Saddle Sores and Second-Hand Smoke

It’s always fascinating to wonder about the unintended consequences of political decisions and natural occurrences in the world. I am currently reading “Napoleon’s Hemorrhoids: And Other Small Events That Changed History,” by Phil Mason, an amateur historian who supposedly has the world’s largest collections of weird happenings, incidents and events. It’s great fun –- and often lowers the high mucky-mucks to our level –- or below.

The title is derived from the fact that Napoleon Bonaparte was a very active supreme commander on the battlefield, rushing from one cavalry charge or fire fight to another, directing and commanding his army in making pincer moves and defensive stands. Napoleon spent much of his life making war to acquire land or defending France from numerous invasions. But a battle in 1815 fought against the British really proved to be his “Waterloo.” It seems that Napoleon had spent too much time in the saddle dashing from one spot to the next in preparing his battle plan and had a severe case of piles or hemorrhoids.

On the morning of the decisive day – minus the bliss of Preparation H – Napoleon was unable to climb into the saddle to guide his troops. As a matter of fact, Napoleon was so saddle-sore, his orders were somewhat muddled and were sent out to his field commanders at 11:20 in the morning, much too late to take advantage of the morning sunlight in the eyes of his British attackers. Because of the lateness of the attack, the Duke of Wellington was able to call on Prussian reinforcements late in the day, and they saved the day for Wellington. But the possibility exists that Napoleon, free of the hemorrhoidal squirms and pain that so concentrates the mind, might have used his often superior battlefield strategies to win the day.

Remember the Song Line “Little Things Mean a Lot?”

The world may have been sheltered from the art of Pablo Picasso had his uncle not been a cigar smoker. I am such a poor artist I have never been able to make the judgment that Picasso progressed much beyond a third grade art lesson. But when his drawings and paintings bring tens of millions of dollars on the international art market, it is convincing that someone out there likes him.

Picasso was stillborn – not breathing at birth – so in a panic the nurses attempted to revive him through spanking his feet and butt among other physical treatments. In desperation, his uncle blew cigar smoke in Pablo’s face and he immediately started to cough, spit and breathe. The founder of cubism, child-like scrawls, spilt watercolors and weird looking subjects lived to be 92. I have to find out if he smoked cigars to the end. Who says second-hand smoke kills?

Mason’s book is filled with this style of anecdote, but being a political junkie, I must bring up one about Richard Nixon. When Nixon was a young struggling lawyer at 27 he and a small group of businessmen in Whittier, Calif., put their money together and started to make and sell frozen orange juice. As there are a few billion oranges in California, with a national market available to enterprising entrepreneurs, Nixon’s friends made him president of the company because they felt he was driven to make lots of money. The business failed – and the rest is history.

This story reminds me of another Republican president, even one possessing an MBA, who failed in business –- several times. I think one of the amazing things about George W. Bush is that he couldn’t find any oil to sell in all of Texas, one of the leading oil-producing states. I remember when Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone’s campaign manager told the Democratic National Committee that he could defeat Bush with just one campaign ad makeup. He would put Bush in the center of a huge Texas oil field with a simple caption: “Here is a man who couldn’t find a drop of oil in the whole state of Texas.” The Committee turned him down, but I think he was right.

What if Ronald Reagan Had Been a Card-Carrying Member of the Communist Party?

Being a socialist-commy-pinko liberal with some libertarian family values, I must pick on the legacy of that great conservative president Ronald Reagan, who never balanced a federal budget and ran up our national debt by about 2.5 trillion. It seems that when Reagan was a 27-year-old actor in Hollywood in 1938 he discovered that many of his close friends were members of the Los Angeles section of the Communist Party. Howard Fast, who later became a very famous Hollywood scriptwriter, revealed that Reagan was very “passionate” about joining the group. Poor Ronnie was rejected. From conversations with sources, Mason determined that the party figured he “was a feather-brain… a flake who couldn’t be trusted with a political opinion for more than 20 minutes.”

Reagan survived as a “B” movie actor because he wasn’t on the blacklist during the anti-communist campaigns of the late 1940s and 1950s. The unintended consequences of his rejection by commies? Can you imagine Reagan winning the California governorship and the presidency with a record of being a member of the American Communist Party? He not only ended up being a mediocre but busy actor in his day, he actually played president on TV – complete with 3X5 cards and script.

I have never understood the anti-intellectual attraction of conservative Republicans for Reagan. He was gregarious, told a good story, could partially memorize a political script, had a great smile, but here was a president who put everything on credit cards for future generations to pay, created out-of-control budget deficits, shifted billions of dollars to the already rich through tax cuts for his buddies, didn’t understand the Constitution at all by starting the Iran-Contra scandal, and started the greed mode of the Bernie Maddoff crowd.

Reagan’s official biographer Edmund Morris, perhaps the most reliable of the many writers who have written about Reagan, wrote that the guy with the big smile and happy laughter was actually remote and distant if you really got to know him. Morris sided with Washington lawyer and power broker Clark Clifford who said that Reagan was an “amiable dunce.”

Could Fidel Ever Hit a Baseball and Other Stories

Back in the early 1950s when Corky and I lived in Washington, D.C. I followed the Washington Senators baseball team – later the Minnesota Twins – when cheapskate Clark Griffith wore out his welcome in our national capital. Clark always looked for baseball talent from Latin America because the players were cheaper than those from Kansas City, Modesto, or Maxbass. It was one of the funny stories circulating in Washington that Griffith was often seen down on the docks with pockets stuffed with baseball contracts waiting to sign anyone between 15 and 45 carrying a baseball glove or carrying a bat coming off a boat.

Mason reveals in his book that a 21-year-old Cuban by the name of Fidel Castro had a tryout with the Senators in 1947 but was not signed. No one seems to know too much about Fidel’s baseball potential, but I bet he wasn’t signed because of an argument over the size of a possible contract. Fidel was a member of a rather wealthy Cuban family, so he understood the value of a dollar. I think it’s hilarious that Fidel might have been a Hall of Fame player in the U.S. because he was considered a fine athlete in his day. Instead, he has bedeviled and made life politically miserable for our last ten presidents.

“Landslide” Lyndon Baines Johnson

Texas politics was once accurately described by an Oklahoma Indian named Will Rogers when he mused that whiskey bottles in the backroom of the counting office put more men into office than any ballot count. In Lyndon Johnson’s first run for the U.S. Senate he was behind by 87 votes when the last precinct from the tiny border town of Alice came in. Lo and behold, Lyndon had garnered 202 of the total of 203 votes sent in by the precinct chairman. There was another oddity. All of the people had voted in the same order as they appeared on the tax rolls of the town!

There was also another story about “Landslide” in his run for the House in his very first elective try. Lyndon won by just a few votes when, in what was later called “The Night of the Living Dead Voters” in Texas, it was later determined that many dead from one cemetery voted and put “Landslide” in office for the first time. A resident later conceded that he had observed Lyndon and a “friend” late at night reading and copying the names of “residents” off tombstones with the aid of a flashlight. That cemetery had one of the best voting records in the county. Such practices must have encouraged one of the Udalls from that political family to say he wanted to be buried in Chicago so he could “remain politically active.” That remark was made after Jack Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960 with the help of a few Chicago cemeteries.

How Can the Starving Poor Own a Car? Could “Family Values” Have Saved Jack Kennedy?

John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” has always been considered the best novel about the Great Depression ever written. When the book about the Joad family was made into a classic movie, Russian censors decided to approve its viewing in the entire Soviet Union because it portrayed the hard life experienced by the working class in a capitalist country. After the first few Russian showings it was quickly banned. It seems that poor Russian citizens were impressed by the fact that poor Midwest farmers seeking better lives in the fields of California owned their own cars. That was impossible in Joseph Stalin’s Russia.

Sometimes ignorance can compound the problems of unintended consequences. A Wisconsin newspaper editor – during the 1950s hysteria about Communist influence in the government charged by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy – wanted to run a series about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He had reporters stand on the corners with petitions containing the very words of the Declaration, asking them to sign the petition if they wanted the “bill” to be passed by the Wisconsin Legislature. Of the first 112 approached to sign the petitions, 111 refused to sign them because the petitions contained “subversive” language!

Only after President Jack Kennedy’s assassination did we learn that he was a womanizer of the first rank. In Seymour Hersh’s 1997 exposé of Kennedy’s “private” life called “The Dark Side of Camelot,” he recalled that Kennedy had pulled a groin muscle in “muscular activity” with a female partner while on a quickie vacation in the late September of 1963. Presidential doctors ordered him to wear a stiff canvas-to-groin body brace that kept him rigidly upright. In that Kennedy always wore another back brace because of a football and war injury, he was virtually immovable. When he was shot in the neck in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, those braces kept him from falling forward in the car. The second shot blew his brains out. The neck wound would not have been fatal and would have pushed his body violently forward. So if Kennedy had behaved himself….

Charles DeGaulle, president of France, led France after WW II during the Algerian War between 1954 and 1962. DeGaulle survived 31 known separate assassination attempts. He always traveled in an armored car. In one incident his car suffered 14 bullet holes caused by armor-piercing bullets. He was not hurt. In another incident his motorcade passed a vehicle that had one ton of explosives in it. The person who was supposed to detonate the bomb as he passed picked that time to go to a nearby bathroom. DeGaulle lived to the ripe age of 80, knowing that he had led a rather charmed life.

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