World War II Closure in the Bronx

At Yankee Stadium last night, a young man born in Japan decades after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought joy to, among others, a generation of Americans who fought his ancestors in World War II.

As the Most Valuable Player in this year's World Series, Hideki Matsui joined the pantheon of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and other hyphenated Americans of the last century in Yankee lore.

After six years in Yankee uniform, Matsui still needed a translator to express himself about the award but, for older onlookers, there was a feeling of closure at the sight of a new hero of our national pastime who, if he had been here in the 1940s, would not have been playing baseball but would have been sent to an internment camp along with his family.

Back then, the American Melting Pot had sprung a leak as even Joe DiMaggio's parents were among the thousands of immigrants classified as "enemy aliens" after Pearl Harbor who had to carry photo IDs and were not allowed to travel five miles from their home. Jolting Joe's father was barred from the San Francisco Bay, where he had fished for decades, and his boat was seized.

But what used to be the Great American Pastime is global now and perhaps in the future, a young man of Middle East descent will be standing in Yankee Stadium holding up that trophy.

Different Ways of Remembering D-Day

All the eloquence about World War II comes from Americans too young to have experienced it--Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation," Steven Spielberg'a "Saving Private Ryan"--and now Barack Obama is memorializing D-Day along with Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown et al.

The survivors are in their eighties now, but age alone does not explain how inarticulate we all are about the transformative experience of our lives. As usual, reporters are interviewing veterans, but the quotes are the same as they have been for more than half a century--less the vivid impressions of participants than the dazed wonder of witnesses, whose bodies were doing what they were told but whose minds and hearts were watching from afar.

President Obama, born decades later, sees it as "the story of America...that always gives us hope" and finds a lesson for today:

"For as we face down the hardships and struggles of our time, and arrive at that hour for which we were born, we cannot help but draw strength from those moments in history when the best among us were somehow able to swallow their fears and secure a beachhead on an unforgiving shore."

Tom Brokaw, of the generation between Obama and us, puts it even more strongly: "Their sacrifices at home and on the frontlines make our current difficulties look like a walk on the beach in comparison."

"Hardships," "struggles" and "sacrifices" put a rhetorical glaze over a nightmare of blood and body parts in which those who were there had little control over whether they lived or died.

Heroism was a matter of staying and doing what had to be done. That's a high enough bar to set for today's generations without glorifying their parents and grandparents who set that example in a time when doing anything else was unthinkable.

Torturing Ourselves

The continuing national debate is getting more and more self-righteous as Americans look for absolutes in a world of moral murk.

Dick Cheney emerges from his psychic cave to insist that torture works, but he has no standing after eight years of secrecy and ruthlessness. Barack Obama tells us we are not the kind of people who torture on principle but refuses to punish those who did while believing they had a legal right to do so.

Now we are rooting through the moral wreckage for evidence of whether or not vile treatment of human beings can sometimes serve a greater good. Are those who insist that it never can and insist on punishing anyone who disagrees any less rigid than Cheney?

At 19, I was given a rifle and ordered to kill for my country against all my beliefs and three years later saw an American president command the only use of nuclear weapons in history to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children to save lives like mine in what would have been a bloody invasion of Japan.

Those experiences left me with a lifelong aversion to sanctimony on questions where life and death are involved. Even if the Cheney-minded can show that torture may sometimes produce useful information, does that justify its use as a policy? Even if those who disagree can refute those claims, does it justify their moral certitude?

The dangers of living in a world where rectitude is a zero-sum game (If I'm right, you must be wrong) are the greater threat to our humanity than the issue of torture as an abstraction in a world where, while recognizing ambiguity and ambivalence, nonetheless taking a moral stand is our best hope for surviving as the kind of people we believe ourselves to be.

Obama, McCain and a Romantic Memory

The presidential candidates will be facing off tomorrow night in a place that holds a special place in my heart, Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee

In the summer of 1943, I was scheduled to board a ship for North Africa as a foot soldier. Days later I was in a dorm at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, plucked out of a war movie into an MGM musical on a picture-book campus.

Needing weathermen and translators for the coming invasion of Europe, the Army had decided to manufacture some. I was sent to be trained as a meteorologist.

For the next months there were beautiful coeds, math classes, beautiful coeds, science classes and beautiful coeds. Two dozen of us in uniform lived on manicured grounds among hundreds of women and a few 4Fs, and nearby there was Ward-Belmont, then a junior college filled with rich girls who put on pretty dresses for patriotic Saturday night dances with the servicemen.

At the first one I met her. Joan from Waukegan, Illinois was, like me, away from home for the first time, but she was like no other girl I had ever known, so lovely that when I put my arm around her and she touched the back of my neck, I forgot how to breathe or move. We danced and talked and, by the end of the evening, were planning to meet every Saturday and whenever on weeknights she could slip out of her finishing-school fortress.

We held hands and shared chaste kisses and muted desire. I was James Stewart singing “You’d be so easy to love” to Eleanor Powell. I was poor Gatsby smitten forever by the unattainable Daisy. We talked and talked in a wondrous haze. For a few months, I lived in a romantic movie of my life, knowing the house lights would have to come up sometime.

Before she was to go home for the holidays, there was a formal dance. Someone told me about corsages and, finding myself broke, I stayed up all night doing a classmate’s guard duty to earn enough for a spray of gardenias, chosen when the florist told me white would go with any color.

At the dance, Joan pinned them to her shoulder strap, and I spent the next hours in a delirium of body warmth and overpowering sweetness. By the time we kissed and kissed our farewells, I was left in a gardenia haze that would stay with me always.

While she was away, the college dream abruptly ended. The Army, now needing more foot soldiers than meteorologists, ordered us to pack and prepare to ship out. I went off to fight a war in Europe and never saw my dream girl again.

But when Barack Obama and John McCain face off tomorrow night on the campus where we met and danced, memories will come flooding back of a time when, even in war, life was so much simpler and sweeter.

Obama as Eisenhower

On 60 Minutes last night, he evoked another man who came to office promising to end an unpopular war and to restore confidence after the tenure of a president with abysmal approval ratings.

"I am a practical person," Barack Obama said, channeling the Dwight Eisenhower of more than half a century ago. "One of the things I'm good at is getting people in a room with ...different ideas who sometimes violently disagree with each other and finding common ground, and a sense of common direction. And that's the kind of approach that I think prevents you from making some of the enormous mistakes that we've seen over the last eight years."

Looking back at his two terms in the 1950s, Ike had taken pride in bringing together the vehemently opinionated and reasoning them into agreement, as he had done in World War II with such military divas as Gen. George Patton and Britain's Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery.

"Extremes to the right and left of any political dispute are always wrong," Eisenhower would say. "The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes are in the gutters."

Despite his own mantra of change and Republican efforts to tar him as a wild-eyed radical, Obama is temperamentally akin to Eisenhower in his reliance on persuasion and conciliation. If elected, he will face a much more divided America, but his instinct will be like Ike's--to reason and heal.

Maybe it goes back to their common childhood roots in Kansas.

A Personal Farewell to Arms

Just before I turned 19, my country put a rifle in my hands and taught me how to use it. As an inexperienced city boy, I eventually learned how to unbolt it, release the barrel from the stock and remove the metal innards. Putting it back together was torture but, after a while, my hands took over even as my mind went blank.

Toward the end of basic training, as recruits sat on khaki blankets in a large hall, a sergeant ordered us to take apart our rifles and reassemble them in one minute--with our eyes closed.

As he counted down, I managed to pull out and put together a few pieces, but time was almost gone and I could hear disapproving footsteps and I knew the non-commissioned officers were shaking their heads. Sitting up, the wooden rifle stock between my legs, I fumbled to fit the barrel to it and slam home the bolt.

Just at the count of sixty, it all came together and I felt an overwhelming whoosh inside my thighs. At the age of 19, I was having my first conscious orgasm in carnal knowledge of a Garand M-1 rifle.

Three years later, after carrying my new friend through France, Germany and Austria without shooting anyone face to face, I turned it in but brought home a souvenir pistol taken from a German officer.

It remained on a closet shelf, wrapped and unloaded, for years until my children were old enough to start showing curiosity about it.

Forty years ago, I used my Army training to disassemble the weapon and then take a long walk through Manhattan streets, dropping parts of it into a dozen garbage bins more than a mile apart.

Somehow I've managed to keep my family safe without firearms ever since.

Obama Says Uncle

On Memorial Day, Barack Obama told a group of veterans, “My grandfather marched in Patton’s army, but I cannot know what it is to walk into battle like so many of you."

He went on to talk about an uncle, "part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz" and, returning from the war, spent six months in an attic: “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain.”

Since then, the GOP gaffe police have been gleefully pointing out it was the Russians who freed Auschwitz and that Obama's mother was an only child, causing his campaign to scramble and admit that he should have said "great uncle" and "Buchenwald."

Sloppy as he may been with the words, Obama had the music right, as a Patton army contemporary of his ancestors can attest.

In the spring of 1945, we were sweeping through Germany and Austria. Along the way, we saw stragglers in ragged stripes, dazed gaunt figures wandering the roads and being picked up by Army trucks. We didn't know the names of the places they had come from, but we knew who they were, and the sight of them was an indelible reminder of why we had been fighting.

Most of us didn't spend any time in attics after coming home, but our lives were changed forever by having seen what human savagery can do.

Obama was trying to evoke and honor that pain. What he said might not win any prizes on a quiz show, but it was true to the spirit of Memorial Day and human decency.

A Grateful Nation Turns Its Back

Returning from World War II, my generation was welcomed home with open arms, gratitude and a GI Bill to pay for our college education.

For its counterpart today, a New York Times editorial points out, "the commander in chief now resists giving the troops a chance at better futures out of uniform. He does this on the ground that the bill is too generous and may discourage re-enlistment, further weakening the military he has done so much to break."

Luckily, His Lame Duckness will be overruled by a Congress facing reelection and more sensitive to the popular will, but what does all this say about George W. Bush and his wannabe successor, the warrior patriot, John McCain?

According to the Times, "Mr. Bush--and, to his great discredit, Senator John McCain--have argued against a better G.I. Bill, for the worst reasons. They would prefer that college benefits for service members remain just mediocre enough that people in uniform are more likely to stay put."

Even worse, McCain has used the issue to attack Barack Obama, who supports the bill: "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did," he huffed, overlooking the small point that his antagonist was six years old when McCain was taken POW in Vietnam.

In the Bush-McCain worldview, the citizen soldiers of the Greatest Generation have morphed into personnel whose lives come second to the needs of a military that has been stretched to the breaking point in Iraq

Responding to McCain's attack, Obama said, "It's disappointing that Senator McCain and his campaign used this issue to launch yet another lengthy personal, political attack instead of debating an honest policy difference."

"Disappointing" is a mild word for what the proprietors of the Iraq war are doing with their opposition to the 21st century version of what the Times says "became known as one of the most successful benefits programs--one of the soundest investments in human potential--in the nation’s history."

Zero: A Memory

They're showing the original of Mel Brooks' "The Producers" on Turner Classic Movies tonight with Zero Mostel, an actor of comic genius. In 1943, we were in basic training together in South Carolina, and he gave me one of the most memorable evenings of my life.

The country boys in my company were excited by anything exotic and, given their lives before induction, it took little to tickle them. One day they were chortling over a guy in the next battalion named Zero.

He had been at City College a decade before me and in the 1940s was getting known in Manhattan night clubs for political satire that would later fail to amuse the House Un-American Activities Committee. The night I looked him up, Zero was on his way to becoming the pear-shaped presence that years later would charge around a Broadway stage and turn into a rhinoceros.

Sitting on his bunk, field jacket zipped to the throat, his big head seemed to be resting on a bulging bag of laundry. He was in his late twenties, but his eyes were a thousand years old. When I told him I was from the Bronx, he grabbed me as if I were a pastrami sandwich.

We went into town Saturday night to the Spartanburg USO, where local ladies entertained with doughnuts, coffee and Southern charm, and the troops entertained back however they could. When the hostesses heard Zero was a professional performer, they pushed him to the stage. I sat in the front row, happily awaiting my share of the attention he would be getting.

Zero slouched up to the microphone with a shy smile and a glint in his eye, gathered his bulk, fixed his face into a scowl and suddenly emitted the roar of a deep Southern demagogue. To this audience of dewy damsels and redneck recruits, he was offering his rendition of Senator Pellagra T. Polltax, a raging parody of the Mississippi racist, Theodore Bilbo.

As Zero flung his arms in all directions and turned up the angry rant about niggers and kikes, I slid down in my seat, looking for an exit.

By the time he finished, I was crouching near the floor. Through the startled silence, I heard the start of a low rumble, and I sprinted to the stage where Zero was beaming and bowing, grabbed his elbow and shoved him through a door toward the bus that would carry us, untarred and unfeathered, back to camp. On the ride Zero seemed relaxed, a small smile on his face. We never went to the USO again.

A. J. Liebling's War

As a charter member of what has been called the Church of Liebling, I have good news for fellow worshippers.

Liebling's coverage of World War II for the New Yorker has now been gathered into a volume of 1089 pages by the Library of America. Like everything else he wrote, by reporting what he saw and heard, Liebling conveyed more about his subject than all the TV cameras and embedded journalists have told us about Iraq.

I have had the temerity to borrow his name for the URL here, but it's likely Liebling would have been ambivalent about blogs. As a press critic, he was a premature blogger himself, looking behind the news and picking apart the work of those who delivered it, making connections between the motives and methods of the messengers and the frequent unreliability of the message.

But a reporter at heart, Liebling hated experts. He mistrusted anyone who claimed "to have access to some occult source or science not available to reporter or reader...the big picture."

He didn't like editors much, either. "They come to newspapers," he wrote, "like monks to cloisters or worms to apples. They are the dedicated. All of them are fated to be editors except the ones that get killed off by the lunches they eat at their desks...The survivors of gastric disorders rise to minor executive jobs and then major ones, and the reign of these non-writers makes our newspapers read like the food in the New York Times cafeteria tastes."

Above all, he hated publishers. "The function of the press in society," he wrote, "is to inform, but its role is to make money. The monopoly publisher's reaction, on being told that he ought to spend money on reporting distant events, is therefore exactly that of the proprietor of a large, fat cow, who is told that he ought to enter her in a horse race."

And that was before Rupert Murdoch.

A Birthday Memory

Seventy-one years ago, on my Bar Mitzvah day, I went to the movies to see the elegantly beautiful British actress Madeleine Carroll and, on the day the Jewish religion declared me a man, I fell hopelessly in love with the most golden shiksa of them all.

A decade and a war later, at my alma mater, City College of New York, I was doing publicity for the Institute of Film Techniques, a grandiose name for a few courses started by Hans Richter, an avant-garde filmmaker who had fled the Nazis. Since the Academy Awards ignored them then, I suggested the Film Institute select the best documentaries of the year. He happily agreed and started to round up his friends as judges.

Looking at his list, unaware that my subconscious was groping toward divine fulfillment, I suggested the jury would benefit from adding a name, a big Hollywood name, a movie star name. We pondered for a while, but my subconscious had been reading the New York Times. Who was in New York, just retired from films, about to take her fourth husband, a tycoon at Time Inc.? Did it surprise my subconscious when her name came to my lips? Madeleine Carroll.

She agreed to do it. On the day of judging she appeared, a well-dressed woman of forty, but I was seeing her in soft focus, her shimmering hair framing lips, eyes and cheekbones that had inflamed a boy's heart. We sat together in the dark, shoulders touching, for six hours, her perfume flooding my senses. If she was bored by the unreeling of banal images by sensitive filmmakers with foundation grants, she never showed it.

In a sneering documentary about Hollywood materialism, the camera unsteadily panned million-dollar homes, with the narrator intoning, "This is Beverly Hills, a rich community with well-kept lawns..."

She turned and put her lips to my ear, her hair brushing my temple.

"And well-kept women," she whispered.

After the lights came on to end my dream, Madeleine Carroll took my hand in farewell with a dazzling smile.

She was the first of Alfred Hitchcock's blonde goddesses in the 1930s and, after her sister was killed in a World War II bombing raid, she had stopped acting to work in field hospitals as a Red Cross nurse, receiving the Legion d'honneur for bravery in France.

I still see that smile in my dreams and on Turner Classic Movies.

W. C. Heinz

The man who died today at the age of 93 wrote about courage and grace under pressure better than anyone of his time.

Bill Heinz was idealized by generations of writers who in the new millennium were still reading his books, articles and collected columns.

We met when I edited a piece of his about Lew Jenkins, a Depression kid from Texas who fought his way up to lightweight champion and then lost everything, breaking his body in motorcycle and car crashes and coming into the ring hurt and drunk.

Bill ran into him during World War II when the former champion was in the Coast Guard landing invasion troops and later after he won a Silver Star as a foot soldier in Korea at the age of 36. The article was the best I worked on during my time at Argosy, a picture of a man who knew how to fight but not how to live with what is called success.

In 1958, Bill wrote a piece for me at Redbook about a young boxer who killed his first opponent in the ring. His novel, "The Professional," had just been published to good reviews, but some critics and readers were put off by the ending. The hero does everything right but loses the big fight in a quirk of fate and then learns to live with it. Fight stories are not supposed to reflect a tragic sense of life.

Ernest Hemingway called it the only good novel about a boxer he had ever read. But what mattered to Bill most did not get into the blurbs. It was the only time I saw him allow himself a moment of pride as he told me:

"Hemingway said he knew it had to end the way it did, but when he got to the last chapter, he threw the book across the room."

Bill Heinz's subject was grace under pressure. He wrote about football coach Vince Lombardi, surgeons in the operating room and Martin Luther King's march on Selma. Along the way, he did a little book about a trauma unit in Korea called "MASH."

December 7, 1941

We lived in a different America then. News that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor came from bulletins that broke into Sunday afternoon radio programs and was spread by word of mouth over the telephone, on the streets of cities and house to house in small towns.

World War II came to us in slow motion and seemed unreal until we read details in the next day's newspaper and heard a broadcast of President Roosevelt telling Congress that that day would live in infamy as he declared a state of war with Japan.

Why, then, did that unseen war affect our lives so much more deeply than the 24/7 images and endless words about Iraq, which nevertheless is sliding out of the national consciousness now day by day?

World War II was everybody's war. It would be fought by our fathers, sons, husbands, brothers and those of the people next door and down the block. I was 17 then, but in little more than a year, I knew I would be among them.

We were all in it together, and every night at 8:55, we turned on our radios for the only news most of us were able to get.

If we had been told then we would be called "The Greatest Generation," we would have wondered what was unusual about doing what we had to do. It would have saddened us beyond tears if we knew that our children and grandchildren would ever have to fight and die when the nation's survival was not so clearly at stake.

It would have broken our hearts then, and it still does.

Deborah Kerr

The woman who died this week was part of an American legend that will live forever in the Hollywood movies of the mid-twentieth century.

From the 1930s on, the studios there manufactured what John Updike has called “those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains project Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of the immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience.”

Louis B. Mayer at MGM, the chief dream maker, son of a scrap-metal scavenger who became the most highly-paid man in the U.S., had an idealized vision of womanhood--beautiful, British and well-bred. He went to London and found Greer Garson to embody her in “Goodbye Mr. Chips,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Random Harvest,” “Mrs. Miniver” and “Madame Curie.”

After World War II, when Garson was becoming matronly, Mayer replaced her with Deborah Kerr, starting with “The Hucksters,” in which she played a high-born British widow who tames the American rough-and-readiness of Clark Gable.

Kerr kept playing the part with grace and wit until the early 1950s when Mayer lost control of the studio. She left MGM in 1953 to play an Army officer's alcoholic, sex-starved wife washed over by waves in the adulterous embrace of Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity.”

American reality was changing, and so were the movies but, looking back, Mayer’s dream world had its charms, and Deborah Kerr was a lovely part of it.

War Stories

Here is a scene that won’t be part of Ken Burns’ new series about World War II on PBS this week.

In 1945, a 20-year-old foot soldier arrives at General Patton’s Third Army in France. Before being sent to a rifle company, he is assigned to stay up every night and on the battalion’s only typewriter, which is not available during the day, copy officers’ notes about suspected SIWs, Self-Inflicted Wounds.

Night after night, under a Coleman lantern hissing yellow light with sounds of battle in the background, he taps out stories in quadruplicate about young men who have maimed themselves out of fear and fatigue, offering up some body part to save the rest--shooting an arm or leg, slashing a thigh, dislocating a shoulder or wrenching a knee in some improbable fall.

Fighting a war, the stories reveal, is like everything else that is important in life, a matter of showing up, doing what has to be done and not running away, and there is a thin line between those who can do it and those who can’t.

Later on and further away, there will be talk of heroes and greatest generations and abstractions about defending ideals. For those who fight wars, it’s as simple as being there and staying.

The more complicated questions have to be answered by those who send and keep them there.

Swift-Boating Congress

The man who wouldn’t fight for his country in Vietnam yesterday gave those who did false analogies about their war to the one he is now waging with the lives of another generation.

Be thankful for smalls favors that President Bush did not dress up in the flight jacket he wore for his “Mission Accomplished” speech, but his Iraq comparisons to Vietnam and World War II had no more reality than that Commander-in-Chief moment in 2003.

“Invoking the tragedy of Vietnam to defend the failed policy in Iraq is as irresponsible as it is ignorant of the realities of both of those wars,” Sen. John Kerry said after the speech.

Kerry knows first-hand about the Bush big-lie machine that is now gearing up to swift-boat Congress as it did his war record during the 2004 Presidential election and, before that, John McCain’s Vietnam experience in the primaries of 2000.

Now advertising will be aimed at lawmakers, especially Republicans, who face re-election next year. An interest group, Freedom’s Watch, is beginning a month-long, $15 million campaign to pressure wavering members of Congress to stay the Surge course. Ads will run in 20 states, in more than five dozen Congressional districts.

This bunch has no idea of how to run a war, but it is very good at smearing those fought one and those who want to stop the senseless carnage they started and can’t finish.

If George Bush ever takes time out from comparing himself to great leaders of the past, he might want to take a look at what a real military commander, Dwight Eisenhower said when leaving the Oval office:

“People want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

Iraq's Battle of the Bulge

In December 1944, when World War II seemed all but over, the Germans launched a furious last-ditch offensive to try to change the outcome. It lasted a month, cost many lives but failed.

That memory comes back today as proponents of the war in Iraq now mount their attack on the widely held belief that all is lost there.

In a New York Times OpEd, titled “A War We Might Just Win,” Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack claim: “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily ‘victory’ but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.”

Their first-hand report on signs of improvement seems from this distance to be based more on hope and optimism than hard reality, but it deserves a hearing.

Meanwhile Gen. David Petraeus is working hard to dispute last week’s reports from many sources that Prime Minister al-Maliki wants him out: "He and I have truly had frank conversations but he has never yelled or stood up. This is really, really hard stuff, and occasionally people agree to disagree."

We are in half-full-or-half-empty terrain here. Those of us who love our country but hate the war and see it through the glass darkly can only hope some of this is true.

But it will take a lot more to persuade us to bear the continuing loss of American lives because, as the Brookings Institution warriors put it, “there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.”

Bush, Cheney et al have begun their Battle of the Bulge, but Congress should have the good sense and guts to see a last-gasp counterattack for what it is.

Undoing America

In 1954, after coming home from an unavoidable war, I was proud that, with Brown v. Board of Education, the country I fought for was taking a big step toward racial justice by declaring separate but equal schools were wrong.

It never occurred to me I would live long enough to see my country trapped in an avoidable war and taking steps back toward segregation, as the Supreme Court did today.

It never occurred to me that a President who had avoided fighting for his country would appoint a Chief Justice who, despite his avowed respect for precedent during confirmation, would move so swiftly to start undoing half a century of social progress.

Who are these people and what kind of America are they creating for our children and grandchildren?

Gates Swinging Both Ways on Iraq

The man who replaced the unlamented Donald (Often-Wrong-But-Never-in-Doubt) Rumsfeld has seemed, by comparison, reasonable and realistic. Who wouldn’t? But the current Secretary of Defense’s ambivalence about Iraq is showing.

Commemorating the June 7, 1944 landings in Normandy, Gates said today, “We once again face enemies seeking to destroy our way of life, and we are once again engaged in an ideological struggle that may not find resolution for many years or even decades. Just (as) during World War II, free nations of the world are banding together--and dying together--to confront their common threat.”

Very Bush-Cheney, down to the basic untruths: Nations are not “banding together” but bailing out of the so-called Coalition of the Willing, and “the enemies seeking to destroy our way of life” are a collection of unpredictable fanatics rather than the organized armies we faced in World War II.

Gates knows better. Last weekend, he told a conference on Asian security that “we have not made enough progress in trying to address some of the root causes of terrorism in some of these societies, whether it is economic deprivation or despotism that leads to alienation."

In Iraq, Gates is not talking about “many years or even decades” to the parliament, setting late summer as a deadline for getting their act together if they expect us to extend the Surge.

His double-edged (or if you will, two-faced) talk may reflect, at long last, some unwelcome reality seeping into the White House. One thing is sure: If he were still running the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld would be railing against such defeatist talk.