Cyd Charisse: An Appreciation

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JUNE 2008)

Let's get the physical stuff out of the way first: Cyd Charisse had the finest legs in Hollywood, was the greatest dancer – and unquestionably the most sensuous -- to ever grace the silver screen in a skirt and was every bit as good as the great Fred Astaire and the almost as great Gene Kelly.

Given those attributes, the fact that Charisse could hold her own as an actress put her in rarified territory, and if there was a downside to her career it was that she was relegated to more conventional rolls when the era of the great screen musicals ended in the 1950s.

Oh, and she was married to the same man for nearly 60 years, a notable length of time for Tinseltown.

* * * * *

Charisse was born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas, in 1922 by her own account (or 1921, according to others) to a homemaker mother and jeweler father. Her nickname was "Sid" for how a younger sibling tried to say “Sis," later changed by the ever inventive MGM publicity machine to "Cyd" to give her an air of mystery.

Sid/Cyd was a sickly girl who started dancing lessons at age 6 at the suggestion of her father to build up her strength after a bout with polio left her with a slight atrophy on her right side. During a family vacation in Los Angeles when she was 12, her parents enrolled her in ballet classes at a school in Hollywood, where one of her teachers was Nico Charisse.

At 14 she auditioned for and studied ballet in Los Angeles with Adolph Bolm and Bronislava Nijinska, and subsequently danced in the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo for Colonel W. de Basil under the stage names Celia Siderova and later Maria Istromena because everyone in the troupe was required to take a Russian-sounding name. It was while touring in Europe that she again met Nico Charisse. They eloped in Paris in 1939 and divorced in 1947.

The Ballet Russes broke up at the outbreak of World War II and Charisse, who was to keep her husband’s name, returned to Los Angeles, where David Lichine offered her a dancing role in Gregory Ratoff's Something to Shout About (1943). This brought her to the attention of choreographer Robert Alton, who had also discovered Gene Kelly, and she ssoon signed with MGM, where she became the resident ballet dancer.

Charisse is, of course, principally celebrated for her on-screen pairings with Fred Astaire and Kelly.

Her lithe body, gorgeous looks and simmering sensuality -- as well as having extraordinary chops because of her Russian ballet training -- contrasted starkly with the usual Hollywood dancers, who film historian Larry Billman wrote were "typically cute and fluffy."

She first appeared with Astaire in a brief routine in Ziegfeld Follies (1946) and then in her first lead role in The Band Wagon (1953).

Astaire plays a fading Hollywood song-and-dance man hoping to make a comeback on Broadway in The Band Wagon. He finds himself cast in a show opposite Charisse, who plays a snooty ballerina. The couple do not see eye-to-eye until they take a nighttime carriage ride through Central Park and wind up embracing to the strains of "Dancing in the Dark," which invariably sends chills up my spine whenever I see it.

The movie also contains the equally famous "The Girl Hunt Ballet" in which Charisse plays a vamp to Astaire’s private-eye stage character.

In 1957, she rejoined Astaire in the film version of Silk Stockings, a musical remake of 1939's Ninotchka, with Charisse taking Greta Garbo's role.

It was Debbie Reynolds' lack of training as a dancer that led Kelly to choose Charisse to partner him in the celebrated "Broadway Melody" ballet finale from the steamy Singin' in the Rain (1952). She also co-starred with him in Brigadoon (1954) and again took the lead female role alongside him in his penultimate MGM musical It's Always Fair Weather (1956).

In her autobiography, Charisse reflected on her experience:

"As one of the handful of girls who worked with both of those dance geniuses, I think I can give an honest comparison. In my opinion, Kelly is the more inventive choreographer of the two. Astaire, with Hermes Pan's help, creates fabulous numbers — for himself and his partner. But Kelly can create an entire number for somebody else . . . I think, however, that Astaire's coordination is better than Kelly's . . . his sense of rhythm is uncanny. Kelly, on the other hand, is the stronger of the two. When he lifts you, he lifts you! . . .

"To sum it up, I'd say they were the two greatest dancing personalities who were ever on screen. But it's like comparing apples and oranges. They're both delicious."

Looking back on her work with Kelly and Astaire during a 2002 interview, Charisse said that her husband always knew whom she had been dancing with: "If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch."

For his part, Astaire called Charisse "beautiful dynamite." while New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff wrote that she was "the only dancer who could make a pirouette look sexy."

MGM claimed that it had a $5 million insurance policy on her legs, earning her mention in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Most Valuable Legs," but Charisse later revealed that was another invention of the MGM publicity machine.

After the decline of the Hollywood musical in the late 1950s, Charisse retired from dancing but continued to appear in film and TV productions through the 1990s. She made cameo appearances in Blue Mercedes's "I Want To Be Your Property" (1987) and Janet Jackson's "Alright" (1990) music videos, and made an exercise video for senior citizens.

Charisse was married to Tony Martin, a singer and nightclub entertainer with whom she danced in nightclubs and on television, from 1948 until her death. The marriage lasted almost 60 years, matched in 2008 amongst living American actors by only Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, who also married in 1948.

She had two sons, Nico "Nicky" Charisse from her first marriage, and Tony Martin, Jr. from her second.

Charisse was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after suffering an apparent heart attack. She died on June 17, 2008, at age 86.

On The Road Again. Again.

This is the strangest summer of my acquaintance with a rare sunny day, cycles of violent thunderboomers and Saigon-like humidity. So my expectations weather-wise are low as I find myself out on the road yet again. Not sure when I'll be back at the shack, but in the meantime Kiko's House will be robo-posting blasts from the past.

On The Road Again. Again.

This is the strangest summer of my acquaintance with a rare sunny day, cycles of violent thunderboomers and Saigon-like humidity. So my expectations weather-wise are low as I find myself out on the road yet again. Not sure when I'll be back at the shack, but in the meantime Kiko's House will be robo-posting blasts from the past.

On The Road Again. Again.

This is the strangest summer of my acquaintance with a rare sunny day, cycles of violent thunderboomers and Saigon-like humidity. So my expectations weather-wise are low as I find myself out on the road yet again. Not sure when I'll be back at the shack, but in the meantime Kiko's House will be robo-posting blasts from the past.

The Tail of the Chimera: A Reflection on the 9/11 Terror Attacks & George W. Bush

Sergeant Joseph Mosner, a veteran of George Bush's Forever War

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER 2007)

As we slouch toward to the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, the real story of that awful day and its aftermath is now well known.

While the attacks were the darkest day for the world's remaining superpower since Pearl Harbor, astoundingly they were leveraged by President George W. Bush into the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history -- the Iraq war.

This American flag-draped act of hubris and deceit is so colossal that its bloody consequences have brought the Republican hegemony in Washington to a crashing end and assured Bush's place in history as a manipulated mediocrity who squandered America's world standing in the service of a fool's mission. No matter when or how the Iraq war ends, his actions will reverberate for many years to come.

In the eight months that Bush held office prior to the 9/11 attacks, the intelligence community that he pledged to reinvigorate slept the sleep of the complacent, rousing itself only when there were turf battles to be fought.

This despite the fact that:

* The CIA, NSA and FBI had detailed intelligence that Al Qaeda was plotting an attack on the homeland and so informed Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security advisor, and possibly Vice President Cheney, as well.

* Knew the terrorists' modus operandi if not their exact targets.

* Knew the identities of some of the terrorists and their whereabouts in country.

But Rice, by her own subsequent admission, still was fighting a Cold War that had been over for a decade. Cheney, of course, isn't talking.

Today Rice is secretary of state, while the nation’s spymaster on 9/11 and two of the architects of the Iraq war and occupation were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for what the commander in chief proclaimed was "their pivotal roles in great events," but was nothing less than a reflection of and payback for the sycophantic loyalty that he demands.

* * * * *

Could the 9/11 attacks have been stopped?

I have been reluctant to conclude that they could have, but the growing mountain of evidence showing what key U.S. intelligence operatives, Rice and others knew but did not feel compelled to act on has convinced me that there was a reasonable chance that the terrorists could have been intercepted at airports in Boston, Newark and Washington on that deceptively beautiful September morning, if not before.

Could the Iraq war have been stopped?

That’s an easy one. With a compliant Congress and somnambulant news media, Bush’s neoconservative coven was going to get a war that they had long lusted for even if it was in the wrong place at the wrong time and would divert precious resources from the nascent GWOT in general and Afghanistan in particular.

While we will never know how the war in Afghanistan might have turned out if it hadn’t been starved of resources, there is no question that the Bush administration's pushback against Al Qaeda has not been anywhere near the triumph that it claims. The White House's own intelligence mavens say that much of the leadership cadre of the terrorist group remains intact, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and they have rebuilt this incubus to its pre-9/11 strength. Meanwhile, the neocons' built-to-order war in Iraq has become a graduate school where jihadists can hone their skills before exporting them elsewhere.

That Al Qaeda has been able to reconstitute itself so successfully can be traced back to a single event:

In the most ignominious chapter in a presidential tenure littered with bad judgments, the fires at Ground Zero were still burning when the decision was made not to throw the full weight of America's might at Al Qaeda and its leadership but to instead go after Saddam Hussein, a has-been of a brutal dictator who had long been in the neocon crosshairs but of course had only a tangential connection to the jihad against the U.S. and the West.

* * * * *

Little has changed in the homeland since 9/11 except a gross erosion of civil liberties, including the initiation of clandestine domestic spying programs, as well as the abandonment of international treaties and concomitant embrace of torture.

Where George Bush gets a partial pass is that the rot in America's intelligence agencies long predates his tenure and the tenure of his father as a past CIA director and president, as well.

Where he is complicitous is in his appointment of a rogues gallery of political hacks to key homeland security posts while bowing to powerful Republican Party benefactors in the ports, chemical, rail transport and other key industries in backing away from homeland security reforms that have real teeth. (It should be noted that Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, eagerly aided and abetted.)

America remains frighteningly vulnerable to another big hit and its intelligence agencies have made only modest steps to be able detect, let alone prevent, an encore performance. Despite the urgent need for more Arabic-speaking intelligence agents and analysts, there has been only a modest increase in their numbers and key officers with these skills have quit out of frustration.

The obsession of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) with preventing copycat 9/11 attacks has led to important steps such as reinforcing passenger aircraft cockpit doors and screening for weapons and bombs, but there has been little coherent analysis on what form future attacks might entail although it's a good bet that they will bear little resemblance to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

This is called "risk management" in the real world. Bush's DHS, where fully one quarter of the top jobs remain unfilled, is pretty much inured to that world.

But the most gaping hole in America's homeland security armor is disaster management. No events better captured the incompetence of this administration than the Ground Zero cleanup, which despite its claims that the air was safe to breathe exposed thousands of emergency workers and others to appallingly high levels of toxins that will significantly shorten many of their lives, and of course the response to Hurricane Katrina.

The president took a battering in public-opinion polls after Katrina -- in fact, that disaster and not the war was the point at which his approval ratings began dropping precipitously. A reasonable person would assume that an effort has been made in the two years since Katrina to repair the literal and figurative damage that the White House and federal government caused.

Wrong.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency remains the first line of defense and the leading responder for large-scale disasters. Yet the administration did such an effective job of crippling FEMA by folding it into DHS and treating it like a bastard child that a replacement couldn't be found for the disgraced Michael "You're Doing a Heck of a Job, Brownie" Brown despite a lengthy nationwide search.

The reason why the White House finally had to promote someone from within FEMA to run it was because the most qualified replacements -- people with real world disaster-management experience -- were all too aware that the president was not really serious about fixing the agency.

A bipartisan Senate panel has concluded that FEMA is beyond repair and should be abolished. It has not been.

* * * * *

The initial decision to call General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker before Congress to deliver their hugely anticipated Iraq progress report on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was triply insulting.

It was insulting to the victims of the attacks and their kin, to the nearly 4,000 American soldiers who have perished in Iraq and their kin, and to voters who went to the polls in the mid-term election last November to send George Bush a message that he has ignored:

We are sick of your lies and deceptions and your use of patriotism as a cudgel. Bring the troops home now!

The lame-brained decision to summon Petraeus and Crocker to Capitol Hill on the sixth anniversary of the attacks was made not by the White House, but the Democrats who now control Congress. Petraeus and Crocker will now testifiy on September 15 because the Dems were made aware of their scheduling faux pas, but the original date helps explain in a small but symbolically large way as to why those voters are just as furious at the new majority party as they were with the old majority party.

* * * * *

Even the president's most stalwart supporters must acknowledge as they sit alone with their thoughts and their whiskies in their inner sanctums late at night that the Iraq war is lost. Only the degree of defeat is at issue.

There were no WMD. There will never be the neocon pipe dream of a democracy. The Middle East is a flashpoint or two away from a runaway refugee crisis and perhaps even a regional war. Only the terrorist threat that the Bush administration itself created in Iraq is now cited to justify staying the course.

Like the chimera of Greek mythology, the Iraq war has become a monster with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail.

The lion's head represents the brave men and women of our armed forces like Sergeant Joseph Mosner who have sacrificed so much for so little, and the goat's body the president's feckless enablers in Congress. The serpent's tail represents George Bush himself, a nightmare visited upon America that has been incalculably worse than the 9/11 attacks.

The Chimera of Greek mythology finally was defeated by Bellerophon with the help of the winged Pegasus.

How and whether this chimera will be slain is truly a question that cries out for an answer. We can be certain that will take much more than a mere presidential election and the dispatch of George Bush back to his Texas ranch.

Much more.

Photograph by Nina Berman courtesy of Jen Beckman Gallery

On The Road Again. Again.

This is the strangest summer of my acquaintance with a rare sunny day, cycles of violent thunderboomers and Saigon-like humidity. So my expectations weather-wise are low as I find myself out on the road yet again. Not sure when I'll be back at the shack, but in the meantime Kiko's House will be robo-posting blasts from the past.

Mythos & Alberto Gonzales' Red Shoes

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN AUGUST 2007)

We observe the ebb and flow of our political leaders' fortunes from a simple and safe two-dimensional perspective. They earn our esteem and trust or do not. Success smiles on them or does not. They stay clear of controversy or wallow in it. Sooner or later, they retire or are pushed from the stage.

We may occasionally remark that "Senator Stanley was born under a bad sign" or other allusions to there possibly being a perspective beyond those two dimensions, but except for reading the daily horoscope with our morning coffee we stay comfortably within the confines of those dimensions that conform with our cradle-to-grave world view.

On the surface, the arc of Alberto Gonzales' stormy career in Washington followed typical two-dimensional signposts. But I've long had the feeling that there is another dimension that reveals a heckuva lot more about him and other public people. Commentators don't notice this dimension in their rush to be authoritative, edgy or first with a story. And even if they did, it wouldn't make sense to them because they were born under a literal sign.

* * * * *

It's the morning after Gonzales' resignation and I've just come back into Kiko's House from viewing the opening phase of a total lunar eclipse as I write this. It was so amazing. The crickets are cricketing, but the birds that would be singing their songs at this hour are silent and will remain so until the eclipse is over.

So I'm feeling a good deal less two dimensional than usual as I introduce Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a friend, psychoanalyst and folklorist who is possessed with the ability to not just see that other dimension beyond our normal scrutiny but also describe it in vivid strokes.

In an enthralling post over at The Moderate Voice that is unlike any of the zillions of others you've read in the last 24 hours, Dr. E takes us into that dimension as she muses on the rise and fall of Alberto Gonzales.

She does this by stirring together the mythos of the Carreta del Muerto, in which a passenger climbs on board a gilded carriage without realizing the driver is Death, and the fairy tale "The Red Shoes" in which an impoverished child who has made her own shoes from cloth scraps is walking in a forest when a gilded carriage draws up beside her and she is beckoned inside by an old woman dressed in finery.

Following are excerpts of Dr. E's essay, although I urge you to read the whole thing.

* * * * *

First we must ask: Will the girl in the red shoes climb into the gilded carriage?

Dr. E answers:

"This is the part that . . . children in the theatre would cry out, 'Don’t get in! Don’t get in!'

"But, the child, dazzled by the wealth and accommodation, and offer of friendship from on high, cannot hear her own conscience, her own instincts for self-preservation. So overwhelmed is she by the opportunity . . . without consideration, she scrambles up into the carriage."

So what of Alberto Gonzales and his red shoes?

"[W]hether the red shoes were too big for him, too fast for him, or controlled by others by unseen means, whether he wore them willingly, or suddenly woke with these as requirement of his office . . . someone tapped the soles of his shoes, and thus he began to dance. Eventually danced crazy and out of control. No limits. Dancing into hearings, dancing around the topics, dancing and dancing.

"Mr. Gonzales, like the child in the tale, is, in reality, a boy from nowhere, he says. Those of us from poor beginnings are often all the more vulnerable to gilded carriages, that's for sure. For Mr. Bush to choose a Latino boy from poor beginnings means extra loyalty from that boy, and more importantly, an ever grateful ally. The operative word: grateful.

"There is often in those who come from nothing a perpetual wonder that we are in the presence of those who claim to breathe rarified air. It ought be our first warning sign that we are about to lose our wits and be exploited. But, more often being invited into the sanctum sanctorum can seem a wondrous step away from our history of our ancestors and parents . . . All the more reason to be wary when sudden gold is offered with wheels.

"So, Mr. Gonzales, like many, stepped into the gilt conveyance willingly, gladly, likely at first seduced by all the trim and fit . . . and especially by being able to be unlike his father, unlike his mother, being able to ride instead of walk that dusty road.

"Fairy tales have such irony. Mr. Gonzales' feet were severed by those he severed. Those persons who raised the 'hew' and cry, along with Congressional committees; together they all hoisted the axe . . . and though it was not a clean cut, but a severance from a hundred cuts . . . it is done at last."

Detail of photograph of "Caretta" by Marina Ludanova

The Trent Affair: How The Civil War Almost Became An International Conflict

USS San Jacinto intercepts British mail ship Trent

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln had little to do with foreign affairs. He had no knowledge of diplomacy, did not correspond with anyone aboard and was entirely focused on the Civil War. This myopia was to exacerbate a crisis early in his presidency that could have transformed the war into an international conflict.

The scope of Lincoln's counterpart, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, was considerably wider and he believed from the outset of the war that the dependence of Europe on Southern cotton for its textile industry would lead to diplomatic recognition and even intervention. The Union's focus was just the opposite -- to prevent any British recognition of the South that might encourage France and other nations to follow suit.

The seeds of the crisis were sown in October 1861 when James M. Mason of Virginia and John Slidell of Louisiana, who had been named ministers plenipotentiary to represent the Confederacy in Great Britain and France, escaped through the Union naval blockade to Cuba.

There they boarded the British mail packet RMS Trent. Without orders from Washington, Captain Charles Wilkes, who commanded the USS San Jacinto, stopped and searched the vessel on November 8 and removed the Confederate envoys, who eventually were incarcerated in Fort Warren in Boston harbor, a prison for captured Confederates.

Overwhelming jubilation greeted Wilkes' bravado in the North, but abroad it was viewed as a blatant violation of international law and an insult to the British flag.

Lincoln had no advance knowledge of Wilkes' act and preoccupied with other matters, did not recognize the seriousness of the Trent crisis until Charles Sumner returned to Washington in late November.

The Massachusetts senator and leader of the Radical Republican faction was savvy when it came to foreign affairs and Lincoln soon came to rely on him in addition to Secretary of State William Seward when it came to such matters. Seward corresponded regularly with John Bright and Richard Cobden, the great British Liberal leaders, and brought the president news of an immense outpouring of anti-American fervor in Great Britain because of the Trent incident.

"There will be no war unless England is bent upon having one," the president assured the senator. Upset that European governments misunderstood "the pacific temper" of his foreign policy, he offered to ignore bureaucratic protocol and talk face-to-face with Lord Lyons, the British minister in Washington, but Seward and others warned that this was no time for arbitration.

There had been continuous improvement in Anglo-American relations throughout the 1850s.

Even before the Civil War, British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston had urged a policy of neutrality. Britain had long insisted that neutral nations abide by its blockades, and when the war began it tacitly supported the Union blockade of Southern ports. Palmerston's concerns were focused in Europe where Napoleon III was bent on expanding the French empire and Otto von Bismarck was on the rise in Germany.

* * * * *

The mission of Mason and Slidell was an open secret and the Union received regular intelligence on their movements.

By October 1, the diplomats were in Charleston where they planned to board the fast steamer CSS Nashville and run the blockade, but the main channel was guarded by five Union ships. An overland route through Mexico and departure from Matamoros was also considered, but was ruled out because the delay of several months was unacceptable. The men instead slipped out of Charleston aboard the cargo ship Theodora under the cover of darkness and arrived in Cardenas, Cuba on October 16.

Meanwhile, Wilkes had taken the USS San Jacinto into Cardenas, where he learned from a newspaper article that Mason and Slidell were in port and were to leave Havana aboard the Trent on November 7.

The captain's orders were to join a naval force preparing for an assault on Port Royal, South Carolina, but he realized that the Trent would need to use the narrow Bahama Channel, the only deepwater route between Cuba and the shallow Grand Bahama Bank. After consulting his second in command, Lieutenant D.M. Fairfax, and reviewing law books, the impetuous Wilkes decided to intercept the Trent and seize Mason and Slidell as "contraband."

Ironically, Seward had been warned by Treasury officer George Harrington that Wilkes "will give us trouble. He has a superabundance of self-esteem and a deficiency of judgment. . . . he alone was right, everybody else was wrong."

The Trent left as scheduled with Mason, Slidell, their secretaries, and Slidell’s wife and children aboard. Around noon on November 8, the San Jacinto spotted the Trent and two shots were fired across her bow. She was boarded and the diplomats and their secretaries taken into custody.

International law required that when contraband was discovered on a ship it should be taken to the nearest prize court for adjudication. While this was Wilkes' initial plan, Lieutenant Fairfax argued that the San Jacinto already was minimally staffed and could not spare crew to the Trent. Wilkes' ultimate responsibility was to his ship, so the Trent was allowed to proceed to Saint Thomas.

In Washington, the excitement generated by the seizure was soon replaced by doubts as the specter of a legal conflict with Britain arose, but despite strong protests from London and finally an ultimatum, the U.S. initially was reluctant to back down.

Lincoln was at first enthused about the capture, but as reality set in he stated:

I fear the traitors will prove to be white elephants. We must stick to American principles concerning the rights of neutrals. We fought Great Britain for insisting . . . on the right to do precisely what Captain Wilkes has done. If Great Britain shall now protest against the act, and demand their release, we must give them up, apologize for the act as a violation of our doctrines, and thus forever bind her over to keep the peace in relation to neutrals, and so acknowledge that she has been wrong for sixty years.

When the ultimatum was not immediately answered, military preparations were accelerated and British financial markets reacted as if war were a certainty.

When Lord Lyons presented the formal British demands for the release of Mason and Slidell and for an apology from the U.S. on December 23, they were hardly a surprise. Informally the British minister also let Seward know that unless a satisfactory answer was received within seven days, he had instructions to close the embassy and leave Washington.

With that deadline in mind, Lincoln summoned a cabinet meeting on Christmas Day, to which Sumner was invited in order to read the most recent letters he had received from Bright and Cobden urging the release of the Confederate diplomats.

The president noted that he had to avoid the folly of having "two wars on his hands at a time," while Seward, who had finally awakened to the gravity of the crisis, read a paper he was preparing that would explain how Wilkes had violated international law and why Mason and Slidell must be released.

The next day Seward read his final version of the reply he intended to give Lord Lyons, and it was endorsed with some expressions of regret but without dissent. And so with that decision the grave threat that the American Civil War would become an international conflict was removed and a serious blow was dealt the Confederacy.

This was because the momentum for recognition by Britain and France that had grown during the summer and fall of 1861 was dissipated. The British concluded that the U.S. was prepared to defend itself when necessary, but had recognized its responsibility to comply with international law. Most importantly, the Confederacy's would-be European allies concluded that peace could be preserved as long as the they maintained strict neutrality in the Civil War.

PHOTOGRAPHS (From top):
Lincoln, Davis, Palmerston, Lyons, Mason, Slidell, Wilkes, Sumner, Seward.

Lincoln Bones Up On Military Strategy

28th of 45 excerpts from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald:

Toward the end of January 1862 military affairs took a turn for the better. When Lincoln finally got rid of [Secretary of War Simon] Cameron, he moved quickly to replace him with Edwin M. Stanton. The appointment was a surprising one. In view of Lincoln's well-known unwillingness to cherish grudges, it was not important that Stanton was the lawyer who had snubbed him in the McCormick reaper case, but Stanton's lifelong record as a Democrat might have counted against him. . . .

Stanton photo, above left) was not amiable or altogether stables, but Lincoln found him indispensable. A short, stock figure, fifty-seven years old, the new Secretary of War was highly intelligent and fiercely honest. In the War Department he worked standing behind a long, high desk, which he moved into a room open to the public, where he excoriated shoddy contractors and blasted military officers angling for promotion. His extraordinary energy reminded Lincoln of an old Methodist preacher whose parishioners wanted to put bricks in his pockets to hold him down. "We may be obliged to serve Stanton the same way, "Lincoln told Congressman [Henry L.] Dawes, "but I guess we'll just let him jump a while first."

The President and his new War Secretary developed an excellent working relationship, which eventually became a warm friendship. . . . With Stanton in control of the War Department, the President could turn his attention back to the armies. His conferences with [General-in-Command George B.] McClellan had disappointed him, and the general, whose health was now fully restored, was still reluctant to divulge his plans for an advance. On January 27, Lincoln forced the issue by publishing the "President's General War Order No. 1." It ordered all the land and naval forces of the United States to undertake a general advance on February 22 and threatened to hold all commanders to strict accountability for carrying out the order.

The order, which vented Lincoln's deep sense of frustration with the military, reflected his recent hasty reading of books on strategy. Since McClellan (photo, above right) seemed to have no plan for operations against the Confederates, the President announced his own; as he told [Senator Orville Hickman] Browning, it was to "threaten all their positions at the same time with superior force, and if they weakened one to strengthen another seize ad hold the one weakened." Both Lincoln's strategy and his ordered ignored such variables as the weather, readiness, roads, communications, and logistics -- not to mention the location and strength of the Confederate armies -- buyt he did not intend to announce a specific plan of battle. He wanted to give a jolt to the military, a warning that they must act.

I that sense it worked. February 22 passed without a general advanced, but before that date Union armies in the West began to win victories.

An Index To Abraham Lincoln Posts

Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president because none faced such enormous challenges, none grew more in office and none reinvented the United States to the extent that he did. All of that and the fact that 2009 is the bicentenary of his birth is reason enough to publish posts each Sunday on the great man.

Series highlights so far:

COMPLEX & IMPERFECT (7/26) Historian Edna Medford argues that we do better for Lincoln and for the nation -- and for understanding of the Civil War -- if we view him in all of his complexity. LINK.

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED LINCOLN & AMERICA (7/19) Uncle Tom's Cabin shook the U.S. like an earthquake when it was published in 1852. LINK.

SLAVE COLONIES (7/12) Lincoln believed that he found a way to deal with the problems caused by slavery in sending blacks back to Africa to colonize Liberia, but hee was wrong. LINK.

A TRUE GENIUS (6/28) Historian Shelby Foote says that there has never been a president who functioned like Lincoln did, and despite having no executive experience, he was a miracle at it. LINK.

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE (6/21) Historian Harold Holzer leads an intimate walk-through of the very different presidential mansion of Lincoln's time. LINK.

EVEN LINCOLN NEEDED A GOOD EDITOR (6/14) Guest blogger Michael Reynolds imagines how the Gettysburg Address might have turned out had the president had a good editor. LINK.

MOST HANDS-ON COMMANDER IN CHIEF (6/7) The outcome of the Civil War in all likelihood would have been different had Lincoln not cajoled, taken over for and in some cases dismissed the generals who lacked his vision and courage. LINK.

A SKIMPIER RESUME WOULD BE HARD TO FIND (5/31) David Herbert Donald, the recently deceased Lincoln biographer, writes that an inexperienced chief executive can cause the country immense heartbreak, but that with time and good common sense can grow into greatness. LINK.

NOW ALIEN TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY (5/11) Pete Abel writes in a two-part guest blog that while there are a few common traits between Lincoln and today's GOP, the differences are far more substantial. PART 1, PART 2.

THE ASSASSINATION (4/22, 4/29, 5/4) It is rather amazing that so little is known about basic aspects of the assassination of John F. Kennedy while there is virtually no aspect of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier that remains a mystery. PART 1, PART 2, PART 3.

THE STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (4/5) It took fewer than three minutes to deliver the famous speech, but it was an afterthought on the day it was given and remained so into the next century. LINK.

HOW VALID THE COMPARISONS? (3/29) With the nomination and election of Barack Obama, the comparisons to Abraham Lincoln have come fast, thick and furious. But do they hold up? LINK.

A PATENTLY CLEVER PRESIDENT (3/22) That Lincoln was the only president to get a U.S. patent is not surprising when you consider that he was an inveterate tinkerer and had a lifelong fascination with mechanical things. LINK.

A PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLAR ON LINCOLN (3/15) A wide-ranging interview with James Hilty on Lincoln's greatness, frailties and innate conservatism. LINK.

A BUMPY RIDE TO HIS REWARD (3/8) There was a controversy over a photograph taken of Lincoln's open coffin, an attempt to steal his corpse and his body was exhumed an extraordinary 17 times. LINK.

WAS THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR GAY? (3/1) No revisionist history of a famous person would be complete without a book on whether they were gay, or if they were gay whether they were bisexual, or if they . . . LINK.

PRESIDENTIAL POWER GRABS (2/22) The infringements by Lincoln on civil liberties arguably were greater than during any period in American history, including the last eight years. LINK.

EARLY ASSASSINATION PLOT (2/15) A March 1861 assassination plot was never carried out, but Lincoln's response to it sullied a carefully cultivated image of dignified courage. LINK.

OH HE OF LITTLE FAITH (2/8) Beyond Lincoln's opposition to slavery there was no aspect of him more controversial than his spiritual bona fides. LINK.

THE BOHEMIAN BRIGADE COMES THROUGH (2/1) Modern journalism can trace its roots to the Civil War, which because of the telegraph and steam locomotive was the first instant-news war, something of which Lincoln was very much aware. LINK.

LINCOLN ON BLACKS & SLAVERY (1/25) His metamorphosis from a frontiersman who always opposed slavery but like most white Americans felt that blacks were unequal into the Great Emancipator was as complex as the man himself. LINK.

LINCOLN'S CAUTION (1/18) Guest blogger Robert Stein writes that Barack Obama can learn much from the 16th president, who perhaps even more than wisdom and moral strength needed a highly developed political sense of the possible. LINK.

THE FIRST TECHNOLOGY PRESIDENT (1/11) Arriving in Washington at the dawn of the age of the telegraph, Lincoln embraced this new technology of instantaneous communication with a passion and used it not just to communicate with his generals in the field during the Civil War, but to bend them to his will. LINK.

LINCOLN LINCOLN BO BINCOLN (1/4) A substantial Lincoln mythology had taken hold in the American imagination even before his assassination in 1865. This canon of broad brush strokes and tall tales gave Lincoln his historic due but overlooked or willfully ignored the myriad complexities of our greatest president. LINK.

You Know That Society Is Doomed . . .

When the president of the United States invites a cop and the man he arrested to the White House for a brewsky.

When a man sleeping in a trash bin is emptied into a garbage truck. (Just like in the movies.)

When it turns out that even the best-trained soldiers do better when they rely on hunches.

When yet another conservative Republican politician has to resign for

When a police officer pulls his gun to try to speed up a McDonald's breakfast order.

When an authority on energy opines that oil and gasoline don't pollute.

When a man is charged with beating a beauty contest judge with a trophy.

When the White House doesn't make a big deal about the arrest of terror suspects.

When a first-year Oscar Mayer Weinermobile driver plows into a house.

When North Korea airs its first beer commercial. (As in, Beer for the People.)

When a butcher at a Piggly Wiggly kills his romantic rival at a checkout register.

When the leading Democratic opponents of health-care reform are from the poorest districts with the most uninsured.

When the police have to mace a berserk groundhog after it tries to attack them.

When a mother tries to assault a police officer with her stroller while her baby is inside it.

When General Motors keeps hedging on the mileage that its make-or-break new car will get.

When a town manager is fired after finding out his wife is a porn star.

When a man returns home after a 4,200-mile motorcycle ride across the U.S. and is struck and killed by a car.

When a leading conservative pundit says on the one hand that the government can and should run a first-class health care system for GIs and veterans but is incapable of doing that for people who don't wear uniforms.

When a man sues a restaurant after finding a condom in his soup. (It was French onion.)

When God resigns.

Click here, here, here and here for previous installments

of You Know Society Is Doomed . . .
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Hat tip to Obscure Store for many of the links.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

WORKER BEFORE MACHINES
By Max Burchartz
Hat tip to Woods' Lot