"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have the liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine."I got my traditional beginning-of-summer haircut yesterday: a short buzz cut, high and tight, almost a flattop. It's hard to find a barber who knows how to do a good flattop these days. Later, after I'd showered to wash off all the itchy stubble, I looked in the bathroom mirror and was shocked to see a face I hadn't seen in almost fifteen years.—John Adams
Dad.
It was all there: the jawline, the cheekbones, the forehead, the slightly crooked nose from an old break, poorly healed; the thick and once-dark hair, now speckled with gray and turning silver at the temples. True, he wasn't as tall as I remembered him. My dad was a big bear of a man; a prep school and college sports hero, once famous for his way with a football and his exploits in track and field. I vaguely remember shelves full of trophies and a wall full of framed newspaper clippings from when I was very young, but at some point in my childhood all that went away, and the scrapbooks went into the attic and have long since vanished. I'm given to understand he was considered a top prospect in track and field for the '36 Olympics, but there was some problem with his college having not paid its NCAA sanctioning fees that year, or something like that.
The truth is, I don't know. He never talked about himself. All these are things I learned third-hand after he died, when strangers started coming up to me and telling me about my dad and what a difference Coach Bethke had made in their lives.
I didn't know that man. To the extent that I knew Coach Bethke, I knew him as the loud and scary doppelgänger who sometimes replaced my real dad, a quiet, bookish, and professorial man who was more likely to be found sitting at the kitchen table, pouring over Lord Macaulay's History of England or some book about the Plantagenets and looking up every now and then to read aloud some bit he'd found particularly amusing.
My dad was larger than life. He married an (I'm told) adorable little pixie with literary ambitions. (It's hard to think of your mother as sexy, even if she was once propositioned by JFK.) From him I got my face, my intellect, my love of books and history, and my peculiar sense of humor. From her I got my gift for words, my chronic back problems, my mercenary instincts, and the acerbic wit I've struggled all my life to keep under control. It's a tricky combination to own and operate.
World War II was my father's war, not that he served in it. Teaching jobs were hard to come by in the Great Depression, and by the time the war came along he was a married man working as a machinist in what would become a defense plant and still clinging to the hope of getting into graduate school. In time he landed a full-ride graduate fellowship in physics at a university in North Dakota—probably the University of North Dakota, as I doubt North Dakota could have afforded two universities in those days—but then his draft board informed him that if he quit his job to accept the fellowship, he'd be drafted immediately, as good machinists were hard to find but the nation already had all the physicists it needed, thank you very much.
Ah. Irony.
In time my oldest brother came along, and then my sister. In time they even began drafting 27-year-old defense plant machinists with two kids, so dad enlisted in the Navy and went straight into Officer Candidate School, to become a 90-Day Wonder. About halfway through, though, they discovered another ironic thing; that this big, healthy, bear of a man had a previously undiscovered medical condition that would have disqualified him, had it been found before he enlisted. By the time he'd recovered from the surgery needed to repair it, the Navy had decided it already had all the lieutenant (j.g.)'s it needed to finish out the war, and cut him loose.
I admire John Adams' words, even as I realize they're sentiment, not fact. By the same token I love that old Stephen Foster song, even as I recognize it as a pipe-dream. Gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside. I'll study war no more...
My grandfather was a stonemason, who refused to speak or allow his children to speak German; who in 1917 named my father in honor of Woodrow Wilson; and who despite living in rural Wisconsin refused to hunt or even own a gun. "The neighbors get nervous when Germans own guns," is what he taught my father, before he died of cancer when my father was still a child.
My father was probably meant to be a history professor, had not history conspired otherwise. I think he would have been very content to spend his life reading and teaching, and in his retirement he did become an accomplished watercolor painter.
I studied "Musick," having no skill for poetry and no interest in porcelain. My generation's war was Vietnam, and at the time I believed myself to be a committed pacifist. Thankfully, my principles were never tested in the fire.
My children's war is going on now. Today. In Afghanistan, and Iraq, and perhaps in Iran. And perhaps tomorrow, in Lower Manhattan.
Adams' sentiment is admirable, but ultimately, wrong. Each generation pays the price for the mistakes made and the lessons mis-learned by its forebears. Each generation must study war, so that their children might study mathematics and philosophy and their grandparents might putter peacefully in the garden and dabble with watercolors. Si vis pacem, para bellum is as true today as it was two thousand years ago.
As Winston Churchill makes clear in The Gathering Storm, the first volume in his massive six-volume history of World War II, it was the failure of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, and moreover the willful blindness of "the international peace community," that made the second World War inevitable. It was clear to anyone with eyes to see that the Germans were cheating on the Treaty of Versailles from almost the moment it was signed, and there was a time when all the horrors of 1939-1945 could have been prevented by sending in a single French division to enforce the treaty terms at bayonet-point.
Churchill lays the blame for World War II on Wilson. We could as well lay the blame for all the troubles in the Middle East today on Churchill and T. E. Lawrence, for the way they carved up the remains of the Ottoman Empire and then were unwilling to support the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres. Likewise, a strong case can be made that Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski share joint-responsibility for the today's war in Afghanistan, and perhaps tomorrow's war with Iran, because they so badly mis-learned the lessons of Vietnam.
But the truth is, pretty much my entire generation shares Carter's blame. We were the ones who misunderstood what happened in Vietnam; we were the ones who earnestly, naively, believed that wars didn't need to happen. We were the ones who thought it was possible for enlightened people everywhere to join hands, talk it over, pass an international law abolishing war forever—and then maybe pass around a joint and sing a couple of verses of Kumbaya, too. All we were saying was, "Give peace a chance."
We were, in a word, fools.
The verdicts of history are harsh, remorseless, and sometimes terrifyingly swift. Those who beat their swords into plowshares too often end up as slaves plowing the fields of those who didn't. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety all too often end up with neither. Those who lay down their swords and shields, down by the riverside, put their children and grandchildren at the mercy of thugs, thieves, and madmen. Those societies that cease to honor those brave few in every generation who take up the sword and shield, and make the whole of society their family and their responsibility, in time cease to be.
And thus we have Memorial Day: a day not for furniture sales, or keggers, or going up to the cabin to make sure the septic tank lift-pump still works, but a day to honor the memory of those who have fallen in the service of our country.
So go ahead; light the charcoal, ice down the beer, cook the brats, and have fun with your friends, neighbors, and family. But as you do this, remember that there were those before you who studied War, so that you might have the right and liberty to do what you will today, and some of them never came home. A moment, a few words, a silent thought of gratitude for their sacrifice would not be out of order.
Wherever they are now, I believe they'll appreciate it.
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