unprepared for the challenges of fighting a counterinsurgency war because the lessons of Vietnam that he so well understood had never been taken to heart.

While certainly not a matter of having the last laugh, Hackworth was prescient about Iraq, although he did not live out the third year of the war. He contracted bladder cancer, possibly from his exposure to the Agent Blue defoliant used in Vietnam, and died three years ago tomorrow.

Hackworth earned over 90 decorations, including a Distinguished Service Cross with two Oak Leaf Clusters, a Silver Star with five Oak Leaf Clusters, and a Legion of Merit with three Oak Leaf Clusters. But he was most proud of his Combat Infantryman Badge, which he wore on the lapels of sports jackets in retirement.

Colonel David Hackworth is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Cartoon du Jour

Bill Mauldin (ca. 1945)

More Bad News On The Afghan War

If a report in today's New York Times is to be believed, and it almost certainly is a product of controlled leaks from the White House, President Obama's national security team is "coalescing" around the idea of sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

While that is less than the 48,000 that the Pentagon wants, it is nevertheless a bitter Veteran's Day present because no amount of troops will win the day in a vast, ungovernable and deeply corrupt land with a tribal culture and myriad enemies beyond a resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Vet's Day: The Things They Carried

A common experience of the men and women who served in Vietnam was the feeling that the war was an indescribable blend of fact and fantasy.

Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried are two of the greatest books on the war. They are considered fiction, but their power lies how O'Brien plays off of that moulage of fact and fantasy.

Here is an excerpt from The Things They Carried:

They carried USO stationary and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a week when the resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in green mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a two-gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide. Dave Jansen carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself -- Vietnam, the place, the soil -- a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters -- the resources were stunning -- sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter -- it was the great American war chest -- the fruits of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat -- they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders -- and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they never be at a loss for things to carry.

Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

65 Million Fought; Only Three Survive

An extraordinary 65,038,810 men fought in World War I and an even more extraordinary 9,750,103 men died during the conflict. Today, 90 years on, only three veterans survive, including Frank Woodruff Buckles, now 108 and living near Charles Town, West Virginia, who was an ambulance driver near the Western Front.

The other remaining vets are John Henry Foster Babcock, 109, a Canadian, and Claude Stanley Choules, 108, an Austrialian.

Dr. No: The Veteran's Best Friend

Beyond the U.S.'s sole survivor of the Great War, there are some 23 million veterans. Most are doing quite well, thank you, but some need help in the worst way.

This is why Congress is trying to enact a $3.7 billion bill that would expand mental care and home assistance to wounded veterans. But Senator Tom "Dr. No" Coburn, the knuckle dragging Republican from Oklahoma, says that's "wasteful spending."

And no, Coburn is not a veteran, having found better things to do during the Vietnam War.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

MORE HERE.

Photograph by Justin Mott/The New York Times

Quick Hits I: State Of U.S. Womanhood

How sad it is that American men are fixated on women's breasts but give little thought to the territory south of them. That would be the uterus, which is a big loser in the health-care reform bill passed by the House.

To recap, a woman would be denied insurance coverage for a life-saving D&C but a man would get coverage for an erectile dysfunction-relieving prescription drug.

This tells you all you need to know about the progress American women have made at the end of the first decade of the new millennium.

Keep holding 'em down, you big strong men, keep holding 'em down.

IMAGE: "Portrait of Jeanne Hébutern" (1918) by Modigliani

Quick Hits II: A Recovery Not For You

The New York Times called it a "fraught topic." Others are calling it a "jobless recovery" and a "joyless recovery." As the sobering October jobless numbers show, the suspicion grows that employers aren't hiring in sufficient number to signal a robust, which is to say more traditional, recovery because they have found that they can make their nut with less.

And so 10.2 million Americans are officially listed as unemployed with another 7 million or so off the books because they have given up looking for work or are working part time but not by choice. And the long-term unemployment rate -- the share of the unemployed population out of work for more than six months -- also continues to set records. It is now an astonishing 35.6 percent.

Only another healthy shot of government stimulus money -- exactly what the Party of No so vociferously opposes -- could begin to turn things around. So do it, already.

Quick Hits III: That Opportunity Window

I am not one of those people getting agita over President Obama taking his time on deciding whether to send more troops to Afghanistan and, if so, how many more. I happen to think we should be getting the hell out of that sinkhole.

But there is an issue pertaining to that Good Old Arab Street that deeply concerns me and that is Obama not making good on his promises that the street will not be treated with Bushian disdain on his watch.

In fact, views are hardening in this regard. Guantánamo is still open, Gaza is still blockaded and there is zero movement in getting Israelis and Palestinians to talk thing over.

It's time to get a move on, Barry.

Quick Hits IV: Are Pakistan's Nukes Safe?

Is the pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods? Nobody's nukes are safe, but the estimated 80 to 100 warheads in the Pakistani arsenal are especially problematic after Taliban hit teams penetrated the national army's main headquarters and held it in a bloody day-long standoff, attacked police installations in two cities and shot dead a general.

All four incidents stink of the Taliban clearly having inside information, but insofar as the are-they-safe issue is concerned, its not what these terrorists might do but what might happen were there to be a mutiny from within Pakistan's porous military.

Even more worrisome is that Pakistani officials seem to put a lot less weight on placating anxious American officials than the Americans do.

Quick Hits V: Why Liveblogging Sucks

Although I already was leaning in that direction, the Fort Hood Massacre has convinced me that liveblogging can be an especially dangerous form of narcissism. I happen to like Allahpundit over at Hot Air even if this blogger's politics and mine could not be more different, but the sheer volume of inaccurate information and inane speculation that he spewed in the span of a few hours on the shoot 'em up at the Army base was incredible.

Bloggers like to brag about how much they get right that the MSM gets wrong, and that can be the case. But Sweet Mother of Bejeebus, can't we be a little more aware of the pitfalls of appointing ourselves as blogging Walter Cronkites when we have no special sources or insights beyond what anyone with a cable TV or a cell phone has?

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Found! After Being Stolen In 1964

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

UNUSUAL MATRIX
By Giorgio

What A Bummer, Man! The Psychedelic Revolution Wasn't Gonna Be Televised

TIMOTHY LEARY (LEFT) WITH NEAL CASSADY AT MILLBROOK (1964)

Aldous Huxley's creative powers were at their peak in 1960, some three years before his death. The public lectures given by the author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception were filled to overflowing and never had a parapsychologist been so acclaimed and had a larger following.

But Huxley was perplexed. As had so many other great minds before and after him, becoming immersed in taking and studying the effects of psychedelic drugs had produced an embarrassing consequence: The more he tripped, the more he traveled to the so-called Other World and the more that he mused over the profundities of these voyages and how they could improve mankind's lot, the less insight he had to offer.

As Huxley confided to a friend: "To have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find that at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'Try to be a little kinder.' "

What Huxley was intimating is that while LSD, psilocybin mushrooms or peyote buttons could make individual homo sapiens better people, the psychedelic revolution would not make terra firma a better place.

It wasn't that people didn't try.

Albert "Captain Al" Hubbard, who is said to have given LSD to 6,000 people beginning in the early 1950s until it was outlawed in 1966, believed that if he could provide a psychedelic experience to the executives of Fortune 500 companies, he would change the whole of society.

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who had tripped on psychotropic plants in South America and later took psilocybin and LSD, declared that the psychedelic movement was an opportunity "to seize power in the Universe . . . not merely over Russia or America -- seize power over the moon -- take the sun over."

But as big thinking went, it was hard to top Timothy Leary, a psychologist and psychedelic avatar whose increasingly manic quest to get people to "turn on, tune in, drop out" more or less led to the federal prohibition against not just the possession of LSD, but a halt to virtually all research into promising uses of the drug in treating chronic alcoholism, psychoses and other illnesses.

* * * * *

If Leary hadn't led the way to LSD being outlawed, someone else's antics certainly would have. After all, how could the government not ban the use of a non-addictive substance that could do such wonderful things, let alone have astonishing curative powers?

Leary's initial foray into psychedelics was innocent enough -- the Harvard Psilocybin Project -- which during its 15-month existence in 1960-61 showed convincingly that the comparatively mild psychedelic was a positive agent for behavioral changes even in prison convicts.

Writes Jay Stevens in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream:

"Imagine the Humphrey Bogart of Angels With Dirty Faces suddenly transported into Alice in Wonderland and you will have some idea of what transpired. One of the newcomers [to the psilocybin sessions] became paranoid and decided the whole thing was a fiendish police trick to get him to all the crimes he had never been caught for. . . . But then his paranoia vanished, he forgot about revenge, forgot about his standing in one of Boston's Irish Mafia families; he started thinking about love, about how everyone was really the same, no difference between him and this Harvard boy, really."

The study did have a drawback. The prisoners were indeed changing, but they were changing in ways that made science uncomfortable. As Stevens puts it, "They were getting religion. And if psilocybin could do that to hard-core cons, imagine what it was doing to members of the psilocybin project."

Indeed, the cautious optimism among Leary's professorial peers that the drug could be an extraordinary addition to the psychiatric tool kit turned to anxiety as Leary and many of his graduate students began binging on psilocybin and immersing themselves in mystical texts. What controls their experiments had went out the window and raw data was no longer being collated and written up.

The project's death blow came when the Harvard Crimson ran a story on a drug orgy at Leary's house with students that was picked up by the Boston papers and then the wire services. After confiscation threats from the feds, the Harvard administration put Leary's psilocybin stash under lock and key and promised that when the drug was dolled out in the future there would be close supervision. The scandal had been contained, but it was obvious to all that Leary's contract would not be renewed.

Leary rolled with that punch and soon he and colleagues Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner were deeply involved with LSD, a substantially more powerful psychedelic that for them was less about love than death and rebirth.

Some LSD therapists were showing remarkable results. Hubbard's work with chronic alcoholics at Hollywood Hospital in British Columbia showed an 80 percent success rate, while a research program at the Veterans Hospital in Palo Alto, California showed promising results for psychotic vets. That also is where Ken Kesey, future leader of the Merry Pranksters, tripped while writing One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest.

These results notwithstanding, therapists struggled to figure out why LSD could do what it did.

Stevens presents this analogy in Storming Heaven:

"Imagine the self as an oxbow lake, which is formed when a meander is cut off from the main body of a shallow, slow-moving river. Over time, unless fresh sources of water are found, the oxbow begins to stagnate, becoming first a marsh, then a swamp, as vegetation (thickets of received ideas, neuroses, etc.) starts to compete for oxygen. Psycholytic therapy, you might say, contented itself with removing the vegetation; psychedelic therapy, on the other hand, operated by dynamiting the obstruction and restoring the oxbow to what, in fact, it had always been: a lazy curve in a broad, flowing river."

Most of these therapists used small doses of LSD on their patients in charting a path to consciousness before any deep exploration began, but from the outset Leary administered massive doses to both patients and himself.

Perhaps inevitably a man with the brightest of futures in psychiatry began to think of himself as a prophet. By the spring of 1962 he was deeply into Tantric Buddhism and was referring to his acclaimed pre-psychedelic work as "antediluvian stuff."

Stevens:

"To hell with Harvard and psychology, Leary wanted to shout, to hell with boring old bourgeois science. To hell with boring old bourgeois religion. Mind-expanding drugs were going to be the religion of the twenty-first century . . . and he was going to be the chief avatar."

As Stevens notes, Leary's escapades, including the creation of a psychedelic circus known as the International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF), highlighted what by 1963 was a turf war over who would control traffic to the Other World.

Medical doctors believed that mere psychologists like Leary and Al Hubbard, let alone an engineer like Myron Stolaroff, did not have the competencies to examine the extremes of consciousness.

The rap on Stolaroff was misplaced. He was an assistant to the president for long-range planning at Ampex Corporation, which was a leading maker of magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorders and an incubator for pioneering engineers.

Stolaroff was making big bucks but felt that his life was empty. It was through an acquaintance that he learned of a new drug called LSD and an unusual man from Canada who was administering the substance to Aldous Huxley and others. Stolaroff was skeptical, but then one day in 1956 he looked up from his desk at Ampex to see Hubbard standing in the doorway.

Several weeks later, Stolaroff took 66 micrograms (a moderately heavy dose) of LSD-25 in Hubbard's Vancouver apartment that had been manufactured by Sandoz, the Swiss firm where biochemist Albert Hoffman had stumbled upon the drug's psychoactive properties in 1943.

Stolaroff found his first trip to be a deeply religious event that took him far into his own unconscious mind and he returned to California an LSD zealot. He soon founded the International Foundation for Advanced Study and over the next several years led several hundred people, including Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and 30 or so other young engineers in what came to be known as Silicon Valley, on trips closely supervised by experienced therapists.

The engineer was well aware of the dangers of LSD and was horrified when Leary founded IFIF.

"It will wreak havoc on all of us doing LSD work all over the nation," Stolaroff correctly predicted in a letter to Leary. "The medical profession in this country has had these materials available for years. Yet outside of the Canadian groups, and a very few individuals in this country, no one has really learned how to use these materials and get the benefits from them in spite of years of trying. Tim, I am convinced you are heading for very serious trouble if your plan goes ahead as you have described it to me."

"In 1961," Leary's wrote of his master plan in High Priest, one of his two autobiographies, "we estimated that 25,000 Americans had turned on to the strong psychedelics . . . at that rate of cellular growth we expected by 1967 a million Americans would be using LSD. We calculated that the critical figure for blowing the mind of the American society would be four million LSD users and this would happen by 1969."

After Leary and his IFIF cadre were kicked out of Mexico and two Caribbean nations they landed at Millbrook, a huge estate in Dutchess County in upstate New York.

Millbrook was many things, but to consider it an ashram as many IFIF adherents did is misleading insofar that the leader of a typical ashram doesn't ride around on a horse painted blue on one side and pink on the other and brag about screwing every woman who comes through the door, including his future second wife. Then there were the gold painted ceilings, mandala filled walls and antique furniture with the legs cut off so the residents could live on the floor.

The IFIF spun its wheels, beginning many experiments and programs but finishing none, before succumbing a year later. Out of its ashes rose Leary's next ego trip, an organization called Castalia that was to set up shop on a tropical island a la Huxley's Island, a utopian counterpoint to Brave New World where a drug he called soma was used for enlightenment.

The name Castalia came from Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game. The IFIF crowd was convinced that the German author was a psychedelic adept from an earlier age who had succeeded where Huxley had failed in that his books were accounts of the internal drama of the psyche.

The Millbrook era ended with a bang in April 1966 with a raid by a law enforcement team led by former FBI agent and future Nixon White House Plumbers unit operative G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate scandal fame, whom in but one of many bizarre plot twists in Leary's life was to become a friend who 15 years later would go on a national speaking tour with him.

Undeterred, of course, in September 1966 Leary segued to his next ego trip and created the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as a holy sacrament. The league also was, in part, an attempt to maintain legal status for the use of the drug, which was outlawed the following month.

Leary was arrested nine more times over the next two years, and while his craving for attention would not diminish until he drew his last breath in 1996 at age 75, he spent much of his last three decades dodging the law and doing prison time.

It is hard to tell whether Timothy Leary ever understood his role in outlawing a drug that he tirelessly advocated and ingested, but he carried some sense of irony into his dotage, so he probably did, although the Sixties certainly ended with a whimper and not a day glo bang.

Writes Stevens: "And so the psychedelic movement ground to a close. The drugs were still available, more so than ever, but it was a rare person who took them to push the envelope. For the kids, a trip to the Other World was like a trip to Disneyland, lots of scary rides and laughs, but no wisdom.

"Kesey, Owsley, IFIF, the Acid Tests, Castalia, the Trips Festival, the Harvard Psilocybin Project, the Be-In -- it had receded into memory so fast it was almost as if it had happened to an older brother, or an uncle, or maybe they'd read about it in some book or magazine -- it didn't seem real. Had they really thought they could transform Uncle Sam into the Buddha? The fact was, the good times were too painful to talk about because they always led to the bad times, to all the people who had been left behind, either burned out or in prison or on the run or irrevocably lost. . . "

PHOTOGRAPHS (From top): Aldous Huxley; Allen Ginsberg; Timothy Leary (ca. 1962); Richard Alpert (later Baba Ram Das); Ralph Metzner; Leary (ca. 1966); Al Hubbard; Ken Kesey; Martin Stolaroff; Hermann Hesse; Leary escorted by drug agents after 1966 Millbrook raid; Hermann Hesse; Leary and fourth wife Rosemary.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

DEVIL'S TOWER WITH MILKY WAY PANORAMA
By Wally Pacholka

Lincoln's Spymaster & The Rebel Rams

ONE OF THE LAIRD RAMS CONFISCATED BY BRITAIN

While the tide began to turn against the Confederacy after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 and subsequent victories in Tennessee that opened the way to Georgia and the heart of Dixie, it was a forgotten foreign-policy coup engineered by the Lincoln administration that arguably sealed an eventual Union victory.

That coup came in September 1863 when the British government succumbed to intense lobbying by Secretary of State William Seward and seized two formidable ironclad rams being built for the Confederacy at the Laird Shipyards in the great port city of Liverpool, ending the last serious threat to a Union blockade of Southern ports that was slowly strangling the rebel cause.

* * * * *

The key player in this diplomatic coup was Thomas Haines Dudley, who has been called "Lincoln's spymaster" for operating a small group of detectives who scoured British shipyards and ports searching for evidence of Confederate shipbuilding activity.

Dudley, a Camden, New Jersey attorney and Republican Party operative, was appointed to the consulship at Liverpool in 1861 as a reward for his help in getting Lincoln the presidential nomination and then winning the 1860 election.

Even before the Civil War, British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had urged a policy of neutrality. Britain had long insisted that neutral nations abide by its blockades, and when the war began it tacitly supported the Union blockade of Southern ports. Palmerston's concerns were focused in Europe where Napoleon III was bent on expanding the French empire and Otto von Bismarck was on the rise in Germany.

But the Confederacy, with few shipbuilding facilities of its own, was desperate for fast ships that could raid Northern ports, destroy Northern shipping and commerce and run the blockade.

Led by Confederate Navy Captain James D. Bulloch, representatives of the Confederate government exploited the weak language of the British Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819 to manipulate the British government's declaration of neutrality, as well as the widespread sympathy with the South among many Britons fueled in part by the Trent Affair.

Bulloch's initial efforts to work with British businessmen to build and outfit warships were successful, and in March 1862 an unarmed CSS Florida sailed out of Liverpool harbor, completed its armament outside British waters and proceeded to raise hell with Union shipping until the fall of 1864 when it was captured by the Union Navy. Despite Dudley's efforts to get the British government to intervene, the CSS Alabama was to soon join the CSS Florida.

Subsequent efforts were less successful.

Dudley and his detectives learned that the Laird shipyards were building two massive ironclads with rams on their prows under the guise of merchant ships eventually named El Tousson and El Monassir. They were due to be delivered to the Confederacy in March 1863 at the cost of £93,000 each.

Each ship had a length of 230 feet, a beam of 42 feet, and a fully loaded draft of 15 feet. The deck was designed to raise a mere 6 feet above the water line, while the ships' outer surfaces were teak over iron and finished with armor plate to a depth of 5.5 inches. Both ships had a pair of revolving turrets, each of which was to house two large bore guns, but the vessels' most ominous features were massive rams made of solid iron that jutted out 7 feet beyond the prow.

As construction ran past the deadline, the U.S. increased pressure on the British government and Parliament regarding the ships. Indeed, a growing number of MP's considered that the construction was tantamount to full participation in the war. One week after the Battle of Gettysburg, U.S. Ambassador Charles Francis Adams gave a thinly veiled warning that if the vessels were delivered to the Confederates, a state of war would exist between the U.S. and Britain.

Bulloch had anticipated just such a turn of events, and through political maneuvering in France, attempted to transfer technical ownership of the rams to the Egyptian government. This delaying action ended when Napoleon III backed down in the face of American threats.

Nevertheless, Bulloch's actions very nearly bought enough time. El Tousson had been launched and was being fitted out for sea at Liverpool's Albert Dock, while pre-launch finishing touches were being made to El Monassir back at Laird.

A second threat of war by the U.S. finally tipped the scales against the Confederates.

On the night of October 8, 1863 the Royal Navy warship HMS Goshawk dropped anchor near El Tousson while HMS Liverpool did likewise near the dock where El Monassir was berthed. Two days later both vessels were officially impounded by British Customs and Royal Navy personnel were put aboard the them.

Following their seizure, the British Government tried to placate the Confederates by paying them compensation totaling £180,000. The ships were were turned over to the Royal Navy and commissioned HMS Scorpion and HMS Wyvern, but were never used in the role for which they had been designed and proved to be poor ocean going vessels.

It seems unlikely that the course of the Civil War would have been significantly altered with the two ironclads flying Confederate flags, but their construction did lead to a major change in British warship building design, and sparked a string of events that would lead to the emergence of the Dreadnought series of vessels four decades later.

PHOTOGRAPHS (From top): Seward, Dudley, Palmerston, Bulloch, Adams.

'The Greatest Question Ever Presented'

AN ALLEGORY SHOWING REBUILDING OF THE UNION

40th of 45 excerpts from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald:

Lincoln returned from Gettyburg [on November 19, 1863] with a fever, and his doctor put him to bed, diagnosing varioloid, a mild form of smallpox. For the next three weeks he remained under quarantine in the White House, seeing few visitors and transacting little public business. But he remained in good spirits, and newspapers reported that he was able to joke that his illness gave him an answer to the incessant demands of office-seekers. "Now," he is supposed to have said, "I have something I can give everybody."

His convalescence gave him an opportunity to reflect on the tasks that still lay ahead of him. The most immediate of these was the drafting of his annual message to Congress, which assumed great importance because it would deal with the thorny question of the terms on which the rebellious Southern states could be restored to the Union. This, the President believed, was "the greatest question ever presented to practical statesmanship." . . .

Lincoln was aware of three possible plans. The first was advocated by Democrats ranging from the pro-Confederate Fernando Wood of New York (above) to the staunchly Unionist Reverdy Johnson of Maryland; it called for the President to withdraw the Emancipation Proclamation and to offer a general amnesty to the rebels. The Southern states, which had never legally been out of the Union, would simply send new congressmen to Washington, and the war would be over.

Conservative Republicans made Liberty as well as Union their war aim. Apart from insisting on the Emancipation Proclamation, they favored generous terms for the conquered South. [Secretary of State] Seward let it be known that he hoped that no conditions, beyond the emancipation of the slaves, would be imposed on the returning rebels, and his powerful friend Thurlow Weed (right) believed that Southern planters, mostly former Whigs like himself, would recognize the impending defeat of the Confederacy and lead their states back into the Union. . . .

Radical Republicans sought to add Equality as a third war aim. Most called for a drastic reorganization of Southern social and economic life before the rebellious states could be readmitted. Thaddeus Stevens, the powerful head of the House Ways and Means Committee, favored treating the South as a conquered province, wholly subject to the legislative will of the Congress. In a more elaborate argument, Charles Sumner maintained that the rebellion had vacated all government in the South and the region now fell under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress, like any other national territory. It followed that slavery, which could not exist without the protection of positive law, was abolished in the entire region -- not merely in the more limited areas designated in Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. . . .

In his sickroom, the President began working on an annual message to Congress that would avoid both extreme Republican positions. . . . Only at the end of the message did Lincoln's distinctive voice emerge. Announcing a proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, the President offered "full pardon . . . with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves," to all rebels, excepting high-ranking Confederate officials, who would have to take an oath of future loyalty to the Constitution and pledge to obey acts of Congress and presidential proclamations relating to slavery.

An Index To Abraham Lincoln Posts

Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president because none faced such enormous challenges, none grew more in office and none reinvented the United States to the extent that he did. All of that and the fact that 2009 is the bicentenary of his birth is reason enough to publish posts each Sunday on the great man.

Series highlights:

'AND THE GREAT STAR EARLY DROPP'D' (11/1) The great poet Walt Whitman's admiration for Lincoln bordered on a fixation. LINK

THE COMPLEXITIES OF MRS. LINCOLN (10/25) History has not been particularly kind to Mary Todd Lincoln and it's not difficult to understand why. LINK

CAPITULATING ON BLACK ENLISTMENTS (10/18) Lincoln had vowed to never use African-Americans in the Union Army, but that finally changed in advance of the Emancipation Proclamation LINK

HE MADE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME (10/11) Lincoln was a superb railroad lawyer before he became a superb president, so it should come as no surprise that the American rail network grew during his four years in office not despite the Civil War but because of it. LINK

BRILLIANT, HUMANE & RUTHLESS (10/4) More recent authors have disputed Lincoln's brilliance as commander in chief. Military affairs expert Eliot A. Cohen says that they're wrong. LINK

THE WAR WITHIN THE CIVIL WAR (9/27) Lincoln knew virtually nothing about Native American affairs, an ignorance driven by the commonly held view that the U.S. government should disenfranchise Indians of their land because they were barbarians. LINK

'HIS AMBITION WAS AN ENGINE THAT KNEW NO REST' (9/20) Historian Richard Shenkman debunks several Lincoln myths. LINK

HOLLYWOOD'S OBSESSION WITH LINCOLN'S LOVES (9/13) The great man -- and his loves -- have been played by an eclectic range of actors and actresses over the last century. LINK.

THE MONITOR-MERRIMACK SHOWDOWN (8/30) The battle between the ironclads settled nothing but did change navies forever. LINK

'STAND BY OUR DUTY' (8/23) Lincoln's Cooper Union speech was probably his finest. Yes, greater than the Gettysburg Address. LINK

WAS HE DISHONEST ABE? (8/9) Historian-economist Thomas DiLorenzo says that scholars criticize Lincoln at their own risk, but there is plenty of bad about the man along with the good. LINK

THE TRENT AFFAIR (8/2) In 1861, Lincoln had little to do with foreign affairs. This myopia was to exacerbate a crisis early in his presidency that could have transformed the war into an international conflict. LINK

COMPLEX & IMPERFECT (7/26) Historian Edna Medford argues that we do better for Lincoln and for the nation -- and for understanding of the Civil War -- if we view him in all of his complexity. LINK

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED LINCOLN & AMERICA (7/19) Uncle Tom's Cabin shook the U.S. like an earthquake when it was published in 1852. LINK

SLAVE COLONIES (7/12) Lincoln believed that he found a way to deal with the problems caused by slavery in sending blacks back to Africa to colonize Liberia, but hee was wrong. LINK

A TRUE GENIUS (6/28) Historian Shelby Foote says that there has never been a president who functioned like Lincoln did, and despite having no executive experience, he was a miracle at it. LINK

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE (6/21) Historian Harold Holzer leads an intimate walk-through of the very different presidential mansion of Lincoln's time. LINK

EVEN LINCOLN NEEDED A GOOD EDITOR (6/14) Guest blogger Michael Reynolds imagines how the Gettysburg Address might have turned out had the president had a good editor. LINK

MOST HANDS-ON COMMANDER IN CHIEF (6/7) The outcome of the Civil War in all likelihood would have been different had Lincoln not cajoled, taken over for and in some cases dismissed the generals who lacked his vision and courage. LINK

A SKIMPIER RESUME WOULD BE HARD TO FIND (5/31) David Herbert Donald, the recently deceased Lincoln biographer, writes that an inexperienced chief executive can cause the country immense heartbreak, but that with time and good common sense can grow into greatness. LINK

NOW ALIEN TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY (5/11) Pete Abel writes in a two-part guest blog that while there are a few common traits between Lincoln and today's GOP, the differences are far more substantial. PART 1, PART 2

THE ASSASSINATION (4/22, 4/29, 5/4) It is rather amazing that so little is known about basic aspects of the assassination of John F. Kennedy while there is virtually no aspect of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier that remains a mystery. PART 1, PART 2, PART 3

THE STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (4/5) It took fewer than three minutes to deliver the famous speech, but it was an afterthought on the day it was given and remained so into the next century. LINK

HOW VALID THE COMPARISONS? (3/29) With the nomination and election of Barack Obama, the comparisons to Abraham Lincoln have come fast, thick and furious. But do they hold up? LINK

A PATENTLY CLEVER PRESIDENT (3/22) That Lincoln was the only president to get a U.S. patent is not surprising when you consider that he was an inveterate tinkerer and had a lifelong fascination with mechanical things. LINK

A PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLAR ON LINCOLN (3/15) A wide-ranging interview with James Hilty on Lincoln's greatness, frailties and innate conservatism. LINK

A BUMPY RIDE TO HIS REWARD (3/8) There was a controversy over a photograph taken of Lincoln's open coffin, an attempt to steal his corpse and his body was exhumed an extraordinary 17 times. LINK

WAS THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR GAY? (3/1) No revisionist history of a famous person would be complete without a book on whether they were gay, or if they were gay whether they were bisexual, or if they . . . LINK

PRESIDENTIAL POWER GRABS (2/22) The infringements by Lincoln on civil liberties arguably were greater than during any period in American history, including the last eight years. LINK

EARLY ASSASSINATION PLOT (2/15) A March 1861 assassination plot was never carried out, but Lincoln's response to it sullied a carefully cultivated image of dignified courage. LINK

OH HE OF LITTLE FAITH (2/8) Beyond Lincoln's opposition to slavery there was no aspect of him more controversial than his spiritual bona fides. LINK

THE BOHEMIAN BRIGADE COMES THROUGH (2/1) Modern journalism can trace its roots to the Civil War, which because of the telegraph and steam locomotive was the first instant-news war, something of which Lincoln was very much aware. LINK

LINCOLN ON BLACKS & SLAVERY (1/25) His metamorphosis from a frontiersman who always opposed slavery but like most white Americans felt that blacks were unequal into the Great Emancipator was as complex as the man himself. LINK

LINCOLN'S CAUTION (1/18) Guest blogger Robert Stein writes that Barack Obama can learn much from the 16th president, who perhaps even more than wisdom and moral strength needed a highly developed political sense of the possible. LINK

THE FIRST TECHNOLOGY PRESIDENT (1/11) Arriving in Washington at the dawn of the age of the telegraph, Lincoln embraced this new technology of instantaneous communication with a passion and used it not just to communicate with his generals in the field during the Civil War, but to bend them to his will. LINK

LINCOLN LINCOLN BO BINCOLN (1/4) A substantial Lincoln mythology had taken hold in the American imagination even before his assassination in 1865. This canon of broad brush strokes and tall tales gave Lincoln his historic due but overlooked or willfully ignored the myriad complexities of our greatest president. LINK

Save the Babies! Why It's Long Past Time To Clean Up U.S. Thoroughbred Racing

EIGHT BELLES GOES DOWN AT THE 2008 KENTUCKY DERBY

I used to look forward to the Breeders Cup, an annual thoroughbred horse racing competition with more than $25 million in purse money that begins this weekend. Same with the Triple Crown. But it is obvious that the people who run this sport in America have only their best interests in mind. The horses are mere commodities to be raced and too often raced to death.

I began to sour on a sport that I have long loved because of what happened after the 2008 Kentucky Derby, an incredible race by any account.

Big Brown closed with an extraordinary burst of speed under picture-book blue skies to become the first horse to win the first leg of the Triple Crown from a 20th post position since 1929 and the first to win after only having run three races since 1919. And if that wasn't enough, Eight Belles -- the rare filly in a race dominated by colts -- gave Big Brown a run for the roses awarded the winner since the first Derby way back in 1874.

Eight Belles crossed the wire nearly five lengths behind Big Brown, but moments later the champion filly fell without warning in front of her outrider as she was easing down. She had fractured both of her front ankles -- extraordinarily in the same stride -- and was euthanized as 157,000 Churchhill Downs fans and tens of millions more at home, at bars and betting parlors looked on in stunned silence.

I had watched last year's Triple Crown races with trepidation. Two years earlier, Barbaro (above, right), the Kentucky Derby winner, had broken down in the Preakness after shattering his right hind leg. He died several months later from the inevitable complications of such a severe injury.

The Barbaro tragedy prompted calls to adopt safer synthetic racing surfaces as opposed to traditional dirt ovals like Churchill, and there was the inevitable second-guessing over whether Eight Belles was done in by the track, which happened to be dry and fast, let alone whether she should have been competing against colts.

Eight Belles had never raced beyond a mile and one-sixteenth in her prior nine starts. The Derby is a mile and one-quarter. Only four fillies have ever won the Derby; the last was Winning Colors in 1988. And when Rags to Riches won the 2007 Belmont Stakes, the last leg of the Triple Crown, she was the first filly to capture the grueling mile and three-quarters race in 102 years.

There is an even larger issue that will never be addressed: Three-year-old horses -- and the Triple Crown is open only to three year olds -- are mere babies.

These horses may appear to be magnificent specimens but in reality are pedigreed freaks bred for speed who have extremely fragile and still developing bones that make them especially prone to what has happened to too many young horses. These include Barbaro and Pine Island (above, left), who had to be euthanized after the 2006 Breeders' Cup Distaff race at Churchill when he suffered a dislocation of the left front fetlock.

If that weren't bad enough, there is an ongoing scandal off of the track. The New York Times reports that Steve Asmussen (above, right), Patrick Biancone (below, left) and several other Breeders Cup trainers have multiple and serious drug violations, and in fact of the top 10 American-based trainers in purse winnings this year, only one has never been cited for a medication violation.

It is part of an evolving culture in horse racing that ultimately rewards those who seek any means, legal and otherwise, to get an edge. When illegal drug use goes undetected, trainers walk away with the winnings and an enhanced reputation. But when they are caught, they are all too often handed punishments that are in name only. Their horses still run and their stables still operate, usually under the name of a trusted assistant.

It is long past time to go to the safer racing surfaces widely used in Europe and already adopted by many equestrian venues, and otherwise clean up thoroughbred racing. It is long past time to stop racing three-year-olds into early graves. And it is long past time to stop giving trainers wrist slaps for illegally drugging their horses.

But all of that is wishful thinking in a sport is awash with big money, outsized stud fees and enormous egos.

Cartoon du Jour

Tony Auth/The Philadelphia Inquirer

Fort Hood Short & To The Point

The sheer amount of misinformation and speculation about the Fort Hood massacre is staggering even by mainstream media standards. My take is simple: This one's on the Army. Given what we now reliably know about Major Nidal Malik Hasan, he should have been mustered out years ago.

Photograph by Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Miss Goody Two Shoes' Sex Tape

I will say one thing about Carrie Prejean: Rank hypocrisy does sometimes come in pretty packages, even if they are of the cosmetic surgery variety.

You may recall that Prejean lost her Miss California crown last year because it was learned that she had posed naked (from the waist up, anyway) on the Internet in her pre-boob job incarnation. Prejean, who had parlayed her tiara to become a tiresome scold against same-sex marriage, sued the California pageant organization for a gadzillion bucks claiming that she was tossed because of her views.

Well, a funny thing happened on the way to Settlement City. It turns out that Miss Goody Two Shoes was the star of a Triple X-rated home video in which she graphically reveals that she has talents that don't involve standing in high heels. Pageant officials waved the video in Prejean's face and poof! the lawsuit went away in a flash.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

SPIRAL STAIRCASE
(Former insane asylum, Roosevelt Island, New York City)
From Spiraling Out of Control
Hat tip to Woods' Lot

This Just In: John F. Kennedy Is Still Alive (But In My Dreams, Not Yours)

(PORTIONS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 2009)

I can remember some but by no means all of my dreams, which are seldom erotic, rarely nightmarish and more often than not mundane, frequently involving people and places that I have known, although the people are in places different than where I have known them, while the places are conglomerations of, say, a big old farmhouse where I once lived, a rustic high street bookshop in England and a coastal fishing village in Japan. These nocturnal journeys usually have soundtracks, sometimes music that I recently listened to with no apparent connection to the dream and seems to have been selected by some mad deejay. My dear departed parents make occasional cameo appearances in my dreams, less so my siblings and children, and only rarely the woman who has to put up with me as I toss and turn my way through these somnambulations, which I am able to interrupt to have a drink of water from a bedside glass or a shuffle off to the loo for a piddle, and then continue. Oh, and I always dream in color.

Having gotten those preliminaries out of the way, I am happy to report that John F. Kennedy is still alive. Or at least he was in a dream of several parts and epic length I had the other night that was more unusual than usual for several reasons, including it being partially in the third person; that is, unlike my usual modus, I could occasionally see myself as opposed to being inside myself looking out onto the dreamscape.

This dream opened on a balcony above an old and rather ornate Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool, possibly at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South where I played water polo as a young man before living in that farmhouse and visiting that bookstore and fishing village. The occasion had the feel of a graduation or some other ceremony just ended. Everyone in the knot of a dozen or so people was dressed formally as would seem to befit such an occasion, and the center of attention was Mr. Kennedy, who by my reckoning is now a ripe 91 years old. He was shaking hands, back slapping and handing out really big Cuban cigars. I had several friends with me, but who they were was not revealed. There also were pair of elderly and diminutive identical twin butlers in evening coats and white gloves hovering nearby.

(I would like to pause for a moment to thank the folks who do the lighting and cinematography for my dreams. The results are fabulous -- a texturally rich but slightly gauzy look reminiscent of a Baz Luhrmann movie.)

If you're wondering what John Kennedy would look like as a nonegenarian, the answer is an even puffier version of Teddy Kennedy, but with the same steely yet warm gaze and incredible greenish-gray eyes that met my baby blues when we shook hands on an airport tarmac a few weeks before the 1960 presidential election. (He was 44, I was 13.)

The dream Mr. Kennedy took my hand, his as firm as it had been at the airport, and introduced me to several of his companions with effusive praise. Unfortunately, that part of the dream was interrupted by a water break, so I suppose I'll never know about what or why I was so great.

(If you, like me, think there may be a connection between spicy food and vivid dreaming, I would like to again pause to let you know that my pre-dream evening meal consisted of a bowl of pasta with a homemade clam sauce generously imbued with hot peppers. Ta-da!)

The over-the-pool formalities concluded and a big Cuban cigar tucked into a pocket of my waistcoat, we were escorted out a door by the bookend butlers onto an ivied university-like campus. Things get a little hazy here (it's a dream, okay?) but a door was opened to an outsized English estate car, possibly a custom Bentley, with wood side paneling and a cavernous back deck. I was beckoned inside.

One of the butlers slipped behind the wheel, his bald head barely visible over the seatback, while his companion rode shotgun. Mr. Kennedy, his companions and my friends were nowhere to be seen. Sitting on the spacious back deck with legs crossed, as it was suggested that I also do, were several children that I didn't recall seeing at the pool and some older lasses whom I did. As noted, my dreams are seldom erotic, but I did eye one of the women with a lust that was not just in my heart.

"Off we go!" announced the butler driver as he hit the starter and the estate car charged out onto a wide boulevard under a full moon no doubt arranged by my dream lighting guy. Kaboom! We were suddenly riding very fast through New England farm country and the occasional picture-postcard town. At some point after a piddle break and brief announcement to my then stirring bed mate that I was having the most amazing dream, it shifted into its final phase as the other butler declared "Here we go," or words to that effect. The estate car burst through a covered bridge, hurtled down a lane bordered by fieldstone fences and slowly lifted off, gaining altitude as I awoke.

Now here's where things get really interesting: The soundtrack to my dream was not something that I had recently heard, but rather something that I had wanted to hear and had left next to the stereo with that intention. Holy cripes! The very same music -- Santana's "Eternal Caravan Of Reincarnation/Waves Within" from the Caravanserai album -- came on the radio station that I was listening to as I wrote this the morning after. A marvelous piece of music but with no apparent connection to the dream. Natch.

If that wasn't a hoot, dig this: I decided to write out a draft of my dream as a text document before cutting and pasting it into this blog post. I have a blank document hanging around on the computer for such exercises and typically wipe this template clean after using it, but failed to do so last time. And so when I double-clicked on the template it came up with the text still intact from the last time. It was a quote from John-freaking-Kennedy that I had used after Barack Obama's victory in November. It goes like this:

"As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them."

What does all of this mean? I really don't have a clue, but your thoughts are welcome.

PAINTINGS BY KEVIN WRIGHT