On Wednesday, Colonel Robert L. Howard, the most decorated American soldier living, passed away at the age of 70. He served five tours of duty in Vietnam and the extraordinary list of honors and unit citations he received in those years is itemized in his Wikipedia entry. But one honor stands out among them, and how he came to receive it is described by Richard Goldstein in Col. Howard’s New York Times obituary:
In December 1968, Sergeant First Class Howard, his rank at the time, was in a platoon of American and South Vietnamese troops who came under fire while trying to land in their helicopters on a mission to find a missing Green Beret. As the men set out after a prolonged firefight to clear the landing zone, they were attacked by some 250 North Vietnamese troops.
As related in “Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty,” by Peter Collier, Sergeant Howard was knocked unconscious by an exploding mine. When he came to, his eyes were bloodied and his hands injured by shrapnel that had also destroyed his rifle. He heard his lieutenant groaning in pain a few yards away. He then saw an enemy soldier with a flamethrower burning the bodies of American and South Vietnamese soldiers who had just been killed.
Sergeant Howard was unable to walk, but he threw a grenade toward the soldier with the flamethrower and managed to grab the lieutenant. As he was crawling with him toward shelter, a bullet struck his ammunition pouch, blowing him several feet down a hill. Clutching a pistol given to him by a fellow soldier, Sergeant Howard shot several North Vietnamese soldiers and got the lieutenant down to a ravine.
Taking command of the surviving and encircled Green Berets, Sergeant Howard administered first aid, encouraged them to return fire and called in air strikes. The Green Berets held off the North Vietnamese until they were evacuated by helicopters.
Having gained an officer’s commission after that exploit, he received the Medal of Honor from President Richard M. Nixon on March 2, 1971. The citation credited him for his “complete devotion to the welfare of his men at the risk of his life.”
Presenting an award to so valiant a warrior was, indeed, one of the proudest moments of the Nixon White House. May the Colonel rest in the eternal peace that he so very much has earned.
The Beauty in the Beast: The Daily Beast‘s choice of illustrations hints at the hatchet job that follows in the excerpt from Sally Denton’s new book about the 1950 California Senate Race between Richard Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas.
The Daily Beast is offering an exclusive excerpt from The Pink Lady: The Many Lives of Helen Gahagan Douglas — a new book by Sally Denton about the 1950 California Senate race.
Richard Nixon —the just-post-Hiss-case young 12th District congressman— ran against Helen Gahagan Douglas — the Broadway-and-movie-star-turned 14th District congresswoman. The result was a shellacking —59.23% to 40.76%— that has ever since been the source of many misunderstandings — many of them fueled by still-lingering animosities.
And, at least on the basis of this Beastly excerpt, few of these misunderstandings will be illuminated, much less put to rest, by this new book.
That said, excerpts are purposely chosen to pique interest and create controversy, so I will withhold judgment until I’m able to check out the book itself. But, because many readers won’t get beyond the excerpts, at least a few words may be in order at this early point.
Ms. Denton’s tone is tendentious and perfervid — perhaps reflecting her time as an investigative reporter for Jack Anderson. She writes that “In a carefully orchestrated whispering campaign of smear, fear, and innuendo that would go down in American history as the dirtiest ever—while also becoming the model for the next half-century and beyond—Nixon exploited America’s xenophobic suspicions and reflexive chauvinism with devastating consequences.” Douglas, on the other hand, was “the Democratic Party’s bright and shining hope—rich, smart, and charismatic—who, as one of the first women in the U.S. Senate, would be a powerful voice for an enlightened social policy.”
I can’t help thinking that 256 pages of this is going to be very hard going. It appears to be history of the Brodie-Morris-Perlstein school — over written and under researched. And, indeed, it turns out that Roger Morris was Ms. Denton’s collaborator on her earlier history of Las Vegas.
The Beast excerpt condemns the Nixon campaign’s “Pink Sheet” (“implying that she was a communist, ‘hinting darkly at secret ties,’ as one historian put it”) without noting that it had been taken verbatim from an ad run by one of Douglas’ Democratic opponents in the primary campaign. No doubt the book will deal with this inconvenient truth at some length.
In the mid-1970s, while researching President Nixon’s memoirs, I had the opportunity to interview Paul Ziffren, the legendary Los Angeles lawyer and power broker who had managed the 1950 Douglas campaign. He told me that, while there had been rough moments, they occurred on both sides. Her dismissal of Nixon as a “pipsqueak,” and her talk about “the backwash of Republican young men in dark shirts” were no less provocative than some flyers printed on pink paper stock — only less credible and, therefore, less effective. And even Fawn Brodie admitted that Douglas got caught misrepresenting Nixon’s record.
In 1977 Jimmy Roosevelt —FDR’s eldest son, who stood in for Douglas when she decided to stay in Washington rather than face Nixon in the first of their three scheduled public debates— told me that her crushing defeat was the result of her high handed manner and badly run campaign.
7 November 1950: Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas emerges from the voting booth after casting her ballot in the California Senate race.
Ms. Denton charges that during the campaign Nixon called Mrs. Douglas —who was married to movie star Melvyn Douglas, whose given name was Melvyn Hesselberg— “Mrs Hesselberg.”
This ugly charge has become uncritically accepted as part of the ’50 campaign lore. But the first time it appeared was forty-two years after the event, in a singly-sourced statement attributed to a Douglas supporter in Greg Mitchell’s 1992 book Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady. On page 139 he wrote:
Occasionally, in public appearances, Nixon himself would “slip” and refer to his opponent as Helen Hesselberg, before correcting himself.
Mr. Mitchell provides four footnotes for page 139 — but none of them pins down this serious new claim. He revisits the story on page 239 and this time the footnote attributes it to an individual identified in the text as “Douglas backer Jean Sieroty.”
No contemporary press accounts or analyses mention any such a statement(s). Nor did Mrs. Douglas include it in her discussion of campaign excesses in her memoirs. Neither Professor Brodie nor Mr. Morris, whose books preceded Mr. Mitchell’s, claim that Nixon ever said those words; and Mr. Morris writes at length about some of the ugly ambient anti-semitism that unquestionably surrounded the campaign. Presumably Mr. Ziffren and Mr. Roosevelt would have remembered any Nixon references to “Mrs. Hesselberg.” It will be interesting to see Ms. Denton’s sourcing for this story.
I suspect that this “Mrs. Hesselberg” charge is in the same category as the even more widely accepted claim that Nixon said that his opponent was “pink right down to her underwear.”
Although many accounts make it sound as if this was a recurring punchline of Nixon’s campaign rhetoric, there is no record of his ever having made what would have been a highly salacious (and therefore highly notable) remark at that time. The actual claim was that he had used it at a closed-door meeting with fat cats. But that was only based on a single second hand report only quoted several years later in an article in The New Republic. (That was the source Mrs. Douglas cited for the claim in her memoirs.)
The considerably post-facto and uncorroborated second-hand reports of a “Douglas backer” and a New Republic reporter are mighty thin reeds on which to hang such serious charges in any work of history that wants to be taken seriously.
Mrs. Douglas was an attractive candidate but a difficult colleague and a bad campaigner. To put it mildly, her own party was less than enthusiastically behind her. The incumbent Democratic Senator (against whom she had run in the primary before his health required him to vacate the seat) made radio ads endorsing Nixon. Congressman John F. Kennedy famously personally delivered a $1000 check from his father for the Nixon campaign. (In her book, Ms. Denton apparently inflates the amount to $150,000 — which is either an example of gross negligence or a really embarrassing typo.) And President Truman, whose cordial dislike for Douglas was ill-concealed, refused to campaign for her; his lukewarm endorsement, only issued on the eve of the election, was far too little far too late.
Last year —on the occasion of the opening in Los Angeles of a new play called Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for Helen Gahagan Douglas— I wrote here at some length about some of these and other Nixon-Douglas disputes.
The 1950 California Senate race needs and deserves a serious, well-researched, and objective study. Alas, it appears that Ms. Denton’s book isn’t going to change that situation. In the meantime, anyone who wants to understand what really happened should consult the relevant chapters in Irwin F. Gellman’s rigorously researched and scrupulously reported 1999 book The Contender: Richard Nixon: The Congress Years, 1946-1952.
7 November 1950: Richard and Pat Nixon are joined by two-year-old daughter Julie at the polling place in Los Angeles.
Ron Silver died in his sleep on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 62.
When I was named editor of Saturday Review in 1984, one of my first tasks was to liven up that distinguished by moribund institution. In my search for interesting and unusual reviewers and writers, I came across the information that Ron Silver spoke and read Chinese.
In fact, as I discovered when we met, he had majored in Chinese and Spanish at SUNY Binghamton, and then taken a Masters in Chinese at St. John’s, followed by a year on scholarship at the University of Taiwan. He spent almost half of that time backpacking through the Golden Triangle. Or, as I would put it to him, “backpacking”. He was too serious to be a tourist; and too smart to be on some Pineapple Express. What else was left but CIA? His reply to my questioning and teasing would always be one of those patented Silverian smiles, half way between smug and inscrutable. (He later told Cindy Adams that he was, in fact, working for the Company: ”I thought it was patriotic. But then time came that life, love and girls distracted me.” But I bet he said it with one of those same smiles.)
He wrote some reviews for us and, for the September 1986 issue, he interviewed China’s foremost female writer — the non-English speaking Zhang Jie. In several hundred words he sketched the history of feminism and popular literature under communism in China. He wrote with real insight and considerable style. (Not to mention that, despite the heavy demands of his day jobs, his print-ready copy was always delivered on time.)
“We Chinese open our gifts after the guests leave — unlike Westerners who share them with others publicly. The content is the same.”
The subject was sex, not birthday presents. The speaker was the feminist author Zhang Jie. A striking women whose jet-black hair is streaked with gray, she represnts a new breed of Chinese writer. Apparently, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution, these artists feel free to discuss the angst of the individual —including some matters of romance, love and sex — without the traditional ideological packaging.
For over 5,000 years, the burden of social responsibility fell heavily on Chinese women. Female oppression was brutal and deeply entrenched; female infanticide and foot binding were widely practiced. After marriage, women went from servitude in their homes to servitude in their mother-in-laws’. Until 1949, in fact, wives were called “neiren,” or “inside persons.”
Zhang’s heroines are often “inside persons” who break out. They are outsiders, strong women unafraid of taking risks — not unlike Zhang herself. In a land where divorce still carries a stigma, Zhang is divorced with one child. During the Cultural Revolution she was “sent down” to work in the countryside, an experience which shaped her current belief in women’s superior abilities to withstand adversity.
Ron was already widely known and recognized as a young TV star (he was Valerie Harper’s swinging bachelor neighbor on Rhoda) and a journeyman movie actor before a breakthrough role in 1983’s Silkwood.
He was interested in politics and fascinated by RN, so we started meeting every so often —usually at Orso, but sometimes at home— for dinner. In those days Adam and Alexandra were toddlers, but his wife Lynne joined us whenever she could. He was a great and expansive raconteur with an observant eye, a lively wit, and, not surprisingly, the ability to supply dialog and dialects and shtick.
He was a hidebound Democrat, but his curiosity about RN —and particularly about his foreign policy and the way his mind worked— was as sincere as it was intense and challenging. I like to think that he put some of these conversations to use when he played Henry Kissinger (to Beau Bridges’ RN) in the 1995 TV movie Kissinger and Nixon.
By the late 1980s he was embarked on a political journey that included being president of Actors’ Equity (1991-2000) and co-founder and president of the Creative Coalition (1989-1993). He became a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was on the Board of Advisors of the Israel Project; and on the advisory board of Scooter Libby’s Defense Trust.
He was an admirer, a supporter, and a friend of Rudy Giuliani.
On The West Wing, he played Bruno Gianelli, the political consultant who manages President Bartlett’s re-election campaign.
Apparently Ron —a longtime smoker with a particular fondness for big cigars— was diagnosed with esophageal cancer two years ago. He kept the diagnosis to himself and fought the disease right to the end. That knowledge makes this clip from an appearance six months ago on David Frost’s British TV show particularly poignant and painful.
The Los Angeles Times’ ”Top of the Ticket” blog noted:
As you can imagine, yesterday’s death of Ron Silver from esophageal cancer at 62 is inspiring many conservative ecomiums for the liberal actor who full-throatedly embraced the reelection of President George W. Bush in 2004. In a speech to the Republican National Convention, Silver admitted being “a well-recognized liberal,” but rapped his colleagues:
I find it ironic that many human rights advocates and outspoken members of my own entertainment community are often on the front lines to protest repression … but they are usually the first ones to oppose any use of force to take care of these horrors that they catalogue repeatedly.
Under the unwavering leadership of President Bush, the cause of freedom and democracy is being advanced by the courageous men and women serving in our armed services. The president is doing exactly the right thing.
In Hollywood, of course, it’s slightly dangerous to veer off the approved ideological path, but Silver’s liberal bona fides were unassailable, and he was able to cross party lines without much repercussion.
Although he didn’t know of any jobs he lost because of his beliefs, he was realistic about the fact that he was very much the odd man out in an instinctively liberal profession. He said that after his speech at the Republican Convention “The phone stopped ringing . . . nada . . . not a thing.”
The New York Times‘ obituary is headed “Persuasive Actor and Activist” and deftly handles the latter characterization:
An activist most frequently allied with left-wing issues, he was president of Actors’ Equity, the stage actors union, for most of the 1990s and was a co-founder of the Creative Coalition, a group that advocates for First Amendment rights, public education and arts support. He campaigned for Bill Clinton for president.
“I’m an actor by calling but an activist by inclination,” Mr. Silver said in a 1994 interview.
Still, he had contrary impulses, and he paid attention to them. He was an advocate for President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan, and he supported Mr. Giuliani’s campaign for mayor of New York in 1994. In 2004, he made headlines when he was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan, supporting the nomination of President George W. Bush for a second term, largely because of the president’s stance against Islamic terrorism. He supported Mr. Giuliani for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.
Alas, the Times ends its notice on a churlish note. After mentioning his family (but not that they were with him when he died), it concludes:
His acting awed them, his conservative streak confounded them, [his brother] Mitchell Silver said.
“Ron’s politics, as far as I know, were not shared by anyone he knew, except for the people he knew because of his politics,” Mitchell Silver said. He paused and added, “He told me that he did vote for Barack Obama in the end.”
(Walter Isaacson’s Kissinger: A Biography was the basis for Kissinger and Nixon, a 1995 made-for-TV movie that starred Beau Bridges as RN and Ron Silver as HAK. The screenplay was by Lionel Chetwynd; the director was Daniel Petrie. Ron Silver’s other notable film roles included Alan Dershowitz in Reversal of Fortune, Angelo Dundee in Ali, and the deliciously villainous Senator Aaron McComb in Timecop. On Broadway he won the Tony for Best Actor for his role opposite Joe Mantegna and Madonna in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow.)
