I can hardly believe it, but it’s been five years since we lost David Campbell.
Here’s what I wrote way back when, and this is a nice collection of warm remembrances.
I wrote this last year, in large part about Campbell’s memory.
Hero Friday: Kesha, Connaughton and Hersh
I will probably have occasion in the future to ponder the Kesha 2.0 rollout, which just appears to have begun in earnest. She has been through some rough times, going to lawyers with her erstwhile svengali Dr Luke, and battling an eating disorder. See, the thing about it is I think her music is really good, and I wish her the best.
I have to take a moment to talk about Pat Connaughton, who helped lead the men’s basketball team for Notre Dame (my alma mater) to dizzying heights, by that program’s modest standards. Having already signed to pitch for the Orioles, he insists on pursuing his dream of making an NBA team.
Yesterday, at the poke and prod session otherwise known as the NBA Draft Combine, he recorded a 44-inch vertical jump, the best of the year, and the best since Kenny Gregory in 2001. That was surprising (but not too surprising if you’ve watched him play for four years). What was a real shocker is that he has 10 percent body fat, one of the highest figures in the Combine. (I told you it was a poke and prod deal….). CBS Sports’ Sam Vecinie said Connaughton “might be the best pure athlete at the Combine” and the Vine of his leap sparked numerous twitter references a certain hoops movie starring Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes.
And then there is Seymour Hersh, whose London Review of Books piece about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden caused a shitstorm of reaction, both pro and (mostly) con.
My small contribution to the kerfuffle: It seems to me to offer a textbook illustration of the snark/smarm dialectic described in Tom Scocca’s brilliant essay from 2013. It’s a meandering piece, in the best way, and hard to summarize.
[Drums fingers] OK you’re back and have read “On Smarm.” Excellent.
There is a lot of good stuff in that piece about David Denby and Dave Eggers and Joe Lieberman, but as it relate to Hersh I have in mind the passage where Scocca writes, regarding Edward Snowden:
Talk about something else, smarm says. Talk about anything else. This young man is in possession of secret official computer files that document the routine lawlessness and boundless intrusiveness of the American surveillance state. An unaccountable power is monitoring the entire global flow of information—which amounts, in contemporary practice, to monitoring thought itself. Illegally.
Smarm says:
– Edward Snowden broke the law.
– Edward Snowden is a naif, who has already foolishly betrayed his nation’s most vital secrets.
– Edward Snowden is an unstable, sensation-seeking narcissist.
– Edward Snowden isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know.
– Edward Snowden is a traitor.
So what if Snowden is telling the truth? Just look at the way he’s telling it.
I see a similar dynamic being played out by mainstream journalists with regard to Seymour Hersh.
Um, that interview in Slate with Isaac Chotiner…. Yowsa. He really doesn’t want to be there, and yet Hersh deflects and mocks his young inquisitor’s earnest (and dishonest, nay, smarmy) efforts to corner him into the same old traps (anonymous sources, the New Yorker rejected your story…) so many other “respectable” journalists have been trying to paint him into. It’s impossible to summarize the interview, so I will paste in a couple of representative chunks….
Hersh: I sent it approvingly because it crossed my desk and it does say there were walk-ins. [Laughs] You can read it any way you want. The White House has been very clever about this. They have gone after me personally. They don’t like me boo hoo hoo. But they have been very careful to hedge everything, they quote Peter Bergen. Bergen or Berger, is that his name?
Chotiner: Bergen.
Hersh: They quote him. He views himself as the trustee of all things Bin Laden.
Chotiner: I just want to talk to you about your piece and journalism.
Hersh: What difference does it make what the fuck I think about journalism? I don’t think much of the journalism that I see. If you think I write stories where it is all right to just be good enough, are you kidding? You think I have a cavalier attitude on throwing stuff out? Are you kidding? I am not cavalier about what I do for a living.
Chotiner: I don’t think you are cavalier. That was not my question.
Hersh: Whatever it is, it’s an impossible question. It’s almost like you are asking me to say that there are flaws in everybody. Yes. Do I acknowledge that not everybody can be perfect? But I am not backing off anything I said.
***
Hersh: So, all that happens is I tell [New Yorker editor David Remnick] about the story, and his initial approach was to say do a blog item. Go fuck yourself! A blog? I have done a couple blogs when it is 1,000 words but this is worth more. At that point it was very early. So I was on contract for a book and said fuck it … You want to make a lot out of it? David always says he welcomes another view. I am the guy who said fuck it, I will do what I want to do. [Editor’s note: Other news sources have reported that the New Yorker declined to publish a version of the story.] [Hersh picks up other phone]: Yeah. Yeah. Oh no, fuck no … I don’t want to do it there! Go fuck—
Hersh: You there?
Chotiner: Yes.
Hersh: Fucking TV interview sets up in the hall of my office building. It’s a lawyer’s building.
Chotiner: I was just asking—
Hersh: You want to write about this totally tedious shit? Yes, I am a huge pain in the ass. I am the one that decided to publish it wherever the hell I please. That’s the story. You want to listen to hall gossip about me? Go ahead. [Sarcastic voice] It is so immensely important to so many people to know where I published. I can’t believe it.
***
Anger is upsetting to smarm—real anger, not umbrage. But so is humor and confidence. Smarm, with its fixation on respect and respectability, has trouble handling it when the snarkers start clowning around.
***
Smarm in l’affaire Hersh is the “respectable” media saying “old Sy has finally gone off the rails….” It’s being intensely skeptical about the challenging narrative, isolating/attacking the messenger, and circling the wagons around the Obama/Schmindle/Zero Dark Thirty accounts, which are far more absurd and unlikely.
We know what we know about My Lai and Abu Ghraib and the CIA’s domestic spying because of Sy Hersh.
Until we can find out exactly what really happened in the bin Laden raid, which is probably never, because SECRETS, giving Hersh the benefit of the doubt seems the least we can do.
UPDATE: Trevor Timm’s The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful which I saw just now, is simply fantastic on the highly selective skepticism of the press.
Besides one piece by Huffington Post’s Ali Watkins, the press has barely made a peep about the fact that the CIA’s argument about bin Laden and torture—one that Hollywood made a movie about!—is a lie. Meanwhile, Slate ran five hit jobs on Hersh within 36 hours. Perhaps that’s why Hersh treated their reporter with contempt during this already-legendary interview.
We know that the administration made many assertions about the bin Laden raid in its aftermath that turned out to be false. The purported details, many given to reporters “anonymously,” were downright fantastical—yet reporters dutifully printed them just the same. We also know that the government ordered the photos of bin Laden’s body destroyed—possibly in violation of federal law—and, in an unprecedented move, had all information about the raid transferred to the CIA, where it can’t be accessed through Freedom of Information Act requests. John Kerry told reporters directly to “shut up and move on.” How Hersh himself deserves more scrutiny than these disturbing moves by the government is beyond comprehension.
Crepuscular études
I posted this on Instagram yesterday, and it led to comments from friends as far afield as Minnesota, Brazil and Australia. Genevieve in St. Paul declared it “word of the day,” and Dan in Sao Paulo informed me that crepuscular is a common Portuguese word, which I didn’t know, but it makes sense. Saudade has no direct English translation either.
Then Ricky chipped in from Corrimal.
Personally, I’m quite fond of dawn and dusk, they have a bit of a mystic feel. The changing of the light is always interesting.
…I love the outline of the cow…. The filigree quality of the trees against the light is beautifully delicate, and the warm glow on the horizon sets the middle ground of the frame, but it’s the presence of of the animal and its lack of complete definition that brings it all back to earth.
I didn’t know I had done all that, but … yeah. I hadn’t wanted to explain the shot too much, Ricky’s interest in it led me to confess to what I was really after.
I was actually photographing that cow more that the entire scene. She just lost her calf yesterday morning. It’s been my experience that cows don’t quite get it when their calves die, especially when they get taken away (and the Dead Truck came around in record time, a mere 15 minutes after I had called). So typically the mama bellows for the calf for a couple of days. She comes up to me accusingly and bellows with special ferocity, as if to say “where’d you put my calf!??!”
Ricky: With my tendency to anthropomorphise, I couldn’t do what you do, Tim.
Me: Well, you harden over time I guess. Yesterday I took the opportunity to ship off two of my favorite old cows as well (they both had udder problems and couldn’t nurse their calves, and one had chronic hoof issues). They got onto the trailer like humans stepping onto a bus, and when we opened the gate, both trotted gamely into the heart of the cacophonous stockyard labyrinth.
I felt a bit of a pang, but turned and let ’em go.
When I told my daughter we had sold the big red cow with the horns, she was very upset with me.
“I had to sell her,” I told her. “You didn’t HAVE to,” she replied. Correctly.
A birthday, an unhappy Anniversary, and Back to the Future we go …
The divine Julie Christie came into this world 75 years ago today, which is something to ponder and/or celebrate. Here is an interview she did in 1967 for something called “Tonight, Let’s All Make Love in London”….
… and there’s this amazing clip from the other end of her career…
Let’s not forget that she has always been, and remains, a feisty activist lady.
***
Two other historical resonances to note for April 14, 2015. First, the unhappy anniversary: it’s been 150 years since John Wilkes Booth shot Abe Lincoln with a derringer (!) at a performance of “Our American Cousin.”
Second, it’s apparently also the target date for the Back to the Future Delorean time machine, so there’s that.
It’s a little early for me even to try to wrap my head around the awfulness of the coming (likely) Clinton v. Bush death march. Already I have Facebook acquaintances throwing down the gauntlet, daring anyone to question the inevitability of the Hillary express. I have yet to take the bait, but it’s, what, 18 months to go? Don’t know if I can hold out.
She does seem pretty fricking inevitable at this point, I will grant you that.
It’s true: There are definitely ways to restore popular control of federal elections that increasingly seem to have little or nothing to do with the popular will. Indefatigable antiwar activist David Swanson does a nice job in laying out all the things that have to be changed at the activist level:
Instead, we need to grab this moment in which two corrupt dynasties are vying for royal powers, to use every nonviolent tool available to work at the local, state, and federal levels for:
No private election spending.
Free media air time on our air waves for candidates qualified by signature gathering.
Public financing, ballot access, and debate access for candidates qualified by signature gathering.
No gerrymandering.
Hand-counted paper ballots publicly counted in every polling place.
Election day holiday.
Limited campaign season.
Automatic voter registration.
National popular vote with no electoral college.
Mandatory voting with an option for “none of the above.”
Yup. That’s all there is to it. Easy-peasy.
***
Middle East policy: Start fire, just add gas!
Reginald Perrin: You realise the sort of people you’re going to attract, don’t you, Jimmy? Thugs, bully-boys, psychopaths, sacked policemen, security guards, sacked security guards, racialists, Paki-bashers, queer-bashers, Chink-bashers, anybody-bashers, rear Admirals, queer admirals, Vice Admirals, fascists, neo-fascists, crypto-fascists, loyalists, neo-loyalists, crypto-loyalists.
Jimmy Anderson: Do you think so? I thought recruitment might be difficult.
***
Friedman: “1st I’ll ask an insane question. Then claim it was rhetorical. Then immediately make it clear it was NOT rhetorical.” Lunch time!
— Billmon (@billmon1) March 18, 2015
With few exceptions (Iran nuke talks) US Middle East policy post 9/11 consists of throwing gasoline on fires, being surprised when it burns.
— Billmon (@billmon1) March 18, 2015
Juan Cole’s Tom Friedman & funding ISIL: Israel/Iran Derangement Syndrome is a pretty compelling read.
I don’t agree with everything Cole says, and haven’t forgotten his support for Obama’s non-Constitutional “kinetic action” in Libya, nor his “letter to the left.” His position was not short on nuance, but Libya is a disaster today, though surely it’s cheering for those who like their middle eastern nations in flames.
Thomas Friedman’s more-puzzling-than-usual column from midweek, in which he wondered aloud whether the West should be arming ISIL, led to more than a few hot takes asserting Friedman had lost it, and was floating that balloon out of ignorance and/or dementia. I beg to differ: I think he knew exactly what he was saying.
Between Obama’s pending rapprochement with Iran and the cooperation between US and allied militaries in bombing ISIL combatants (and countless more collateral persons of no interest), there lurks the possibility of peace breaking out in the Middle East. Well, OK, peace is not really in the works, but there remains the chance the U.S. will stall out on its accidental/on purpose mission to take down every proper country in the region that doesn’t kowtow to U.S./Israeli domination.
Cole:
What accounts for [Friedman] being in this category of Daesh-supporters when he is not a conservative (in the American political sense of conservative)? It is his Zionism. For Israel, Daesh is just a manifestation of chaos and not threatening to Israel which has the best military in the Middle East. But for many Israelis and supporters of Israel, it is the big conventional rejectionist states and armies with their potential for nuclear weaponry that are the real danger. That is why Friedman supported Bush’s Iraq War, as well. Apparently, for this strain of Zionism, the Middle East has to be in flames and broken up by constant American military invasions and special ops covert actions and coups in order to keep Israel from having any peer militarily in the region. Daesh is just a set of gangs and aids in keeping Syria and Iraq in chaos, so from this point of view, it is a good thing and should be armed to cause more chaos.
It is a monstrous point of view that would come as a surprise to most Americans when put like this, but all Middle Easterners understand that it is exactly the kind of policy Israeli hawks pursue and urge the US to pursue.
Yesterday morning in the Post David Petraeus was not miles away from what Friedman was jokingly-but-not-really suggesting. Suddenly, the ISIL threat has been downgraded from Existential/Kill Them All to Maybe We Should Be Friends.
Watch the pundits go along with this 180-degree turn. Will the prospect of peace breaking out reclaim its rightful place as Public Enemy Number One? That’s been the safe bet for a while now.
Now with video! Matt Lee to Jen Psaki: “whoa, whoa, whoa”
Democracy Now has an interview with Pomona College professor Miguel Tinker Salas on the latest events in Venuzuela, including the Obama administration’s recent designation of that South American nation as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to national security.” The broadcast features a clip from this precious exchange between State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki and AP reporter Matt Lee:
JEN PSAKI: These latest accusations, like all previous such accusations, are ludicrous. As a matter of long-standing policy, the United States does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means. Political transitions must be democratic, constitutional, peaceful and legal. We’ve seen many times that the Venezuelan government tries to distract from its own actions by blaming the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela. These efforts reflect a lack of seriousness on the part of the Venezuelan government to deal with the grave situation it faces.
MATT LEE: Sorry. The U.S. has—whoa, whoa, whoa—the U.S. has a long-standing practice of not promoting—what did you say? How long-standing is that? I would—in particular in South and Latin America, that is not a long-standing practice.
It goes on and you should really read the whole thing, but I just had to share the “whoa whoa whoa” bit from Lee, who has quite a history with Psaki. If this were a mainstream Hollywood movie about Washington, the two of them would be having a secret affair…
Stiffening into the bog
Where the bodies are buried, Patrick Radden Keefe’s long piece in this week’s New Yorker, is a grim read, but fascinating, and infinitely sad.
I’m not sure how I came to follow Gerry Adams on Twitter, but I do, and it’s hard to reconcile the accusations that he ordered murders with the slightly oafish, avuncular persona I read daily. To wit:
Drat! Left My Crocs In Derry!
— Gerry Adams (@GerryAdamsSF) March 9, 2015
Having said that, I find the accusations credible. But it’s a tangled mess. Many of Adams’ accusers who spoke to the Boston College oral-history project were “former Republicans who have accused Sinn Fein of betrayal,” according to a representative speaking for Adams. Which is true, but doesn’t invalidate their testimony.
Similarly, Jean McConville, the woman murdered allegedly on Adams’ orders, was a widow and a mother of ten. It doesn’t beggar belief that a woman in her predicament would be vulnerable to the blandishments (or threats) of British spies looking for low-level informers. Murdering a woman mired in such circumstances seems unusually cruel, whether she was a tout or not. The facts are murky there as well.
One of the creepiest aspects of this: the buggering holy men lurking in the background. After McConville disappeared, the state broke up the family; the younger children were “dispersed to different orphanages.” One son, Michael, “recalled an orphanage where monks walked through the dormitory at night with a roving flashlight, taking boys from their beds.” (It also came out in a 2013 trial that Adams’ own brother was a “pedophile who had molested his own daughter, and that Adams had known but done little to intervene.”)
Keefe notes that Northern Ireland has yet to see (and will probably never see) a “truth and reconciliation” process similar to South Africa’s, and evokes the great Seamus Heaney’s characterization of Ireland’s bogs as “a landscape that remembered everything”:
In Northern Ireland, where roughly thirty-six hundred people were murdered during the Troubles and some forty thousand wounded, there has been no comprehensive accounting. A recent report by Amnesty International criticizes the “piecemeal” investigations of historical abuses, and suggests that, “across the political spectrum, it is those in power who may fear that they have little politically to gain—and possibly much to lose—from any careful examination of Northern Ireland’s past.” In 1999, with the encouragement of Bill Clinton, the British and Irish governments established the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains, and the I.R.A. agreed to identify the graves of nine people who had been murdered and secretly buried during the Troubles, but only after securing a promise that no criminal prosecutions would result. The I.R.A. declared that some of the disappeared had been informers, including Jean McConville. Michael and his siblings angrily rejected this characterization, yet they had little choice but to work with the I.R.A. to search for her remains.
Much of the Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs; the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland can be subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters occasionally churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies date as far back as the Bronze Age, and often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death. These victims, cast out of their communities and buried, have surfaced vividly intact, from their hair to their leathery skin. The poet Seamus Heaney, who harvested peat as a boy on his family’s farm, once described the bogs of Ireland as “a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it.”
Ah, here we are, back in the bogs. Which brings me round (again) to that last passage of O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation,” which I’ve been obsessing over since I re-read it a month ago. Deaths, reprisals, repeat. It’s a story about the same civil war, only nearly a century earlier, and it ends with two captured English soldiers stiffening into a bog. The infinite sorrow of its final lines still seems apt:
Noble says he saw everything ten times the size, as though there were nothing in the whole world but that little patch of bog with the two Englishmen stiffening into it, but with me it was as if the patch of bog where the Englishmen were was a million miles away, and even Noble and the old woman, mumbling behind me, and the birds and the bloody stars were all far away, and I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow. And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.
Evergreen post: Why we fight…
David Swanson is always worth a read, especially when the drums of war are beating, which come to think of it is always….
From his latest, Putin Wants to Eat Your Children:
My point is not that bombs would be worse than the problem addressed and would make the problem itself worse as well, although that’s all true. Rather, my point is that most people who favor wars do so in order to blindly support a nation, and in blindly supporting that nation they allow it to dictate which wars they will favor. Although war supporters will give you reasons for the wars they favor, they actually favor whichever wars they are told to favor, and no others. And they’ll give you the reasons they are told to believe in as well.
More often than not, the U.S. public is advised to favor a war on a single individual of demonic nature, even though a war against an individual is completely nonsensical. According to nonsensical propaganda, you don’t bomb Iraqis; you bomb former-U.S.-ally Saddam Hussein. You don’t bomb Afghans; you bomb former-U.S.-ally Osama bin Laden. You don’t drone kill Pakistani and Yemeni and Somali children and women and men; you drone kill Al Qaeda Terrorist Number Three, over and over again. You don’t liberate Libya from what stability it had; you kill former-U.S.-ally Muammar Gadaffi. You don’t attack Panama; you attack former-U.S.-ally Manuel Noriega. Et cetera et cetera.
Well, it’s Vladimir Putin’s turn, which means Russia is at risk, which means the world is at risk, and yet the rough beast stumbling toward Bethlehem to be born is as oblivious to its conception as any unborn thing or television viewer.
Summer is ready when you are….
Ah, yes, son, the winter of ’15. Like everyone else in the eastern United States, we’ve been hammered by winter weather for three weeks. First, the blizzard, then the bitter cold, then a brief respite, and then the exact same thing happened 10 days later. Jesus.
I like to think we’ve seen the last of it. This forecast says mild and messy for the next couple of weeks. The white is melting. Outside the window I can hear the otherworldly murmur of a flock of sandhill cranes. The receding snow shows the mums poking out and ready to go.
As my dozen discerning regular readers know, my family’s Snopocalypse ’15 experience differed from the norm in that we’ve been hunkered down with an animal not usually housed in the living spaces of humans. We let the news trickle out via Facebook status updates and Instagram posts, and friends from our old lives in New York whispered with concern and anxiety the question: “do you really have a cow in your house?” A couple of my more literary chums mentioned Flann O’Brien’s great parodic novela An Béal Bocht, in which a wretchedly poor Irish family keeps the pig inside their humble home….
Well, it’s not like that, he says, not at all defensively, except that it is. The situation is–however and thank God–almost at an end. I’ve already written about how this calf came inside, if you need to be brought up to speed. There were many times in the first two weeks we resigned ourselves to the idea our calf was not going to make it. But, irony of ironies, it was Heather’s extraordinary efforts that finally got the calf to begin sucking milk from a bottle. Now she is on the feeding schedule of a normal bottle calf. A half gallon twice a day, the bottle sucked dry in two minutes. You can no longer count the calf’s ribs just by looking at her. She is ready to go outside, if still not quite to the point where she can go back with the herd.
During the dark days since February 16, when the first blizzard blew in, my mind has been pulled in a dozen different directions, aside from the expected noise of kids fighting, and the kids’ Kindles not working with the Wifi, and the thumping of two boys addicted to bouncing basketballs and practicing dunks on mini hoops.
In the kitchen I’ve been experimenting with pork braised in milk, a new thing (to me). A recipe in Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook matched almost exactly one from Simone Ortega’s 1080 Recipes. “Whenever I teach this dish, writes Hazan, “I am greeted by more or less polite skepticism, which usually turns to enthusiasm at first taste.” That was my experience, exactly, dear Marcella. Later I noticed a Mark Bittman variation using coconut milk and, well, I’ve got the theme for suppers until spring.
I watched basketball games, lots of them. Kentucky is exhausting sportswriters’ supplies of superlatives, and both Fighting Irish squads well positioned for the postseason, the ambitions of the men’s team of course more modest that those of the women’s.
For some reason the Breeders’ Last Splash has emerged in my mind as a masterpiece, and “Saints” has become my unofficial anthem. In the video (shown below), the band is playing in the snow and then suddenly wandering through a crowded midway at the height of summer, “sticky everywhere … hot metal in the sun … summer is ready when you are ….” You can imagine why it appeals. Yes, I’m ready. Yes!!!!
***
It’s warm and sunny today and it appears six of my seven beehives have made it through the worst of it. It’s a few weeks before they can forage in earnest, so I am not counting that as a victory just yet. But it’s close. The cowherd looks fat and robust and I have plenty of hay left. I lost a chicken but that sometimes happens even in good weather. They are all a little worse for wear, but our house, farm, and marriage have survived the winter o’ ’15.
“Like the Latin for fingernails”: Remembering Hesburgh
A large group of students just walked out of Notre Dame’s commencement during VP Mike Pence’s address. #ND2017 pic.twitter.com/g3dCuqPbXg
— WNDU (@WNDU) May 21, 2017
Students walked out on Pence’s commencement speech today at Notre Dame. Good. I’m reposting this piece from a few years ago because readers might be interested in the other time ND students protested a commencement speaker, Ronald Reagan in 1981.
We, the class of ’81, didn’t walk out. This year’s students look to be braver than we were….
When it comes to the Catholic Church and the priesthood, to say that I am deeply conflicted does not begin to get at it. But reading this morning about the death, and the legacy, of Father Ted Hesburgh brought me to tears, and not for just a few seconds. I am still wiping them away.
There are two good appreciations at the Post and the Times, and I am sure hundreds more to come.
Hesburgh was outspokenly liberal and a man of ideas, who was at ease with the powerful but never a panderer to power. The Post piece ends with something of a shot at the current breed of academic CEOs:
In 2001, Father Hesburgh lamented that university presidents had become distant from public affairs.
“Once upon a time chief executives in higher education talked to the press about military policy in the same breath as the Constitutional amendment for the 18-year-old vote, but I wonder whether we’d hear them taking stands on similar topics now,” he wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Where we once had a fellowship of public intellectuals,” Father Hesburgh asked, “do we now have insulated chief executives intent on keeping the complicated machinery of American higher education running smoothly?”
***
I loved the “fishing, steaks and martinis” story, also from the Post piece:
President Dwight D. Eisenhower named Father Hesburgh to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission at its inception in 1957, a position he held for 15 years, immersing him in confrontations over racial discrimination.
In one of its first actions, the commission held hearings in Southern states to investigate the suppression of the black vote. When it came time to write a report to Congress, Father Hesburgh brought the commission in 1959 to Notre Dame’s Land O’Lakes retreat in Wisconsin for a day of fishing, steaks and martinis — and votes on recommendations that later influenced civil rights legislation.
Eleven proposals won unanimous support from the six commissioners, and a 12th won approval from five. The degree of consensus shocked Eisenhower.
“I told Ike that he had not appointed just Republicans and Democrats or Northerners and Southerners, he had appointed six fishermen,” Father Hesburgh recounted in “God, Country, Notre Dame,” a 1999 memoir written with Jerry Reedy. Eisenhower replied that more federal commissions should be sent to Land O’Lakes to resolve disputes.
***
What’s the difference between God and Father Hesburgh? God is everywhere. Father Hesburgh is everywhere but Notre Dame.
***
Hesburgh was an almost mythic presence at ND when I was there. My memory of my four years Under the Golden Dome, from 1977 to 1981, are pretty hazy, but I’m fairly sure I only stood face to face with the great man on two occasions.
The first time was on the very last day of the 1980 spring term. A friend and I had to drop off our housing election forms for senior year. We were stoked about going off-campus and maybe a little panicked we would be forced to pay for on-campus housing if we missed the deadline, so we trudged over to the Administration Building with our forms. It was Saturday and the building was locked up tight. For some reason we banged on the basement door. Nothing. We turned to leave. Then, footsteps. And yes, Father Ted himself threw open the door.
We yammered something about our housing forms and he was all, “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll take them,” and he invited us to introduce ourselves. My friend Chris stuck out his hand and it turned out Hesburgh was on a first-name basis with Chris’ older brother and father, both alums. Chris and Father Ted shot the breeze for a few more minutes and then a lull came and it was my turn to say something.
I blurted out: “Uh, um, I’m Tim Ungs, from Minneapolis.”
He paused a beat, then gazed down at the back of his hand, and said pensively, “Ah, Ungs… like the Latin for fingernails….”
***
My second face-to-face was when Father Ted handed me my diploma at commencement.
Like maybe a couple hundred other students I had white tape on my graduation cap in tepid protest of Ronald Reagan’s being invited as the commencement speaker (also on hand were Pat O’Brien and Kurt Waldheim).
Reagan’s being chosen as speaker was, in retrospect, not at all unusual. If Hesburgh’s status as America’s preeminent Catholic gave him the sway to have every president come to campus when he calls them, well, why not Reagan?
But I think people forget how polarizing Reagan was in his day, and his being guest of honor at commencement (his first public appearance since the attempted assassination) divided the campus. That polarization even made it into this history of commencement ceremonies from the Notre Dame alumni magazine.
Vocal protests against Reagan’s presence at Notre Dame created an especially tense atmosphere. “Every liberal advocacy group, including many from the Catholic left, had been waiting for an opportunity to protest what they considered Reagan’s lack of concern for society’s marginalized members,” [Richard] Conklin [former University spokesman] recalls. More than 1,500 protesters marched outside the Joyce Center while Reagan spoke. Inside, a few students reportedly wore white arm bands and covered their mortar boards with white paper.
Reportedly? I was one of them and we were more than a few.
I remember fairly vividly one gathering at the end of April protesting the savagery of Reagan’s policies, many of which, sadly, have since become mainstream. What made the rally stand out in my memory was that a group of student counter-demonstrators came forward, shouted, and pelted the speakers with eggs. I remember one student was reading poetry in her father’s Notre Dame letter sweater when the eggs rained down. English professor Joseph Buttigieg (whose son is now mayor of South Bend) was treated especially badly as I remember. He contrasted the decorous manifesto of the Students Concerned about Commencement with the counter-protesters’ “Don’t Give the Gipp No Lipp” banner (“a poster made up of mono-syllabids”).
That’s a distillation of my memory of Notre Dame. A small core of passionate progressive people in a generally reactionary environment. That Hesburgh managed to make the university as open-minded as it has become is a testament largely to his energy and powerful personality. Hesburgh didn’t have to embrace civil rights, didn’t have to transfer university governance to a board of lay trustees, didn’t have to be first to admit women undergraduates, didn’t have to battle the Vatican and assert the “Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”
He didn’t have to. But he did. RIP Father Ted.