So As I Was Saying . . .: My Somewhat Eventful Life (14 page)

*   *   *

The girls at UCLA had all tried to look like Linda Darnell. She was a big-name actress in the 1940s, and it turned out she’d been a classmate at Beverly High, but nobody knew it until graduation day. Child actors and actresses were allowed to go to school at their studios and then, when the time came, get a real diploma at a real school. All through the war, many guys carried pinup pictures of her.

*   *   *

Shortly after combat ended, I fell in love with a Red Cross volunteer named Dorothy Shea. I was twenty-one and she was twenty-five, so we agreed we would each “cheat” by two years and call ourselves twenty-three. I thought I would marry her. Then, months after my reassignment home separated us, I received a telegram from Dorothy; in a few days, she was marrying a U.S. Army military police officer still stationed in Germany. I was desolate. We’d exchange letters on and off. “Dreams die hard,” she wrote. I saw her once in Atlanta when I was there on business. She’d grown old. Turned out she was seventy-nine and I was seventy-five.

*   *   *

My buddies and I paid no attention to the war in the Pacific while we were fighting Germans, but soon after V-E day we began preparing to invade Japan. Then came news of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; we were delighted. People today who question the need to drop those bombs just don’t understand. I still think it was clearly the right decision.

*   *   *

After the German surrender, we lived in a house in Bremen and ran an American radio station. The woman who owned the house cooked for us and did our laundry. There were a few other GIs in the house. I can still name them. They are all dead now, but I have some great memories of them. The memories are all happy.

*   *   *

I, of course, did not know it at the time, but also fighting in the European theater was the man who would become the presidential nominee with the most combat experience in U.S. history. He was a B-24 bomber pilot whose units had taken a 50 percent casualty rate by war’s end, and he won a Distinguished Flying Cross. Yet, in politics, he refused to talk about the war and strictly forbade his staff to mention his combat experience. He said it was too close to bragging. He was Captain George McGovern.

*   *   *

We often used two words that seemed to have emerged from GI culture during the war as useful acronyms: “Tarfu” meant “Things Are Really Fucked Up.” It did not catch on. “Snafu,” short for “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up,” is now an accepted word, used by the very politest of people. How and when did that happen?

*   *   *

My World War II experiences conflicted with something later that puzzled me at the time but now seems like a key turning point. In 1953, I was in my first year of law school at the University of California at Berkeley. As a veteran of World War II, I was at least a few years older than most of my classmates, and a fellow veteran (of the navy), Graham Moody, was a good friend. That winter, he received a letter from the navy, which he showed me. It seemed Graham had acquired a particular specialty during the Pacific battles, and that specialty was in short supply and needed in the Korean War. The navy’s request was that Graham, with a suitable promotion, reenlist for the duration of the Korean struggle, or at least until the shortage of officers with his skills had eased. So far in the letter, everything seemed quite normal, and I was quite pleased the supply of infantrymen, at least among those with my skills at helping to operate an 81 mm mortar, was adequate.

It was the final paragraph of the navy’s letter that stunned me. If, it said, Commander Moody was willing to reenlist but preferred not to be seen as volunteering, it could be arranged to appear as a compulsory call-up, as if he had no choice in the matter. Graham was as shocked as I; we had each volunteered at an early age in World War II, as had just about everyone we knew. Indeed, in 1942, it was—at least to us—almost unthinkable not to join the service, put on a uniform, and be ready to fight for our country. So it seemed amazing that the military would now have a separate plan for those willing to serve but not willing to have it
seem
they were willing to serve. Scarcely seven years after the end of World War II, and ours seemed to be in the process of becoming a country where the idea of sacrifice, of service to the country, was not only passé but often a public role to be avoided.

*   *   *

Looking back over more than half a century since the end of the war, I can’t help but think that Norman Thomas—who warned that if mainstream America were mobilized, it would never be demobilized—was right, and that entering World War II might have been when America “jumped the shark.” (“Jumping the shark” is a show business expression taken from an episode of the 1970s–1980s TV situation comedy
Happy Days,
when, to boost sagging ratings, writers had the program’s chief character, the Fonz, literally jump over a shark while surfing at Santa Monica. The show began a steady decline, and “jumping the shark” thus became show business lingo for evidence a decline has become irreversible.)

I, of course, remember that ROTC training at UCLA during which we had only wooden rifles. I’m not saying that neutrality was preferable to war. I’m just saying it’s hard to believe those had to be our only two choices: an America not ready to defend itself, or an America whose economy, culture, and political life placed, and places, so much emphasis on militarism. I don’t remember anyone ever debating it. The militarism of our society just sort of happened. After World War II, it was just there, which is why Norman Thomas was so prescient. At the time, the things he said seemed like just another warning to stay out of Europe’s wars.

Maybe it was inevitable. We came out of World War II believing we had to maintain a larger and larger military force to remain the “leader” of the free world. I can think of only one president since World War II who openly tried to make the United States
less
oriented toward war and the military than it was when he took office.

A slight digression before we talk about him: The French novelist and essayist André Gide disliked the works of Victor Hugo, both for Hugo’s writing style and for what Hugo said about human nature and French society. But when asked who he thought was the best French writer, Gide replied, “Victor Hugo, alas.” That’s how I think of this. Has even one U.S. president tried to slow or reverse America’s flow toward militarism since World War II, or at least wanted to have America unjump the shark? I must respond, “Jimmy Carter, alas.”

9

In Which I Call Death “the Lady in the Marketplace,” See Obituaries as Literature, Explain What Is Remembered Versus What Is Important, Continue to Quote James Joyce, and Seem to Be Writing My Own Obituary

On Air Force Two, the plane Lyndon Johnson sent to take Robert Kennedy’s body from Los Angeles to New York, Jacqueline Kennedy took the seat next to mine. At the time of his assassination, the president’s widow and I had met several times, in Washington, D.C., in Hyannis Port at family events, and at various campaign and other political sites, and we were certainly acquainted but hardly close friends. These special airplanes—Air Force One and Air Force Two—had comfortable seats, two abreast, so it was clear by her choice of seating for this final flight she wanted to talk to me, if to anyone, and not with any of the family members or a few close friends who were on the flight after rushing to Los Angeles for the final despairing days, and certainly not with the usual traveling journalists. I think she sought me out as a sort of safe conversationalist. She began the conversation by remarking, about the crowds that had surrounded the hospital, “Those black women—they certainly do understand death.” She went on to say, “Now we know about death, and if it weren’t for the children, we’d welcome it.” “Wait a minute, lady,” I wanted to say. “You may be ready, but…” Instead, I just nodded.

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My feelings about death are minimal.

On one level, longer life spans are changing linguistic truisms about age and death: It used to be that if someone died after age thirty, there would be no special notice for his accomplishments. If at age twenty-seven, people might say something like “He was only twenty-seven,” but if at age thirty-seven, no one would say, “He was only thirty-seven.” And if at an age older than forty, nobody would call him “young” or mention accomplishments; they would just say he died. Or worse, “passed.”

Now this is slowly changing once again, I think, perhaps to be replaced, in part, by a question I am sometimes asked when someone’s death is mentioned, “Is he old enough to have died?”

*   *   *

Obviously, every living thing dies. And I know my contemporaries are falling fast; for example, government statistics document every day an average of seven hundred of my fellow World War II veterans die.

“An uninvited, unwanted guest has joined us,” said a breakfast companion one day. “A third person, Time, has pulled up a chair and joined us. We can’t do anything about it.” He was responding to my story about having felt glad there were so many great recent movies like
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
and
Five Easy Pieces
and then realizing these movies were more than forty years old.

The glum-sounding mention of time triggered my disapproval: “You think it’s the Lady in the marketplace, waving to say hello. You believe in the Lady. You’re wrong.”

*   *   *

I was referring to “the Lady,” the central character in an ancient fable the American novelist John O’Hara used for the title of his 1934 novel,
Appointment in Samarra,
and dating back, in various forms, it turns out, to the Babylonian Talmud: A merchant in Baghdad, so the story goes, sent his servant to the marketplace one day, but the servant returned shortly, his face white and sweating, ran up to the merchant, and said that when he had arrived in the marketplace, he had seen a woman he’d never seen before. And when she saw him, she made a threatening gesture. “She was young and quite pretty, and all the other people in the marketplace seemed to find her pleasant,” the servant said.

But the servant saw the woman differently. He said he knew who she was with more certainty than anything he had ever known before. She was, the servant said, Death.

The servant pleaded for permission to borrow a horse so he could ride at once to Samarra, where he had relatives, and where “that woman” could never find him.

Never had the merchant seen anyone so terrified, and he told the servant to take a horse. Later that day, though, realizing his anger would not abate unless he confronted the woman in the marketplace, the merchant decided to find her. He rode to the village, and there he saw a woman he’d never seen before. She was attractive, and he felt somewhat self-conscious asking why she had threatened his servant. “Oh,” she replied, “that wasn’t a threatening gesture; I was simply waving to him. I was surprised to see him here, because I have an appointment with him this evening in Samarra.”

I like to finish the story by saying, “I’m going to see that Lady long before she sees me.”

*   *   *

Every day, obituaries are a favorite part of the newspaper, second only to baseball box scores. You always see positive things in an obituary. Sometimes there’s nothing else positive in the paper.

Obituaries
are
a good way to see what people have done with their lives—they are, in fact, the most positive part of the paper because they record and tell the story of people’s accomplishments, even those accomplishments that don’t involve a huge amount of drama. My father, noting someone from a bygone era had died unnoticed, would say, “I thought he was already dead,” and would often add, triumphantly, “Hell, I went to his funeral!”

Many people, perhaps most people, as a matter of principle, or out of fear, don’t—or won’t—read the obits They seem to believe even to glance at obituaries gives Death an opportunity to become more real. Such people seem to me to be far more acutely aware of their own inevitable death because they let it control some of their conscious actions. They’re on their way to Samarra, even without an appointment with the Lady in the marketplace. I’m the real optimist. I’ll see that Lady before she sees me. For me, Fate is not in charge, and it’s in my power to keep avoiding her, until, of course, I no longer can. There’s an old joke about being old enough to get up in the morning and read the obituaries to see if your name is there. I take heart when I’m not listed, and an even better day is when nobody I know is listed.

To me, the written obituary, wherever published, is an invaluable art form, and it bothers me when a headline writer, or the person who writes the obituary, emphasizes a problem or a scandal in a person’s life and treats it as though it were the defining element in the decedent’s life.

Once, a friend of mine had died earlier in the week, and I asked my assistant to save me a copy of the obituary from the print newspaper delivered to my office. After having to dig through the trash can several times, she asked, “Why don’t we just print all the copies you want?”

But I explained that words printed in the newspaper, particularly after it has started to curl and crinkle, are much more authentic than the computer-printed version. Newsprint, by its very presence, conveys the importance and power of the obituary, and for me just finding an old clipping—not only of an obituary, but of any story or letter to the editor or op-ed—often triggers my thinking and musing. A printed-out sheet of clean fresh white paper doesn’t do that, because it’s too formal and universal. It’s not “authentic.”

*   *   *

The only mornings to leave me not upbeat, or even a bit depressed, come when I have recently attended, or been invited to, the funeral of a good friend.

There’s nothing like the death of one’s contemporaries to bring on serious and melancholy thought. This is especially true when friends die without “warning”—accidents as opposed to prolonged illnesses. Sometimes, I’ve been back at my office for ten minutes after a funeral, and the phone will ring with news someone else has died. There was something special about each of these people, and it is quite natural to respond by thinking in terms of oneself. James Joyce says to see your friends “go under first” gives a person a sense of power.