Margotlog: One More Round with Tricky Dicky

Margotlog: One More Round with Tricky Dicky

I thought I'd never forget my outrage at Richard Nixon in the presidency (1969-74), but so I have, until now, when listening to Barbara Tuchman's occasional pieces brings his astonishing depredations roiling back. Yet, he was in office when some of the cornerstones of our contemporary era were put in place: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, even abolishing the draft and putting in place an all-civilian army. He also visited China and shook Mao's hand, the first American President to do so, which signaled to Russia that we were cultivating another Communist power, and may have furthered the rounds of talks to limit American and Russian nuclear arms proliferation.

Two things stand out in Tuchman's incisive considerations: that the U.S. as a whole was just emerging from its Communist "witch-hunt"--she cites such activity as a recurring strain in the American character--all the way back to the Massachusetts witch trials in 1690. Nixon had risen to prominence in the House Un-American Activities Committee which helped finger Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. He also created a "pink sheet" against his opponent in the 1949 California Senate campaign. This kind of suspicious sniffing around, along with a taste for undercover politics helped fuel the three major mistakes that led to his forced resignation (rather than impeachment). First as president, his tape-recording daily notes about his "agents," and then these agents' dirty tricks: bugging political opponents, harrassing activist groups, and breaking into Democratic party headquarters to steal supposedly incriminating papers--the Watergate affair. Finally his undercover bombing of Cambodia and Laos, once it was exposed, not only enraged the legions of anti-war activists but also added to Nixon's reputation for going underground to proceed outside legal channels.

I remember loathing him. But it was more for the man's weasel looks and his sneaky "smile-in-your-face" while stabbing you in the back behavior that I remember. We shouldn't blame the weasel, after all, who is no more than a small predator trying to sustain itself in a narrow environmental niche. Barbara Tuchman, writing in the 1980s, suggests that the American presidency under John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon had risen above its supposed limitations to act outside the checks and balances forged in the constitution. Now, when our various heads of state--Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton or our country's president Barack Obama--are so mightily opposed and stymied by gridlock in Congress or state legislature, when the legislative branches of government seem unable to reach consensus and pass necessary measures to reduce a mountain of national debt--I muse back on this era when presidents operated with sweeping powers, and wonder what the heck we can expect next. For all-out brawls, just this side of civil war, it's hard to imagine anymore more wild than the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 or the various occupation of capitol grounds and flight of legislators in contemporary Wisconsin. Political theater at its wild and wooliest. I guess I'd rather have the conflict out in the open rather than, as Nixon tried, secretive and illegal. But when it means an obstruction of necessary government, I'd like to dispense with both.

Margotlog: Cultural Suffering

Margotlog: Cultural Suffering

With my students, I'm reading a touching novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa (1981) Set in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada before, during and after World War II, Obasan portrays the suffering of Japanese "relocated" by the Canadian government. It's actually far more complex than that because two members of this extended Japanese family returned to Japan in the 1930s. They are the child Naomi's mother and grandmother. She never sees them again.

Shifting between several perspectives--Naomi's experience as a child of five through high school, and then leaping ahead to herself as an adult, a teacher in an Alberta school--the novel also infiltrates personal memory with documents which gradually shed light on her Aunt Emily's search for information about the "lost" relatives and justice for her extended family, separated and tossed about by the Canadian government.

In the United States, we usually find about about the Japanese internment camps during 7th grade history. The title that stays with me from my years working as a writer in the schools is Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Houston, 1979. Told from the perspective of a 7-year-old child, the story of dislocation and internment is harsh but not unrelieved--children adjust. In comparison Obasan is a much more probing account, with adult perceptions of loss, injustice and hardship interspersed with Naomi's childhood awareness. After the war ended, she and her family--brother and aunt and uncle--were uprooted again. This horror included not only the loss of the lively community the internees had created in a former ghost town, complete with the Japanese communal bath, but a resettlement to what was little more than a hut, amid the beet fields of Alberta. Unheated, cramped, the hut enforced a hatred that was doubled as all the family worked in the beet fields--heavy, hot labor--the only work offered to them. When they finally could afford to move to a small house in town, it's a relief the reader shares.

Through all this suffering runs the cultural manners of Japanese people themselves--their quiet, restrained acceptance, their sturdy continuation despite extreme loss and hardship. their lack of voiced complaint. I find all this remarkable and unforgettable. But I also spy amid the quietude, the defeat that quells and forces submission, the defeat that was visited upon the Jews in Germany, who went quiet to their own slaughter. I know that sounds like a harsh judgment but reading Obasan reminds me that when whole communities recognize the futility of revolt, many simply cave in. Not the Warsaw ghetto, however, nor countless individual resisters. Reading Elie Wiesel's Night proclaims just this resistance. It remains perhaps my most treasured document of an individual soul, helped quietly by others, to survive the most determined attempt at extermination.

Margotlog: Getting Out of Vietnam, Getting Out of Anything

Margotlog: Getting Out of Vietnam, Getting Out of Anything

Though I didn't realize her power when she was first publishing, Barbara Tuchman has since become one of my top three favorite American writers about history--Barbara Tuchman, Joseph Ellis and David McCullough. Ellis and McCullough are still alive, but Tuchman died in 1989.

What distinguishes them from other writers of history whom I've read is their astonishing ability to dramatize yet propell a narrative forward with periodic assessments that plunge right to the heart of significance. Take Tuchman's book review of Henry Kissinger's memoirs, which I'm reading now, long after its initial publication, collected in her book called Practicing History (1981).

Kissinger, as head of President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisors and as Gerald Ford's Secretary of State, contributed enormously to the lengthy U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. As Tuchman argues, his council should have urged U.S. withdrawal far sooner than it occurred in 1975. The U.S. should have withdrawn in the early 1970s when it was clear that the U.S. could not assure that Saigon, i.e. South Vietnam could sustain itself independently. Instead Kissinger and the presidents he served opted for continued U.S. troop and bombing incursions eventually pushing the war into Cambodia with an additional 40,000 Cambodian and 19,000 American lives lost. Tuchman astutely summarizes that the U.S. stayed because its government wanted to withdraw with honor. Instead, she argues, we should have made the case that we'd done all we could for the South Vietnamese and now they needed to stand or fall on their own strength. Which she goes on to remark, is exactly what happened when North Vietnam invaded the South and Saigon fell in 1975.

Getting out when winning is clearly impossible, chosing compromise and life-saving alteration, rather than a "fight to the finish"--that I'd like to see more of. For instance, how wonderful if the various legislatures, national and state, could put down their insistence on "winning" and agree that there must be a two-pronged approach to combating the budget deficit--raising taxes on the wealthy and altering "entitlement programs" like Medicare and Social Security. Just as the U.S. government fighting in Vietnam could not "imagine" withdrawal with anything short of "honor," meaning victory, so now we are brought to our knees by a refusal to take items from each side of the political divide and recognize that they both have an important place in addressing the inevitable: unless we make significant changes in both tax and entitlement structures, our economy will suffer short-term and long-term. Suffer so significantly that our political position may well become weakened, our vaunted ability to "rule the world" may well pass to others.

Ditto our blind, headlong path toward doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to bring a halt to fracking (which tears up forest and grassland, uses huge amounts of water, and then pumps this natural gas across sensitive acquifers--mine and your drinking water). No, no, no. We must admit we've exhausted this kind of energy. We must do two difficult but possible things--conserve far more than we do, and buy in big time to energy production that does not sprew CO2 into the environment.

How much longer, I muse, as I listen to Barbara Tuchman's clear and incisive indictment of Henry Kissinger and the governments he served--how much longer before we can make the sane but difficult choices?

Margotlog: A Polish and an African-American Grandmother

Margotlog: A Polish and an African-American Grandmother

We get so fixated on the nuclear family in the United States with its portability, privacy, and freedom to reinvent itself that we forget, except on Thanksgiving, how rich and supportive it can be to have several generations around the table. A few days ago, in this wonderful interregnum between frantic work-weeks called Thanksgiving break, I had lunch with two friends who had never met before, but who both grew up in Chicago. "She's my sister," cried the younger African-American friend. That lovely "soul sister" idea. Then when they were face to face, she asked, "Are you from the city?" As opposed, I found out, to the many suburban communities spreading in all directions except directly east, where of course lies great Lake Michigan. Yes, they both grew up in inner city Chicago. One with an immigrant Polish family, the other with African-American grandparents who came up from Mississippi.

I never knew my grandmothers, a lack I've often mourned. Word has it they were both good women, though not strong enough to withstand cancer in their early 60s. "Your grandmother could make us four boys stop fighting just be coming into the room," that's my father's voice in my memory. His mother Rose was a tiny Sicilian woman, probably no more than four feet, ten inches tall. When she was dying of ovarian cancer in Florida (where she and my grandfather moved to escape the Pittsburgh winters), my father's first cousin Eleanora, then newly trained as a nurse, took the train south to care for her. "When I looked in her jewelry box," Eleanora remembers, "I found a note from your grandfather, a love note telling Rose how much he adored her. He did that--left her little charms in her pockets or in her hymnal or behind the spices."

Let's call my two Chicago friends Adele and Roxy. Adele's Polish family lived not far from Lake Michigan in a duplex, the grandmother on the bottom, her daughter's family on top. After school, Adele immediately stopped at her grandmother's kitchen. "She wasn't a great cook," Adele confesses, "In fact, I can't remember what she gave me to eat, but it was quiet downstairs with Grandma. Upstairs, my mother would be sitting around the kitchen table drinking coffee with her friends and criticizing their relatives. I didn't like that."

Roxy's African-American single mother had four children before she was much over twenty. Roxy spent the first and second grades in Southside Chicago schools--"all the schools were neighborhood schools," Roxy tells us. "We had an entirely African-American class." When she was in third grade, her mother moved the family to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The change was enormous. The four kids were the only black children in their grades. They quickly learned to speak "white English." Then every summer for five years, Roxy and her brother went back to Chicago and stayed with Gramma. "She was a witchy old lady," Roxy laughs, "saying things like, 'Don' you go leavin that purse on de floor."

"How come?" Roxy would challenge her. "Purse on floo, you be poor."
Hands on her hips, little Roxy sassed, "Then how come you be poor? Yo purse neber on de floo?" Roxy laughs at her sassy kid-self, then shakes her head at Gramma. "That lady brought all these notions from Mississippi. She was strict with us, but we'd laugh at her, not mean, just enjoying all being sassy together. Later she was proud of me. She kept saying, 'Law, chile, you be so smart. Don' you stop that studyin!'"

Adele picked up sewing from her Polish grandmother. This woman was so skilled that she made her daughter's entire graduating class of girls fancy "stepping out" gowns. She would take the bus downtown to the big department stores and shop for fabric. She knew the names of all sorts of linens, wools, silks, cottons, and later synthetics. Then arthritis stopped her, and she became simply a haven from Adele's sharp-tongued mother. Now Adele creates masterful needlework herself, knitting, needlepoint, crocheting, even that old-fashioned edging on pillow "slips" and sheets called "tatting."

I, who grew up so far from any grandparents that I saw them only in the presence of my parents, I wonder how my young-life might have been different if the older generation had taken part in it. I imagine they might have buffered me from my parents' excesses which became more and more pronounced as we lived longer in South Carolina--my father's ranting against civil rights, his finickiness about clothing and housekeeping and food, and my mother's rigid attempts to control his outbursts, her fearful whispering at me to behave, "because if you don't your father will never forgive me...."

There's a truism among immigration historians that the first generation arrives with grit, determination, and an unexpected sense of who they are and where they came from. It's the second generation that flounders. That fits my father, determined though he was to escape the Italian immigrant community and marry "a real American." Yet that "real American," my mother, constantly failed to create a milieu that comforted him, plus by moving to South Carolina, he had lifted himself out of the larger associations that defined his identity. It was sweet, though pathetic, how he sought out Italian ships docking in Charleston harbor, and occasionally brought home sailors from Genoa or Naples who could speak to his heart.

Lucky indeed are my friends whose childhoods were enriched by extended families. Their hearts beat close by, and still help to measure and regulate their own.

Margotlog: My Father and the Bird

Margotlog: My Father and the Bird

And I don't mean Charlie Parker, the reknown jazzman. No, the bird in this case was the annual Thanksgiving Turkey.

My father grew up thinking very little of birds. He and his brothers (one of whom became a hunting guide in Nova Scotia) shot rabbits occasionally. Not in their Pittsburgh neighborhood of Mount Lebanon, heaven forbid! That was a relatively upscale and thoroughly civilized neighborhood. No guns. His father, the minister and lawyer for the Italian people, the tribal leader, never would have countenanced shot guns stacked beside the door. Maybe in the garage, but never in the sanctuary of the home.

But there are photos of my father and one of his younger brothers at their prep school, Gettysburg Academy, with rabbits strewn at their feet and shot guns upended as staffs of honor. Then when he visited my mother's North Dakota family for Thanksgiving, he shot rabbits and draped them over the front of a mean-looking sedan. Snow on the ground, lace-up boots on his feet, and a smirk on his face. Mighty Hunter!

In fact, he was finicky beyond belief. I can laugh now, but his precautions and admonitions about cleanliness and right behavior used to send my mother, sister and me into spasms of frustration. When it came time to bring home the turkey, the grocery store was the source and my mother the conveyor. She upended the bird in the sink, made sure all the pin feathers had been removed, cleaned out the cavity, put the gibblets to boil on the stove,and set the carcass in the roaster ready for the oven. "Maxine, are you sure you've thoroughly washed that bird?" my father would caution, as if it hadn't already passed through several stages of denaturing, as if it still carried barnyard dirt between its toes.

When we leafed through Ideals Magazine during summer visits to Papa Max in North Dakota, images of Thanksgiving always showed Father at the head of a snow-white table studded with family and relatives, while Mother lowered the bird in front of him. At our family Thanksgivings in Charleston, South Carolina, our Midwestern mother acted this role to perfection, her arms reaching around my father with the platter and the beautifully browned bird. At that point, however, he did not take up the carving tools and ask us to pass our plates. In fact, she stepped to one side of him and commenced to loosen the drumsticks, slice open the breast, and excavate stuffing to mound in a bowl. "Your father has no sense of anatomy," she would explain later with a touch of self-satisfied superiority. "He can never find the joints."

Then, after this ritual they'd silently worked out (unlike many other alterations of expected male/female roles which invoked loud protests on my father's part), she took her place at the foot of the table, and my father did indeed ask us to pass our plates. Often we were entertaining Citadel cadets or faculty members, stranded without family for the holiday. My father's joviality increased. He was truly thankful for bounty that could be shared, for evidence that many of the flock had gathered, and for what, as he would say, "the Lord has provided." Then we would bow our heads, and afterwards raise a glass in Thanksgiving.

I can see him now, light from the candles glinting on his glasses, his wide Italian mouth open in a grin, while we all follow his direction and lifted our tumblers of milk or water or wine, saluting with appreciation the flame around which we congregate. At the other end of the table, my mother is smiling her soft, girlish smile, reserved for moments like these, when all her work is done, when she can retreat into shy reserve, and enjoy the gregarious, slightly deranged bird she has married.

Whatever other configuration my own Thanksgivings take, this is the model against which they all are measured.

Margotlog: J. Edgar, Leonardo DiCaprio and Clint Eastwood

Margotlog: J. Edgar, Leonardo DiCaprio and Clint Eastwood

"The FBI in Peace and War"--was that the title of the radio drama? I never listened, but the music from a companion show, "Dragnet," even now plays its "bum-bum-bum-bum-bumbumbum" through my head. As historical movies go, or "bio-pics" if you prefer, Clint Eastwood's "J. Edgar" is a marvel. Watching Leonardo DiCaprio morph before your eyes from the smooth-faced young agent-on-the-make to the crinkly-haired, hunched, jowly J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI is, in my book, a marvel of acting. Include his accent, which reminds me of someone eating a mouthful of peanuts without the crunch--all stiff jaw and chew in the hopes of not choking.

Or is the film so powerful because of its lightning-fast shifts from J. Edgar's home with Judy Dench as Mama (who flirtatiously compliments her son on his new suit) to the Bureau of Investigation line-up of prospective agents--J. Edgar tweaks their ties and warns them against facial hair (presumably to render each sleuth as neutral and unrecognizeable as possible). We shift from glimpses of a pale heroic Lindberg to J. Edgar's hiring of a beautiful young man who stands on the other side of his desk with a dreamy expression in his dark-lashed blue eyes. Surely the relationship that develops between Hoover and this agent Clyde Tolson, his life-long friend, is homosexual. But was it consummated? The movie teases us with this--they reach for each other's hands in a cab, with Mama up front who will be dropped off first. As J. Edgar mentions taking up with actress Dorothy Lamour and asks, "Is it time for a Mrs. J. Edgar," Tolson attacks him in their side-by-side hotel rooms. After that brawl, a kiss must follow. Their bruised bloody lips say a lot--without anyone having to fess-up.

DiCaprio's acting is superb. Ditto Mama and Tolson and long-time secretary Helen who refuses to marry Hoover early in their young rise to power, but agrees instead to become his private secretary. She outlives him, and in the end, true to her promise, empties the files and starts shredding. Did shredders exist in the Nixon administration? My husband and I decide probably so for government offices, if not for private homes. It is this kernel of intense secrecy played against Hoover's many sleuthing innovations that we now take for granted--like fingerprinting or analysis of crime scenes like a science lab--that support his importance in the story of fighting crime. His importance and his weakness--he wanted the glory, and in the thread that recurs throughout the film, he dictates many lies to young agents writing his memoirs. Hoover claims more for himself than he deserved, for instance that he arrested the kidnapper of the Lindberg baby (whose pathetic little skeleton was found near the Lindberg mansion). A lie, but Hoover did push for the analysis of the wood used to build the ladder which the kidnapper climbed to steal the baby from a second -floor bedroom. Throughout the shifts back and forth in time and between public and private realms, we see Hoover become more aggressive in publishing and burnishing his own valor. Was it the rise of a monomania or the necessary P.R. to keep Congressional approval of funds? There is no easy answer.

I've admired Clint Eastwood in films (The Good, Bad and the Ugly), but I think this might be the first film he'd directed that completely mesmerized me. Cudos to the screenplay as well, written by Dustin Lance Black, but from my small experience with film-making, the magic is often in the editing. This I credit to Eastwood. Not a through-story like the wonderful "King's Speech" from last year (which we thought of here because of the astonishing casts in each), "J. Edgar" emphasizes the clip and dissolve possibilities of movie-editing--quick shifts in time, place, age of main character, etc. I found it riveting, and a good choice for portraying a man who hid a lot, whose public persona was not the most loveable, and yet in the films end by being largely sympathetic if humanly fallible.

Final comment: the music was composed by director Eastwood and one of his seven children, Kyle, performed in the movie combo.

Margotlog: The Bridges of Venice

Margotlog: The Bridges of Venice

All the bridges in Venice are pedestrian--it's a city without cars. Yet, the map shows only a few--the Rialto and the huge bridge crossing the Grand Canal before the railroad station. But how do people get across? I asked myself, studying the map in the months before I arrived. Donna Leon's mystery novels suggest all kinds of sprinting, sauntering, skulking. Surely there must be bridges.

The approach to the city over water from the Marco Polo airport is the most romantic I've ever experienced--misty, flat and watery--with the Alilaguna "motoscaffo" (great Italian word suggesting the motor part and escape) twisting around striped poles to avoid the shallows. Cormorants and gulls bobbed or soared overhead. I could have been a teen again, speeding down the Inland Waterway between wild green barrier islands south of home, Charleston, South Carolina. The same excitement of entering a watery world at a speed to put wind in your face.
The same anticipation of discovery that could plunge deep and lift into the air. Then we slowed for Murano, the huge glass-factory island, a village in itself; passed the cemetery island girded with its retrained necklace of pink and white walls below a colony of tall green cypress, and found the city itself.

I was tired and excited and a bit unsteady on my feet. With my insistent map-gazing, I'd determined that my little hotel Boccassini lay close to this northern rim of the city, but which direction from the dock? Someone pointed and said in Italian, "over two bridges." Each bridge was like an arched hand over a narrow strip of water; each had thin "steps" which required me to lift my little suitcase on its rollers, trudge to the next and lift. Many of the wider and steeper bridges did the same, but by then, I'd ditched my suitcase and taken a nap.

Here are somethings I discovered about canals and bridges. For good walking, choose a long sidewalk beside a canal. My favorite was Fondamenta dei Mendicanti, which I found by crossing another bridge along the rim of the lagoon and turning into the heart of the city. For the Venetians, "Fondamenta" means a wide paved "front" or foundation to the water. It's not the same as a "Riva," which is a much wider paved space, such as the Riva degli Schiavoni, along the Grand Canal leading toward San Marco. When I left my little hotel in its warren of crazy-making narrow streets, and found myself again on the Fondamenta Nova along the lagoon, then turned onto Fondamenta dei Mendicanti (that last word refers to beggars) I soon felt as if I might not get lost for quite a while.

This was true in part because I soon walked into what in other Italian cities would be called a piazza, but which in Venice is a campo or field. This one, Campo Santi Giavanni e Paolo (Saints John and Paul) shared its name with a wonderful building, once a church, now a huge hospital. When Napoleon deconsecrated enormous numbers of churches in the early 1800s, many immediately took on other uses. In the campo before this truly unusual building, with two half-moon atop its facade, I discovered amazing bas reliefs arranged beside the door. The image at the start of this blog is the second image. It's of men in turbans--Venice was after all linked closely with what we'd call the near east. It's no doubt an image from the Bible, though I'd be the last to guess, well ok I'll guess Joseph and his brothers.

In any case, passing the ospedale, pausing each time I passed to and fro toward the innards of Venice and more twists and turns and dead ends against walls and bridges that ended in private doors, each time passing, I would pay homage to the former church, its elegant facade opening into the campo and the astonishing images. In my next entry on Venice, I'll give you the other image, a lion forward of a long colonnade into the background. Another mystery of this amazing city.