Outliving this Day and Coming Safe Home

Martyr, n. – In extended (esp. non-religious) contexts: a person who undergoes death or great suffering for a faith, belief, or cause, or (usu. with to; also with of, for) through devotion to some object.
                                    — Oxford English Dictionary

He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.
                                    — Jacqueline Kennedy, November 22, 1963

Did John F. Kennedy die for civil rights?

I believe that he did, but not in the way one might think.

Despite his death at the hands of the silly little communist, John F. Kennedy still was hailed as a hero, and even a martyr, of the 1960s civil rights movement. An important reason for that posthumous status is that movements need heroes and icons for focal points. Fantasy and myth are often enlisted to provide heroes, whether they actually existed or not. After JFK’s assassination, there was no shortage of myth-makers who had something to gain from promoting an iconic status for the murdered President. Of course, myths require some facts and real occurrences to anchor them. With Kennedy, there was little more than his expressions of sympathy for victims of racist violence, and his proposal and support of a sweeping civil rights bill that ultimately became law, all occurring within the year prior to his death. Timing is everything.

President Kennedy had been elected in 1960 by a thin popular plurality. During the campaign, Kennedy was seen as pro civil rights, but so was his opponent Richard Nixon. After all, Nixon was vice-president when President Eisenhower used troops to desegregate the University of Arkansas, and helped break filibusters of civil rights bills when presiding over the Senate. The political wisdom at the time was that most Americans, though in theory were in favor of equal legal and political rights for Negroes, as Black people were called at the time, they were not all that keen on bucking tradition as far as social mixing was concerned. Also, few white people outside the South felt strongly about civil rights. Many in that region did, and these were adamantly opposed to desegregation. Some were prepared to violently resist it. JFK was competent politician, and what he lacked in acumen, he had picked astute advisers to provide it. Choosing a vice-presidential candidate from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson, undoubtedly provided the razor thin margin for the Democratic victory in that critical state. Johnson doubtless helped in other Southern states as well.

For the first two years of his Presidency, JFK stayed away from the civil rights issue. Holding together a Congressional majority that would enact his New Frontier programs, and re-election in 1964 were Kennedy’s foci. Until he was forced to, Kennedy steered clear of civil rights controversies.

That changed in 1963. The events of that year included the brutality of Birmingham’s police commissioner Bull Connor’s suppression of protesters, on national television no less. That summer saw the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi, George Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door, and the church bombing that killed four little girls in Birmingham transform the national consensus to favor doing something to protect the rights of Negroes. Then, the August 1963 march on Washington led by Martin Luther King demonstrated the political power of the movement. These events made it imperative that Kennedy stand up on the side of civil rights. So, the President proposed a sweeping civil rights law in a nationally televised speech.

Pushing the bill that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress, however, was no easy task. The President proposed it as the comprehensive measure it turned out to be, but he doubtless expected the act be significantly watered down or compromised. The strategy was to set an anchor point as high as constitutionally possible with plenty of room to negotiate, but still end up with a meaningful law. The bill met with immediate opposition from the southern Democrats who held a disproportionate amount of the power in Congress, particularly in the Senate. Not long after the bill was introduced, it stalled.

As of the time of Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, the civil rights bill was in limbo, and its future uncertain. The opposition among key Congressional Democrats, mostly from the Southern states, was firm. The bill was likely to be compromised to the extent that it would be no more significant than the two previous acts, in 1957 and 1960, that Senator John F. Kennedy had voted for, but had done little else to promote. Additionally, the President, though generally popular because of his firm Cold War stand, had a lot of opposition throughout the nation, and not just over civil rights.

Then, all of a sudden, he was gone. Lyndon B. Johnson was President.

Johnson had never been popular with the northeastern liberal wing of the Democratic Party. In fact, they barely tolerated him. Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s brother and attorney general, loathed LBJ. The feeling was mutual. There was quite a bit of speculation, now known to have a real basis, that Kennedy would dump Johnson from the ticket in 1964.

Even though he shepherded two weak civil right laws through the Senate, he was a Texan, a Southerner, and presumed to be opposed to any comprehensive civil rights law as was then languishing in Congress. When Johnson arrived at Andrews Air Force Base upon returned from Dallas with Kennedy’s body, he briefly addressed the nation on live television. At least one Negro, when hearing the new President’s Texas Southern accent, wondered out loud what was going to happen to them now.

Lyndon Johnson was misjudged. The new President had grown up politically under the tutelage of Sam Rayburn and John Nance Garner, allies of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Johnson believed in the New Deal and use of government power to reform society, both economically and to some extent socially. He had long dreamed about taking the Rooseveltian polices to into the next phase.

While most of LBJ’s policies turned out to be like the New Deal, misguided and disastrous, he was right when it came to civil rights. Johnson had for sometime held the view that the South was never going to take a significant place in the nation, economically or otherwise, so long as racial segregation existed and the systematic denial of basic civil rights to Black people continued there. He was indeed predisposed to push for an end to racial segregation, and now was given the means to do it.

There was just enough to John F. Kennedy’s civil rights posture in the last year of his life to make him a credible civil rights hero. Enough that, unbeknownst to Jacqueline Kennedy that day, and even to the assassin, the silly little communist provided Lyndon B. Johnson a martyr.

There was much more. Before accepting the vice-presidential nomination, Johnson had been the majority leader of the Senate, where he had in two terms as Senator, gained immense power. He knew which buttons to push, where the closet skeletons were, who was having an affair with who, and who paid. He could get things done in the Senate and even decisively influence key members in the House when no one else could. As vice-president, LBJ’s power was greatly diminished, but he kept his contacts and still knew whose favor to curry in Congress. He could have been of great help in pushing the civil rights bill had JFK lived, but Bobby Kennedy and other influential White House staffers who disliked Johnson were not going to let that happen.

By using all of his political acumen with Congress and playing the Kennedy icon for all it was worth, Lyndon Baines Johnson persuaded Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with not one comma changed, as he put it, and triumphantly signed it into law.

Lee Harvey Oswald slew John F. Kennedy for reasons of his own, and it is doubtful that Kennedy’s belated stance favoring civil rights was one of them. Marxists believed that the proletarian classes all over the world regardless of nationality or color, should unite against their oppressors. But Kennedy became a martyr in spite of his widow’s lament, and his death enabled his successor to pass laws he probably never could had he lived: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965. Though some of their provisions may have outlived their usefulness, for their time, both were good and necessary measures, and truly advanced the cause of civil rights for our country.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal (see here) in which he promoted non-discrimination in the workplace as good for business. Cook’s article is certainly well taken insofar as equal treatment in the workplace for employees regardless of race, sex, nationality, or sexual orientation. I applaud Apple for its comprehensive non-discrimination policy.

Cook also maintains that it also turns out to be great for the creativity that drives our business. He says he has found that when people feel valued for who they are, they have the comfort and confidence to do the best work of their lives. Actually, I would hope that Cook, and all rational employers, generally value employees for what they can do, and do not, and should not, care who they are.

Cook overreaches in using Apple’s policy of not discriminating based on sexual orientation in hiring and on the job treatment to push for passage of the Employment Nondiscrimination Act, a bill that would  provide similar requirements for all businesses, now pending in Congress. As for extending legal protection to sexual orientation, Cook does not make a good argument. In fact, except for governments, and those who seek and benefit from government contracts, private employers should be legally allowed to discriminate on any basis they believe appropriate. If Cook is correct, and I believe he is, that it harms a business if competent, creative, and enthusiastic employees are excluded because of the aforementioned classifications, they will suffer in marketplace. After all, a business’s business is not so-called social justice or the betterment of society. It is to make a profit. Of course, when more businesses that profit, the positive externality is the betterment of society by creating jobs and products that increase the overall standard of living. Nevertheless, legally coercive measures to accomplish equal treatment by private persons has proven to be counterproductive.

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Charles Krauthammer, long time Washington Post columnist and political observer, explains the significance of the first phase of the looming ACA debacle in his column today.

“Hundreds of thousands of cancellation letters went out to people who had been assured a dozen times by the president that ‘If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period.’ He writes, quoting President Obama touting the ACA back in 2009 and later.

“The cancellations lay bare three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.”

As for the mendacity, the President, his official spokesman Jay Carney, and his acolyte James Carville are now saying that the quoted statement did not apply to “substandard” individual policies. Perhaps they could have been clearer. Big perhaps. That was a classic half-truth – which is effectively a lie. It’s like bragging that you came in second in a marathon when there were only two runners. Actually, it’s worse.

Krauthammer’s absolutely clear observation is “[a]s if this is a partisan issue and not a brazen falsehood clear to any outside observer — say, The Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who gave the president’s claim four Pinocchios. Noses don’t come any longer.”

Paternalism has been the bedrock of feudal societies, the Progressive Movement of a century ago, and today’s leftist agenda..

“We canceled your plan, explained presidential spokesman Jay Carney, because it was substandard. We have a better idea,” Krauthammer relates.

Better for whom? What is their standard? Who decided? Wish they would stop being so good to us. What the nation is going to end up with is expensive standard health care insurance policies and lousy health care. Except, of course, for the top tier – the “1%” – who the President and his toadies publicly vilify, but privately court. The ACA is really a boon for the insurance industry. At the time it passed, Aetna and United CEOs were giddy with excitement, though lately they discovered that if you lie with dogs, you’ll get fleas, and are having second thoughts, as are labor unions.

“Obamacare is the largest transfer of wealth in recent American history. But you can’t say that openly lest you lose elections. So you do it by subterfuge: hidden taxes, penalties, mandates and coverage requirements that yield a surplus of overpayments.”

Most of the wealth transfer is not going to the consumers of medical services, but to the clients of the K Street lobbyists, and to expand government power. Anyone that believes differently is living in a dream world.

Not long after the passage, I heard Dr. Ron Anderson, then CEO of Parkland Hospital remark that the scariest words in the ACA were the 200 instances of the “The Secretary shall. . . .” Given that the “Secretary” referred to in the statute is Kathleen Sebelius, that is now even scarier. The thousands of pages of regulations, that defines matters like standards and procedures, as well as eligibility criteria, and myriad other details are in her hands (or rather those of her minions).

For Charles Krauthammer’s column, please see this link.

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Time magazine’s cover story this week (October 28, 2013) is entitled “The United States of Texas: Why the Lone Star State is America’s Future.” Authored by Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, it relates cogent reasons why Texas is prospering and its population is increasing at the expense of other, mostly east and west coast states. Cowen styles himself a libertarian, not surprising as the long tenured Walter Williams is also at that institution. What is surprising is Time’s somewhat approving editorial introduction by its new managing editor Nancy Gibbs. The magazine has been known for the past several decades as leaning portside in such matters.

The article starts with the list of supposed horribles the coastal left likes to sling at Texas. The climate is brutal; there were 40 days of over 100 degree temperatures at Dallas-Fort Worth this year. The state’s social services are thin. Its welfare benefits are skimpy. Over a quarter of its people lack health insurance. Public schools leave much to be desired. Violent crime is high.

The obvious question is, then, why are more Americans moving to Texas than to any other state?

Professor Cowen’s belief is that these migrants are being moved by the major economic forces that are reshaping America’s economy as a whole. The middle class is being hollowed out elsewhere and many Americans are looking for a radically cheaper way to live and do business.

Other societies have traditionally defined the middle class – the bourgeoisie that Marxism had such contempt for – as professionals, skilled tradesmen, manufacturers, and merchants who generally employed members of the working class. The upper echelon was reserved for the landed aristocracy, mainly inheritors. The lower classes were semi- and unskilled workers, low-level supervisory personnel, and, in rural areas, peasants who worked someone else’s land. The middle class in America has been defined primarily by income in a certain middle range, and not necessarily the occupation by which it is earned.

Thus, the middle class is being squeezed on the coasts and in many parts of the interior in America by rising costs of living and stagnant wages. The higher costs of living are a result of housing prices, more than anything else. These prices, as well as others, are affected by increased regulation, as well as crowded conditions that make land prices astronomical in some places. To illustrate, Cowen compares what kind of living quarters $300,000 will buy you: in San Francisco, a 210 sq. ft., one bath loft; in Chicago, a 900 sq. ft., one bed, one bath apartment; in Austin, a 3,000 sq. ft., 4 bed, 3 bath house. There are places in Texas the same that could be had for a third less.

At the same time, middle class income throughout the nation is being stunted by globalization, high technology, automation, and a general failure by so many to respond to those changes by upgrading their skills, or acquiring them in the first place. Texas creates more jobs that any other state. Many are high skilled, and high paying. Texas does create more low-paying jobs. But Texas has a low cost of living compared with other states. It has cheap land, and a lot of it; cheap produce, and a lot of it. And cheap labor? Well, yes. But every low-paying job is an entree into something better for someone with few skills and a lot of gumption. Anyway an income that would strap the San Francisco loft-dweller would provide a fairly nice living for a Texas home-owner.

One other aspect that Cowen touches upon, but does not provide much elaboration is that migrants are not the typical greedy, lazy, and scared populace that historian Ian Morris hypothesizes drive historical movement. They are generally adventuresome and not adverse to risk. Immigrants to America have not been the “tired, poor, and huddled masses” of the unfortunate quote on the Stature of Liberty, but the individuals of oppressive foreign societies, tired of being poor and huddled who had the courage to strike out and better themselves elsewhere. Those coming to Texas, are immigrants on steroids (to use a tiresome, but apropos metaphor).

Or should I call them high-octane adventurers. Texas is certainly among the top petroleum producers in the United States, and is in the forefront of the natural gas production boom. There is a fantastic amount of opportunity in that area, particularly for engineers and highly skilled technicians, as well as speculators and investors.

Of course, there is the inevitable mope who complains; who is contemptuous of opportunists because he thinks that those who had the same opportunity but failed to make something of it are ill-used by those who did. Cowen quotes one Scott McCown, a University of Texas law professor who maintains that Texas prosperity is not the result of low taxes and lax regulation, but because of geography and geology. McCown laments that the economy favors the wealthy, and predicts that in a democratic society, it will ultimately be rejected.

Perhaps so. Well, it can be irritating, but we do have our McCowns. They often remind us to be vigilant toward the looter and moochers out there lest we become too complacent. But I believe McCown is wrong. Geology and geography are important; I would be the last to deny that. There are, however, numerous places in the world that have as great or greater natural resources and the favorable location to build a powerful economy that have remained pathetic backwaters. It takes more than just those resources; it takes knowledge, wisdom, and initiative of human beings to exploit the resources. A Texas example is the city of Dallas. It was for a long time, and may still be, the largest city in the world not located on a navigable waterway. It is not located proximate to any great agricultural land, and except for the only recently discovered Barnett Shale gas field, it had no mineral resources to speak of. As Holland McCombs wrote for Fortune in 1949, “Dallas doesn’t owe a thing to accident, nature or inevitability. It is what it is . . . because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way.” If this kind of economy is rejected by a democratic society, it will be democracy that is doomed. Entrepreneurs and visionaries thrive under a measured and rational democracy; i.e., democracy that is restrained by the priority of individual rights, especially property rights, over the will of the fifty percent plus one. Lazy, greedy, and scared people do not do well under democracy. Ultimately, they degenerate into mob rule and then evolve into a dictatorship or an all powerful oligarchy – Nineteen-Eighty Four or Brave New World.

For everyone outside the Lone Star State with vision, boldness of enterprise, and determination, and who is tired of being frustrated and pushed around, come to Texas. Everybody else may go to hell.

For Professor Cowen’s article see Time Magazine 10/28/13 here.

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Today I noticed that it has been over a month since I’ve written and posted to this blog. Well, for the past six weeks or so I have had an unusual number of things on my plate. As many who read my missives know, I like to relate to what is going on in the nation state and world, or, quite often, what went on in the past that seems relevant to our condition today. As it happens, this weekend provides that occasion.

Monday is Columbus Day (actually it was Saturday, the 12^th but officially designated so as to provide a three-day weekend for some). It’s a holiday celebrated in many parts of this nation to celebrate the feat of the Italian navigator in the service of the queen of Castile in discovering the Western Hemisphere for Europeans. Today, coincidentally, the professional football teams Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins play each other in what has become a famous rivalry.

For anyone to whom it is not obvious how these two events might relate, let me clue you in. Christopher Columbus, once a noncontroversial historical figure, has during the past several decades become somewhat declasse, if not the embodiment of evil, to the politically correct crowd. I suspect some of those believe it appropriate to place poor Chris on the level of Adolf Hitler. His sin, of course, was enabling the conquest of the supposed paradise that was America (before they were dubbed that terrible Italian appellation) and extermination of the indigenous inhabitants, mainly by diseases unknowingly brought by Europeans. Celebration of the day he landed on a currently unidentified island in the Bahamas is regarded akin to celebrating (as opposed to merely commemorating) the anniversary of Presidential assassinations or 9/11 (though I’m certain that the latter is celebrated by many of those of a certain religious persuasion). Columbus’s legacy, at least to a good number of academics and loudmouth race-baiters, is centuries of oppression of Amerindians.

The football game seems metaphorically reminiscent of the once common childhood pastime known as cowboys and Indians, played with (gasp!) toy pistols and involving a minimal amount simulated violence. Maybe not a big deal except that recently many in the media on the Coasts have come to deem the Washington team nickname, Redskins, to be a slur of a certain racial or ethnic group. These folks never seem to get tired of looking for some group that they are concerned might be hurt by certain figures of speech – in this case, a synecdoche – that they deem offensive.

I for one have never thought that the word “redskin” was a slur; it seemed a mildly uncomplimentary term at worst. A leftist would doubtless chalk that up to my insensitivity. I plead guilty to that character flaw, if it is one.

Before going much further, however, I have to mention one term that is really offensive to me. That is “Native American” when applied to identify someone who has some ancestors who immigrated to this land before Columbus arrived. By definition, “native” to a location means having been born there. Anyone born in the United States of America is a native American. Those persons, as well as those who were naturalized as provided by law, have the same right to be here as those whose distant forebears came prior to some arbitrary date in history. Calling the latter “Native” Americans a special category implies otherwise.

Columbus, and others, called the indigenous people he found on the islands he visited “Indians” because he believed he had found a westward route to India. Some historians maintain that Columbus was never disabused of that belief. This appellation nonetheless has been hard to shake. It can be confusing, particularly because of the more recent arrival of immigrants from India. The British have long distinguished by referring to descendants of pre-Columbian Americans as “Red Indians.” I have heard in recent times that some use the distinguishing terms “dot” and “feather” though I suspect that usage drives the politically correct crowd up the wall. I have settled on the use of the portmanteau “Amerindian” as a descriptive term coined by the American Anthropological Association. I believe, however, it is only necessary to use that term for historical purposes, when a legal issue quasi national status of certain tribes comes up, or when someone else wants to play identity politics.

The speech police generally do not get upset about epithets or slurs applied to white males of European descent. Perhaps that is because they are not perceived as needing the protection afforded by PC speech. There does not seem to be any outrage over use of “honky” or “ofay” as slurs. The left justifies their unconcern in this regard because white males have always been dominant and are thus fair game. Nonsense. Every one of us has ancestors who were oppressors, or who were oppressed. It is true that Amerindians were often treated unjustly and even brutally by European colonists and their descendants. The Romans mistreated the Carthaginians, the Visigoths mistreated the Romans, Attila and the Huns (not the ‘60s rock band) mistreated the Franks, the Normans brutalized the Anglo-Saxons, and so forth. The lesson to be learned from all of that is not to feel ashamed and wring our hands over an earlier generation’s injustice, either on the giving or receiving end, but to take special care to insure that injustice doesn’t happen on our watch, in our nation. To that end, a slur loses its impact, not by being banned, but by becoming commonplace and unremarkable. This was the case with “redskin” until some seized upon it as a political wedge opportunity.

Back to the main point. It should not be necessary in other contexts to define who is and who is not an Amerindian. For one thing, the use of the one-drop rule has resulted in the total uselessness of that definition for physical identification purposes. The absurdity of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren claiming Amerindian status on that basis to make her academic employers appear to be on board with affirmative action quotas is a case in point. I suspect that most of those today who could qualify as Amerindian using the one-drop rule have assimilated into the American genome and would never be regarded as anything but “white” persons.

Anyway, this might be a moot point. The owner of The Washington Redskins has said he will not change the name under any circumstances. Whether the NFL could force him to, assuming it had the collective will, is legally doubtful. I suspect this will blow over after a while, and possibly raised again at some time in the future. Perhaps it will not. We have a lot more serious problems to be concerned with.

Like maybe banning Aggie jokes?

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For those of us Texans who are unfamiliar with subway and other heavy electric mass-transit systems, a “third rail” runs alongside the track and supplies 700 volts of electricity to the motors that run the cars. Touching it could kill or severely injure a human. Thus, it has become a common, though somewhat hackneyed, metaphor for issues politicians touch at their peril.

Two Colorado State Senators learned the hard way that the right to keep and bear arms is such an issue, in that state at least. Democratic State Senators John Morse, who was the President of the state senate, and Angela Giron were recalled by the voters in their districts on Tuesday. Both will be replaced by Republicans.

For the news reports please see MSNBC News, Fox News, or CNN, whatever your pleasure.

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Nothing I can say adds to what others have been saying and writing today except to suggest listening to the Sequence in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem. It is the most profoundly sad, yet triumphal music ever written.

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. . . is a 64 year-old woman.” – D. L. Stewart, Dayton Daily News

Diana Nyad is nuts. She is already eligible for early social security and next year she will be old enough for Medicare. Yet, for the past 35 years she has had a goal in mind – to swim 110 miles from Cuba to Key West. She tried four times and failed, for one reason or another. The fifth time, on Labor Day of this year, she labored mightily and achieved that goal.

Why on earth would one do that? The strait between Cuba and the United States is infested with sharks, jellyfish, whose sting is excruciatingly painful, It is a known storm path, and this is the mid-point of hurricane season. At the best of times, the water there is far from gentle. Why? I suppose Sir Edmund Hilary’s answer as to why he climbed Mount Everest is the only possible one. Because it is there.

Co-incidentally, I recently discovered the work of Angela Lee Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who is studying the phenomenon of “grit” or persistence. Duckworth has developed a self-test to measure the index of one’s grit. She uses it as a predictor of success in life. No doubt Nyad would have few peers in that index. She gives a who new meaning to “True Grit.”

Diana Nyad is nuts. We need more like her.

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“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” — G.K. Chesterton

On September 2, 1946, Ayn Rand begin writing Atlas Shrugged. A number of fictional occurrences, significant to the plot, took place on that date in the novel, and among many Randians, this is Atlas Shrugged day.

It took Rand slightly longer than a decade to complete this magnum opus, but it has endured for more than half a century without ever being out of print. Two of the three films dramatizing the novel have been completed, and a third is in production. It took so long to reach the silver screen (her other great novel The Fountainhead was released as a film six years after its publication) because of its epic scope, but also because its theme and philosophy run counter to the prevailing Hollywood ethic.

It may seem ironic to some that this year September 2 falls on Labor Day. The view of the so-called labor movement in this country, and everywhere else, is mostly contrary to Rand’s vision.

In a larger sense, however, labor is not merely the physical act of human muscles, which can only produce the standard of living characteristic of a medieval blacksmith. It is the thought products of the creative mind that allows those muscles to exercise a power that is (conservatively) a trillion or more times the slightest movement of a human thumb and forefinger.

Happy Labor Day and Happy Atlas Shrugged Day. Would that they could stay together.

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Before last week, the last and only time I regretted losing a newspaper columnist was when the Chicago Tribune’s Mike Royko died in 1997. Royko, along with the Baltimore Sun’s H. L. Mencken, and William Cowper Brann, who published the Iconoclast in Waco during the 1890s, have been my fantasy dinner party guests. The careers of the latter two, of course, predate my existence, but I often read their essays in collections.

Now I may have to add the eminent Texas historian and San Antonio Express-News columnist T. R. Fehrenbach to the guest list. Fehrenbach is still among the living, but he retired and published his last essay a week ago. He cited ill-health, and, at 88, he is entitled to retire. Nevertheless, his readers are the worse off for all that.

I first became acquainted with Fehrenbach by reading his This Kind of War, a history of the Korean War, on cold winter nights in, of all places, South Korea. This book was more than just a recitation of battles, tactics, and individual heroism, though it contained much of all three. It dealt with the geo-political context, the nature of limited war, and the military. It is subtitled a study of unpreparedness, because, in his view, the war was just that. “The lesson of Korea is that it happened” is the final sentence of the book.

Fehrenbach, though born in San Benito, Texas was educated at the Ivy League’s Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1947. He served in World War II in stateside desk jobs, and returned to service when the Korean War broke out. In Korea, he served with distinction as a front line platoon leader and company commander, and participated in major combat actions. Fehrenbach, however, never once mentions his personal service in the book.

Fehrenbach apparently never had an academic post. He was thoroughly an intellectual in touch with the real world, having tried cotton farming (interrupted by the Korean War) and working in the insurance industry before turning to writing full time.

He has published eighteen books and numerous articles, including weekly Express-News columns for several decades. The work that made him the (informal) dean of Texas historians is the 1968 work Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (revised edition in 2000). Lone Star, according to a 2006 article in the Texas Monthly, “[a]t more than seven hundred pages . . . has nearly the heft of the Old Testament” and “paragraphs as architecturally elegant and idea ornamented as Edward Gibbon’s in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire —along with passages almost Homerically poetic.” It is a sweeping tale of the state which Fehrenbach opines is different from “every other American state in the twentieth century [in that] Texas had a history.

Also noteworthy is Fehrenbach’s Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico, the most readable overview of Mexican history in English currently available.

Fehrenbach’s weekly columns dealt with a panoply of topics most current events and concerns and how they fit in a historical context. As an example, here is a quote from a column published March 21, 2013.

“As a rule, the future’s not ours to see.

“To make my point, let’s go back and look at learned opinion about the growth, power and prosperity of the nations of about 1900.

“Very few people recognized the already-in-being industrial capacity of the United States. We, together with Japan, had just been accepted as ‘great powers’ because both of us had won wars — the U.S. against Spain; Japan against Russia — establishing colonial empires. The acknowledged great powers were Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy.

“Britain was the greatest trading nation, and the pound outshone the dollar; a large part of the world map was colored British red.

“Russia was considered to have the greatest prospects, with its huge size, rapid industrialization and untapped natural resources. A table printed in a recent Economist magazine shows that the Russia stock market out-performed Wall Street from 1865 through 1914.

“Another ‘hot’ country was Argentina, also large and resource-packed. Investment poured into both nations’ businesses, securities and bonds.

“China also was not forgotten. It was in chaos and foreign-dominated, but all those people had to count for something.

“Mexico was another attractive place, then modernizing under so-called ‘technocrats.’

“If you had invested in all those hot prospects, your return in 2000 would have been, roughly, zero.”

This kind of revealing commentary will be sorely missed.

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