What he does not talk about is his retirement, a subject of much speculation on Wall Street, where the analysts love his company but fear the repercussions if anything takes Hank Greenberg out of the captain’s chair. He’s likely to snap something like “I enjoy what I am doing. Besides, no one’s offered me another job.”
Hank Greenberg and Al Neuharth, two smart, ambitious, and demanding business entrepreneurs, built highly profitable empires a long way from their humble origins. While doing so, they never lost touch with the lessons of those earliest years, when they worked so hard for so little, when they volunteered for dangerous duty as they came of age and returned home with a new sense of the possibilities for their lives.
THE ARENA
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed, to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.”
—From John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, January 1961
Given the ambitions of his father and family, John Kennedy’s decision to pursue a public life was not wholly altruistic, but in his eloquent inaugural speech he gave voice to his generation on the issues of peace and war, and also on the importance of entering the arena beyond the battlefield. In the postwar years, politics was a noble calling and a natural extension of the lives of the men and women who had made so many sacrifices and learned so many lessons during the war. Their ideologies and their ambitions spanned a broad spectrum, but they came to the public arena determined to have their say in the future of the country and of the world.
Some, such as Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, a tail gunner in the Marine Corps during the war, emerged with a dark and twisted view of what was necessary to advance the cause of liberty. Others drew entirely different lessons from their common experiences. John Kennedy, the scion of a rich and powerful Boston family, a decorated Navy veteran, ran as a Democrat against Republican Richard Nixon, also a Navy veteran, the son of a poor Quaker family from California. Senators Barry Goldwater and George McGovern were both pilots from western states during the war, and when they landed in the U.S. Senate they were at opposite ends of the political field. Strom Thurmond and Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, both World War II veterans, represent the same state, South Carolina, in the U.S. Senate. They’re equally colorful and canny, politicians with Old South manners and rich accents, but one is a Republican and the other a Democrat.
From Eisenhower through George Bush, all but one American president was a veteran of World War II. The exception was Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate who was commissioned as an officer just as the war ended. From the fifties through the seventies, the halls of Congress were dominated by World War II veterans. Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a classic liberal, had been a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps. Senators Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, George McGovern of South Dakota, Edmund Muskie of Maine, Jacob Javits and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of NewYork, Warren Magnuson of Washington, George Smathers of Florida, John Tower of Texas, John Glenn of Ohio, Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Frank Church of Idaho—all World War II veterans.
State capitols were the fiefdoms of governors such as Orville Freeman in Minnesota, who still carried a prominent scar on his jaw from a gunshot wound he’d received while serving in the Marines. Governor John Connally of Texas saw considerable action in the Pacific with the Navy, but his most serious wounds came when he was riding in a limousine with fellow Navy veteran John Kennedy on November 22, 1963. William Scranton, governor of Pennsylvania, was a World War II pilot. Governor Harold Hughes of Iowa was an Army infantryman. George Wallace was a defiant symbol of segregation as governor of Alabama, but he had a notable combat record as a crewman on Army Air Corps bombers in the Pacific.
They came out of the same war to their political posts, but they were not in lockstep in their ideologies. Their varied views on social, diplomatic, and military questions were another affirmation of the independence and skepticism that Andy Rooney so admired when they were men in uniform. They emerged from the war with those qualities intact and reenforced. They took them to the political arena along with their hard-won understanding that the world is a large and complicated place, a personal self-confidence gained in the most trying circumstances, and their determination to influence the fate of their time.
They were immediately faced with a new war, a Cold War that would go on for forty years and threaten the entire world with nuclear destruction of a far greater magnitude than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. An ally turned foe, Joseph Stalin, had a voracious appetite for power and a nuclear arsenal to back it up. The day he died in 1953, a refugee from eastern Europe living in our South Dakota community said to my mother, “They’re stoking it up down below for old Joe today.”
Stalin had galvanized the West into forming a new military alliance, NATO. China under Mao Zedong and communism set off a wave of other fears, leading to another shooting war, this one on the Korean peninsula.
Then there were the unresolved issues at home, particularly of race and broader economic opportunity. There were great public-works projects to construct. The men and women of this generation moved from the problems of war to the problems of peace with alacrity. They were not always correct in their approach, but they were not intimidated. They also had a deeply personal understanding of the consequences of war as an instrument of national policy. They were the young men another generation of old men had sent to war. Now they had in their hands those same decisions for another generation of young Americans, this time in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War deeply divided not only the country but the World War II generation as well. The leading hawks and some of the most eloquent doves were from that generation. The new war also created a cultural schism. Those in political life who publicly supported the war effort while wrestling with private doubts had a visceral antipathy for the long hair, language, and flag-burning ways of the antiwar demonstrators. Then, too, they knew that in the working-class neighborhoods and on the farms, there were no deferments and little access to alternative service.
No two politicians symbolized the differences with greater clarity than two friends in the U.S. Senate, both members of the Republican party: Bob Dole of Russell, Kansas, and Mark Hatfield of Salem, Oregon. One the son of a small-town jack-of-all-trades, the other the son of a railroad blacksmith. One an infantry lieutenant, the other a Navy ensign.
Mark Hatfield
MARK HATFIELD
“I could almost feel the hate leaving me. It was almost a spiritual experience.”
SENATOR MARK HATFIELD of Oregon is a politician whose central political philosophy was defined by the interlocking experiences he had as a young man raised in a strongly religious family and by what he saw as a Navy ensign in the Pacific, particularly at Hiroshima. Consequently, he was always a unique member of the Republican party in the U.S. Congress. While other members of the GOP were aggressive defenders of American involvement in Vietnam, he was an early critic of that war. He also voted against his own Republican presidents, Reagan and Bush, when they sent American troops to Grenada and the Persian Gulf.
Hatfield, a teetotaler and devout member of the Baptist church, also split from his party on the issue of gun control and the death penalty, although he did support the antiabortion views of the vast majority of his fellow Republicans. Despite the differences on some of the major litmus tests of the GOP, Hatfield’s place in Oregon politics was always secure.
Following the war, he earned a master’s degree at Stanford and returned to his alma mater, Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, to teach political science and serve as dean of students. He served in the state legislature, as secretary of state, and in two terms as governor before winning the first of his four elections for senator in 1966.
Before Pearl Harbor, Hatfield said his family had been strongly isolationist, explaining, “My father had been in the Navy in World War I. . . . We were very patriotic . . . but you didn’t want to be
come cannon fodder for European wars. We thought we were protected by the oceans. Why should we get involved? Pearl Harbor changed all of that.”
Hatfield was a freshman at Willamette when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He immediately joined the Naval Reserve and accelerated his studies so he could be in training by the winter of 1943. He remembers it was a jolt to go from the mild winters of the Pacific Northwest to the harsher ones in upstate New York, where he trained to become first a midshipman and then an ensign, assigned to amphibious landing craft duty.
However, he was such a novice that when he was told to report to Coronado Beach, California, for assignment as a wave commander, he remembers his first reaction “was that I was going to do a lot of close-order drills for WAVES [the newly formed women’s branch of the Navy]. I found out that wasn’t the waves they were talking about. They meant ocean waves to hit the beaches in those flat-bottom boats.”
After additional training in Hawaii, Hatfield participated in the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, two of the most critical and costly battles of the war in the Pacific. As is often the case with veterans of combat, here members the comical and the tragic equally well.
Recalling the landings at Iwo Jima, he said, “Our boat was taking on water and we had to bail. We had two buckets. The first bucket load . . . they threw the bucket overboard with the water. . . . It wasn’t going to work with that bucket down in the water, so it just came to me, ‘Take off your helmets and use them—and hang on to them!’ It broke the tension and gave everyone an opportunity to laugh.”
There weren’t many other laughs on Iwo Jima or in Ensign Hatfield’s experience there, however. He was too busy making the runs from the mother ship to shore with fresh Marines, and returning with wounded Marines. The Navy maps failed to show that the approach to the landing zone was a steeply pitched beach, so many of the larger vessels were partially sunk or wrecked. That made maneuvering the small landing craft a tedious and even more hazardous affair.
It was a dangerous assignment that Hatfield repeated again and again, always aware that he could be killed at any moment, but like so many his age and in these conditions, he had what he remembers as a “certain feeling of fatalism. There is nothing you can do about it. You become oblivious to the death and wounds all around. You become a detached person, viewing it from a distance, even though it is going on right at your feet.”
Mark Hatfield, wartime
Mark Hatfield, senatorial portrait
There was something else for Hatfield: his faith. “I was raised in a very strong Christian home,” he says. “I suppose that was also part of my armor, in the sense if I got hit, I knew where I was headed. I had confidence in my faith.”
Hatfield was on the beach at Iwo Jima the day one of the most symbolic acts of World War II occurred. He remembers, “One of the guys said, ‘Hey, look!’ At the top of the rock—Suribachi—we saw the American flag being raised. It was a thrilling moment. When we saw that flag go up it really did give us a sense of victory, even though we still fought on for some time.”
The future senator from Oregon had a close-up look at other momentous occasions in the Pacific war. After participating in the Okinawa invasion, his unit was sent to the Philippines to prepare for the invasion of Japan. When the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender, Hatfield suddenly had an altogether different assignment: he was part of the fleet that accompanied Douglas MacArthur into Japan to begin the occupation.
“We sailed by the USS Missouri as the Japanese diplomats were going aboard to sign the terms of surrender. Quite a moment. MacArthur had instructed the Japanese to place a white sheet in front of every gun emplacement, so when we were coming into Tokyo Bay it was like a checkerboard on all sides of us. We would have been caught in a murderous cross fire in the invasion. It would have been terrible, terrible, invading Japan,” Hatfield concludes.
In September 1945, Hatfield had a one-day experience that would affect his life and his political behavior forever. “I was part of a crew of people that went into Hiroshima,” he says. “This was about a month after the bomb had been dropped. There was a smell to the city—and total silence. It was amazing to see the utter and indiscriminate devastation in every direction, and to think just one bomb had done it. We had no comprehension of the power of that bomb until then.”
Hatfield says as the American party sailed into the canals, Japanese parents and their children watched silently. “When we landed, the little kids saw we weren’t going to kill or shoot them, so they began to gather around. We realized they were very hungry, so we took our lunches and broke them up and gave them to as many kids as we could.”
In that moment, Hatfield came to realize something that stays with him to this day. “You learn to hate with a passion in wartime,” he says. “If you don’t kill your enemy, they’ll kill you. But sharing those sandwiches with the people who had been my enemy was sort of a therapy for me. I could almost feel my hate leaving me. It was almost a spiritual experience.”
When he made his way to the U.S. Senate, Hatfield brought with him not only what he calls “an unshakeable anti-nuke” philosophy, but also a firsthand understanding of what motivated Ho Chi Minh and his forces. In addition to seeing the flag raised on Iwo Jima, the USS Missouri when the surrender ceremonies were getting under way, and the devastation of Hiroshima, Hatfield saw a future battleground, Vietnam.
“We were sent to Haiphong to pick up Chinese nationalist troops and transport them to northern China, where they would fight the Communist forces of Mao Zedong.” In Vietnam, Hatfield visited Hanoi, where Ho Chi Minh, who had been an American ally against the Japanese, was organizing his forces for independence. “Seeing the terrible misery imposed on the Vietnamese people by the French affected my position on the Vietnam War from the very beginning,” Hatfield says. “I never could buy the idea that America somehow had a national interest out there, or was threatened.”
Hatfield became one of the most persistent and articulate opponents of the Vietnam War as soon as he was in the Senate, often joined by fellow World War II veteran Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, another product of a religious family who had learned to abhor war during his heroic service in the Army Air Corps. They were among the earliest congressional critics of the war, often mocked by conservative voices as being somehow soft on the question of how to face down communism.
At least McGovern had support within his own party. Hatfield was often alone within the GOP ranks, but it did not deter him. Simultaneously he devoted a good deal of his energies to checking the growth of nuclear weapons and power. “I was persuaded,” he says, “that the genie was out of the bottle, but somehow we had to try to put it back in. I devoted myself to stopping underground nuclear testing and controlling the military spending on nuclear weapons. Also, I was opposed to the use of nuclear power for electricity. That, to me, is the greatest environmental problem that we have.”
Through the years Hatfield remained a consistent foe of nuclear weapons and war in general. In addition to his persistent stand against Vietnam, one of the reasons he wound up on President Nixon’s infamous “enemies list,” Hatfield also opposed Ronald Reagan’s invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, and he was even more critical of President Bush’s plan to go to war in the Persian Gulf. He says, “Why, I couldn’t believe the American people approved the . . . war in the Gulf. To me, it was nothing but an oil war.” Hatfield was one of just two Republicans to vote against approving Operation Desert Storm. He also criticized the dispatch of an American peacekeeping force to Bosnia, wondering aloud what American troops could do to reverse eight hundred years of history.
As time went on, Senator Hatfield was increasingly isolated within his own party, and not just because of his views on war and nuclear power. He had cast the vote that defeated the proposed amendment to the Constitution requiring a balanced federal budget. At the time he was chairman of the mighty Senate Appropriations Commi
ttee, so his negative vote was a powerful statement—and unacceptable to the class of aggressively conservative younger Republicans who had been elected to the Senate in the Republican Revolution. They wanted to strip him of his chairmanship or find some other way to punish him. Hatfield was astonished. He’d even offered to resign his seat rather than be forced to vote against his conscience. As Hatfield told The Washington Post, “I said what I would do from the beginning. I at no time got any indication that I was going to be chastised or disciplined for voting my conscience.”
Hatfield stood his ground and won the day, garnering praise primarily from older senators who recognized that instances of individual courage in their chamber were rare. But Hatfield also knew it was time to go, after four terms in the Senate. In his last election, his margin of victory had fallen after an embarrassing and surprising development. “St. Mark,” as he is sometimes called, had been formally rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for not reporting gifts and loans from friends and lobbyists. Now he was plainly much more out of step with his party on the issues that defined the GOP agenda in the nineties.
So in 1996, Mark Hatfield retired and returned to his beloved Oregon to teach and share in the benefits he had brought to his state during thirty years in the Senate. He left as he arrived, a man of strong, independent convictions and still a member of the Republican party, despite the changes in the DNA of the GOP in recent years.
Commenting on the Republican newcomers, Hatfield told a reporter, “There are those who think we should be of one mind. They feel, perhaps, that diversity in the party is a weakness, not a strength. I’m an Old Guard Republican. The founders of our party were for small business, education, cutting the military budget. That was our platform in 1856 and I think it’s still a darned good one.”
Tom Brokaw Page 28