Out of My Mind (20 page)

One argument put forth as a reason for retirement is that it opens up jobs for younger people. This argument presupposes that there is a finite amount of work to be done in the world and that it can be done by a fixed number of people. That's nonsense. There is more work to be done in the world than could ever be accomplished if everyone worked 100 hours a week. There is no end to work.

There are about 40 million people collecting Social Security and I am one of them. It has always seemed strange and somehow wrong that I am paid handsomely for writing and for doing my commentaries on
60 Minutes
and then also receive a subsistence allowance from the government of $28,992 a year. It is obvious that I wouldn't starve without
my monthly Social Service stipend of $2,416 a month. I understand that it would be unfair not to give me back some of about half a million dollars that I've contributed over fifty-five years of employment and I also understand that if the government stopped paying Social Security to people who continued to work, it would greatly increase the number of people who retired. But there's still something wrong with it.

It's almost 11 P.M. now and I think I'll retire—but just for the night.

One of the strange facts of life is that wars energize the people who fight them. People get more done when they're at war than when they're at peace. It doesn't seem as if it should be true but the most productive time in the whole history of the United States was the four years of World War II.

When people are at peace, they invent ways of simulating the intense competitive pressures of war that produce such good things in us as courage, invention, endurance, enterprise and bravery. In their own way, all the games we play are tiny wars designed to evoke some of those good elements in our character that only emerge during times of military conflict.

No war can ever be a good thing, but good things have come out of war. It always seems a terrible waste for us to spend $300 billion a year making weapons, supporting our Army, Navy and Air Force and doing weapons research. The fact is, though, most of the things developed for our fighting forces have had a great effect on our lives during peacetime. The technology we've developed for building warships, airplanes, helicopters, all-terrain vehicles and a variety of medical procedures have all been used more during peacetime than wartime.

Wars put our brains to the test, too. In a college history course I took, I recall the story about a pass through the Apennines Mountains of Southern Italy where the Roman Army trapped several thousand enemy soldiers. Cato, the Roman leader, couldn't decide whether to kill all of them to eliminate them as a threat or to let them go unharmed as a way of making friends.

My memory of that history course stops short of recalling what Cato decided to do, but the story of 3,500 former Taliban soldiers being held under cruel conditions by a notoriously sadistic Afghanistan tribal leader put the United States in Cato's position a few years ago. We could have allowed them to be killed by these unlikely allies or insist
that they be treated humanely. Most Americans would have preferred the latter.

The enemy has to be the bad guy but not all Taliban soldiers were responsible for the terrorist attacks on us or even knew about them. They should be treated like human beings. They should be fed, clothed and, of course, interrogated. They should not have been slowly starved, frozen and tortured to death for information they probably did not have.

During World War II, German prisoners were generally—not always—treated humanely and the Germans generally—not always—treated American prisoners humanely. The best reason to treat prisoners according to the rules of war is that if the enemy knows it is going to be killed when captured, it will never surrender. In the process of fighting on after all hope is gone, an enemy kills a lot of the winning Army. If they know they'll be treated decently, they surrender and it saves lives on both sides.

“Taliban” is a relatively new word in our vocabulary and isn't in any of our dictionaries. Translated literally, it means “student.” What its members are students of is an ignorant, militant way of life that they find justification for in some corrupt version of their religion that has nothing to do with the religion of the average Muslim.

The Taliban, in a monstrously uncivilized act, wantonly destroyed the treasured 2nd-century Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, to the great displeasure of Afghan farmers, the Taliban banned the growing of poppies. As evidence of their dysfunctional leadership, they continued to allow the sale of the opium made from poppies.

It's apparent that wars weren't meant to be understood—just fought.

There are a hundred places in the world that need the help U.S. power and money can provide. But we have to ask, how much can we
do and how much do we have the will to do? How effective would diplomacy be?

The dictionary says of “diplomat”: “one skilled in diplomacy.” Under “diplomacy,” it reads: “tact in dealing with people.”

The dictionary doesn't say so, but being diplomatic also means not always saying what you think. “Tact” can mean saying something that's less than the whole truth in order to influence or avoid offending someone.

The diplomats don't dare tell us the whole truth because half the time we wouldn't let them do what they think our country should do. They may know best but we don't want to hear it.

We've had a lot of good secretaries of state over the years. Thomas Jefferson was George Washington's secretary of state. John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren were both secretaries of state before becoming president. Daniel Webster was a great one. Henry Stimson, Dean Rusk, Cyrus Vance—a great American who died just recently—were all better than good. Most people thought Madeleine Albright was good at the job. Not everyone thought the same of Henry Kissinger.

President Woodrow Wilson made a speech to Congress right after World War I that became famous because it contained his “Fourteen Points of Diplomacy.”

One of them insisted on “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in public view.”

Other points included “Absolute freedom of navigation on the sea,” “Removal of all trade barriers” and “General Disarmament.”

Americans aren't much interested in diplomacy because it usually means dealing with foreign countries. If a vote were taken and the choice for Americans was between never having any relationships with any foreign country again, or doing everything within our power and wealth for the poor people of the world, we'd vote to curl up and forget everyone else. A great many Americans don't think we should concern ourselves with the rest of the world's problems. It doesn't make our
government's job any easier that Americans are losing their enthusiasm for the Israeli cause.

There have always been a lot of Americans who are isolationists, and sometimes they've been right. It seems likely we should never have become involved in either Korea or Vietnam. We were embarrassed about being too slow to enter World War II, so we made up for it by moving too quickly in Korea and Vietnam. When Hitler moved into Poland and started to take over Europe, Americans generally were cool to the idea of going to help. Our policy was indifference. An organization called “America First” had a huge number of supporters who were isolationists.

It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to make us realize we were also residents of this Earth and what happened any place on it also happened to us.

The restrictions put on reporters trying to tell the American people what's going on in any war we are involved in is wrong and un-American.

The American public often doesn't seem to realize it's not getting anything but government-approved information from the front—or from the back, for that matter. We have to depend on the almostnightly press conference from the bright, engaging, sharp and forktongued Donald Rumsfeld for what little he chooses to tell us. Rumsfeld shares the generals' belief that it's easier to fight a war if the people you're fighting it for don't know what you're doing.

Someone said the Pentagon isn't telling us what its doing because it doesn't know what it's doing.

One of President Bush's best moments in his whole presidency came when he stepped in to close down the new “disinformation” agency. As part of the war on terrorism, the Office of Strategic Influence was apparently
going to spread false information to influence opinion in foreign countries.

President Bush, in indicating he disapproved of the agency, hedged a little when he stated, “We will never misinform the American people.” He left the door open for us to lie abroad.

There has always been animosity between journalists and generals. Generals don't like being watched. If they bomb the wrong target or alienate several million people in a foreign country by killing innocent citizens by mistake, they don't want anyone back home to know. They cover their mistakes by not allowing reporters where the action is.

The death of Daniel Pearl, the
Wall Street Journal
reporter, has helped the military. Every time a reporter is killed, injured, or captured it reinforces the Pentagon's claim that it's too dangerous to let such factfinders go forward to where the facts are.

Journalists are no more or less brave or heroic than anyone else. There have always been reporters who risked their lives to get a story up front while other reporters waited behind the lines for a handout from the military. Sometimes the reporters went where it was dangerous, not based on any grand vision of informing the American public but to get a story no one else had. Even if it was glory the reporter was after, the story served the American public better than a Pentagon announcement of what happened. You won't read about any of our military disasters in the bulletins issued by a U.S Army public relations office.

Our current military leaders in the Pentagon would find the press operation in World War II hard to believe. In June of 1944, days after our invasion of France, I joined the First Army press camp. There were about twenty-five reporters there.

The motor pool for the press camp had fourteen jeeps and one Diamond T truck. We shared the jeeps and as the Army pressed forward across France, our tents were packed into the truck and the press camp was moved up nearer the action.

Every morning, reporters from different news organizations paired up in the jeeps and set out for the front lines. The
Time
magazine
reporter avoided the jeep with
Newsweek
's man. AP didn't share with UP. CBS didn't go with NBC.

The reporters in search of stories told no one where they were going. They didn't tell the fighting units they were coming. They asked permission of no one. They each went where they thought the story was and talked to the soldiers fighting the war. No one stopped us.

We had two censors, lieutenants, assigned to the camp. Their only job was to delete anything that might reveal troop locations. They were not charged with changing our copy to make it more favorable to Army commanders.

The American public learned first hand, in a day, more about the progress of World War II than it will learn in a year anywhere our military is in control of what the public is told.

At my age, which is plenty, there aren't many things that happen to me for the first time anymore. Last week, something happened to me for the first time that I feel assures me of a place in history. I was attacked in an editorial in the
Wall Street Journal.

The
Wall Street Journal
is a good newspaper, especially if your primary interest in life is money. Serious philatelists have a publication called
Stamp Collector
, which they wouldn't miss. Sports fans read
Sports Illustrated
. I look for the newest tools for my hobby in Fine
Woodworking
. Business executives, stock brokers and bankers read the
Wall Street Journal
.

If I didn't read anything but
Fine Woodworking
, I would have impaired vision of what's going on in our government. I feel the same about people who read no newspaper but the
Wall Street Journal
. Most of what's in the paper is related to the interests of money collectors.

The
Journal
's complaint about me was for remarks I made in an interview with Larry King. I said that our government had made it difficult
for reporters to ask difficult questions without being accused of being unpatriotic.

The fact is, I believe our government assumed, for government agencies like the CIA and the FBI, powers that were invasive of the privacy of individuals and are therefore un-American. If John Ashcroft had been an influential member of the Constitutional Convention that met in 1789 to correct some omissions in the original document, it seems likely the First Amendment would never have been passed. He does not trust the democratic system. Democracy is easy to mistrust because we are such idiots as individuals that it is hard to believe we're wise collectively.

It's difficult to argue for a continuation of our traditional American openness in the face of potential terrorist attacks. I am reluctantly ambivalent about some of the steps we've taken for our own security. It means they have won. I don't want Americans to die and I don't want our landmarks blown up. Therefore, I concede that maybe we have to give up the free life we have in this country and let the government invade our privacy.