THE PLOT TO SEIZE THE WHITE HOUSE

Jules Archer

Now that I’ve gone through The Plot To Seize The White House, I realize I’ve read about the greatest American named, Smedley. Before, if I had heard that name, I would have thought he was a cartoon character of days yore, or one dreamed up right now.

Of course, it does not surprise me that Smedley’s place in history is buried. He was an isolationist and a pacifist throughout the 1930s. Lindbergh took most of that oxygen; Smedley did not make it into World War Two. Finally, as Lindbergh realized it was unpopular to be against the Fascists as policies and attitudes changed within the United States.

For me the value of the book described American foreign policy for the forty years from 1890. Oddly enough, Theodore Roosevelt was all-in during the Spanish-American War, but within a decade he was ruing his decision to takeover the Philippines. One reason the Americans went in was to stop the competition taking over – the Japanese and the Germans, not allies at the time. Taft became governor of the colony, and took a horse-tour which drew the remark of Taft’s final report: “What happened to the horse?” Having been governor, Taft figured he knew how to fix things, just like Doug MacArthur believed his military prowess could defend those islands in 1941. They were both morons.

Descriptions of small military actions and involvements for 40 years from 1890 confirmed the poor diplomacy of the American State Department. We adopted French and British ways although those nations frequently took entire lands, to scattered benefits: Hong Kong did not exist before the British arrived in 1839, and Shanghai was a mid-sized sea-side outpost. Each is near the mouth of a large river. American involvement was late and tiny, but we played by the rules: I believe the American government paid the French for their concession to build the Panama Canal at the time Panama separated from Columbia.

What The Plot does not explain, sometimes countries did not have any government in place to deal with internal problems or make foreign investment possible. The face of American diplomacy became the Marines, the Navy or Army. Note before World War One Pershing was trying to track down Pancho Villa in Northern Mexico. The Mexican government did not have control over that area until 1919 or later. Villa was killed in 1923 which settled things. Yet, today the Mexican cartels have established themselves there. The cartels are the only government.

Times were different. The book spends no time giving those settings. Herbert Hoover mining engineer provided employment to many foreigners. Along with mines he built roads and railroads, and made sure products could be exported to the world. He made tens of millions of dollars. ($75,000,000?)

It was a type of foreign aid program inexpensively backstopped by the military. Investments were made and natives rose: Chile, mining; Venezuela, oil; Egypt, cotton. For Europeans they spared the expense of the Marines and business diplomacy, by colonization. There were horrors like the Belgiums in the Congo. Yet the world situation caused Mark Twain to observe: “The British are mentioned in the Bible. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” All that colonization was well and cheap until the Europeans began fighting other Europeans for concessions and land: An issue over British Guiana in the 1890s brought the British much closer to the Americans, being the bedrock of the special relationship. The Boar War on its heels was destructive and expensive. Further into the Twentieth Century concessions and colonies became untenable changing policies for the British, Dutch, French, Italians, Turks, Spaniards, Portuguese and Americans (copper in Chile in 1970).

The whole set of business arrangements was imperfect and unfair to natives by today’s standards. Yet today’s circumstances are dissimilar. There were about a billion humans on earth in 1900, and many foreign military units were untrained. That’s how smaller forces of Marines could make a difference. How would any of those people, natives and Marines, do on earth with eight and a half billion humans?

I don’t fault Smedley for knowing he was defending American financial and investment interests – persons and activities he found distasteful and disagreed with. There were a lot of frauds which completely exploited natives and investors. Laws were not yet written. The British used their excellent espionage services. Americans were lucky if they knew where the country was. (The same ignorance prevailed into the early 1960s with Vietnam.) Americans did sent a lot of do-gooders – Christian ministers and some journalists: “Doctor Livingston, I presume,” said Harold Stanley of The New York World.    

That was Smedley’s world – innocent, individual and somewhat messy. His Marines were needed, but the whole historical context is not found in this book. Smedley’s protestations in the Thirties seemed to come from no where. It is inadequate history to cite a poll saying most Americans were against foreign intervention, when the country had been using its military in like situations for 120 years. 

Finally, about Smedley, as an individual, what did he do to establish the Marines was an entity, as he rose through the ranks? Certainly he was beloved and could lead fellow Marines, but once he was gone what was left? I don’t know. I raise this point because during the Civil War, U.S. Grant identified and promoted men who led the U.S. Army into the 1890s. Smedley was not political enough to make such changes.

I’ve read books about investigations, and I’m not surprised that this investigation failed: There was no legislation to remedy anything, which can be a point: Investigations lead to nothing. In the last 30 years someone ought to have proposed a constitutional amendment defining and limiting Executive Privilege. Nope. So in our life time we’ve seen a lot of investigations, however worthy, begun and gone no where.

Specifically, about The Plot there is no explanation about The American Legion and its power. It was a rival organization to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. There needs to be at least 10,000 words to explain its organization and power which the book does not give.

I got nothing about The American Legion from The Plot. It seems an essential part of the story – activities before and after the 1930s, during World War Two, and words explaining after the War. By the Fifties the Right splintered e.g. John Birch was a missionary in China, one of the persons Americans innocently sent overseas to preach religion. Once dead by the dreaded Chinese communists (the Nationalists were good murderers), John Birch became a martyr.   

FAT BOOKS

Non-Fiction: Read one, Jettison two.

This year I’ve bought or checked from the library three fat books. 

READ: Thomas Cromwell, Diamaid MacCulloch, presenting a detailed study of Henry VIII’s most competent and efficient advisor and Chancellor. From 1530-1540 Cromwell’s story as been hidden and marred behind the glow of persons who like Thomas More, chief proponent of the Church of Rome in England.  

Cromwell was an accomplished businessman whose excellent judgment and actions saved Britain from the upheavals centuries later which arrived in France and the remainder of Europe. He made Henry VIII the sole sovereign, and let institutions – Parliament, nobility, gentry, commerce, universities – begin whittling away the monarch’s power. Cromwell lost his head, but his family survived; 109 years later a relative, Oliver Cromwell, cut off the head of Charles II who wanted to restore Britain to an absolute monarchy and who conspired with foreign powers. 

This book is detailed to show that Cromwell was not only well-informed but also there not a person of significance whom Cromwell did not know, it seems. For literary persons there are passages in which Crowell recognizes the functionality and the efficiency of English as a language. He fostered learning in the language and its widespread use.

VALUE OF READING? Jefferson Davis, Felicity Allen, 570 pages, tells of the President of the Confederate States, 1861-1865, a U.S. Senator, Secretary of War and a soldier in the Mexican-American War. Except during the Civil War he was considered by peers as a competent manager of affairs.

Davis has all the deficits of a hate-spouting, fire-eating, slave-owning, ante-bellum Southerner, even after the South lost the war. (Grant took over one of his plantations around the Mississippi River in the middle of the War.) Davis could not compromise, he hated inferiors and intellectual superiors like Abraham Lincoln (also born in Kentucky), and he rode the crest of Southern Society until that was ended by the Civil War.

I gave the book, heavy lumber, and Jeff Davis 60 of 560 pages. Fortunately my cost was $1.00-2.00.

VALUE OF READING? None. The Day of Battle, Sicilian/Italian Campaigns, Rich Atkinson, Volume Two of the Liberation Trilogy.

I read about the Sicilian campaign, about 170 pages. I had read a more detailed analyses of that Campaign. The only new fact I learned was Patton on two separate occasions, slapped two Americans in hospital tents. 

The Author, Rick Atkinson, gives a lot of gossipy facts that are not germane to the success of the American Army in Sicily. Attributed to Audie Murphy is the observation: “I’m a fugitive from the law of averages.” Those quotes are enjoyable and lend humanity to men fighting the battles.

Yet, many men were not quoted, or they did not survive. They were sacrificed. The Command structure was weak because Eisenhower was stupid and incompetent, along with Marshall and Eisenhower’s favorite inferiors. The plan for the Sicilian innovation was hastily made up; it was incomplete: Montgomery began fighting in the American sector without announcing what he was doing; he lengthened the fighting on Sicily two or three weeks, Atkinson admits. Note, from another source Montgomery always attacked the Germans with less than a division while the Americans were using complete divisions on the attack.

Sicily is an island, right? No one wondered how the Germans would leave Sicily. They all evacuated because Eisenhower and every advisor and lackey (British and American) in the planning never wondered what could happen to the Germans? Eisenhower did not want to use airpower to destroy port facilities or attack shipping. Those Germans were another 50,000 Germans to terrorize Italy and to contend with for the remaining two years of the War. 

Reading about the American performance in Italy is a waste. Everyone knows and knew, at the time, that the American Generalissimo Mark Clark, was one of the most inept Generals since George McClellan. But Clark was one of Eisenhower’s buddies. I refuse to read about one mistake after another. I note the Italian Campaign was the first time Japanese-Americans soldiers, once in American concentration camps, fought. Author-Atkinson does not mention Company 100 although heroism by those men was as professional and complete as in Division 442.

It is unlikely that Author-Atkinson will detail mistakes after mistakes by Marshall, Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery in his third volume, the campaign against Germany following D-Day.

A World To Be Won,  Murray/Millet, in fewer words, gives more insight into strategic and tactic mistakes and successful plans than Atkinson seems capable of presenting.

 

HISTORY – RESEARCH, RECOUNTING, WRITING

Not recommended is Adam Hochschild’s, The Uuquiet Ghost, which lands on a significant subject. It supposedly tells of Stalin’s Gulag and survivors thereof. That is fine, but there is no I (me, Adam Hochschield) in the book. The author is not a survivor, the spouse of a survivor, a family member of a survivor, and he is not Russian. He is an American writing about Stalin’s Gulag. His text has the blunders of Edmund Morris, who decided to include himself in the Reagan biography, Dutch. About the stories from the survivors, the book reverses its purpose. I did this, I travelled there, the author tells. However notes giving brief backgrounds are in the text at the end of a section or at the end of a chapter. The reverse should be true – less author, more history.

Of interest in the Preface and the early chapters of The Unquiet Ghost, are statements:

iii: “And it’s important….that those things should be documented by someone who speaks with the authority of having been there.”

iii:  “How could the country that gave the world Tolstoy and Chekhov also give it the gulag?”

iv:  “Thomas Hardy…wrote that ‘if way to be Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.’”

vii-viii: “…no one should have any illusions that the country’s path will be a smooth and easy one. …[A] secret police major…thought it would take two generations for the Russian Bureaucracy to completely outgrow it’s authoritarian habits.”

xix: “…a more hazardous facet of Utopianism: the faith that if only we make certain sweeping changes, then all problems will be solved….Marxism offered this: the belief that once people overthrew the social and economic system…human character itself would be transformed.”

20-21: “Memory made public is also a warning: You can’t get away with this again…’Retrospectively, the broadcasting of truth…upends the torturer’s boastful claim…is at once more subtle and perhaps more momentous…It is essential to the structure of torture that it takes place in secret, in the dark, beyond considerations of shame and account…Torture can never again feel so self-assured – not their victims so utterly forlorn.”

21. “Vaclav Havel speaks of the “fear of history” that leads people to avoid dealing with complicity and guilt. But, sometimes we blot out the past simply to spare ourselves unnecessary pain.”

The easy points to address are about art and about politics, pages iii and vii-viii above. Tolstoy and Cheknov were not authors promoting social change. They wrote about Russian society before them, and did that well. It is naive to believe everyone in Russia wanted to preserve what Tolstoy and Chekhov wrote about, the glory of Russia under the Czars. Likely the population wanted political change. Can art change society is en elementary question? That is the hope. But recurring in early Nazi Germany were the identical questions with scores of cultural giants that the population knew. A cultural heritage actually aided the Nazis in the racially and religiously charged exterminations and prejudices.

It is not bureaucracy that needs changing; it is the system of government. Democratic ways seeking truth and society’s advancement must override bureaucratic rules. But democracy is not an automatic avenue to rectify governmental ways. It must be worked at. Without a long history of democratic expectations, Russia, for instance, has demonstrated it is easy to lapse into previous totalitarism ways.

Thomas Hardy is correct, to make the human race better, we must force a complete understanding of the worst. And who better to describe the worst – the persons who suffered. One cannot rely on officials. Stalin said it best: The loss of one human being is a tragedy The loss of 62,000,000 is a statistic. 62,000,000 has been published as the number of Russians and other nationalities killed by the Communists from 1917 to 1991.

Communism does offer utopian promises and goals becoming reality after making “sweeping changes.” Human beings with any education, knowledge, and intelligence know the promises of dictators, authoritarians and tyrants are false and must be disbelieved. Some pandering with those aspirations are lying without caring that change cannot be made with sweeping changes. Human beings done’t change with alterations of the basic law. Witness the Civil War Amendments to the United States Constitution, directing to shift the status of former slaves and other African-Americans. As revered as is the Constitution to the American people, the actions and behavior of Americans needs more change.

The dictator, the tyrant, the authoritarian primary tool is torture to get people to comply and to follow. Shifting from that system to one of democracy is not perfect and absolute. Again human beings does not change immediately, over generations or longer. Yet the South Africans held its Truth Commissions for all the world and its own people to witness. I do not know the status of interpersonal relations, based upon race, wealth, faith in South Africa. I have not heard completely bad news, but I don’t know. Perhaps the South Africans led by Nelson Mandela did it right.

Is there a fear of history? Likely not. The persons who led and those who contributed to atrocities and exterminations were not concerned what will be written or thought about them. The numbers of deaths must be HUGE. Who remembers Pol Pot? If history means leaders and their disciples will be remembered, they have overachieved. And given the reverence some Russians have for Stalin, the Chinese for Mao and westerns for the drug-addled Hitler and the Nazis, the enormities attract fans, followers and devotees. It is hard to say what will end those influences – open the archives and expose all the facts?

BOOMERANG

michael lewis

This gossipy book does not penetrate; it replies on and conveys surfacy impressions. It is told in a loose journalistic style to recount lives of various actors, none of whom have stayed as movers and shakers. As a book of the times (2008-2011 – setting, years, attitudes of people and countries), it keys the paint of subjects, but presents nothing unusual or memorable.

In one chapter Lewis visits Germany, and ends up on the Reeperbahn (Red Light District in Hamburg). Red lights affirm Lewis the luxury of citing Alan Dundes, venerable, cherished professor of folklore at Berkeley. Lewis talks about Dundes’ essay describing German impressions of s–t. 

Although writing a book about finances, apparently Lewis was unaware of the financial power house Hamburg was. After World War Two it was the largest city in West Germany. Frankfurt had the bourse, but Hamburg had the trade. Historically Hamburg was home to George Phillipp Telemann, who wrote music for five local churches and is a master beside Bach and Handel. Centuries before Telemann Hamburg was a city in the Hanseatic League. Boomerang would have been a much better book if Lewis had stuck to finance and history rather than whimsical escapees into s–t.

I found this book on a library-sales shelf, 25 cents, which is a lot better than the dust jacket price, $25.95. But no index, no footnotes, no bibliography, nothing to make it appear researched or authoritative, it’s a read to skip.