Faith, Fear and Tom Hanks

by Bill Doughty

Tom Hanks was a military dependent, a Navy family member whose dad served in the Pacific in World War II.   

Tom Hanks has acted in some of the most memorable films of our time — Forrest Gump, Saving Private Ryan, Apollo 13, Sleepless in Seattle, The Green Mile and Charlie Wilson’s War.  He produced From the Earth to the Moon, Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers, David McCullough’s John Adams and the controversial, powerful The Pacific.  And, he’s no doubt achieved immortality -- as the voice of Woody in the Toy Story trilogy.  

Tom Hanks transcends genres.  

He is a champion of history and reading, and he frequently encourages people to pick up a book.  Reading — especially reading nonfiction — has nourished his intellectual curiosity and ability to put history in context.

Former Navy Captain NASA astronaut James "Jim" Arthur Lovell, Jr.,
makes a cameo appearance in Tom Hanks' Apollo 13.

Yale University invited Tom Hanks to speak to its 2011 graduating class recently where he said their imprint on history would be determined by how well they handle fear and inspire faith.  Here’s what Yale Bulletin reported: 

In the ceremony... (May 22), Hanks urged the soon-to-be graduates to begin their future by coming to the aid of the U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars, whose "faith in themselves is shadowed by the fear of not knowing what is expected of them next," he said.

Hanks spoke about the positive and negative aspects of technology for the perpetually plugged-in and connected graduates.  While Facebook and Twitter and other e-media ensure “boredom is vanquished” and certainly help us communicate, there’s a certain shallowness to the celebrity-driven culture that’s being created, he said.

Again, from the Yale Bulletin:

The continual instant access and instant communication, Hanks suggested, has also created a world where fear easily becomes contagious and divisive.

"Fear has become the commodity that sells as certainly as sex," Hanks told the seniors. "Fear is cheap, fear is easy, fear gets attention.... It's fast, it's gossip and it's just as glamorous, juicy and profitable. Fear twists facts into fictions that become indistinguishable from ignorance."

Tom Hanks on Navy’s John Paul Jones and faith and fear:

Hanks... told the seniors that he has a passion for history because of the lessons it teaches. He quoted American naval commander John Paul Jones: "If fear is cultivated, it will become stronger. If faith is cultivated, it will achieve mastery."

"Fear or faith — which will be our master?" Hanks asked the seniors.

"Throughout our nation's constant struggle to create a more perfect union, establish justice and ensure our domestic tranquility, we battle fear from outside our borders and within our own hearts every day of our history," Hanks commented. "Our nation came to be despite the fear of retribution from the king across the sea. America was made strong because people could live free from the fears that made up their daily lives in whatever land they called the ‘Old Country.' Our history books tell of conflicts taken up to free people from fear — those kept in slavery — in our own states, and to liberate whole nations under the rule of tyrants and theologies rooted in fear...

Tom Hanks on a commitment to Veterans and service:

"But we live in a world where too many of us are too ready to believe in things that do not exist," Hanks continued. "Conspiracies abound. Divisions are constructed and the differences between us are not celebrated for making us stronger but are calculated and programmed to set us against each other."

Tom Hanks at Yale: "Move forward, move ever forward."

Hanks told the seniors that they will make choices between fear and faith every day of their lives. He urged them to "take the fears [of U.S veterans] head on" for at least four years — the same amount of time they've been at Yale.

"Whatever your opinion of the wars, you can imprint the very next pages of the history of our troubled world by reinforcing faith in those returning veterans," Hanks told the seniors. "Allowing them rest, aiding in their recovery ... empathizing with the new journey they are starting even though we will never fully understand the journey they just completed, even though we will never understand what they endured. We will all define the true nature of our American identity not by the parades and the welcome-home parties, but how we match their service with service of our own."

The soon-to-be graduates' new "career," Hanks said, is a permanent one: "To stand on the fulcrum between fear and faith — fear at your back, faith in front of you.

"Which way will you move? Move forward, move ever forward," he encouraged them, "and tweet out a picture of the results."

According to Douglas Brinkley, in an insightful profile last year in Time magazine, “Hanks has become American history's highest-profile professor, bringing a nuanced view of the past into the homes and lives of countless millions. 

Brinkley reported that Hanks became intensely interested in military history after reading the two-volume, 1,882-page Library of America Reporting World War II: American Journalism (1938 to 1946).

Hanks read William Manchester and John Hersey.  His Pacific is based on Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed and Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow.  He was inspired by McCullough, Ambrose, Barbara Tuchman and Doris Kearns Goodwin.  According to Brinkley, “Leon Uris's fact-anchored novels — Mila 18, Armageddon and Exodus — taught Hanks to feel history in a way no high school teacher ever did.”  

According to Brinkley, author of The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, “There's no such thing as a definitive history. But what was once a passing interest for Hanks has become an obsession. He's a man on a mission to make our back pages come alive, to keep overhauling the history we know and, in the process, get us to understand not just the past but the choices we make today.”

I heard the Tom Hanks Yale address on one of my favorite podcasts, Tom Ashbrook’s On Point, from WBUR Boston.  Tom is also a big champion of books, authors and reading. 

A Tom Hanks Gift

Review by Bill Doughty

Actor, writer, patriot Tom Hanks speaks with a Purple Heart recipient veteran.

Tom Hanks, writer, builds short stories the way he describes building a fire in "Christmas Eve 1953," a gem of a story in "Uncommon Type: Some Stories" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017) – to breathe, brighten and be warm. There's a reason why warmth, like hope and resilience, is important in this story.

Hanks's character Virgil Beuell entrusts his son, Davey, to operate the family's fireplace:

"A fire is going in the family room. He had taught Davey how to build one by stacking the wood the way he did his toy Lincoln Logs, like a square house around the kindling, never a pyramid. The kid now viewed making the fire as his sacred duty. Come the first frosts of November, the Beuell home was the warmest place for miles and miles."

U.S. soldiers fight in Belgium, Nov. 4, 1944. (National Archives)

As a Navy read, I found "Christmas Eve 1953" most poignant: Army combat scenes and references to Pearl Harbor, FNGs, battle buddies, and wounded warriors (before they were called that).

We are transported from a quiet and cold December 24, 1953 in a family home in the American heartland to another Christmas Eve nine years earlier fighting Nazis in France and Belgium. The cold helps us appreciate being warm.

"This hole was the seventh Virgil had chipped out of the frozen ground and covered with tree limbs since they had walked through Bastogne. Virgil didn't want to dig any more of them. Moving to another position meant shouldering weapons and gear, carrying it who knew how far or for how long, digging another hole, and building another shelter, working up the sweat that, in the subzero winter, caused a man's uniform to freeze to his back. Frostbite had taken more men off the line than wounds from enemy fire. Some of the freezing guys had been able to get out before the encirclement. Those that hadn't had already lost toes and fingers, some even their feet and hands."

Hanks fans, and there are legions, will no doubt want to pick up this collection of American short stories as a holiday gift. 

Be aware that the language is saltier than anything you'll likely hear on screen in a Tom Hanks film.

Each short story has strong characters, compelling dynamics and a reference to a typewriter. Tom Hanks loves typewriters – mechanical wonders, each connected to countless stories in the lives of the people who tapped their keys.

Funny and sad, loose and tense, cool and warm as a fireplace, these stories are an exquisite slice of Americana. Read "Christmas Eve 1953" and be prepared to have the story stay with you for a long time.

In a 2011 post, "Faith, Fear and Tom Hanks," I said Renaissance man Tom Hanks "transcends genres." Add "gifted short story writer" to his list of skills.

Tom Hanks, Navy SEALs and 'A Captain's Duty'

Review by Bill Doughty

Tom Hanks is Richard Phillips, formerly the civilian captain of MV Maersk-Alabama.  A movie about Captain Phillips and his rescue by the Navy is being produced now in Norfolk, Virginia.

Meantime we have the book.

“A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea” by Richard Phillips, with Stephan Talty, published in 2010, presents the harrowing story of the rescue of the merchant mariner from the hands and guns of pirates at sea.

Phillips recounts his ordeal but also gives a fascinating look at life as a civilian sailor, showing us what its like in big container ships moving cargo on the world’s oceans, comparing ports like Subic Bay (Philippines), Chongjin (North Korea) and Monrovia (Liberia).

Some of the prose will read like poetry to men and women who go to sea:

“When you’re a sailor, you return to an ancient rhythm.  The sun tells you when to get up and when to go to bed.  It bookends your day with these incredible sunrises and sunsets.  I couldn’t wait to get out on the water.  this is why you go to sea, I thought, as I looked out over my ship.  I knew that every day on the water would be different.  It always is.  The sea would never look the same, its color changing from a granite black to vivid blue to an almost transparent green...”

“A Captain’s Duty” is reminiscent of “Lone Survivor” by Marcus Luttrell, about Lt. Michael Murphy and the Navy SEALs’ Operation Red Wings -- similar stage-setting, biographical background, and mix of the sacred and the profane.

Sacrificing his own safety and risking his life, Phillips negotiated with the pirates to take him rather than members of his crew.  How and why that came about is its own cat-and-mouse story in the book.

Throughout the retelling, Phillips brings in themes of leadership, duty and service.  He showed the strength of improvisation and trusting instincts while resisting fear in the face of threats, beatings and loaded AK-47s.

“The real obstacle wasn’t the Somalis, I told myself.  It was fear.  Every time I pushed through it, I found that I could persevere.  This isn’t over until you say it’s over, I said to myself.  I’m not going to give up.  I will outlast these guys.”

Tension builds, but there is real humor, believable dialog and splashes of philosophy as Phillips references Jack Kerouac, Winston Churchill and Mark Twain.

USS Bainbridge Sailors are thanked by Phillips. (Photo by MC3 David Danals)

He sees the irony of being rescued by the USS Bainbridge (DDG 96), named after the Navy captain who was captured by Barbary pirates in the Tripolitan War (and who went on to command the USS Constitution in the War of 1812).

Phillips speaks with gratitude about meeting with the Sailors who rescued him and with President Obama who gave the go-ahead for the rescue.   Obama, who invited Phillips and his wife Andrea to the Oval Office in May 2009, said, “I share the country’s admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips and his selfless concern for his crew.  His courage is a model for all Americans.”  

Phillips’s biggest sense of gratitude, understandably, is for the Navy SEALs who saved him.

“I’ll be grateful for what the SEALs did for me until the day I die.  And these days I can’t go to a ball game and listen to the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ without choking up.  When other Americans risk their lives to rescue you, that anthem becomes more than a song.  It becomes everything you feel for your country. The bond we all have with one another that is so often invisible, so often demeaned...”

“A Captain’s Duty” gives us a unique civilian seaman’s perspective on the importance of the Navy to the world’s shipping.  Readers can look forward to how Tom Hanks will bring the story to life.

Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum) is directing the film from a screenplay by Billy Ray, according to media reports, and the movie is due for a March 2013 release.

Hear from Tom Hanks in a previous Navy Reads post, "Faith, Fear and Tom Hanks."

Decisive Action: ‘Gravity’ & ‘Captain Phillips’

by Bill Doughty

Two movies this month offer thrill rides and edge-of-the-seat action: “Gravity” and “Captain Phillips.” Directors Alfonso Cuarón and Paul Greengrass and actors Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks, respectively, will be up for top awards by the end of the year.  Supporting performances by George Clooney and Barkhad Abdi will likely be up for awards, too.

“Gravity” takes special effects to a new level, but the story and life-and-death performance by Bullock are grounded in humanity.  The whole world is an audience to the drama.  Some themes: cooperation in space, importance of STEM, faith in oneself, innovation, training, courage, rebirth from grief, and appreciation for the gift of life.  

The film brings out the stark challenges and deep desire to explore space and understand the universe.

Tom Hanks congratulates James Lovell on being
awarded the Lincoln Leadership Prize in 2010.

Coincidentally, this past week the U.S. Naval Institute held its 2013 annual history conference, “Past, Present, and Future of Human Space Flight,” with Capt. James A. Lovell, USN (Ret.), Capt. Robert L. Crippen, USN (Ret.), Col. Robert Cabana, USMC (Ret.) and Capt. Ken Ham, USN.  (Lovell, captain of the famed Apollo 13 mission, was portrayed by Tom Hanks in a movie about that mission.)

Ham, chair of the Aerospace Engineering Department at the Naval Academy, said he and astronauts and other aviators were influenced by the movie, “Top Gun.”  Ham commented, “When I look up into the sky at the moon, it’s epic. When I look at Mars, it’s epic. It seems to me to be completely obvious that we need to go there, and I think if we decide to do it, the American people will support it.”

There are similarities in the appeal of space and call of the sea.

“Captain Phillips,” based on the book “A Captain’s Duty” by Phillips with Stephan Talty, shows how uncompromising resolve, creative negotiation and decisive action can work against hostage-taking extortion and intimidation.  The U.S. Navy stands for freedom of commerce on the seas, and “Captain Phillips,” shows -- through blood, sweat and tears -- how that freedom is protected.  Once again, Navy SEALs are on the forefront but so are surface forces, naval aviation and hospital corpsmen.  The movie closely follows action described in the book, with an eye on accuracy.  Greengrass says he wanted the movie to seem like a documentary, and it does.

[ Coincidentally, today Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced targeted operations by U.S. servicemembers against terrorists in Africa.  “These operations in Libya and Somalia send a strong message to the world that the United States will spare no effort to hold terrorists accountable, no matter where they hide or how long they evade justice. We will continue to maintain relentless pressure on terrorist groups that threaten our people or our interests, and we will conduct direct action against them, if necessary, that is consistent with our laws and our values.” ]

Barkhad Abdi as "Muse."

Building cooperative partnerships, providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, and enforcing international fishing laws with the U.S. Coast Guard are missions of the Navy as reflected in the Maritime Strategy and as touched on in “Captain Phillips.”  The Maersk Alabama ship was carrying relief supplies to Africa.  The pirates from Somalia claimed they were fishermen driven to piracy because of overfishing.  Their attack, however, was based on a flawed strategy from a position of weakness.

How can we preserve quality of life on the planet and protect natural resources?  How can we resolve conflict and uphold constitutional democracy?  How can we overcome fear and find the will to survive under the worst circumstances?  These are some of the questions prompted by these two movies.  On a practical level, “How did they film that?” is another question that comes to mind, especially during “Gravity.”  Amazing.

Tribute to Veterans

by Bill Doughty

CNO Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert delivers Veterans Day remarks. 

(U.S. Navy photo by MC2 Jacob Sippel)

Veterans are being honored today from coast to coast and around the world.  Today, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert delivered remarks at Madison Square Park during the New York City Veterans Day parade opening ceremony.  This year the Navy is the parade’s featured service.

In San Diego, the Navy hosted a history-making sports event aboard a historic aircraft carrier.  More about that in a moment.

Last year Navy Reads reflected on Veterans Day and Sailors who transited both the Atlantic and Pacific.  The context was Tom Ashbrook’s On Point radio interview with Commander, U.S. Pacific Command Adm. Willard and Simon Winchester, author of Atlantic. We also discussed a special radio interview with veterans, including a conversation with former Command Master Chief Jim Taylor, Pearl Harbor Survivor Liaison for Commander, Navy Region Hawaii.

Since then we’ve featured other posts of interest to veterans.

In “Faith, Fear and Tom Hanks” I reprinted some of Hanks’s remarks at a commencement address at Yale, including his challenge to the college graduates about veterans, especially wounded warriors, returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other deployments.  His words are worth reposting today:

"Whatever your opinion of the wars, you can imprint the very next pages of the history of our troubled world by reinforcing faith in those returning veterans," Hanks told the seniors. "Allowing them rest, aiding in their recovery ... empathizing with the new journey they are starting even though we will never fully understand the journey they just completed, even though we will never understand what they endured. We will all define the true nature of our American identity not by the parades and the welcome-home parties, but how we match their service with service of our own."

Over the past year I reviewed Army veteran Wes Moore’s remarkable book, The Other Wes Moore.  Moore talked about the key that unlocked his passion for education, his mother’s encouragement to read Mitch Albom’s Fab Five, a book about the Michigan University college basketball team.  Moore writes: 

I was riveted by that book.  The characters jumped off the page, and I felt myself as engulfed in their destiny as I was in my own.  I finished Fab Five in two days.  The book itself wasn’t what was important -- in retrospect, I see that it was a great read but hardly a work of great literature -- but my mother used it as a hook into a deeper lesson: that the written word isn’t necessarily a chore but can be a window into new worlds.

Navy veteran Nancy Harrity guest-reviewed two windows into new worlds of strategic thinking, Seven Deadly Scenarios and Power Rules.  Always insightful and thought-provoking, Nancy has a new review on the way. Stay tuned.  

In a review of Ganbare! I discussed the juxtaposition of achievements of the veterans and heroes like the 442nd Regimental Combat Team with what happened to some of their families -- the WWII interment of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

Guest reviewer Theresa Donnelly reviewed Use Your Head to Get Your Foot in the Door, a book that can help new veterans who face challenges after leaving the service.  Theresa wrote, “This is why it is important to have a robust plan in place for your post-military transition.”

Since last November we wrote other posts with with a focus on veterans: a review of USS Arizona’s Last Band, Culturnomics (Honor/Courage/Commitment) and Revolt of the Admirals in the Centennial of Naval Aviation, with some interesting history and perspective on Congressman Carl Vinson and his vision of a two-ocean Navy.  Revolt ties in nicely, by the way, with the latest post on Courageous Followership and an interview with author Ira Chaleff.

The Navy Reads blogpost on the late Navy veteran “Amazing Grace” Hopper and her 2011 milestones was reposted on a number of other blogs, including GHC Bloggers in conjunction with the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing going on now (Nov. 9-12) in Portland, Oregon.

Rear Adm. Grace Hopper’s namesake, USS Hopper (DDG 70), recently transited the waters of the Battle of Leyte Gulf and observed a moment of silence exactly 67 years to the day of that historic battle. You can read about the veterans of WWII who fought in “the U.S. Navy’s Finest Hour” in Leyte and off Samar, Philippines in James D. Hornfischer’s Tin Can Sailors.

This Veterans Day, 2011, in addition to tributes and commemoration ceremonies around the world, the Navy is hosting a season-opening college basketball game aboard USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) in San Diego.  The Commander in Chief and First Lady attended the Quicken Loans Carrier Classic featuring the University of North Carolina and Michigan State University.  That’s a pretty cool, all-American thing to do for and with our veterans.  The game is going on now as I post this.  

The University of North Carolina team practices aboard USS Carl Vinson. (U.S. Navy photo by MC2 James R. Evans)

Check out how USS Carl Vinson was transformed, and see ESPN’s “a look at life on USS Carl Vinson.”  ESPN also featured a Veterans Day profile of J. P. Bolwahnn, a 34-year-old former Navy SEAL, who plays football at the University of San Diego as a walk-on.

‘Our Team’ of Guardians

Review by Bill Doughty––

Navy and Marine Corps veterans play a pivotal role in bending the arc of history toward justice in “Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series that Changed Baseball” by Luke Epplin (Flatiron Books, 2021).

Sailors and Marines as guardians of democracy have key roles in this fascinating book about baseball’s history. It’s a timely book as the team from Cleveland plays its last home game as the “Indians” September 27. The team has been renamed the “Guardians,” as announced by the team owner Paul Dolan and as presented in a powerful video by Tom Hanks*.

Seventy-five years ago the Cleveland team was led by owner Bill Veeck, who enlisted in the United States Marine Corps after Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor/Oahu (and after Veeck said he saw the military drafting young fathers). Veeck would be wounded in an artillery accident at Bougainville in the South Pacific and would return to quickly rebuild the postwar Cleveland Indians.

Feller takes the oath from boxer Gene Tunney and joins the Navy.

Cleveland’s star pitcher and a national sports icon was Bob Feller. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Feller signed up for the Navy at the encouragement of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, who told Feller he would help recruit young Americans if he, too, joined. Feller reported to gunnery school and became a chief petty officer in charge of an antiaircraft battery aboard USS Alabama (BB 60). He served in the North Atlantic and South Pacific.

Larry Doby in WWII

One of the team’s eventual top hitters and outfielders worked his way up from the Negro Leagues and became the first African American in the American League: Larry Doby. (Doby would forever be in the shadow of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the color barrier and play in Major League Baseball.)

Veeck (rhymes with “heck”) would eventually lose part of his leg to his war injury. He was known as one hell of a showman. Epplin calls him “the most eccentric and forward-thinking executive of his era.” Veeck brought fireworks, gate prizes, bands, clowns, vaudeville acts, tightrope walkers, and quiz shows to baseball stadiums. He oversaw the planting of ivy along Wrigley Stadium. He was one of the first owners to embrace radio broadcasts and night games. Later in his career, Veeck famously recruited 3'7" little person Eddie Gaedel to bat, creating an impossible strike zone for the opposing pitcher.

In the mid 1940s, Veeck, the Marine Corps Veteran, took a swing at integrating baseball and connected. He recruited Negro Leagues veteran pitcher Satchel Paige and Navy veteran Larry Doby as well as Major League Baseball’s first black executive, Louis Jones, the Cleveland team’s director of public relations.

Satchel Paige and Bill Veeck

Jackie Robinson, Army vet.

The great Jackie Robinson is justifiably honored as the first African American to play in the major leagues, recruited by the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League after being discharged from the Army. But what the Cleveland team created with Satchel Paige, Larry Cody, and Louis Jones –– combined with Veeck’s relentless welcoming of black fans –– also deserves the spotlight.

Fortunately, “Our Team” enlightens readers with great storytelling about the ups and downs and behind-the-scenes lives of interesting and complicated characters, none more complicated than Veeck, Feller, Paige, and Doby. The stories are set in an era of Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, when black baseball players could not stay in most white hotels or eat in white restaurants, especially in the South. It was also a time when the military had not yet embraced equality of opportunity.

When Larry Doby joined the Navy after attending an integrated high school in Paterson, New Jersey, he was “shocked” by what he experienced at Great Lakes Naval Training Station in a segregated section for black sailors. Doby said he dealt with the indignities of segregation by shutting down. “I didn’t crack up,” Doby recounts, “I just went into my shell.” Epplin writes:

“It was a familiar feeling for many black recruits arriving at Great Lakes. For decades, no branch of the armed services practiced segregation as rigidly as the Navy. Almost immediately after the battleships docked in the wake of World War I, the Navy closed its ranks to black Americans. They were allowed to enlist again in 1933, but solely as stewards and mess attendants, tending to white troops during the day and retiring to separate quarters at night. The bombing of Pearl Harbor spurred change, but only to a degree. Though black recruits soon would be admitted as apprentice seamen, they were not treated equally. Clark Clifford, who acted as President Harry Truman’s naval adviser during World War II, looked back on the compulsory segregation of that period with disgust. ‘I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation the had somehow escaped the Civil War,’ he wrote in his memoirs.”

Doby played baseball for the Great Lakes black Bluejackets. Later, Bob Feller, after returning stateside from fighting in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot aboard USS Alabama, would oversee the white Bluejackets baseball team at Great Lakes.

USS Alabama (BB 60)

In building and promoting his team, Veeck took advantage of the great migration of blacks from the South to industrial centers, including Cleveland, to bring in massive crowds and record-breaking profits, embracing a slowly building wave of greater integration.

Veeck told the press, “I don’t think any man who has the ability should be banned from Major League Baseball on account of his color.”

Epplin writes, “It was (Veeck’s) belief that the war had ‘advanced us in regard to racial tolerance.’” But Veeck was a realist. He advised Cody –– just as Jackie Robinson had been advised –– to never show anger and to not respond to racial taunts by white supremacists.

Veeck valued and rewarded military veterans. Navy veteran Eddie Robinson played first base for Cleveland. Veeck recruited two young Cleveland pitchers –– Gene Bearden and Bob Lemon, who together had starring roles in the World Series of 1948 –– both Navy veterans.

USS Helena (CL-50), center, fires during the Battle of Kula Gulf, just before being torpedoed and sunk. The next ship astern is Saint Louis (CL-49). Photographed from Honolulu (CL-48). Official U.S. Navy photograph, National Archives, 80-G-54553.

Writing about Bearden, Epplin reports:

“While serving in the Navy during the war, he'd shipped out to the South Pacific aboard the USS Helena. During a skirmish with Japanese forces in the Solomon Islands in 1943, three torpedoes struck the ship, flooding its interior and throwing Bearden from a ladder. An officer, slinging the unconscious Bearden over his shoulder, lugged him onto a rubber life raft. There, they bobbed about before being saved by a rescue team. Bearden had a fractured skull and a crushed right knee. Aluminum plates were slotted into both.

“Some doctors told him that his pitching days were done. But Bearden was persistent. Unable to lift his right leg high during his windup, the southpaw compensated by learning to throw his own peculiar version of a knuckleball.”

Feller visits his teammates before shipping out.

Cleveland’s star pitcher and combat veteran Bob Feller goes under the microscope and is revealed as a somewhat tarnished “hero.” In Cleveland’s run toward the World Series Feller sets up a military-grade telescope to spy on other teams’ pitching signs from the opponents’ catchers. Feller had obtained the three-foot-long telescope from USS Alabama! The sign-stealing "espionage" by Feller and some of his teammates wouldn't be revealed till decades later.

A remarkable entrepreneur, Feller established a transactional relationship with Satchel Paige in barnstorming exhibition games. Feller nevertheless was a product of his time regarding race issues. “He seemingly continued to view racial matters through the prism of his own life story, which sometimes blinded him to the barriers that grit, hard work, and self reliance alone couldn’t topple.”

Characters from the past drift in and out of this book, a treasure trove for baseball history aficionados: Leo Durocher, Dizzy Dean, Buck O'Neill, Branch Rickey, Effa Manley, Abe Saperstein, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Boudreau, Warren Spahn, and Fay Vincent, among others.

You have to read this book to get the full effect and meaning of a special photo that personifies advances in baseball in the pivotal year of 1948. The iconic photo, included with other photos in the book, is of teammates Steve Gromek and Larry Doby at the end of game four of the World Series.

Steve Gromek and Larry Doby embrace after game four of the 1948 World Series.

The true standout hero in this book, though, is maverick Bill Veeck, a man who was a forward-thinking innovator who worked to bring greater equality to American society through baseball. What he lost along the way because of his singleminded passion is also an important part of this book, which in many ways is written for and about guardians of our democracy.

*Tom Hanks video announcing the Cleveland Guardians above.

Top Photo: Marine Corps Private Bill Veeck reads.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear

Reviews by Bill Doughty

Middle Age artist Hieronymous Bosch evoked fear and evil in his art hundreds of years ago.

Fear is corrosive. It eats away at a democracy. It feeds anger and hate. Sometimes it's necessary, but often fear is overhyped and misplaced, according to evidence provided by such critical thinkers as Steven Pinker, George Will, Bill Nye, Tom Hanks and Barry Glassner.

Fear is appealing and easy to access; the amygdala is immediate. The news media are rewarded by hyping fear: "If it bleeds, it leads." Autocrats foment fear to gain support. Fear works. 

Author Glassner reminds us in "The Culture of Fear":

"Samuel Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: 'People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true.' That principle, which guided the late president's political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well."

Glassner's national bestseller, featured in "Bowling for Columbine," is "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, and So Much More" (Basic Books/Perseus, 1999). [Note: I pulled this book of the shelf to see how it could add context to the review of "Enduring Ideals," which follows this review; Glassner recently updated his work, and I'm looking forward to seeing his perspective twenty years later.]


Don't Believe the Hype

If people are afraid of the "wrong things," constantly sensationalized in the media and by some self-serving politicians, what are the "right things?" 

In "The Culture of Fear," Glassner tries to answer two questions: "Why are Americans so fearful lately, and why are our fears so often misplaced?" He concludes that instead of worrying about statistically minuscule threats, we should take "decisive action to quash – problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population."

"Will it take an event comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to convince us that we must joint together as a nation and tackle these problems? At the start of the new century it ought to be considerably easier for us to muster our collective will and take decisive action than it was for our own parents and grandparents six decades earlier. This time we do not have to put our own lives or those of our children at risk on battlefields halfway around the globe."

It's interesting to read Glassner's perspective, published two years before 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He looks back to 1938 and the famous Orson Welles broadcast of an adaptation of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds." The broadcast created panic in New Jersey because of it's hyper-realistic presentation of actual "fake news." Glassner contrasts the hyper-fear of a Mars attack with the actual dangers of the rise of fascism in Europe at the time.


Commitment to Freedom

Meanwhile, nearly 80 years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was alarmed – but not fearful – about the rise of Fascism, especially the threat of Nazism to Western democracies, as well as the militarization of Imperial Japan.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

On January 6, 1941, eleven months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR gave his Four Freedoms speech. An examination of the speech's concepts is presented in a stunning coffee-table book, "Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms" (Abbeville Press Publishers, 2018).

The book offers beautiful art by Norman Rockwell and other contemporaries, especially from World War II, as well as photos, sketches, source material and reimagined art inspired by the concepts of liberty that could be guaranteed by democracy.

Along with the finely reproduced art are insightful essays to give context and history.

William J. Vanden Heuvel, former deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations, writes:

"(In) the address to the United States Congress that history knows as the Four Freedoms speech ... the president asked not only his countrymen and women but also the people of the world to understand that the terrible scourge of war could be justified to our children's children only if we in faith and honor determined to create a different world to assure the peace of humankind. That world, Roosevelt proposed, should be based on the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. In the world of the time of the president's speech, however – beset by war, oppressed by Nazi domination, brutalized by racist thugs – every tenet of democracy was threatened and ridiculed."President Roosevelt's power as a speaker lay in his ability to present profound ideas in simple language."

Clockwise from top left: Freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

Rockwell's power as an artist transformed Roosevelt's words into pictures, even if the artist's paintings were imperfect in capturing the diversity and potential of America then and especially now. Rockwell hired people to pose and painted from staged photographs, so his realism wasn't quite real, and his staging might be considered hokey and corny in a post-Vietnam War and post-9/11 America.

Nevertheless, according to another essayist in this volume, Mark Shulman, "Rockwell translated FDR's lofty language into imagery that appealed to Americans' better angels and inspired the kinds of sacrifice necessary to fund the (Second World) war, to fight it, and to persevere in the face of horrifying adversity." 

In the wake of the First World War and the Great Depression – and in the growing shadow of an approaching WWII – FDR succeeded in coming to the aid of Great Britain.

Roosevelt and his team negotiated the U.S. Navy destroyers-for-bases initiative and lend-lease act while prying Americans, influenced by Charles Lindbergh, away from isolationism in the America First movement. 

Essayist Stephane Grimaldi writes, "Norman Rockwell embodied the American people who had to resign themselves to the need to defend the universal ideals of justice, peace, and prosperity. But President Roosevelt had to convince citizens that a foreign war was necessary. After all, aren't oceans the last bastion against tyranny?" Not really.

Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and other parts of Oahu on Dec. 7, 1941 forced the nation to confront the realities and dangers of foreign threats in the Pacific and Europe. Rockwell's paintings, produced in 1942, were in part a mission statement outlined by Roosevelt for the United States and its Allies.

Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter, part woman, part man.

Essayist Jan Eliasson writes, "...while oceans may separate people, there is not that much that sets hopes and dreams apart."

This book blends history and shows the power of art, including in shaping public opinion. Some surprises included in this book:

• Rockwell's portrait of tough and gritty Rosie the Riveter, literally transgender because Rockwell used a woman's face and a man's body as real-life models; 
• Rockwell turning down a request to paint recruiting art during Vietnam;
• an interview with Ruby Bridges (the black girl in the iconic and powerful 1963 Rockwell painting "The Problem We All Live With") revealing that her father fought and was wounded in the Korean War; 
• the effects of Rockwell's art on Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and the United Nations; 
• how FDR, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was inspired by President Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address in developing the four freedoms concept; and
• Eleanor Roosevelt's role in translating FDR's mission statement into a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Commitment Against Fear

Essayist Allida Black insists we recognize the role FDR's widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, played after WWII in perpetuating the concepts and ideals of the four freedoms. Black shows Ms. Roosevelt's "concrete" achievement in putting the four freedoms into action:

"If FDR gave us the vision that Rockwell immortalized on canvas, ER insisted that American's recognize what it meant. 'It is not only in war ... that we fight for freedom,' she wrote, shortly after Rockwell's paintings appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. 'When the war is over, the four freedoms will not have been won, we shall simply have dominated their more aggressive enemies. At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from fear, and freedom from want – for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war.'"

"Ultimately," Black writes, "Eleanor Roosevelt's commitment changed the world." The same can be said, to a degree, about Norman Rockwell who confronted fear in various forms before and after the war.

But fear, according to essayist Daisy Rockwell, the artist's granddaughter, "is now threatening all four of the freedoms Norman Rockwell enshrined."

Daisy Rockwell contends, "Since 2001, Americans have in fact been encouraged to live their lives in fear." She says, "A terrorist, by definition, is someone whose goal is to incite fear. Fear leads to chaos."

It can be argued that the attacks of 9/11 and Russian attacks on our political system and culture are forms of terrorism designed to cause fear and division leading to an erosion of freedom and unity.

As usual, the antidote to the corrosion of fear is found in education and critical thinking. So is art. "If you see something, say something" becomes, according to Daisy Rockwell, "see something, paint something.

Bill Nye says, "see something, think something."

Hieronymous Bosch's weird and fearful Vision of Hell.

Norman Rockwell's concept of the Golden Rule, a core concept for the Four Freedoms – universally applied.