DailyNewsGems

Hail to the Chief: A Dark Day in Cleveland Sports History

Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield once wrote that the three most evil men of the 20^th century were, “Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley.”

O’Malley, of course, was the brute of an owner, who moved Brooklyn’s beloved Dodgers to L.A. after the 1957 season.

Now, we may have to update the three most evil men of the 21^st century to be: bin Laden, Hussein, and Rob Manfred.

Most of us will never forget January 29, 2018.

It was the day that Chief Wahoo died.

It was the day, the baseball commissioner issued a stinging press release announcing the Cleveland Indians would discontinue using Chief Wahoo logo on their uniforms, beginning in 2019.

It was first reported by The New York Times.

According to the press release, Mr. Manfred is committed to nurturing a culture of diversity and inclusion, and, apparently, the Indians Chief Wahoo, a cartoon caricature of an American Indian, smiling ear-to-ear, is deemed too offensive to continue wearing.

I applaud the commissioner’s commitment to diversity and inclusion, we all do, but I would also suggest that he first get his own house in order before he starts picking on an innocuous logo in order to solve the country’s social ills.

Dr . Richard Lapchick, the primary author of the 2017 Major League Baseball Racial and Gender Report Card , says when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, his vision was to see diverse players on the field, reflecting diverse coaches and those in the front office. Lapchick's report shows “Major League Baseball still has a long way to go to achieve those goals.”

While MLB, according to the report, did receive an A- for hiring people of color; it dropped precipitously to a C- for gender hiring practices. 20 female employees hold executive positions in central baseball. 

In terms of gender, senior team administration received a D+ while professional administration received a C-. "The team front offices need to have more open hiring practices so they will look more like the residents of their community and of America,” Lapchick stated in his summary report.

Interestingly, gender equality doesn’t appear to be high on Manfred’s list of diversity and inclusion priorities.

Back to Chief Wahoo.

For some of us, like former Plain Dealer reporter and state editor Bob Daniels, when he thinks of Chief Wahoo, he thinks of “the long baseball tradition and a lifetime of summer fun in northeast Ohio.” “I do not think,” Daniels emphasized, “of illiterate, alcoholic barbarians infested with lifestyle and personal-hygiene-related illnesses, who never developed written language beyond pictographs.”

Daniels also takes issue with the "Diversity" card Manfred is flashing.

"The commissioner's office uses common PC [Politically Correct] words like "inclusive" and "diversity," while simultaneously and hypocritically reducing inclusiveness and diversity by isolating native American representations from baseball's lucrative national presence," Daniels says.

Others, roundly applaud the Indians decision to abandon the Chief.

New York Times bestselling author of "God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours”  ," and former Plain Dealer columnist, Regina Brett, says that she's "thrilled the team will retire Chief Wahoo. It's 2018. Any caricature of a Native American with bright red skin and a giant hook nose is offensive."

Similarly, Dave Hyde, an Ohio native, and an award-winning sports columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper,  chimed in to say, that he never really thought anything was wrong with Chief Wahoo as a kid growing up in Columbus, and occasionally, coming to the stadium, and listening to the rumbling sounds of John Adams pounding away on his drums.

“When you do think about it,” Hyde reasoned, "how can an awful caricature of a Native American be any team mascot? The only strange part of this is it took until 2018 to stop with Chief Wahoo? “

It’s a shame that Chief Wahoo has become so demonized over the last few decades, because that was never the intention.

Walter Goldbach, the artist, who originally designed the logo in 1946 at age 17 (who incidentally died in December, age 88), never dreamed Chief Wahoo would be so ridiculed and held up as symbol of racism and considered so demeaning to Native Americans. Goldbach once said, “it was the last thing on my mind [to] offend someone.”

Rob Manfred, obviously has little appreciation for how much Chief Wahoo has meant to Cleveland Indians fans for so long (over 70 years); it’s been such a source of pride, a rallying cry in good times and bad, that connects generations, creates memories, and celebrates families.

The Chief has never represented racism, fascism, or repression, like so many other flags and relics of the past.

Chief Wahoo, moreover, has been a universal symbol that spans the globe.

I recently talked to someone at TribeFest who just came back from Italy. He was walking down the street, he told me, wearing a Chief Wahoo cap. Someone immediately yelled to him in broken English, “Cleveland Indians…Go Tribe!”

Having the Chief stripped from their lives is especially painful to someone like Rich Passan, former Plain Dealer columnist, sports copy editor, and local sports radio talk show host, who was raised on Chief Wahoo for much of his younger days as an Indians fan. “Chief Wahoo to me,” Passan says, “is the Cleveland Indians. For all those years, no one complained.”

Passan, like so many other die-hard Tribe fans, has a lot to vent about.

“I am appalled and sad at the same time,” Passan explained. “Appalled because baseball has enough troubles without inserting itself into something other than the sport itself. And sad because a symbol that has been a part of my life is disappearing for no good reason.”

While the Chief has undoubtedly triggered controversy and is a source of rage to Native American groups, not all Native Americans take such offense to the logo.

According to Dan Coughlin, a longtime sports anchor/reporter for WJW Fox 8 in Cleveland, author, and former sports writer for the Plain Dealer, “most people of Native American heritage had no problem with the Chief. I understand that the Cherokees in Oklahoma are actually proud to be associated with him.”

Coughlin additionally argues that the American Indians have a lot to complain about. “Treaties were broken, the U. S. government swindled them. Shamefully, many have been relegated to reservations.  It's a long list. Chief Wahoo isn't on it. “

While the Cleveland Indians will abandon the Chief Wahoo after this season, they still will maintain merchandising rights and continue to sell apparel with the Chief at team shops.

Which means, ironically, Chief Wahoo logos will dot Progressive Field in great abundance, like the stadium has never seen before.

A small consolation, indeed, to rabid Indians fans.

Will there be another logo, or will the Indians be restricted to using the unimaginative block “C ” on the uniforms?

After all, what’s a team without a logo?

According to Curtis Danburg, Senior Director of Communications with the Cleveland Indians, they will explore options for a new logo, but no timetable has been set.

In the meantime, while those few, those happy few, are downright giddy that Chief Wahoo has been thrown overboard, others, mostly the Indians most loyal fans, will have to endure the sharp, piercing pain, that their very soul has been torn from their bodies, with blood dripping from their hearts.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

January 30, 2018

Old Friends: The Simon & Garfunkel of the 18th Century

Pulitzer Prize historian Gordon S. Wood, in “Friends Divided” does a superb job of pitting the ideas, principles, and different versions of their ideal governments against one another in order to explain to the reader, why Thomas Jefferson might be more remembered and affectionately thought of today than John Adams.

Why shouldn’t these two Founding Fathers be equally remembered and the phrases from their vast trove of writings and books be equally invoked by Americans today?

Both, after all, were omnivorous readers, both well-educated and steeped in history, poetry, and the arts, both were the principal framers of the Constitution, both ministers abroad, Jefferson (France) Adams (Great Britain), and both occupied the office of the President of the United States in the early stages of the frail republic.

The answer becomes clearer to the reader as they make their way through Wood’s sharp analysis and parsing of personal letters, penned by both Adams and Jefferson. One believed all men were created equal, the other only saw the inequality in society; one yearned for a nation free of British tradition, while the other held monarchial sentiment and a troubling reverence for the British constitution. 

Most importantly, the reason one is better remembered than the other, stems from one's high hopes for the Republic, especially in how all the nationalities, diversities, and religions in America would bond in one magnificent way, while the other took a dour and decidedly more pessimistic view of the diversity of America and the portents of the future. One was inspiring, the other pessimistic.

The French Revolution, religion, and spiteful partisan politics are just a few of the principle differences of opinion that would divided these intellectual firebrands over the years until Benjamin Rush would intercede, convincing both to cast aside their differences and begin corresponding together, once again. Wood reports 158 letters would be written between Jefferson and Adams.

If they had email today, you could just imagine their inboxes would be filled to the brim.

--Bill Lucey
January 28, 2018

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For One Brief Shining Moment: The Melding of the Imperial Historian with the Camelot President

President Kennedy and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in the Oval Office of the White House, July 26, 1962.

Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

***

Historian Richard Aldous presents a remarkably well-balanced and informative, biography of one of the preeminent historians of the modern age, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

At the young age of 28, the Ohio born historian won a Pulitzer Prize in history for the “Age of Jackson,” still considered a classic today, in capturing not so much the biographical nuances of the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, but the Jacksonian democracy that permeated the era with its progression of classical liberalism.

Despite his multi-faceted intellectual endeavors, Schlesinger is best known for being President Kennedy’s court historian.

It was a perfect marriage.

Both appeared to be cut from the same cloth, both with overbearing fathers, both Harvard educated, both with best selling books at a young age, and both immersed in rocky marriages.

Schlesinger, of course, would go on to write “A Thousand Days’’ his personal recollections of the short-lived White House years of John F. Kennedy. The book won a Pulitzer Prize for biography or autobiography.

Throughout Professor Aldous’s well researched, superbly written biography, you get the sense that over the years, Schlesinger regretted becoming too connected to the Kennedy’s. It was John F. Kennedy, after all, who pulled him away from his professorship at Harvard, a position he loved and absolutely hated giving up. And it was Ethel Kennedy, who prodded him to write a biography on Bobby Kennedy, which he did in “Robert Kennedy and His Times.”

Schlesinger did go on to produce some widely read political narratives, including the “Imperial Presidency,” and “Cycles of American History,” among others.

Still, you wonder what revolutionary works this prestigious American historian, social critic, and public intellectual would have produced had he not been so tightly connected to the Kennedy’s and cultivating the Kennedy mystique.

--Bill Lucey
January 22, 2018 

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The Washington Post Soars to New Heights in 'The Post'

 

“The Post,” Steven Spielberg’s political thriller of a film, centering on the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, initially by the New York Times, then the Washington Post, appears to be a smash hit.

Over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, the film generated $18.6 million from North American theaters, coming in second behind “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.” “The Post” is additionally being met with enthusiastic reviews from a number of film critics.

Among other accolades, at the 75th Golden Globe Awards, the film received six nominations: Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, Best Actress – Drama for Streep, Best Actor – Drama for Hanks, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score.

Much like he did with “Lincoln” (in nabbing Daniel Day-Lewis to play President Abraham Lincoln), Spielberg went to the top of the mountain in search of star-studded talent, this time convincing Tom Hanks to play the tough as nails executive editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, and Meryl Streep to unveil her interpretation of Katharine “Kay” Graham, publisher of the Post.

How believable were they in their roles?

Author and journalist, Sally Quinn, the third wife of Ben Bradlee, who writes a blog about religion  , responding though an email, wrote that she enjoyed “The Post” immensely and thought Hanks did an incredible job portraying her former husband, so much so that she cried while watching the film.

Author and Washington based journalist, Jim Mann, who worked briefly on the Watergate scandal while at the Washington Post, thought Streep's “rendition of Graham was close to perfect.”

Even actor Michael Stuhlbarg's depiction of Abe Rosenthal, the irascible managing editor of the New York Times, met with rousing approval from a family member.

Andrew Rosenthal, former Editorial Page editor of the New York Times, (now a regular Op-Ed columnist ), thought Stuhlbarg was magnificent, but admitted his disappointment that a larger scene in the movie involving his dad, was left on the cutting room floor.

With a hefty $50 million budget to work with, Spielberg didn’t spare any expense, going to great lengths to make sure select scenes and the general landscape presented in the film was a true reflection of the early 1970s.

The newsrooms of both the Washington Post and New York Times, for example, depicting predominantly white men in white shirts, clacking away at their typewriters, using their rotary dial phones, while flipping a lighter, and firing up a cigarette, was convincingly presented.

Even the film’s exterior panoramas of the New York Times former building at 229 West 43rd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue near Times Square in Manhattan (from 1913 through 2007), looked like it was the real deal. Through the magic of Hollywood, however, Spielberg’s production company used The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen building in mid-Manhattan (20 West 44th Street, New York) as the Times’ former headquarters. The Times signature 300-foot-long array of globe lights, that was prominently featured outside its old building, were the original fixtures kept by the Times.

Incredibly, it’s been almost 50 years since the Pentagon Papers were published, and what an uproar it caused at the time, pitting the Government against press freedoms provided by the First Amendment.

Many of the press liberties that are taken for granted today, came as the result of hard fought, gutsy battles, of two newspapers and their indomitable editors.

When Neil Sheehan’s first batch of revelations from the Pentagon Papers splashed across the front page of the New York Times on June 13, 1971, newspapers were put on a collision course with the Richard Nixon administration.

After the third instalment of the Times expose, the U.S. Department of Justice secured, through the U.S. District Court, a restraining order on the Times’ from publishing classified material (on the grounds the material would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to U.S. national defense interests”), essentially shutting down the paper from publishing the Pentagon documents.

Bradlee thundered that the ruling represented, "a black mark on the history of democracy.”

Five days later, the Post, undaunted, despite the temporary restraining order imposed on the Times, decided to charge ahead and publish their own analysis of the Pentagon Papers, which unlike the Times, did not reprint classified documents, but paraphrased or quoted select sentences from the study. In particular, the Post articles highlighted the deep divisions between the State and Defense Departments with its policy in Vietnam. The Post analysis also cast President Johnson in an unfavorable light, documenting the lengths to which he went to escalate the war.

As enlightening as the publication of the Pentagon Papers proved to be, things, nonetheless, looked mighty bleak for the Times and Post and the freedoms once taken for granted under the First Amendment.

15 stormy days would ensue before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision, a favorable ruling (6-3) for the press, ruling that prior restraint was unconstitutional and further asserting, that “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.”

Ben Bradlee and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham celebrated the 1971 ruling allowing publication of the Pentagon Papers. Photo Credit: Associated Press

 

As brilliant as the Times and the Post’s reporting was, it’s worth emphasizing that such an expose wasn’t possible, but for a brave, courageous Pentagon analysist (superhawk turned superdove), Daniel Ellsberg, stepping forward and going public with 4,000 pages, and 2.5 million words of critical Pentagon history, releasing copies first to the Times, then to the Post.

It was Ellsberg’s hope that the release of this Pentagon study, officially titled, “History of the United States Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy" commissioned in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, would convince President Nixon to change his Vietnam policy.

Among other troubling revelations, the Pentagon Papers showed that the Truman Administration provided military aid to France in its colonial war against the communist-led Viet Minh, directly involving the United States in Vietnam; and that President Lyndon B. Johnson ramped up the war against North Vietnam, while planning to wage a covert war in 1964, a full year before the U.S. involvement was publicly revealed. The Pentagon study additionally documented disturbing cases of deception by the Johnson administration, by, for example, withholding vital information from Congress and the public, critical information, which raised serious questions about the effectiveness of the U.S. government’s course of action in Southeast Asia.

Knowing his treasonous actions would more than likely land him in jail, Ellsberg wasn’t surprised when he was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, which carried a total maximum sentence of 115 years.

The charges against the former RAND Corp. employee, however, were dismissed on May 11, 1973. on grounds of "improper Government conduct shielded so long from public view," as ruled by United States District Court Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr.

Another highly invasive abuse of power directed at Mr. Ellsberg happened on September 3, 1971, shortly after the Pentagon Papers went public, when H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's top advisor, ordered the break in of Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. The burglars photographed files, but found nothing damaging on the former Pentagon analyst. The Nixon administration rationalized such action on the peculiar grounds that Ellsberg threatened national security.

After seeing the film, I now understand why Mr. Spielberg made the Washington Post the center of this film, and not the New York Times.

The Pentagon Papers clearly raised Ben Bradlee and the Washington Post’s stature to new heights, demonstrating their fearless resolve not to be bullied by the White House in withholding the truth from its readers.

Prior to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Washington Star had a higher circulation than the Post. Kay Graham’s paper was no longer a local paper, they were now a prominent national paper.

Though the Times would win a Pulitzer Prize for the Pentagon Papers in 1972, only a year later, the Post would scoop its chief rival and win a Pulitzer for the Watergate scandal, a triumphant moment for the Post in which Bradlee roared, ''Eat your heart out, Abe Rosenthal, eat your heart out!"

The Post's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, permanently changed "the ethos of the paper and crystallized for editors and reporters everywhere how independent and determined and confident of its purpose the new Washington Post had become,’’ Bradlee would wrote in his memoirs.

Bradlee also wrote that the Post had become, “a paper that stands up to charges of treason, a paper that holds firm in the face of charges from the president, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General, never mind an assistant attorney general. A paper that holds its head high, committed unshakably to principle.”

Katharine Graham, the heroic publisher, who ultimately gave the green light to publish the papers (“OK...let's go, let's publish”), writes in a book she wrote about the Pentagon Papers, that when national editor Ben Bagdikian came back to Washington with a suitcase full of Pentagon documents from Boston (given to him by Ellsberg) and called the executive editor to ask whether they should publish, Bradlee purportedly responded, "If we don't publish, there's going to be a new executive editor at the Washington Post."

That quote, Graham readily admits, might be apocryphal, but she said it certainly sounded like something Ben would say.

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

January 18, 2018

 

Further Resources

• Pentagon Papers (National Archives)
• Time Magazine, June 28, 1971: The Pentagon Papers: The Secret War

 

The Vanity Fair Diaries: The Decade of Glitz, Glam, and Greed

Tina Brown and Vanity Fair staffers review the latest layout of an upcoming editon.

Photo Credit: Tina Brown

 

What do you remember about the 1980s?

The decade that ushered in Ronald Reagan and his vision of a shining “city on a hill”; the Cinderella story of an assistant nursery school teacher, Diana Frances Spencer, landing her Prince Charming (or, so she thought) when she pledged her troth to Charles, Prince of Wales;  Dynasty star, Joan Collins (Alexis Colby) and her signature puff shoulder dresses; Michael Jackson, ascending to the throne as the “King of Pop;” and corporate greed leading to the collapse of a number of prominent financiers, including Michael Milken, Dennis Levine, Ivan Boesky and Martin Siegel for racketeering and trading with inside information.

Harvard Business Review, in fact, labeled the 1980s, the “Decade of Greed.”

Tina Brown, award-winning journalist, author, former magazine editor, and founder of Women in the World Summit, takes us back to the glitter and glam of the affluent 1980s, in “The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992.”

Brown contextualized her personal diaries, from the time she arrived in New York City in 1983 as an advisor to Vanity Fair Magazine, quickly replacing Leo Lerman as editor in chief in 1984, and assuming editorial control of a magazine that she considered "pretentious, humorless, not a bit clever…just dull.”

Vanity Fair was also losing money in buckets.

Condé Nast Publications, under the ownership of Samuel "S.I." Newhouse Jr., forked over $50 million to acquire the popular culture and fashion magazine in 1981.

The first version of Vanity Fair was published from 1913 to 1936.

The Oxford educated Tina Brown, of course, the “Wunderkind of British Magazines,” as she was known, earned her journalistic chops back in London, becoming the top editor at the Tatler, a fashion and lifestyle magazine, when she was only 25, turning it into a trendy magazine for urban professionals (“Sloane Rangers”), making it edgy, dazzling, and boosting circulation from 10,000 to 40,000.

Brown stormed into her Vanity Fair job with a Category Five Hurricane bravado, replacing a number of staff members, (with pools of “blood on the floors”) while a few, the lucky few, were shipped off to other Condé Nast Publications. What Brown wanted was not stuffy, bookish, intellectual pieces, but the marriage of celebrities with cutting edge, politically engaged journalism that carried some bite, capturing the cultural zeitgeist, mirroring, in a sense, the success of Don Hewitt’s CBS’ 60 Minutes with its high-lo balance.

Brown’s first issue of Vanity Fair as editor was in April, 1984, featuring a new up and coming actress, Daryl Hannah, splashed on its cover with the headline: “Blonde Ambition.”

Many of the most eye turning Vanity Fair cover shoots under Brown’s stewardship were Annie Leibovitz masterpieces, including, “Jerry Hall Tells All” (March, 1985 issue), Cher (May, 1986 issue), Michael Jackson, "Hall of Fame" (December, 1989 issue), and arguably the most talked about VF cover of all time, a pregnant Demi Moore, fully exposed (August, 1991 issue), "More Demi Moore" The Demi Moore issue, by the way, sold a staggering 548,058 newsstand copies.

Brown spared no expense in recruiting some of the most talented, prolific writers, such as Alex Shoumatoff, writing on the murder of the rain-forest activist Chico Mendes from Brazil, Pete Hamill reflecting on the 10-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon , the multi-talented Gail Sheehy on the self-destruction of one-time presidential hopeful Gary Hart, or Dominick Dunne, profiling British socialite, Claus von Bülow, who was charged with attempted murder for trying to kill his wife (twice) with insulin injections--in 1982, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison--though, the verdict was later overturned. 

Brown reportedly signed writers to substantial contracts, ranging, in some cases, from between $60,000 and $100,000 for four or more articles.

Her bold, creative, no holds barred approach, paid off handsomely.

In 1987, a mere three years after taking the reins, VF turned a profit and its new star editor was awarded with a $30,000 raise. What’s more, from January through March, 1989, VF issues made a profit of $1.4 million, a 63 percent rise in circulation (652,000), and a tripling of ad pages, from 431 in 1985 to 1,193.

What’s most intriguing about Tina Brown’s new book, centers on the title itself, “diaries.” You almost feel guilty peering into the private journal of someone else. 

But the reader, I suspect, will quickly get over their uneasiness and soak up all the juicy gossip they can, whether it’s Carl Bernstein's affair with Margaret Jay, the wife of British ambassador to the United States Peter Jay, while married to writer and filmmaker, Nora Ephron, seven months pregnant with their second child; Washington Post writer, Sally Quinn, disinviting Brown from attending hubby Ben Bradlees’s 65^th birthday party for not warning her in advance of Christopher Buckley’s scathing VF review of her novel, “Regrets Only,’’ in which he referred to it as “cliterature;” strong suspicions that Arianna Stasinopoúlou's new husband (in 1987), Michael Huffington, might be gay; Donald Trump pouring a glass of wine down the back of Marie Bremmer at the Tavern at the Green for taking down the real estate mogul and his messy divorce from Ivanka ; or learn what Jerry Hall does to (then) husband Mick Jagger to prevent him from cheating on her before releasing him to the wolves.

Tina Brown doesn’t spare any arrows for The New York Times, claiming the paper is “pompous and badly laid out,” according to a 1988 entry from her diary. Similarly, she notes that Condé Nast’s other publication, The New Yorker, isn’t “feeling the pulse of the news” under the leadership of its editor, Bob Gottlieb.

Aside from the globs of juicy gossip, The Vanity Fair Diaries, catches the true spirt of the age, namely, the unabashed flaunting of wealth with extravagant parties, whether aboard Malcolm Forbes private yacht, The Highlander, with lobster and champagne flowing freely; or at Spago, Hollywood, with wall to wall stars and celebrities, including Ryan O’Neal, Jack Nicholson, Joan Collins, Walter Matheau, and Jack Lemmon.

To be sure, as Brown’s diaries corroborate, the 1980s was teeming with greed and glamour during the era of Reaganomics; by 1989, according to Newsweek, the top 1 percent of families owned 48 percent of the total financial wealth in the country.

In The Vanity Fair Diaries, in fact, readers get a rather obstructed view of how the other half lives in the Big Apple; the New York Tina Brown chronicles is the story of the big and powerful, the extravagantly rich, lunch at the opulent Four Seasons restaurant, the world of the glamorous with gold-plated penthouses overlooking the magnificent splendor of the Manhattan skyline, while dashing off to their ritzy Hampton addresses for weekends and the holidays.

Small wonder, then, that Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987) was such a smash hit, his satirical novel, which chronicled the rise and fall of Sherman McCoy, an investment banker making a million a year, who is impervious to everything around him, except, that is, appearances, sex, and money. 1987 was also the year, the motion picture “Wall Street’’ hit the theaters in which the leading character, Gordon Gekko, played by actor Michael Douglas, affirms that “greed is good.”

To her credit, Brown, as recorded in her diary (1987), notices an appreciably rise in homeless sprawled across several streets in NYC.

And throughout The Vanity Fair Diaries, Brown is surrounded by the HIV/AIDS epidemic sweeping through New York, first as a casual observer, and then becoming emotionally distraught in losing some of her nearest and dearest friends.

According to the New York City Department of Health, there were 717 deaths with AIDS in New York City alone, from 1983 through 1992, the same time of Brown’s VF Diaries.

For the March, 1987 issue, VF ran a gallery of photos on the lives lost from AIDS, largely from the fashion and arts industries. 

The Vanity Fair Diaries, it should be noted, isn’t solely devoted to Brown’s professional career, vast amount of entries center on her family life, especially her husband, Sir Harold Evans, the former editor of the Sunday Times. Harry, her beloved Harry, is Brown’s rock, her knight and shining armor, who brings a sense of calm to her life while she deals with the periodic storms raging within the VF editorial offices.

The persistent challenges of maintaining a sense of balance in raising two children, (George, born in 1986, and a daughter, Isabel, born in 1990), while revolutionizing one of the nation’s most vibrant magazines, reveals Brown to be just as vulnerable and exasperated as any working mother.

The Vanity Fair Diaries ends with Brown facing a new challenge in her professional career, a job she had being coveting for quite some time. On June 30, 1992, she was named editor of The New Yorker, age 38, replacing Robert Gottlieb, an announcement that “stunned the publishing industry,’’ according to a page one New York Times article.

As strong, independent, and competitive as Brown is, you would think her role models would be women like Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, or Geraldine Ferraro.

But as Brown writes, “my role models are men-they have the lives I wanted.”

 

--Bill Lucey

[email protected]

January 10, 2018

'Darkest Hour' Was Gary Oldman's Finest Hour

 

Put the Oscar on ice for Gary Oldman.

I spent a cold Christmas afternoon, taking in “Darkest Hour,” English film director Joe Wright’s brilliant depiction of Winston Churchill during the early stages of World War II, specifically, May, 1940, when a menacing Nazi Germany loomed large and all seemed lost.

It was hard to believe the mesmerizing performance unveiled by Mr. Oldman was really the same actor who portrayed Sid Vicious in “Sid and Nancy” and the corrupt cop, Jack Grimaldi, in “Romeo is Bleeding.”

But through creative makeup enhancements and prosthetics, viewers found themselves lost in who was really behind the mask. For all they knew, they were transported back in time, when Britain was indeed on the brink of capitulation, led by a new wobbly Prime Minister, who had failed miserably during the ill-fated Gallipoli Campaign (the Allied powers botched attempt to control the sea route from Europe to Russia during World War I) and for supporting Edward VIII during the Abdication Crisis.

Unlike a number of productions about Churchill during this tumultuous period in Britain’s history, the movie doesn’t attempt to be a complete history of World War II, (from vanquished to victor), but instead, focuses on the intense days of May and June, 1940, during Churchill’s finest hours.

Before deciding how to defend England at the time of its greatest peril, Winston Churchill must confront enemies in his own backyard first, namely, deposed British PM Neville Chamberlain (forced to resign for being too weak on national security) and Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, both of whom are trying to box Churchill into a corner to seek a peace treaty with Germany (with Italy serving as an intermediary) before it’s too late.

Initially, even a jittery King George VI (a k a Bertie) offers heeded suggestions to No. 10 Downing Street that a peace treaty might be the Island’s most viable option.

Just as a bewildered, grief stricken, Churchill gives his reluctant ascent to the War Cabinet to consider peace talks with the Nazi dictator, the “Miracle of Dunkirk” fell from the heavens.

“Operation Dynamo,” as it was called, involved the use of civilian boats —rescuing more than 300,000 British troops from the beaches and harbor of Dunkirk, in the north of France, between May 26 and June 4, 1940.

It was a major game changer for Churchill; the wind now at his back and the people of Britain solidly behind him to prosecute the war against the wrath of Nazism, punctuated, of course, by his thunderous speech to the House of Commons of the Parliament on June 4, 1940 , with the highly celebrated words, ``we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…” 

As captivating as it was, one particular scene of “Darkest Hour” however, caught me off guard.

That was when Churchill, perplexed as he was, whether to retreat or surrender, decides to ride the London Underground (the Tube) in order to canvass public opinion about what his next course of action should be.

The proud citizens of London, give the PM the answer he was desperately looking for: A resounding call to arms; Britain will never surrender, they’ll fight to the death.

The first thing I did when I got home was to email some British historians, to check if “The Tube” scene matched with reality, since I never heard of it before.

It wasn’t long before answers flew back into the inbox of my gmail account.

Patrick Allitt, Professor of History at Emory University, responded that he thought “the Tube scene is pure invention, and highly uncharacteristic of the real Churchill, who was an unashamed elitist, and would never have bothered to consult ordinary citizens.”

Allitt did think the strongest part of the film was its depiction of just how desperate Britain's situation was by May 1940, and “how reasonable the position of Chamberlain and Halifax must have seemed at the time.”

British historian and journalist, Andrew Roberts, informed me that not only did Churchill never ride the Tube, but that King George VI never visited him at No. 10 Downing Street (as portrayed in the film) to tell him he had a change of heart, and wanted him to defend the Island against Nazi tyranny.

Rosemary Haskell, Professor of English at Elon University, believes the fictitious Tube scene was a "crib from Shakespeare's play Henry V, where the King goes in disguise among his soldiers before the Battle of Agincourt, to find out what the common people are feeling about him." "Nothing I have ever read about Churchill," Haskell says, "mentions any such action, and it really doesn't fit in with what we know of Churchill's personality and character. "

Haskell additionally contends “the director [Joe Wright] and script writer [Anthony McCarten] were trying to find a way to explain how and why Churchill got his cabinet (and Parliament) to agree to continue the fight and to evacuate the troops from Dunkirk.  I thought it was a pretty clumsy device---a kind of get out of jail free card for the viewer.  (It would have been too difficult, apparently, to dramatize the subtleties of what actually happened.) “

Meanwhile, British historian and professor of History at the University of Exeter, Richard Overy, replied that he hasn't seen the film, but was one of two consultants brought in to discuss the script and brief the actors. "The version we saw, Overy informed me, “was full of errors and inventions (including the story of Churchill in the Underground), but I could see that the producers were indifferent to our criticisms. I've had many experiences where fact has had to bow to fiction."

A number of historians did tell me in light of “Darkest Hour” taking some dramatic liberties in its portrayal of Britain and Churchill during the May crisis, one book came highly recommended, “Five Days in London, May, 1940” by John Lukacks , which provides an excellent historical account of the uneasy days, from May 24 to May 28, 1940, as the members of the British War Cabinet debated whether to negotiate with Hitler or to thrust themselves into a long, bloody war with Germany.

Though “Darkest Hour,’’ did bend the truth, here and there, as so many historical dramas tend to do, I think the thrust of the movie was spot on. Churchill found himself backed up against the wall during those anxious days of May, and the future of Britain’s liberty and independence was very much in doubt, before the tide turned in her favor.

Of all the films I’ve seen English actor, Gary Oldman in, “Darkest Hour,” arguably, was his “Finest Hour!”

-Bill Lucey

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January 3, 2018