September 11, 2005

HARRY REYNOLDS OF SCARSDALE, NEW YORK, MADE MEMBER OF KENYA'S KIKUYU TRIBE AND GIVEN THE NAME "KAMAU"

On Sunday, September 11th, 2005, I met at a New York City hotel with several Kenyans - my good friend, the aged Kimani Ng'a Ng'a Maruge, brought here to attend at the Summit at the United Nations, Kimani's Kenyan grammar school teacher, Jane Obinchu, a Kenyan representative of Aidinternatinal, the NGO that arranged for Kimani's trip to New York, and an onlooking official of Kenya's ministry of education. In a hilarious meeting, during which a Kikuyu translation was made of my extended conversation with Kimani concerning our families, for I have known him and his family, Kimani made me a member of the Kikuyu tribe in recognition of the fact, he said, that I am his brother. As we all stood in the quietude of the lobby, Kimani blessed me from head to foot, and latterly, left and right, with swift flourishings of a tribal whisk which he then gave to me. I was given the Kikuyu name "Kamau", birth name of Kenyatta who was the first president of Kenya. I had taken an interest in Kimani's welfare, and provide money for him, because, among other things, he had been tortured by English soldiers in the 1950's when tens of thousands of Kenyans in the Mau Mau movement were rounded up like animals, imprisoned, hanged or by other means killed by the British government in concentration camps.On entering the hotel I did not expect to leave it as a Kikuyu. So one can see that benefactions can come out of nowhere unexpectedly.

Kamau (Harry) Reynolds

My FBI:

Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton,

and Fighting the War on Terror

By Louis J. Freeh St. Martin's Press New York, N.Y. 336 pages $ 29.95

A thread runs through all memoirs. In Louis Freeh's memoir, My FBI, the thread is an avowedly devout Catholicism, a faith in which Freeh was raised a "straight laced Catholic", a faith that "moved me toward the FBI", that "taught him to respect authority", that made the FBI "like a calling". His book's language is unadorned and is honest as a handshake, high spirited, decent, compassionate, and handsomely generous. If your name is in this book and Freeh has not called you "a great guy", "remarkable", "an inspiration", you are probably wanted in Nebraska for an axe slaying.

Early on in My FBI, Freeh tells of a winter night in 1968, when he, an 18 year old Rutgers sophomore bound for his rented room above a store after having worked that night on a beer truck, finds an old vagrant, reeking of "booze", lying in the hallway. Rather than prudently calling the police to have the man taken to a shelter, Freeh carries the stranger to his room, puts him on a sofa, and covers him. After morning coffee, the man states that he is "Flaherty", one of three brothers who had joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and went to Spain in 1937 to fight Franco. Upon returning home, he was persecutued by the FBI as a Communist. He could not find a job, and so, thirty-one years later, he was on skid row. Freeh gave him "a few bucks". Flaherty left, never to be seen by Freeh again. Admitting that he did not know how true Flaherty's story was, Freeh calls their conversation "one of my richest undergraduate experiences" for he saw how the FBI had set out to ruin Flaherty "without lifting an official finger against him". The story is a movingly genuine one of Freeh's compassion.

On the other hand, by startling coincidences I know that the man in the hallway was Frank Flaherty who in October, 1969, was buried in an unmarked grave in Olean, New York. I knew the political commissar of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Steve Nelson, and I knew that the three young Flaherty brothers from south Boston were famed for heroism in battle. I read Flaherty's 260 page FBI file provided upon his relative's FOIA request. It discloses, among other things, Flaherty's primary work as a seaman on coast line ships. The FBI's checking of him, such as it was, ended in 1953. The thread in Flaherty's ruin lay curled with him at the bottom of whatever bottle he was holding. He had sunk so low - his nickname was "Sunky" - that the FBI's last interest in him arose out of complaints that in at least three states and the District of Columbia he scammed parents of servicemen by calling them, posing as their son's college friend in sore need of money to reach his ship, and conning the parents to wire him money. Ironically, Freeh might have been scammed by Flaherty who might have known that the other tenants in Freeh's building were college students.

With a Phi Beta Kappa degree from Rutgers college in 1971, and a law degree from its law school in 1975, Freeh went to work at 25 as an FBI agent. He begins work in the small crimes world of "the street". There he doesn't "rat out" anyone, collars "nobodies", and works "to get enough goods" to put the deserving into the "slammer". In 1981, he is appointed an Assistant U. S. Attorney in the Southern District where he attracts national attention during 1985 as the fighting prosecutor in the 17 month Pizza Connection case involving 300 witnesses, 15,000 exhibits, a 41,000 page transcript, a defendant shot during his attorney's summation, while another, unhappy with his attorney's summation, "put out a hit contract on him". In 1989, Freeh tediously tracks and brings to conviction the bomber Walter Moody who killed U.S. District Judge Robert Vance and NAACP leader Robert Robinson. At 43, Freeh is appointed a U.S. District Judge. His two years as a district judge are quickly glossed over in My FBI, though he does stop to refer to Learned Hand as a "Supreme Court justice".

In 1993, President Clinton appoints Freeh Director of the FBI. Freeh

confesses in retrospect that he "wasn't ready" for the political pressure that position would attract. He describes the constant FBI budget problems, the failure to keep abreast of communication technologies, and the daunting great need for additional agents. Notable convictions are recalled - the Birmingham church bombing, the conviction of the former governor of Louisiana, and the usual suspects, corrupt police officers. He points to China and the foreign intelligence services of our closest allies engaged in intellectual property thefts. Health care fraud, anti-trust, bank fraud, and theft by computers, are but a handful of the many matters that made him work "like a dog".

In 1995 he dealt with the apprehension of the Unabomber, Kaczynski, and in 1996 he oversaw the Murrah Federal Building bombing investigation in Oklahoma. And then there was the mindboggling nightmare of the Russian mole, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, caught in 2001 having compromised intelligence operations since the 1970's. Hanssen lived in Scarsdale close to my home and prayed in our parish Catholic church. As yet undiscovered, he was then transferred to Washington where he lived near Freeh and prayed in Freeh's church.

Freeh's book was published more than four years after he resigned in 2001 and entered corporate life. He so despised Clinton, and so loved the FBI, that he delayed his resignation until Clinton had resigned, thus allowing President Bush to appoint his successor. Freeh had spent most of his time as director "investigating the man who had appointed me". Clinton's moral compass, said Freeh, pointed in the wrong direction. The closets "were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out." In eight years, "Clinton ran through six White House counsels, a telling index of just how troubled his tenure was."

Freeh points to FBI evidence of illicit fund-raising during the 1996 presidential campaign, particularly Republic of China soft money in Clinton-Gore coffers. With a fine touch of solemn comedy, Freeh describes the FBI's overseeing in the White House of the procurement from Clinton himself of his DNA for comparative use with the historic semen stains found on Monica Lewinsky's dress. The odor of decay is recalled by Freeh in Clinton's end term rain of controversial pardons, especially that of Marc Rich. For "the most devastating moment of my entire tenure as director", Freeh points to Clinton's 1999 citation by U.S. District Judge Wright for contempt for the giving of intentionally false information in Paula Jones v. Clinton. In January, 2001, the Arkansas Supreme Court suspended Clinton for five years for having knowingly given evasive and misleading discovery responses in that matter.

For the public however, Freeh's claim that Clinton attempted to obtain money from the Saudis in connection with the Khobar Towers bombing is by far the gravest charge made by Freeh against Clinton. In June, 1996, Iran's exclusive terrorist agent, Hezbollah, bombed the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 Americans and wounding 372. The FBI could not question suspects in Saudi Arabia unless Clinton obtained King Fahd's consent. Freeh determinedly pressed Clinton to persuade the Saudis to allow FBI agents to enter Saudi Arabia for hard evidence of Iran's complicity. In 1998, when Crown Prince Abdullah met with Clinton in Washington, Freeh expected Clinton to persuade the Saudis to cooperate. Instead, Clinton, wrote Freeh, "raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he certainly understood the Saudi's reluctance to cooperate [because of Iran]. Then...he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the still-to-be-built Clinton library".

For his accusation against Clinton, one that directly challenges Clinton's integrity in a grave matter, Freeh offers "usually reliable sources". Freeh, an attorney, must know that his accusation of Clinton, still an attorney though suspended, made without stating its grounds, denies Clinton the means of challenging the truth of the accusation. On the other hand, Freeh's claim of misconduct by Clinton is relevant to whether the Committee on Professional Conduct of the Arkansas Supreme Court should recommend his reinstatement in January, 2006. Freeh would then have an opportunity to identify his "usually reliable sources".

 

 

 

 

                                                    THE RIGHT REVEREND RICHARD CHENEY

Rare is the person who has never been deceived, conned, tricked, or flipped.

Are you the exception? Try this for size:

It’s February, 1992. Bush the Father had led us into the "Gulf Conflict" to "protect the sovereignty of Kuwait" by protecting our oil under Kuwait. Richard Cheney, Halliburton oil and gas hustler and our Secretary of Defense, appears on BBC to explain why we had not pressed on to Baghdad. Listen to con man Cheney ["The Gulf Conflict 1990-1991" by Freedman and Karsh, p. 413]:

"If we’d gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein - assuming we could have found him - we'd have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground some place. He would not have been easy to capture. Then you've got to put a new government in his place and then you're faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq? Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Shia government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to have to leave there to keep it propped up, how many
casualties are you going to take through the course of this operation?"

Thirteen years later and betcha’ don’t know how many of your sons and daughters, or those of your neighbors, are going to be decapitated by mortars, have their body parts zipped up in those black bags, and sent home in those neat, white coffins that the nosey press are barred from photographing.

Betcha’ don’t know how many of those youngsters are going to die defending a dummy government propped up by Bush the Idiot Son "to establish democracy" while protecting our oil under Iraq "against the terrrorist Islamist global conspiracy" because, Mr Mumbles will tell you, "There’s...uh.... nobody.....uh...anywhere.... can ...uh, establish a Kooditch...uh... or Sheeta...uh or Sunny....uh, government for Iraq. Why, Dick Cheney said that in uh...1992..... ‘Member that?.....Right, Dick?"

                                       Harry Reynolds

                                       Scarsdale, NY

                                                            Rehnquist, the Clerk

When Chief Justice Rehnquist leaves the Court, it will be with a smile that he was not entitled to be there in the first place.

Rehnquist obtained his confirmation as associate justice in 1971, and later as chief justice in 1986, by making false statements before the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning his writing in 1952, when he was clerk to Justice Robert Jackson, of a legal memorandum in support of segregation when Brown v. Board of Education was before the court. Jackson had died in 1954.

In 1971, when Rehnquist, a Nixon nominee, appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he was confronted with his 1952 memo. He stated that his 1952 memo was written, at Jackson’s request, for use at a conference of the justices in Brown as a statement of Jackson's views concerning the constitutionality of segregation. Rehnquist restated his claim before the committee in 1986 when nominated for the chief justiceship. In doing so, he committed the despicable act of putting into the mouth of the dead Jackson a racist position that Jackson would have denounced from his grave, if that had been possible.

 After Rehnquist's confirmation as chief justice in 1986, an examination of the papers of Justice Jackson at the Library of Congress disclosed Jackson's draft of his unissued concurrence in Brown, a document unequivocally declaring segregation unconstitutional, and wholly "inconsistent with Rehnquist's assertion that his memo was intended to state Jackson's rather than Rehnquist's view on the constitutionality of segregation." This the pointed judgment of Bernard Schwartz, one of the greatest scholars of our constitutional law. Schwartz, "A History of the Supreme Court" , p. 290 (1993); see Richard Kluger's monumental work, "Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality", p. 609 (1975).

Had Jackson's draft of his unissued concurrence in Brown been known to the Senate when it voted on Rehnquist's nomination in 1971, it undoubtedly would have deprived Rehnquist of a seat on the Supreme Court, to say nothing of the chief justiceship in 1986. Chief Justice Warren, however, persuaded the court in Brown to speak in one, unanimous opinion. Had Justice Jackson issued his concurring opinion in Brown, Rehnquist would not have been on the Court today and Bush might not have been our president.

                                                                           Harold Reynolds

 

                                                  Reviewed by Harold Reynolds

                       Becoming Justice Blackmun

           

                By Linda Greenhouse

            Henry Holt and Company, New York, N.Y. 268 pages $25

In June, 1970, President Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun to the Supreme Court having been assured by Chief Justice Burger of Blackmun’s strict constructionist credentials. Independently of his right wing glow, Blackmun had had the foresight to attend kindergarten, Sunday school, and grammar school with Burger, capping it with Blackmun’s role as best man at Burger’s wedding. It mattered little in any case. The Court had become "the apotheosis of mediocrity", a condition assured by the politicization of the appointing and confirmation process (Bernard Schwartz, Decision:How the Supreme Court Decides Cases, 256 (1996)).

Linda Greenhouse, the New York Times’ Supreme Court reporter, after having trawled the 530,800 papers that Blackmun gave to the Library of Congress, among which he thoughtfully included his honeymoon receipts, has written Becoming Justice Blackmun. In prose of the finest style, she sketches in her initial pages the essentials of Blackmun’s persona - a small man arisen out of a family of modest means, himself restive, insular, religious, intense, painstaking, melancholic, a worldclass note writer and chronic list keeper destined to become the slowest worker on the bench, a risk avoider, honest and sensitive to slights made or imagined - she takes these facts and, illuminating them through the scrim of Blackmun’s twenty-four years on the Court, produces the illusion of a life created, a penetration of a personality, all of which she would not have done but for Blackmun’s writing of the Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

In January, 1973, the Court decided Roe upon Blackmun’s lengthy opinion holding that a Texas statute that criminalized abortion, except in the case of the saving of the mother’s life, violated a woman’s right to abortion assured to her by her right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The right to abortion was "fundamental" and could be regulated only on the basis of a "compelling" state interest. The abortion decision during the first trimester was left to the mother and her physician. In the subsequent stage of the pregnancy, the state was allowed to regulate the abortion procedure in order to promote the health of the mother. After viability, the state could regulate and even proscribe abortion, except to preserve the life or health of the mother.

Several months after Roe, John Hart Ely, gifted scholar and pro-abortionist, published his famous article, The Wages of Crying Wolf: A Comment on Roe v. Wade (82 Yale L.J. 920 (1973)) in which he eviscerated Blackmun’s reasoning to the satisfaction of virtually the entire pro-abortion academic world. In sum, Ely stated that "Roe lacks even colorable support in the constitutional text, history, or any other appropriate source of constitutional doctrine."

Roe, though broadsided in the elite legal world, nevertheless became the most controversial Supreme Court case of the last century. It changed the last thirty years of American life and politics. By drawing lines at trimesters and viability it acted like a legislature. Ironically, Blackmun, though but one of a majority of seven, was instantly and until his death in 1999 beatified by the pro-choice camp and vilified, cursed, picketed, and denounced by the pro-life movement. Few knew that, in his first draft opinion, Blackmun had nearly led the Court into a blunder by declaring the Texas statute unconstitutional for vagueness, having sidestepped the Court’s opinion in United States v. Uvitch that upheld an essentially similar District of Columbia statute against a claim of vagueness. In that first draft, Blackmun struck down the Texas statute not because it violated a woman’s right to abortion but because the statute’s meaning was vague and hence exposed physicians to criminal prosecutions. Upon seeing his error, he withdrew vagueness as a ground and there then ensued exchanges among the bench that provide entertainment for lawyers who relish watching the drama,

chess moves, shadow boxing, political conniving and theory shopping that are sometimes hidden behind the assembling of a judicial construct bound to set off a

national political and social explosion. In his second draft, Blackmun substantially wrote the Roe opinion as we have it, an opinion that seemed, at times, a cut and paste job more concerned with protecting physicians performing abortions than with women undergoing them.

As in war, so in law. If you can’t kill, maim. Over the hedge came Missouri in a failed, bizarre attempt to require a husband’s consent for an abortion except when necessary to save his wife’s life. Then a trio of high minded cases succeeded in upholding a state’s decision not to finance abortions for poor women. Ohio hopped aboard requiring grown women to make multiple trips to clinics or physicians’ offices there to enjoy informed consent procedures in which their doctors were compelled to show them pictures of fetuses in various stages of development. The husband whose consent was not required? Now he had to be notified before an abortion could take place, presumably to cheer his wife on. Denial of federal funding, except for life saving abortions, was held constitutional. If federal money was used, family planning clinics were barred from counselling patients on abortion. Missouri successfully barred abortion in public facilities and required public employees to perform extensive prenatal testing for viability. Notice to a teenager’s parent who did not have veto power was upheld, but a statute requiring notice to two parents was struck. Finally, when Roe in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992) had a near death experience, abortion was held no longer a right to privacy but a liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Gone was the strict scrutiny of abortion regulations now made reviewable by an "undue burden" standard. Gone was Roe’s rigid trimester scheme, an unwise incursion in any event by Roe into science. Forbidden were spousal notices, but justified were informed consent, waiting period and, for teenagers, one-parent consent requirements, the latter tied to judicial bypass procedures.

Unfortunately, Ms Greenhouse does not report the startling fact, learned by this reviewer, that within forty-eight hours after Casey was decided, John Hart Ely, who famously flayed Roe as constitutionally indefensible, supra, sent off a letter to Justices Kennedy, O’Connor, and Souter heartily congratulating them for refusing to overrule Roe. Ely wrote that "society has indeed built up expectations on the basis of [Roe], particularly as regards the aspirations of women. And falling into a pattern whereby presidents appoint justices with the essential promise that they will overrule particular cases, and then having them dutifully proceed to do so, would weaken the Court’s authority immeasurably". Ely, On Constitutional Ground, 304 (1996).

Though Roe is the center of her book, Ms Greenhouse skillfully describes the sad deterioration of the once intimate friendship between Blackmun and Burger; Blackmun’s striking out at the death penalty ("From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."); and the beginning of the development in his thinking, triggered by sex discrimination cases, of a central core of women’s rights in which Roe is an essential but not exclusive right. It was not until I read her book that I saw and felt in a pointedly human way the dilemma of women in their struggle for their identity as persons and their equality as citizens. The mind numbing journalese that for long had glossed news reports about women’s rights, the repetitive photo and television shots of women in protest, all of our insensibility to their suffering, was stirred up by this book whose singular literary character justifies Ms Greenhouse for consideration for a Pulitzer Prize. She received one in 1998, but it is not written that one cannot have two.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published:           Scarsdale Inquirer April 29, 2005  
                   Dogs can help finance school wing replacement
To the Editor:

As of September, 2004, there were 694 registered dogs in Scarsdale.

Every day, 694 guilty looking men and women leave their homes with 694 gaily expectant dogs who trot to nearby, favoured roads where they drop their loads. Thereupon 694 refreshed looking men and women fly back to their home bases which are never located near the dumping sites. By an intuited calculus, the principle of dumping on someone else's road is executed peacefully every day, a not inconsiderable feat when one realises that 694 dogs, at the end of each calendar year, have dropped 253, 310 loads or, rounded out, more than one-quarter million dumps. No one doubts the sacred value of the power of a Scarsadale dog owner to have his Rex or Mimi dump daily in the village . It is a power more immediately meaningful to him than any of his civil liberties he so infrequently uses.

I own a German Shepherd dog. She is a hearty eater, probably better fed than the average commuting adult Scarsdale male. I pay $12 a year for the license granted me to possess that dog in Scarsdale. I would be willing to pay $100 a year for that dog license and its implicit dumping rights, on condition that the excess sum of $88 be used to replace, and not to repair, the conditions that exist at the Quaker Ridge school. 694 dumping dogs times $88 for 20 years is the sum of $1, 221,440 which when discounted amounts to a lesser sum but one that certainly reduces to an insignificant amount the $900 thousand difference between the $12.6 million cost for the repair option and the $13.5 million cost for the superior replacement option. All that is required of the Village is that it rake in, so to speak, the money from the dogs. We will thus avoid, among other things, the repellant use of portable classrooms, to say nothing of the estimated security cost of $100 thousand if those portable classrooms are used under the repair option. Surely, no one favours compelling grade school children to spend their early years in portable classrooms. Indeed, if I were considering the purchase of a Scarsdale home, and learned of the use of those portable classrooms near the edge of an interstate highway system, I wouldn't stop my car to look at Scarsdale. I would wonder why Scarsdale had to go to the dogs in order to fix a modest tax increase spread over 20 years for just one of its grammar schools. I wouldn't want my children or my dog in that district.

                                             Harry Reynolds

April 21, 2005

  

              ATTORNEY GENERAL SPITZER WHERE ARE YOU?                    

                  New York State Punishes Families of State Prisoners                             
       
        I am a member of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.                                   HARRY REYNOLDS                                                                 

                             Reviewed by Harold Reynolds

            His Excellency: George Washington

By Joseph J. Ellis, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 320 pages, $26.95

 

In May, 1754, the twenty-two year old George Washington, leading a party of forty, together with warriors led by Seneca chief Half-King, attacked French soldiers in the Ohio Country. As their wounded commander, Jumonville, tried in French to explain that he was on a peace mission, Half-King, fluent in French but favoring brevity, with one blow hatcheted the Frenchman’s skull in two, pulled out his brain and washed his hands in it, shocking Washington. There followed in July a bloody battle at Fort Necessity where the French and Indians, led by the brother of Jumonville, administered a world class beating to Washington. In his formal surrender, Washington admitted responsibility for the assassination of Jumonville, thus triggering the French and Indian War.

In 1755, Washington, as aide to General Braddock, saw nine hundred British and Americans savagely killed by the French and Indians. Braddock, hastily buried by Washington, had warred against the Indians as if he were in the suburbs of Paris. Upon returning from the battle, Washington became "the hero of Monongahela" for rallying the survivors in retreat.

Several years followed in which Washington created an elite colonial unit having the discipline of British regulars and the proficiency of Indian warriors. His discipline was simple: he hanged deserters and gave up to a thousand strokes to the drunk and the lewd. At twenty-six, he fell in love with Sally Fairfax but married instead Martha Custis, Virginia’s wealthiest widow, who at twenty-seven had eighteen thousand acres that Sally didn’t have, a decision that should warm the heart of any managing partner. The acreage positioned Washington at the top of Viginia’s planter class. For his soldiering, he received royal land grants that at his death would constitute the core of his great wealth.

Little is known about Washington’s youth. His father died when Washington was eleven. His mother, from whom in later life he was estranged, never praised him. Unfortunately, she lived into his second term as President, publicly deriding and harrassing him. James Thomas Flexner, Washington’s distinguished historian, thought her a shrew. Washington, with only the equivalent of a grammar school education, always felt inferior to those who had managed college degrees . As a young man, he was six feet three, one hundred seventy-five pounds, athletically built, and had gray, blue eyes. He was emotionally restrained and mentally enigmatic. Those who knew him noted the imperial effect of his height and silence. He was markedly fearless, had great integrity, and was profoundly ambitious. Obsessive about his property, he thought slavery wrong, but not wrong enough to move him in life to free his slaves. He was not an intellectual, and he was not religious, fixing his eye more to the earth than to the heavens.

Angered in 1774 by Britain’s punitive reaction to the Boston Tea Party, Washington, at forty-three, found himself in 1775 commander in chief of the Continental Army, sitting in a custom made chariot, escorted into Philadelphia by five hundred horsemen, and addressed as "His Excellency". If he failed, he would hang and his extensive property would be confiscated. He could not have foreseen the embattled dead at Long Island, Fort Washington, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine Germantown, and Saratoga; his depleted army, one-third shoeless, at Valley Forge, the snow red with the bloody feet of his men; the Continental Congress, useless as teats on a bull, without power to supply men or money; the hanging of unpaid soldiers in mutiny; soldiers eating their horses; the pillaging of farmers by starving soldiers; a hell sustained by his steel will.

Yet, at Valley Forge the war turned. The bread we eat in freedom was earned there by poor immigrants, fifteen to twenty-five years old, recently arrived from Ireland and England, identured servants, former slaves, the landless, the castoffs, who, in their long hair, laughed as they decorated their uniforms with feathers and furs. They were so poor they didn’t have betweem them the price of the shovel that would bury them.

The unknown god of perfect conjunctions suddenly appeared in October, 1781, when Cornwallis was marooned in Yorktown, Virginia. With the essential help of the French fleet and French army engineers, Washington, after six years of hell, delivered a blow so decisive that he didn’t realize at the time that the war was over. In 1783, the peace treaty having been signed, he dismissed offers of a kingship, surrendered his commission, and rode off in what Ellis, in his Pulitzer worthy book, wittily describes as "the greatest exit in American history".

Unfortunately for Washington, he rode back. He chaired the constitutional convention and unanimously was selected president, not for his mind but for what he was in the public mind. No longer in the field, he was not prepared for the slophouse of politics where the hypocrite, the devious, the envious, the greedy, and the intellectually pretentious constantly dine. In the struggle between Federalists and Republicans, he suffered reports that he was senile, naturally slow in mind, a dupe in a Federalist conspiracy, a British bribe taker, and a puppet of Hamilton. Jefferson dismayed him by secretly paying newspapers to libel him. In the rage over the Jay Treaty, he observed, in ear shot of shouted threats and insults, the principle of avoiding foreign alliances in the absence of the nation’s selfinterest.

The unyielding political strife drove the retired Washington into the great blunders of his life. He endorsed the idea of a provisional army in order to crush a perceived threat of Republican subversion and he gave his blessing to the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts.

Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin, all agreed that Washington was by far their superior. If so, it was because there was conjoined in him an ordinary man and an iron willed leader who had marched into the mouth of hell with a ragbag army and then out of it with a nation. Who among them could have led those poor, young men whose bloody footprints were in the snow at Valley Forge?

 

 

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