A Cold Case Revisited

We live in an imperfect world.

Consequently, there are some mysteries that always will remain unresolved.

It is unlikely, for example, that we will ever know

• what happened to Amelia Earhart, or


• if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone — or if he even participated — in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, or


• if D.B. Cooper survived his leap from the Boeing 727 he hijacked in November 1971 and lived for awhile — or continues to live — on the $200,000 ransom he received, or


• the identity (or identities) of the person (or persons) buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Those topics continue to make for lively discussions that no one ever wins and no one ever loses.

Nevertheless, some people spend their lives trying to solve the cold cases that perplex the rest of us.

Sometimes they succeed in tying up all the loose ends. Most of the time, they don't.

Sometimes, investigators know the answers they seek. They just lack sufficient proof to make their case hold up in a court of law, and they spend years sifting through the evidence they do have, hoping to find something that has been overlooked.

Sometimes that hard work pays off, and the guilty person is finally brought to justice.

Sometimes it doesn't pay off.

Sunday was the fifth anniversary of the still–unsolved disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway during a high school graduation trip to Aruba.

Holloway hasn't been seen since May 30, 2005, and no one really knows what happened to her. Most people assume she is dead. I've heard some people speculate that she was sold into white slavery. Others have said that she has been held hostage somewhere for the last five years.

There's always a lot of conflicting information in a missing person case. In this case, the missing person's parents believed what most parents probably believe of their own children — she was a good kid, she didn't drink or use drugs, she was a virgin. But the authorities put together a different picture — one of a young girl who drank excessively, at least when she was far away from home. If she was like others in her age group, she may have been sexually experienced and/or may have experimented with drugs.

Holloway's mother and stepfather descended upon Aruba almost immediately after she failed to show up for the flight home, and they apparently ran roughshod over the local authorities in their pursuit of justice. They did uncover some plausible leads (as well as some bogus ones). And the primary suspects — Dutch national Joran van der Sloot and two friends of his — produced some plausible rebuttals (as well as some bogus ones).

There may be some truth in what both sides have said — and there may have been some self–serving aspects as well. A lot really isn't known about the night Natalee disappeared.

What is known is that a lot of drinking was done by Holloway and her fellow graduates on the trip. Holloway may have been one of the worst offenders. The head of the original investigation said they had learned Holloway "drank all day every day" during the trip.

Now, make no mistake. If she had been on a five–day drinking binge, that didn't justify someone else exploiting her inebriation to sexually assault her, to kidnap or to kill her.

And, even if van der Sloot's mildest account of the events of that night (and he apparently has had more than one) — that he and his friends left a beautiful, young (and, presumably, intoxicated) girl alone on the beach at night at her request — turns out to be true, doesn't it seem plausible that he should be held criminally liable? After all, if that particular story can be believed, he was the sober one, as well as a resident of the island. She was intoxicated, a tourist, unfamiliar with the terrain.

Wasn't he, at the very least, negligent to leave her alone like that?

And then there have been the other versions he has told under various circumstances — one of killing her on the beach and another of selling her into slavery.

Well, at the end of the day, we're left with contradictory accounts, no body, no crime scene, no evidence that a crime was committed, although the fact that Natalee hasn't been heard from in more than five years now seems to be pretty compelling evidence that something happened to her. But what happened? Was she killed? Or is she being held somewhere against her will?

Maybe we'll get some answers now.

On the fifth anniversary of Holloway's disappearance, a woman named Stephany Flores was murdered in a hotel room in Lima, Peru. Today, van der Sloot was taken into custody in Santiago, Chile, and is being flown back to Peru, where he apparently will be charged with the slaying.

There appears to be a certain amount of hope in Holloway's family that, with van der Sloot in custody and facing a murder charge in Peru, the missing person case will be reopened in Aruba.

I'm sure it must be hard for Holloway's family, not knowing where she is or what became of her. And I hope they get some answers. But they might not.

Some mysteries never are solved.

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Sweet Home Alabama

They held their primaries in Alabama this week, and I'm a little bewildered.

A black man named Artur Davis, who has represented west Alabama's Seventh District in the U.S. House since 2003, ran for governor and was handily beaten by the state's agriculture commissioner, a white man named Ron Sparks.

Unofficially, Sparks received 62% of the vote in what the Birmingham News called "one of the more remarkable upsets in Alabama primary history."

Huh?

I grew up in the South, but I have never lived in Alabama. In fact, I have seldom even been in Alabama. And — no offense intended to the congressman — I had never heard of Artur Davis until a few days before Christmas, when his colleague, Parker Griffith, switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Obviously, my credentials as an Alabama insider are seriously lacking. Actually, I would characterize them as nonexistent.

In the course of researching my blog article on that decision, I learned about Davis' campaign and discovered that he had been saying that Griffith's decision "repudiates the hard work of many Democrats who sustained him."

I saw nothing at the time that indicated whether Davis or Sparks was in front in the governor's race. I knew nothing of their political philosophies (I have since learned that Davis is, based mostly on his congressional voting record, a centrist, but I still know very little about Sparks' views). And I will readily admit that my gut reaction was based on what I have seen and heard about Alabama and the Deep South all my life.

My gut reaction last December was that Davis would lose — eventually. I didn't know if he would lose the Democratic primary, because most blacks in America are Democrats and Alabama (like most Southern states) has a fairly large black population.

It was possible, I reasoned, that the Democratic Party in Alabama — the same Democratic Party that nominated George Wallace for governor four times — might nominate Davis.

That's the same George Wallace who was remembered in a PBS documentary by a black lawyer for being "the most liberal judge that I had ever practiced law in front of," but, after losing the 1958 gubernatorial nomination to a Ku Klux Klan–backed opponent, ambition may have gotten the better of him, and he vowed never to be "outseged" again.

After being sworn in as governor the first time in January 1963, he famously proclaimed, "Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" Accurate or not, that came to summarize Wallace in the minds of most Americans — a defiant, stand–in–the–schoolhouse–door racist.

And, more than 10 years later, Wallace lamented, after endorsing Jimmy Carter (the symbol of the "new" South) for president, that "I had to do things — say things — to get elected in Alabama that made it impossible for me to ever be president."

Well, Wallace (along with just about all of the American politicians who built state and national careers on the tragedy of racial conflicts) has been dead for many years now. But the attitudes that he and others exploited for their own political gain were generations in the making and cannot be completely erased in a single election.

Still, there is no doubt the parties have moved farther to each extreme. Wallace's son and namesake is a Republican now, and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the descendants of the Alabamians who elected the elder Wallace governor so many times now regard themselves as Republicans, too. Thus, it wouldn't shock me at all if Alabama's Democrats are more liberal than their ancestors.

So I couldn't conclude that Alabama's Democrats would not nominate a black man for governor — but, ultimately, I believed his candidacy was doomed. I found no reason to believe, as some people apparently did after Davis was elected in 2002 to represent a newly created district that is more than 60% black, that he was a rising star in Alabama politics. And, yes, I suppose that was not politically correct in the modern sense because I presumed his lack of statewide star quality was a racial thing.

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Oh, yes, a lot of things have changed in the South, and, for all I know, Davis was doing much better in the polls at some point than he did when the voters cast their ballots this week. But maybe this was one of those Bradley effect deals, where poll respondents said they would vote for the black guy but, at the moment of truth, just couldn't do it.

OK, Davis lost the party primary. But if he had not lost the party nomination, I'm inclined to think he would have lost the general election — when the more conservative Alabamians will participate along with the left–leaners.

But, as I study accounts of the final weeks of the campaign, I wonder if maybe Alabama's Democrats actually gave the nation some reassurance that the state has progressed farther than most had dared to dream.

Maybe it was mostly about race. Maybe it was a case of the so–called Bradley effect.

But, maybe, it was something as simple and as basic as the adage so memorably expressed by Tip O'Neill: "All politics is local."

A couple of weeks ago, the Tuscaloosa News quoted a political science professor as saying that there was a significant difference in the candidates' approaches. Davis, he said, appeared to be structuring his campaign with the general election voters in mind while Sparks was focused on the party's voters, the ones he had to persuade to win the nomination.

Now, to put it bluntly, it is never a good idea to run as if you have already won the preliminary and you're mostly positioning yourself for the general election campaign. It seems like a recipe for disaster for any politician — never mind the politician's race, gender, age, religion, etc.

Maybe, to paraphrase Michael Jackson, it don't matter if you're black or white — as long as you tell 'em what they want to hear. Perhaps Democratic voters didn't want to hear Davis defend his vote against health care reform, which might have played well in November. Perhaps they were more impressed by the facts that the state's black leaders and the teachers and other groups that appeal to today's Democrats endorsed Sparks.

Anyway, I believe race did play a part in what happened. Maybe its influence was very subtle. In spite of all the talk of a post–racial America, it seems to me that such change is coming more slowly in the South than it is in other regions. At some point, I hope the South can overcome its racist legacy, but it will require a certain amount of tolerance and understanding on the part of the rest of America.

There seems to be a one–size–fits–all mentality outside the South about black politicians. Since Obama's election in 2008, the conventional wisdom appears to be that it is all a matter of strategy — especially if you read Jeff Zeleny's article on the Alabama primaries in the New York Times: "[T]he decisive defeat of Artur Davis ... illustrates the limits of trying to replicate the strategy that helped carry President Obama to office," he writes.

That strikes me as being willfully ignorant of certain facts — one of which is that there is nothing of the sort to replicate in Alabama. Two years ago, more than three–fifths of Alabama voters voted for John McCain.

I don't know if Davis openly sought to emulate Obama's national triumph in a Deep South state or if that objective was a presumption by some in the outside media, but, if that was the strategy, it leads me to ask a simple question: Why?

Blacks have seldom won statewide races in America — and almost never in the South. And it is worth remembering that most Southern states did not vote for Obama, either. It may be hard for people in other regions to understand, but even with the sizable black populations in this region, Obama has never been especially popular here.

And maybe that is, to a certain extent, the product of racial conflict.

Because, you see, another fact that has been conveniently ignored is that, in 2008, the results in Alabama clearly were polarized by race. Whites, who account for nearly 69% of the state's population, voted heavily for McCain; blacks voted heavily for Obama.

The same thing happened in other Southern states, too. It just wasn't as pronounced as it was in Alabama.

And, yet, as I say, Davis' voting record was a centrist one. Alabama Democrats who wanted to win a governor's race for the first time in the 21st century should have been tempted to nominate Davis — and, yet, most of them picked his white opponent.

You can reach a racist conclusion based on that information if you wish. And, human nature being what it is, there may always be those voters who make choices based on irrelevant factors like race or gender or age or religion. Politicians don't get to choose what the voters get to use to make electoral decisions.

But maybe the message from most of Alabama's Democrats wasn't that a black man had been rejected by the voters (although there is no getting around the fact that a black man did lose the primary).

Maybe the message was that voters have evolved so much in this country that a black Democrat can be defeated in his party's primary because his views did not reflect the voters' — not because he was black.

Isn't that what Martin Luther King was talking about when he spoke of being judged not by the color of one's skin but the content of one's character?

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The Day 24-Hour TV News Was Born

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In my lifetime, I have literally witnessed the transformation of the world, a transformation that has been so profound, so all–encompassing, and, yet, at the same time, so subtle that it often seems that changes that took years to emerge happened overnight.

Sometimes major shifts in the human experience can be traced back to a single event on a single day — for example, July 4 is remembered more than two centuries later as the day this experiment in self–governance called America began — even if the seeds had been planted long before.

Thirty years ago today, Ted Turner launched the Cable News Network — and everything changed.

Not right away, of course. The change was gradual, but the seeds were planted on this day in 1980.

It's not hard to see the fruits today. There are many networks that provide news coverage 24 hours a day now, but in 1980, it was a new concept when David Walker and Lois Hart (a husband–and–wife team) anchored CNN's first broadcast.

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Cable was not anywhere near as pervasive in 1980 as it is today, and local cable providers charged extra for many things (not just movie channels) that weren't offered as part of the basic package.

When CNN made its debut, I guess cable providers weren't sure what to do with it. In the town where I was living at the time, the local provider allowed viewers to watch CNN at no extra charge for the first few days, then it was relegated to the "extended" package, which included ESPN (which was still new itself at the time) and for which viewers had to pay extra.

CNN's initial programming was primitive, to say the least. It had no real model to follow, just a vague concept of providing viewers with the latest news whenever they switched on their TVs.

That could be quite dramatic — when there was breaking news. And 1980 had already had plenty of big events by June 1 — not to mention the ongoing drama of the American hostages in Iran.

But Turner and his crew of journalists seemed to be bewildered by how to fill the hours that seemed to drag on what had long been known in the news business as "slow news days."

That's not really surprising. CNN was a pioneer and much of what it did broke new ground. It evolved from a network that, essentially, began a brand–new broadcast every hour or half–hour (a precursor, I suppose, to the Headline News channel that came along in 1982) to a network that produced its own programming on all sorts of topics that were in the news.

And, in the last three decades, CNN became the go–to network whenever something big was happening.

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On Jan. 28, 1986, CNN was doing something the other networks once did but had stopped doing — televising shuttle liftoffs.

Space travel, the traditional networks had concluded, had become routine, and televising a shuttle liftoff was not considered newsworthy enough to risk the wrath of daytime TV viewers who didn't want to see their game shows or soap operas interrupted.

So only CNN was on hand for the launch of Challenger on that cold day. But every network's news division had reporters on the scene before the sun went down — after it exploded minutes after liftoff.

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Everyone was in the Gulf five years later when war broke out, but CNN's ability to be on the spot whenever something happened catapulted the network past the traditional networks in the public's estimation.

The Gulf War may have been the real turning point for CNN, giving it credibility with viewers and making household names out of some dedicated correspondents, like Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour.

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And, of course, CNN was one of many networks with its cameras focused on New York's World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

By that time, there were many cable networks trying to do what CNN had been doing for more than two decades. They learned from CNN's mistakes and provided news shows that were as polished, if not always as accurate, as CNN's.

Both CNN and its competitors have been bringing viewers important breaking stories in recent years — Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 presidential campaign, etc. CNN has lost some of its audience, and it wouldn't surprise me if many of its staffers often feel like the pioneers like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather who made CBS News the dominant name in news coverage for earlier generations — only to see their grip on the top spot give way to newcomers like CNN.

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It was always part of CNN's mission to be experimental. It has launched specialty channels that failed and specialty programs that never caught on.

But it has changed the world and how journalists report on the events that occur in it.

And only those who work — or have worked — for the network are truly free to say, as James Earl Jones has said for many, many years ...

"This is CNN."

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The C Word

The "C" in "C word" doesn't stand for "color" — although I have no doubt that there are those among the Obama apologists who wish it did because that would be something their hero could blame that is beyond his control.

The "C" doesn't even stand for "conference" — as in "press conference," which is something Obama can control, and it's a good thing he held one on Thursday.

I say that not only because it is essential for a president to keep the country informed when the greatest disaster of its kind is happening in the Gulf of Mexico — which it is — but also because, as Doug Mataconis of Outside the Beltway reminded readers on Tuesday, the president's last press conference was nearly a year ago.

On that memorable occasion, Obama criticized the Cambridge, Mass., police for responding to a citizen's complaint and arresting a black man, who turned out to be a noted Harvard professor, for breaking into his own home.

It was also held during prime time, whereas Thursday's soiree was in the afternoon (and, presumably, drew a smaller audience). So, like Roger Maris' single–season home run record, I guess an asterisk is needed — because the clock is still running on Obama's streak between prime time press conferences.

Will the streak live for a year? Less than eight weeks to go. Does anyone know the Vegas odds?

The president pledged an open and accessible presidency, and, in fairness, he has been accessible for one–on–one interviews with some members of the press, usually the ones whose employers already have shown themselves to be editorially sympathetic to Obama's agenda.

A president has many ways of communicating with the people — and, since the Kennedy presidency, the televised press conference has been one of the most effective ways of explaining policy. Not all presidents have excelled at the give and take with the press (JFK did set that bar pretty high), but the nine men who succeeded Kennedy (including Obama — because, after all, no matter how many one–on–one interviews a president does, there's nothing more American, more democratic than an open press conference in which a dozen or more people get the chance to ask the president a question in front of a national TV audience) have utilized it.

In spite of his much–publicized oratorical skills, Obama has been reluctant to hold press conferences. He got off to a rather fast start, holding monthly press conferences in the first couple of months, but the pace of his press conferences seemed to taper off after his faux pas about his bowling skills and the Special Olympics — and was nonexistent after the Sotomayor confirmation hearings last summer.

No, the "C" in "C word" clearly doesn't stand for "press conference" — although maybe it does qualify as a word for which this White House has little fondness. After all, Obama could have used the occasion of Labor Day to hold a press conference and reassure unemployed Americans, who saw their ranks swell by nearly 250,000 the month before, but he did not.

Perhaps he didn't hold a press conference on Labor Day because he was too busy putting the finishing touches on the speech he was scheduled to give to America's schoolchildren the next day.

Or maybe he was too tired after traveling to Cincinnati to give a speech on health care reform on Labor Day.

Well, that's ancient history now, I suppose.

I guess the "C" in "C word" could stand for "crude," as in crude oil. Alphabetically, of course, it could — and perhaps that would be appropriate, given that, during Thursday's press conference, Obama told America that "[rapid response] has been our highest priority since this crisis occurred" more than a month ago.

Perhaps it was just coincidental that, as Obama was saying that, in my mind's eye, I saw the mayor from "Jaws" telling the sheriff "it's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, 'Huh? What?' You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July."

No, actually, the "C word" is "competence." Sometimes it is expressed directly. Sometimes it is implied.

But that is the buzzword I have been reading and hearing lately. And, upon reflection, it does seem to me that, if it was fair to use that as the standard by which to judge George W. Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina or Jimmy Carter's handling of Three–Mile Island, it's fair in this case as well.

At first, I guess I tended to brush off criticism as more from the sour grapes crowd. In fact, I think the first article I saw was a double whammy — a column from former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan in the Rupert Murdoch–owned Wall Street Journal.

"He was supposed to be competent," moaned the headline on Noonan's column, and I almost didn't bother to read what she had written. But then I did, and I couldn't help admitting there were times when I felt she might be on to something. Like:

• when she started with the observation that "[t]his is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts."


• or when she wrote that Obama "continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. ... [H]e has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another."
  
  Kind of like that Labor Day thing I mentioned earlier. Seems like an obvious time for a president who is presiding over a nation reeling from an economic crisis to hold a press conference on job creation. And maybe, I mused at the time, that is precisely why he did not hold a press conference. Too obvious. Style would be critiqued with no attention given to substance. The spin would be all about politics.
  
  Well, I mused that at the time. But I never really believed it.
  
  Anyway, the days after Labor Day turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months. At some point, it became obvious that the press conference on joblessness — which, for months, has been getting the top spot in polls about Americans' No. 1 concern — wasn't coming, that Obama hadn't merely been playing pre–emptive politics by not addressing the issue on Labor Day.


• or when Noonan complained that Obama "repeatedly took refuge in factual minutiae," observing that his professorial demeanor "made him seem like someone who won't see the big picture."
  
  His tendency to lecture isn't too appealing, either.


• or the thing that seems so incredible to so many people — "the way both BP and the government, 40 days in, continue to act shocked, shocked that an accident like this could have happened. If you're drilling for oil in the deep sea, of course something terrible can happen, so you have a plan on what to do when it does.
  
  "How could there not have been a plan? How could it all be so ad hoc, so inadequate, so embarrassing? We're plugging it now with tires, mud and golf balls?"

Peter Wehner also has ties to previous Republican administrations, so you've got to consider the source, but I am compelled to admit that he puts his finger on a problem I have seen in not only Obama but also his most strident supporters.

"Obama is among the most thin–skinned presidents we have had," Wehner writes for Politics Daily. "In Obama's eyes, he is always the aggrieved, always the violated, always the victim of some injustice. He is America's virtuous and valorous hero, a man of unusually pure motives and uncommon wisdom, under assault by the forces of darkness."

It all has a Nixonian feel to it, doesn't it? And, in a telling observation, Wehner writes, "When arrogant men lose control of events it can easily lead to feelings of isolation, to striking out at critics, to bullying opponents, and to straying across lines that should not be crossed."

Shades of Watergate, for sure.

Then Wehner makes another point: "With Obama there is also the compulsive need to admonish others, to point fingers, to say that the problems he faces are not of his doing." He's been president for 16 months now, and he continues to blame his predecessor for everything. I gather, from what I see in the polls and in the primaries that have been held so far, that it's wearing thin, even with those who bent over backwards to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Last week, Obama spoke in the Rose Garden of the "cozy relationship between the oil companies and the federal agency that permits them to drill." Wasn't 16 months enough time to do something — or at least get started on something — about that cozy relationship?

Wehner concludes that Obama "was as unprepared to be president as any man in our lifetime" and he is "overmatched by events."

As I said, you can make a case for disregarding such thoughts from Noonan and Wehner. They have reputations as being among Obama's loyal opposition.

It isn't so easy to overlook what Charles Blow of the New York Times writes.

"People needed to be assured that Obama possessed three basic presidential traits: being informed, engaged and empathetic," says Blow.

• "As for the first trait, he was superb as always. I think amassing facts is his idea of being warm and fuzzy."


• "On the second, he was a bit wobbly."


• "On the third point, empathy, Obama came up short."

And empathy is one of those things Americans want to see in their presidents. Even if there isn't a damn thing the president can do — and there often isn't — people like to know that a president, in Bill Clinton's famous words, feels their pain.

Obama often seems to be above their pain.

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A Portal into the Past

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These days, millions of people think they know what Americans experienced during the Great Depression three–quarters of a century ago.

It is understandable that they should feel that way. This recession has been persistent, stubborn, cruel, painful — choose the adjective you think is most appropriate. Housing foreclosures have been rampant. Job losses have been across the board. They haven't been confined to specific industries. Few have been spared the misery that has been wrought.

But the vast majority of the people who are living today were not living in the days of the Depression, and their only sources for comparison are books, journals, films, perhaps the recollections of older family members (most of whom likely are not living anymore). Even most of the living people who can remember that time in American history were mere children. They didn't have to look for work when the unemployment rate was 25%.

Dorothea Lange did live in those days. Is the name unfamiliar to you? Perhaps the name is unfamiliar, but the work she did during her life shouldn't be.

For it was through her photographer's eyes — and camera lens — that those living in the 21st century can get an idea what life was like for so many Americans in the 1930s.

For example, her 1936 photograph of Florence Owens Thompson — titled simply "Migrant Mother" — captured for many the sense of helplessness and shame that many people experienced during the Depression.

"I did not ask her name or her history," Lange said. "She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food."

Lange wasn't a trained reporter, and Thompson later acknowledged that she got some of the details of her story wrong.

"There's no way we sold our tires, because we didn't have any to sell," she said. "The only ones we had were on the Hudson, and we drove off in them. I don't believe Dorothea Lange was lying, I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn't have."

If Thompson harbored any resentment, it was that she was never compensated for her image.

Well, Lange wasn't a businesswoman, nor was she writer. She was a photographer, and her photography told stories the way words couldn't.

What is more, her pictures didn't just tell the stories of people who were victims of the economy. She also took pictures that told the story of discrimination in America.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, more than 100,000 Japanese people living in the United States (more than three–fifths of whom were American citizens) were forced to relocate in internment camps. Shortly before that happened, Lange snapped the picture at the right that shows Japanese children pledging allegiance to the American flag.

She was a pioneer, a woman excelling in what had been largely a man's world. But that wasn't her only handicap. Like so many others of her generation — including the man who was president during the Depression — Lange suffered from polio. She survived, but the disease left her with a permanent limp of which she, apparently, always was conscious.

"It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," she said. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."

I don't know how pronounced that limp was. I knew a man who had polio when he was young and walked with a noticeable limp until his death (in his 80s) a few years ago. I never saw Lange walk so I don't know if, perhaps, it was as severe as that.

I've known people, for example, who, for one reason or another, suffered from speech impediments. Some were quite severe, while others were so modest that no one except the people who were afflicted really seemed to be aware of it.

If Lange's handicap was modest, perhaps it served its purpose by helping her to be more empathetic with the suffering she must have seen all around her in the mid–1930s — and then, of course, after Pearl Harbor.

Lange died of cancer at the age of 70 in 1965. Today would have been her 115th birthday.

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The Things With Feathers

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"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops — at all

"And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm

"I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest Sea
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb — of Me."

Emily Dickinson

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I've had many thoughts as the enormity of what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico has become apparent.

Some of my thoughts are relevant, and, I suppose, others are tangential.

• One thought I have been having pertains to religious conversations I had with an acquaintance in college.
  
  Now, when it comes to matters of faith, I suppose I'm like a lot of people. There are some things that I believe, and there are other things of which I'm not so sure. And that, I suppose, is what keeps bringing me back to my church, even if I have been away for awhile — a desire to sort them out.
  
  At this stage of my life, there are many things of which I am not certain. But when I was in college, I believed I knew most of the answers. I didn't, of course, but I thought I did.
  
  And this acquaintance was convinced that he, too, had all the answers — about God and the afterlife and the existence of hell and the certainty of the end times as described in the Book of Revelation. His answers weren't like mine, though, and he apparently decided it was his obligation to "save" me.
  
  Problem was, I didn't think I needed to be saved. The mean and vengeful God he kept describing sounded nothing like what my parents had always told me about God. So I defended my image of a loving and compassionate God. And he defended his image of fire and brimstone and eternal damnation. Neither of us budged an inch.
  
  Ultimately, I suppose, we decided to agree to disagree, and we went our separate ways. He probably thought I was a lost cause, doomed to hell, and maybe he was right.
  
  I know I'm not as convinced about some things now as I was then, but one thing that I still believe that I believed in my college days is that humans are obliged to be good stewards of this planet.
  
  We are so obliged because, of all the creatures on earth, we are the smart ones. Every other creature on this planet does things to satisfy its needs without giving any thought to the consequences to others. But only man's activities can completely alter an ecosystem.
  
  And man knows it.
  
  We aren't necessarily superior. But it is humans' ability to think and to reason that sets them apart from all the other creatures."[W]hy did God plague us with the power to think?" asked Henry Drummond in "Inherit the Wind." "What other merit have we? The elephant is larger, the horse is swifter and stronger, the butterfly is more beautiful, the mosquito is more prolific, even the simple sponge is more durable. Or does a sponge think?"
  
  Like Matthew Harrison Brady, I do not know if a sponge thinks. I doubt it. But, if it does, its reasoning cannot possibly be worse than the reasoning of those who found ways to cut corners — and allow man's lust for oil to jeopardize the Gulf of Mexico and all the wildlife who live in and around it.
  
  If there is a hell, surely there is a place in it that is being held for those who allowed this catastrophe to occur.


• I also have been thinking of times I spent on the Gulf coast. I was thinking of one year in particular — which year it was escapes me at the moment, but I'm guessing that I was about 14 or 15 at the time — when our family went to South Padre Island for Christmas, then drove north by northeast until we got to New Orleans and went to the Sugar Bowl.
  
  In those days, my family had one of those tent trailers, and we often slept in it when we went on trips, but, for some reason, as we made our way along the Louisiana coast, we stayed overnight in a very basic travel lodge. The rooms weren't very fancy, but they were roomy enough for a family of four, and they had their own stoves so we could cook our meals there.
  
  I can remember the seawater smell of the harbor that was a short walk from the place where we stayed, and I can remember tasting that smell in the fresh (and dirt cheap) shrimp we bought from the local fishermen. I always loved my mother's cooking — but what she was able to do with that fresh shrimp, some rice and some canned vegetables (plus a few well–chosen spices) simply defied belief.
  
  And I wonder what this oil spill is going to mean to fresh Gulf seafood.
  
  Will future generations be able to enjoy the pleasure of fresh Gulf shrimp?


• Several years later, I went on a trip with my mother to Biloxi, Miss. She loved to jump the waves in the ocean — no matter how old she got, she became almost childlike when she was near the sea — and for some reason the two of us decided to go to Biloxi one summer. I was living in Arkansas, and Mom was living in Texas. We saw each other so rarely that I guess we just decided to take a little trip together.
  
  So we got a motel room on the beach and spent a few days breathing the Gulf air and jumping the waves. At night, we dined on fresh seafood and gazed at the water. From time to time, we saw birds that had been perched on the roof take flight over the water.
  
  It was a memorable trip, a memory that I will always cherish. But I wonder how many such memories will be made in the coming years if the oil slick turns out to be only as bad as — and not worse than — the experts predict.


• Then, a couple of years later, when I was working on the copy desk for a daily newspaper, we began to get word of an oil tanker that had hit a reef in Alaska and spilled a quarter of a million barrels of crude oil into the water.
  
  I am speaking, of course, of the Exxon Valdez disaster. That happened more than 20 years ago. You don't hear much about it anymore, but they are still struggling to clean up the mess.
  
  Granted, it is pretty remote — and relatively confined — but it is not terribly comforting to know that it is far easier to access the Gulf of Mexico than Prince William Sound — nor is it reassuring to think of how vast is the Gulf's area by comparison.
  
  In fact, if the worst–case scenario that I have heard (so far) is correct, the spill in the Gulf exceeded the volume that was spilled into the waters of Prince William Sound sometime on the third day — and crude has been gushing into the Gulf for more than a month now with no indication that man has found a solution.

I know that Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was panned — and deservedly so — for delivering an, at best, tepid and, at worst, vapid response to Barack Obama's address on the financial crisis in February 2009.

But I have to give the man credit for taking the lead for his state, which is still recovering from the damage left by Hurricane Katrina nearly five years ago.

"We've been frustrated with the disjointed effort to date that has too often meant too little, too late for the oil hitting our coast," Jindal said.

Well, somebody has to stand up for Louisiana. And that's what citizens elect governors for, isn't it?

I guess it's also what presidents are elected to do. But, as Bob Herbert observes in the New York Times, "after more than a month of BP's demonstrated incompetence, the administration continues to dither."

I know there are budget problems out the hoo–ha today. But the oil spill in the Gulf calls for bold leadership now, not dithering. The cost should not be a factor. Nor should anything else other than stopping the flow of oil into the Gulf and devoting all available resources to cleaning up the oil that has been spilled there so far.

And whatever needs be done to rescue the wildlife of the region must be done. The creatures of the Gulf of Mexico are the innocent victims of human greed. No one would mistake me for an environmental activist, but BP must pay a heavy price for what it has done, and the federal government must shoulder the responsibility for repairing the damage.

Blame can be assigned later. The wildlife — and the livelihoods — of the Gulf need to be rescued now.

Sacrifice isn't the sort of thing politicians — especially politicians who belong to the party that is at risk in the upcoming election — want to talk about with their constituents.

But they must be candid with the American people — and they must be insistent about finding answers — whether or not this turns out to be an unusually active hurricane season.

To live up to the lofty promises of hope and change, Obama must be a true agent of change at a time when it is particularly challenging. Obama promised hope and change, but, with health care reform not kicking in for another four years and until unemployment starts making noticeable movement in the right direction, the average voter can look around and say things aren't noticeably better than they were the last time they went to the polls.

By law, a president is elected to a four–year term. But the actual "windows" for tangible achievements are two years and four years. The four–year window is for the president himself, but the two–year window — leading up to the aptly named midterms (because of the resemblance to mid–semester exams in college) — is an assessment time frame with which Obama has no experience, although it will produce the congressional lineup that will affect the president's next two years in office.

Bill Clinton understands it, though. Until the mid–1980s, Arkansas elected its governor every two years, and Clinton understood the psychology that is necessary to be successful in an office that was on the ballot every other year. It didn't help him prevent the tsunami of 1994, but I think he had regained his balance by 1998.

Anyway, I believe most House members (and any governors who live in states that still choose their governor every two years — if there are any) would tell you that the campaign never really ends. Neither do the expectations.

"Hope" made a nice campaign slogan in 2008.

Now, the folks who rode that slogan to victory need to realize that, in the words of Emily Dickinson, hope is the things with feathers.

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Declaring War on Poverty

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If you look at an American history book today, you're likely to see Lyndon Johnson's name prominently linked with the Vietnam War.

There is certainly good reason for that. Like the mutually dependent tales of the Nixon presidency and the Watergate scandal, you can't tell the story of the Johnson presidency without telling the story of the Vietnam War — and vice versa.

Dig a little deeper in history's account of that administration, and you're likely to see Johnson's name mentioned in connection with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, Johnson was a major figure in those legislative acts as well, and it would be wrong for the history books not to mention his contributions to them.

It's interesting, isn't it, the things a president is remembered for — as opposed to what that president wanted to do when he took office? But the truth — as unpleasant as it often can be — is that the times define the president, not the other way around.

It's pretty well known that Johnson was an admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal," which should come as no real surprise since Johnson served in the U.S. House for the last two–thirds of FDR's presidency. But when LBJ became president, he had to lead a nation that was embroiled in a Cold War that never existed in Roosevelt's day. And the economy of the 1960s was in much better shape than the economy of the 1930s had been.

Johnson wanted to leave his mark on American daily life in a way that went beyond what FDR's presidency had achieved. When he left the White House, he wanted to leave behind a government that would offer to people not a handout but a hand up. He was ensnared by a war in a tiny Asian land few Americans knew existed, but he still had many domestic accomplishments, and he might well be remembered as one of America's 10 greatest presidents if not for that war in southeast Asia.

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Sometimes, I'm inclined to believe that LBJ may have felt more pressure to build on FDR's legacy than he felt to be worthy of being Kennedy's successor.

Nevertheless, on this day in 1964 — exactly six months after the assassination of John F. Kennedy — Johnson fired the first shot in the war on poverty.

He came to Ann Arbor, Mich., to address the graduates of the University of Michigan, and he took the opportunity to call upon them — and the rest of America's citizens — "to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society."

The "Great Society." That, Johnson apparently believed, would be the phrase that would conjure up memories of his presidency for future generations. The way "New Deal" summoned memories of FDR and the way "New Frontier" reminded listeners of JFK.

He pursued that goal because he had been personally touched by poverty when he was young in central Texas, touched by it in ways that patricians like Roosevelt and Kennedy never could have been.

He did not pursue it because powerful lobbyists encouraged him to do so. There are no lobbyists for the poor, the homeless, the uneducated. Nor were there many votes to be gained from legislation aimed at helping the needy.

He felt called upon to urge his countrymen "to lead America toward a new age." He genuinely wanted to help what the Bible called "the least of these."

Perhaps LBJ believed what Gandhi believed, that "[p]overty is the worst kind of violence." I don't know if he did or did not, but wouldn't it be ironic if Lyndon Johnson, whose name is cursed in the annals of history for America's long and bloody involvement in Vietnam, was driven in his quest for the Great Society by his revulsion to the violence of poverty?

"We have the power," he said, "to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will and your labor and your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society."

And, in the days ahead, Johnson promoted — and pushed through Congress — enough domestic legislative accomplishments — among them, acts that created Head Start, food stamps, Work Study, Medicare, public broadcasting and Medicaid; acts that provided funds to support the arts and the beautification and conservation of the nation's natural wonders; acts that encouraged a higher standard of living for all — to make half a dozen administrations successful in the assessment of history.

Eradicating poverty was a worthy goal, but Johnson was not naive enough to think that it could be achieved in a few years. He warned his listeners that "the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor."

America, he knew, would always be a work in progress, and there are many challenges today that Johnson could not have anticipated 46 years ago. But, because of his efforts, when Johnson left office, the playing field had been leveled dramatically. In less than six years, Johnson brought the nation's poverty rate down from 22% to 13%.

In his speech at Ann Arbor, wrote historian Theodore H. White in "The Making of the President 1964," Johnson "was describing ... all the uplands of the new civilization to which America could be guided."

And, yes, there was a clear upside to it for LBJ when compared to his predecessor. "Kennedy had demanded sacrifice," wrote White. "Johnson promised happiness."

I recall once hearing George Carlin making fun of the tendency in America to "declare war" on anything we don't like, and then he recited a list of such wars — the wars on cancer, crime, poverty, drugs, etc.

It was a funny bit, but I wonder, when I think of what Johnson achieved, whether it isn't necessary to call for an effort that is the moral equivalent of war on some things in order to bring the kind of serious attention and focus that is needed to make them realities?

Maybe it will take that kind of approach to finally rid the world of cancer. Maybe things like cancer can't be stopped until they are treated like the deadly adversaries they are.

And, perhaps, that brings us to another lesson from the Johnson/Vietnam years that can be applied to almost anything from the war on drugs to the prospect of a nuclear war:

Some wars cannot be won and must never be fought.

And some wars, like the war on poverty and the war on terrorism, are going to take a lot of commitment and sacrifice.

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