Will We Ever Know the Truth About JFK?

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President and Mrs. Kennedy disembark in Dallas.

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In a little more than two months, it will be the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy here in Dallas.

It goes without saying that it was a traumatic event for this country — particularly so for this city (my grandmother always regarded it as a black eye for Dallas) — and I suppose many people have lived for years, probably decades, with a desire to know the real story of what happened that day. Perhaps they, like my grandmother, believe that whoever pulled the trigger couldn't possibly be local because, well, everybody knew that folks from Dallas wouldn't do that kind of thing — even though Dallas in general was known to be hostile to the administration.

Initially, I guess, a majority of Americans accepted the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. That was how most Americans were raised in those days — to respect authority and accept its word on everything (the deceit of the Johnson and Nixon presidencies would go a long way toward eroding that inclination).

At the dawn of the 1960s, conformity was in fashion in America, just as it had been (and still was) in the European cultures from which many Americans' ancestors had come — and they, like all other immigrants before and since, brought their values with them.

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After the home movie that Abraham Zapruder made that day went public a few years later, suspicions rapidly grew among Americans that the Kennedy assassination had been part of some sort of conspiracy. America had been souring on the Vietnam war, and the pump was primed for conspiracy theories to flourish.

A general consensus arose that the true story had not been told, either by omission or commission, and that view gained some momentum in the mid–1970s when a special congressional committee evaluated the evidence from prominent assassinations in the 1960s — President Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King — and determined that it was probable that there had been more than one gunman in Dealey Plaza that day.

I guess that is the only thing that many Americans agreed on — and, I will admit, I was one of them. There is little agreement about who was responsible — some say the CIA, some say organized crime, others say Cubans, still others say right–wing extremists. Some of the more elaborate scenarios combine two or more.

I use the past tense — was — for myself not because I now believe the Warren Commission (I don't), but because I believe that, whether the Warren Commission was right or wrong, it doesn't matter now. Too much time has passed, too many material witnesses are deceased or suffering from dementia, and we will never know what the truth is.

Some people will never believe that. They will keep searching for the truth, and I do hope they find it, but I have strong doubts that anyone ever will.

Some people will insist that they already know the truth. I have dealt with such people all my life — on some subjects, I must admit, I am one of those people — and I have learned that it is usually futile to attempt to change their minds.

And who knows? They might be right — as one of my favorite journalists, H.L. Mencken, liked to say in letters to angry readers.

Perhaps Lee Harvey Oswald did shoot Kennedy. Perhaps he did act alone. I don't know. What I do know is that there have been unanswered questions from the start. Granted, some of the questions eventually received plausible answers, but it has often seemed in the Kennedy case that, whenever a single question has been answered, it has raised two new questions, and we seemed to drift farther from the truth than we were before.

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Not even the best mystery writer could invent as many red herrings and dead–end leads as there have been in this case over the years. It is alleged that many of these were the results of sloppy investigative work or human error or even coincidence.

If Oswald really did act alone, it is hard to imagine the investigation into the murder of any president being handled as sloppily — or as many coincidences occurring. There has been plenty of doubt about the number of shooters — heck, even the number of shots — in Dealey Plaza that day, and it did take the Dallas police an inexcusably long time to seal off the Texas Schoolbook Depository after the shots were fired and the consensus among witnesses was that at least some of those shots had been fired from that building.

Maybe there are simple explanations for things that appear to be so clearly sinister. I am a defender of our legal system in spite of its flaws, and I know things are not always how they seem — but, really, so many? It defies logic and common sense.

Suppose Oswald had not been killed but had lived to face trial. America's legal history is filled with cases where juries acted differently than many observers expected. How many times in your life have you heard of a verdict that was contrary to public opinion? That was one of the things I learned during my days on the police beat. You can never tell what a jury will do, but you can be sure that someone won't like it.

No one knows what a jury might have said about the case against Oswald. The closest we came was the case brought by Jim Garrison in New Orleans that was re–enacted in Oliver Stone's "JFK." That trial was only a few years after the assassination, when the trail presumably was still warm, and it resulted in an acquittal.

In 2013, it is a decidedly cold case, and I believe it will remain so.

In (almost) the words of a once–popular TV show, the truth may be out there. I just don't think that, at this stage, anyone will find it.

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George Wallace: No Middle Ground

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"There's some people who've gone over the state and said, 'Well, George Wallace has talked too strong about segregation.' Now let me ask you this: how in the name of common sense can you be too strong about it? You're either for it, or you're against it. There's not any middle ground as I know of."

George Wallace
1962

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There are many people who, regardless of almost anything else they ever did or will do, will forever be linked to the American civil rights movement.

Some made only brief contributions to the movement's history; others were a part of the conversation for years.

George Wallace, who died 15 years ago today, was one of the latter.

Earlier this year, MSNBC's Chris Hayes asserted that Wallace had been a Republican. Hayes and I don't always see eye to eye on issues, but ordinarily we do agree on historical facts. This time? Well, I'm sorry, but he had his facts wrong.

His was an understandable assumption, I suppose. Most Southern states have been solidly Republican for many years, and Wallace probably would be a Republican if he was living and running for office.

(Wallace's son and namesake was elected state treasurer in Alabama as a Democrat, but he switched to the Republican Party a decade later and was elected to the Alabama Public Service Commission.)

But George Wallace's time was the middle of the 20th century. Most successful Southern politicians were still Democrats, as they had been for more than a century.

If that sounds strange to 21st–century ears, remember that it was a time that was significantly different from today. In those days, both parties had liberals, conservatives and moderates. The parties are far more polarized today.

(I noticed in yesterday's Dallas Morning News that editor Sharon Grigsby wrote about "sorority racism" at the University of Alabama.

(With a black man in the White House for nearly five years now, it's been fashionable to toss around the accusation of racism at anyone who so much as disagrees with the president. I grew weary of that long ago. But that doesn't mean that I deny the existence of racism. I just think there are more important battles to fight than the ones that have been waged.

(This sorority thing falls in that category. I appreciate, as does Grigsby, the work that went into the Alabama student newspaper's article that exposed sorority racism on campus, but if the exclusive nature of the Greek system is the most egregious offense that one can find on the 'Bama campus, things are a lot better than they used to be.)

Wallace was probably best known for seeking the presidency as the nominee of his own political party, the American Independent Party, in 1968. Well, Wallace wasn't actually the founder of the party. That was Bill Shearer, a right–wing political activist who, along with his wife, founded the party to give Wallace, by that time the former governor of Alabama (existing state law prevented him from seeking re–election in 1966), a platform from which to campaign for the presidency.

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But his political story actually began some 30 years earlier when, as a 19–year–old, he contributed to his grandfather's campaign for probate judge. Seven years later, he was appointed one of Alabama's assistant attorneys general. About a year after that, he was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives.

Ironically, considering the tone of his later political career, he was considered a moderate on racial issues in those days. But he shifted his politics after losing the Democratic nomination for governor to an avowed segregationist in 1958.

"I was outniggered," Wallace reportedly told Seymore Trammell, his 1958 campaign director, "and ... I will never be outniggered again."

(Such a pivotal moment in a politician's life story always sounded like satire to me — sort of like Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind.")

He gained national notoriety in 1963, when he pledged, in his inaugural address, to "toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny" as a tireless advocate of segregation. About six months later, he made what was largely a symbolic gesture when he made his "stand in the schoolhouse door" in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama.

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As I say, the value of the stand in the schoolhouse door was largely symbolic. There was Wallace, small of stature, trying to stand up to the big guys who were assaulting the beliefs and values of his state. He lost, but he was able to take credit for the attempt to defend the little guy.

"There was always a grand sense of persecution among the Wallace workers," wrote political historian Theodore H. White of the 1968 campaign, "a nearly religious faith that everyone was against them but the people, and that the saving of white America from the pointy–heads was a cause greater than politics."

And in the cauldron that was 1968, there was a time when Wallace was a serious contender for the presidency. Like Ross Perot in 1992, though, Wallace did best in the national polls when he said the least. But it simply wasn't in Wallace's nature to remain silent.

Thus, it was probably inevitable that he tumbled in the polls the more he opened his mouth.

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"Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?"

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His rhetoric was incendiary, and, ultimately, it appealed to only a small minority of American voters — too small even to force the race into the House of Representatives, where Wallace hoped to play kingmaker.

Nevertheless, his campaign was the most successful third–party effort in nearly 60 years; forty–five years later, he is still the last third–party candidate to win at least one state (he won five — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi — worth 45 electoral votes).

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His national ambitions were dealt a permanent blow in 1972 when he was shot while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Wallace tried to win the nomination again in 1976, but by that time, another Southern politician, Jimmy Carter, had overtaken him in his regional base. Wallace's day had ended.

My memory is that, at the conclusion of the 1976 primary season, Wallace gracefully accepted the voters' verdict and told the nominee–to–be that he would support him in the general election campaign.

"It must have been one of the most difficult conversations Wallace had ever had to conduct, this telephone call to the man who had dashed his own presidential hopes and replaced him as the South's political hero," wrote Jules Witcover and Jack Germond in their book about the 1976 presidential campaign, "Marathon."

Wallace returned to Alabama. In 1982, after apologizing to the black voters of Alabama for his racist past, Wallace won his final term as governor. When that term ended in January 1987, he retired from public life.

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"I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor."

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I guess that was the great irony of George Wallace.

Nationally, I guess he was the poster child for bigotry and intolerance, but, in his judicial career before he ran for governor, Wallace was known as a liberal judge who treated everyone the same, regardless of race.

Wallace was an enigma in life, and he remains one 15 years after his death.

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The Centennial of a 'Humble Healer'

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"I am a Ford, not a Lincoln. My addresses will never be as eloquent as Mr. Lincoln's. But I will do my very best to equal his brevity and his plain speaking."

Gerald Ford

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Today would have been Gerald Ford's 100th birthday. He didn't miss being here for it by much, either. He was 93 when he died in December of 2006.

He lived longer than any other president. So far.

As nearly as I can tell, not much of a fuss is being made about the centennial — except maybe in Ford's hometown of Grand Rapids, Mich., where the Grand Rapids Symphony planned a Ford tribute in its Independence Day "Picnic Pops" performance — with the focus being on a special composition written in Ford's honor titled "One of Us, Portrait of A Humble Healer."

This weekend, there have been all sorts of activities in Grand Rapids, and the Vail Daily News in Vail, Colo., where Ford took his ski vacations, says "[t]he valley will stop for a few moments" in Ford's honor.

Other than that, though, there doesn't seem to be much of a fuss, as I said earlier.

In Omaha, Neb., the town where Ford was born, the Omaha World–Herald reports that, while the occasion "will be marked with no pomp and circumstance ... America's 38th president won't be forgotten."

A recent Pew Research Center article observed that, in a Gallup poll last year, a majority of respondents said Ford was an average president, neither above nor below average.

Those who remember the Ford presidency are bound to have differing opinions of him — and that is true of all presidents, even those who have been judged by history to be among the greats. Most folks probably would say Ford was humble. Fewer probably would call him a healer, but I think nearly everyone would agree that Ford was a decent guy.

He was what people of my parents' generation called a "stand–up" guy.

Rarely is there that kind of agreement on any president. But, when compared to the dark, dour and paranoid presidency of Ford's predecessor, Richard Nixon, I guess just about anyone would look like a decent guy.

Ford really was. But he is primarily judged for what was perceived at the time to be a decidedly indecent act — his pardon of Nixon on Sept. 8, 1974, about a month after he took office. Regardless of the general decency of the man, he continues to be judged by many on the basis of that single act.

And that was/is understandable. Nixon's popularity had dropped into the 20s by the time of his resignation. Most of Nixon's fellow Republicans in Congress — on whom Nixon had been counting to keep him from being convicted in an impeachment trial in the Senate — turned on him when the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over the tapes he had been refusing to surrender for months, and the "smoking gun" that proved his early involvement in the Watergate coverup was revealed.

There was a lot of bitterness in the country over the fact that Nixon had dragged the nation through a two–year investigation, protesting his innocence all the while, only to be indisputably shown to be a liar, and, even though there were those who believed an ex–president should not be sent to prison, many more Americans wanted Nixon to stand trial in a court, where he would have to tell the truth or face additional criminal charges.

When Ford pardoned Nixon, it removed any possibility that Nixon would have to face the legal music. That made many Americans angry — enough, some political analysts would say, that it cost Ford election to the presidency in his own right two years later.

Until the end of his life, Ford would say — and not without some justification — that pardoning Nixon was the only way for the country to put Watergate behind it and focus on the sputtering economy.

It was the kind of remark a decent, stand–up kind of guy would make — as were Ford's remarks in his first State of the Union speech in January 1975.

"I must say to you," Ford said, "that the state of the Union is not good: Millions of Americans are out of work. Recession and inflation are eroding the money of millions more. Prices are too high, and sales are too slow. This year’s federal deficit will be about $30 billion; next year's probably $45 billion. The national debt will rise to over $500 billion. Our plant capacity and productivity are not increasing fast enough. We depend on others for essential energy. Some people question their government's ability to make hard decisions and stick with them; they expect Washington politics as usual."

Tell the truth. Can you imagine any other president in your lifetime being quite that blunt with the American people?

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I have often reflected on Ford's decision in late 1973 to accept Nixon's nomination of him to fill the vice presidential vacancy left by the resignation of Spiro Agnew. I have wondered what it was like. In hindsight, it seems somewhat inevitable that Ford would become first vice president and then president. But there must have been a time — however brief it may have been — when Ford's decision had not been made, and it still was possible that he might turn Nixon down.

I always wonder to whom Nixon might then have offered the vice presidency — and how that might have changed America and the world.

Some 16 months earlier, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern had to do something similar when his running mate was dropped and a new one had to be selected. He offered the spot to just about every prominent Democrat, and they all turned him down — until he got to Sargent Shriver.

McGovern never made his offer in public so there are no recordings of those Democrats turning him down — but they always wound up in the news. The details were only made public — if at all — in books or interviews long after the fact.

I have no memory of anyone other than Ford being offered the vice presidency in 1973, but I can imagine a few of the thoughts that must have gone through his mind when the offer was made. And, based on what I know of Ford, I'm sure he consulted his wife, Betty, before giving Nixon an answer.

He always claimed he expected to be something of a place filler for the rest of Nixon's term, and then he would retire to Michigan when it was over. He apparently accepted the vice presidency with no expectation that he would be president. He figured Nixon would ride out the storm.

Well, that was his story. And maybe that really was what he believed. But my memory is that Nixon's approval ratings took a serious hit when it was revealed in the Watergate hearings (coincidentally, a couple of days after Ford's 60th birthday) that there had been a secret taping system in the White House.

That meant that there was a witness that could verify what Nixon and his associates had said in their meetings after the Watergate break–in. The only real question at the time was whether the witness' account would be heard. Would Nixon be able to run out the clock on his term before that account was heard?

Although Nixon and his lawyers tried every legal trick in the book, the Supreme Court ultimately ruled in the summer of 1974 — several months after Ford's confirmation as vice president and more than two years before Nixon's term was due to end — that Nixon had to relinquish the tapes to the investigators.

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In those tapes was the "smoking gun" that ended Nixon's presidency.

At that point, most people seemed to realize that it was just a matter of time — and not much of that — before Nixon would be leaving office. By then, Ford must have been anticipating the massive changes that were about to take place in his life.

Ford certainly didn't give the country politics as usual, even though one of his earliest acts was dismissed as such by many Americans. He was like a breath of fresh air when he became president, which is no doubt why so many Americans felt betrayed when he pardoned Nixon.

To continue with the breath of fresh air analogy, it was like breathing fresh oxygen for four weeks after a steady diet carbon dioxide — only to suddenly inhale carbon dioxide again without warning. There was a national coughing spasm.

There was a lot of raw emotion in the Watergate era, and I have often wondered if Ford might not have encountered such a hostile reaction had he waited longer to issue the pardon.

Some economists of the time felt it was urgent to put Nixon and Watergate behind the country so full attention could be given to the economy. But if their counsel prompted Ford to issue the pardon when he did, those economists did both the nation and the new president a disservice.

Although I disagreed, I always felt Ford truly believed it was essential for the country to move forward, and pardoning Nixon was the only way to do that — while he never managed to completely regain the trust he lost when he pardoned Nixon, Ford was an upfront kind of guy, determined to press on no matter how great the adversity.

And the adversity for Ford in the 1976 presidential campaign only got worse when John Dean, the man who first exposed the Watergate coverup, wrote in his book about the scandal that he had heard from another source that Ford had been involved in efforts to postpone a congressional investigation into Watergate until after the 1972 election, which would have made him an accessory.

I came from a family of Nixon haters, but I was willing to give Ford the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was sincere when he said his motivation was to move the country forward. Perhaps it was that quality that made him an All–America center/linebacker and the acknowledged team leader at Michigan in the 1930s. (It was said Ford "would stay and fight in a losing cause.")

Perhaps that trait was honed even earlier, in his days as a Boy Scout.

Whatever the origin may have been, it forced even Ford's political adversaries to admit to a certain amount of admiration for the way he carried himself before, after and during his presidency.

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The Shooting of Robert Kennedy

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Five years ago, just a few days before the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, I wrote of my memories of that time.

Today is the 45th anniversary of that event, and I have no new revelations about it to share. Neither, it seems, does anyone else, although I have been fascinated by the articles I have found on the subject.

Five years ago in Newsweek, for example, Evan Thomas wrote about the looming "what if" from 1968: What if Kennedy had not been killed? Would he have spared the nation the agony of Watergate?

Thomas never really answered that question. He wrote of the pros and cons of Kennedy's personality and candidacy — and he did point out some inconvenient historical truths. For example, Americans in the 21st century are conditioned to believe that presidential candidates win their party's nominations via the primary route, and Kennedy won many primaries in the spring of 1968 — but choosing delegates in primaries is a fairly recent political phenomenon.

In 1968, most convention delegates were still selected by party bosses, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the choice of the Democratic Party's establishment. It is by no means certain that Kennedy would have prevailed at the party's convention later that summer in Chicago.

To me, though, the fact that Thomas' question was even asked in 2008 seems to be proof of what Theodore H. White wrote in "The Making of the President 1968":

"The gash that Robert F. Kennedy tore in the story of 1968 aches still — aches in personal memory, but more in history itself. Of all the men who challenged for the presidency, he alone, by the assassin's bullets, was deprived of the final judgment of his party and people."

Clearly, the "gash," as White put it, still ached after four decades.

A year earlier, in The Independent, Liz Hoggard recounted the event as Emilio Estevez's movie "Bobby" was in theaters. That was interesting, but it really added nothing to what was known about the shooting.

Last year, Michael Martinez and Brad Johnson of CNN reported that a witness had told them there was a second shooter in the pantry that night.

To date, nothing seems to have come from that assertion.

An interesting addition to the story came from CBS recently. CBS reported the story of a black doctor who did what he could to save Kennedy's life.

That is interesting, as I say, but it really adds nothing to the tale. The doctor wasn't successful, and it provides no evidence of who else might have been involved.

A few days ago, Gina Logue of the Murfreesboro (Tenn.) Post wrote that Kennedy's assassination was the end of our national innocence.

I'm not so sure I buy that one, but I will agree that it was a traumatic event for the country.

A lot of things have been described as the end of our national innocence, but I'm inclined to think that there is some event like that for every generation.

I really began to think that five years ago. At the time, I was working for an online study guide. Two young women in their 20s were working with me. We wrote history and civics questions and lessons for students in subscribing school districts to use.

Around this time, I recall hearing one of them ask sort of general questions about Bobby Kennedy that told me she knew nothing about him — other than the fact that he had the same last name as the president who was killed here in Dallas nearly 50 years ago.

She had been affected more by Princess Diana's untimely death 10 years earlier. That was probably the major innocence–robbing event for her generation — at least until 9–11.

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Folks in that age group really can't understand how different it was for my generation, who had only three TV networks (and no internet) — nor can my generation truly understand what it was like for our parents, who grew up with the radio and nothing else, not even a landline phone, in many homes.

There's no question that the shooting of Bobby Kennedy, like the shooting of Martin Luther King a couple of months earlier, had a profound effect on everyone. But, in a culture that had been rocked by the killing of a president, the murders of civil rights activists in Mississippi, race riots, a seemingly never–ending war, the fiery launching–pad deaths of three astronauts and King's shooting within the previous five years, it's hard to justify regarding it as a generational flash point.

More like one in a series of flash points.

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The Paradoxical Century of Nixon

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"The greatness comes not when things go always good for you, but the greatness comes when you are really tested, when you take some knocks, some disappointments, when sadness comes; because only if you've been in the deepest valley can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain. ... Always give your best. Never get discouraged. Never be petty. Always remember: Others may hate you. But those who hate you don't win, unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."

Richard Nixon (1913–1994)
Farewell address, Aug. 9, 1974

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Today is the centennial of Richard Nixon's birth.

That is an odd thing to realize, remembering the Nixon years as I do. I was only a child at the time, but I was old enough to understand that America's young people were protesting being sent halfway around the world to fight in a war that few of them seemed to support.

Or that blacks were rioting in all of the major cities in the United States.

It was a strange and confusing time, an unsettling time in America and the world when Nixon finally won the presidency 45 years ago — and the American people probably couldn't have elected a stranger man president.

Nor, I suppose, could they have elected a more intelligent president.

Nixon was an enigma during his life. He remains so nearly 20 years after his death.

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"Do you want to make a point, or do you want to make a change? Do you want to get something off your chest, or do you want to get something done?"

Nixon campaign speech, 1968

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In the years that have passed since the end of the Nixon presidency, I have often reflected on him and wondered which of the Nixons the public saw was the real Nixon — the one who seemed to so earnestly pursue the label of peacemaker or the often–crude, conniving Nixon of the White House tapes.

I'm inclined to think that, somewhere in between, the truth lies.

But one thing of which I am certain at this time, when Nixon's Republican Party is looking for a way to recapture the U.S. Senate and the White House, is that the GOP can learn some important things from Nixon's career.

Nixon wasn't quite the right–winger that modern political observers may think of when they think of the Republican Party. In his day, right–wingers could be found in both parties, but even then, Nixon wasn't a conventional Republican.

For one thing, he wasn't exactly an advocate of smaller government. Well, not entirely. He founded the Environmental Protection Agency. He was also behind the federal government's first affirmative action program.

During the Nixon presidency, "liberal" and "conservative" were not the most popular terms that were used to describe the existing political divide. "Hawk" and "dove," which were really more about military/foreign policy, were heard more frequently in those days.

That's because everything, it seemed, was seen through the prism of international conflict — in much the same way, things today are seen through the narrow prism of social issues.

Things are interrelated, though, which is what I often think modern politicos overlook. Nixon didn't. He was a true centrist, and the proof, I think, can be found in the fact that he often drew fire from both liberals and conservatives.

The nature of politics is that if a decision is made that will benefit one group, it must affect another group in an adverse way. If something is given to someone, it must be taken from someone else. Nixon sought to be at the center of the imaginary scale, where losses could be minimized.

But it also minimized the gains. Nixon won re–election by one of the widest margins in American history, but he was forced from office less than two years later. His majority was not permanent.

Nixon was a proponent of the triangulation theory long before it was applied to things like the assassination of President Kennedy. It was at the heart of his famous trips to Russia and China in 1972.

Nixon played one against the other that year. He certainly appeared to be motivated by a desire to "get something done," to be, as he said in his first inaugural address, a peacemaker.

But his motives weren't always clear. And, while I realize Nixon's flaws were many, that may have been his greatest — that he was self–centered.

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"He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time."

Hunter S. Thompson

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Perhaps, in the 21st century, Nixon would be regarded as a RINO by members of the Republican Party. Then as now, there were members of each party who despised members of the other party on principle, but Nixon had his share of detractors within his own party as well.

Nevertheless, he knew how to win, both elections and legislative battles, and his knowledge came from having to adapt to changing conditions. As president, he promoted things like environmental protection and affirmative action as much to pre–empt his rivals as anything else.

It seems to me from what I have read that, if Watergate had not interfered, Nixon might have pursued policies in his second term that, in effect, repealed many of the more liberal policies of his first term.

His performance on the foreign stage was filled with contradictions, though, and I haven't a clue what a Nixon unencumbered by Watergate might have done in that arena.

When he sought his second term, after failing to end the Vietnam conflict as promised in the explosive year of 1968, he often spoke of seeking "peace with honor" — an objective he pursued with an apparently contrary expansion of the war to neighboring countries.

Incredibly, he won re–election by seizing the reputation of peacemaker from the Democrats, who fancied themselves the party of peace.

That was the tightrope Nixon walked as a centrist, and that was hard to do then, but it is even more difficult now.

For the most part, Republicans have nominated presidential candidates who were center or right–of–center in their politics since Nixon's day (and even before), but, increasingly, those nominees are expected to pass a right–wing litmus test that only extremists can truly pass.

That is something Republicans are going to have to give up if they hope to continue to be one of the parties in our two–party system.

In the aftermath of the 2012 election, I heard many Republicans bemoaning their performance with minorities and discussing ways to appeal to those groups. Forty years ago, Nixon received more than one–third of the black vote, about six times the share of the black vote that Mitt Romney received two months ago.

Romney, of course, had a black opponent, and Nixon did not. Nevertheless, there are lessons for modern Republicans to learn from Nixon about adjusting to a changing political landscape.

But Nixon was a flawed man, and, thus, it was ironic that he was struck by an almost blinding moment of clarity in the very last moments of his presidency. As he gave his farewell address, he advised the White House staff, "Others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself."

That was Nixon's story. He had achieved what he set out to achieve, but he was undone by his own hatreds and insecurities.

It was almost Shakespearean. Nixon held what he most desired in the palms of his hands, but it slipped through his fingers and shattered on the floor.

The century of Nixon stands as a cautionary tale. It offers guidance in how to cobble together a political coalition, and it offers guidance in how not to lose what you have won.

A century after his birth, Richard Nixon remains a paradox.

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Sonny Side Up

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"Keep your sunny side up, up,
Drown a frown with a smile.
If you think it's raining for you,
Just remember, others are blue."

Lew Brown

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The timing was ironic, I suppose, for Mary Bono Mack's defeat in her bid for another term in the U.S. House last November.

She has represented that California district ever since she was elected to succeed her late husband, Sonny Bono, who died in a skiing accident 15 years ago today.

Whenever I think of him, I mostly think of him as an entertainer, primarily in his musical partnership with his second wife, Cher. They recorded a few hit songs together, the most noteworthy being "I Got You, Babe," which was their signature song.

Nearly all of my exposure to Bono was the result of his entertainment career. And I always made a mental connection between him and the song "Sunny Side Up," even though it wasn't one of his compositions — and, to my knowledge, he never sang it in public.

Sonny was an appropriate name for him. I don't know how he acquired that nickname — it certainly wasn't his given name — but it described his personality.

I can still remember the first time I saw Sonny Bono in a non–entertainment context. (Well, it was kind of entertaining, in its way.)

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It was during TV coverage of the 1976 Republican National Convention.

Bono had been invited to sit with President Gerald Ford's family, and TV cameras frequently showed his image as he hobnobbed with the president's wife and children.

The most comical moment came when Bono and the first lady disco danced after Ford had secured the nomination.

Until I saw Bono at the Republican convention, I had no idea what his political leanings were.

And I might never have known his political views if he had not encountered a mountain of red tape when he tried to open a restaurant in Palm Springs, Calif. Largely because of that experience, he ran for — and was elected — the mayor of Palm Springs in 1988.

Six years later, he was elected to Congress. It was a couple of months after he had won his third term that he hit a tree while skiing near Lake Tahoe.

Sonny was a character, but he understood public relations in a way that few do. After the Republicans had seized control of both houses of Congress in 1995, he reportedly observed that Republican leader Newt Gingrich had gone from being regarded as simply a politician to being a celebrity.

And that was a game changer.

"The rules are different for celebrities," Bono told the authors of "Tell Newt to Shut Up."

"You need handlers. You need to understand what you're doing. You need to understand the attitude of the media toward celebrities."

Bono always seemed to handle himself just fine, and it might not be a bad idea for today's politicians to follow the example he set. He was humble, a carryover, perhaps, from his entertainment days when he always used to say Cher was a better singer.

(She was, but that was beside the point.)

He brought a common–man approach to his work in Washington. A member of the House Judiciary Committee even though he held no law degree (he didn't even finish high school), I recall that Bono complained that the lawyers on the committee were fond of rhetorical games and did more to restrict law enforcement than empower it.

Sonny might not fit the modern Republican Party. He was, reportedly, more accepting of his gay daughter (who redefined herself as a transsexual after his death) than Cher, the more liberal of the two.

He was something of an environmentalist, and he was always a patron of the arts. While mayor of Palm Springs, he helped create the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

He was often put down by his congressional colleagues and the media that covered him. He was called a "dim bulb" and an "idiot savant from way beyond the Beltway," but he had common sense that many of today's lawmakers could use.

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The Life of Mother Teresa

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• "People are often unreasonable, irrational and self–centered. Forgive them anyway.
• "If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
• "If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.
• "If you are honest and sincere, people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
• "What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
• "If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
• "The good you do today will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.
• "Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.
• "In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."

Mother Teresa (1910–1997)

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Fifteen years ago today, the global grief over the untimely death of Princess Diana overshadowed the death of Mother Teresa.

I understood at the time why that was so. Princess Diana was young and beautiful. She seemed to have her whole life ahead of her, and she had already devoted much of her life to helping others. It was seen as a great loss.

Mother Teresa was in her 80s. She, too, had devoted most of her life to helping others, and her loss was considerable as well, but her life seemed to be mostly behind her. Consequently, most of the attention went to the loss of Diana.

Well, that was 1997. It is now 2012. People may look back at that time and think Diana's death was an appalling loss — and it was — but the shock and grief have faded. The memories of the lives and good works of both women are, justifiably, honored by those they left behind.

But, now that so much time has gone by, it seems to me that this is a good time to reflect on Mother Teresa's contribution to a better world.

For nearly half a century, she gave aid and comfort to the poor, sick, orphaned and dying.

She was recognized for her work in many ways — perhaps most notably with the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize (for which she declined the traditional banquet and asked if the nearly $200,000 in prize funds could be given to India's poor).

Mother Teresa sincerely tried to make her corner of the world a better place.

She didn't succeed in changing it. But, by the time she died, I believe she had made it a better place.

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The Hindenburg Milestone

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It is, perhaps, appropriate that a milestone anniversary for the Hindenburg disaster comes less than a month after a milestone anniversary for the Titanic disaster.

In April, of course, we observed the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic. Twenty–five years later, on this day in 1937, the German airship Hindenburg met a fiery end as it tried to land in New Jersey.

Everyone knows the story of how the Titanic was regarded as unsinkable before it struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic. I don't know if people felt the same way about the Hindenburg in 1937 — if there was a widespread conviction that the Hindenburg would arrive safely at its destination.

Perhaps there was. The Hindenburg had been flying for little more than a year, and it had been used for propaganda purposes at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It had crossed the Atlantic earlier in the year and was making the first of 10 round trips between Europe and the United States.

The Hindenburg set no speed records. Even in their relatively developmental state 75 years ago, airplanes could still get people across the ocean faster than airships like the Hindenburg — but airplanes couldn't come close to matching the creature comforts available on the airships. The people who traveled in them were paying for amenities, not speed — and they paid a lot for the privilege.

They were not unlike the first–class passengers on board the Titanic, who were pampered in every imaginable way. The Titanic could cross the ocean as fast as or faster than any other ship on the sea, but a huge ship like that simply couldn't slither through an ice field the way a smaller ship could — and that was its fatal flaw.

No conclusion has ever been reached about the cause of the Hindenburg disaster — but it seems to me that a significant contributing factor would be the fact that, in the 1930s, highly flammable hydrogen was the fuel being used on airships. In the last half–century, airships have relied on the far less flammable helium.

That might not have made a difference, though, if the talk of sabotage that has persisted for 75 years is true. Surely, a saboteur would have found another way to accomplish his objective, and the landing that was scheduled for 75 years ago tonight would have been far too tempting to pass up. Heavy preflight publicity virtually guaranteed that the Hindenburg's arrival would be extensively covered by the press of the day.

In spite of the huge fireball that erupted, more than half of the passengers and crew survived. Proportionately, that was far better than the survival rate on the Titanic although the passenger manifest on the Hindenburg was far shorter.

There was never a chance that the fatality rate on the Hindenburg would come close to that on the Titanic. The numbers just weren't there.

Part of it may have been the shock value that comes from an outcome that simply isn't possible. And part of it may have been the experience, the immediacy of seeing it happen on newsreels.

Whatever it was, the Hindenburg deserves its spot in history the same as the Titanic disaster 25 years earlier — or the Challenger disaster nearly half a century later.

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The Randomness of Life

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I took this picture of Mom's grave this morning. See that
dark marker in the center? That's where she is buried.

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A couple of days ago, Stan Musial's wife, Lil Musial, died at the age of 91.

I think it is fair to say hers was a storybook life. The Musials were married for more than 70 years, and they raised four children, who gave them 11 grandchildren, who have given them 12 great–grandchildren so far. Stan is remembered as one of the great hitters of all time — unorthodox in his stance and swing but very effective — and Lil is remembered as his constant booster, his #1 fan.

Mrs. Musial passed away at 6 p.m. on Thursday — "her favorite number," one of her grandchildren told the St. Louis Post–Dispatch, as her husband's uniform number was 6.

Her grandson also said she had been sick recently, and the family had been been aware that her death was imminent — so many family members were at her side when the end came.

I guess that's the way most of us hope to make our exits — with the people who mean the most to us at our side.

And I wish life was fair that way. But it isn't.

Today, I have been thinking of a song that Paul Simon recorded in the mid–1970s. I think it was called "Some Folks' Lives."

The refrain of the song, as I recall, went like this: "Some folks' lives roll easy / Some folks' lives never roll at all."

I'm not sure why that song is in my head today. Perhaps it is because today is the anniversary of the day my mother died. Thoughts of Mom often bring thoughts of Paul Simon to my mind. She was a fan of Simon & Garfunkel, and many of my childhood memories include her and the Simon & Garfunkel records she frequently played. On such occasions, the music literally filled the house.

But why that song?

I'm not really sure — except that the manner of Mom's death (she drowned in a flash flood) was so sudden and shocking. It's been exactly 17 years since she died, and I can still remember how I felt each day for a long time thereafter and the general melancholy that lingered much longer.

Perhaps thoughts of that song are more about my own life, not Mom's.

There are only two things of which one can be absolutely certain in life, I have been told — death and taxes.

There are some things that folks tend to take for granted — for example, that parents will not outlive their children. And that's usually the way it works. But sometimes children die before their parents do. There have been people with whom I grew up who died while their parents were still living. Nothing fair about that.

So, while people may think, may even expect, that they will die before their children, there are no guarantees.

Neither are there any guarantees that there will be enough advance notice of your approaching death that the people in your life can be assembled and at your side when the time comes.

Even that taxes thing isn't absolute. That part presupposes that everyone will (at least) live to adulthood — and participate in that annual ritual of paying income taxes. But I've known people who died when they were still children, still totally dependent on their parents — and did not yet file tax returns..

If they were old enough, of course, they paid sales taxes. I guess my first real experience with sales tax was when I would buy gum and candy with my weekly allowance when I was about 4 or 5, but it sometimes happens that small children die so even that sales tax thing would not be something they would experience.

Death is the one constant. It's the one thing that everyone will experience. But the experience is different for everyone.

Parents tend to assume that their children will have to bury them — just as most of them had to bury their own parents. It's the natural order of things, and most people probably expect that they will die relatively peacefully in their beds of some disease that tends to afflict the old, surrounded by the people they love. Much like Lil Musial.

Odds are, anyway.

But it isn't always that way. People don't always outlive their parents. Sometimes people die young, and sometimes people never find a significant other and wind up dying alone. It's different for everyone.

I guess most people, given a choice, would prefer the way my grandfather died — in his sleep with plans to go fishing with one of his buddies the next day. There was no lingering illness that forced him to spend his final days, weeks, months in a hospital room. When he died, he may well have been dreaming of a day spent dedicated to one of his passions in the company of one of his closest friends.

Perhaps, in his last moments, he dreamed he was reeling in the biggest fish he had ever caught.

Not a bad way to ease out of this world and into what, if anything, comes next. But people who don't take their own lives have no real say in how or when the end comes.

Most people probably only think of death in general terms — an event that will happen sometime in the future, presumably the distant future — and they don't think at all of how their deaths will affect those who are left behind. When people have children, it has been my experience that they give little, if any, thought to that day when they will die and their children will have to cope with a new reality — and any unpleasant memories from the experience.

(When my mother died, I was living in another state, and my father had been injured in the flood. It fell to my brother to identify her body. I have always tried to remember that he must carry that memory.)

If people do give it any thought, it is the kind of thought that usually goes unexpressed until circumstances make it necessary.

My mother, I'm sure, rarely gave any thought to the eventual circumstances of her death or how it would affect her family and her friends. She probably never gave much thought to which friends and relatives would outlive her — except that she probably assumed she would outlive my father. Both of my grandmothers outlived my grandfathers, and I think that was the pattern in the previous generations although you'd have to confirm that with my father. He's the genealogist in the family.

It is an ironic story, an irony she might have appreciated if she hadn't been the casualty.

In the last decade (or more) of her life, my mother was greatly influenced by the sight of my grandmother slipping deeper into dementia. Mom always called it "hardening of the arteries," and I am no doctor so that may well be a sort of layman's way of describing an actual medical condition, but, for the last 20 years or so, I have believed that what my grandmother really had was Alzheimer's disease.

I think Alzheimer's was first identified more than a century ago, but I don't recall hearing much, if anything, about it until after my grandmother died. I was young, though. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention.

She lived with my parents for a couple of years before the burden of meeting her needs became too great for my working mother, and she was put in a series of nursing homes before Mom finally settled on one that she believed had an honest staff that would provide the best of care for my grandmother.

My grandmother lived into her 90s, and my mother, who believed (as I did) that she would live a long life, too, eagerly absorbed every tip — be it from a study in a medical journal, a newspaper article or word of mouth — that promised to enhance mental acuity, even to advanced age. Through diet. Through exercise. Through whatever.

If Mom was going to live into her 90s, by golly, she was going to make sure that she was mentally engaged to the end. She wasn't going to spend year after year sitting in a chair and staring vacantly out the window of a nursing home.

Mom feared an end like the one she saw her mother go through. She didn't want her children's last memories of her to be of an old woman who didn't know them, wasn't even aware when they were in the room with her.

Turned out, that wasn't in the cards for her. And, not long after her death, I remember a family friend observing that "she went out at the top of her game." I suppose it would have made her proud that she was forever frozen in people's memories as a vibrant life force.

But I think I speak for just about everyone who knew her when I say that we could have lived with her in a diminished state if it had meant we could have another 25 or 30 years with her.

She outlived her mother by about six years. I know it wasn't what I expected — and I am about as certain as I can be that it wasn't what she expected, either.

But that is how it worked out. Some folks' lives roll easy. Some folks' lives never roll at all. My family's lives, I think, fall somewhere in between.

I've been musing a lot about how the future plays out. Maybe it's the influence of that TV commercial where the little boy and his grandfather are sitting on the front porch of the grandfather's house, and the grandson is talking about how much he loves to be there.

"I'm going to have a house just like this when I grow up," he says confidently.

"I hope so," replies his grandfather as the narrator starts to speak about future prospects for home ownership.

That commercial never fails to make me think about things that go far beyond real estate. No one ever seems to think about those parts of it. (Well, I do, but, perhaps, as George Carlin said of himself, that is the kind of thought that kept me out of the really good schools.)

Yes, it would be nice if we always got some advance warning that someone we loved was about to die — but, if we did, it might suggest that we have more control over things than we actually do.

Because today is Cinco de Mayo — a fairly prominent holiday here in Texas — I've been thinking about a particularly touching Christmas episode of M*A*S*H in which the doctors tried to keep a mortally wounded soldier alive (technically) until after midnight so the date on his death certificate would be Dec. 26, and his children would not have to think of Christmas as the day their father died.

Soldiers have a pretty high rate of unexpected deaths, and most of those deaths probably occur with no relatives and few, if any, friends nearby.

But the soldiers' relatives probably treated their last moments together as if they really would be the last ones — ever. They knew that death was a real possibility.

That's something we all should realize. The last time I saw Mom, the thought that it would be the last time never entered my mind. In hindsight, I have told myself that, somehow, Mom may have sensed it was the last time, and I have told myself that I remember a little something extra in her last embrace.

But then there are times when I think that is something I must have dreamed up, that there was nothing unusual about our parting embrace, nothing that hadn't been there a thousand times before. Mom always hugged me when we said goodbye.

That was on an Easter Sunday. Mom was killed less than three weeks later.

Maybe it was for the best the way it turned out.

But I will always wish I told her all the things I wanted to tell her. They all came down to one simple sentence. It was one I said to her often, and I always meant it. I just wish I could have told her one more time.

I love you.

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Five Years After Virginia Tech

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Over the years, sadly, the American culture has grown accustomed to the reality that, from time to time, somewhere someone will open fire on students at a high school or a college.

It's to be expected, I have heard some people say, in a country where private gun ownership is not only legal but encouraged.

I don't know if that is true or not, but there are a few things I do know.

For one, I know that we seem to have shootings on school grounds every year, at least since the mid–20th century.

Now, even though gun ownership in the United States has been legal — but not absolute — since the nation broke from England in the 18th century, we haven't had school shootings every year.

The first one that I know of occurred in 1966 on the University of Texas campus. There might have been some before that, but if there were, I haven't heard about them.

There were occasional shootings on campuses throughout the 1970s, but not very many, and each was followed by shock and dismay — and then by recrimination. How could such a thing happen? What reason could there have been?

In the last three decades, though, there has been a literal explosion of such incidents. They have not been confined to a single state or region. Sometimes they involve other students; sometimes they involve adults.

I guess the culture adapted to the new reality because it became more difficult to shock people. I suppose people started running out of senseless reasons for senseless acts and just accepted shootings as things that could happen anywhere (not just on school grounds) at any time for any reason.

(Frankly, I have long believed the ultimate in pointless reasons for committing a pointless act was given when a teenage girl gave this as her excuse for shooting at children in a school playground: "I don't like Mondays."

(The gender of the shooter in that case was highly unusual. As the cold and clinical studies of this phenomenon have demonstrated, nearly all school shootings are perpetrated by males.)

Another thing I know is that the body count at Virginia Tech was the greatest of any school shooting with which I am familiar. In nearly all such incidents, the body count can be done with one hand, maybe two. But more than 30 people died on the Virginia Tech campus — and more than two dozen others were injured, some permanently.

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I have been a student on three college/university campuses in my life. I've been a journalism instructor on two others, one of which was at the time and in the vicinity of the Oklahoma City bombing.

And I can only imagine what it must have been like on the Virginia Tech campus that day.

Make no mistake about it. The Oklahoma City bombing was a horrific experience for my students, many of whom had grown up in Oklahoma City. That bombing was literally in their own back yards. One of my students lost her father in the explosion.

It doesn't get more personal than that.

But I think it would have been an even more personal event for those students if the bomb had been set off on the OU campus — in the campus food court where just about everyone must have eaten a meal at least once or along the sidewalks the students traversed every day.

That had become their daily lives, and an attack on that setting would have been an even more egregious violation.

It must have been that way for the students of Virginia Tech five years ago today. On that Monday, they were getting up and going about their early morning routines when the first victims were shot. When the other attacks began, of course, classes were under way all over campus.

What started as an ordinary day suddenly went terribly wrong.

And a nation watched in pained — and mostly stunned — silence.

On the first anniversary, Virginia Tech paid tribute to those whose lives were lost on that day and remembered the special talents that brought each to the VT campus.

Many other campuses probably could have (and would have) said similar things about the victims if such a terrible event had happened somewhere else. It would have been proper to do so — as it certainly was for the Virginia Tech community. It was, I suppose, a way of seeking closure.

I've written here before of my skepticism that such a thing as closure is really possible, but even a thing as elusive as closure is easier to achieve than finding answers for why things like this happen. The News & Advocate of Lynchburg, Va., reports there have been few answers for the victims' survivors in the last five years.

It is doubtful that they will find more in the next five years.

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The Legacy of 9-11

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I know this has been said before — in many, many ways — but it really is hard to comprehend that it has been 10 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

I learned long ago that it isn't necessary to mention the year. All you need to say is "September 11" — or, in the shorthand form of which modern Americans are so fond, "9–11" — and the listener knows precisely what you're talking about.

My memories of that day are bound to be considerably different than the ones most people have, though. At the time, I was working in an office that had no television, and we had to get whatever information we could from the radios at our desks, phone calls from friends and relatives who did have access to television coverage and the internet.

The thing I remember most about that morning is how pleasant the weather was. It was unusually mild for Dallas, Texas, that early in September — the kind of weather, really, that one expects around mid–October at the earliest. Temperatures dropped to the mid–60s the night before, and I remember thinking briefly about wearing a jacket to work that morning.

(It's been a little spooky around here lately. We've endured one of the hottest summers ever, but, a few days ago, a cool front came through and our lows have been in the 60s while our highs have been in the 80s — just in time for the 10th anniversary.)

I remember thinking to myself that it really felt like football season — and that pleased me. You see, when I talk about football weather, I mean the kind of weather I remember from my childhood and college days in Arkansas — cool, crisp, a few clouds in the sky, maybe a slight breeze.

In fact, football season had begun, and that truly is a sacred time in Texas. Not every Texan believes in God, but most do believe in football. I do, anyway, and the knowledge that football season had begun put a spring in my step as I left my apartment that morning.

I was driving to work when I heard reports on the radio of the first airplane crash into the World Trade Center. The radio guys in Dallas were treating it like it was an accident, an isolated event, and I assumed it was. Apparently, they had a television in the radio studio, and they described the sight of one of the tall towers billowing smoke into a clear blue sky.

I have tried — many times — to remember if there were any clouds in the sky over north Texas that morning, and I just can't remember. There may have been some, and I just didn't notice.

I do remember that the sun was shining so, if there were any clouds, there couldn't have been many.

Airports shouldn't be so close to tall buildings, one of the guys on the radio said, as if he knew anything about New York geography. Most listeners probably assumed that he did — but, in fact, JFK Airport is about 12 miles southeast of Lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center stood.

That alone should have been a tipoff that something was seriously amiss.

But I was driving in rush hour traffic and gave little more thought to the morning radio banter than I usually did, and I recall thinking that having airports a good distance from commercial districts was just common sense.

Terrorism wasn't on my mind yet — and, for whatever reason, it didn't occur to me that a plane crashing into the World Trade Center would be the lead story on the evening news. I made a mental note to mention it to my co–workers — and hoped it wouldn't slip my mind.

Well, it didn't slip my mind. Turned out, it was the only story on the news for several evenings.

I parked my car a few minutes before 8 a.m. Dallas time and entered my building.

In my office, we worked in two–person teams, and I remember walking to my workstation and starting to tell my partner, "I just heard the wildest thing on the radio ..." but she put one finger to her lips to silence me and turned up the volume on the radio on her desk. They were talking about a second plane that had crashed into the WTC.

My office processed auto loans for dealerships around the country, and our work flow depended on the morning and afternoon shipments of paperwork from UPS and FedEx. When air travel was grounded that day, work came to a screeching halt — and remained slow for weeks.

For the rest of that day, we heard about all the things that most people were seeing — the destruction at the Pentagon, the people who jumped to their deaths from the towering infernos that the twin towers had become, the apparently heroic acts of the passengers on Flight 93 that may have prevented the White House or the Capitol from being destroyed.

It was shocking enough to hear about. I remember my departmental manager, Carrie, walking around in a kind of daze. She kept talking about the people who were trapped on those doomed airplanes.

By mid–afternoon, the overall managers of my office decided to close up early (there wasn't any work to do, anyway), and, when I got home, I finally got to see what everyone else had witnessed live.

I haven't had to live with the trauma that seeing all of that as it happened surely must have caused for many. I have seen footage from that day, of course — I saw a lot of it that very day — so I know what millions saw. The difference was that I knew what was coming.

It was like seeing a shocking movie ending that someone told you about before you saw the movie.

Imagine if, 50 years ago, you were standing in line to see "Psycho," and someone walked by and casually said to his/her companion, "I saw it the other day. What a finish! Anthony Perkins is his own mother, and he kills Janet Leigh while she's taking a shower!"

If you stayed to see the movie, the ending would be tarnished for you — to say the least.

Unfortunately, what happened 10 years ago was no movie, and even though I knew what was going to happen, I felt compelled to watch it — maybe out of respect for all the innocent lives that were lost, perhaps out of a sense of duty as an aggrieved American.

Maybe I felt like one does when a car accident or train wreck is unfolding before one's eyes.

Thousands of people died that day, and, as a result, thousands more have died on Middle Eastern soil, and billions of American dollars have been spent there.

I know people who are convinced that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed heavily to America's current economic problems, and perhaps they are right. I'm certainly no economist, but even those people who studied it in college and practice economics professionally don't know everything there is to know. If they did, it seems to me, there would be more of a consensus on what economic policy should be.

There can be little doubt that America's wars in the last decade have taken much of this country's resources, human and financial. But they weren't the sole contributors.

It would be foolish to blame what happened 10 years ago for the troubles facing America in 2011.

And yet ...

I remember, at the time, how so many of the people around me spoke in awe of the brilliant intellects that conceived such a plot. Much of their logic was rooted in the Middle Ages, most people agreed, but they were smart enough to anticipate any roadblocks they might encounter because of modern policies.

They did their research. They were familiar with routine procedures. They made sure the box cutters that were used as knives met existing standards. No detail was too small.

As the plan was taking shape, of course, the roadblocks they wished to avoid were the ones that could stand in their way to achieving a short–term — albeit dramatic — goal.

And they achieved it, perhaps in more spectacular fashion than any dared hope in those days in the late 1990s. From what I have heard, few, if any, thought the Twin Towers actually could be brought down.

But what if one — or more — not only thought the Twin Towers could be reduced to rubble but had the prescience to anticipate a more long–term consequence: how the financial weight of waging two wars simultaneously, combined with the unchecked greed of the seamy underside of capitalism, could bring America to its knees?

It almost seems like one of those bizarre conspiracy theories in which everything must happen just so. What are the odds?

And yet ...

Many of the upper–level operatives for Al Qaeda are either deceased or in custody now.

But if any who are still alive and at large had the foresight to anticipate how hijacking and crashing four airplanes would reverberate in American life and continue to have a corrosive influence on both American economics and American politics a decade later, I can only guess that this must be a satisfying moment.

If so, they must be the only ones who feel satisfied on this occasion.

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Remembering the 'Culminator'

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One of the real regrets of my life is that I have no photographs of myself with my friend Mike Culpepper, who died 20 years ago today.

Well, that's one regret that I have. Another regret is that I have no photographs of Mike by himself. I have only my memories.

But I have many of those.

One of the things I remember is how many of the same things we both liked. Near the end of his life, he liked the music of the Southern rock group the Black Crowes, and I remember that he mentioned to me once that he liked their song, "She Talks to Angels."

(Mike was really more of a fan of the Black Crowes than I was so I guess that isn't really a good example. However, it illustrates our shared appreciation for Southern rock — so maybe it isn't a bad example, after all.)

He liked other songs by the Black Crowes, too, but that stood out in my mind after he died. Maybe, under the circumstances, it seemed to have a special relevance — regardless of how one felt about the concept of an afterlife (thoughts of which were unavoidable — the introduction of the word angels invited its consideration).

Mike wasn't one of my childhood friends. In fact, we met relatively late in his life, about six or seven years before he died. (I guess late isn't the right word. Mike and I did know each other in the last years of his life, but I think what I'm getting at is not really chronological. It's more proportional. It was a rather significant chunk of Mike's life. Mine, too, actually.)

We met through a mutual friend in one of those random, chain–reaction things that so often seem to happen in life. I've met many people that way — most of the time, those acquaintances haven't amounted to much more than comments like "Didn't we meet at ...?" and "Oh, yes, I thought you looked familiar ..." the next time we bumped into each other, but my friendship with Mike was different.

I don't remember how or where we met, but I know through whom we met — my friend Brady.

Ironically, I hadn't really known Brady all that long, either, when I met Mike. I met Brady through some mutual friends I knew in college — Mike (that's a different Mike) and Joe.

Mike and Joe were roommates. I think I met Joe first. Must have. Joe was a journalism student, and so was I. Mike was an artist.

Before our college careers were over, Joe and I did attend some of the same classes. But that wasn't how we met. My memory is that we met through another friend (also a journalism student) whom I did meet in a journalism class, and she introduced us at some sort of social occasion on campus.

I didn't know any of those people before I graduated from high school — but they came to mean more to me than most of the people I'd known since grade school.

After we finished college, we all gravitated to central Arkansas, which is where I met Mike Culpepper. You know how the memories of some people, some places and some things are forever linked to certain times? I guess that is how I feel about Mike.

For me, memories of our friendship are almost entirely linked to my memories of the 1980s. We met when I was living in Little Rock, working for the Arkansas Gazette, and he was living in Pine Bluff, a short distance away.

We became friends as we crossed paths frequently at Brady's place. I worked on the Gazette's sports staff, and Mike was a sports fan. We always had a lot to talk about.

I felt honored to work for the Gazette. It had a rich tradition of which I was proud to be a part, and sports always played an important role in the lives of the people in Arkansas, as it still does today. As a child, I dreamed of working on the news side at the Gazette, but that never meant that I regarded my work on the sports side as trivial.

I can say, without hesitation, that I am proud of the work I did there. And my memories of that time in my life are enhanced by the ever–present memory of my friend, Mike Culpepper. It would have been a completely different experience for me if he had not been there. We didn't work together, but I can't think of my time at the Gazette without thinking of the influence Mike had on me.

He was a true friend.

Like just about everyone I knew, Mike was a Razorback fan, and he always wanted to talk about the Hogs. And, like most of the men in Arkansas at that time, he was a Dallas Cowboys fan. He always wanted to talk about the Cowboys, too.

He wanted to know who the hot prospects were at different positions and who was likely to be in the Super Bowl.

I didn't always know what he wanted to know, but that was OK with Mike. I soon discovered that he would bring up topics usually as a way to start an open–ended conversation. He liked to speculate.

My job required me to work nights and weekends. So did Mike's. In fact, there were several occasions when Mike came by my apartment late at night, and we would watch TV and drink a beer — or eat some food he had just picked up at the Waffle House nearby.

(Mike always was fond of the Waffle House. I never understood why. Maybe it was because the Waffle House was about the only place in west Little Rock that was open late at night. The food was always a little too greasy for my taste.)

Mike usually had food with him on those nocturnal visits, and I figured, although we never discussed it, that he must have missed a lot of meals. He was always thin (painfully so after his chemo treatments). But he was generous, almost to a fault. Whatever he had was yours to share, even if he was down to his last penny or his last morsel of food.

Often, when Mike came by, we would play computer football — which was an altogether different thing from what folks play today. I had an old Commodore 64 in those days and a computer football game diskette. Mike would come by shortly after I returned from work — sometimes he would be waiting outside my door when I arrived — and we would play football until the wee hours of the morning.

Then, sometimes, Mike would fall asleep on my couch, and I would retreat to my bedroom. If neither of us had to work the next day, more computer football would be played after we got up.

That computer football game was a tradition for awhile — not only for Mike and me but for Brady and a mutual friend of ours named Steve as well. In fact, it was the source of a nickname that Brady gave Mike that was based on Mike's surname — the Culminator. Even now, whenever I speak or even think of Mike, Culminator comes to mind.

I spent about 4½ years at the Gazette, then I moved to Texas, where I enrolled in graduate school. I was working on the sports staff of the local newspaper, and I took pride in watching (from a distance) the Razorbacks' Southwest Conference championship season, which brought them to Dallas for the Cotton Bowl.

Mike and Steve came to visit me, and the three of us went to the game. Arkansas didn't win (the Razorbacks lost to Troy Aikman and UCLA), but it is a memory I treasure now — along with the game program I bought that day.

I was still in north Texas — on the verge of getting my master's degree, in fact — when Mike was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer in the spring of 1991, and he died less than five months later.

I had planned to take my last graduate–level class that summer and receive my degree in August, but I put those plans on hold. I made a few trips back to Arkansas that summer to visit Mike as he was undergoing the final, ultimately futile treatments for his disease, then, on this day 20 years ago, Steve called to let me know that it was over.

It had been a hot, sticky summer — not nearly as hot as this one has been although the humidity here in north Texas was higher in 1991. My memory of Aug. 7, 1991, is that the actual temperature wasn't quite 100°, but the humidity made it feel like it was well over 100°.

I had been out somewhere, running some sort of errand, and I had just been back in my apartment for a few minutes when the phone rang. My clothes were drenched in sweat — there wasn't a single part of me that was dry — and I probably made sloshing noises as I rose from my seat to answer the phone.

I'm still not sure what I thought or what I felt at the moment Steve called. I remember feeling dizzy, and I stuck out my hand so I could grab something and remain standing. I couldn't tell you what I grabbed — a chair, a table, whatever. All I know is that I did remain standing. I propped myself up against whatever it was that I grabbed, and I remained vertical.

I couldn't imagine a world without Mike in it, even though I had been preparing myself for the likelihood that he would not survive ever since I heard the diagnosis. I knew the outlook was not good — Brady had told me how grim it was — and yet, somewhere in my mind, I clung to the belief that he could, that he would beat it.

But he did not.

That brings me to another regret that I will take to my grave. Each time I visited Mike during those months when he was fighting his losing battle, I mentally accepted the fact that I could be seeing him for the last time. But I could never bring myself to say goodbye to him.

I wanted to say goodbye. I wanted to tell him what a great friend he had been, that I would never forget him, but I just never could when I had the opportunity. Maybe I was a coward.

A couple of weeks before he died, I finally broke down and wrote him a letter. Writing has always been my default position, I guess. It's easier for me to deal with things when I write them down.

Anyway, I wrote a very heartfelt letter to him. I assume he received it, but I don't know. He never sent me a reply, and his parents didn't mention it to me when I came back to Arkansas for his funeral.

During that phone conversation 20 years ago today, as I say, I felt dizzy, and there was a sudden roaring in my ears. I knew Steve was talking, probably telling me details that I have long since forgotten that he told me, but I couldn't make out the words for awhile.

(I guess the best way to describe it would be to compare it to the teacher's wah wah wah droning in the old Charlie Brown cartoons. No offense, Steve. Nothing made sense to me at that moment.)

Then things cleared up enough that I heard Steve tell me that Mike's family wanted me to be one of his pallbearers. I don't remember what I said or how I said it. I probably said something like "I'll do that" or "I will be there" or maybe even just "OK," and Steve said something like "We already told them you would."

So, on Aug. 10, 1991, I found myself in Pine Bluff, Ark., serving as one of Mike's pallbearers — instead of doing what I originally planned to do on that Saturday, receive my master's degree.

I thought about that during the eulogy, and I remembered what John Lennon said: "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." And I remember wondering what plans Mike had that had been interrupted.

Before they lowered Mike into the ground, I finally said goodbye. It was under my breath so I doubt that anyone at the graveside heard it, but that was OK because it wasn't meant for anyone else.

That provided a certain sense of closure, I suppose, but I was still left with the maybes.

Maybe I thought I was saying that to Mike's spirit, but I have often wondered about that. In the last months of his life, Mike underwent something of a religious conversion. He didn't strike me as being particularly religious most of the time I knew him, but in the months before his death, he seemed to embrace his family's Catholicism.

I wasn't really sure what I believed about the afterlife at the time. I am no more certain about it today. Maybe, when I was standing next to his coffin just before it was lowered into the ground, I felt it was being respectful of Mike and his faith, even if it wasn't/isn't a belief that I share.

Maybe Mike had accepted something that some of us could never accept — at least, until it was too late.

Mike was still in his 20s when he died. I have often wondered what he might have done if he had been allowed to live for the next 20. Would he have gotten married? Would he have had children? What would he have done with the additional time?

I always thought he was a talented person. I can't begin to guess what he might have done if he had lived, but I'm sure it would have been impressive.

Mike may have been the most courageous person I have ever known. I long ago concluded that I will never be able to face what he faced with the grace with which he faced it.

But I will try.

As I say, I don't know what I think happens when people die.

But if there is anything to the perception that humans have souls that live on after their physical bodies die, then I know at least one thing is true.

My friend talks to angels.

Put in a good word for me, Mike.

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