The Daily Brief

(Standing:Butterfield, Festa, Thomas, Menaul, Buonarobo, McClendon.
Kneeling: Francis, Dodge, Chandler, Becker)

The ten men in this picture assembled in May of 1943 at Ephrata Army Air Base, Washington, a place of which Jimmy-Junior wrote in disgust, “They have me living in a tent, out in somebody’s cow pasture. When we get into a crew, we move into hutments that are bigger than a doghouse, but smaller than a garage. I am the official ‘sound-the-alarm-er’ in case of rain. There is a rip in the canvas over my head, so I will be the first to know – it’s getting dark now and somebody forgot to put electric lights in this tent so I guess this is all I can write.” Two weeks later, he wrote, “As of this morning I am head armorer-gunner of crew #30. Crew #30 isn’t much to get excited about though, as all we have besides myself are the second armorer-gunner and the bombardier. I’m going to insist on a pilot before I do much.” A week later: “Our crew is changed around considerable. We lost everyone we had, but now we have a pilot, copilot and myself, which is much more practical than before . . . We fly today for the first time. Didn’t do much of anything but land and take off. After the third time I lost interest and slept most of the time.”

An observant young man with an unexpectedly sardonic sense of humor, born and raised in Pasadena, he had gone to trade school and left a job in the lithography department of the Los Angeles Times. Firmly convinced of all the then-forty-eight states there was only one good one, he was pleased that two other Californians were assigned to Crew #30: Lt. John Chandler, the co-pilot, was from Vallejo, and waist-gunner Sgt. Robert Thomas from Burbank. Both were married, and Mrs. Chandler was expecting a baby. True to the movie cliche, though, the rest of the crew was from all over: pilot and A/C commander, Lt. Sherman Dodge— also newly married— from Boston; bombardier Lt. James Becker from Kennet Square, Pennsylvania; flight engineer SSgt. James Festa, from Brooklyn; Sgt Louis Buonarobo, the ball-turret gunner (notably shorter than the other crewmembers) from the Bronx; navigator Lt. Frank Francis of El Paso, Texas; radioman SSgt Douglas McLendon from Greenville Mississippi, and waist-gunner Sgt. Warren Butterfield from Salmon, Idaho.

By mid-June they had accumulated fifteen flying hours. “Yesterday we made what they call ‘dry runs’—that is, going thru the motions of bombing something and don’t: that way, we bombed the city of Wenatchee, blew up the school in Quincy, a couple of dams, bridges and just about everything else in sight . . . got a letter from George— he had his first airplane ride and wished now he was flying. He could have had my place the other day when we went up to 30,000 feet, It got down to 40 below and I had to forget my flying boots! We just got up there and then an oil line broke so we had to come down, which couldn’t have happened at a better time. My nose was running under my oxygen mask and freezing on my lip. Very annoying. We had a gunnery mission today; I had the tail guns. I think they are mine permanently. At least I hope so, as I like it . . . we shot at targets on the ground. . .”

In July they moved to Geiger Field, near Spokane, for continuing training and a series of long flights all over the northwest; “We are supposed to be very observing of everything we see in the way of military objectives, especially trains and railway yards. Then we get questioned all about it, just as if we were over Germany or some place. I guess I will have to give up sleeping on future flights . . the navigator is getting me a set of maps so I can be able to tell where we are at. He claims in the tail I have the best view— not that anyone is depending on me, but he wants two of us . . “
In late fall, they were assigned a new B-17F, promptly christened the “Lonesome Polecat” by Lt. Dodge. Following another month of training flights, they ferried it to England, where the aircraft went to the replacement depot, and the crew to Rougham airfield, near Bury St. Edmunds, where they were assigned to an aircraft there. They promptly re-christened it “Lonesome Polecat II” but James Festa lamented during one of our conversations, they didn’t have it long enough to paint an emblem on the nose. Jimmy-Junior sent a telegram on arrival to let the family know they had arrived safely. Four V-mail letters followed, the last dated the day before his first combat mission: He couldn’t make sense of the coinage, there wasn’t much to buy that wasn’t rationed, he was making money faster than he could spend it. He hoped to visit London, and he had bought a bicycle to get around the field.

(Next: Part 3— Schweinfurt)

The first picture hung in a black frame, in the back bedroom of Granny Jessie’s house in Pasadena for many years, a black and white photo of four graves piled high with flowers. Only recently did my mother realize, upon looking closely at it, that the flowers were carefully tended hot-house chrysanthemums, and even more fabulously expensive in 1943 as they are now. The grave markers are plain wooden crosses, painted white and the names just barely visible, for the picture was taken in haste and surreptitiously, smuggled out of Occupied France.

“James Menaud” is one of two names which can be clearly read; a misspelling of James Menaul who was my mother’s older brother, Jimmy Junior who was a tail gunner on a B-17 and died in the war. There was a badly-tinted portrait-photo in Granny Jessie’s living room, a young man awkward in a hastily fitted set of woolen class-As, smirking uncomfortably at the camera, frozen forever at 19. Our curiosity about him was never rewarded. Mom had been only thirteen at the time. Ten years ago, when my father found a picture of Jimmy Juniors’ crew— ten young men on the tarmac in front of a B-17, awkwardly solemn or cocky and smiling— everything had faded from memory except for the name of the aircraft commander, Lt. Sherman Dodge. We knew that only because his grave was next to Jimmy-Juniors’ in an unknown cemetery somewhere in France. The rest of what we knew fitted into one sentence: Sgt. James Menaul, Jr. was killed in action in the fall of 1943 on one of the raids on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing factories, and some of the other crewmen had survived and escaped into Switzerland. Dad finally asked me, as a persistent and inventive snoop, if I could find out their names and whereabouts, and what had happened to them.

I started with my uncle’s service number and unit of assignment, the 331st Squadron, 94th Bomb Group, Bury St. Edmunds. It was one of the units that had formed an association (since dissolved due to the age and infirmity of many of the members), and they replied promptly to my first letter of inquiry, confirming that Jimmy-Junior’s B-17, the Lonesome Polecat II was one of those lost on Black Thursday, October 14th, 1943.

60 8th Air Force B-17s, each with a crew of ten were lost in a single day, attacking the ball-bearing factories in two waves at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, running a gauntlet of German air defenses to and from the target. A report on the status of various missing crewman, sent from the Army Mortuary Affairs Office contained some riveting extracts: Flights of enemy aircraft stood of at 1,500 yards on both sides and tail of the formation to ‘lob’ rockets or heavy cannon projectiles into the formation, while others attacked from the nose and top and bottom . . . Several enemy aircraft would dive through the formation from all angles, at times coming within four to six hundred yards . . . many that went down were hit by rockets or heavy cannon . . . whenever a Fortress was hit – it either exploded or fell apart. . . This aircraft was last heard on the ‘command channel’ and there were no eyewitnesses . . . This report showed no further information; the plane was simply missing from the formation . . .A total of 80 parachutes were seen in the vicinity of the target . . .the survivors were so busy avoiding enemy aircraft they were unable to observe what happened . . . Of the eighteen planes from this particular group which went on this mission, three aborted, thirteen failed to return and two completed the mission . . .Last seen at 1400 hours, just before it reached the target . . .Lost as a result of enemy aircraft.

(Next: Part 2: Crew Pictures and Old Letters)

(A version of this article was published in “Friends’ Journal”, the quarterly publication of the US Air Force Museum Foundation, Wright Patterson AFB, and accepted by a historical publication which shall remain nameless since they never actually scheduled it for publication or paid me a dime for it… and didn’t look likely to within the lifetime of anyone involved. William tells me that that particular magazine usually fobs off writers with a couple of subscriptions in lieu of cash anyway. I blow a large raspberry in their direction and publish it here anyway!)

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, they take on Jeffrey Rosen’s article The Unregulated Offensive in this week’s NYTimes Magazine, as they previously did with Cass Sunstein. Start here, and work up. It’s good reading for any student of Constitutional history.

There was one redeeming factor to James Cameron’s “Titanic” movie, to my eyes; and that lay in how rich, realistic and convincing the set of the “unsinkable” liner looked. How very solid, luxurious and sheltering it all appeared, such perfectly recreated spaces… and I could see how people would have been reluctant to leave it, at first. Who wanted to bounce around in a tiny open boat on the cold, on the open water? Surely, a ship as big as the Titanic, with every possible comfort, and modern advantage couldn’t be mortally wounded. Surely rescue was on the way, the situation couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that… Well, it was, and after seeing the movie, I could understand why the first couple of boats went away half-empty.

But there is a tenuous family connection to the loss of the Titanic, through the person of Granny Dodie’s older brother, Great Uncle Fred.
Great-Uncle Fred had a lady in a frilly skirt tattooed on each forearm, who did a kind of shimmy when he flexed his muscles, and he had been a sailor. He had been, in fact, a real sailor, on a real sailing ship, and had been around the Horn no less than four times, and thrilled us children with the tale of how he had fallen out of the topmost bit of rigging, once… but had managed to catch hold of a lower bit of canvas and rope before his Captain had been able to do much more than recollect the page number of the burial service in his Book of Common Prayer. (Well, we thought it was thrilling, everybody else had been listening to the same old story for forty years and were bored rigid.)

By 1912, the allure of a seafaring life had lost its charms for Great Uncle Fred and he was working on land, in Wanamakers’ Department Store in New York. (I have no idea in what capacity!) Wanamaker’s had a powerful Marconi wireless station on it’s roof. David Sarnoff, who would eventually be the president of RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, was the station manager and one of the operators. This Marconi station was one of the most powerful on the east coast, and was one of the first to receive news that the Titanic had struck an iceberg and might be sinking. It seemed barely credible, perhaps exaggerated, at first. According to Great Uncle Fred, one of the managers who knew he had been a sailor asked him if it were possible that a great ship like that might actually be so damaged that it would in fact, sink.

His moment of faint glory, being asked for his professional expertise in such weighty and tragic matters; his answer was a masterpiece of noncommittal caution;
“Could very well be,” Great Uncle Fred said.
I wish, now, that we had been able to make him tell us some other stories, but those are the only two I remember.

“Then long folk to go on pilgrimages, And palmers for to seek strange strands,
To far-off hallows, couth in sundry lands; And specially from every shires end
Of England to Canterbury they wend.” Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales

And make pilgrimage they did, in payment of vows, to seek healing, to acquire merit, to give thanks— and offerings. The great shrines of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury grew rich on offerings and benefices from the devout, as did any number of lesser shrines. Even more virtue attached to having made the much more difficult journey to St. Peter’s in Rome, the seat of Christ’s Vicar on earth, or the dangerous journey to far distant shrines in Jerusalem. To possess a relic, even one of dubious provenance, was a money-making proposition on the part of the ecclesiastical establishment which held proprietorship, especially if it appeared to have worked a miracle or two.

Many church treasuries in Spain and Italy still contain elaborate jeweled reliquaries, great things of silver and gold wrought to display little grimy brownish bits of bone and teeth, or a shred of crumbling fabric. I never felt myself so sternly a Protestant myself, as when I looked at these objects— those, and the rich vestments in silk, embroidered with jewels and gold, the Episcopal rings with stones the size of walnuts, crosiers and crucifixes in ivory and gold, and more gems. The upwelling urge to begin gibbering incoherently about simony, idolatry and indulgences usually didn’t subside until I went to look at the stained glass or the stone carvings, or something. These present treasuries, although reduced by schism and war, give an idea of how very, very rich the Catholic Church was by the fifteenth century, of how profitable it was to control the means of grace.

Of course, there had been other reformers — some of them later anointed with sainthood — who were troubled by how the church seemed to have been corrupted by power and riches, fallen away from it’s original mission, become distanced from the humble and devout. Early critics and reformers were co-opted, for a time seeing some success in establishing a more rigorous order, or having a particular reform adopted, but as the clamor of criticism became louder and more insistent, the Church tended to squelch it with a charge of heresy, a quick conviction and a public burning-at-stake. Martin Luther, priest and monk, a Doctor of Theology who had been intended by his father to be a lawyer, could not be co-opted, and would not be silenced. Besides his own formidable intellect, he also had the benefit of powerful and highly-placed friends, and the newly popular printing press, which did to theological disputes what the internet is doing to the mainstream news media. The flash of Luther’s insight, that man is justified by faith, rather than works, that grace and forgiveness were freely given – and could not be earned by pilgrimage, by generous donation, by turning over a few pennies or ducats for specific services rendered, had the effect of a bombshell on the carefully structured finances and schedule of benefits offered by the official Church.

It was, I thought, the most amusing of ironies that the Cranach portraits of Luther and his wife, Catarina von Bora hung in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, the city of the di Medici, those merchant-princes of the Italian Renaissance. While Luther was studying and preaching in Germany, a Medici was advancing steadily up the ranks, eventually to be enthroned as Pope Leo X. Born Giovanni de Medici, he proved to be as cultured and as worldly a patron of the arts as any of his ancestors, but without a shred of their financial acumen. Having emptied the Papal treasury, and with an extravagant lifestyle to uphold, and the Basilica of St. Peters’ to finish in style, the Pope authorized the sale of indulgences— automatic forgiveness of sins upon payment to the Churches’ representative. Luther, as outraged as a devout and thoughtful person could be in the face of a flagrant abuse and perversion of doctrine, wrote up a list of debating points and posted them as a challenge for discussion on a public notice-board, the door of the church at Wittenburg.

With a couple of taps of a hammer on nail, the established Catholic Church shattered like a bit of crockery with a flaw in it; it had to much invested in the system to entertain the notion of the sort of reforms that Luther and others wanted to see; and by the time that reforms were forced upon by necessity, the tipping point had been reached. Scholars and kings and cardinals had taken positions, and there was no going back – although occasionally someone like Mary of England would try. The monastery cloisters were empty, the bell towers silent, the brothers and sisters gone away, treasuries defaulted to the crown.

And one last little story, a Noel Cowardish, 1930ies screwball comedy sort of story, of the clever woman who met the romantically clueless academician, and made up her mind that he was the one for her. She had been a nun, Caterina von Bora, of a good family but an impoverished one. She and some of the other nuns wished to leave their convent; their escape was facilitated by a merchant who smuggled them out in some empty barrels. Doctor Luther and his friends pledged to help them: some of them returned to their families, and the others all found good marriages or a household position, all but Caterina von Bora. They respectfully asked her what she wanted — did she wish to be married, was there a particular man she would like to be married to? They would do everything they could to arrange that, if it were the case. And she said, yes, there was; Dr. Luther himself would suit her very nicely, thank you. He was nearly twice her age, had lived with the expectation of being executed as a heretic, in all the untidiness and disorganization that a single man tends to accept. It would amuse me to think he was flabbergasted at first, while all their happily married friends were gently and fondly amused – but it worked in the best sort of way. They had six children and were as happy as they could be and a great deal happier than most. It may not have happened quite like that… but that’s the way I like to tell it.

The most striking thing about the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome is that it is immensely, overwhelmingly huge, but so humanly proportioned that the size of it doesn’t hit you right away. It sneaks up on you, as the grand vista unfolds, marble and gold, bronze and Michelangelo’s glorious dome soaring overhead… and then you realize that the chubby marble cherubs holding the shell-shaped holy water font are actually six feet tall, that what looks like ordinary wainscoting at the bottom of the wall opposite is itself six feet wide, and those are not ants crawling slowly along the polished marble floor, they are other people.

All the artistic genius of the Renaissance was poured out lavishly to build and adorn this, the center of Christendom, the palace, church and administrative center of Christ’s vicar on earth, the latest in a line unbroken (although it did distinctly thin, in some places) from Apostolic times. All this, built over a necropolis in what had been outside the ancient walls, across the Tiber River from the city on seven fabled hills, in which tradition held that the bones of St. Peter—apostle and martyr, fisherman, missionary and Bishop of Rome— were laid. Over a hundred years in the building, it absorbed the energies of architects and the papal treasury, even the bronze roofing from the ancient Pantheon were taken to make the baldacchino, the elaborate canopy over the high altar. “Not the barbarians, but Bernini” was the wry comment by ordinary Romans on this particular bit of sack and pillage. But, oh, it is a splendid place, built for the greater glory of God on the Vatican Hill, and it is worth seeing many times, even if one is not Catholic, just for the treasure store of painting and sculpture. When St. Peters’ was a-building, the Church was a spiritual authority to a degree hardly comprehensible to us now, and— even more incomprehensible— a mighty secular power as well. Said the wise man, “Fear not he who has the power of life and death, but he that has the power to cast thee into hell”.

For a thousand years, the church was the intercessor between sinful human beings, and the divine, the keeper of the gates of heaven and the doors to hell, intercessor, arbiter, final authority, before whom even kings and emperors quailed and obeyed. Lesser men and saints trod very carefully, in the majestic presence of he who held all-power in this world and the keys of the next. The Basilica of St. Peter was meant to be a fit frame and show-place, but ironically it’s completion sparked the fracture of that one holy, catholic and apostolic church.

In one of the small rooms on the upper floor of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence are gathered many of the small treasures and rarities, portraits and curiosities mostly. Visitors are admitted one by one by a guard, and the line circles the room slowly. The couple ahead of my daughter and I on the Sunday afternoon that we “did” the Uffizi were older Italians with a look of country people about them, but country people dressed in their best, and uncomfortable in it. The man’s black suit was old, and pulled across his shoulders and gut, his white shirt collar and knotted tie looked like they were about to strangle him and he had the faint grimy lines on his knuckles and under his fingernails of someone who works with machines or automobile engines. But he and his wife were extracting the most out of their afternoon of culture, reading very carefully all the little cards underneath the pictures.

At a pair of Cranach portraits of a husband and wife, though, he leaned down to read the little cards, then straightened up and practically spat with contempt when he hissed
“Protestante!, and moved on to the next item in the treasury. My daughter and I looked at the two portraits. I didn’t need to read the little card, these were faces I was already familiar with. The husband, a bulky man with the thick shoulders and broad features of a working man; shrewd, tough, confident, clad in plain, unornamented clothes. The wife, whose round features sparkled with intelligence, and the assurance of a woman who is entirely pleased with the life she has made for herself, having had the wit to have picked out her man and made her own match and their mutual married happiness… which had been very much to his incredulous surprise.

Dying in bed of old age, was not how Martin Luther had expected his tumultuous life to end. He himself, brilliant, driven and outraged by the corruption of the Church he served with devotion, fully expected to burnt at stake as a heretic, from the moment he defied Emperor and the Pope’s representative at the Diet of Worms with the ringing words: “Unless I am convicted by [testimonies of the] Scripture and plain reason…I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe…Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.”

(To be continued)

The Vatican says Pope John Paul has died. Word came in an e-mail from the Vatican. It said “The Holy Father died this evening at 9:37 p.m. in his private apartment.”

(I’m at my Saturday job at the radio station. We have just announced it, and scheduled special programming. I am most unexpectedly moved by this, especially since I was in the news game 25 years ago, and my voice was breaking up in a most unprofessional manner….)

We drove across the border on a Sunday, my daughter and I, on a mild autumn day that began by being veiled in fog when I gassed up the VEV at the PX gas station at Bitburg, and headed southwest assisted by the invaluable Hallwag drivers’ atlas, open on the passenger seat beside me. Blondie shared the back seat with a basket of books, a pillow, some soft luggage stuffed into the space between the seats, and half a dozen Asterix and Obelix comic books. Fortunate child, she could read in the back seat of a moving car for hours. Not like me— child or adult, I could not even look at the printed word while underway without becoming nauseated.

“We’ll cross right over Luxemburg, and then we’ll be in France,” I said. “You know, Gaul.”
“Will there be indomitable Gauls?” my daughter asked, seriously. She was just coming up to five years old. Her favorite comic books followed the adventures of the bold Gaulish warrior Asterix, and his friend, the menhir-deliveryman Oblelix, whose tiny village was the last to hold out against the imperial might of Roman conquest, thanks to a magic potion worked up by the druid Getafix, which gave superhuman strength to all the village warriors. The drawings in the books were artistically literate, and there were all sorts of puns and word-plays in the stories – and they had been translated and distributed all over.
“There could be,” I said, noncommittally. Three or four weeks ago, we had left the apartment in the suburb of Athens where we had lived for most of what she could remember of life and taken the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, on our way to my new assignment in Spain.

In easy stages I had driven the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, through the tiny neck of Austria, and across Southern Germany. We had so far stayed in a castle on the Rhine, a couple of guesthouses, a hotel outside Siena which could have been nearly anywhere, as it overlooked a junkyard on one side, and acres of grapevines on the other three, and another which covered two floors on the top of an office block in Florence and offered a view of the Duomo from the terrace. We had been to see ruins in Pompeii, the Sistine chapel, the wondrous Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, a Nazi concentration camp, and a mineral bath in Baden-Baden.

“Where are we going to do first?”
“Buy some jam,” I said.
“What kind of jam?” my daughter asked.
“It’s very superior jam, made with currents. They pick out the seeds by hand with a goose-quill, so it’s very expensive and only made in this one little town in France, but it is supposed to be the tastiest on earth. It’s on the way between here and Paris.”
Well, it wasn’t any odder than anything else I had taken her to see in the time that we had lived in Europe. She curled up with Asterix, while the VEV’s tires hummed tirelessly down the road.

I could tell, without having to see a border sign, when we had left Germany. Germany was as clean as if Granny Dodie had dusted it all, and scoured it twice with Lysol, and then groomed all the grass and trees with a pair of manicure scissors. Houses and cottages were all trim and immaculate, not a sagging roof or a broken shutter to be seen – and then, we were in another place, where slacker standards prevailed. Not absolute rural blight, just everything a little grimier, a little more overgrown, not so aggressively, compulsively tidy. And the highway became a toll road, and a rather expensive one at that. I made a snap decision to take the rural, surface roads at that point, and the toll-taker indulgently wrote out a list for me of the towns along the way of the road I wanted, hop-scotching from town to town, along a two-lane road among rolling hills and dark green scrub-forest, and little collections of houses around a square, or a traffic circle labeled ‘centre’ around which I would spin until I saw a signpost with the name of the next town, and the VEV ricocheted out of the roundabout, and plunged headlong down this new road. (Good heavens, a signpost that way for Malmedy! Well, they did say snottily in Europe that wars were a means to teach Americans about geography, but I was interested this day in the earlier war, and my route led south.)

Always two lanes, little traveled on a Sunday it seemed. I had no shred of confidence in my ability to pronounce French without mangling every syllable, but at least I could read signs in Latinate alphabets. And this was Alsace-Lorraine, I was sunnily confident of being able to make myself clear in German, if required. The VEV’s tank was still better than half full, and it was only midday. Here we were climbing a long steady slope, a wooded table-land, and a break in the trees, where a great stone finger pointed accusingly at an overcast sky. A signpost with several arrows pointed the various ways farther on – Ossuaire …Ft. Douaumont … Fleury. A parking lot with a scattering of cars, the same oppressive sense of silence I had felt in places like Pompeii, and Dachau, as if even the birds and insects were muffled.
“What’s this place?” My daughter emerged from the back seat, yawning.
“There was a horrendous battle here, sixty years ago. The Germans tried to take it, but the French held on.”
“Indomitable Gauls,” My daughter said wisely, and I pointed up at the Ossuary,
“That place is full of their bones. We’ll go see the museum, first.”

This was the place of which the stalwart Joffe had commanded, “They shall not pass,” the place in which it could be claimed— over any other World War I battlefield— that France bled out as a significant military power. For ten months in 1916 Germany and France battered each other into immobility, pouring men and materiel into the Verdun Salient with prodigal hands, churning every inch of soil with shellfire and poison gas, splintering the woods and little towns, gutting a whole generation of the men who would have been it�s solid middle-class, the politicians and patriots, leaders who might have forestalled the next war, or stood fast in 1940. It was the historian Barbara Tuchman who noted that the entire 1914 graduating class of St. Cyr, the French approximation of West Point had been killed within the first month of war. For this was a wasteful war, as if the great generals all stood around saying “Well, that didn’t work very well, did it?— so let’s do it again, and again and again, until it does indeed work.” And afterwards, no one could very well say what it had all been for, and certainly not that it had been worth it, only that the place was a mass grave for a million men.

There was the usual little sign at the admittance desk to the museum— so many francs, but students and small children were admitted free, and so were war veterans and members of the military. I got out my military ID, and politely showed it to the concierge, a gentleman who looked nearly old enough to have been a veteran of Verdun saying
“Ici militaire…”
He looked at me, at the card, at my tits, and at my daughter, and then at the card again, and laughed, jovially waving me on to the exhibits; models and bits of battered gear, mostly, and a bit in the cellar made up to look like a corner of the battlefield, hell in a very small place, all the ground stirred up again and again. Supposedly, they had despaired of ever planting a straight row of trees; there was so much stuff in the ground.
When we came out again, the clouds were lifting a bit … down and across the river there was a golden haze over the town.

“Are we going to buy jam now?” my daughter asked.
“When we get to Bar le Duc. I think we’ll get something to eat, and stay the night there,” I said, and in that golden afternoon, I followed the two-lane road, the Voie Sacree, the only road into Verdun from the railhead at Bar le Duc, where traffic never stopped during the battle, two hundred trucks an hour, and 8,000 men shoveling gravel under their wheels day and night. The only visible mark left along the road were square white-washed mile markers, topped with a metal replica of a poilu’s helmet, like grave markers for a France gone sixty years ago.

I bought six jars of the confiture, six tiny jars of preserve as bright as blood, filled with tiny globes of clear red fruit. It was exquisite; saved for special occasions; I made them last for nearly a decade.

A couple of years ago, I wrote (here) about my adventures in the periodical stacks and the microfilmed archives of various newspapers, while in pursuit of a degree in English at California State University, Northridge. I spent hours in the Oviatt Library, reading periodicals and newspapers from the Thirties and Forties, leafing over the pages of magazines, sepia with age, and bound into heavy volumes, or spooling miles of film though the microfilm readers, my entrée into the world of my parents and their parents, and a disconcerting view of how things appeared the very day or week that they happened, before the historians set to and put it all to rights, smoothing out the wrinkles and making all the below-the-surface connections apparent.

There was an essay I read, whose premise has always stuck in my mind, although I cannot remember the author, or where it was published. I have the vague idea it was in the Reader’s Digest, reprinted from somewhere else— the Atlantic? New Yorker? Harpers’, maybe? Something meditative and literary anyway, penned by a woman sometime after the defeat of France, when England looked like being the next to fall, maybe even after Stalinist Russia had changed sides yet again, but well before Pearl Harbor, when the US was uneasily and technically at peace. But the war was on the authors’ mind, war and occupation, the loathsome-ness of the Nazis, and the tension between resistance and collaboration; France would have been occupied for at least a year, when the essay was published, and America was still a neutral, with businessmen, diplomats and journalists moving somewhat freely around the Continent.

The unremembered author wrote as someone familiar with Europe, and current events, and imagined herself at a literary cocktail party in her elegant New York apartment, looking around at the other guests and thinking “What would you do, under Occupation? How would you conduct yourselves? Would you resist? Collaborate? To what degree, and why?” She sketched out the character and background of her guests— old money, new money, artist, writer, actor, academic, non-conformist, businessman, man-about-town, and poseur—-and ventured suppositions on who would go along to get along, and who would quietly resist. I don’t quite know what struck me about the essay, other than her calm and even slightly chilly acknowledgement of the fact that, yes, given a military defeat and occupation of ones’ own country, the reactions of a personal circle of friends would be all over the ethical map.

There would be no united front, given ordinary day to day realities, and the necessity of making a living and keeping safe those you loved. Of course there would be individuals who wholeheartedly embraced their new overlords, and some who would feel obliged to strongly resist, and those in the middle who would have to work out some kind of accommodation, some way of enduring the situation without feeling ethically soiled. The writer did get that part quite right, but the trouble with that kind of speculation is when it got to specifics about people. Speculation is a more or less educated guess, and people can be more complicated than even the most imaginative writer can fathom.

A very few people are absolutely straight forward, and possess the heart and courage to carry on with the principles that they are renown for, like this man. But this man— for most of his life a soldier, patriot and hero— still fell resoundingly short of what anyone would have expected of him in the crunch. Yet this man, a bon-vivant, adulterous husband and dodgy businessman from whom nothing principled and high-minded could have been expected calmly risked everything to save lives, hundreds of lives. And this unremarkable young student nurse organized an escape line which funneled Allied evaders across three borders and a mountain range. If people sadly have the capacity to disappoint, they also have capability to take your breath away with their courage and dedication…. And most times it is just not something that you can see in advance. But what you do see it, the least you can do is recognize and honor those qualities.
In four days, the Iraqi people vote, in defiance of murder, bombs and terror, and it is in my mind that we may see the same hopeful, reckless courage, for out of that is a free nation born.

… You have more money than Midas. You are looking for a new car – a sporting cabriolet. What would you buy?

This is an interesting question. Despite the worldwide depression, there was a wealth of spectacular (for their day) high-end automobiles available. Just consider: the Blower Bentley, the Mercedes 540K Special Roadster, the Hispano-Suiza J-12, the Type 57 Bugatti, the Cadillac 36-60/90, the Talbot-Lago T150C SS, the Isotta-Fraschini Tipo 8B, the Maybach SW38, and, of course, the Duesenburg SSJ.

Well, the Cadillac and the Bentley can really be considered “second tier” automobiles. [It’s sad to say, my Limey friends, but in-between the Silver Ghost and the VW/BMW takeover, Rolls-Royce produced some relatively crude automobiles (great aircraft engines though)] Further, the Cadillac, the Isotta-Fraschinis, the Maybach, and the Hispano-Suiza were really more touring than sports cars (there were some exceptions, witness the ’37 Dubonnet Hispano.).

The Talbot, and particularly the Bugatti, are both spectacular examples of industrial craftsmanship – every facet finished to perfection. However, while the Talbots were by-and-large particularly beautiful, the 57s, with exception of the stunning Atlantic coupes (only 3 made), were some of the most ungainly Bugattis ever produced. For myself, iconoclast that I am, these cars would have a strong pull for me. But my practical side would not be unaware that these were really “small” and “delicate” cars for their age – not really the ticket for America’s [non] roads.

This brings us to the Mercedes and the Duesy. This is a tough choice. To me, there are few pre-war cars more beautiful than Jack Warner’s 540K Special Roadster (only 6 “hidden spare” models were built, IIRC). But Gary Cooper’s SSJ comes close (also IIRC, only 2 SSJs were ever built). On paper, you had that marvelous Duesenburg engine vs. that futuristic Mercedes chassis. But, in reality, while there are very few who have driven a 540K, ask anybody who’s driven a 300SL coupe, a Porsche 356 or early 911/912, or for that matter, a VW Bug or a MUTT – those swing-axle rear ends aren’t what they are cracked up to be.

In the end, it comes down to this: The Benz was a 105mph car, the Duesy would do 140+. I know what I’d choose.

Update: Well this is the last time I waste my time on an extendeded classic car post on you people. Not one comment? Not even to mention my omission of the spectacular Delahaye? Jeeze. (j/k – As I don’t make a dime on this, if I did it to please the unwashed masses, I wouldn’t do it.).

I fell asleep to the monotonous, but engaging drone of Eugen Weber, preaching of the final days of The Holy Roman Empire on PBS’ The Western Tradition. I awoke to the sounds of the same man – but preaching a whole new doctrine.

More later

Update: Argh, how embarrassing. I had a whole argument formulated last night, which I can’t recall this morning. *blush*

It basically followed this line. He proclaims the legitimacy of the European nation-state model because we’ve come to rely upon national governments for “all the services they provide.” But, in his section on the 16th and 17th century, he argues that the European nation-states were formed almost exclusively for the express purpose of more effectively conducting war.

Indeed, a strong argument can be made that the majority of the troubles facing the world today are the aftermath of centuries under the stewardship of war-mongering imperialistic European nations.

I see the day coming, not likely in our lifetimes, but perhaps our children’s, where mankind is, by and large, no longer at war. And people compete with each other in a truly free and global marketplace, not the field of battle. When that day comes, I predict that the great nations of the world, and their governments, will become obsolete, and slowly fade into just another chapter in the annals of human history.

Anyway, that wasn’t bad for something off-the-cuff. 🙂

It is a country of dreams, fragile pavilions, airy courtyards, and meticulously planted gardens, cool trickling fountains and pools, refuges from the harsh summer heat of Southern Spain, that the Moors called Al-Andalus. In this country the bougainvillea vines make a splash of dark red or electrical magenta against whitewashed plaster walls, and curved roof tiles of a peculiar faded hue, somewhere between rose pink and honey. In the afternoon, the cicadas make a churring sound in the oleanders in the great enclosed garden of the citadel of the Alhambra high on the Albaicin hill, in the city of Granada.

The place seems deserted of people, only my daughter and I exploring the paths where the white dust settles softly in our footprints as we pass. Behind us is the ruined citadel of the Alcazaba, the fortress looking out over the city below, and the sprawling palace complex of towers and courts, whispering with myrtle leaves and the trickle of water. The Patio of Myrtles – the Comares Tower, the Hall of the Ambassadors, its interior walls covered with a fine tracery of intricate plaster lace. Our footsteps fall with a faint scuffing sound on the stone floors. The Lions’ Court, water bubbling from a great stone basin, born up on the backs of oddly stylized, almost Chinese-looking stone lions, at the center of a forest of slender pillars, branching into more elaborate arching trees of plaster filigree. To me it is a wonderland, a place of enchantment, but something about the rooms opening into the Lion’s Court creeps out my daughter. She feels a sense of oppression, the whisper of something bad having happened there, and runs ahead. I follow, doing my best to drink it all in, the fabled rooms and gardens, loggia and court. There was the Queen’s mirador, a tower with an airy latticed window, once with a view into the town below- all ornamented with plasterwork, with tile and magnificent woodwork, the last grand flowering of the Moorish kings in Spain, their paradise on earth, planted with flowers and shrubs to make a living carpet, ornamental trees swaying gracefully in the cool breeze. Boabdil, the last king of Granada, departed in 1491, asking of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs that the gate out of which he left be stopped up and never used again. At the head of the pass leading down towards the sea, he looked back at his glorious citadel and wept.

Granada, the last remnant of Moorish control on the Iberian Peninsula. Once, at the peak of power and glory, the great dynasties—the Umayyad, and after them the Almoravids and the Almohads held all but Asturias in the far north-west, and went over the Pyrenees as far as Tours before being pushed back by Charles Martel. Moorish rulers held the great cities of Toledo, Cordoba, Seville; shining beacons of learning and culture in the darkness of the European Middle ages. Gloriously adorned with gardens, running water, street-lighting, Cordoba boasted subtle philosophers, learned doctors of medicine, poets and mathematicians, and an atmosphere of toleration that drew on the finest scholars from all three religious traditions. Abd-al-Rahman III, who held supremacy as the Caliph of Cordoba built himself a great palace outside the city, called the Medinat-al-Zahra – palace, garrison and city all at once, splendid and sprawling – as glittering and ultimately as fragile as a blown glass sculpture. It existed only a bare half-century as the Versailles of Iberia, before it was razed nearly to the ground, and the Caliphate collapsed into a muddle of warring city states. The Christian Reconquest slowly gathered, retaking Toledo by the 11th century, brought to a glorious conclusion by Ferdinand and Isabella in this very city, in the shimmering fairy-tale palace that my daughter and I now explored. Within a few years and decades many others followed King Boabdil into exile, probably many of them looking one last time over their shoulders and weeping for that lost paradise, that splendid dream that was no longer theirs. The exiles took skills, intellect and trade contacts with them, and Spain glittered for a while, and then grew moribund, rigid, overtaken in intellectual, industrial and mercantile energy by other countries.

But some still dream, of colonnaded gardens, and fountains of clear water from the snow-melt of the Sierra Nevada, and of taking back the lost paradise of Al-Andalus, caring little that what made it so, was liberty from religious orthodoxy, and the free exchange of ideas, in the courtyards of Cordoba and Toledo, with the blossoms of orange trees perfuming the twilight air.

Three or four years ago while Saddam Hussein still had a death-grip on the Iraqi people and a slightly looser grip on the Western journalists who came to commiserate with them, I listened to an interview on NPR, an interview with an Iraqi gentleman and musician, who was the principle cellist with the symphony orchestra in Baghdad. The orchestra then existed against great odds and every deprivation that the UN sanctioned, and out of which certain western powers were profiting.

It was heartbreaking, listening to the voice of the cellist, and his account of the orchestra, much reduced, and with its surviving coterie of musicians having to work day jobs, and starving not only for materiel sustenance, but for connection with the larger world, with other musicians, to travel, to perform for a world audience. The Iraqi cellist longed for it, longed with the desperation of a man stranded in the desert who craves water, a desire all the more poignant because of dread, dread of what might, would, probably take place in order to make all those longings a reality. And of course, with Saddam’s media minders vetting every word of interview, the cellist could not voice his hopes or fears in any but the most banal and inoffensive phrases and I am sure the interviewer knew this, and so did any sensitive listener.

The interviews were taped during rehearsals for a concert featuring Elgar’s Cello Concerto. I rather like Elgar and composers like Smetana, Dvorak, Neilson, and Delius; the agreeably second-rank, late nineteenth and early 20th century composers of symphonic music, with a mildly nationalist interest in the folklore and musical traditions of their respective countries. It’s accessible in a way that the jangly and self-consciously modern later composers are not. They composed and performed largely in a time and world which was hopeful, where great and wonderful advances in everything—medicine, machinery, political movements, and communications— were making lives better and more rewarding, and most Americans and Europeans were confident that things would get even better. Even the Cello Concerto, completed in 1919 after the wreckage of much of that sunny confidence during the First World War, still offered a bit of hope, and a refuge in music, when everything else is gone.

I don’t know how the concert itself went over, but I wonder now if it wasn’t something like an occasion caught for newsreel cameras sometime during the last months of Hitler’s Germany; one last performance by the Berlin Philharmonic; the faces of the audience somber and exhausted. The vengeful Soviets are advancing from the East, the British and Americans from the West, every night, the nights are hideous with high-explosives as the Allied air forces methodically steam-roller cities into rubble, the thousand-year Reich is imploding, its’ functionaries seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, nemesis and blood. There is no refuge for the concertgoers, except for a little while in the music. That little is all they have left, before the ending of their world, and so they are lost in it, grateful for this little respite, the reminder that there is order, and beauty, and hope in the world, and a promise that the present nightmare may pass. And so I think it was for the principal cellist of the Baghdad symphony— a hope and a reminder.

I don’t know about Afghanistan; it seems to be very like what it was in Kipling’s’ day, all swashbuckling and intrigue and tribal feuds. But for a country like Iraq, where there can be a symphony orchestra, and a musician who loves Elgar’s Cello concerto; that is indeed a light and a promise of order, beauty and hope.

Around the time of the first anniversary of 9/11, I saw a drawing commemorating, and making a bittersweet comment about anniversaries, memory and the passage of time. Quick pen sketches of the WTC towers, each with a sequential date underneath; 9/11/02, 9/11/03, 9/11/04, but with each repetition, the outline of the towers became mistier, more diffuse. The first anniversary to me was almost unbearable, as much of a psychic battering as the event itself. The second was a sad and thoughtful occasion, and now we are facing the third year, and the day falls on a Saturday; not a work day for most of us. Curiously, that seems to set the event a little aside, this year. I will not be walking into the glass and granite lobby of the office building where I work— a lobby that looks eerily like the lobby of the WTC buildings, owing to the fact they were built at about the same time, following many of the same architectural precepts, and which houses many of the same sort of businesses, although on a much smaller scale— on a glorious September day, not knowing that the towers had already been hit, they were burning, and thousands of people doing the same job they did every day would be dust and ashes in the next few moments.

On that day, a great crack ran across our universe, and everything before that day was on the other side of a great chasm. On the side of the chasm where we were now, we would be taking the fight to the hydra-headed monster that is Islamofascism, grimly lopping off the heads that we could get at; either heads that were directly responsible and defiantly proud of it, or heads that would at least discourage the others from striking again.

Time and events have overtaken the memory, and as the sketch artist pointed out, the edges will fade and blur, year by year, and on the whole, I do not think this is a bad thing; it is, in fact, they way we humans are. It is the way we have to be, if we are able to go on with living, and living anything like a normal life.

Curiously, this week marked another anniversary of catastrophe, but a natural one, rather than man-made. On September 8th, 1900, the city of Galveston, on the Texas Gulf coast was struck dead on by a tremendous hurricane. The city was built on a low sand barrier island, just a few feet above the water, separated from the mainland by a wide lagoon, a pleasant seacoast town of wood-frame buildings boasting all the amenities of new and bustling port— a thriving business district, railway terminal, schools, an orphanage, a theater, boarding houses, mansions and a newspaper. With almost no warning, the weather— the first cool days of fall, much longed for in South Texas— turned queer and ominous. The movie director King Vidor, who was a small boy at the time, always recalled how water of the lagoon and the sea seemed to mound up on either side of the town, as the hurricane drew towards the coast, as if Galveston were at the bottom of a bowl and the water about to spill over.

The barometers plummeted down, and down, and it began to rain, and the waves fell on the sand shore, heavier and heavier, gnawing away the margin of safety. The winds increased, hurling the rain— and soon all sorts of deadly debris sideways; some estimation put the wind speed at 150, possible up to 200 MPH. And the storm surge, when it swept ashore, was fifteen or twenty feet of water, which pounded the houses into so much scrap lumber, and drove a deadly moraine of debris against every structure still standing. The waves smashed the orphanage buildings, where the ten Urseline sisters had herded the children into the upstairs dormitory farthest from the seashore, and each had lashed seven or eight children to themselves with clothesline, all in a line like ducklings after their mother, in a vain attempt to keep them together and safe. The sea came down, and smashed the building, and the only ones to survive were three older boys who scrambled into a tree.

In the morning, the dazed survivors would find bodies everywhere, and a two-story tall line of storm wrack dividing the town into a sector in which buildings still stood, however damaged, and a sector swept nearly clean. It still stands, over the Johnston Flood and the San Francisco Earthquake as a municipal disaster, with at least 6,000 dead, possibly as many as 10,000.(This is a good account of it.) Not a family was unaffected; even if they had all survived, huddling in their houses, listening to the roar and crack, feeling the house shudder underneath and all around for all that deadly night. Recovering and burying the dead went on for months, the rebuilding for years, for the city fathers had decided on a great course of public work; a seawall, and to raise the level of the town.

This was eventually done, and Galveston rebuilt on a scale grander yet, but in the stories written about the centenary of the great hurricane, many of those who grew up In Galveston afterwards often remarked that their parents and older kin who had survived it, never much mentioned the storm. It was almost as if they had willed the whole traumatic time out of existence. I finally understood why this was so, nearly a week after 9/11, when I forced myself away from the television, and put the portable radio back onto the classical station, and took it out with me while I pruned the rosebushes, and spread out mulch in the garden.

This was what you had to do, to not forget such an event— something like that could never be put out of mind and memory, but compartmentalized, just so you can go on and build some kind of satisfactory life, rebuild a city, win a war, make your garden grow. But the music in my mind when I see the videos of the fires, of the clouds of dust, of people falling, is always and forever Mozart’s’ “Requiem”, a mourning for what we lost, and the world that used to be, a world that is fading like the outline of the towers.

I am honored to be given the opportunity to email interview best-selling author Michelle Malkin. Michelle is the daughter of Filipino immigrants, wife and mother of two, blogress, TV commentator, nationally syndicated columnist, author of Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores and her just released book In Defense of Internment: The Case for “Racial Profiling” in World War II and the War on Terror.

Before we get on with the interview I want to state three things. First I want to say that I think that this is an important book that proves there is an intellectual case for the 1942 evacuation order. That there were abuses that occurred as a result of that order is undeniable, but they were not the reasons for the order. Second, my wife and I agree that this book is an impressive achievement given that Michelle gave birth while writing it. (Dr. Wife gave birth to Darling Daughter#2 while finishing her PhD long distance, so we empathize.) And thirdly, I personally want to thank Michelle for writing this book. After my posts on the 1942 Evacuation Order, I received many requests that I write a book on the subject. Michelle has written a book better than I could have imagined. So thank you, Michelle, for getting me off the hook!

Michelle: Thank you for your kind comments about the book. As you know, I embarked on this project in part because of your debate with Eric Muller last spring. If not for you, I doubt that this book would exist.

Sparkey: Thank you! I really appreciate that. Now, you once wrote that you believed the internment of “ethnic Japanese was abhorrent and wrong.” What changed your mind? Was there a specific “Aha” moment, was it a gradual process, or what?

Michelle: My “Aha” moment occurred as I read David Lowman‘s book, especially the MAGIC cables and intelligence memos that he reproduced in the back of the book. I put many of those documents in my book and online. Many more are available at www.internmentarchives.com, which was founded by Lowman’s publisher, Lee Allen.

The memos show that U.S. intelligence agencies regarded ethnic Japanese on the West Coast as a serious national security threat. My critics have written dozens of blog entries assailing my book. They have accused me of being a self-hater, of slander, of shoddy research methods, of providing too few footnotes (there are more than 600), and of being physically repulsive. But as of this morning, they have not addressed the concerns about Japanese espionage discussed in the intelligence memos reproduced in my book. Why? Because anyone who spends even ten minutes perusing these memos is likely to conclude that the evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese on the West Coast was rooted in legitimate national security concerns, not simply wartime hysteria and racism.

Sparkey: In the introduction to In Defense of Internment you state that it is forgivable that American’s don’t fully appreciate “the wartime exigencies of early 1942.” How do you feel the prism of Vietnam has distorted people’s view and understanding of 1942?

Michelle: In the late 1960s and the 1970s, anti-war agitation and ethnic identity politics became all the rage. Third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans embraced the America-bashing, victim-card culture and launched a nationwide bid for blanket payments to evacuees and their families. That movement led to the formation of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which issued a biased report that reached the predetermined conclusion that Roosevelt’s policies were motivated by racism and wartime hysteria.

Sparkey: How widely publicized was the Niihau incident in the States, and how significant was the event to the Administration at the time? [Niihau is a Hawaiian island where ethnic Japanese Americans assisted a downed Japanese pilot after the Pearl Harbor raid. -S]

Michelle: It was written up by naval intelligence officers in Hawaii and was publicized by the local papers. The incident appears to have been very significant to the Roosevelt Administration-as evidenced by inclusion of reports related to the incident in the proceedings of the Roberts Commission.

Sparkey: After both Pearl Harbor and 9-11 many security fears were not realized. Critics point to these as evidence that such fears were unfounded. How do you respond to this?

Michelle: Obviously this is a logical fallacy. If X (say, an appendectomy) causes the absence of Y (say, a burst appendix), it is incorrect to conclude that since Y did not occur, X was unnecessary.
[I would like to add that just because a threat was not realized doesn’t imply that the concern for that threat was unjustified. – S]

Sparkey: Eric Muller insinuates that (based on the name of your book) you’re really advocating an Arab roundup of a sort. You address this charge in your rebuttal, but it does beg the question, why name the book In Defense of Internment if you’re not really advocating internment?

Michelle: The title is In Defense of Internment because the bulk of the book (including all 12 chapters between the introduction and conclusion) is devoted to a defense of the evacuation, relocation, and internment (policies collectively referred to as “internment”) of ethnic Japanese during World War II. This is very relevant to the War on Terror, obviously, and I tease out some lessons in the introduction and conclusion. But it is clear that my book is a defense of internment in 1942, not today. I do support racial profiling and other policies that my opponents have repeatedly likened to the WW II internment.

Sparkey: What do you see as the biggest benefits resulting from the 1942 Evacuation Order, and do they justify the policy?

Michelle: The greatest benefit was to severely disrupt Japanese espionage cells on the West Coast. Given what was known at the time, I believe the decisions made in early 1942 were justified.

Sparkey: What do you see as the biggest negatives of the policy and their effects on public perception?

Michelle: The biggest negative was the adverse impact on Japanese-Americans who were loyal to the U.S. and the PR campaign on their behalf that followed. The effect has been to wrongly discredit any and all homeland security policies that apply heightened scrutiny based on race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality as well as any detention policies that bypass the criminal justice system.
[It also didn’t help that the Government dragged its feet to the point of abuse in providing direct compensation for actual incurred losses after the war. – S]

Sparkey: How do you think the Evacuation Order could have been handled differently or better?

Michelle: There were numerous problems with the way evacuation was carried out. Military authorities did not initially appreciate how hard it would be for ethnic Japanese to move east on their own. They initially allowed Terminal Island residents 30 days to evacuate, then abruptly shortened that length of time to 48 hours following the Goleta shelling and Los Angeles air raid scare. This caused considerable hardship for the evacuees, who scrambled to sell off household goods (typically at rock-bottom prices) and pack for their move. The conditions in some of the assembly centers were miserable. (It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the centers had to be built quickly and at the time construction materials and equipment were scarce.) Some of these problems could not have been prevented, but others might have been with better planning.

Sparkey: It’s obvious many critics haven’t even read your book before casting aspersions. It’s as if you attacked some article of their religion. How do you expect to “kick off a vigorous national debate” with those who believe in the infallibility of their faith?

Michelle: There are many people who feel the issue is settled and should not be debated. This is unfortunate. If they are confident that their position is right, they should have nothing to fear from an open, vigorous debate. There are others, however, who are willing to debate the issue-most notably Eric Muller and Greg Robinson.

A word about that debate. Muller mainly addresses side issues, such as the book cover and my research methods and terminology and the book’s title and why he didn’t receive an advance copy of the book from my publisher and whether I slandered Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga and whether I mischaracterized Sarah Eltantawi of the Muslim Public Affairs Council and whether I took too long to respond to his critique.

Robinson, to his credit, focuses on the core issues-but much of what he says is flat out untrue. He says most of the MAGIC cables I discuss in my book came from Tokyo or Mexico City and refer to areas outside the United States. Wrong. He says those cables that do speak of the United States detail various efforts by Japan to build networks, and list hopes or intentions rather than actions or results. False. He says I said that Hoover’s opinion was not reliable or relied upon. Nonsense. He says ONI opposed evacuation. Rubbish. He says the Navy opposed evacuation. Wrong again. I pointed out these errors 18 days ago, but he has yet to acknowledge any of them.

Sparkey: Your book Invasion didn’t receive the attention it deserved from the mainstream press. How does the reaction to In Defense of Internment compare?

Michelle: I was heartened by the pre-release response, particularly the coverage my Bothell, Wash., speech received in the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Invasion was never covered as a news story by any major newspaper. Though I sent In Defense of Internment to every major newspaper, it appears it will not be reviewed, just as Invasion was not reviewed (except by a few small-town papers).

Sparkey: The next time you are in the Dallas area, would you give my family and me the honor of having dinner with us?

Michelle: If time allows, I would be delighted. I will be in Houston later this week, by the way, at an event sponsored by the Houston Forum. More details here.