Dangerous

Flowers, balloons and other mementos left for the Jackson family outside their home in Encino, California, are collected daily; and quickly replaced by new ones the following day.


Give Michael Jackson his due: his final exit is lasting longer than the Victory tour from 25 years ago. The man passed away June 25th and yet he won't be returned to the Earth [which is an assumption I'm making; for all I know, he'll be stuffed and mounted at Neverland] until July 7th.
In all seriousness, there is something tragic about Jackson's death. While there's a touch of Elvis' overdose/heart attack at Graceland in 1977, there's also the Marilyn Monroe drug/homicide/suicide angle [I won't sully the names of those two icons by mentioning why-is-she-a-celebrity Anna Nicole Smith].

By almost any definition, it appears that Jackson's final years were full of pain, denial and out-of-touch narcissism. Investigators have found the names of at least five doctors who prescribed drugs to Jackson - and that's only the number they are willing to admit off-the-record. Any chance that Jackson's career would be the focus in the aftermath of his death went out the window [along with a few of the doctors, no doubt].

Before getting into the medical nightmare, something else struck me: Michael Jackson did almost everything in his power to shield his three children from the camera. He didn't mind using them as props, don't get me wrong; and for that he should've been ashamed [assuming that was still possible]. But in terms of their identities, what they looked like, what they did, he was a fanatic about protecting them. It was to very, very few people that Jackson shared the lives of his children [hell, I don't think their mother was one of those people]. One person that he did share it with - and here again you call into question Jackson's ability to make [correct] judgements about people - was 70-year old sleazeball Al Malnik [as my grandmother would have said, 'Naturally, he's gotta be Jewish']. Malnik is one of those self-made millionaires who flutters around celebrity millionaires - yet no one knows exactly what he did to get his money.





Jackson was quite close with Malnik, who has [turn the creep-meter off] a 7-year old daughter himself. When with Malnik, Jackson actually felt comfortable enough to allow Malnik to photograph him with the children - both his own and Malnik's. These were private moments for Jackson meant to be shared with his friend Malnik and their closest friends.

And yet, less than a week after Jackson's death, Malnik had inked a deal with NBC to release the entire trove of photographs, which the network wasted no time in posting on MSNBC. The photos are endearing. They show a side of Jackson that makes you realize that he actually was a human being. I'm not going to link to them, though. There is something about looking at them that made me feel dirty. No, they're not those kinds of pictures, sicko. It's just that, Jackson never intended the likes of me to see them. My curiosity, naturally, led me to view them all. But somehow I think that was wrong, hence they're not here. I'm sure you can find them on the Internet if you want to.

I couldn't get the photos - or my sick desire to see them - out of my head for a long time. To me, Malnik's decision to release them just so typified Jackson's dealings with people and underscored his understandable lack of faith or trust in anyone. So many people turned a buck off of Jackson in his life. Granted, he played the 'Oh, woe is me' card a bit much. But that doesn't change the fact people betrayed him for his whole life. If Elvis had the Memphis Mafia - who kept him medicated in a cocoon-like environment over the last years of his life, living off his name, just as they have for 30 years after his death - at least they were people Elvis had known his whole life. People went in and out of Jackson's life so fast that the members of his inner sanctum changed almost literally daily.

Those talking heads you've seen on the television the last 10 days touted as "Jackson Associate" are merely winners of the lottery: they happened to have been in Jackson's inner circle when he died. Had he lived another year, 9 out of 10 of them would've been gone by that point; replaced by 9 others. If it is hard to imagine having all of that wealth and fame and still being miserable, think about what it would mean if everyone you consider a 'friend' turned out to be nothing more than a sycophant. Combined with the physical pain Jackson suffered from years of performing, plus the emotional demons he dealt with - that either led him to commit child abuse or were the root cause of his incredibly unhealthy relationship with children - and it's not hard to see why he sought to be medicated.

Which leads us back to the drugs. By now, of course, it's well known that authorities removed drugs and other medical evidence from the Holmby Hills mansion where Jackson was stricken. While they are trying to determine whether the medications were properly prescribed - and you'll find a hard time getting anyone to take a bet with you that they all were properly prescribed - and whether they played any role in his death. It would seem obvious, though, that it's not a question of "whether" they played a role, but rather "what" role they played.

Jackson - like many celebrities - had a plethora of pseudonyms he used throughout his life, for everything from hotel reservations to email accounts. Some of these pseudonyms, unfortunately, also appear on the prescription labels of the drugs found at Jackson's rented home. More interesting, though is that - in some cases -- the drugs had no prescription labels on them at all. Even for someone with Jackson's celebrity, that would be incredible. It would mean that he had a supplier who had access to those drugs on a common everyday basis. Since it's unlikely that Jackson befriended his friendly neighborhood CVS pharmacist, then, it means some doctor or doctors were providing him the drugs, fully understanding that what they were doing was illegal [not to mention unethical and probably immoral].

The most significant finding - so far - is the discovery of numerous bottles of the powerful sedative Diprivan at the home. Some of the bottles were full and others were empty. None had prescription labels, so investigators - uh, obviously - are trying to determine how Jackson got the drugs.

Diprivan is an extremely potent drug that is supposed to be dispensed by a person trained to administer anesthesia, such as an anesthesiologist or a certified registered nurse anesthetist, and it is typically used in hospitals. It is not, therefore, what one should find in a private home - even a rented one. The drug can be deadly if self-administered - and it is still unknown if Jackson self-medicated or was assisted by someone else. It is also dangerous if administered by someone not trained in what is called airway management and cardiac life support.

Diprivan is the market name for propofol, and is one of the most widely used IV drugs for general anesthesia. The product label from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says a patient being given the drug should be monitored at all times for early signs of abnormally low blood pressure, low oxygen levels and stopped breathing. Problems with the heart or breathing are more likely to occur after rapid administration of the drug. The label states that equipment to provide artificial ventilation, supplemental oxygen, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation "must be immediately available." It's unclear whether any of this equipment was found in Jackson's home.
Apparently, abuse of Diprivan is a growing problem. According to a 2007 study of Diprivan abuse, in an e-mail survey of 126 academic anesthesiology training programs nationwide, 18% of departments reported one or more incidents of Diprivan abuse in the previous 10 years. Of the 25 individuals who abused propofol, seven died as a result, including six who were residents, according to the study.

Based on what the drug is supposed to do, it's not hard to see why people would want it. Essentially, it makes you completely numb. It totally takes away all anxiety, all fear, and it's incredibly relieving of pain, anxiety and stress. People do it to escape. I hear that.

The California Attorney General's office has offered assistance to the Los Angeles County Coroner and the Drug Enforcement Agency [DEA] - both of whom are involved because of the investigation into doctors suspected of improperly prescribing drugs. The involvement of the AG's office is noteworthy. Earlier this year they brought charges against doctors for supplying model Anna Nicole Smith with addictive prescription drugs in the years before she died. The DEA is expected to investigate whether doctors who prescribed medication for Jackson had a face-to-face relationship with him and provided a diagnosis, as required by law.

Diprivan first surfaced as a possibility when a self-described Jackson "nutritionist", Cherilyn Lee, said the singer complained to her earlier this year about having insomnia and asked her to get Diprivan for him. Lee went to CNN with the information shortly after Jackson's death. Lee says she is a registered nurse. Lee said she told Jackson, "This medication is not safe." She said she never saw him take the drug.

If Jackson suffered from insomnia as has been reported, and if he was using Diprivan to fall to sleep, he was playing Russian roulette. Diprivan should never be used for insomnia. As mentioned earlier, the drug is normally administered in a hospital setting with EKG equipment, a blood pressure cuff and a blood-oxygen monitor in close proximity to watch a patient's status. Also on hand in a hospital is supplemental oxygen. Of course, unless you have a trained physician to rescue the patient if something goes wrong, all of the monitors in the world mean nothing.

We'll learn more in the days and weeks ahead [if not years]. In the meantime, Jackson's funeral final takes place on Tuesday. Something tells me, though, that the real show has only just begun.
copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: Lincoln's Virtues

This book is not for the faint of heart; or for anyone who falls asleep easily. Don't get me wrong: the book is worth reading. It looks at Abraham Lincoln from a different prospective. Rather than just Lincoln the politician, or just Lincoln the war president, William Lee Miller goes deeper, delving into the moral, philosophical and spiritual [not religious] underpinnings of Abraham Lincoln. Miller then makes a strong argument that those moral and philosophical foundations go a long way toward explaining why the man is on Mount Rushmore.

A central tenet of Miller's work is this: Lincoln abhorred slavery. He viewed slavery as inherently wrong, and he held this belief by the age of 30. To those who have argued - using some of Lincoln's own words - that Lincoln was not truly against slavery, or did not truly believe that bondage was wrong, Miller painstakingly [with the emphasis on pain] refutes these critics throughout the work. Any ambiguity as to Lincoln's feelings about slavery, according to Miller, fall to the floor once you understand his 'virtues'.

Yet, if that is a central tenet, Miller also insists that those who deify Lincoln are equally misguided. That Lincoln was a fantastic politician is generally agreed to, even by his critics. But many who worship Lincoln believe that his political activity was nothing more than an end to a means: that he didn't really like politics and didn't do the things that politicians do. Miller argues that this is simply not true. Lincoln not only was good at politics: he loved it. Miller's message to Lincoln-worshipers who try to forget that Lincoln was a politician is simple: the man not only liked politics but he practically founded the Illinois Republican party. Certainly not something that one who abhors politics would do, no?

Lincoln was a true Whig at the start of his political career, which began before he turned 30 when he served in the Illinois House of Representatives. He was a firm supporter of Henry Clay and his idea of an 'American System' of national improvements. Unlike Clay, however, he believed that slavery was morally wrong. Unlike abolitionists of the next two decades, however, Lincoln did not believe that slavery where it existed should be touched. Where Lincoln was adamant, however, was that slavery should not spread to new territories. Lincoln often made the analogy of dealing with slavery the way you deal with walking in to find deadly snakes in a bed with your children: the snakes are an evil, but you dare not disturb them for fear of your children being harmed. You do not, however, put more snakes in the remaining beds, either.

Miller looks at the 1860 election in an interesting way, too. Basically, working backwards, Miller says the question isn't how Lincoln got elected President. The question is: how did he secure the Republican nomination. The distinction is important because, according to Miller, it was largely a foregone conclusion that whomever the Republicans nominated stood a better than even chance of winning the presidency.

So, how did Lincoln secure the nomination? A commonly-held misconception is that a great deal of luck was involved. Miller argues that, while luck played a small role, it was no more than the fact that Lincoln was "lucky" to be from Illinois; "lucky" that Illinois had been home to Stephen Douglas; and "lucky" that Lincoln had used his six-year verbal jousting with Douglas to create a litany of speeches and written documents outlining his views far beyond Illinois itself, making him something of a national figure even before the 1860 convention. The location of that convention is often viewed as "lucky". It was not. Lincoln was instrumental in getting Chicago chosen as the site of the convention.

Throughout the book, Miller does a thorough job of tracing the trajectory of Lincoln's journey from self-taught lawyer to the White House. While dry and somewhat existential at times, Miller includes enough politics and history to make the book worth reading. He gives more depth to Lincoln than many authors. His is a balanced look at the life of the "real" Lincoln, not the icon with a monument on the Mall in Washington.

The book stops at Lincoln's inauguration. There are numerous examples, however, of the 1861-1865 Lincoln and his decision-making. But the purpose of the book is not to report on Lincoln the President. It is to explain how Lincoln the President came to be. What his values were, what his philosophies were, what made him what he was. After reading this, you'll get a greater appreciation of Lincoln the Icon, too.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Death of An Enigma

The "real" Michael Jackson [above left, with producer Quincy Jones at the 1984 Grammy Awards]: 1958-1995....not 2009.


South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford [R] thanked the late-pop star Michael Jackson on Friday for helping to get the politician's whimpering visage off of the nation's front pages. "It was awful big of him to die," Sanford said cheerily, speaking of the 50-year old Jackson, who succumbed to what is believed to be a "massive coronary event" [which sounds like something Jackson would bill one of his concerts as, now that I think of it] on Thursday. "I thought my ass would be on the front page for months," Sanford said. "Now I know how Woody Allen felt when O.J. whacked his wife."

Ok, the above didn't really happen. The reality though is. as most of the world mourns the loss of Michael Jackson, there is a Republican governor down south who is probably moonwalking across the governor's mansion. With Jackson's stunning death, news of another politician with an active penis suddenly seemed passe. It's possible that Sanford actually started cheering up mid-morning on Thursday, as news of the death of another icon - Farrah Fawcett - hit the media like a punch in the nuts. Still, by mid-day, slowly Farrah news was sharing the front pages of news sites with new details of lurid emails between Sanford and his 'strange' that sent the "creep-meter" into purple and made even one of South Carolina's top Republicans [State Rep. Glenn McCall, who is one of South Carolina's two national representatives to the Republican National Committee] - a well-known hypocritical, bible-thumping, God-knows-there's-something-in-his-closet, homophobic Neo-Con - to call for Sanford's resignation.

This blog post was originally going to be written Thursday evening and it was going to be about the penis of Mark Sanford. Maybe I'll write that one tomorrow. [Fear not, it still will be about the governor's pecker, as this has nothing to do with any other part of Sanford]. But, as I sat down before dinner on Thursday, to turn on the computer and try to figure out why the White Sox-Dodger game was still on [they went to 13 innings, it turns out], my homepage came up with the news that Jackson had been rushed to a hospital and that "it has been reported he was not breathing."

If that last part hadn't been part of the headline, I would've continued unconcerned to the ballgame. It's not exactly news when a reclusive lunatic genius like Jackson gets rushed to a hospital. It is news, though, when he's not breathing. The thought popped into my head, "Jesus, he's dead!" Another thought followed, "No way. He just collapsed, probably trying to dance on top of a Land Rover again", or something equally ridiculous.

Then, though, came the confirmation of my first impression: Jackson was dead. Earlier in the day, I'd been thrown for a loop with Fawcett's death. Sure, it wasn't unexpected: even a guy like me, who ignores popular culture post-1990s and has no clue who in the fuck Jon and Kate are, knew that Fawcett was dying of cancer. The cold reality of it, though, was what hit me. So did the picture of a long-forgotten poster that hung on my bedroom wall for years: the iconic shot of Fawcett in a red swim suit, head cocked just so, long beautiful hair trailing over her shoulder. I'd say something rude here, but actually my sexual fascination with Fawcett pre-dated puberty for me. So, in that respect, it was actually pure. As a 7, 8 and 9 year old, I knew nothing of sex but I sure knew she was pretty. It was - hold down your lunches - a pure kind of romantic falling in love with Fawcett for the little me [me as a youngster, not my pecker, smart-asses]. I honestly don't think I ever thought of the actual sexual "act" with her. She was just probably one of the first 'girls' who made my heart race.

I feel the same way about Olivia Newton-John, so I'm warning you: when she goes, I'm writing something equally sappy. Fawcett was - to me - what the 1970s were all about. It was pre-puberty, pre-high school, pre-'celebrities and politicians get shot', "pre" a lot of stuff. So, with her death, I figured I'd be spending much of the rest of the day thinking about the 1970s. I had no idea that the 1980s flashbacks would be coming so soon.

I have to confess: I stopped listening to Jackson's music shortly after the second round of molestation rumors began earlier this decade. And I'm a grown heterosexual man who bought his double-CD HIStory in 1995. No casual fan. The first set of charges were disturbing, as they became known in 1993. At the time, though, either the sordid details of those charges weren't available to the general public [pre-Internet for me], or I ignored their existence. It was only after the second set of charges that I read the lurid details of the first set of charges on The Smoking Gun and decided that my earlier feelings that Jackson had to be innocent were misguided to say the least.

Maybe it was because by 2004 I had children of my own, I don't know. Whatever the reason, I made a conscious effort to stop listening to his music. I kept the CD's, but I took them out of rotation; took them off of my computer, etc. I loosely followed his 2005 trial. For some reason that I'm sure has to due with a severe character flaw in me, I was thrilled when he was acquitted. Not "O.J. IS FREE - LET'S PARTY"-thrilled, like some celebrity-worshiping pea-brained schmuck, but happy for him nonetheless. I was equally pleased when he got the hell out of Dodge [or, in this case, Neverland and the U.S.] and lived on an island in Bahrain. The less I saw or heard of him, I guess I thought, the greater the chance that I could forget that whole side of his life and maybe one day appreciate the music again.

I'm so unhip to popular culture today, that I totally missed the March announcement that Jackson made - naturally with much fanfare - that he was going back on tour. I knew nothing of the 6-hour rehearsals at Los Angeles' Staples Center; the rumors that people were concerned that he was overextending himself physically in trying to practice dance-routines he created at 25 years old as a nearly-51-year old anorexic prescription-drug-addicted shadow of a man. Had he lived, I'm sure I'd have paid no attention to the new tour, nor to any other news about him.

The only chance that would have been different, however, would have been if he had somehow been able to resurrect his music. The music industry is dead, has been for years. Maybe partially because Jackson wasn't in it; I don't know. That may be making too much of his importance. He apparently released something in 2001. I vaguely remember hearing that, but with all that was going on in my life then, I had no time for new [or old] music. Then the second charges came and that was that. But I wonder if - somehow - he had been able to [pardon the unintended awful pun] breathe new life into the moribund music industry, if he had been able to write another hit song, would I have "come back" to him?

Now that he's dead, naturally the tendency is to think I would. Who knows? I do know that his music always touched me [see, thanks to those charges, I even feel creepy writing that]. There was very, very little of his work that I didn't take an immediate liking to. Me and about 2 billion other humans [maybe more, actually]. He had a gift, and if he really was the animal that he was portrayed in that lurid '05 trial, it still doesn't change the fact that he was a musical genius. Other than buying half of the Beatles catalog - and granted, that was a helluva 'other than' - he was a nightmare in making business and personal decisions. It seems clear he and his entire family had lost their minds years ago. Of course, with that lunatic Joe as a father, I'd have lost more than my mind.

I'm hoping that I can come back to his music now, although somehow I feel that is wrong. I made a decision years ago that this was a bad, bad man and that by listening to his music I was somehow condoning his behavior. Watching the news coverage last night [and I don't think I've watched cable news for five hours straight since the Space Shuttle Columbia went down in 2003], whenever a pre-1988 Michael would be on the screen, I was warmly remembering him. Less so the 1988-1991 Jackson, even though I loved Dangerous. Really less so the 1991-1995 Jackson, again even though I actually liked a lot of the songs on HIStory. Damned near nauseous the post-1995 Jackson, every time the freakish image appeared on the screen. Having not actually looked at him, probably since the trial in '05 and definitely not as intensely as watching him on that surreal 2003 Martin Brashear documentary, I found it painfully uncomfortable to look at the footage of the March 2009 press conference announcing the latest "Final Tour". Hence the photo I chose for the blog post today. That's how I want to remember him. For some of you, even that photo is too freakish - but I was too young to remember what he looked like [although I do remember what he sounded like] when he was in the Jackson 5.

Yet, for whatever reason, I and billions of others this morning can't get Michael Jackson out of our heads. Long ago, for a period of about 10 years [longer for those of you born pre-1970], we couldn't get Jackson out of our heads, either: at least we couldn't get the tunes he'd write out of our heads. Even though he hasn't recorded a relevant piece of music in about 14 years, his death still resonates, obviously. That, too, must be a gift.

I also confess that I grew tired of Jackson's, "Oh, woe is me" bullshit regarding his "awful" childhood [or lack, thereof]. With kids starving to death by the thousands around the globe, I found it hard to shed a tear over what Jackson "went through". I'll grant, though, that what he suffered was clearly child-abuse. Whether he inflicted child-abuse himself, I don't know but my gut feeling is he did. I don't think he was a classic pedophile. But I do believe he sexually molested more than one boy. I cannot imagine anything coming out between now and the end of my own breathing that will change that opinion.

Now that he is dead, though, and he can no longer shock the world with new bizarre behavior [although, remember, the rest of the family is still alive], maybe Michael Jackson "the entertainer" as opposed to Michael Jackson "the entertaining" will come back into our heads. That Michael Jackson,? Well, I wouldn't mind if I could never get him out of my head again.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Memorial Day

Donna Reed with servicemen during World War II. She was a popular pinup because so many saw her as a hometown girl.

If you're like me - and who isn't - your recollections of Donna Reed are broken into three segments: the first is as the wife of Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life. The second is brief glimpses of The Donna Reed Show you caught on afternoons when you were home sick as a kid watching UHF stations, back when there were such things. The third and - unfortunately - final image is a God-awful performance of Miss Ellie Ewing on one season of Dallas in the mid-80s. There hasn't been a worse prime-time switch since the braniacs at ESPN put Tony Kornheiser on Monday Night Football.

I say that last image is unfortunate because shortly after being rescued from Dallas, Donna Reed died at the early age of 64 in 1986. [Editor's Note: I remember when Reed died in 1986. At the time, 64 seemed old to me. I can now properly call it 'the early age of 64'] Even though she's been gone for 23 years, Reed still holds a spot in the hearts and minds of most Americans over the age of 40, even if it is only for her performance in It's a Wonderful Life.

On this Memorial Day, however, there is another reason to remember Donna Reed. During World War II, Reed was a young Hollywood actress. She was at once both sensual and motherly - even at the tender age of 22. The United States military had encouraged what became known as the pinup phenomenon [providing servicemen with 'glamour shots' of Hollywood starlets] as a way to maintain the morale of soldiers far from home. Reed was a rare pinup girl to the men in the U.S. armed forces in that she was not just an image of home that allowed them to satisfy their very natural sexual urges [these were, remember, young men]. She was that, but she was more: to many, perhaps because she was closer in age to these men than any of the other pinups [Dorothy Lamour, Rita Hayworth, Ann Sheridan, Hedy Lemarr and - paramount of all - Betty Grable come to mind], they looked upon her as sister/mother/lover all in one.

What makes Reed's role as a pinup girl poignant today on Memorial Day is a discovery that Reed's youngest daughter made late last year. Her daughter, Mary Owen, was an out-of-work 52-year-old Bear Sterns employee. With the newly found - and unwanted - time on her hands, Owen pulled out some old boxes of her mother's that she had kept stored away since her mother's death. It was in one of those boxes that Owens made an amazing discovery: Reed had held on to many of the letters that G.I.s had sent her over 60 years ago.

Owen was stunned. Her mother had always downplayed her fame in general, and of her part in the war effort Reed was particularly silent. None of Reed's other three children have any recollection of Reed mentioning the letters, either. After Owen catalogued the letters, she found that her mother had held onto a total of 341 of them. For Memorial Day 2009, she shared them with the New York Times.

The letters are remarkable. For one thing, you remember that at one time there was a generation of us that could actually write. I don't mean the college-graduate, educated classes, I mean everyone could write, from the high school dropout to the kid just off the farm. Even if the grammar and punctuation weren't always right, these men could communicate their thoughts through the written word in a way that text messaging simply does not allow. The other thing that stands out is how innocent the letters are in terms of sexual tension. Most of the men writing her, of course, never met Donna Reed. It could be expected that they simply wanted an autographed picture to...well, you know. Instead, the men write with a wholesome goodness that one wouldn't believe as authentic if they appeared in one of Reed's Hollywood war films of the 1940s.

But they are authentic ands speak of a real time in our history. The letters were real, and the men who wrote them were real. They wrote to Donna Reed, yes because she was famous and beautiful. But there was something else that kept them writing to her: she corresponded with them. It was not uncommon for Reed to send more than just an autographed picture - there was often a letter accompanying it. It was then subsequently not unusual for a second letter to come to Reed from the same G.I. Thus began a pen-pal relationship between Hollywood starlet and American soldier that seems as if it would be unthinkable in today's age.

“The boys in our outfit,” Sgt. William F. Love wrote on Aug. 18, 1944, from the jungles of New Guinea “think you are a typical American girl, someone who we would like to come home to!!!!!” On March 28, 1944, Sgt. John C. Dale of Tennessee, a tail gunner on a B-17, told Reed that he wanted her “to be the girl back home that I am fighting for.” Cpl. Bob Bowie wrote of how seeing Reed in The Human Comedy made him long to be back home in Los Angeles and wishing, “I could see my Mom.” He added: “I don’t know how it affected the other fellows, we never discuss our feelings with one another.”

Reed seemed to keep letters from those with whom she corresponded more than once, as well as from soldiers who came from her native Iowa. These including correspondence with Gordon Clausen, with whom she grew up. “Sometimes I wish I was back there with the old gang, able to go the usual rounds of the week,” Clausen wrote from the U.S.S. Simpson on April 8, 1945. “Occasionally I will sit on the fantail and look at the moon, wondering how many of our old friends were doing the same.”

Even those letter-writers who survived the war have, for the most part, died. But for those who died during the war, their letters are sobering. In an April 12, 1943 letter [the date on the letter is actually "April 12th (I think)"], Lt. Norman P. Klinker - with whom Reed kept a correspondence - wrote Reed from North Africa:

"Have just received your letter from the eighth of December. And believe me or no, it was the first piece of mail I have received in the past two months. By the sound of your tale, life in the old U.S. is not quite as fine as it used to be. But I honestly feel that it is better than eating the same 3 meals out of the same 3 c-ration cans for a month or three. We have been in action for some time here in North Africa, you see. Quite an interesting and heartless life at one and the same time. One thing I promise you - life on the battlefield is a wee bit different from the "movie" version. Tough and bloody and dirty as it is at times, there is none of that grim and worried feeling so rampant in war pictures. Its a matter-of-fact life we live and talk here. And here for the first time, no one has the 'jitters'. I hear you have done your part and done got [sic] married. Congratulations and good luck! See you in your next 'pic'"."

On Jan. 6, 1944, Klinker was killed in action in Italy during his unit’s seemingly suicidal assault on Mount Porchia, between Naples and Rome. An official history of the battle indicates that his unit was part of a task force “organized at the end of the year for the purpose of taking the ‘suicidal’ objective.” It met with “fanatical resistance” and “artillery and mortar fire of such devastating accuracy that the troops were forced to withdraw.”

The Times was able to locate one surviving letter-writer, who could not believe that Reed had kept his letters. Edward Skvarna, now 84, is retired and living in Covina, California. In 1943 he had just graduated high school in a mill town near Pittsburgh. As was the case with tens of thousands of others that year, Skvarna then enlisted in the Army Air Forces. It was while training in Kansas to be a right gunner on a B-29 that Skvarna actually met Donna Reed, at a U.S.O. canteen. Somehow, he got up the nerve to ask her to dance. “I had never danced with a celebrity before, so I felt delighted, privileged even, to meet her,” Skvarna told the Times. "But I really felt she was like a girl from back home. She was from a smaller community, and we were more or less the same age, so I felt she was the kind of person I could talk to.”

In one correspondence - from May 7, 1945 after being shipped to Asia - Skvarna writes:

"Dear Donna: First, I want to thank you for the swell letter, it was just like I hoped it to be. If you remember, I was in China, at the time but now I am in the Marianas, quite a change in climate. Please forgive me for not writing sooner but, I guess your letter took so long , that I almost gave up hope but, one day during male [sic] call, in India, it came boy! Did I jump with joy. Your letter was written Mar. 19th and I received it the latter part of April, just at the time we were on the move so at last I could answer it now. Conditions out here are much better than in India or China but, that should be expected because of the shorter supply lines. Oh/Yes almost slipped my mind, here are a few shots [Skvarna included in this letter three photographs - shown below - taken while in India] of a Rajah's Palace that I took while visiting it. During our stay in India, we were presented with the opportunity of visiting the Rajah's Palace so these three pictures are just part of the outcome of my visit.

The palace I took this shot from his [sic] main gate as you can see the boys are sure eager to get threw [sic] the second gate.

The fountain shot with yours truly it [sic] is also a fish pond, the nature boy is showing me the different types of fish, he also carried my camera, notice the wall in the background to keep out the uninvited.

The third shot was hard to get after a little bribing with food it came out far enough for us to get him in the sun. I was dropping him food that the boys gave me and another fellow took the picture. One of the native boy's [sic] fell in the pit a few days ago so you can see the little fellow's [sic] are a bit scared and I don't blame them a bit. Now I'd better stop this before I start writing a book. Anyway I hope you enjoyed the shots and, as a very slight favor how about a snapshot of yourself. I don't care how small okay! 'Yes'. I've cut a picture of you out of the papers a while back. I think its a shot of you taken out of the movie 'Dorian Gray'. Well I'll sign off now to get a bit of sleep because tomorrow is a big day. So good nite [sic] and may God bless you always."

Here - for those of you prone to wrenching your hands over the U.S. decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan - it is worth nothing that Skvarna more likely than not would have been one of the 2,000,000 casualties who would have fallen if President Truman had opted to take Japan by invasion. Think of Skvarna the next time you feel guilty about Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki.

Donna Reed died 23 years ago. Thanks to her feelings about the men with whom she corresponded - and her desire to hold onto many of those letters - and to her daughter's efforts once she discovered the letters last year, Donna Reed can remind us - in 2009 - why we aren't working today.

Remember a veteran. It's Memorial Day.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Jane Doe

Mary Alice Willey McGregor [above] disappeared some time after August 29, 1971. Here, the young southern California native can be seen wearing a pin that signified her strong belief in the Black Power movement in the early 1970s, in the form of the "black power fist" pin worn on her sweater.


No one knows exactly what happened to Mary Alice Willey McGregor. Until last year, in fact, the question of whether she was dead or alive remained as unanswered as it had been nearly 37 years before, when she disappeared. What made McGregor's disappearance from San Francisco in September 1971 more nuanced than a typical, tragic, young-girl-gone-missing tale all-too-frequently repeated in California - particularly during the period in which McGregor disappeared - was one thing: McGregor was believed to be an accessory to murder. And not just any murder, either. Only the most notorious police killing of the 1970s, the so-called 'Black Liberation Army [BLA]' (a violent offshoot of the Black Panthers) assassination of San Francisco police Sgt. John V. Young on August 29, 1971.

Like McGregor's disappearance immediately after that murder, the crime of Sgt. Young's death remains unpunished - although that may change shortly. While evidence at the time indicated that the killing of Young was in retaliation for the death of BLA activist George Jackson in a San Quentin prison riot on August 21, 1971, charges in the Young killing never went through until 36 years later. Investigators did track some of the suspects to New Orleans and extracted incriminating statements from them, but in 1975 that evidence was thrown out by an apparently delirious judge after it was alleged that New Orleans police used torture to get the information. The one suspect they could not track, though, was Mary Alice Willey McGregor.

The Young murder case languished for decades until 1999, when San Francisco police made one last effort to investigate it. Apparently, a re-examination of a cigarette lighter found at the station [why do killers always do something stupid like leaving something like that behind?] yielded a thumbprint belonging to a member of the BLA. In addition, a BLA member apparently agreed to testify against his former associates. Eight men, all former BLA members, were arrested in 2007. Authorities charged them with murder and conspiracy, but a judge ruled that the statute of limitations had expired on some of the conspiracy charges. On June 8th, seven suspects [one of those arrested had only been charged with the now-dismissed conspiracy charge] will go on trial in San Francisco Superior Court for Young's murder.

Who was Mary Alice Willey McGregor? By all accounts, she was a nondescript typical white southern California girl growing up as an only child with parents significantly older than her peers' mothers and fathers. As such, she became detached from her parents to the point of leaving Anaheim at some time in 1969 for the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco. There, she apparently became enamored of the Black Power movement. She became particularly won over to the cause of the BLA, and its founder George Jackson.

Jackson himself had been the victim of an archaic early 1960s California law that sentenced him to "one-year-to-life" in 1961 for robbing a gas station of $70. Jackson read widely in prison and became a Marxist. By the end of the decade, Jackson was an internationally known militant prison inmate and best-selling author who had become a powerful voice for prison reform and civil rights during his years behind bars at Soledad State Prison in Monterey County.

As Jackson's reputation grew among those on the Left, the Black Panthers - as good at marketing as Madison Avenue - decided to capitalize on his popularity by making him a "field marshal" in their organization. In 1970, Jackson and two other inmates were accused of beating and hurling a white prison guard to his death from a Soledad tier, apparently in retaliation for the exercise yard slayings of three black inmates. Known as the Soledad Brothers, the three were transferred to San Quentin for trial. In October 1970, Jackson published a collection of letters called Soledad Brother, a searing indictment of the prison system. The book turned Jackson into an international celebrity, especially among the new Left.

And he had become an especially strong magnet for McGregor. According to McGregor's second husband - she had married once at 17, divorced, and then married Patrick Warren McDowell in a hastily arranged union designed to allow McGregor to complain about prison conditions in which McDowell was suffering while awaiting trial on an armed robbery charge - McGregor fully believed in Jackson's plan, which involved a violent breakout from San Quentin and then, "the start of the revolution!"

The set of related circumstances that ended in the violent death of Sgt. Young began on August 21, 1971. A young lawyer named Stephen Bingham visited George Jackson at San Quentin. Shortly after that visit, Jackson somehow had a gun in his possession. At the time, authorities said that - inexplicably - Bingham had smuggled the gun into the visiting room and gave it to Jackson, who allegedly hid it under an Afro wig that Bingham had also brought in. [Editor's Note: Bingham fled the country and lived in Europe for 13 years before choosing, in 1984, to return to the United States to stand trial. In 1986, Bingham was acquitted on charges that he smuggled the gun to Jackson. Bingham at the time and to this day believes that guards smuggled the gun to Jackson in exchange for cash and the promise that the planned uprising would not occur during their shifts]. As Jackson was being led back to his cell, a guard noticed the gun. Jackson drew the weapon and, paraphrasing Vietnamese lunatic Ho Chi Minh, declared: "This is it, gentlemen. The dragon has come."

What happened next was the most violent day in California prison history. Inmates freed from their cells murdered three guards and two white inmate trustees. They tried to kill several others. As the prison went to lockdown, Jackson and another inmate ran across the prison yard. A guard in the tower fired twice and - in a literal burst of good taste - Jackson was dead before he hit the ground.

Then, on August 29th, a bomb went off at the Bank of America branch at Stonestown mall, and all but one of the available officers from San Francisco's Ingleside Station rushed to investigate, leaving Sgt. Young and a civilian aide to man Ingleside station during the incident. A short time later, a young white woman entered the station to report a missing purse. After she finished filling out a report, she walked out shining a flashlight toward the street. With that, a car pulled up. Several black men got out and walked into the station. One shoved a shotgun into the voice grate of the station's bulletproof glass and fired. Sgt. Young was hit in the chest and died on the station floor. The civilian aide was wounded, but survived.

Two days afterward, the San Francisco Chronicle received an anonymous letter from a group calling itself the "George L. Jackson Assault Squad of the Black Liberation Army." The note said that Ingleside Station was attacked to retaliate for Jackson's death. Police at the time - through investigation of Jackson's private letters and other clues - believed that Mary Alice Willey McGregor was the woman who had come to the station to report her stolen purse; that she was a lookout connected to the BLA; and that she was there essentially to confirm to the gunmen that most of the police force at Ingleside had not yet returned from the bomb explosion that apparently had been a diversion to draw them away from the station. Young's murder was an assassination in that the BLA wanted to target one San Francisco policeman in response to Jackson's death on the prison grounds of San Quentin a week before.

McGregor's sighting - by witnesses who identified her as the woman who shined the flashlight after leaving the station - was the last time anyone saw her alive. Throughout the next 37 years, as the Young murder investigation would ebb and flow, there was an assumption that McGregor had eluded capture, perhaps fled to Canada, or - like many other radicals of the day - assimilated back into the cultural norm, where she was probably somebody's mother, or a Girl Scout troop leader.

No one, it seems, ever considered the possibility that McGregor hadn't willingly disappeared, but that - as a key witness who could identify Young's killers - she had been brutally murdered herself shortly afterwards. Even after Modesto, California police found an unidentified body floating in a canal on September 11, 1971, and with the biggest manhunt on in California history for Sgt. Young's killers, unbelievably no one in the San Francisco police force was told about the finding of the body. McGregor's body was found wearing only a handmade blouse and an earring when she was pulled from the water. The coroner said she had been dead for 12 to 24 hours.

She had 65 stab wounds, most of them defensive, but at least 10 were considered fatal. One stab wound entered under her left breast and hit her spinal column. One wound penetrated her skull and entered her brain. Her throat was cut. An autopsy indicated that someone - apparently trying to make identification of the body impossible - had tried to cut off her hands and failed. Her killer then tried to cut off a couple of fingers and failed at that, too. One thumb was removed with much hacking. But she had no identification. Investigators couldn't determine who she was. For 37 years, she lay in a grave marked only by a large stone that said "Jane Doe."

As in most instances in these cases, however, there was one investigator at the time who could not put the Jane Doe body out of his mind. Over the years, on his own investigation, he had determined that Jane Doe was Mary Alice Willey McGregor. The problem, though, was that McGregor was not the typical girl-gone-missing: she was a suspect in one of the most notorious murders in California history. If the body was McGregor, she certainly couldn't help police identify Sgt. Young's killers. In that case, not too many police were all that concerned about finding out if Jane Doe was McGregor.

The stereotypical persistent detective - in this case Detective Ken Hedrick of the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department - kept on pushing. Finally, in the spring of 2008, Hedrick convinced authorities to see if new technologies could help identify the woman found dead in the canal back in 1971. He had the body exhumed, a forensic anthropologist made a facial reconstruction, and technicians tried to get a DNA sample for a match. In late summer, a cousin of McGregor's stumbled upon a short newspaper story explaining the detective's interest in solving the case. The cousin, Corey Oisen of Santa Cruz County, called Hedrick, and the two compared notes. Oisen arranged for a DNA test. It was a match. Finally, the body in the canal had a name, and Mary Alice McGregor's story - or the story's ending - was now known. On Oct. 31, 2008, a small ceremony for McGregor was held at the Patterson cemetery. She now has a proper gravestone. In it is carved her real name and the dates of her birth and death.

It can never be known the extent of Mary Alice Willey McGregor's involvement in Sgt. Young's murder. It is always possible that McGregor - who had never before been known to actually participate in violence, although she clearly supported the theory of violence in support of 'black liberation' - had no idea why she was asked by BLA associates to report a missing purse that day. It would seem folly, though, to think she had any doubt that some violence was pending, even if the actual murder plan was unknown to her. Still, if she was a dupe, and had no idea that she was setting up a young police sergeant for his murder, then her own murder takes on an even sadder tone. If - as seems more likely - she at least knew she was assisting in the perpetration of violence, then many reading about her murder will have little to no sympathy for her case. Still, she was someone's daughter. Her parents went to their graves never knowing what happened to their only child; never understanding where they went wrong, or why she abandoned them in a real-life version of The Beatles' She's Leaving Home. An argument can be made that even the most heinous criminals - guilty of far more than McGregor may have been - deserve a proper burial.

Now, Mary Alice Willey McGregor has had hers.

copyright 2011 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

Book Review: The Last Campaign

Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?

Can you tell me where he's gone?

I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill,
With Abraham, Martin and John.

Dion’s “Abraham, Martin and John” is one of at least two songs whose lyrics were altered in-studio due to the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy [D, NY] on June 5, 1968 at 3:16 am Eastern time. As the title suggests, the song was written [by Richard Holler] as a result of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and was a poetic triumvirate tying Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and King together as men who, “freed a lot of people, but it seems the good they die young…” As Dion was laying down vocals, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination led Holler to add the final paragraph [above] to the song. The other song similarly adjusted was the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy with the Devil”. Keith Richards’ and Mick Jagger’s lyric was originally, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed John Kennedy?’, when after all, it was you and me”. As they were laying down the track, RFK was killed, leading Richards to slightly alter the line to have Jagger sing, “I shouted out, ‘Who killed the Kennedys?’, when after all…”

If I was truly conceived exactly nine months prior to my actual birth, then I was conceived the night that Robert Kennedy was murdered. Other than that – and my nephew’s being born exactly 40 years after the event – I have never thought much about Bobby Kennedy’s 82-day campaign for the Presidency in 1968. I knew the basic facts about the assassination in California, and had seen an extended rebroadcast of the event as it aired in the middle of the night on the east coast on June 5, 1968 – including Lyndon Johnson’s simply surreal address of mourning to the Nation. After listening to LBJ, anyone dropping in from Mars would have been clueless as to the visceral hatred both men shared for one another. That LBJ didn’t win an Oscar for that performance was criminal.

Until reading Thurston Clarke’s The Last Campaign, however, the actual campaign that preceded the assassination never captured my interest. I had generally believed that RFK – in 1968 at least – had been an opportunist. That he ran only after Sen. Eugene McCarthy [D, Minn] showed how vulnerable LBJ was by capturing 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and that Kennedy probably would not have been able to wrest the nomination away from Vice President Hubert Humphrey had he not been killed.

While Clarke often slips beyond the impartial into that world of Kennedy-worship that often makes books about them unreadable, his work does make a very strong argument that Robert Kennedy’s run for the Presidency in 1968 was nothing less than a political revolution that held the promise of a universally new way of politics. Clarke’s portrayal of the campaign, of RFK’s own inner-psyche and transformation at the hands of those who nearly tore him to pieces in trying to touch him, really does lead me to question my previous assumptions of the viability of Kennedy’s candidacy.

Those in the love-Kennedy camp often rhapsodize about ‘what might have been’ had President Kennedy lived; had Bobby Kennedy lived, etc. It is romantic and dramatic to draw up ‘might have beens’ and ‘what ifs’ when writing about either Kennedy. Bobby, though in particular, lends himself to this phenomenon because we know how it ends. We know what President Richard Nixon is going to do – not just in Vietnam and Laos but at home – and we know that what followed were some of the darkest political days in our nation’s history. Because we know all of this, it is tempting to think that – had Bobby lived – it all would have been different.

It is very, very hard to stop yourself from doing that kind of dreaming when reading Clarke’s work. For one thing – Clarke never shuts up about it, constantly hammering home his conviction that RFK would have been the greatest president since Lincoln. If you begin this work, though, aware of this tendency, and keep focused on the facts and stories alone, Clarke’s book is truly fascinating.

Because Bobby Kennedy’s campaign was fascinating. Clarke interviewed extensively all of the surviving members of the [very large] press pool that followed Kennedy from Day 1 to Day 82 of his campaign. These recollections are often being told here for the first time by men and women who – as journalists – fell in love with Kennedy and later felt guilty about losing their impartiality. That – combined with the horrific end of the campaign – led many to remain silent for nearly 40 years about what went on behind the scenes of that campaign.

For Clarke, however, they open up and tell an amazing story. For one thing [and this a major theme of the book], there was the almost universal belief among all of the media that Bobby Kennedy was going to be shot. From the first night of the campaign, when a bunch of reporters having drinks after hours took up a pool to see who could guess the exact date on which Kennedy would be shot [and this was in March; even before King had been killed] there was an inevitability among the press that this man was going to die before he could possibly succeed his brother. That he would die at the hand of an assassin and that it would happen while he was campaigning.

Indeed, that sense of inevitability was felt by many Kennedy aides. The candidate himself thought a great deal about it, according to some of the sources for Clarke’s book. These sources – mostly journalists who Kennedy often sought out after-hours to pour out his soul off the record – say Kennedy once said, “There are guns between me and the White House.” When asked what that meant, Kennedy reportedly smiled and said, “These people [the voters] say I’m a hero; well, heroes get shot.” On many occasions during the campaign, a car would backfire, or someone would set off firecrackers, and Kennedy would jolt upright, cover his head with his hands, or otherwise recoil as if it was Dallas 1963 all over again.

In addition to having that sense of inevitability about him, Clarke’s Bobby Kennedy is a man who – by March 1968 – was eager to leave his brother behind. “I’m interested in what can help this country in 1969,” Kennedy said, “not what we did in 1963.” Indeed, Bobby Kennedy by 1968 was far more ‘in-touch’ with the downtrodden, minorities, poor, and disenfranchised than his brother ever was [or would have been had he lived]. Bobby’s sense of empathy and his deep compassion were not characteristics, in fact, that his brother would have even recognized in his Attorney General. Indeed, the Bobby Kennedy of 1968 would have been unrecognizable to John Kennedy – both physically, with his long hair, and philosophically with his deep and passionate concern for African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and poor whites.

And these constituencies loved Bobby Kennedy. One of the great senses of tragedy around Kennedy’s 1968 assassination was the feeling held by many minorities that RFK had been their last best hope. With his death, no politician for the next 25 years would ever hold their esteem the way Bobby Kennedy had. And Kennedy loved these people. Despite his abhorrence of being so much as touched let alone having his shoes, cuff links, ties and other apparel torn violently from his body by adoring mobs, Kennedy insisted on allowing it to happen. Whenever his [private] security detail would object or try to keep crowds away, Kennedy would reprimand them on the spot and insist that he be allowed to freely greet and mingle. In fact, one of the many ironies of RFK’s actual assassination is that almost to a person those who believed he would be killed thought it would happen during these meet-and-greets. No known attempt on his life, however, was ever made during these literally hundreds of gatherings.

His end would come in a hotel kitchen instead. Here, too, Clarke points to another irony: Kennedy always insisted on leaving a speaking engagement by walking through the crowd and out the back to the exit. On the few occasions during the campaign that aides led him through a back way – such as the kitchen entrance of a hotel – he would furiously chastise them, “Never do that again!” It is possible that – after 82 days of tireless and endless campaigning – by June 5th Robert Kennedy was just too tired to go through the crowd one more time. That is the only reason anyone associated with the campaign can explain - 40 years later - why Bobby Kennedy allowed himself to be led through the kitchen where Sirhan Sirhan was waiting to kill him. In fact, some of Kennedy’s security detail that night had started to clear a path in front of the speakers podium, so that he could exit through the crowd, only to have to double back quickly [and, ultimately, futilely] when they realized their candidate had instead ducked back to the hotel kitchen.

For me personally, another of the great revelations in this book is the fact that Robert Kennedy knew he’d been shot. Because he’d been hit in the head, I had always assumed he lost consciousness instantly. He did not. Because there were so many people in the room at the time – one journalist estimated that there were 80 human beings within a 20-foot radius of the candidate with all of their attention focused on him when Sirhan pulled the trigger, Kennedy’s assassination was the most-witnessed political killing ever. While the Zapruder film captures in vivid and gory detail the assassination of John Kennedy, that film came to light only five years after the event. Until that time, very few had witnessed the actual shots and grim results.

Not so with Bobby Kennedy. The proximity between Kennedy and Sirhan was less than a few feet. Five others were wounded. As Kennedy had been led back through the kitchen, he clasped hands with cooks, dishwashers and other well-wishers. As he was leaning across one of the kitchen worktables to shake hands with yet another member of the kitchen staff, Sirhan reached out from the crowd, pointed a revolver at Kennedy’s head and fired. Sirhan used a .22-caliber pistol, not an ‘ideal’ weapon for an assassin. Later, the surgeon who operated on Bobby Kennedy would say that if the fatal bullet had hit Bobby Kennedy just a centimeter further back on his head than it did, Kennedy would have survived and eventually recovered with no brain damage.

Clarke recounts word-for-word the actual moment of the assassination as recorded live by Mutual Radio Network reporter Andrew West. West happened to be lucky enough to get Kennedy’s attention just as he entered the kitchen. The candidate agreed to talk with him, while he greeted the kitchen staff. On the tape, West asks, “Senator, how are you going to counter Mr. Humphrey and his backgrounding [sic] you as far as the delegate votes go?” Kennedy – still shaking hands – responds, “It just goes back to the struggle for it….” The gunshots. At that point, West frantically screams, “Senator Kennedy has been shot – Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Is that possible? It is possible, ladies and gentlemen. Is it possible? He has. Not only Senator Kennedy – Oh my God – Senator Kennedy and another man – a Kennedy campaign manager – and possibly shot in the head. I am right here and [Kennedy aide] Rafer Johnson has hold of the man who apparently has fired the shot….HE STILL HAS THE GUN!! The gun is pointed at me this very moment. I hope they can get the gun out of his hand. Be very careful. GET THE GUN! GET THE GUN! Stay away from the gun. Stay away from the gun. His hand is frozen….get his thumb, get his thumb take a hold of his thumb [here West momentarily forgets he is on the air] fucking BREAK it if you have to. Get away from the barrel. Look out for the gun. OK – all right. That’s it, Rafer, get it. Get the gun, Rafer. Ok, no hold on to the gun. Ladies and gentlemen they have the gun away from the man. I can’t see the man. I can’t see who it is. Senator Kennedy right now is on the ground. He has been shot. This is a – this is – wait a minute. Hold him! We don’t’ want another [Lee Harvey] Oswald, Rafer! Hold him. Keep people away from him. This is a – make room, make room, make room, make room. The Senator is on the ground. He’s bleeding profusely…apparently the Senator has been shot from the frontal area, we don’t see exactly where the Senator has been shot.”

At this point, Kennedy was still conscious. His eyes would focus and then go blank and then refocus again. A busboy kneeled at his side with a towel, uncertain where to put it as there was so much blood he couldn’t be sure where Kennedy had been hit. Kennedy looked up at the busboy and said, “Is everybody else all right? Is [aide] Paul [Schrade] okay? Is everybody all right?” As Kennedy’s wife, Ethel – who had been held up at the podium by well-wishers and only entered the kitchen after hearing the shots – reached him, he said to her, “My head!” Another witness said he then said, “Jack, Jack…” and lost consciousness. He regained it, however, when the ambulance attendants were finally able to reach him through the throng. “Don’t!” Kennedy screamed, “Don’t lift me. No, no, no, no!”

As Clarke says, perhaps the most surprising thing about Kennedy’s assassination is that almost literally no one was shocked, not even the victim. Journalist Hays Gorey recounts, “Gazing up from the floor, Robert Kennedy, still lucid, wore a haunting expression that no one who knew him will ever forget. He was fully aware of what had happened.” Another reporter, Peter Hamill – speaking for the first time in 40 years about the event – told Clarke that Kennedy had “a sort of sweet kind of acceptance” on his face as he lay on the floor. Hamill looked in Kennedy’s eyes and “instead of asking ‘What happened?’ they seemed to be saying, ‘So this is it.’”

The depth of the grief expressed by the underprivileged of all colors at Kennedy’s death is telling. Clarke’s account is well-done and thought-provoking. Of course, the answer will never be known – would Kennedy have won? Would he have even been a good president? What Clarke’s work does answer, however, is the question, ‘Why did this man want to be president?’ Whatever ambitions he may have had immediately after his brother’s death, by 1968 he was running for president because he’d found himself. He had found ‘his people’ and he was going to show them that in this country they could have faith in the government because he was going to make sure they were never forgotten.

It is tempting to chalk this up to rhetoric and in-the-heat-of-campaign bullshit. The fact that so many in the press fell in love with Bobby Kennedy during those 82 days, and that they fell in love with him because of what he was saying and doing, however, does tend to give credence to the idea that he really believed what he was saying. That these really were ‘his people’ and that he intended to do things his brother would never have dreamed of doing. We’ll never know, of course, but Clarke’s book brings those 82 days to life and is well worth the read for it.

copyright 2009 by EBBP Redux. If you are reading this on a blog or website other than EBBP Redux or via a feedreader, this content has been stolen and used without permission.

The Funniest Show You've Never Seen

Phineas and Ferb stars Perry the Platypus [above....in fedora], Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz [top, right] and characters Phineas, Ferb and sister Candace.

I write today about the greatest comedy on television today, and one you probably have never either seen nor even heard of. I speak of the twice-Emmy-nominated Phineas & Ferb from Disney Channel. Originally aired in August 2007, the animated series is - without fear of contradiction - the funniest thing on television. Bar none. Rescue Me? Great series. Too serious for a comedy. Big Love? Funny, but it's hard to consider polygamy and child-rape as appropriate fodder for humor. Hannah Montana? Also funny, but that God-awful singing just makes it impossible to laugh enough to call it a comedy.

No, it's P&F. The shows - which run in 15-minute cycles with the occasional 30-minute special - always contain two simultaneous plots. The first involves Phineas and Ferb - two step-brothers - and their never-ending search for something to do during summer vacation ["There's a-hundred-and-four days of summer vacation...." says the title song]. This normally involves creating something impossible, like a portal to Mars, a monster-truck stadium in the back yard, or searching for the feared Lake Nose Monster ["Of all the lakes we could have picked," says Dad en route, "I'm so glad we picked the Nose."]. All the while, addled teenage-sister Candace tries to catch the boys in the act to "bust them" - that is, to show Mom that her little ones are really mad scientist-types and not cute little boys with a "wild imagination".

The second concurrent plot - and, to me, what makes the series pure genius - is between P&F's pet platypus [brilliant named, Perry the Platypus] and the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz. You see, Perry - a mild-mannered unintelligible pet platypus to the boys - is really a secret agent. As Agent P, Perry works for O.W.C.A ("Organization Without a Cool Acronym"). Apropos of nothing, as the boys are beginning whatever crazy adventure planned for the day, Phineas will turn to someone and say, "Hey, where's Perry?" At which point, Agent P - who, like most platypuses walks on all fours when he's a family pet - sprints upon his two hind legs, dons a fedora, and is catapulted, dropped, flown, or otherwise dispensed to some other locale where he gets his instructions - via video, of course - from a Bond-like handler known as Monogram.

Perry the Platypus' instructions always deal with handling the evil Dr. Doofenshmirtz, played with the appropriate Colonel Klink-like-German accent by series co-creator Dan Povenmire. Dr. Doof isn't really a doctor, as becomes apparent in one episode when his daughter - yes, Dr. D was married but is now divorced from a wife that has to pay him alimony - finds a price tag [$15.00] on his doctoral degree. He is, however, an "evil genius" dedicated to "spreading evil across the tri-state area!"

Povenmire and his collaborator Jeff "Swampy" Marsh met as layout artists on - surprise, surprise - The Simpsons. For much of the next 16 years, they worked on their concept of an animated series, which began with Povenmire's sketch of a boy with a triangle head. After 16 years of pitching, they finally convinced Disney to order a series. P&F just wrapped up its second season, and have produced a total of 36 episodes.

Each one is a gem. Literally. Not a bad one in the bunch. How do I know? Well, my children discovered P&F and haven't stopped watching them, so I've seen each episode about 100 times. Ok, I haven't seen every episode, but I've seen about half of them and they are brilliant. Whether it's the one where Dr. Doofenshmirtz seeks revenge on hot dog vendors [as a young man he was a bratwurst vendor and - after hot dogs took off and became so popular - "I vowed there and then that I would get my revenge!"; or the one where Dr. D tries to suck all of the zinc out of Lake Nose - "There must be some evil use for zinc," Doofenshmirtz says to Agent P at one point. "No, seriously, Perry the Platypus, do you know any evil uses for zinc...'cause I got nothing!"; or the one where Dr. D seeks to destroy the billboard that is obscuring his window view "from where I used to watch the world's miseries (from there, the shot goes into flashback and we see Dr. D sitting in an easy chair, eating popcorn while he looks to his right at a chiropractor's building and we hear a large "CRACK" and the patient yells, "OH MAN!"; Dr. D then looks to his left and we see a Tax office and a woman says, "Ok, sir, you owe $730,000." and a guy says, "OH MAN!", and so on)" - you'll laugh so hard you'll wet yourself. Particularly if you are incontinent.

Of particular genius is the relationship between Perry and Dr. D. Each episode features Perry barging in on Dr. D, to which Doofenshmirtz, reacts in mock horror and surprise, "PERRY THE PLATYPUS????!!!! YOU'RE EARLY. I'm not ready yet..." or some such banter. At one point, Doofenshmirtz even has Perry wait in "my waiting room, while I get ready. There, go read a magazine. I mean, they're all in Spanish. I steal them from my neighbor. Remember, evil never rests." Dr. D then captures Perry in a trap and proceeds to tell him every detail of his evil plot. The insanity of this is captured in one episode when an evil collaborator says to Doofenshmirtz, "Are you sure you want to take HIM [Perry] with us?!" To which Dr. D says, "Who, Perry the Platypus? I HAVE to take him. He's my nemesis. I have to tell him everything." Invariably, Perry saves the day, leaving Dr. Doofenshmirtz screaming, "Curse you, Perry the Platypus"!

Of course, concurrent with all of this is some attempt by Phineas and Ferb to do something impossible, all while their sister Candace tries to get them "busted" by catching them in the act. This story-line is for the kids, while the Dr. D/Perry storyline is for the adults. What's great is, P&F are actually good kids. That, I think, is what makes the show better than all of the other crap cartoons out there, where the animated kids are either dumber than cup of semen or bigger assholes than that guy who thought to send the planes over New York City last week.

Instead, P&F are good-hearted, smart - even somewhat nerdy - but yet COOL kids, with friends and they have impossible adventures. My favorite friend - and here is the only area, perhaps, where the series veers into the realm of distasteful - is their friend Baljeet. He is the stereotypical Indian-American youth who is brilliant, shy and timid, under tremendous pressure from his parents to be a genius, etc. Even here, though, there isn't anything mean spirited about the portrayal of Baljeet, even if he does reinforce a stereotype (in one episode, Baljeet calls on P&F to help him because his science project got him only an A-. After P&F try to help him improve the project but initially fail, Baljeet moans, "I'm calling my parents and telling them to get the curtains of shame ready to hang." To which Phineas says, "Don't worry, it'll work, you'll see." "Not through the curtains of shame, I won't," says Baljeet).

So, do yourself a favor and check out Phineas and Ferb. Be warned, however: you'll never look at a platypus the same again.

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