by Peggy Noonan
He pushed down income taxes, too, from a high of 70% when he entered the White House to a new low of 28% when he left, igniting the long boom that, for all its ups and downs, is with us still. He believed, as JFK did, that a rising tide lifts all boats. He did much more, returning respect to our armed forces, changing 50-year-old assumptions about the place of government and the place of the citizen in the new America.
What an era his was. What a life he lived. He changed history for the better and was modest about it. He didn’t bray about his accomplishments but saw them as the work of the American people. He did not see himself as entitled, never demanded respect, preferred talking to hotel doormen rather than State Department functionaries because he thought the doorman brighter and more interesting. When I pressed him once, a few years out of the presidency, to say what he thought the meaning of his presidency was, he answered, reluctantly, that it might be fairly said that he “advanced the boundaries of freedom in a world more at peace with itself.” And so he did. And what could be bigger than that?
* * *
To be young and working in his White House at that time in human history was—well, we felt privileged to be there, with him. He made us feel not that we were born in a time of trouble but that we’d been born, luckily, at a time when we could end some trouble. We believed him. I’d think: This is a wonderful time to be alive. And when he died I thought: If I’d walked into the Oval Office 20 years ago to tell him that, he’d look up from whatever he was writing, smile, look away for a second and think, It’s pretty much always a wonderful time.
And then he’d go back to his work.
And now he has left us. We will talk the next 10 days about who he was and what he did. It’s not hard to imagine him now in a place where his powers have been returned to him and he’s himself again—sweet-hearted, tough, funny, optimistic and very brave. You imagine him snapping one of those little salutes as he turns to say goodbye. Today I imagine saluting right back. Do you? We should do it the day he’s buried, or when he lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda. We should say, “Good on you, Dutch.” Thanks from a grateful country.
CHAPTER 3
As I Was Telling Kate…
I call this chapter As I Was Telling Kate because my friend Kate O’Beirne will like the title.
Its subject? History can move you. The people in history can move you. Valor can be found in surprising places.
* * *
Those Who Make Us Say “Oh!”
The Wall Street Journal: May 23, 2009
More than most nations, America has been, from its start, a hero-loving place. Maybe part of the reason is that at our founding we were a Protestant nation and not a Catholic one, and so we made “saints” of civil and political figures. George Washington was our first national hero, known everywhere, famous to children. When he died we had our first true national mourning, with cities and states reenacting his funeral. There was the genius-cluster that surrounded him, and invented us—Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton. Through much of the 20th century our famous heroes were in sports (Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, the Babe, Joltin’ Joe) the arts (Clark Gable, Robert Frost) business and philanthropy (from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates) and religion (Billy Graham). Nobody does fame like America, and they were famous.
The category of military hero—warrior—fell off a bit, in part because of the bad reputation of war. Some emerged of heroic size—Gens. Pershing and Patton, Eisenhower and Marshall. But somewhere in the 1960s I think we decided, or the makers of our culture decided, that to celebrate great warriors was to encourage war. And we always have too much of that. So they made a lot of movies depicting soldiers as victims and officers as brutish. This was especially true in the Vietnam era and the years that followed. Maybe a correction was in order: It’s good to remember war is hell. But when we removed the warrior, we removed something intensely human, something ancestral and stirring, something celebrated naturally throughout the long history of man. Also it was ungrateful: Warriors put themselves in harm’s way for us.
For Memorial Day, then, three warriors, two previously celebrated but not so known now by the young.
* * *
Alvin York was born in 1887 into a Tennessee farming family that didn’t have much, but nobody else did so it wasn’t so bad. He was the third of 11 children and had an average life for that time and place. Then World War I came. He experienced a crisis of conscience over whether to fight. His mother’s Evangelical church tugged him toward more or less pacifist thinking, but he got a draft notice in 1917, joined the Army, went overseas, read and reread his Bible, and concluded that warfare was sometimes justified.
In the battle of the Argonne in October 1918, the Allies were attempting to break German lines when York and his men came upon well-hidden machine guns on high ground. As he later put it, “The Germans got us, and they got us right smart… and I’m telling you they were shooting straight.” American soldiers “just went down like the long grass before the mowing machine at home.”
But Cpl. York and his men went behind the German lines, overran a unit and captured the enemy. Suddenly there was new machine-gun fire from a ridge, and six Americans went down. York was in command, exposed but cool, and he began to shoot. “All I could do was touch the Germans off just as fast as I could. I was sharp shooting… All the time I kept yelling at them to come down. I didn’t want to kill any more than I had to.” A German officer tried to empty his gun into York while York fired. He failed but York succeeded, the Germans surrendered, and York and his small band marched 132 German prisoners back to the American lines.
His Medal of Honor citation called him fearless, daring and heroic.
Warriors are funny people. They’re often naturally peaceable, and often do great good when they return. York went home to Tennessee, married, founded an agricultural institute (it’s still operating as an award-winning public high school) and a Bible school. They made a movie about him in 1941, the great Howard Hawks film “Sergeant York.” If you are in Manhattan this week, you may walk down York Avenue on the Upper East Side. It was named for him. He died in Nashville in 1964 at 77.
* * *
Once, 25 years ago, my father (U.S. Army, replacement troops, Italy, 1945) visited Washington, a town he’d never been to. There was a lot to see: the White House, the Lincoln Memorial. But he just wanted to see one thing, Audie Murphy’s grave.
Audie Leon Murphy was born in 1924 or 1926 (more on that in a moment) the sixth of 12 children of a Texas sharecropper. It was all hardscrabble for him: father left, mother died, no education, working in the fields from adolescence on. He was good with a hunting rifle: He said that when he wasn’t, his family didn’t eat, so yeah, he had to be good. He tried to join the Army after Pearl Harbor, was turned away as underage, came back the next year claiming to be 18 (he was probably 16) and went on to a busy war, seeing action as an infantryman in Sicily, Salerno and Anzio. Then came southern France, where the Germans made the mistake of shooting Audie Murphy’s best friend, Lattie Tipton. Murphy wiped out the machine gun crew that did it.
On Jan. 26, 1945, Lt. Murphy was engaged in a battle in which his unit took heavy fire and he was wounded. He ordered his men back. From his Medal of Honor citation:
Behind him… one of our tank destroyers received a direct hit and began to burn. Its crew withdrew to the woods. 2d Lt. Murphy continued to direct artillery fire, which killed large numbers of the advancing enemy infantry. With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50 caliber machine gun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from three sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back.
Murphy returned to Texas a legend. He was also 5 foot 7, having grown two inches while away. He became an actor (44 films, mostly Westerns) and businessman. He died in a p
lane crash in 1971 and was buried with full honors at Arlington, but he did a warrior-like thing. He asked that the gold leaf normally put on the gravestone of a Medal of Honor recipient not be used. He wanted a plain GI headstone. Some worried this might make his grave harder to find. My father found it, and he was not alone. Audie Murphy’s grave is the most visited site at Arlington with the exception of John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame.
* * *
I thought of these two men the other night after I introduced at a dinner a retired Air Force general named Chuck Boyd. He runs Business Executives for National Security, a group whose members devote time and treasure to helping the government work through various 21st-century challenges. I mentioned that Chuck had been shot down over Vietnam on his 105th mission in April 1966 and was a POW for 2,488 days. He’s the only former POW of the era to go on to become a four-star general.
When I said “2,488,” a number of people in the audience went “Oh!” I heard it up on the podium. They didn’t know because he doesn’t talk about it, and when asked to, he treats it like nothing, a long night at a bad inn. Warriors always do that. They all deserve the “Oh!”
A Day at the Beach
How Ensign John Whitehead Helped Liberate Europe
The Wall Street Journal: July 5, 2008
It was May 1944, and 22-year-old John Whitehead of Montclair, N.J., an ensign on the USS Thomas Jefferson, was placed in charge of five of the landing craft for the invasion of Europe. Each would ferry 25 soldiers from the TJ, as they called it, onto the shore of France. John’s landing site was to be a 50-yard stretch of shoreline dubbed Dog Red Beach. It fell near the middle of the sector called Omaha Beach, which in turn fell in the middle of the entire assault.
The TJ sailed to Portsmouth Harbor, which was jam-packed with ships. On June 1 the Army troops arrived, coming up the gangway one by one. “They were very quiet,” John said this week. Word came on June 4 that they’d leave that night, but they were ordered back in a storm. The next morning, June 5, the rain was still coming down, but the seas were calmer. Around 8 that night, they cast off to cross the Channel. The skies were dark, rain lashed the deck, and the TJ rolled in the sea. At midnight they dropped anchor nine miles off the French coast. They ate a big breakfast of eggs and bacon. At 2 a.m. the crew began lowering the Higgins boats—“a kind of floating boxcar, rectangular, with high walls”—over the side by crane. The soldiers had to climb down big nets to get aboard. “They had practiced, but as Eisenhower always said, ‘In wartime, plans are only good until the moment you try to execute them.’”
The Higgins boats pitched in the choppy sea. The soldiers, loaded down “like mountaineers” with rifles, flamethrowers, radio equipment, artillery parts, tarps, food, water, “70 pounds in all”—had trouble getting from the nets to the boats. “I saw a poor soul slip from the net into the water. He sank like a stone. He just disappeared in the depths of the sea. There was nothing we could do.” So they boarded the boats on the deck and hoisted them down to the water.
It took John’s five little boats four hours to cover the nine miles to the beach. “They were the worst hours of our lives. It was pitch black, cold, and the rain was coming down in sheets drenching us. The boats were being tossed in the waves, making all of us violently sick. We’d all been given the big breakfast. Hardly anyone could hold it down. Packed in like that, with the boat’s high walls. A cry went up: ‘For Christ’s sake, do it in your helmet!’
“Around 4 a.m. the dawn broke and a pale light spread across the sea, and now we could see that we were in the middle of an armada—every kind of boat, destroyers, probably the greatest array of sea power ever gathered.”
Now they heard the sound, the deep boom of the shells from the U.S. battleships farther out at sea, shelling the beach to clear a path. Above, barely visible through clouds, they saw the transport planes pushing through to drop paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. “Those were brave men.”
At 5 a.m. they were close enough to shore to see landmarks—a spit of land, a slight rise of a bluff. In front of them they saw some faster, sleeker British boats trying desperately to stay afloat in the choppy water. As the Americans watched, three of the boats flipped over and sank, drowning all the men. A British navigator went by in a different kind of boat. “He was standing up and he called out to my friend in a very jaunty British accent, ‘I say, fellows, which way is it to Pointe du Hoc?’ That was one of the landmarks, and the toughest beach of all. My friend yelled out that it was up to our right. ‘Very good!’ he cried out, and then went on by with a little wave of his hand.”
Closer to shore, a furious din—“It was like a Fourth of July celebration multiplied by a thousand.” By 6 a.m. they were 800 yards from shore. All five boats of the squadron had stayed together. The light had brightened enough that John could see his wristwatch. “At 6:20 I waved them in with a hard chop of my arm: Go!”
* * *
They faced a barrier, made a sharp left, ran parallel to the shore looking for an opening, got one, turned again toward the beach. They hit it, were in a foot or two of water. The impact jarred loose the landing ramps to release the soldiers as planned. But on John’s boat, it didn’t work. He scrambled to the bow, got a hammer, pounded the stuck bolt. The ramp crashed down and the soldiers lunged forth. Some were hit with shrapnel as they struggled through to the beach. Others made it to land only to be hit as they crossed it. The stuck ramp probably saved John’s life. After he’d rushed forward to grab the hammer, he turned and saw the coxswain he’d been standing next to had been hit and killed by an incoming shell.
The troops of Omaha Beach took terrible fire. Half the soldiers from John’s five boats were killed or wounded. “It was a horrible sight. But I had to concentrate on doing my job.” To make room for the next wave of landings, they raised the ramp, backed out, turned around and sped back to the TJ. “I remember waving hello to the soldiers in the incoming boats, as if we were all on launches for a pleasure cruise. I remember thinking how odd that such gestures of civility would persist amid such horror.”
Back at the TJ, he was told to take a second breakfast in the wardroom—white tablecloths, steward’s mates asking if he’d like more. He thought it unreal: “from Dog Red Beach to the Ritz.” He heard in the background the quiet boom of the liberation of Europe. Then back to a Higgins boat for another run at the beach. This time the ramp lowered, and he got off. Dog Red Beach was secure. The bodies of the dead and wounded had been carried up onto a rise below a bluff. He felt thankful he had survived. “Then I took a few breaths and felt elated, proud to have played a part in maybe the biggest battle in history.”
* * *
John went on to landings in Marseilles, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. After he came home, he went on to chair Goldman Sachs, work in Ronald Reagan’s State Department and head great organizations such as the International Rescue Committee. He is, in that beautiful old phrase, a public citizen.
But if you asked him today his greatest moment, he’d say that day on the beach, when he was alive and grateful for it. “At that moment, dead tired, soaked to the skin, I would not have wanted to be anywhere else in the world.”
It is silly to think one generation is “better” than another. No one born in 1920 is, by virtue of that fact, better than someone born in 1960. But it is true that each era has a certain mood, certain assumptions—in John’s era, sacrifice—and each generation distinguishes itself in time, or doesn’t. John’s did. He himself did. And what better day than today to say: Thanks, John.
How to Find Grace after Disgrace
The Wall Street Journal: July 12, 2013
What a scandal it was. It had everything—beautiful women, spies, a semi-dashing government minister married to a movie star, a society doctor who functioned, essentially, as a pimp. And the backdrop was an august English country estate where intrigue had occurred before.
Unlike modern political sex scandals, which are cold and strange, it was what a sca
ndal should be: dark, glamorous. Human. No furtive pictures of privates sent to strangers, no haggling over the prostitute’s bill.
President Kennedy loved hearing about the story, and when he was on the phone with his friend the British prime minister, as he often was, asking advice on Cuba or de Gaulle, he was as likely to be asking, sympathetically but pointedly as one who loves gossip would: How’s it going with Profumo? What’s the latest?
It was 50 years ago, the spring and summer of 1963. The prime minister was Harold Macmillan, the last Conservative giant before Margaret Thatcher but more broadly beloved, in part because he wasn’t all that conservative. He was in tune with his times, until he wasn’t. He’d been in government 11 years.
It came out that his secretary of state for war, John Profumo, 48, had become involved with a group of people who gathered at Cliveden, the country estate of the Astor family, about whom controversy had swirled since World War II. Years later Macmillan would write in his diary: “The old ‘Cliveden’ set was disastrous politically. The new ‘Cliveden’ set is said to be equally disastrous morally.”
It was for Profumo. At a pool party hosted by the society doctor, he met a young woman, 19-year-old Christine Keeler, who was either a dancer or a prostitute depending on the day and claimant. They commenced an affair. But Miss Keeler was also, she later said, romantically involved with the Soviet naval attaché assigned to London. Yevgeny Ivanov was there the day Profumo met her. And as all but children would have known, a Soviet military attaché was a Soviet spy.