bodacioussylph

Millard Tydings had a distinguished career as a Democratic Representative (1923-27) and Senator (1927-51) to the United States Congress from Maryland. A principled politician, he made an energy in Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose early claims of Communist penetration of the federal government and military he had responsibility to investigate. He oversaw the Tydings hearings (March-July 1950) which were extremely stormy and which published a report denouncing McCarthy and his claims as a hoax.

When Tydings ran for re-election in 1950, McCarthy’s staff distributed a composite picture of Tydings with Earl Browder, the former leader of the American Communist Party, whom Tydings had never met before Browder testified before his committee in July 1950. Although McCarthy himself remained deliberately removed from his dirty tricks brigade, his wife approved the publication of the photo in the tabloids. The composite photo–reproduced half a million times–merged a 1938 photo of Tydings listening to the radio and a 1940 photo of Browder delivering a speech.

More damaging still was the text under the composite photo stated that when Browder had testified before Tydings’s committee, Tydings had stated in reply “Oh, Thank you, sir”. Although the quote was technically accurate, it implied a degree of amity between Browder and Tydings that did not exist. In the committee room, Browder was reluctant to answer questions and the two frequently clashed. Although the caption also stated, “this composite photo,” the audience back then wasn’t familiar with the word, and were taken in.

As the result, Tydings was defeated by John Marshall Butler.

It had been the life’s goal of Edward Heath, Britain’s Tory prime minister, to get his country into Europe. In 1972, he fulfilled this goal which had eluded his two predecessors through a personal friendship with French president Pompidou (the only smooth one between a British prime minister and a French president since the Fifth Republic began). Then he had to fight an uphill battle in the Parliament, and won the Commons vote by a majority of 112, with the votes of 69 Labour MPs, who defied a three-line whip.

However, when Heath arrived at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels to sign the Treaty of Accession on 22nd January 1972, he was splattered with ink thrown by a tourist. The 31-year-old psychologist named Karen Cooper, was not protesting the treaty but Heath government’s handling of an urban renewal project in London’s historic Covent Garden market. The leaders of Ireland, Denmark and Norway who were there to sign the treaty also had to wait an hour for Heath to return to his hotel and change clothes.

It wasn’t the first time ink had been thrown upon Heath. On his very first day as Prime Minister, Heath–who surprisingly turned a Labour majority of nearly 100 into a Tory one of 30–was attacked with ink by a Labour supporter. A man of sharp contradictions, Heath left behind a divisive legacy: while he was able to count on bipartisan support for Europe, Heath had a tumultuous rule at home. His Irish policy was disastrous and his bitter relations with the unions led to a wage freeze, a deranged Prices and Incomes policy and eventually a three-day energy-saving week.

By the time an early General Election had to be called in February 1974, Heath was finished. He was replaced by Margaret Thatcher, under whom he refused to serve. Ted Heath never forgave Mrs Thatcher and the bitterness over his loss of the leadership was deep, reflected in almost ceaseless, and sometimes savage, attacks on her policies. In probably the most vicious and insulting blast of all, he suggested in a television interview in April 1992 that she would be no more than a footnote in history.

Heath was a former schoolmaster and Britain’s only bachelor prime minister to date. A keen yachtsman, in 1971, while Prime Minister, he captained Britain’s winning Admiral’s Cup team. Heath later also became the only prime minister to be summoned before an official tribunal and made to account for his actions when he was in office. It was the Saville Inquiry into the Bloody Sunday in Londonderry a week after Egmont signing (but unrelated).

Posted in Politics Tagged: European Union, Ted Heath, Thatcher, UK

Some said the fall of the Berlin Wall was inevitable, but its peaceful and sudden dismantling on November 11, 1989 owed as much to a blunder by an East German politician as to the people power movement.

The protests caused the East German communist leader Egon Krenz–an uncharismatic and pale successor of larger-than-life Eric Hoenecker–to quickly introduce a new set of regulations, which eased the travel restrictions for East Germans. His true intention was to announce the changes overnight to avert a looming clash between the military and the protesters. Krenz, always a hardliner, planned to phase in the new rules slowly–if at all.

The changes were announced in an impromptu live press conference (above) by one of the charismatic Politburo members, Guenter Schabowski. His announcement was lengthy, complicated and bureaucratic; at its end, many were left unclear whether it signalled free travel. Pressured to clarify, he blundered by saying the new rules would come into force “immediately”.

Instead of returning to their homes as Krenz wished, tens of thousands of East Berliners turned up at the border. The guards who hadn’t been told of the changes had the standing orders to stop anyone from crossing. On that fateful November night, when they failed to turn people back and when the government ministries in charge of security failed to update them, the guards made a critical decision to open the border.

East German leaders, as well as the rest of the world were left off-guard. In Washington, Secretary of State Jim Baker was hauled off to the White House from his lunch with the Filipino president In London Douglas Hurd who had been foreign secretary for just 15 days was at a lost to persuade the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to consider the idea of a united Germany. In the Kremlin, however, Chairman Gorbachev slept through it. He woke up to a changed, chaotic world.

The Iconic Half-Second: Schabowski answers, ”Ist das sofort, unverzüglich!”

On February 7th, 1910, one Herbert Cholmondesly of HMFO demanded a special train from London’s Paddington Station to convey four Abyssinian princes to Weymouth docks. In fact, the troupe who boarded HMS Dreadnought that morning were pranksters, recruited by the noted adventurer William Horace de Vere Cole, the ‘Cholmondesly of the FO’. Under the elaborate disguises as African potentates were novelist Virginia Woolf, sportsman Anthony Buxton, artist Duncan Grant and a judge’s son Guy Ridley. Their interpreter was Woolf’s brother Adrian. Red carpet and a guard of honour awaited them at Weymouth, with Admiral Sir William May himself welcoming the company.

When rain threatened their make-ups, the ‘princes’ requested the permission to inspect the ship. Inside, they overacted to a ludicrous degree: they handed out visiting cards printed in Swahili. Being at a loss of what to say, Buxton improvised Virgil’s Aeneid in a strange accent, lest the navy recognized Latin. They asked for prayer mats at sunset, and tried to bestow Abyssinian honours on senior officers. ‘Bunga-bunga,’ they exclaimed whenever they were shown some great aspect of the ship; this except Virginia Woolf who had to try hard to disguise her womanish voice.

Yet, their disguises were so good that an officer who knew both Woolf and Cole previously failed to recognized either. They had another close-shave when Buxton sneezed and one-half of his moustache flew off, but he stuck it back again before anyone noticed.

The next day Cole sent the above picture and the details of his hoax (which cost him some 4,000 pounds) to the Daily Mail. It was anonymous, of course, but the Parliament and the public were outraged at this audacity. When the identities were finally revealed, it contributed greatly to the fame of Woolf’s nascent Bloomsbery Group.

The only loser from this affair, it appeared, was the Abyssinian Emperor Menelik II. When he visited the country next, he was greeted by the howlers of ‘Bunga, bunga’ and denied the permission to visit any ship by the cautious navy which didn’t want a repeat of the embarrassing affair. For Cole, it was the climax of an adventurous, if not childish, life. With the coming of the Great Depression, he was bankrupted; he died penniless and forgotten in 1936 at the age of 50 in France, where his antics went virtually unnoticed.

Posted in Politics, Society Tagged: Dreadnought Hoax, hoax, Horace de Vere Cole, Royal Navy, Virginia Woolf

On the evening of February 15th 1942, the commander of the British forces in Singapore, Lieut. General Arthur Ernest Percival, surrendered the city to General Tomoyuki Yamashita of the Imperial Japanese Army. This was the greatest military disaster in the British history since the Charge of Light Bridge some eighty years before.

Hubris foreshadowed these final days: the British garrison on the island ignored the dangers of a Japanese attack from land. The result: a quick capitulation that shattered the myth of the Western invincibility and the above surrender in a ramshackle Ford Motor factory.*

It was performed with pithy precision: Yamashita asked, “All I wanted to know is, are our terms accpetable or not? Do you or do you not surrender unconditionally? Yes or no?”. The reply was a monosyllabic ‘yes’. (Yamashita noted that he wanted to speak kindly, but was unable to express his sympathy through an interpreter). Within hours, Percival with 120,000 others were in prison camps.

Sir Ernest Percival survived the camps to see the final surrender of Japan on the U.S.S. Missouri. Yamashita was hanged as a war criminal.

* As I blog this, I am just a few minutes away from the site, staying as I am in a hotel in Singapore.

During 1992 Presidential Election campaign, challenger Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas attacked the incumbent president George H. W. Bush as not doing enough to assist the working middle-class and being “out of touch” with the common man. A gaffe–overhyped by media–played right into Clinton’s hands on February 5th, when the president visited a national grocer’s convention in Orlando, Florida.

There Bush expressed amazement at new grocery store technology, first reported by Andrew Rosenthal in the New York Times. (Rosenthal wasn’t even there at the convention. He based his article on a two-paragraph report filed by the lone pool newspaperman, Gregg McDonald of the Houston Chronicle, who wrote that Bush had a “look of wonder” on his face.) Though it is still disputed what Bush expressed amazement about, it was widely reported at the time that Bush’s amazement was over the checkout scanner-technology widely used by grocery stores since 1980, the very year Bush, a career bureaucrat, moved into the vice-presidential mansion.

Failing to be familiar with this technology made Bush appear to be an elitist who didn’t even have to go to the grocery store, and thus someone who was unable to feel the financial pinch facing ordinary Americans. It sank his re-election campaign. However, it was also argued that Bush was impressed by new scanner technology that could weigh groceries and read damaged bar codes. The Times refused to retract.

Above photo by Barry Thumma/Associated Press

1968. It was a year of turmoil and trepidation. Assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. Vietnam War had come home with impending drafts. Thus it wasn’t a surprise that the college campuses all over the United States erupted into chaos and disorder–and nowhere was did disorder more apparent than on the grounds of Columbia University in New York.

The university was then a prestigious academic enclave surrounded by poverty and decay of the Harlem ghetto. The anxieties there were exacerbated by the university’s ban on indoor demonstrations, its work with a Pentagon think tank and the ‘Gym Crow’ scandal: the newly proposed gym had a grand entrance facing the university while a small separate door for part of the gym built ‘exclusively’ for the neighborhood kids.

On April 23rd, students stormed the acting dean’s office and took him and two others as hostages for 26 hours. Another group of students broke into the empty office of the university president Grayson Kirk, destroyed it and pasted a sing on the window: “Liberated Area. Be Free to Join Us.” The above photo of student David Shapiro relaxing and smoking Kirk’s cigar sitting in Kirk’s chair became one of the iconic images of student unrests in the 1960s. It was taken by Blake Fleetwood who described his experience here.

Over the next 48 hours, students seized three more campus buildings. It forced 17,000-student university to suspend all the classes. Counterdemonstrations were flared up. The university called in the New York Police, and just before dawn on April 30th, 1,000 officers armed with warrants signed by the university trustees entered the campus. More than 130 people–including 12 police officers–were injured; nearly 700 people were arrested. This ended the impasse but further demonstrations, police brutality and arrests plagued Columbia until that summer. As Margaret Mead, the famed anthropologist and longtime Columbia professor, noted, the demonstrations marked the end of an epoch in the way universities are governed.

David Shapiro went on to teach at Columbia.

Posted in Politics, Society Tagged: 1968, 1968 Student Uprisings, Columbia University, David Shapiro

Even in a year that many political scandals bordering surreal (parliamentary expenses in the UK, an Appalachian-hiking governor in Virginia), Silvio Berlousconi held his own as the king of that scandal-infested dunghill. The Prime Minister of Italy so far had survived a divorce, cavorting with minors, orgies unseen since La Dolce Vita, indiscretions that would make Eliot Spitzer jealous, telltale books, corruption charges and Mafia connections not to mention political gaffes and rebukes by HM the Queen and President Obama. He will perhaps even survive the next election now, with the help of that well-aimed statue to his face.

Yet, more than anyone else, he deserve to be this site’s choice for Man of the Year of 2009. Rolling Stone magazine thought the same. In November, the magazine called him “Rockstar of the Year”. Shepard Fairey, designer of the famous Barack Obama “Hope” posters designed the cover. The aging, cosmetically-enhanced, politically-incorrect playboy billionaire maybe famous for just being famous, but his continuing presence on Italian centrestage was telling about the state of politics in there.

With his business and Mafia connections, Berlusconi is the Italian political equivalent of Detroit: too big to fail. Many who have carved out their slice of power would risk losing it all in the monumental shakeout that would follow Berlusconi’s exit from politics. Berlusconi, who own Italy’s major private television networks to fall back on, will ensure that his exit would be climatic.

Ironically for a nation which changes its prime ministers faster than Madonna changes her paramours, the Italians do remember their leaders fondly–even Mussolini. Television generally go easy on Il Duce, reflecting that his government’s anti-Jewish “racial laws”, passed in 1938, were an aberration and that he was a leader misled by Hitler. Mr Berlusconi’s own opinion, given in a 2003 interview, is that Mussolini “never killed anyone”. His family pass him off as a caring family man, who tried hard to avoid war.

Stalin’s son, Jakov Djugashvili Stalin was an engineer by profession, During the Second World War, he served as a senior lieutenant and battery commander of the 14th Howitzer Regiment, attached to the 14th Tank Division and was captured on 16 July 1941 near Vitebsk by the Nazis.

On discovering that their prisoner was Stalin’s son, the Germans attempted to exploit him for propaganda purposes, but did not succeed. Refusing privileges, he asked to remain with the rank-and-file soldiers. In all the photographs of jakov, he deliberately refuses to look directly at the camera. This didn’t prevent the Germans from leafletting to Red Army soldiers “Do not shed your blood for Stalin! He has already fled to Samara! His own son has surrendered! If Stalin’s son is saving his own skin, then you are not obliged to sacrifice yourself either!”

After the battle of Stalingrad, Hitler suggested through the Swedish Red Cross that Jakov be exchanged for Field Marshal Paulus. Stalin refused, saying: “A marshal would not be exchanged for a lieutenant”. Hitler’s counter proposition to exchange Jakov for Hitler’s nephew Leo Raubal was not accepted either. (Jakov never got along with his dad, who called him a “mere cobbler.”) Djugashvili died on the electrified wire of Sachenhausen concentration camp on 14 April 1943, below. Much controversy surrounded the death. Some believe it was suicide, others a failed escape attempt. Some saw the dirty hand of the German SS behind.

After the war, in an uncharacteristic move, Stalin offered a $250,000 reward in East Germany to anyone who could provide details of how Jakov died. In 1945, U.S. and British intelligence teams found a letter by Heinrich Himmler on details of the failed escape attempt and attached was the below picture of young Stalin stretched out on the camp fence. They decided, however, to withhold the information from Stalin in order to spare him any personal pain.

Posted in Politics, War Tagged: Himmler, Hitler, Jakov Stalin, Stalin

For a few unsettling months in 1969, tensions between two nuclear powers reached fever-pinch. On March 2nd, Soviet and Chinese forces engaged in a ludicrous hand-to-hand combat on an uninhabited island in the frozen Ussuri River that separates Manchuria from Russia.

The Sino-Soviet split which reached its high with the above conflict was baffling. Once, Beijing imitated many Soviet projects, from five-year plans to spy bureaus. The Soviets supplied MiGs to fight in Korea. Chinese kids were taught Russian. However, when Mao denounced Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, the latter decided to cancel the Soviet aid to the Chinese atomic program and many infrastructure projects.

On March 2nd, Chinese soldiers crossed the ice to dig foxholes on the island. Deliberately provoking the Russians, they returned the next day shouting Maoist slogans. No one was sure how it began (both sides blaming each other), but after a two hour clash, two dozen Soviets and an unknown number of Chinese were dead.

In a second incident on March 15th, hundreds of Chinese died. Subsequent clashes occurred and China moved back industries to protect them from an air strike. Eventually, with a nuclear annihilation looming, both sides blinked–in October, a Soviet delegation arrived in Beijing. China looked elsewhere for much-needed allies, and found one in Richard Nixon.

In what would be one of the most bizarre curtain calls ever made by a politician, President Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia appeared briefly on the steps of his palace on the night of July 23rd 2001, wearing striped shorts, a polo T-shirt and sandals. With the help of a bodyguard and his daughter Yenni, who served as a personal aide to the half-blind and senile president, Wahid awkwardly waved at ever-dwindling supporters gathered on the other side of razor wire barricades.

Wahid’s impeachment earlier that day ended his erratic yet promising 2-year presidency. A cultured Muslim cleric who read widely (he was the only Muslim leader to defend Salman Rushdie) and loved Beethoven, Wahid ushered in an era of tolerance, promoted rights of minorities and of non-Muslims and apologized for Indonesian atrocities in East Timor.

Nonetheless, when Wahid–who died last week on 31st December 2009–inherited Indonesia in 1999, it was a dysfunctional country meandering directionless after three decades of authoritarian rule. Inexperienced in statecraft, he improvised everything. An informal and impulsive prankster, Wahid also tended to fall asleep publicly; at one parliamentary session dozed off several times during the reading of his own speech, which he delegated because of his blindness. (An aide had to wake him each time by giving him a candy to suck on).

After declaring a state of emergency that was widely ignored, Wahid was impeached. It was a move engineered by his vice-president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, who as the daughter of Indonesia’s founding leader Sukarno, regarded the presidency as hers by birthright. She would prove to be even more inexperienced and a bigger failure than Wahid.

Posted in Politics Tagged: Abdurrahman Wahid, Indonesia