A Love Letter

In January 1958 my father, Chris E. Grimsley, was a freshman at East Carolina College in Greenville, North Carolina, about fifty miles north of New Bern, his hometown. He was a Navy veteran a few months past his 23rd birthday. The G.I. Bill was paying for his education.

Early that month he met my mother, Margaret Griffin Harvin, commonly known as Peggy. Peggy had just turned 22. She was from the small town of Woodland in the northeastern part of the state and had transferred to East Carolina after studying first at Duke University and then, briefly, at Guilford College in Greensboro. She was a senior majoring in Home Economics.

Throughout my life I’ve been told that I look just like my father, which is more or less the case, with two caveats. First, my father was six feet tall; I’m only five foot eight. Second, my father was considered quite good-looking; my looks are passable but not in the same league. It may have been the gap between his front incisors. When he grinned it gave him a boyish charm. I myself have never been accused of having charm, boyish or otherwise. Nor have my looks been compared to my mother’s. She was considered drop dead gorgeous; at age 18 had, in fact, been selected as the beauty queen of WTAR-TV in Norfolk, Virginia, which won her an all-expenses paid trip to New York City.

I don’t know exactly how my parents met, but they very definitely hit it off, and at 9 p.m. on Saturday, January 18, 1958, my father abandoned his textbooks and in his firm, masculine hand-writing penned my mother a three-page letter:

“In the cold light of day—this note—letter—what have you; may seem ridiculous, however, though I realize this. . . . there is, at least for the moment, the need to talk to you and since our sixth sense has not paralleled our development of writing—perhaps this page will suffice to capture this moment as it is—I know I could never tell you about it later.

“A few moments ago I was trying to study. Odd though it may seem, a little background music usually helps, but tonight all it does is bring visions of you to me—So you see it seems I can neither study when I’m with you nor when I’m without you. That probably sounds like a bad state of affairs—yet, I would not trade that ‘need for you to be near’ feeling for all the World.

“This is a crazy world Peg—two weeks ago I had not even heard of you—and tonight you possess my every thought—How do you explain this to anyone? How do you explain it to yourself? I do not know, and yet it is fact so I cannot deny it—even if I wanted to.”

Yes, Virginia, You Can Impeach a Former President

That's Secretary of War William W. Belknap, and his story has much to say about whether you can constitutionally impeach a former president. The short answer is, Yep.

To begin with, the House of Representatives impeached him before he left office.  It's only the required Senate trial that's taking place after he's left office.

As for trying him after he has left office, there's historical precedent for impeaching and trying a federal official after they have left office.  You've got an uphill climb if you want to argue that trying Trump is unconstitutional.  You certainly cannot say, as the GOP has done, that it's unconstitutional on its face.

On January 15 the Congressional Research Service  (CRS) produced a report entitled "The Impeachment and Trial of a Former President," explores the history of impeachment in the United States, and notes that federal officials have been impeached after they have left office.  In other words, it has been regarded as constitutional.

The CRS is a  public policy research institute created by Congress in 1914.  Like the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accountability Office, it works directly for Members of Congress on a bipartisan basis.

The report points out that federal officials have been impeached and tried after they have left office.

The most notable case involved the impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876, essentially on grounds of rampant corruption.  Here's what the U.S. Senate Historical Office says about it:

On March 2, 1876, just minutes before the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on articles of impeachment, Belknap raced to the White House, handed Grant his resignation, and burst into tears.

This failed to stop the House. Later that day, members voted unanimously to send the Senate five articles of impeachment, charging Belknap with "criminally disregarding his duty as Secretary of War and basely prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain."

The Senate convened its trial in early April, with Belknap present, after agreeing that it retained impeachment jurisdiction over former government officials. During May, the Senate heard more than 40 witnesses, as House managers argued that Belknap should not be allowed to escape from justice simply by resigning his office.

On August 1, 1876, the Senate rendered a majority vote against Belknap on all five articles. As each vote fell short of the necessary two-thirds, however, he won acquittal.

Republicans undoubtedly know about this precedent.  They rely on the fact that the American public does not know about it.

Yes, Virginia, You Can Try a Former President

That's William W. Belknap in the photo. And his story has much to say about whether it's constitutional to impeach Trump now that he has left office?  The short answer is: Yep.

To begin with, the House of Representatives *impeached* him before he left office.  It's only the required Senate trial that's taking place after he's left office.

As for *trying* him after he has left office, there's historical precedent for impeaching and trying a federal official after they have left office.  You've got an uphill climb if you want to argue that trying Trump is unconstitutional.  You certainly cannot say, as the GOP has done, that it's unconstitutional on its face.

On January 15 the Congressional Research Service  (CRS) produced a report entitled "The Impeachment and Trial of a Former President," that explores the history of impeachment in the United States, and notes that federal officials have been impeached after they have left office.  In other words, it has been regarded as constitutional.

The CRS is a  public policy research institute created by Congress in 1914.  Like the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accountability Office, it works directly for Members of Congress on a bipartisan basis.

The report points out that federal officials have been impeached and tried after they have left office.

The most notable case involved the impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876, essentially on grounds of rampant corruption.  Here's what the U.S. Senate Historical Office says about it:

On March 2, 1876, just minutes before the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on articles of impeachment, Belknap raced to the White House, handed Grant his resignation, and burst into tears.

This failed to stop the House. Later that day, members voted unanimously to send the Senate five articles of impeachment, charging Belknap with "criminally disregarding his duty as Secretary of War and basely prostituting his high office to his lust for private gain."

The Senate convened its trial in early April, with Belknap present, after agreeing that it retained impeachment jurisdiction over former government officials. During May, the Senate heard more than 40 witnesses, as House managers argued that Belknap should not be allowed to escape from justice simply by resigning his office.

On August 1, 1876, the Senate rendered a majority vote against Belknap on all five articles. As each vote fell short of the necessary two-thirds, however, he won acquittal.

Republicans undoubtedly know about this precedent.  They rely on the fact that the American public does not know about it.

Sounding Taps for Military History--Again

Yet another lament for the supposed demise of academic military history has appeared, this time from the pen of the distinguished military historian Max Hastings.  These op-eds appear every few years, apparently oblivious to the ones that preceded it and the pushback they received from military historians like myself.  My own commentary focused mainly on an op-ed by John J. Miller in National Review Online September 2006.  Since it appears to have disappeared from the Internet, I reprint it here.

EDUCATION 2006 [September 26, 2006]
Sounding Taps
Why military history is being retired

JOHN J. MILLER

A decade ago, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, to endow a professorship in American military history. A few months later, he gave another $250,000. Until his death in 2002, he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today, more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History, named after its main benefactor and the long-dead professor who trained him.

The chair remains vacant, however, and Wisconsin is not currently trying to fill it. “We won’t search for a candidate this school year,” says John Cooper, a history professor. “But we’re committed to doing it eventually.” The ostensible reason for the delay is that the university wants to raise even more money, so that it can attract a top-notch senior scholar. There may be another factor as well: Wisconsin doesn’t actually want a military historian on its faculty. It hasn’t had one since 1992, when Edward M. Coffman retired. “His survey course on U.S. military history used to overflow with students,” says Richard Zeitlin, one of Coffman’s former graduate teaching assistants. “It was one of the most popular courses on campus.” Since Coffman left, however, it has been taught only a couple of times, and never by a member of the permanent faculty.

One of these years, perhaps Wisconsin really will get around to hiring a professor for the Ambrose-Heseltine chair — but right now, for all intents and purposes, military history in Madison is dead. It’s dead at many other top colleges and universities as well. Where it isn’t dead and buried, it’s either dying or under siege. Although military history remains incredibly popular among students who fill lecture halls to learn about Saratoga and Iwo Jima and among readers who buy piles of books on Gettysburg and D-Day, on campus it’s making a last stand against the shock troops of political correctness. “Pretty soon, it may become virtually impossible to find military-history professors who study war with the aim of understanding why one side won and the other side lost,” says Frederick Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who taught at West Point for ten years. That’s bad news not only for those with direct ties to this academic sub-discipline, but also for Americans generally, who may find that their collective understanding of past military operations falls short of what the war-torn present demands.

The very first histories ever written were military histories. Herodotus described the Greek wars with Persia, and Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War. “It will be enough for me,” wrote Thucydides nearly 25 centuries ago, “if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.” The Marine Corps certainly thinks Thucydides is useful: He appears on a recommended-reading list for officers. One of the most important lessons he teaches is that war is an aspect of human existence that can’t be wished away, no matter how hard the lotus-eaters try.

A DYING BREED
Although the keenest students of military history have often been soldiers, the subject isn’t only for them. “I don’t believe it is possible to treat military history as something entirely apart from the general national history,” said Theodore Roosevelt to the American Historical Association in 1912. For most students, that’s how military history was taught — as a key part of a larger narrative. After the Second World War, however, the field boomed as veterans streamed into higher education as both students and professors. A general increase in the size of faculties allowed for new approaches, and the onset of the Cold War kept everybody’s mind focused on the problem of armed conflict.

 

Then came the Vietnam War and the rise of the tenured radicals. The historians among them saw their field as the academic wing of a “social justice” movement, and they focused their attention on race, sex, and class. “They think you’re supposed to study the kind of social history you want to support, and so women’s history becomes advocacy for ‘women’s rights,’” says Mary Habeck, a military historian at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. “This makes them believe military historians are always advocates of militarism.” Other types of historians also came under attack — especially scholars of diplomatic, intellectual, and maritime history — but perhaps none have suffered so many casualties as the “drums and trumpets” crowd. “Military historians have been hunted into extinction by politically active faculty members who think military history is a subject for right-wing, imperialistic warmongers,” says Robert Bruce, a professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

At first glance, military history appears to have maintained beachheads on a lot of campuses. Out of 153 universities that award doctorates in history, 99 of them — almost 65 percent — have at least one professor who claims a research interest in war, according to S. Mike Pavelec, a military historian at Hawaii Pacific University. But this figure masks another problem: Social history has started to infiltrate military history, Trojan Horse–style. Rather than examining battles, leaders, and weapons, it looks at the impact of war upon culture. And so classes that are supposedly about the Second World War blow by the Blitzkrieg, the Bismarck, and the Bulge in order to celebrate the proto-feminism of Rosie the Riveter, condemn the national disgrace of Japanese-American internment, and ask that favorite faculty-lounge head-scratcher: Should the United States have dropped the bomb? “It’s becoming harder and harder to find experts in operational military history,” says Dennis Showalter of Colorado College. “All this social history is like Hamletwithout the prince of Denmark.”

Consider the case of Steve Zdatny, a history professor at West Virginia University. On his webpage, he lists World War I as one of his “teaching fields.” But he’s no expert in trench warfare or aerial dogfights. Here’s how he describes his latest scholarship: “Having recently finished a history of the French hairdressing profession . . . I am now in the opening stages of research on a history of public and personal hygiene, which will examine evolving practices and sensibilities of cleanliness in twentieth-century France.” His body of work includes journal articles with titles such as “The Boyish Look and the Liberated Woman: The Politics and Aesthetics of Women’s Hairstyles.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But when fashion history begins to crowd out military history, or even masquerade as it, the priorities of colleges and universities are clearly out of whack. “The prevailing view is that war is bad and we shouldn’t study bad things,” says Williamson Murray, a former professor who is now at the Institute for Defense Analyses. “Thank goodness cancer specialists don’t have that attitude.” The problem is most severe at first-tier schools. Two years ago, Coffman, the retired Wisconsin professor, pored over the faculties of the 25 best history departments, as determined by U.S. News & World Report. Among more than a thousand full-time professors, only 21 listed war as a specialty. “We’re dying out,” he says.

To make matters worse, faculties are refusing privately financed lifelines. Years ago, William P. Harris, the heir to a lumber fortune, tried to establish a chair in military history at Dartmouth, his alma mater. He offered $1.5 million to endow it, but the school turned him down. “Liberals on the faculty objected to the word ‘military,’” says Harris, who recently pledged his money to Hillsdale College, which was happy to accept it.

Another reason for the shortage of scholars is that military historians have been shut out of The American Historical Review, the most prestigious academic journal for history professors. Last year, John A. Lynn of the University of Illinois surveyed the last 150 issues of the AHR, which comes out five times annually. During this 30-year period, he couldn’t find a single article that discussed the conduct of World War II. Other ignored wars included the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. There was a single article on the English Civil War, dealing with atrocities committed therein. Lynn located precisely two articles on the U.S. Civil War. One of these also dealt with atrocities. “I guess military atrocities are attractive to the editors,” he says. The only article on World War I focused on female soldiers in the Russian army. “I suspect the editors liked it because it was about women, not because it was about war.” The lead article in the most recent issue of the AHR is about wigs in 18th-century France.

Although military history is sometimes viewed as a haven for conservative academics, Lynn calls himself a liberal Democrat. Yet his politics haven’t swayed any of his left-wing colleagues to accept his field. “When I retire in a few years, I’m sure they won’t replace me with another military historian,” he says. “That will end a long tradition of teaching military history at Illinois.” Other schools already have abandoned military history. James McPherson, the most celebrated living historian of the Civil War, recently retired from Princeton; his prospective replacement, Stephanie McCurry, is an expert in gender relations. The University of Michigan retreated from the field when Gerald Linderman and John Shy retired in the 1990s. Purdue failed to replace the late Gunther Rothenberg. “We had a really strong graduate program, with maybe 18 students,” says Frederick Schneid, a former student of Rothenberg and now a military historian at North Carolina’s High Point University. “But the department didn’t bring in a new military historian and now it’s gone.”

TAKING COVER
Military history still clings to a few fortified positions. The service academies continue to teach it; cadets at West Point, for example, must take two semesters of military history during their senior year. ROTC students are also required to pass a course in military history, though the quality of these classes can vary dramatically. “We prefer a member of the regular faculty to teach them, and for these courses to include battle analysis,” says Army Lt. Col. Gregory Daddis, the ROTC battalion commander at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But not every campus has a faculty that can handle this.” When a school can’t satisfy this requirement — or doesn’t want to — the instruction is left to ROTC officers. Elsewhere, students may take “military history” courses that are more likely to concentrate on the quilting patterns of Confederate war widows than Stonewall Jackson’s flanking maneuver at Chancellorsville.

Several public universities — Kansas State, Ohio State, and Texas A&M — are highly regarded bastions of military history. A handful of strategic-studies programs, such as those at SAIS and Yale, also approach the subject with seriousness. But even these strongholds are besieged. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Security Studies Program recently introduced a new logo that features a compass. “It seemed there were complaints from others at MIT that the existing logo with its 18th-century cannons was too aggressive,” complained Harvey Sapolsky, the center’s retiring director, in a recent annual report. “And if the cannons offend, will not the work we do as well?”

Some military historians have found refuge in the military itself. The Army alone employs more than 200 civilian historians. They write official histories, teach at various war colleges and leadership schools, and research questions for active-duty personnel. “Just before the first Gulf War, we got a call from the Pentagon asking us to describe the historical experience of the Army in the desert,” says Cody Phillips of the Army’s Center of Military History. “So we prepared a report that focused on the North African campaign during the Second World War.”

Military historians who try for a more conventional career, however, often confront the academic equivalent of urban warfare, with snipers behind every window and ambushes around every corner. “You shouldn’t go into this field unless you really love the work,” warns Showalter. “And you have to be ready, like Booker T. Washington, to cast down your bucket where you are.” Many talented scholars wind up taking positions at second-rate institutions because they don’t have other options.

Even though they’re embattled, military historians have a not-so-secret weapon: the public’s love for their area of expertise. When history departments actually offer military-history courses, students flock to them. “My classes max out right away,” says Sam Houston’s Bruce. “I like to think it’s because I’m a good teacher, but this material simply sells itself.” A surefire way for a history department to boost its enrollment figures — and perhaps win funding that is tied to the number of bodies it packs into classrooms — is to offer a survey course on a big American war.

The hunger for military history is even more obvious off campus. The History Channel used to broadcast so many programs on World War II that it was nicknamed “The Hitler Channel.” It still airs a lot of shows on war, and now there’s a separate Military History Channel. Booksellers and publishers also recognize the popularity of military history. Most large bookstores have shelves and shelves of titles on generals, GIs, and the wars they fought. “I’m always looking for good books on military history because there’s such a large audience for them,” says Joyce Seltzer, an editor at Harvard University Press. The audience is highly informed, too. “If you get the tiniest detail wrong, you’re going to hear about it,” says Arthur Herman, the author of a book on the Royal Navy. “This feedback from readers improves the overall quality of the scholarship.”

The refusal of many history departments to meet the enormous demand for military history is striking — the perverse result of an ossified tenure system, scholarly navel-gazing, and ideological hostility to all things military. Unfortunately, this failure is more consequential than merely neglecting to supply students with the electives they want. “Knowledge of military history is an essential prerequisite for an informed national debate about security and statecraft,” says Michael Desch, a political scientist at the Bush School of Government and Public Service in Texas. Many voters, for instance, don’t know how to contextualize the nearly 23,000 U.S. military casualties in Iraq since 2003. That’s a pretty big number. But it’s also roughly the level of casualties suffered at Antietam in just one day, and a small fraction of the more than 200,000 casualties endured in Vietnam.

Critics of the war also have plenty to gain from a public that has a better understanding of older conflicts. “People might have realized that we have a poor track record of using the military to do nation-building in Third World countries,” says Desch. “The model isn’t Germany or Japan, but Nicaragua and the Philippines.” Finally, the population of Americans who have served in the military is shrinking, and with it their knowledge of what armies and navies do.

Anybody who has studied the history of war knows that it’s possible to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat — it happened at Shiloh, when a Confederate attack nearly routed the Union army, only to have General Grant drive them off the field of battle the next day. Perhaps military historians can stage a similar comeback. In their efforts to do so, they will be wise to remember something that Grant didn’t know back in 1862: An awful lot of brutal fighting lies ahead.

That "Blaming Your Parents" Bullshit

There is something singularly gutless about rejecting therapy as a tool to improve one’s life and something singularly contemptible about sneering at those with the courage to undertake it.

A common and particularly idiotic libel is that therapy is all about blaming one’s parents.

To begin with, with regard to many issues that merit therapy, upbringing doesn’t enter into it. If you have problems with procrastination, productivity, organization or even free-floating anxiety, a cognitive behavioral approach is almost certainly the best, and it has the advantage of being empirically based. Which is to say these approaches were developed after experimentation, the results of which are replicable and reasonably robust. A good introduction to this subject is Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (2012). McGonigal is a professor of psychology at Stanford who created a wildly popular Continuing Education course entitled “The Science of Willpower.” It routinely maxed out in terms of enrollment—we’re talking a course that had to be moved to bigger classrooms four times until McGonigal had to teach it in one of Stanford’s largest lecture halls.

McGonigal has gone to town on this, writing a number of other books, including The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It (2016). More recently she has gotten into the psychology of movement; for an introduction to this, see The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage (2019).

However, many problems are relationally-based, and then it does become necessary to look at one’s upbringing. Not to blame one’s parents—that is self-defeating—but to understand the ways in which their parenting mistakes generated distorted thinking, mistaken beliefs, low self-esteem, and any number of other problems that play out primarily in relationships: with friends, family members, co-workers and, usually most prominently, intimate relationships (or at least relationships that ought to be intimate). The dominant means by which these issues are addressed is classic “talk therapy,” which essentially tracks back to psychologist Carl Rogers’ conviction that people have an innate bias in favor of healing, and that if given a supportive space in which to heal, that is what they will do.

It is futile to blame one’s parents, but common sense to hold one’s parents responsible for the basic ways in which one was taught to see the world and oneself. I myself am a parent, and I ask you: between myself and my daughter, which of us holds nearly all the power and who exerts an out-sized influence upon the other? The answer is obvious: I do. I hold the power; I therefore bear the responsibility. And there is no doubt in my mind that as hard as I work at being a father, I am making mistakes. I don’t know what mistakes I’m making—if I did I would take corrective action—but I’m making them nonetheless. And I can tell you where these mistakes basically occur: in the realm between the messages I think I am conveying to my daughter and the messages she actually receives.

I do have an advantage over certain other parents—my own, for example—in that I’m self-aware about my limitations, willing to question my parenting choices, and above all, willing to ask for advice from people who know what they’re talking about. (I have an additional advantage in that my daughter has a terrific mom and I have a terrific co-parent.)

I will talk another time about the problematic aspects of the way in which I was raised. For now I want to move on to the second necessary step: to be able to see one’s parents as fallible human beings with their own struggles and their own imperfect childhoods. In the case of my mother and father, both survived personal tragedies that would have destroyed most people. And if they made some serious mistakes as parents, they did remarkably well in others. I will instance only the importance they placed on learning and the way they modeled it in their own behavior. My siblings and I lived in a house filled with books. All three of us learned to love to read, and all three of us have turned out to be pretty bright people. And as far as this project is concerned: were it not for the example of my father’s commitment to realism, my mother’s extraordinary compassion for others, and the courage that both of them displayed, I would simply be unequal to the challenge of writing this book.

Then there’s a third step, which is ultimately the most important. Insight will only get me so far. The crucial question is: Now that I know what I know, what am I going to do about it? The way I generally phrase this to myself is, Where am I in all of this?

There is not a rigid sequencing from assessing the lessons one imbibed in childhood; to viewing one’s parents realistically and with empathy; to making new choices about how to live in this world. After a while there is a kind of working back and forth among these three steps. But there is no doubt in my mind that I am far more emotionally healthy than I was when I first embarked on therapy, not because I have transcended my core issues—that just ain’t gonna happen—but because I have learned to face them squarely. Consequently I have the ability to manage them. They no longer own me.

In May 1977, however, they came within a few minutes of killing me.

Love's Lonely Offices

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

By Robert Hayden (1913 - 1980)

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

How Do We Forgive Our Fathers?

A few weeks before her birth I began keeping a journal for my daughter Chloe, intended for her to read when she turns 18. This is a portion of the entry for October 15, 2012, the day after she had her first birthday party:

When I met your mother, the film that until recently had meant the most to her was “Smoke Signals,” about two young Native Americans who go in search of the father of one of them, an alcoholic with a terrible secret that had caused him to abandon his family years before. At the end of the film one of the character speaks, voiceover, a poem by Dick Lourie:

How do we forgive our Fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our Fathers for leaving us too often or forever
when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.
Do we forgive our Fathers for marrying or not marrying our Mothers?
For Divorcing or not divorcing our Mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?
Do we forgive our Fathers in our age or in theirs
or in their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?
If we forgive our Fathers what is left?

I am sobbing as I write this because the poem is heart-breaking. I think of the troubled relationship I had with my own father but mostly I think of you. What will you need to forgive me for? Whatever it is, please know that I am sorry. I love you so much. I wish I could be perfect for you, and I know that, as hard as I try, I can’t.

Bullied - Part 2

I went to my Dad about it—sort of. I was ashamed to tell him the full extent of the hazing Stephen gave me—it would have been an impossible confession of weakness—but I do remember asking him if anyone had ever teased him and how he’d handled it. He mentioned that in the Navy some guy had hassled him until Dad had learned the guy’s embarrassing middle name and began calling the guy by that, which shut the guy up. Stephen’s middle name was Lynn, so I tried calling him that. He failed to see the point. He just kept razzing me.

I went to a school counselor one day, practically in tears, going there on some pretext or other simply to avoid math class, when Stephen sat next to me and the teasing was at its worst. The counselor vaguely supposed that my upset stemmed from being in a middle school rather than an elementary school. I couldn’t volunteer the real reason and waited for her to drag it out of me through some adroit series of questions which, of course, she never did.

My grades got steadily worse. By this time other kids had begun jumping on the bandwagon and I became fair game for anyone who wanted to acquire some inexpensive status. I couldn’t concentrate in class and when I got home I wouldn’t even glance at my schoolbooks—they reminded me too oppressively of school. Nobody did anything but scold me: students, teachers, parents. Nobody made a move to help. I felt completely alone, completely useless, completely worthless.

By the time Stephen’s incessant teasing had slackened, or at least so it seems in memory, and my chief problem shifted to grades. It’s hard to relate to this episode on either count—I’ve long since grown indifferent to teasing and grades alike—but it was far from being so back then. Plummeting grades were horrible by definition. In memory every day seems gray clad, gusty, bleak, and my stomach feels like lead. Happiness is a myth; my life is one huge gob of humiliation and bile.

Eventually this reign of misery subsided, primarily because it finally dawned on Mom and Dad that my lousy grades demanded something more than a scolding. One day Mom went to my teachers for a private conference and returned, vaguely scandalized. It had surprised her when they told her that I would probably flunk the next grading period and it had appalled her that she had the sense they relished the prospect. She told me what they said and both she and Dad began helping me with special projects—it became a sort of family conspiracy to show those teachers up.

Bullied - Part 1

“The sense of being unwanted has always been for me acutely painful. The sensation is reverberative and seems to attach itself to the last link in a chain made up of all similar experiences. The voices in the cast were loud and scornful, and there I was, buck naked, somewhere in the middle of the city and unwanted, remembering missed football tackles, lost fights, the contempt of strangers, the sound of laughter from behind shut doors.”

-- John Cheever, “The Fourth Alarm”

[Upon discharge from the hospital after my manic episode in September 1986, I was directed to go to Concord Counseling Services in Westerville, Ohio. I had no money or insurance but Concord operated on a sliding fee scale, which was, in my case, three dollars per session. I was assigned a psychiatrist and a therapist. Among the first things they noticed about me was that, when asked to give my family and personal history, I described the most horrible episodes in a flat, matter of fact tone bereft of emotional content. The therapist, an LISW named Linda (who was just two years older than me), spent most of our sessions trying to get me to open up emotionally—or more precisely, to access my emotions in the first place. She gave me an assignment….]

My job in this essay is to describe pain, personal pain: what it felt like, when it happened, why it happened, how I reflect on it after the passage of time; in effect, to relive those moments (or, in most cases, epochs) of pain: an intrinsically unpleasant task. I suppose that almost all the pain I’ve felt in my lifetime has occurred within the context of relationships. I can’t help but think that this marks me out as fortunate. I’ve known almost nothing of the pain that comes from bad health, a lost job, or the failure to achieve some desperately desired goal. When I think of some of the suffering I’ve witnessed secondhand—of Laverne J., for instance, a 62-year old woman slipping toward dementia, living alone in one room of a decrepit frame house with a coffee warmer to cook one, no bath or shower, and only cardboard boxes for furniture; or of a five-day old baby I saw in Zaire, shaking like a poisoned mouse, dying of umbilical tetanus because his mother had swaddled him in a cloth contaminated with goat dung; or the beggars in Kenya who showed me mangled limbs and endlessly repeated, “Saidia” [Help]—well, the suffering of a 26-year old writer who thinks himself unlovable seems rather thin tea.

On the other hand, pain is pain, and although it comes in many patterns and degrees of intensity it is surely fruitless to argue that one man’s pain is legitimate while another’s is self-indulgent or trivial. The labels are irrelevant. Trying to be objective about pain is like trying to see a planet from all sides at once: you can only view it from your personal angle of vision. The task is inherently subjective.

[NB. Notice the reflexive effort to intellectualize the issue rather than grapple with the emotions that attach to pain, which is the point of the assignment.]

Broken Arrow!

I will not hold you in suspense. Room 101 is a therapist’s office.

It is the last place many people will go. Sometimes they misunderstand what to expect—they think it’s just a place where you learn to blame your parents. Sometimes they think of therapists as touchy-feely creeps. If faith-based, they may assume that all therapists are secular and anti-religious (they aren’t). These objections extend to the persons who enter therapy, who are often regarded with contempt by those who reject therapy.

But I sometimes think it’s because the objectors intuitively know what’s in Room 101. The worst thing in the world is in Room 101. And the worst thing in the world is indeed in Room 101—in the therapist’s office.

But there is also the therapist, who serves as guide and protector as their client gradually confronts the problems they have shoved out of conscious awareness and which therefore own them.

Sometimes people—this is especially true of men—think that entering therapy would be a confession of weakness.

Just the opposite.

In their 1990 book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine,” Robert L. Moore, a professor of psychology and religion; and Douglas Gillette, a mythologist, draw upon Carl Jung’s concept of mythical archetypes to create an introduction to the psychological foundations of a mature, authentic, and revitalized masculinity. I teach Moore/Gillette in my “History of War” course.

I first introduce students to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who pioneered many basic psychological concepts relevant to the warrior ethos. The first key concept: we possess all human potentialities, but we choose—or usually our families and society choose for us—which potentialities to embrace and which to reject or hide. The parts we consciously accept are what Jung termed the Persona. Those we reject he called the Shadow. Jung argued that we repress—push outside our conscious awareness—what we regard as being the darker sides of ourselves.

Jungian psychologists have a simple but powerful way to identify a person’s Shadow: ask them what kind of person they most dislike. In my case, it’s bullies. To my chagrin, I have come to see that I myself can behave in a bullying fashion, and never more so than when I fail to see that I have that potentiality. A self-aware person can manage if not master their Shadow. If they cannot, their Shadow owns them.

A second fundamental Jungian concept is the collective unconscious. One of Jung’s students, Joseph Campbell, explored this idea throughout his life, and discovered that all societies basically possess the same mythic stories. The characters and stories are different, but the structure and significance of these stories are strikingly similar. Campbell’s most influential book was “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” (1948), which examined the myths concerning heroes from all around the world. He found that these myths had a common structure and common archetypal characters within them.

The basic structure of the Hero’s adventure is the journey from one place to another, an adventure involving a kind of death and resurrection into a new form of being. Every one of us took such a journey at the beginning of our lives: from a fetus, living in a water world that was enclosed and protected; to emergence into a wholly different world as a newborn.

The Best They Had On the Ranch

You keep telling me I've got everything
You say I've got everything I want
You keep telling me you're gonna help me
You're gonna help me, but you don't

-- “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight,” written by Michael Rutherford, Phil Collins, and Tony Banks, performed by “Genesis” on the album “Invisible Touch” (1986)

["Senator" is me: I have found it helpful to distinguish myself at 17 from myself at 60. The names used in the essay are not the real names of the persons involved.]

After the fact they will say it was because a girl broke up with him. Failing that, they will say that, because the half-finished composition paper on the table dealt with the Kent State shootings, that he was morbidly obsessed with the shootings. Failing that: well, they will find something.

They certainly will not find it in the 80 percent of the one-page suicide note that emphasizes being worn out and washed up, because that suggests that possibly he didn’t get the emotional support he needed, and fuck that.

They will never know that it isn’t the girl friend or Kent State that pushes him over the edge. It is the fact that he realizes he will not be able to finish the paper by the time it is due in the morning.

And they will never ask the obvious question: Why was Senator unable to navigate the stresses and challenges common to a teenager his age?

Time rolls back not quite a year. It is 3 p.m. on Monday, May 31, 1976, and Senator cracks open Notebook Eight. At the top of the first blank page—page 226, he numbers it—Senator notes the day and time and writes, “Christ am I ever depressed. Last night I cried alone hysterically for about ten minutes, till I could get ahold of myself; but after that I felt so mortified & ashamed that I was worse off than when I started. . . . I hope this passes soon. I find myself continually looking around the house for ways to ‘do away with myself.’ Of course I’ve no real intention of suiciding myself, but it’s a reflection of my general attitude. Man I must be crazy.”

After All

On Monday one of my spiritual advisers sent me a link to this song. It was a real blessing, because at the time I was feeling totally blown out on the trail: this book is extraordinarily hard on me psychodynamically. I absolutely loved the song and listened to the studio version and two live performances; I have supplied a link to one of them.

The song is simply stunning. You owe it to yourself to invest the 5 minutes, 10 seconds it takes to listen to Williams' performance.

"After All," by Dar Williams

You go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reigned my soul in tight
Well the whole truth, it's like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world, so I stopped the tide, froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

Then when I chose to live, there was no joy it's just a line I crossed
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost, so I was not lost or found
And if I was to sleep, I knew my family had more truth to tell
And so I traveled down a whispering well to know myself through them
I'm growing up, my mom had a room full of books and hid away in there
Her father raging down a spiral stair, till he found someone
Most days his son and sometimes I think my father too was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain form me
They could not see what it was for
But now I'm sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose, with so many colors it nearly broke my heart
It worked me over like a work of art and I was a part off all that
So go ahead, push your luck, say what it is you gotta say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it'll push right back and there are worse things than that
'Cause for every price, and every penance that I could think of
It's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all|
'Cause when you live in a world, well it gets into who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me, I think life chose me after all

[Dorothy Snowden "Dar" Williams (1967 - ) is a singer-songwriter who performs primarily in coffeehouses. She has nonetheless acquired a national reputation and has opened for Joan Baez, who performed a duet with her in a song entitled, “You’re Aging Well.” In an adoring review of one of her concerts, Hendrick Hertzberg of the “New Yorker” called Williams “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters.”]

Battle Rhythm

“In war, the best strategy is always to be very strong, first in general and then at the decisive point.” – Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.

I need to develop a “battle rhythm” or this project will overwhelm me. I learned the term at the U.S. Army War College during my two years there as a visiting professor. Essentially it means a sustainable routine.

The first priority is self-care. I need spiritual support and friends to whom I can reach out. Re the former, two are in place, one of whom was a close friend of mine in high school, the other a senior-level chaplain in the U.S. Army. Friends include three classmates from my 1977 high school graduation class.

I need to make time to read the Bible each day, do a devotional, and pray. I also need to be sure to take a walk or do some other kind of exercise on a daily basis. I need to eat right.

The second priority is to be consistent in my work on this project but to limit the time spent on it to two hours 5-6 days per week—both to give me time to attend to other projects and also to protect myself from psychological harm. This work is extraordinarily hard on me emotionally.

The third priority is to put regular entries online—each day if possible, but at least several times a week. Most of these entries will be short essays of 500-1,000 words, and most of them will work as a way to generate the book manuscript in a modular way, so that as I construct the final draft I can move them around as best suits the manuscript’s organization.

Insofar as possible I want to use a “show, don’t tell” narrative approach informed by the works of Civil War popular historians Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton. I have already written magazine columns on Foote and Catton. There are two biographies of Foote, two volumes of literary criticism, and a book containing his correspondence with novelist Walker Percy, much of it consisting of commentary on the creation of “The Civil War: A Narrative” (3 vols., 1954-1975).

There is no biography of Catton but there are several article-length appreciations; a few essays that Catton wrote on the craft of narrative history; and a memoir, “Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood” (1972). Most importantly, I studied the works of Catton closely during my teenage years learning the writer’s craft, so I know his style very closely; and more recently I have studied the way he structures his books—it’s no accident that he is a superb story-teller (as well as highly insightful about the war).

The fourth priority is to get the project organized in terms of building an archive, I suppose you’d call it, of all the relevant material, of which there is one hell of a lot: four journals (at least) and three notebooks focusing on poetry, stories, copied poems, etc., from the relevant period; also about 200 pages of typed, single-spaced reflective essays and journal entries (mostly from 1986 and 1997). I can only expend so much time on it, but I need to build it into something reasonably complete and to a standard similar to that of, say, the Library of Congress. Either you do this thing properly or you don’t.

The final priority is actual research and writing, which of course will eventually replace the fourth priority. I’ll start with two general works on suicide: A. Alvarez, “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” (1971), a classic in the field; and “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide,” by Kay Redfield Jamison (1999). Alvarez (1929-2019) was a literary figure—a poet, mostly. Jamison (1946- ) is a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She co-wrote the standard textbook on bipolar disorder (which I own), and has bipolar disorder herself. I have read her memoir, “An Unquiet Mind” (1995). She’s quite a strong writer. Once I have learned my way around the field of suicidology I’ll begin to contact real experts on the subject.