A) a train station
B) a tourism information booth
C) a root beer stand
5. It was a dry-goods store from 1879 until the turn of the century. Then, in 1905, a hotel chain decided to buy the land, tear it down, and build a modern building on it. They offered $75,000 for it. The owner agreed to sell...unless the Texas legislature wanted to match the offer. But the legislature wouldn’t authorize the funds to save it. Was it:
A) the Alamo
B) Sam Houston’s birthplace
C) the Emma Lapham house, where the first baby was born to a Texas settler
6. Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was shot, is now a popular Lincoln museum and working theater. But it was almost demolished by:
A) John Ford himself, a Lincoln supporter who was heartbroken to have played any part in the assassination
B) The U.S. government, at Andrew Johnson’s command. He thought it was in the nation’s best interest to eliminate all memories of the tragedy.
C) An angry mob that gathered after the assassination. They wanted to burn it down, but were dispersed.
7. “Old Ironsides,” the U.S.S. Constitution, is a tourist attraction afloat in the Boston Navy Yard today. But the famous ship was left to fall apart until 1927, when:
A) schoolchildren contributed their pennies to save it.
B) the Boston Red Sox played a series of exhibition games to save it.
C) Al Capone, striving for good publicity, donated the money to save it.
Danny Thomas’s real name was Muzyad Yakhoob.
TRUE LIES:
THE TONKIN INCIDENT
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson claimed that the U.S. was forced into the Vietnam War by an unprovoked North Vietnamese attack. Did it really happen that way—or was it a phony story to get the U.S. into the war? Here’s a look at what happened, from It’s a Conspiracy! by The National Insecurity Council.
Late in the evening on August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson interrupted television programs on all three national networks with grim news. He announced that American destroyers off the coast of North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin had been attacked twice by the North Vietnamese—without provocation.
He promised reprisals; in fact, he declared that U.S. planes were on their way to bomb North Vietnam as he spoke.
Three days later, President Johnson asked Congress to pass an emergency resolution that would authorize him to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”
Congress obliged: The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed 98-2 in the Senate, and Johnson used it to launch the longest war in American history—a war that cost more than $400 billion, killed 58,000 U.S. service people, and divided the country more than any other conflict since the Civil War.
Yet, as incredible as it seems, evidence now suggests that LBJ and his advisors wanted a war in Vietnam—and conspired to start it with a lie.
THE OFFICIAL STORY
First attack: August 2, 1964. According to government reports, three North Vietnamese PT boats, unprovoked and without warning, fired torpedoes and shells at the Maddox, a U.S. destroyer on patrol about 30 miles off the coast of North Vietnam. The destroyer and support aircraft fired back and drove them off.
Second attack: August 4, 1964. North Vietnamese PT boats made another “deliberate attack” on two United States destroyers—the Maddox and the Turner Joy—which were patrolling international waters about 65 miles off the coast of North Vietnam. This attack was described as “much fiercer than the first one,” lasting about three hours in rough seas, with bad weather and low visibility. The government said that American destroyers and aircraft fired on the vessels and sank at least two of them.
Fast food: 42% of drivers say they’ve eaten a meal while driving.
SUSPICIOUS FACTS
The First Attack
• The government lied about where the Maddox was and what it was doing on the night of the first attack:
The Maddox wasn’t in international waters. According to numerous reports, it was no farther than 10 miles—and possibly as close as four miles—from the North Vietnamese coast.
It wasn’t on a “routine patrol.” The Maddox was providing cover for South Vietnamese gunboats attacking North Vietnamese radar stations in the Gulf of Tonkin. According to former CIA station chief John Stockwell, those gunboats were “manned with CIA crew” and had been raiding North Vietnam all summer.
• The government said the attack on the Maddox was “unprovoked.” However, the Maddox’s log showed that it had fired first while North Vietnamese boats were still six miles away.
The Second Attack
• Many people doubt that the alleged August 4 attack ever occurred. They include:
The Maddox’s captain, John Herrick. He radioed that reports of an enemy attack “appear very doubtful” and said there were “no actual sightings by Maddox.”
Commander Jim Stockdale, a navy pilot who responded to the Maddox’s distress calls. According to an October 1988 article in The New American, Stockdale “found the destroyers sitting in the water firing at—nothing....Not one American out there ever saw a PT boat. There was absolutely no gunfire except our own, no PT boat wakes, not a candle light, let alone a burning ship. No one could have been there and not have been seen on such a black night.”
Twenty-three percent of Americans say it’s OK for a wife to slap her husband.
Pentagon planners who analyzed the information from Vietnam. “There was a great amount of uncertainty as to whether there was such an attack,” recalls Daniel Ellsberg, who was working with the Pentagon at the time.
President Lyndon Johnson. According to Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, “Johnson privately expressed doubts only a few days after the second attack supposedly took place, confiding to an aide, ‘Hell, those dumb sailors were just shooting flying fish.’”
• According to investigative reporter Jonathan Kwitny in his book Endless Enemies: “At one point things were so confused that the Maddox mistook the Turner Joy for a North Vietnamese ship and a gunner was ordered to fire at her point blank—which would have sunk her—but he refused the order pending an identity check. That was the closest that a U.S. ship came to being hit that night.”
The Resolution
Although the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was supposedly submitted “in response to this outrageous incident” (the second attack), the document had actually been drafted by William Bundy, Johnson’s assistant secretary of state, three months earlier.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Did our government intentionally draw the U.S. into war? Kwitny writes: “What we know is entirely consistent with the possibility that the Tonkin Gulf Incident was a put-up job, designed to sucker the North Vietnamese into providing justification for a planned U.S. expansion of the war....The North Vietnamese had every reason to believe they were under attack before they approached a U.S. ship, and they certainly were under attack before they fired a shot. The press was lied to, and so misinformed the public. We were all lied to.”
FOOTNOTE
The Tonkin Resolution was passed a few months before the 1964 presidential race between Johnson and Barry Goldwater. According to Kenneth Davis in his book Don’t Know Much About History, “the Resolution not only gave Johnson the powers he needed to increase American commitment in Vietnam, but allowed him to blunt Goldwater’s accusations that Johnson was ‘timid before Communism.’”
Ten percent of Americans say it’s OK for a husband to slap his wife.
THURBERISMS
The wit and wisdom of James Thurber, one of America’s most respected humorists.
“It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all.”
“Love is blind, but desire just doesn’t give a good goddamn.”
“Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?”
“I hate women because they always know where
things are.”
“Seeing is deceiving. It’s eating that’s believing.”
“You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.”
“Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead.”
“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.”
“It’s a naive wine, without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.”
“I have always thought of a dog lover as a dog who was in love with another dog.”
“Some American writers who have known each other for years have never met in the day time or when both are sober.”
“It’s better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
“You might as well fall flat on your face as lean too far backward.”
“Love is what you’ve been through with somebody.”
“All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.”
“I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics, but if there were fifteen months in every year, I’d only be 48.”
“Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.”
“Boys are beyond the range of anybody’s sure understanding, at least when they’re between the ages of 18 months and 90 years.”
In one recent study, 38% of American men said “they love their cars more than women.”
THE NAKED TRUTH
People in this country get very strange when they take their clothes off. Check out these excerpts from newspaper articles contributed by BRI correspondent Peter Wing.
A BIG SURPRISE
“A male motorist told authorities yesterday that a naked, red-haired woman—‘the largest woman you ever saw’—jumped out of the woods and attacked his car on a dark country road in northern Michigan.
After briefly terrorizing the motorist, the woman disappeared into the woods.”
—United Press International
AND WHAT ABOUT KETCHUP?
LANSING, MICH—Oct. 16, 1981. “Two sisters who described their nude mustard-smeared joyride in a parcel delivery truck as a religious experience have been set free....A third sister was found mentally ill; sentencing in her case has been postponed.
“The three were arrested after driving off—nude except for their shoes and smeared with mustard—in a parked United Parcel Service truck. ‘We were trying to find God,’ one of the sisters explained.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
THE CRISCO KID
“A Tifton, Georgia, man has been convicted of public indecency and placed on probation for slinging chunks of lard at women while driving a car in the nude.”
—Associated Press
HOPPING AROUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD
SANTA CRUZ, CA—“A city police officer was investigating a complaint of a disturbance at a man’s home when he spotted what looked like a tall, chocolate rabbit coming ‘hippity hoppity’ out of the yard. After a closer look, the officer discovered it was a 30-year-old female neighbor who had covered her nude body in chocolate glaze. She was disguised as the Easter bunny.”
—Associated Press
More Oklahoma households own dogs than in any other state. Texas comes in second.
“FORTUNATE” SONS
We often assume that the children of rich or famous parents have it made. Maybe not. Here are a few stories to consider.
W.C. FIELDS, JR., son of comedy great W.C. Fields As a child, Claude Fields hardly ever saw his father...or his father’s money. W. C. Fields was as cheap as he was successful. He paid his estranged wife a paltry $60-a-week allowance and refused to contribute a cent to Claude’s education. When he died, he left his wife and son only $10,000 each from his $800,000 estate, instructing that the rest be spent founding the W. C. Fields College for Orphan White Boys and Girls, Where No Religion of Any Sort Is to Be Preached. Claude, by then a successful lawyer, contested the will and won.
WILLIAM FRANKLIN, son of Benjamin Franklin
William picked up pro-British sentiments while living in London with his father in the 1750s and became an outspoken Royalist and opponent of American independence. Through his connections in the English aristocracy, he had himself appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey. In 1776, he was arrested for trying to rally opposition to the Declaration of Independence in the New Jersey colonial assembly. He languished in prison until 1778, then returned to London in 1782 when it became obvious that England was going to lose the war. Disinherited and shunned by his father (who died in 1790), William died in England in 1813.
HARILAL GANDHI, son of Mahatma Gandhi
“Men may be good,” Mahatma Gandhi once observed, “but not necessarily their children.” He was talking about Harilal Gandhi, his oldest son. But the Mahatma, who was as terrible a father as he was a great leader, had virtually abandoned his son by the time the lad was in his teens. Estranged from his father, widowed, and left to raise his four children alone, Harilal became a womanizer and an alcoholic. In 1936, he converted to Islam, which so deeply embarrassed the elder Gandhi that he issued a public letter condemning the conversion. “Harilal’s apostasy is no loss to Hinduism,” the letter read, “and his admission to Islam is a source of weakness to it, if he remains the same wreck that he was before.” Harilal remained a drunk in spite of his embracing a religion that forbade the consumption of alcohol, showing up drunk and disoriented at both his mother’s funeral in 1944 and his father’s in 1948. He died of tuberculosis six months after his father’s death.
McDonald’s restaurants reportedly make about 40% of their profits from “Happy Meals.”
ALBERT FRANCIS CAPONE, JR., son of Al Capone
Believe it or not, Little A1 was actually pretty honest. In the 1940s he even quit his job as a used-car salesman when he caught his boss turning back odometers. When the family assets were seized by the IRS after Big Al died in 1947, he had to drop out of college and make a living. So he opened a Miami restaurant with his mother.
In 1965, he was arrested for stealing two bottles of aspirin and some batteries from a supermarket. He pled no contest, telling the judge, “Everybody has a little larceny in him, I guess.” A year later, still smarting from the publicity, Capone changed his name to Albert Francis.
ROMANO MUSSOLINI, son of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini
He was only 18 years old when his father fell from power at the end of World War II. So Romano spent much of his life in exile going to school, working as a poultry farmer, playing the piano, and developing a taste for jazz music He eventually formed his own band, “The Romano Mussolini Jazz Band,” and either because of talent or novelty was able to book performances around the world.
WILLIAM MURRAY, son of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the atheist whose 1963 Supreme Court case resulted in outlawing school prayer His mother’s famous lawsuit was filed on William’s behalf, so he wouldn’t have to join in prayers with the rest of his ninth-grade class. But he converted to Christianity in the late 1970s after finding God in an Alcoholics Anonymous support group. William later became a Baptist preacher...and on at least one occasion was barred from preaching in a school auditorium by principals citing his own Supreme Court case.
RICHARD J. REYNOLDS II, R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune heir Died of emphysema in 1964. His son, Richard J. Reynolds III, died of emphysema in 1994. Patrick Reynolds (R. J. Ill’s half-brother) sold his R.J. Reynolds stock and became an antismoking activist.
The average American today gets 20% less sleep than the average American did 100 years ago.
BUILDING THE PENTAGON
It isn’t one of the Seven Wonders of the World, but it probably deserves to be. Here’s the story of what was for decades the world’s largest office building...and what remains today “the most easily recognized building on Earth.”
AMERICA GOES TO WAR
As the United States geared up for World War II in the late 1930s, military planners were concerned by the fact that the War Depar
tment was located in 17 buildings spread out all over Washington, D.C Officers wasted hours each day traveling around town from one office to another. This made it almost impossible to plan America’s defense quickly and efficiently. And the problem was expected to get much worse: In the second half of 1941 alone, the Department of the Army was expected to grow by 25%, enough to fill four more office buildings.
GETTING IN SHAPE
In July 1941, General Brehon Somervell, the army’s chief of construction, gave a team of architects one weekend to come up with a plan for a building that would house the entire military, to be built on a compact site adjacent to Arlington National Cemetery. The architects probably would have preferred a traditional square design, but because a road cut through one corner of the property there wasn’t enough room for a square building. So they designed a building with a pentagonal shape instead.
At first it looked like all of their work had been for nothing. When President Roosevelt learned of the intended site for the Pentagon, he insisted that it be moved farther away from Arlington National Cemetery so as not to desecrate the hallowed burial ground. The architects selected another site about ¾ of a mile away, larger than the first site, but stuck with the original pentagonal shape. Why? According to historian R. Alton Lee:
The original Pentagon pattern was retained for a number of reasons: it already was designed and there was the pressure of time; Army officers liked it because its shape was reminiscent of a 17th-century fortress; and any pattern close to a circular shape would permit the greatest amount of office area within the shortest walking distance....Roosevelt agreed to the new site, but disliked the architectural design. Why not build a large, square, windowless building that could be converted during peace time into a storage area for archives or supplies? However, [Gen. Brehon Somervell, the officer in charge of construction] liked the pentagonal concept and, as time was vital, told the contractors to proceed....When the President discovered what was happening, construction had already begun.
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