However, it is clear President Bush did gain something personally from the war that he would not have experienced if he had gone directly to Yale and then on to, say, a career on Wall Street or even a political career from his home in Connecticut. He saw the other side of life through the eyes and some very private thoughts of his comrades from other classes back home.
As an officer on a carrier, even though he was only nineteen or twenty at the time, one of Lieutenant Bush’s jobs was to read the mail of the enlisted men before it went out so no sensitive military information would be inadvertently compromised. As Bush recalls, “As I did my duty and read the other guys’ mail, I learned about life—about true love, about heartbreak, about fear and courage, about the diversity of our great country. The sailors would ask about the harvest or fishing or the heat in the cities.” Bush goes on, “When I would see a man whose letter I had censored, I would look at him differently, look at him with more understanding. I gained an insight into the lives of my shipmates, and I felt richer.”
As a young man at the controls of a TBM Avenger, flying off carrier decks, dropping torpedoes on enemy targets, and getting back safely, Bush was a long way from those days of privilege in Greenwich. What he learned went well beyond his own involvement, however. He remembers vividly standing on the carrier deck when another plane made a bad landing. As the pilot tried to take off again, the plane veered out of control and its propeller cut a crew member in half. As Bush stood there, stunned, staring at a severed leg, a salty chief petty officer “rallied the shocked sailors. ‘God-damnit, get back to work. Swab the deck, clear the deck, get ready for the next plane.’ ” More than fifty years later that Navy chief stands out in the mind of President Bush as a man who, under great adversity, took charge, rallied the men, got the job done—did his duty.
George Bush as a Navy pilot
Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station, July 1943, Flight 44: (top row) Bill Donovan, Ralph Cole, Mort Landsburg, George Bush, Louis Grab; (bottom row) Mike Goldsmith, Leslie Mokry, Bill Shawcross, Tom Campion, Tex Ellison
George Bush, in his plane Barbara III
By his own admission George Bush is not a reflective man. It may have to do with his mother’s constant counsel not to draw attention to yourself. Work well done and a life lived honorably were reward enough. As a former congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, vice president, and then president of the United States, George Bush represents an unequaled record of public service within his generation.
He insists he is owed nothing. In fact, he believes that World War II was such an overwhelming threat that those who served did so out of an obligation that should not require special treatment forevermore. He believes some veterans’ organizations are wrong to keep asking for more and more benefits. As he says, “Serving in World War II, I was a tiny part of something noble.”
George Bush, presidential portrait
Ben Bradlee
BEN BRADLEE
“It separates those of us who were in the war from those who never had that kind of experience.”
BEN BRADLEE, the son of a prominent Massachusetts family, was a Greek major at Harvard when war broke out. Eager to become involved, he made arrangements to fulfill his degree requirements in an abbreviated time so he could get into uniform. In his bestselling autobiography, A Good Life, he describes August 8, 1942, as a “day that has defined hectic for me forever.” I should think so. He was awarded his Harvard degree at ten in the morning, commissioned as a Lieutenant, J.G., in the U.S. Navy at noon, and married that evening in a small chapel across from the Boston Common to the daughter of one of Massachusetts’s most prominent families.
No doubt other young men across the country were undergoing similarly life-changing days that summer, but few could match the Harvard degree—Navy commission—society wedding trifecta of Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee. It was a portent of the life he was to lead for the rest of the century.
Bradlee was assigned to a destroyer, the Phillip, in the South Pacific. He was in the middle of the action in what is called “The Slot,” a stretch of water bisecting the Solomon Islands, islands that were bloody killing grounds for the U.S. Marines. It was in The Slot that the fight for control of the seas between the U.S. Navy and the Japanese Navy was both critical and ferocious.
It was there that Ben Bradlee, who had been tutored in French as a child and sent only to the best schools, began to learn about the real meaning of personal responsibility. “I remember,” he says, “the first day I was made officer of the bridge. I was twenty-one years old. I was in charge of the ship. I am driving this goddamn thing. It was a tremendous responsibility, and at twenty-one it was good to see what you could do.”
Bradlee was also able to see what others, those who lacked his pedigree, could do. He laughs and says, “They were all a guy named Joe with an unpronounceable last name. They could fix the radar, and you couldn’t. I learned a tremendous amount about how excellence had nothing to do with class.”
One long night off Saipan, Bradlee had a lesson in excellence and courage that sticks with him to this day. He was working in the ship’s command and control center, directing the shells the Phillip was booming toward the island. His partner on shore was an anonymous Marine forward observer. “Often when he hit his radio to talk,” Bradlee says, “we could hear the Japanese yelling in the background. They were that close to our guy.”
After hours of this harrowing duty, the forward observer said he could use a break, that he’d like to get off the island and out of danger for a while. Bradlee radioed right back: “ ‘Sure, we’ll come get you, give you a decent meal and a night’s sleep.’ My God, when he got onto our ship he looked about thirteen years old. He was tiny and so heroic. I get all excited even now thinking about it. We kept him for two nights, scrubbed him up and sent him back. I know I learned a lot from those experiences.”
What Bradlee learned, he says, is that there are no tests or psychological profiles that can compare to the experiences of war when it comes to determining what capabilities people have within them. “The war took the cockiness out of you. You couldn’t bullshit your way out the first time you were under fire.” It also gave this Greek major from Harvard an early lesson in what would become a defining characteristic of his personality. “I had not been a big leader before the war,” Bradlee acknowledges, “so the idea that you could persuade people to do things was awesome. Not only that you could, but that you had to—and it was fun and, my God, you were good at it.”
It also prompted Bradlee to think of a life outside the constraints of his establishment background. Before the war, Bradlee thought he’d probably wind up a stockbroker, working for a friend of his father, like so many of his peers. Then, World War II started and, in his words, “I had a sense of what was possible: how many different lives and professions were out there—how many exciting prospects in the world.”
Ben and Jean Bradlee
Constance Bradlee, John La Farge, Jean and Ben Bradlee, 1945
In his own privileged way, Bradlee was as provincial as any enlisted man from a small town in West Texas. He’d known only one way of life, and suddenly he had options. Bradlee remembers that once the war was over he led group discussions on his ship about what the men would do next. “I remember,” he says, “people were interested in public service; teaching got a big call. We were determined not to make the mistakes of earlier generations. I was hustling journalism as a way of righting wrongs.”
Ironically, about that same time, another young naval officer in another part of the Pacific was thinking about his future. He was going home to California, where shortly after the war he got involved in politics. His name was Richard Nixon, and thirty years later he and Bradlee would be on a historic collision course. Bradlee’s vision of journalism as a means of righting wrongs was never truer or more important than when he was directing two young reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in their coverage of Wat
ergate.
After a lifetime of achievement and adventure that includes three wives; four children; six years abroad (most of them in Paris as a Newsweek correspondent); a close personal friendship with his fellow Harvard graduate John F. Kennedy; the editorship of The Washington Post during Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, Spiro Agnew, Watergate, and the fall of communism; his dazzling marriage to Sally Quinn and their large, comfortable homes in Georgetown, on the Chesapeake Bay, and in the Hamptons; Bradlee was a little surprised how vivid his recollections of the war were and how important they seemed to him in his seventies, when he was writing his autobiography.
Nonetheless, they remain stories and memories for his own satisfaction; he seldom shares them, not even with the two fellow officers from his destroyer, the Philip, who live in the Washington, D.C., area. As he was raising his children, three boys and a girl, Bradlee would occasionally bring up an experience from those days. When he did, the kids would say, “Uh-oh, here comes the Big Two.” Bradlee would like to go to a reunion of the men and officers of his ship, but he laughingly concedes that he hasn’t been to one because his wife, Sally, has no interest, even though she’s the daughter of a distinguished Army general.
It’s probably just as well. Bradlee’s life since those exciting days on the Philip has taken him to places and heights far removed from the lives of the other men on board. They shared a time and a place in their late teens and early twenties that could never be duplicated, and Bradlee has reserved a special corner of his memory for that distinctive experience. While a reunion might be fun, it’s hard to imagine it could add to the original experience.
There are times when Bradlee doesn’t hesitate to bring up the war years and the pride he has in his service record: when people question his patriotism, a not uncommon blasphemy leveled at journalists, especially one running the preeminent newspaper in the nation’s capital. As Bradlee puts it, using one of his many favorite profanities, “I have a special reaction to those who impugn my love of country, especially those f——s on the Hill.” But Bradlee also believes it gives him a special bond with people like Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, Naval Academy graduate, and POW in Vietnam.
He thinks of the experience of World War II as being as important to his life as overseeing the Watergate reporting when he was editor of The Washington Post. He says, “It separates those of us who were in the war from those who never had that kind of experience—the teamwork, the danger of dying, the self-confidence we gained. I don’t feel superior as a result of those days. I just know I learned a helluva lot from being there.”
He also believes this is true for almost everyone who served in the military, whether they saw combat or were heroes. “It wasn’t just about throwing grenades or jumping into the water to save someone’s ass,” he says. “God, my ship went from the coast of Massachusetts through the Panama Canal, forty days to Guadalcanal. When we started, I was the lowest cog in the machine. By the time we got there, I was really a part of something.”
Art Buchwald, wartime portrait
ART BUCHWALD
“People are constantly amazed when I tell them I was a Marine.”
IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a greater contrast to Ben Bradlee’s family, Harvard education, wartime service, dashing appearance, and general rakishness than his old friend Art Buchwald, the lovably teddy-bear humorist and columnist who may have been the most unlikely Marine in all of World War II. In his autobiography Leaving Home, he wrote with endearing candor, “People are constantly amazed when I tell them I was a Marine. For some reason, I don’t look like one—and I certainly don’t act like one. But I was, and according to God or the tradition of the Corps, I will always be a Marine.”
At seventeen, Buchwald was running from a troubled childhood and the heartbreak of a failed summer romance. He persuaded a street drunk to forge his father’s signature on the permission form needed to enlist in the Marine Corps. That he survived basic training on Parris Island was a minor miracle. He was always in a jam for his bumbling ways, terrorized by his drill instructor, Corporal Pete Bonardi of Elmhurst, Long Island.
Buchwald spent the war in the South Pacific, attached to a Marine ordnance outfit, loading ammunition onto the Marine Corsairs that were dueling with Japanese Zeroes in the skies over places like Guadalcanal, Okinawa, and Midway. He was on a tiny island called Engebi.
Buchwald was not much more competent on Engebi than he had been at Parris Island. Loading a large bomb onto a Corsair, he hit the wrong lever and it dropped onto the tarmac, sending his buddies scattering, convinced they were about to be blown up. Finally Buchwald’s sergeant assigned him to work on the squadron’s mimeographed newsletter and to drive a truck, reasoning he couldn’t do much harm to himself or others in those jobs. His sergeant told him later, “You had the ability to screw up a two-car funeral. Anything you touched ceased to function.”
He also learned more than he wanted to know about anti-Semitism. Many of the small-town boys he served with had never known a Jew, and they were quick to repeat the bigotry of their upbringing. Buchwald, much more a man of wit and words than fists, nonetheless found himself in numerous fights after some reference to a “kike” or “Christ-killer.” But then he decided it wasn’t worth all the anger and bruises, so he just responded “Stuff it” and walked away. Now, on reflection, he says, “I can’t maintain people picked on me just because I was Jewish. They picked on me because I was an asshole”—followed by that familiar Buchwald laugh.
Buchwald’s life after the war began at the University of Southern California, where he enrolled under the GI Bill even though he didn’t have a high school diploma. In the crush of veterans registering in 1946, the admissions office simply didn’t check. By the time he was found out, Buchwald was a fixture on campus and accepted as a special student.
At USC, Buchwald began to hone the gentle, mocking style of humor that would make him one of journalism’s best-known columnists and a high-priced public speaker. He wrote for the campus newspaper and a humor magazine. He was friendly on campus with Frank Gifford, the All-America football hero; David Wolper, later one of Hollywood’s most successful producers; and Pierre Cossette, who became the man behind the televised Grammy Awards. It was a fantasy come true for this funny little man from a succession of foster homes in New York.
His Walter Mitty life took an even more romantic turn when he learned the GI Bill was good in Paris as well as in the United States. Determined to become another Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Buchwald hitchhiked to New York and caught an old troop ship for France. He lived the life of an expatriate on the modest stipend the GI Bill provided him for classes at the Alliance Française, drinking Pernod late into the night in Montparnasse, stringing for Daily Variety back in the States, and hanging out with new friends who would later become famous writers: William Styron, Peter Matthiessen, James Baldwin, Mary McCarthy, Irwin Shaw, and Peter Stone. As he recounted in I’ll Always Have Paris, Buchwald loved the life. “We had come out of the war with great optimism,” he said. “It was a glorious period.”
Art Buchwald
It became even more glorious when Buchwald talked himself into a job at the glamorous International Herald Tribune, the English-language newspaper that was distributed throughout Europe and served as a piece of home for American tourists. In 1949, just seven years after he’d been rejected by his summertime sweetheart and joined the Marines in a desperate attempt to find a new life, Art Buchwald had talked his way into one of the most sought-after jobs in journalism. “Paris After Dark,” Buchwald’s column, quickly became one of the most popular items in the paper, and it led to the byline humor column that made him the best-known American in Paris. He was the city’s most popular tourist guide for visiting stars such as Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Audrey Hepburn.
His books became bestsellers, and when he came home, sixteen years later, he was an even bigger star in Washington, with his own table at the most popular restaurant in the capital
and lecture fees now at five figures, often with a private plane for transportation. His was practically an uncle to the various Kennedy offspring. When he went to Redskins games, he sat in the owner’s box. He summered on Martha’s Vineyard with pals Katharine Graham, Mike Wallace, Bill Styron, and Walter Cronkite.
However glamorous his life had become, he never forgot he was a Marine. When Colin Powell was preparing to leave the military and enter civilian life, Buchwald offered to advise him on what lecture agencies would serve him best. Powell’s assistant called Buchwald, inviting him to lunch with the general at the Pentagon. Buchwald said, “Lunch? Don’t I get a parade? I was in the Marine Corps three and a half years and I never had a parade.” When Buchwald arrived at Powell’s office, the general said, “Follow me.” He took Buchwald into a large room where Powell had assembled fifty of his staff. As Buchwald entered, they all came to attention and gave him a salute. After all those years of people not believing he had been a Marine, Buchwald had a parade, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at his side, in the Pentagon.
He laughs now when he thinks of how much attention he received from Marine brass once he moved to Washington. “They said I was a great Marine. I was a lousy Marine. But at the last Marine Ball I attended, colonels were coming up to have their pictures taken with me. I loved that.”
Buchwald’s feelings go well beyond the attention he gets at Marine ceremonies. “I had no father to speak of, no mother. I didn’t know what I was doing. Suddenly I’m in the Marines and it’s my family—someone cared about me, someone loved me. That’s what I still feel today.”
Tom Brokaw Page 24
