Indian Removal Act

On this date in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.  The bill had been the subject of much controversy in Congress, before being passed by the Senate 28-19 on April 24, and in the House, on May 26, by the narrow margin of 101-97.  The only Representative from a district containing, or adjacent to, the affected tribes to vote against the bill was David Crockett.  You can read about Crockett's objections here.

The Removal Act, as proposed by President Jackson, with the enthusiastic support of most of the white population in the south, was designed to remove members of the Five "Civilized" Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Seminole) from the southeast, moving them to what later became the state of Oklahoma.  The Removal Act provided the funding to allow this action.

The term "civilized" is used to distinguish these tribes from those in other areas of the country and in different eras.  These tribes all had established treaty relations, as autonomous nations, with the United States, and they were in compliance with those treaties.  The treaties established them on lands across the southeast and each tribe had organized governance structures and were pursuing agricultural and settled ways.  There was also considerable intermarriage between whites and tribe members.  This was a very different scenario from the situation with the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains like the Sioux and Comanche, which the federal government would face in future decades.

Some factions of each of the tribes would voluntarily remove themselves, but others refused to leave, leading to the forced migrations of the late 1830s, known as the Trail of Tears, as well as to the Seminole War of 1835 to 1842 in Florida.

Although it was their white neighbors who triggered the expulsion, it was carried out by the federal government, which, at the outbreak of the Civil War, led all the removed tribes, who also held black slaves, to support the Confederacy. 

The Indian ways of life in the Western Hemisphere were doomed from the moment Europeans first arrived.  The diseases the Europeans carried with them, and the lack of immunity of the native population resulted in population reductions of 80-90% across both continents.(1)  When the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth in 1620, they settled on the remains of an Indian village wiped out from disease.(2) 

Later, there was no way the United States would allow the nomadic raiding culture of the Plains Indians to continue.  The only path of survival was adaptation to European ways while keeping selective parts of native cultures.  This is what the tribes of the southeast tried to do and, indeed, they were living in peace with their neighbors in 1830.  The problem was the insatiable hunger for land by those white neighbors.  One of the arguments made in favor of the Removal Act was that the U.S. military establishment was so few in number that it could not prevent settler infringement on native lands, an infringement that would inevitably lead to violence, and thus the Removal Act actually protected the tribes. Whatever the arguments, the removal remains a blot on our history.

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(1) There is a lot of variation in population estimates for the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere, but the bulk of Indians were south of the current borders of the U.S.  It's likely that less than 5% of the total population in 1491 lived within today's United States borders. 

(2) Mortality rates for the European settlers were also high.  Half of the Pilgrims died in that first winter, and in the Chesapeake region the toll was staggering, as you can read in The Barbarous Years.

Honoring

 THC Memorial Day posts can be found here.

The Missing Concert

Mrs THC and I had tickets tonight to see the Outlaw Tour with Sierra Hull, Billy Strings, Bob Dylan, and 92-year old Willie Nelson.  Unfortunately, I've got a bit of a condition that makes us unable to attend but the THC Daughter and friend will use our tickets.

In lieu of that, here's a mini-concert I put together.

Boom by Sierra Hull from her new album, A Tip Toe High Wire. 

Two from the Billy Strings album, Highway Prayers, released last fall, and hitting #1 on the charts (or whatever they call it nowadays).  An instrumental, Escanaba, named after a town on Michigan's Upper Peninsula that the Mrs and I passed through a few years ago, and Gild the Lily.

 

 

A couple from Dylan.  My Own Version of You from 2020's Rough and Rowdy Ways.  Dylan's voice is shot but that he could produce an album with such amazing lyrics, nearly 60 years after his first recording, is remarkable.  And Mississippi from 201's Love and Theft.

Finally, from Willie, an unusual choice.  This is Willie performing a Brian Wilson song, The Warmth of the Sun, with the Beach Boys harmonizing behind him.  Willie has an immediately recognizable voice.

Sparks

Live At Leeds, the only live album by the original lineup of The Who, was released on this date 55 years ago.  Recorded at Leeds, UK in February 1970.  This is the incredibly dynamic instrumental Sparks.  Starts to get interesting at 0:58 with major theme and Entwhistle's bass and then Moon's drums kick in - catch the syncopation at about 2:35, and then Townshend's monster crash chord at 2:58.  Best listened to at the highest possible volume.

Genius

 Willie Mays was born 94 years ago on this date.  He passed last year, but we'll still remember him here.

"There have been only two authentic geniuses in the world, William Shakespeare and Willie Mays."

Tallulah Bankhead

April 1945: Germany's End

 On the 80th anniversary, a republish of a post from ten years ago.

On April 25, 1945 American and Soviet troops met near the town of Torgau on the Elbe River, cutting the remaining and rapidly shrinking Nazi held lands in half.  Two weeks later the war in Europe would be over.


The path to that historic meeting began in an April twenty eight years before.  On April 6, 1917 the United States declared war on Germany and entered World War One, while three days later Vladimir Ilyich Lenin began his journey via a sealed railcar from exile in Switzerland across Germany to Russia.  Both events were massive miscalculations by German military leadership.  In the first instance it was the unleashing of unrestricted submarine warfare against all shipping to Great Britain, including that of the neutral United States, the Germans understanding it would trigger American entry into the war but gambling they could starve England out of the war before the United States could bring its military to Europe in any meaningful numbers.

In the case of Lenin, the German strategy was to insert a virus into the ongoing chaos of revolution in Russia following the abdication of the Czar in March 1917 and thus knock Russia out of the war.  In the short-term the strategy worked; under Lenin's direction the Bolsheviks outmaneuvered their fellow, more moderate revolutionaries, who were reluctant to use force against the violent Bolsheviks.  Lenin, perfectly willing to use force against his enemies, organized a coup, and took over the reigns of government, dismissing the Constituent Assembly (the first popularly elected legislative body in Russian history), establishing the Bolsheviks as the revolutionary vanguard of the communist dictatorship, and within a year of taking power setting up the first prison camps for political prisoners that later became known as the Gulag.  By March 1918, the Bolsheviks had accepted a humiliating peace treaty with the Germans.  But it was too late for Germany.  The submarines failed to starve the British, the last German offensives in France ground to a halt, the Allies (including the Americans) counterattacked, German army morale collapsed and the German High Command panicked, beseeching the Kaiser and politicians to seek a truce.  And longer term, the new Soviet Union was to arise as a much more formidable opponent than the old Russian Empire.

In 1941, Germany's Fuhrer, Adolph Hitler, made his own miscalculations about the same two countries.  On June 22, 1941 he launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union, Germany's ally since August 1939, confident that his armies could easily overwhelm the Soviet military before the onset of winter but, along with his military commanders, drastically underestimating the resiliency of the Red military, the ruthlessness of Joseph Stalin and Soviet leadership in their conduct of the war, and indifferent to how the atrocious Nazi occupation policies would alienate many potential supporters in the recently occupied borderlands and Ukraine.  The result was the largest and most murderous military campaign in human history leading to the deaths of up to thirty million soldiers and civilians.(1)

Later that year, Hitler compounded his mistake when he declared war on the United States only four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an attack of which he had no prior knowledge, and an action he was not required to take under his loose alliance with Japan.  The reasons for his decision remain unclear and controversial among historians but what is true is that it rescued President Franklin Roosevelt and U.S. military leaders from a dilemma.  They viewed war with Germany and Japan as inevitable but saw Germany as by far the bigger threat, and had already agreed that in the event of war with both countries the United States would direct 85% of its resources against Germany.  During those four days when Japan, but not Germany, was at war with the U.S., Roosevelt and his military commanders knew that public opinion would require all efforts to be directed against the Japanese, taking away from American military capabilities for what they believed was the inevitable war against Germany.  With Hitler's decision, the bulk of the American war effort was directed against Germany and the opening of a Second Front landing in Western Europe became a possibility, something that Britain alone could never have done (it's also the most effective practical rebuttal to continuing conspiracy theories that FDR knew in advance of the Japanese attack and wanted the war; in reality it complicated his foreign policy).

June of 1944 again saw critical miscalculations by Hitler regarding the U.S. and the Soviet Union.  In the West, he was convinced that the long-anticipated Allied landing would take place at the Pas de Calais region of France where he concentrated his best armored and infantry units but the invasion instead took place in Normandy against weaker German opposition and the Allies gained a foothold from which they could not be dislodged.

That same month, the Germans were anticipating a large Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front.  They believed the attack would come either in the Baltic region or in Ukraine and made their dispositions accordingly.  Instead the massive assault, begun on June 22 (the third anniversary of Hitler's surprise attack), took place against the undermanned Army Group Center, in what is now Belarus, resulting in a catastrophic defeat for the Nazis with Soviet armies advancing hundreds of miles into Poland and reaching the outskirts of Warsaw, where Stalin cynically ordered a halt (for more as to why, read Warsaw Does Not Cry).

By late March 1945, American, British and Canadian armies were crossing the Rhine and moving into the heart of Germany against crumbling, but occasionally fanatical, resistance (particularly from SS units).  To the east, the Soviets began their final assault on Berlin on April 16, still desperately defended by the German army.  Though the war was clearly lost Hitler felt that Germany was not worthy of him and, rather than surrendering, deserved total destruction in a final orgy of bloodletting.  It took three days for Soviet armies to encircle the German capital and launch their final assault to capture the city.

Hitler emerged from his bunker in Berlin on April 20 making his last appearance above-ground to award Iron Crosses to members of the Hitler Youth. 

Two days later Hitler was advised by his military staff that his plan to have Berlin relieved by an Army Group under General Steiner had failed or, to be more accurate, his fantasy that there ever was a Steiner Army Group capable of relieving the Nazi capital was finally punctured.

The failure of the Steiner attack was the basis for one of the most memorable scenes in the 2004 German film Downfall, which recounts the final days in the bunker, much of it told from the perspective of Traudl Junge, a young secretary to the Fuhrer.  The film is stunning in its grim account of the end of an evil era and Bruno Granz, in the role of Hitler, is astonishing.  Ian Kershaw, the author of an excellent two-volume biography of Hitler (Hubris and Nemesis) wrote of the performance:

Of all the screen depictions of the Führer, even by famous actors, such as Alec Guinness or Anthony Hopkins, this is the only one which to me is compelling. Part of this is the voice. Ganz has Hitler's voice to near perfection. It is chillingly authentic.

You can watch the scene by clicking here; it's well worth your time.  In the room with Hitler at one point we see two men standing, one thin and odd looking in a brown uniform. The figure in brown is Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda.  Next to him is Martin Bormann, the Fuhrer's Chief Secretary and nominal head of the Nazi Party - they are the primary political figures left in the bunker as both Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Goering had fled the city.  Outside the room are two women standing next to each other.  The taller one on the right is Traudl Junge.  Towards the end of the scene another woman moves forward in the crowd; Eva Braun, Hitler's long-time mistress. 

The fighting for the city ground on day after day with the Soviets inching forward towards the Reichstag and Chancellery, under which the Fuhrer's command bunker was located.  This video contains footage of the street fighting as recorded by Soviet cameramen.

Hitler and Eva Braun were married on April 29 and killed themselves the following day.  Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda arranged for their doctor to inject their six young children with morphine and then crush cyanide capsules between their teeth.  Goebbels and his wife then committed suicide.

The burned remains of Hitler, Braun, and the Goebbels were discovered and identified by the Russians (though they did not inform the British or Americans), reburied and reexcavated several times, winding up at a Soviet security base in Magdeburg, East Germany.  In 1970 the KGB conducted a final excavation, smashing and burning the remains and scattering them in a river (though part of Hitler's skull may have been preserved in the Moscow archives of the KGB).

Martin Bormann attempted to escape the bunker on the night of May 1-2 but committed suicide or was killed by Russian patrols.  His fate remained uncertain for many years until remains were found at a West Berlin site in 1972 and identified as his (later confirmed by genetic testing in 1998).  Himmler committed suicide on May 23 after being captured by the British, and Goering killed himself the following year at Nuremburg, just hours before his scheduled hanging.

The formal German surrender of the city took place on May 2, 1945 while the overall capitulation of Germany took place on May 7 (US and British front) and May 8 (Russian front) though severe fighting continued in the area around Prague, Czechoslovakia until May 11.

Stalin ordered the Soviet military commanders to take Berlin as quickly as possible and not be concerned about casualties (not that the Soviet leaders ever appeared to be concerned about casualties).  The cost was about 350,000 Soviet soldiers killed or wounded in the Battle of Berlin (for comparison, American losses for the entire war were about one million) along with an indeterminable but probably similar number of German soldiers and civilians.  The city, already heavily damaged by British and American bombing raids, was reduced to rubble and significant reconstruction did not begin  until after the Soviet blockade of West Berlin in 1948-9 and the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949.  For more on the Blockade read Berlin Divides.

Traudl Junge was among those that left the bunker on the night of May 1-2, one of the few who escaped death or Russian captivity.  Just before her death in 2002 she gave an interview, parts of which are included at the beginning and end of Downfall.  This excerpt from the close of the movie shows her speaking about her actions and responsibility.

For the returning Russian soldiers, of whom 8 to 9 million had died in the war, the hopes of many for a better life and less arbitrary cruelty by their rulers were destroyed by Stalin's suspicion as told in the greatest and most factually accurate of rock/pop history songs, Roads To Moscow by Al Stewart, of which THC has written before, with its haunting closing verse.

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(1)  Strangely, both Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and Hitler's in 1941 were prompted by the same analysis - Russia needed to be defeated in order for Britain to be defeated.  For more read Bonapartaroo Barbarossa.

Veteran Pitching

Patriots Day in Boston, April 19, 1948.  The Philadelphia Athletics are in town to play an opening day doubleheader against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park.  

Connie Mack, the 85 year old Athletics team owner and manager, would start two veteran pitchers that day.  And by veterans, I mean World War Two veterans, Phil Marchildon and Lou Brissie.  The unusual part was not that the two were veterans, after all, of the 21 players on both teams who started at least one of the games that day, 19 had been in military service during the war.  What was different about for these pitchers was their wartime experience, Marchildon surviving being shot down on a bombing raid and eight months as a German prisoner of war, while Brissie had been so badly wounded in Italy, no one thought he'd pitch again.

(Lou Brissie)(Phil Marchildon)

Phil Marchildon was Canadian, born in rural Ontario in 1913.  Phil got a late start, not  playing baseball until he was 18 or 19, but showed enough promise to be signed by the Athletics in 1940, becoming a starter for the downtrodden A's in 1941 and 1942, going 10-15 and 17-14, in the latter season being the top pitcher for a team which went 55-99.

After the '42 season, Phil joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, becoming a tail gunner on a Halifax bomber.  On his 26th mission on August 17, 1944 Marchidon, along with a buddy, bailed out of his damaged bomber, plunged into the North Sea, and after being rescued by Danish fishermen, was captured by the Germans.  Phil and his crewmate were the only survivors.

He was sent to Stalag Luft III, where the events depicted in the movie The Great Escape, took place, and was there until the end of the war.  Marchildon lost 40 pounds as a POW, and witnessed some of his fellow prisoners executed for petty infractions.

Phil returned to Canada very depressed and showing symptoms of what we now call PTSD.  He rejoined the A's but according to his SABR biography:

"A fairly open, friendly enough person before the war, Marchildon came back a different, guarded man. As teammate George Kell said, 'Phil really changed after his war experiences; he was very serious and rarely spoke about what he had gone through.'

Returning as a full time starter in 1946, Marchildon went 13-16 and then had an outstanding '47 season, going 19-9 and finishing 9th in the MVP balloting.

On April 19, the A's hurler started out easily setting down the first three Red Sox hitters, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky and Ted Williams, but seemed to briefly lose it in the bottom of the 2nd when Stan Spence, Vern Stephens, and Bobby Doerr hit back to back to back solo home runs. 

The A's scored one in the 5th and two in the 8th to tie the game, which went into extra innings.  In the top of the 11th, the A's added two more runs and while the Sox scored an unearned run in the bottom of the frame, Phil Marchidon came away with a 5-4 victory.  Over the last nine innings, Phil gave up only 4 hits and no earned runs.

Unlike Marchildon, Lou Brissie had no pre-war major league experience.  A South Carolina boy, born in 1924, Lou signed with the A's right out of high school in 1941.  The plan was for him to attend college and then join the club.  The world had other plans for Lou.

Brissie enlisted in 1942 and ended up in the 88th Infantry Division which saw a year of combat in Italy during 1944 and 1945.  It was hard fighting.  A WW2 US infantry division had about 15,000 soldiers and during its time in Italy, the 88th suffered 12,464 dead, wounding, and missing (excluding captured).  Lou, by then a squad leader, was one of the casualties.

In the Apennine Mountains, near Florence, on December 7, 1944 Lou's unit came under heavy German artillery fire, which killed eight enlisted men and killed or wounded three of the company's officers. The shell that got Lou broke both his feet, shattered his left tibia and shinbone, inflicting shrapnel wounds to his right shoulder, both hands and both thighs.  Knocked unconscious he was found several hours later and taken to a hospital where he successfully pleaded with the surgeons not to amputate his leg.

Lou wrote Connie Mack from the hospital and according to Brissie:

"He told me that my duty now was to try to get well, and whenever I felt I was ready to play, he would see I got the opportunity. That meant an awful lot to me. It was a tremendous motivator.”  

After two years, 23 operations, and with a metal plate in his left leg, Lou was to get his opportunity.  In 1947, pitching for the A's Savannah Indians farm team, Brissie went 23-5 and made his major league debut in late September against the Yankees who hammered him.  His second start was against the Red Sox on April 19, 1948.

Brissie retired the first 6 Red Sox batters before a double and single scored a run in the 3rd, knotting the game at 1-1.  The A's added three runs in the 4th on two hits, including a Brissie single, a walk, and an error, to take a 4-1 lead into the 6th.

In the 6th, after a Dom DiMaggio double, Ted Williams hit a line drive that ricocheted off Brissie's metal leg with DiMaggio scoring.  Williams stopped at first, called time, and went to the mound to check on the prone Brissie.  According to Brissie:

"When Ted leaned down, I said, ‘Damn it, Ted! Why don’t you pull the ball?’” 

The score would remain 4-2, with Brissie tossing a 4-hitter and striking out seven.  He'd go on to compile a 14-10 record and finish 4th in Rookie of the Year voting.

Marchildon and Brissie went on different paths after that day.  For Phil, the opening day victory was the highlight of the season as he finished 9-15 with a sore arm.  He would only pitch 17 more innings in 1949 and 1950 before his baseball career ended.  Marchildon continued to have adjustment problems, sitting around the house and drinking beer according to his SABR bio.  With the help of his wife and friends he eventually pulled himself out of the depths, passing in 1997 at the age of 83.

In 1949, Lou Brissie went 16-11 and pitched in the All-Star game.  His major league career ended in 1953.  After retiring he became Commissioner of the American Legion Junior Baseball Program, and then worked as a scout for the Dodgers and Braves.  Later he served on the South Carolina State Board of Technical Education.  Throughout the years his damaged leg required treatment at Veterans Administration hospitals every four to six weeks.  Lou Brissie died in 2013 at the age of 89.

My thanks to the Society for American Baseball Research biography project which made this piece possible.  I came across a reference to Phil Marchildon, looked up his biography, and while doing further research realized he and Brissie pitched on the same day.

The Road Back

(The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere by Grant Wood, 1931)

Today is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride to warn of the British army advance into the countryside around Boston.  He set out late on the evening of April 18 to warn the countryside, was captured by the British, and released in time to appear on the Lexington Green the following morning. This is a repost from several years ago:

 

"During the whole affair, the rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with perseverance and resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body.  Indeed they knew too well what was proper, to do so.  Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself very much mistaken.

"For my part, I never believed, I confess, that they would have attacked the king's troops, or have had the perseverance I found in them yesterday."

- Lord Percy, April 20, 1775

The quote is from Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer, which I recently reread, and Lord Percy is referring to the final part of the British retreat from Lexington to Charlestown, along what is now known as Battle Road, on April 19, 1775.  Percy led a relief column out of Boston that morning to support the British force sent late the prior evening to seize Patriot arms stored in Concord.

When Lord Percy arrived in Lexington at mid-day he found a panicked British force hastening back from Concord in disarray, stunned by the resistance and the number of casualties inflicted upon them by the locals, whom, until that day, they held in contempt.  If Percy had not shown up it is doubtful any of the original British force would have made it back to Boston.  Under the direction of Lord Perc,y the combined force fought its way back with the most violent action of the day taking place in Menotomy (now Arlington).

Lord Percy's observation was perceptive.  For the most part he was not encountering local farmers spontaneously taking positions behind walls to shot at his soldiers.  These were regiments organized by local Massachusetts towns and under the direction of William Heath, a Roxbury farmer who had taught himself the rudiments of military strategy, and thought deeply in advance how to deal with British regulars.  The local regiments did not fight the British from fixed positions but rather formed a moving circle of skirmishers around the entire enemy column during this last phase of the British retreat.

Learning about the little-known Heath and the patriot military strategy is one of the joys of reading Fischer's book.  While it reclaims the legacy of Paul Revere it also tells the entire story of April 19 in great, and very readable detail.  Revere was much more than the man who made his famous ride.  He was instrumental in the years leading up to the events of April 19, becoming the key link between the artisans and tradesmen of Boston and the elite businessmen and lawyers like John Hancock, Joseph Warren, and Sam Adams.  He is seemingly everywhere, involved in every key event.

On the night of April 18-19 Revere was captured by the British on the road between Lexington and Concord.  Released later that evening he made his way to Lexington, where he had previously stopped to warn Hancock and Adams, who were staying at a house next to the Town Green, of the British expedition.  On his return he helped relocate the two patriot leaders to a more remote location and then learned they had left a large chest full of sensitive documents at a tavern on the Green!  Recruiting an assistant they removed the chest and carted it across the Green as dawn broke passing through the Lexington militiamen assembling there and seeing the approaching British troops.  As Revere reached the nearby woods he heard the first shots of the American Revolution.

Fischer is one of our great narrative historians and while Paul Revere's Ride is scholarly and full of fascinating footnotes at the end, it is also a rollicking and exciting tale as told by the author.  Washington's Crossing, about the darkest days of the Revolution in late 1776, is another narrative masterpiece by Fischer.  

In his introduction, Fischer explains his continued belief in the power of the narrative even as other approaches have come to dominate historical scholarship:

Pathbreaking scholarship in the 20th century has dealt mainly with social structures, intellectual systems, and material processes.  Much has been gained by this enlargement of the historian's task, but something important has been lost.  An entire generation of academic historiography has tended to lose sense of the causal power of particular actions and contingent events.  

An important key here is the idea of contingency - not in the sense of chance, but rather of 'something that may or may not happen' . . . An organizing assumption of this work is that contingency is central to any historical process, and vital to the success of our narrative strategies about the past.

To that end, this inquiry studies the coming of the American Revolution as a series of contingent happenings, shaped by the choices of individual actors with the context of large cultural processes.

Fischer's first book, originally his doctoral thesis, is Albion's Seed, the most important book ever written about the cultural differences between the British groups that settled America and their impact on the strands of American culture that powered this country throughout its history, at least until recent decades.

While modern academic theory has reduced all those of European origin into a faceless, indistinguishable blob of white supremacy, Albion's Seed reminds us of the strikingly different cultures from different geographical areas within England that settled in various parts of the New World - Puritans in New England, Quakers in the mid-Atlantic, Cavaliers in the South and the Scots-Irish in the backcountry.  Cultural and religious traditions in these groups varied tremendously and those differences carried over into America.

In the introduction to Paul Revere's Ride, Fischer speaks to the cultural traditions he identified in Albion's Seed writing:

Paul Revere's idea of liberty was not the same as our modern conception of individual autonomy and personal entitlement.  It was not a form of "classical Republicanism", or "English Opposition Ideology", or "Lockean Liberalism", or any of the learned anachronisms that scholars have invented to explain a way of thought that is alien to their own world.

He believed deeply in New England's inherited tradition of ordered freedom, which gave heavy weight to collective rights and individual responsibilities - more so than is given by our modern calculus of individual rights and collective responsibilities.

His genius was to promote collective action in the cause of freedom - a paradox that lies closer to the heart of the American experience than the legendary historical loners we love to celebrate.

And then there is Samuel Whittemore.  Read Tough Guy.

A Memory

Over the years it became overshadowed by the later inning drama of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds; Bernie Carbo's pinch hit 3-run homer with two outs and two strikes in the bottom of the 8th, Denny Doyle getting thrown out at the plate in the bottom of the 9th, Dwight Evans' miraculous snag of Joe Morgan's line drive in the 11th, and Carlton Fisk's dramatic walk off home run in the 12th, but I still vividly remember the incident depicted above, which occurred in the 5th inning, and the image of a crumpled Fred Lynn so still at the base of the Fenway Park centerfield wall.

The Big Red Machine was ahead 3-2, entering Game 6, and looking to wind things up.  Sox starting pitcher Luis Tiant got through the first 4 innings before running out of gas.  At that point, the Sox were up 3-0 on a three-run home run by rookie sensation Lynn.

In the top of the 5th, Tiant got Caesar Geronimo to fly out but then walked Ed Armbrister and gave up a single to Pete Rose, leaving runners on 1st and 3rd.  Next up was Ken Griffey Sr and he slammed a hanging breaking pitch deep to center.  Lynn racing after it crashed into the concrete wall (padding was added later) and slumped awkwardly and immobile at the base of the wall.  Griffey ended up on third and two runs scored.  Meanwhile, the crowd was completely silent as Lynn stayed motionless.  It was also silent in the living room in which I watched in Maynard, Massachusetts.  Everyone was wondering if he had broken his neck or back.

As Lynn explained years later in this video, he turned just as he hit the wall so that his back, not head, took the impact.  He was fully conscious when he was on the ground, but initially he could not feel anything below his waist and thought the best course of action was not to move.  Fortunately, he got the feeling back and was able to continue in the game, but I will never forget that moment.

Fred Lynn has a very positive, upbeat twitter account, and often visits Fenway.  Take a look.

Return Of The Magic Bus

 

Back in 2017, THC did a post on the memorable trip he took with the future Mrs THC on the Magic Bus in September 1978, traveling from Athens to Paris.  The post has drawn more comments than anything else on Things Have Changed.  As wild as our adventure was, many of the comments have matched or exceeded our experience for sheer weirdness.  The Magic Bus remains prominent in the memories of many of its passengers forty and more years later.

 Last month THC was contacted by Spiros Vasiliou, a writer for the popular Greek online newspaper, Reader.gr, who was working on an article on the Magic Bus and had come across my 2017 post, which I gave him permission to use.  I learned that the Magic Bus, which began as a transport on the Hippie Trail in the early 70s, going all the way to Nepal originally, also had a place in Greek culture and memory.

You can find the lengthy article here, including photos and excerpts from my post, but you'll have to do the translating yourself! 

Spiros also told me that the Magic Bus inspired a very popular rock song in the 1980s by one of the pioneering Greek new wave bands (it's got 2.4 million views on YouTube).  The band was Tripes and the closest translation of the song title is Psyche Taxicab.

These are the translated lyrics:

London, Amsterdam, or Berlin

You've forgotten exactly where you want to go

No matter how much I borrow, I won't let you

Go for rides on the Magic Bus anymore

 

Traveling soul 

And if I want to be by your side, it's hard to stay

It's time to see my own life

On this trip I won't wait for you

 

I'll go shopping and one night

What I have inside of me for you I'll erase

The road you've taken is a one-way street

And I don't see you turning back 

Take a listen.  It's pretty good.

 

 

Translation of the section on our trip:

American Mark Stoller is one of the thousands of passengers who traveled to Greece in the late 1970s on the Magic Bus. Several years ago, he decided to record that experience on his blog. What followed was something he never imagined. Dozens of responses to his text, from people who had similar experiences! “I am still amazed that my post on the Magic Bus has received more comments than anything else I have written on my blog since I started it in 2012,” he tells us. “So many years later, my wife and I still have such enjoyable memories of our month in Greece and the Magic Bus,” he adds, and kindly provides us with the itinerary of the trip, as it was distributed to passengers in the summer of 1978!

The article then goes on to include a long quote from my 2017 post.

 

Files

The release of tens of thousands of pages from the JFK assassination investigation will not clarify anything or end the conspiracy theories for those so heavily invested in such theories.  By its nature an investigation of this sort collects all pieces of evidence without regards to its credibility, so I expect we will see a lot of wacky claims regarding conspiracies and individuals and groups, like the Illuminati!, and a lot of people on social media republishing random and unsubstantiated documents as proof that their particular conspiracy theory is thus proved.  For those who can't find the document(s) they were confident existed, absence alone will provide definitive proof that the conspiracy existed.

Here is what I think happened:

On President Kennedy

Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin and not part of a conspiracy.  The Warren Commission got its overall conclusion correct, but made major mistakes in its analysis, in part because the real scandal was the CIA and FBI covering up the evidence they had gathered enough information, in the three months prior to November 1963, that if acted upon properly, could likely have prevented the assassination. It was a bureaucracy protecting itself. And Lyndon Johnson was convinced Castro was behind the deed, and he did not want that to be the public conclusion because he thought it would lead to war with the Soviet Union.

For my prior analysis read A Cruel And Shocking Act. 

On Robert Kennedy

RFK was the target of Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian upset by Kennedy's support for Israel.  There is a small possibility that the fatal shot came from a guard or law enforcement officer in the chaos after Sirhan began shooting. 

On Martin Luther King

James Earl Ray was the lone assassin though it is possible that someone else encouraged his action.  Of the three events, this is the one I know the least about, and am least confident of my conclusions.

Taj

I've heard Taj Mahal since the late 1960s, but had never seen him perform until last night at the 300-seat theater at the Musical Instruments Museum where he and his ban (bass, drums, pedal steel) were playing four shows.

Over the years he's played with everyone from the old blues artists to Eric Clapton, The Rolling Stones, Joe Walsh, Cyndi Lauper, and Bonnie Raitt.  Taj (real name Henry St Clair Fredericks Jr, but known as Taj since 1960) is now almost 82 and moving a lot slower than he used to but his voice and playing is as strong as ever.  He played electric acoustic and steel guitar, ukelele, banjo, and keyboards.  At a Taj concert you'll hear an eclectic mix of country blues, roots music, reggae and Hawaiian music. What a fun, relaxing, and upbeat show! 

You can listen to some of his music in the linked post above; this is Take A Giant Step, the first song I ever heard from Taj and what he closed last night's show with, and below are a couple of more recent sessions:

Revenge Or Justice?

Over at National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy argues that President Trump's Executive Order suspending security clearances, contracting, and access to federal buildings to the law firm of Perkins Coie is an unconstitutional and deeply wrong act.  I agree, though with a partial dissent as discussed below.

Two senior Perkins Coie lawyers, Marc Elias and Michael Sussman, are deeply implicated in the Clinton campaign conspiracy regarding Russia Collusion, a conspiracy designed to improperly influence a presidential election.  Both Elias and Sussman are long gone from the firm, which employs 3,700 people.

It was through Elias and Sussman that the Clinton Campaign and the DNC hired FusionGPS to fabricate the phony Steele Dossier, and Sussmann used his direct influence to move its allegations through the Federal bureaucracy.  They then prepared the false submissions to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) by both entities, claiming the more than $1 million paid to FusionGPS was for legal services.  The FEC found this statement to be in violation of Federal law, fining the campaign and the DNC a total of $135,000.  You may recollect that it was the alleged violation of the same FEC rules by the Trump campaign regarding the $250,000 payment to Stormy Daniels, that led Manhattan District Attorney Bragg, with the assistance of the Biden Justice Department and a bizarre legal theory converting a federal misdemeanor matter into 34 felony counts under New York law, to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump.  It's fair to say that Elias and Sussmann are scumbags whose activities undermined American democracy.  The question is what is to be done about the partnership of Perkins Coie?

McCarthy's point, apart from the constitutional argument is:

Trump is stubbornly wrong, however, in refusing to accept that the payback he gets — extraordinary payback, but the only legitimate payback — is his stunning political comeback. The Democrats suffered thunderous defeat, in large part because the public saw these and other lawfare abuses as scandalous. That has to be enough. Trump’s retribution is that he won the presidency; it is not turning the presidency into lawfare on steroids.

I agree with McCarthy in so far as this argument applies to Perkins Coie.  However, I part ways with him on his next assertion:

Participants in the Russiagate farce have been disciplined. The government officials, particularly at the FBI, were the subject of scathing inspector general reports and either fired or pushed out of office. Hillary Clinton is irrevocably damaged political goods.

Whether it is petty or prudent to do so, Trump has all the authority the Constitution gives a president to remove government officials he blames for the lawfare tactics, and he has done that.

Here, McCarthy is wrong.  There has not been personal responsibility and accountability for the greatest political scandal of my lifetime, and arguably in American history.  I support any efforts by DOJ to investigate and, if appropriate, bring criminal charges against those involved in the conspiracy.  Unfortunately, with the passage of time, the statute of limitations may have expired regarding many potential offenses. 

McCarthy admits "I’d prefer to ignore the EO because the Democrats and their base supporters now expressing outrage over it are hypocrites", pointing out the efforts to disbar any attorney who worked on supporting Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, adding:

So it’s hard to take sides with these people: progressive ideologues who can’t spew enough bile about pardons for participants in a three-hour riot at the Capitol, including hundreds who viciously assaulted police officers (and they’re right about that)(1), but who turned a blind eye to — or even marched in lockstep with — left-wing radicals who engaged in months of lethal rioting, looting, and arson triggered by the death in police custody of a black man with a substantial criminal record, who had started the fateful confrontation by assaulting the cops. This includes progressive ideologues now trying to turn a Hamas-supporting activist into a free-speech martyr, but who have not a word to say about Hamas’s brutal killing, maiming, and raping of hundreds of people on October 7, or about Edan Alexander, the American citizen who is among the two dozen living hostages the jihadists are still holding in their dungeons after 17 months.

And, I'll add the same progressives who reveled when the Trump White House was under assault on May 31-June 1, 2020, gleefully pointing out that the president was in the basement below for security purposes, while sixty law enforcement personnel were injured, eleven seriously enough to go to the hospital. 

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(1) I disagreed with President Trump's pardon of those convicted of violent offenses on January 6, while agreeing with his decision to pardon non-violent offenders.  There was clearly a two-tier legal system created by the Biden Justice Department in which red-coded defendants were treated much more harshly than those blue-coded.  The deluded non-violent protestors (the bulk of those convicted of J6 offenses) drawn to DC by Trump's ridiculous Stop the Steal claims, deserved pardons, particularly after Trump went on to raise more than $100 million for his personal kitty, while leaving his arrested supporters bereft of legal counsel and, in some cases, to rot in jail awaiting trial.

Nobody's Fault But Mine

From Otis Redding's last Stax recording session just before his death in a plane crash at Madison, Wisconsin in December 1967.  Composed by Otis and Steve Cropper.  What a talent lost!

Funny Stories

 Kevin Pollak tells great stories about Don Rickles and Walter Matthau.

The Cost

Assistant Village Idiot from fifteen years ago.  AVP is now retired but was a social worker at a New Hampshire psychiatric facility.  A very thoughtful guy.  This is a piece about the fantasies we all indulge in when regarding those who can't cope in society.  He tells the stories of how two former psych patients manage in small town New England.  Sounds ideal but, as AVP reminds us, that is not reality.  It's a subject I know a bit about.

It is the ideal solution everyone is thinking about in the back of their minds when they are setting policy. This is the way life should be. This is how communities should act. It is the thought behind Tolkien's anarcho-monarchism, the idea behind the libertarians's love of small, naturalised, spontaneous solutions, the force behind all the liberal programs to teach job skills, develop natural networks of support, and have self-determination.

Wouldn't it be nice if.

It's 90% fantasy.

How would you replicate this solution in Boston? Hell, how would you replicate it in Concord? There are many, many more people out there, all of them with added difficulties - some of their own making, but many not. Making a life for all of them is an expensive proposition. In fact, it is furiously more expensive than any of you imagine. To do this right, to provide the services that people need to have a life, is well beyond our ability to fund. Well beyond. We might hope for technological solutions to bail us out over time: medications with fewer side effects, or gene manipulation to pull some of the developmental and psychiatric problems out of the equation. Better methods of incentive and persuasion to keep people in the treatment they need. New communication technologies that allow people to work without having their oddness and lack of social or employment skills show.

But for now, we have these people, and they are real people, and they are just difficult and expensive.

Conservatives and liberals have their separate ways of screwing this up. Small-government types entertain the fantasy that a lot of this would work itself out if people were more self-reliant - if individuals and families stepped up and made these natural solutions happen. They have a point, of course. I am very reluctant to apply for disability benefits for young people, knowing that this dooms them to a rather meager, helpless life in many cases. A lot of people could indeed smarten up and fly right if they had to. The risk of that is, some people can't, even with significant family support, or can't quite, and pushing them out into the world is merely kicking them when they are down. And let me assure you, you don't know which one's are which.

Liberals feel your pain, and in their kind-heartedness think we could do what is necessary if we would just try harder. They also have no idea how extensive the problems are. But you can see how they sense it at a distance, because a lot of them move into parts of the human-services bureaucracy where they are no longer providing services. They set up information clearinghouses, in order to connect people to services that already exist. They go into advocacy, trying to get this miserly, uncaring society to see how much we need to increase our support and grow new programs. They believe that if we all just pull together, dammit, we could make this pretty good. And so human service bureaucracies, and non-profits supported by government money, become about 50% people not doing anything that actually provides services. They go to meetings a lot.

Spurious Correlations

 

Causation or correlation?  And you thought it was just random!  Someone actually took the time to put these charts together.  For more, go to Spurious Correlations.  This maniac has done almost 6,000 of these. And, for even more, take a look at the background on the Spurious Scholar.

Walk On Boy

 Sierra Hull doing a little Doc Watson at the Crossroads Guitar Festival.

All Is Phony

 Propaganda, all is phony (1)

- It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), Bob Dylan, 1965 

 Sometimes it is the framing and messaging that is the tip-off.

On March 7, NBC News online ran an article with the alarming title (alarming, that is, for their target audience);

"Trump allies launch a bid to take control of a powerful Washington legal group" 

The group is the D.C. Bar, the lawyer association for the District of Columbia, which oversees the licensing of its 120,000 members and recommends members to be on the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility, the disciplinary arms of the D.C. Court of Appeals.

The article centers on the efforts of two Republican lawyers attempting to win election as President and Treasurer of the Bar's Board of Governors.  There are 23 members on the Board and having two Republicans join it would be an threat to its integrity according to the NBC article, an article obviously planted by members of that Board.  

NBC goes on to implicitly portray the current Board as non-partisan and every negative mention of lawyers is of Republicans.

Of the 23 current Board members, four are government attorneys, five from NGOs, and five from DC mega firms.  Anyone who knows the mega firms, as I do, know that with one exception they are Democrat strongholds.  The one exception does not have a member on the Board.  The current president is the former CEO of the American Psychiatric Association and former COO of the DC Department of Health.

Allow me to explain how the DC Bar really works.

In the fall of 2016, the FBI obtained a warrant to surveil Carter Page, who was alleged in the Steele Dossier to be serving as a tool of the Kremlin within the Trump campaign.  Meanwhile, Page's name had surfaced in the press in connection with these allegations, which were planted by Christopher Steele.  This prompted Page to reach out to FBI Director Comey at the end of September, volunteering to speak to anyone in the FBI "in the interest of helping them put these outrageous allegations [about him] to rest".  Comey never responded to Page then, or to later requests, instead investigators were "prohibited by FBI senior executives from approaching Page" until authorization was received in March 2017.  Once authorized, Page sat for five voluntary interviews (without having a lawyer present!) and "fully cooperated with the FBI, even going so far as to bring his own PowerPoint presentation to one of the interviews".

Comey had avoided having Page interviewed for as long as possible, because he wanted to avoid learning anything that might interfere with the warrant application or renewal.  In the meantime, Comey and other FBI and DOJ officials certified in the warrant application to the FISA Court that they were confident in the reliability of the information contained therein.

However, in the March interviews, Page claimed that he agreed to be debriefed by the CIA after every visit to Russia and after any contacts with Russians.  In April 2017, the FBI would be seeking a second extension to the FISA warrant, and Kevin Clinesmith, a DOJ lawyer assigned to the FBI, was asked to contact the CIA regarding Page's claim.  Clinesmith was a committed Democrat and strong anti-Trumper, who had, on November 22, 2016 sent an email to friends stating "viva la resistance!".  The CIA informed Clinesmith that indeed, Carter Page was an "approved operational contact" and had been cooperating with the agency.  Clinesmith altered the communication so that it read that Page, was NOT ever a source, and sent it on to his superiors. If Clinesmith had included the real CIA response, the FISA warrant application would not have been renewed. (2)

Clinesmith's alteration of the communication was discovered by DOJ Inspector General Horowitz and referred for criminal investigation.  This was one of 17 material errors and omissions found by Horowitz in the warrant application process, all of which helped support the granting of the application.

On January 29, 2021, nine days into the Biden administration, Clinesmith pled guilty to one felony charge and was sentenced to twelve months probation.  Clinesmith was a member of the DC Bar.  The standard procedure for the DC Bar was to immediately suspend membership for anyone convicted of a felony and, only after their sentence expired could then apply for readmission to the Bar, which was at the discretion of the organization.  It was two months after the conviction that the Bar finally suspended Clinesmith, and then only after an inquiry from a conservation DC publication.  And then, immediately upon the expiration of the probationary sentence, Clinesmith was readmitted to the DC Bar, without having to make an application and go through the normal long review process.  That's because the DC Bar saw Clinesmith as one of the "good guys".  And that is how the DC Bar operates.  And that's why they are terrified of having two Republicans out of 23 Board members.  It poses a risk to their friendly club.  

Naturally, NBC drags the American Bar Association into this as a paragon of integrity and virtue which as anyone who know about the ABA recognizes is a joke.  I was briefly a member before realizing it was a, back then, overwhelmingly liberal organization, and now is completely run by progressive left-wingers.  The leaders are either from government, NGOs, or from large law firms that tilt D.  The bulk of lawyers don't have the time to spend on the association.  We're busy doing stuff.  Like most other American institutions, the ABA has destroyed its credibility in the 21st century.

Since 1952, the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar (the Council) of the American Bar Association (the ABA) has been approved by the Congress as the recognized national agency for the accreditation of programs leading to the J.D. degree.  It is that accreditation that allows federal funds to flow to approved law schools.  Over recent decades the ABA has transformed the accreditation process from one focused on instructional capabilities for training lawyers into forcing a morass of left wing, mostly recently DEI, programs into the curriculum.  The Trump administration should seek to remove this accreditation authority from the ABA, and review every one of the many similar delegations to other organizations to determine if, like the ABA, they have perverted the process to promote preferred ideologies.

A last word on Carter Page.  The DOJ Inspector General and Special Counsel Durham found no evidence supporting the allegations made against Page.  As mentioned, Page voluntarily sat for numerous interviews with the FBI, and later with Special Counsel Mueller's team, all without having legal counsel present, and came through it all unscathed.  I regard him as the most innocent man in America. 

-----------------------------------

(1) The song also contains this lyric: But even the president of the United States/
Sometimes must have to stand naked

There's also a variant with the Soviet term agitprop, which is literature and the arts harnessed in the service of propaganda.  Are Showtime and The History Channel art and therefore producing agitprop?  I explored that topic back in 2012.

(2) Clinesmith was not just a low-level functionary.  On August 30, 2016, he and high level FBI official Peter Strzok approved a summary of FBI official Joe Pientka's August 17 counterintelligence and security briefing to candidate Donald Trump, Chris Christie, and Michael Flynn.  While supposedly a briefing of candidate Trump, it was actually part of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation opened by the FBI on July 31, 2016 regarding allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.  In other words, an excuse to investigate Trump.  Pientka highlighted that during the briefings he "actively listened for topics or questions regarding the Russian Federation."  This briefing took place five months before Director Comey's January 27, 2017 meeting with President Trump at which he told the president in response to Trump's statement he was thinking of ordering the FBI to investigate the Steele Dossier, that the FBI was not investigating the president.  Clinesmith was not just a lawyer who deliberately altered a national security email; he was an active participant in the Russia collusion conspiracy.  The FBI managed to hide this document for four years before it was released in 2020.

Old School Boston

I enjoy the photos at Old School Boston, having lived in the area from 1973 until 1992.  The pictures below are of some of my often-frequented spots from those days.

I worked in Harvard Square from June 1980 through January 1982 and spent a lot of time there throughout my years in Boston.  Had a few burgers at the Fatted Calf in Kenmore Square, and frequently ventured into the North End and Salem Street where Ida's was one of our favorite restaurants.  A very different city back then. 

 

Mass. Ave., Harvard Square 1973. (Ernst Halberstadt photo) pic.twitter.com/ANT1TMBtXn

— Old School Boston (@OldSchoolBoston) February 20, 2025

The Fatted Calf Kenmore 1979.
( Photo courtesy Anty Diluvian) pic.twitter.com/tUAbQzZv59

— Old School Boston (@OldSchoolBoston) February 28, 2025

Salem Street 1975. @BPLBoston pic.twitter.com/YJdVsYLoZY

— Old School Boston (@OldSchoolBoston) February 21, 2025

Let's Make It Happen

 

Make this the Super Bowl halftime show, cowards https://t.co/l9rqmERbfC

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 6, 2025

Getting The Last Laugh

The decline of what used to be one of the finest metro areas in America.

 

When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visited California in September 1959, this Safeway was the SF supermarket they showed him to demonstrate the superiority of the American way of life.

Maybe he gets the last laugh. https://t.co/cfCXV6jG9B

— Ted Gioia (@tedgioia) February 27, 2025

He's Not Your Bro

Looking further at the debacle of the Zelensky-Trump-Vance White House meeting, something that originally escaped my notice needs some attention, as it gets to the heart of President Trump's views of Vladimir Putin.

Trump has always been susceptible to flattery, particularly from those he considers his equals.  In his 2017 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Trump lawyer Michael Cohen stated the only discussion he ever had with Trump about Russia was when Trump said to him one day in the office prior to the 2016 campaign, "Did you see that President Putin said some really nice things about me?"  After his disastrous 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, I wrote that Trump seemed like a star-struck teenage girl in his presence.  At the same time, when acting at a distance, during his first administration Trump was much more aggressive with Russia than either Obama or Biden.

Nonetheless, it seems Trump feels some type of special bond with Putin and that bond was created by the Russia Collusion Hoax.  During the recent White House meeting, Trump said to Zelensky: 

“Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia, ever hear of that deal?”

A very revealing comment as the President makes clear he thinks the Russia Collusion matter was something that both he and Putin were put through together, making them "bros" of a sort, a kind of bonding experience.  He thinks they have a common enemy in the Democrats and their sycophants in the media who put them through this ordeal.  It explains why Putin was his first call to an international leader after the Mueller Report was released.

Having thoroughly investigated the Russia Collusion allegations, I know it is, by far, the biggest American political scandal of my lifetime.  But Vladimir Putin is not one of the victims, he is one of the perpetrators, and he has played American politicians, including Trump, and media across the political spectrum for fools.

Putin's goal for years has been to weaken America by creating division.  Prior to 2016, the Kremlin supported Occupy Wall Street and the American environmental groups seeking to block energy development, particularly fracking.  Through social media, his minions have supported Black Lives Matter and those opposed to the organization.  A Facebook executive testified that after the 2016 election, the Russian bots immediately switched to agitation against the incoming Trump administration. Disruption, chaos, and distrust is Putin's goal.  In this effort he has been successful and Russia Collusion was his crowning achievement.  In perpetrating this hoax, Hillary Clinton, James Comey and the Intelligence Community, Adam Schiff, and the New York Times could not have done more damage to trust in our institutions if they'd been paid agents of the Kremlin.

While we've had many other scandals since, including the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, Trump's Stop the Steal garbage, and four years of pretending Joe Biden was at the top of his game, so full of energy he was running rings around younger staffers (the NY Times actually wrote a story promoting this nonsense), along with a swarm of fake narratives on other matters, Russia Collusion was the big poison injected into our system; the starting point. 

Putin was playing all sides against each other.

It astonished me that those who took the Steele Dossier allegations that Trump and his campaign were collaborating with the Russians on face value, never stopped to ask themselves why that information was coming from what the dossier itself described as Russian sources, including intelligence sources.

Let's look at the players involved in those allegations:

FusionGPS, the company hired in April 2016 to investigate Trump's Russia ties, by a Clinton Campaign desperate to divert attention from Hillary's email fiasco, was at the same time working for Denis Katys, a Russian oligarch, helping him to lobby the Federal government to lift the Magnitsky sanctions, sanctions imposed by the US, after Magnitsky, a Russia journalist exposing Putin's corruption, was jailed and beaten to death by Putin's thugs. Glenn Simpson, head of Fusion, was working closely on this project with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who arranged the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 with Fredo Trump Jr.  Simpson met with her the day before and the day after the Trump Tower event.

Fusion hired Christopher Steele to conduct the investigation.  Steele had worked on the Russia desk for MI6 in the UK, before retiring a decade earlier.  At the time he was hired by Fusion, Steele was also working for Oleg Deripaska, another Russia oligarch, currently under indictment by the U.S.  Deripaska was cast by the media as a "bad guy" because of his connection with Paul Manafort, but the same people, including the Clinton Mob Lawyers working for Mueller, stayed mum about his connection with Steele.

Steele hired as his "major sub-source" Igor Danchenko, a Russian national, who had illegally remained in the U.S. and was being paid, through a cut-out, a monthly retainer by Steele.  Danchenko was the subject of a FBI counter-intelligence investigation after allegations made by fellow employees at the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank, that he told them if they got jobs in the Obama administration he would pay them for information.  Upon investigation, the FBI determined that Danchenko had been in contact with known FSB (Russian intelligence) officers in the U.S. (1)

Given this background, in his final report, Special Counsel John Durham wrote:

"It appears the FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence Danchenko was providing to Steele - which, again, according to Danchenko himself, made up a significant majority of the information in the Steele Dossier reports - was, in whole or in part, Russian disinformation."

He goes on:

"The failure of the FBI to assess properly the prior counterespionage investigation of Danchenko is incomprehensible."

Another of Steele's sources for the allegations in the dossier, in particular, the most scandalous and one that got much of the initial press attention when the dossier became public, that on a visit to Moscow in 2013, Trump insisted on having the same suite at the Ritz-Carlton used by President Obama and then had prostitutes come to that room and piss on the bed, turned out not to be a Russian, but an American.  Charles Dolan was a DC lobbyist and public relations guy who was representing Russia in the United States.  Dolan was in close contact with Putin's press secretary and Russia's ambassador to the U.S.  He was also an advisor to the Valdai Club, a Moscow organization which organized events for Westerners and seen as a propaganda outlet for Putin.  Along with his Russia connections, Dolan was also the former executive director for the Democratic Governor's Association, had chaired the Virginia campaigns for Clinton-Gore in both 1992 and 1996, been appointed by President Clinton to two four-year terms on the State Department's U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, was a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, and a supporter in her 2016 presidential bid.  And, in January 2017, Dolan emailed an acquaintance describing Igor Danchenko as a "Russian agent". (2)

One of the bombshells contained in the Durham Report is that an FBI review conducted in 2018 "showed that the Russians had access to sensitive U.S. government information years earlier that would have allowed them to identify Steele's subsources . . . Steele's subsources could have been compromised by the Russians at a point in time prior to the date of the first Steele dossier report".  The Review team was then told "no more memorandum were to be written" and a further meeting held in which "the review team was told to be careful about what they were writing down because issues relating to Steele were under intense scrutiny". 

Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Dina Corsi then directed the Review team not to document any recommendations, context, or analysis in the memorandum.  Team members described this as "highly unusual" because analysis is what analysts do.  An Office of General Counsel Attorney at the briefing "remembered being shocked" by Corsi, stating "it was the most inappropriate operational or professional statement he had ever heard at the FBI".  As of last year, Corsi was still at the FBI.

As a reminder, the Durham Report concluded:

"Notably, not one of the damning allegations contained in the Steele reporting was ever corroborated"

So who was playing who? 

Trump's failure to recognize Putin's long-term goals is potentially a disaster.  Because Trump personalizes everything he cannot see the bigger picture.  What happens next in the Ukraine-Russia war will be a test of whether Trump can drop his illusions about Putin. (3)

Trump's second administration is shaping up much differently than his first.  The first time around he was surprised to win and unprepared for the office, floundering around for quite a while, not being astute enough to know much about his own appointees and willing to take advice from DC Republicans.

Russia Collusion took a gullible and conspiratorial Trump and constructed an actual conspiracy against him, leading to a daily media beating for years and reducing his ability to run his administration.  They actually were all plotting against him!  Including Putin.  

The hoax also contributed to the destruction of his relationship with DC Republicans.  His Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, was a good senator and a decent man, but his naivete led him to recuse himself on flimsy grounds from Russia collusion matters, leaving Trump unprotected.  Eric Holder and Merrick Garland never would have recused themselves in the same situation, because they viewed themselves, as Holder once described it, as the "wingman" for their presidents.

That left the Justice Department on Russia matters under the weak reed of Rod Rosenstein, who Trump was assured would be just fine by DC Republicans.  Rosenstein quickly crumbled under the pressure and appointed Mueller as Special Counsel and then stood aside.  Rosenstein would later testify that if he'd known the truth about the Steele Dossier he never would have appointed Special Counsel, and that Mueller knew by September 2017 there was nothing to the allegations, yet the investigation went on for another year and a half.

Finally, when Mueller was appointed, Trump had to retain his own lawyers, who were good litigators, but traditional DC Republicans.  They assured Trump that Mueller would be a "straight-shooter" and once he saw the evidence he'd quickly close up shop, so they advised full cooperation with the Special Counsel.  Trump agreed, and over one million documents were provided with no claims of Executive Privilege made and he allowed, in an unprecedented move, his own White House Counsel to be interviewed about his discussions with President.  All to no avail, as Mueller and his Clinton Mob Lawyers kept going, though they knew they had nothing, it was essential for political purposes and continuing media coverage to keep the pretense up as long as possible.  If Bob Barr hadn't come in as AG and forced Mueller to close shop, the farce would have continued until Trump was out of office.

Trump had enough of "honorable" men who played by the rules of DC. That's why he now only wants those whose top priority is personal loyalty to The Boss; their competency and real agendas are of less concern.  It's also why, as I predicted three years ago, this is his Revenge Tour.  Will the tour bus be driven off the cliff, like he did in 2020?  I did not vote on the presidential line in 2024 because of that prospect on the one hand, and the insane and divisive policies and growing authoritarian streak of the Democrats on the other.

The bottom line is that however we got here, and however unfair it was to Trump, at the end of the day Donald Trump is fully responsible for his own actions and decisions.  He's the President of the United States, after all.

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(1) The full Danchenko story is even more damning.  The allegations against him arose in the first Obama administration.  When the FBI learned that Danchenko had returned to Russia in 2011 it suspended the investigation.  In December 2016, FBI analysts identified Danchenko as Steele's major sub-source and then learned that while his wife boarded the flight to Moscow five years earlier, Danchenko had not, remaining in the U.S.  Durham discovered the rest of the story.  Danchenko was desperate to find employment after losing his Brookings job because if he failed his visa would no longer be valid.  An arrangement was made that he would be hired by a Russian operating an IT company in Virginia, but he would actually be paid by Christopher Steele who would funnel the funds through the IT company.  In other words, breaking American immigration law by committing a fraud.  According to Durham, "Danchenko Employer was merely a front to allow Danchenko to continue his work on behalf of Orbis [Steele's firm], while at the same time allowing him to secure a work visa through alleged employment with a U.S. based company".  His employer, an ethnic Russian, described Danchenko as "boastful . . . having low credibility, and a person who liked to embellish his purported contacts with the Kremlin". In January 2017 Danchenko was interviewed by the FBI and explained he was just passing on gossip and bar talk regarding the allegations and was not aware how Steele would use it.  Danchenko said he could not corroborate any of the allegations.  That interview concluded the day before FBI Director Comey led President Trump to believe the FBI was not investigating the credibility of the Steele Dossier; Comey was responding to the President telling him that he was thinking of ordering the FBI to investigate the dossier.

Interestingly, Danchenko was hired at Brookings at the instigation of Fiona Hill, later to be an opponent of Trump's and involved in the attempted impeachment of the President over Hunter Biden's corrupt dealings in Ukraine.  In a September 2017 FBI debriefing, Christopher Steele stated he was introduced to Danchenko by Fiona Hill in 2011.  Steele described Hill as a "close friend" and told the FBI she "has a very high opinion" of Danchenko.

(2)  In March 2017 FBI analysts identified Dolan as the source of the Ritz Carlton and other allegations in the Steele Dossier.  Two months later those same analysts were transferred to Mueller's team and assigned to the unit working on corroborating the allegations in the Steele Dossier.  But wait, you might think, didn't Robert Mueller repeatedly state in his Congressional testimony that the dossier was "outside my purview" with his report omitting any mention of the dossier in the discussion of possible collusion?  Yes, he did state that, but he lied to Congress, which is criminal conduct.  The FBI agents not only told Special Counsel Durham about the dossier team under Mueller, they testified to it in open court during the trial of Igor Danchenko.  

The analysts continued to work on Dolan and in August 2017 briefed several senior people on the Mueller team on their work, and drafted a case opening document on Dolan, including a request he be interviewed.  However, on September 7 they were instructed "to cease all research and analysis related to Dolan",   According to Dolan the analysts' contemporaneous notes "explicitly state that Mueller investigation leadership directed [them] to dedicate no resources" to Dolan.  Their request to open a case on Dolan was denied with them being told it was a "higher level decision" and the document was to be deleted from the Special Counsel's computer system.

The shocked analysts "discussed whether the decision not to open on Dolan was politically motivated, given Dolan's extensive connections to the Democratic party", with one of the analysts speculating that "the information on Dolan ran counter to the narrative that the Mueller Special Counsel investigators were cultivating".  The analyst believed the decision would eventually be reviewed by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and, after deleting the report from the Mueller system, uploaded memorandum to three other separate case files on the FBI system to make sure OIG would have access.  That is where the Durham team located it several years later.

Later that month, the analysts were instructed to "cease [all] work on attempting to corroborate the Steele reports" and the unit was disbanded, with members transferred to other teams in the Special Counsel's office.

Durham notes that while the Special Counsel interviewed hundreds of witnesses during his investigation, Charles Dolan was never interviewed.

It is obvious that Dolan was never interviewed, and the investigation halted, because Mueller's Clinton Mob Lawyers did not want to document what he knew because his connections would expose the relationship between the Clinton Campaign and the Kremlin, destroying the narrative they had so carefully constructed.

Though Mueller knew by September 2017 that nothing in the dossier could be collaborated, he never said anything at the time or in the final report, even denying that his office ever investigated it.  You can read more about the Mueller team's obstruction of justice here.

(3)  The expiration of the Tik Tok ban extension in early April will be another test for the president's ability to see the bigger picture.  His extension in January was actually illegal, but no one has the legal standing to challenge it.  However, the president has an independent obligation to ensure the legality of his actions.

Not For Me

Why would I want to drive that car in that town?  I'd be forever squishing folks against the buildings!

 

pic.twitter.com/8NAHYaKqXT

— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) March 5, 2025

The Workingman's Eddie Coyle

(Robert Mitchum as Eddie Coyle)

Back in 2014, I wrote Eddie Coyle's Friend, about a novelist I greatly admire, George V Higgins.  I probably worked harder on that post than on anything else I've written, figuring Higgins deserved it.

I just came across an appreciation of the novel and movie, The Friends of Eddie Coyle by Daniel Moran, writing on Substack and found it quite perceptive and worth a read. Here are some excerpts:

This kind of dialogue may seem easy to write, but anyone who has ever tried knows it’s almost impossible. Here, we get everything we need to know about these two guys and the rules of their worlds in a handful of near-grunts.

I was an English major—sure, things like Eddie Coyle were fun to read, but shouldn’t I be reading more Keats, James, and Shakespeare? I didn’t know that the music found in the works of these writers could also be heard (if faintly) in a book like this one. I’ve since read it several times and I’m always amazed by how the book carries its reader along in a series of conversations that move so quickly yet reward close-reading. The book reads itself to you like a criminal nanny.

Everyone loved the realism, but a more accurate word is “realism.”(1) I have no idea if actual gunrunners are as interesting as the people in these pages or if their dialogue is worth overhearing. I’d bet that it’s not. What’s absolutely realistic, however, about Eddie Coyle is how everybody in it—just like the reader—is constantly negotiating to just get to the next step of what he needs by the end of the day. . . His story—the real realism—is about going to work and being someone in middle management who has to answer to all kinds of people and wants to just get his part of the process complete so he can move on to the next thing. It’s about the guy in Purchasing who won’t sign the form you need so that you can tell the client that yes, everything is in motion, because that guy in Purchasing thinks that you’ve cozied up to the Senior Vice President of Acquisitions for a job that he’s had his eye on for months. It’s about having to speak in a conciliatory tone when trying to wrangle a favor from the guy in the next cubicle.

Peter Yates’s 1973 film is an object lesson in how to faithfully adapt a novel to the screen. It stands with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon and the Coens’ True Grit as an example of a screenwriter (in this case, Paul Monash) sitting with the novel propped open on his desk so he can type the dialogue word-for-word in screenplay format. Huston’s version of Falcon was the third attempt to adapt it for the screen and the Coens’ True Grit was the second; both of their versions are superior to their predecessors because they knew what was great about the novels and transferred that greatness to the screen.     

I have not seen the earlier versions of the Maltese Falcon, but as much as I enjoyed John Wayne in True Grit, the Coen's True Grit is superior.

Coming across this post led me to read more of Moran's work and it is quite good.  He's got that thing.

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(1)  In my Higgins post I wrote:

The dialogue Higgins wrote was realistic but it wasn't real.  Very few people actually talk like that, or at least they don't talk like that for so long and, at times, he could venture dangerously near Damon Runyon territory.  But mostly, Higgins had a knack for cadence, ambiance and simplicity that rang true even if it wasn't actually true.