A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  Johnson led the raid. Three thousand died and Wurzburg was almost completely destroyed. There were too many bodies for nails and coffins. Just a big hole for all in the cemetery and, later, a chronicle of the raid with eighty-seven pages listing the victims by name and former address. Zahn remembers his verdict of 1957, about the bombers being “barbarian murderers.” After reading Johnson’s memoir (published by New European Publications, in London, with the subtitle Reflections and Doubts of a Bomber) Zahn writes now of the officer in charge:

  A barbarian? After reading his memoir I can no longer make that judgment. The sensitivity of the undelivered letter, the struggling with his conscience growing ever more intense as the nature of the air war became clearer—these reveal a concern about, and respect for, moral considerations and limits meriting credit, even admiration.

  A murderer? Harsh though the judgment may be, it is hard to see what other term would be appropriate for the action itself, the slaughter of three thousand civilians, including women and children, in a war already won. Obedience to orders, even seen as a sworn duty cannot justify engaging in what he believed—worse still, what he knew—to be an action contrary to the Law of War: the murder of an entire city and its population.

  Zahn takes Johnson’s book as an act of contrition that could awake other consciences. “In any event, the final judgment is not ours to make, but we can pray with some confidence that the Heavenly Bookkeeper will take full account of the sincerity and, in His boundless mercy, forgive.”

  September 25

  Sioux Falls—Here I am, in South Dakota with the express and only purpose of covering Republican Senator Larry Pressler with the slime of innuendo, aimed at providing just that marginal twitch in public opinion which will ensure the victory of his Democratic opponent, a conservative Midwest Democrat named Tim Johnson. And who knows? Johnson’s eviction of two-term incumbent Pressler could, at only a modest level of unlikelihood, mean the recapture of the Senate by the Democrats, a return to the best we can hope for—gridlock in the US Congress.

  I’m here to hurl slurs at Pressler at the request of my old friend Jim Abourezk, who served as US Senator for South Dakota between 1972 and 1978 before quitting in disgust because he couldn’t get anything done. Jim, Lebanese by family origin, was born on the Rosebud Indian Reservation where his father and mother ran a store, and in course of time became a populist politician and certainly one of the most radical denizens of Congress in this century. In the mid-1970s his bill proposing vertical divestiture of the oil companies—meaning they couldn’t simultaneously own oil wells, tanker fleets, refineries and gas stations—failed in the Senate by only three votes, marking the high-water point in post-Watergate legislative exuberance. The oil companies, led by Texaco, promptly doubled their purchase orders on Congress.

  Jim, now practicing law in Sioux Falls, mostly on behalf of a Yankton Indian tribe, has one failing: a loyalty to the Democratic Party that is invulnerable to the repeated rebukes of history. He’s a lesser-of-two-evils man and when driven into a corner starts the traditional keening about appointments to the federal bench.

  Jim nourishes a particular contempt for Pressler, partly because this nincompoop took over the Senate seat Abourezk had held throughout the 1970s. Mentally frail and morally inert, Pressler is a man long and widely derided in Washington as an imbecile of fantastic proportions. Jokes about Pressler have haunted him from the beginning of his congressional career, when he bucked the Watergate crash for Republicans and won a House seat in 1974.

  All the above facts about Pressler—ranging from his incredible stupidity to speculation about his supposedly meandering sexual preferences—have for many years been a source of ribaldry and gossip in Washington and South Dakota. Only the ordinary voters have been spared the truth, with newspapers, radio and television respectfully displaying the words and deeds of their senior Senator.

  Hence Jim Abourezk’s plea that I hurry east.

  I did his bidding. On the appointed day in Sioux Falls, September 19, I faced a grueling schedule of two morning radio shows, an address to the City Club, a speech at the University of South Dakota’s Vermillion campus, addresses at two bookstores—Zanbros and Barnes and Noble—plus sidewalk encounters. At each opportunity I derided Pressler. On one radio show a listener called in to ask whether the fact that my father Claud had once written for the English Daily Worker might perhaps have affected my view of the Senator.

  At the City Club Mrs. Pressler’s daughter by a previous marriage rose to denounce my treatment of her stepfather. The local newspaper reported that she quavered words of denunciation of my brutality before sitting down “amid stifled sobs.” That may be but she was seen ten minutes later clambering into her car with a Pressler supporter, roaring with laughter. Kevin Schieffer, Pressler’s former Chief of Staff, exhibited the imbecility of his boss by insisting on a lengthy exchange—carried on public radio—about the substantive evidence for my allegations. Pressler rushed out a statement saying that I was trying to ruin his life and that I was a tool of the Johnson campaign.

  When it was all over, the local Gannett paper, the Argus Leader, carried the charges and editorialized that I had failed to prove them. But perhaps … out there my words will have found their mark, sufficient to make the difference. Jim Abourezk pronounced himself satisfied.

  October 2

  Like a death ship, its sails hanging limply off the spars, Campaign Dole drifts ever deeper into a Sargasso Sea of disaster. Dole campaigns on the crime issue and the Justice Department reports that violent crime is down 10 percent. He hammers the Clinton economy and the Bureau of the Census announces that real income for the average American went up for the first time in six years, and that the number of Americans living in poverty dropped from 36.4 million—a tidy total, to be sure—by 1.6 million.

  Things are so bad for Campaign Dole that the columnist Mary McGrory reckons its shining moment came when Bob fell off a platform in California.

  October 4

  Ever since leaving South Dakota, I’ve been moving westward in the ’72 Imperial, noting the effects of political campaigning on the landscape. Bad. Driving into Yellowstone from Cody, the road was ripped for sixty miles, with several hundred bulldozers, loaders, oilers, dump trucks and graders massed along terrain that looked like the Plain of Jars after four years of American bombing in Laos. This is Senator Alan Simpson’s annual contribution to the economy of Wyoming, with millions poured into the effort to build something resembling the New Jersey Turnpike from Cody through to Old Faithful, then out the other side to West Yellowstone.

  After a night under canvas in sub-freezing temperatures in Yellowstone, never my favorite park, I turned southward into the Tetons, finally entering the town of Jackson Hole, a horrible spot now favored by President Bill who told Vernon Jordan not so long ago that he much preferred it to Martha’s Vineyard, since it was impossible to get “pussy” in the stuffy Massachusetts resort. Jackson Hole probably reminds Clinton of Hot Springs.

  October 9

  Back in 1991, when outing was a hot topic, I wrote about the matter and got the opinions of my friend John Scagliotti, maker of the famous historical documentary Before Stonewall. The test for outing, John said, should be:

  Has the person benefited from being in the closet in careerist terms, in the sense of actively pretending to be something he or she is not? There’s a difference between a passive closet, in which you simply survive and hope for the best, and the active closet, which involves putting on a heterosexual mask and promoting yourself as such, which is in ethical contradiction to your actual life. You’ve made the choice. You’re living an actual lie, bringing girls to the company ball and so on.

  So, think about a gay actor who has made the decision to advance his career by pretending to be heterosexual. But by doing that he is insulting and oppressing all those who are already out. Take Barry Diller, who is in a position of enormous power at Fox. Why doesn’t he push for a gay and lesbian TV show, which I
could produce, which would be a gay version of In Living Color? Now, no one wants to out little people, gay teachers and so on—unless gay teachers are publicly anti-gay—but I would out people who are gay and yet are promoting heterosexuality.

  I believe as a general proposition that people should come out. It would be better for them. But at the same time I understand that such a public coming out might hurt or confuse children, parents, etc. But just as there’s a difference between being passively and actively in the closet, you can be actively or passively out. In the former, you are publicly espousing a case, and in the latter, passive case, you are attempting to live a gay or lesbian life within the limits of what’s possible for you and not too hurtful to parents, children, etc. One of the reasons straight people don’t understand outing is that they don’t understand what it’s like to be gay. It’s all more complicated than they think.

  J. Edgar Hoover used the gossip columnist Walter Winchell to out Commies. Gossip usually has a repressive function in the mainstream press, which is why outing has to remain a subterranean, countercultural activity. Yet even in the counterculture, or at the level of the off-beat and unofficial, gossip always has the twin function of being liberating—letting the sunlight in—and repressive, in the sense of exposing the personal and the private, naming names and hurting people. Gossip represents visible fault lines at the social surface, reflecting subterranean, gradual shifts in our social attitudes. Although the liberating and repressive functions are both at work, given the structure of media ownership and control, the repressive function is usually dominant.

  November 6

  It’s all over, thank God. The American People took one last lingering look at the options, breathed the deepest of sighs, and mostly decided to stay at home. The stay-at-homes always win.

  One big factor militating in Clinton’s favor was something virtually unmentioned: the end of the cold war. For almost half a century this was all-important. A president had to demonstrate he could defend the Republic by all means necessary, including nuclear obliteration of the planet. If the Soviet Union had existed in 1992 George Bush would have been reelected.

  By 1991 it was all over and America was ready for a draft-dodger in the White House. Dickie Morris’s genius was to stick the Republicans with all their truly unpopular causes (assault weapons, abortion ban, end to affirmative action) and co-opt all the rest for Bill Clinton. It worked like a dream. As for Bill, I along with thirty million Americans of Irish descent liked what he did for Gerry Adams.

  November 13

  It’s just like the man said: vote for the lesser of two evils and you get both. Or, vote for Clinton and you get the other one free. Hardly had the polls closed before Clinton was saying that he’s likely to appoint the man—Dole—he’d spent the previous six months reviling to be in charge of a bipartisan commission to re-evaluate Medicare—a program he’d spent the previous six months hollering that Dole would destroy. And people wonder why the citizenry is cynical! The whole point of democracy is not to have bipartisan government.

  Goodbye to the “soccer moms,” altogether the silliest confection of the entire campaign. In the end the soccer moms, deemed Clinton’s secret weapon, voted for him less than other female cohorts. Biggest enthusiasts for the man from Hope were elderly widows and young single mothers, far too frazzled to care about soccer. Judging from the ones I know, the soccer moms voted for Nader. What next? Across the past three elections the press has given us Joe Sixpack, the Reagan Democrat, the Angry White Male and most recently, the Soccer Mom. Aging Boomers?

  In Humboldt County about 20 percent of the voters went either for Perot or Nader. In Mendocino the percentage was a bit higher. In a straw poll of 2,000 high school kids in Humboldt, over 25 percent went for a third party candidate, which is a comfort.

  There’s not much to console oneself with otherwise. Large portions of the nation’s affairs are now being run by three men from Alaska. Appropriations, the powerful committee that Hatfield used to run, will now be under the sway of Ted Stevens, who really would drill through his mother if he thought there was oil in substrates below her coffin. Energy policy is under the sway of Alaska’s junior Senator, Frank Murkowski. In the House natural resources are overseen by Rep. Don Young, a former trapper and riverboat captain whose congressional office resembles a cheap Ketchikan taxidermy, its wall covered with the skins of Alaskan grizzlies, the lacquered corpses of king salmon and severed heads of Roosevelt elk and Sitka black-tailed deer.

  Young does have a certain charm. Animal rights advocate Mary Tyler Moore once read a poem about the cruelty of steeljaw leghold traps before the Merchant Marine subcommittee, on which Young was serving. Accompanying Moore was Cleveland Amory, who periodically inserted a pencil into a trap, causing it to snap shut. The moment was highly charged and Young, as a hunter, trapper and taxidermist, realized dramatic action was required to turn the tide. His solution was to place his hand in a trap he had brought along and then begin calmly to question a witness as though nothing unusual had occurred. “I never told anyone, but it hurt like hell,” Young later confided to a congressional aide.

  November 14

  Goodbye, Larry. The only incumbent US Senator turned out of office was … yes, you’ve guessed it, Larry Pressler of South Dakota. I claim the victory. He went down by about 5,000 votes, against the trend in the state, where Republicans mostly carried the day. Before I traveled to Sioux Falls at the invitation of Jim Abourezk (Pressler’s predecessor in the Senate), Larry was running even with Tim Johnson. After my slurs on his character his standing briefly rose, as Dakotans made a show of standing by their man, then sank steadily as solidarity was overwhelmed by rank prejudice. I am responsible for the Democratic majority in the Senate. Take that, you work-within-the-system types!

  November 20

  In the early 1970s Mobil decided to fight back against the consumer lobby denouncing it for price gouging in the wake of the oil shocks of 1973. The company’s boss, William Tavoulareas, and his Vice-President for public relationships, Herb Schmertz, decided to capture just the sort of middle and upper income support sought by Texaco thirty years earlier with opera sponsorship.

  Schmertz did this by successfully placing Mobil commercials on public television, while simultaneously winning for himself the reputation of being the most munificent patron of culture since Lorenzo de’ Medici. He managed this amazing feat by getting Mobil to sponsor Masterpiece Theater on PBS. Schmertz, the patron, and Stan Calderwood of the PBS station WGBH in Boston, the original object of his patronage, deserve credit for turning public television into the prime corporate showcase.

  Indeed, many of America’s cultural furbishments turn out to be the gifts of oilmen deeming it necessary to daub perfume on their profit statements.

  After minions of John D. Rockefeller caused state troopers in Colorado to incinerate striking miners, their wives and children in the Ludlow massacre of 1914, Rockefeller hired a journalist, Ivy Lee, to improve his abysmal public standing. Lee threw himself inventively into the task. Young John D. Rockefeller Jr. was dispatched to Colorado to mix with the miners and project concern. Soon the press was praising the common touch of this plutocrat mingling with the ordinary folk. Meanwhile Lee told John D. Sr. to lavish a few of his millions on charitable projects and to give dimes to children. Soon the old robber’s name was practically synonymous with the philanthropic impulse.

  It seems to work … and then it all falls apart. Just when a gratified citizenry is listening to Texaco’s operas or goggling at Mobil’s Masterpiece Theater or rambling through some Rockefeller-endowed museum, it all goes wrong. A tanker runs aground. The price of gas shoots up. And then the people remember what they never really forgot: they hate Big Oil.

  November 21

  As Warren Christopher packs his files and prepares to quit the State Department, one man in particular exults and cries Good Riddance. He is Kinsey Marable, purveyor of rare books at an excellent bookstore by that name situated at 1525
Wisconsin Avenue, in Washington, DC.

  When Christopher became Secretary of State in the far-off dawn of the Clinton era, he was granted a Secret Service bodyguard. Christopher’s Georgetown house stands on Volta Place, which runs off Wisconsin. From Marable’s bookstore one can look up Volta Place, though the view is partially obscured by a fine old maple tree directly outside Marable’s premises.

  Reviewing security arrangements for Christopher the Secret Service concluded that a potential assassin could clamber up into the leafy maple, seclude himself amidst its foliage and then, at leisure, take a potshot at the Secretary of State as he emerged from his house. So they mutilated the tree, sawing off its branches. The maple promptly began to die, and with each leaf it shed the fury of Kinsey Marable waxed ever more fierce.

  He phoned the State Department. He wrote harsh letters to Christopher, pointing out the needless amputation of the maple. Finally, last Hallowe’en, he dressed up in a short skirt, applied makeup, clapped a blousy wig on his head and teetered up to Christopher’s front door on high heels. He rang the bell and the bodyguard opened the door.

  “I’m here,” shrilled Marable. “Mr. Christopher sent for me because his wife is out of town.” “Mr. Christopher is out,” the bodyguard snarled, and slammed the door. It’s Marable’s hope that stories of Christopher’s closet queendom will soon circulate inside the Beltway, doing harm to the reputation of the pinstriped lawyer.