December Remember: PAOs & Doggone Luntz

The day’s keynote guest speaker did something awful.

It happened at the May 2010 Navy Public Affairs Symposium in Baltimore, Md. The speaker was GOP pollster Frank Luntz. He bounced around the room in red-white-and-blue sneakers, arms waving, voice rising, making incendiary insinuations and politically incorrect remarks as he showed PowerPoint slides.

Attendees at the May 2010 Baltimore PAO Symposium hear a panel discussion. (SN Marty Carey)

Of course, his prickly comments and attempts at jokes were his First Amendment right ––– and typical Luntz schtick.

But then he went too far. On the screen he showed a picture of the first woman speaker of the house, Representative Nancy Pelosi. It was a photo –– he said –– of Pelosi "after plastic surgery" to her face. Then he showed a “before” photo. It was a picture of a dog.

A nervous murmur rippled through the crowd of military and civilian public affairs officers and mass communication specialists.

We were in Baltimore. Nancy Pelosi’s hometown, where her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., had served as mayor after serving in Congress for five terms. Speaker of the House Pelosi was in her fourth year in her leadership role, second in line to Commander in Chief Barack Obama after Vice President Joe Biden.

Just a few years earlier, Pelosi had spent the early part of her time as Speaker in direct opposition to President George H. W. Bush and his war in Iraq, which she contended began on a lie about weapons of mass destruction. She said Bush’s war killed thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis and negatively impacted the necessary war in Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. She had also vociferously opposed Bush’s move to privatize social security, and she fought for expanded affordable health care. Republican politicians and advisors unleashed their vitriol on her and, forgive the bad pun, really “dogged her out.”

Luntz

In making the jab ridiculing Pelosi’s appearance, Luntz, who has worked on behalf of Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanon, Ross Perot, Ted Cruz, and other Right Wing politicians, as well as the former Washington Redskins, must have thought he’d receive a friendly reception in a conservative-leaning military audience. Personally, I thought he just embarrassed himself.

And –– his low-blow joke made him sound like a hypocrite.

After all, in his entertaining book “What Americans Really Want … Really: The Truth About Our Hopes, Dreams, and Fears” (Hyperion, 2009), published the year before the symposium, Luntz wrote, “‘Do Unto Others as You Would Have Them Do Unto You’ applies to communication, not just behavior.” Luntz says it’s important to come across as patient, understanding, and humble, not just in the words we use but in the words others hear us say.”

In recent years Luntz has publicly criticized the lack of “decorum” in politics and sore-loser campaigning by ex-President Trump and his ultra-MAGA supporters. Yet, on Nov. 7, 2022, he predicted Republicans would gain control of the Senate and win 233 to 240 House seats; instead, they lost a seat in the Senate and only won only ten seats in the House for a total of 222 (including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and newcomer fabulist George Santos).

Luntz mis-read his flawed polls, and it wasn’t the first time. He also mis-read the room that day in Baltimore.

Part of his schtick includes polling his audience and asking provocative questions, which he did to the PAOs and MCs. He told us to indicate whether we believed the Constitution was more of an authority for the United States than the Bible. He expressed surprise when many of us chose the Constitution. It seemed to me, then and now, that Luntz was giving a veiled nod to Christian Nationalism.

In “What Americans Really Want…” Luntz praises former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s commitment to her public expressions of devotion to her Christian identity:

“Sarah Palin is the perfect case study for those seeking to uncover the secret to religious messaging and communication. She clearly recognized the connection between religious values and small-town values –– and sought to make that connection the centerpiece of her campaign message. It was a genuine appeal from a devout Christian … Throughout the campaign, it was impossible to tell where her political beliefs ended and her religious beliefs began –– they were so intertwined.”

He notes how Palin said in an interview with James Dobson that she had sought God’s “intercession” in the election: “I can feel the power of prayer, and that strength that is provided through our prayer warriors across this nation,” Palin said, continuing, “…it’s our reminder to do the same, to put this in God’s hands, to seek his perfect will for this nation, and to of course seek his wisdom and guidance in putting this nation back on the right track.” Luntz admits, her words, “while balm to the religious community were like fingernails on the chalkboard to everyone else.”

In that chapter, “God Help Us,” Luntz offers his “rules for religious discussion” with an attempt to find common ground through listening instead of lecturing. He says we need to, for now, acknowledge a separation of state and church –– as “an accepted doctrine among all but the most devout in America, even as we disagree about its application.” To his credit, he says we wouldn’t want laws based on Sharia law or Supreme Court citations of Deuteronomy rather than the Constitution. Yet he concludes, “But just because we don’t want our government to establish a religion doesn’t mean we should pretend religion doesn’t influence our government at all. The fact is, we pick our politicians after we pick our God. Just don’t say it this way.”

Trump supporters, some holding Bibles and nationalist flags and symbols breach security at the Capitol, January 6, 2022, attacking police. (Luke Mogelson)

Luntz’s focus on seeming to be genuine, in "coming across" a certain way, and in disguising true beliefs in superficial and misleading phrases is antithetical to Navy core values of honor, courage, and commitment, where integrity is based on a deeper ethos. Politicians may take the oath to uphold the Constitution on a family bible or koran (or other book representing a person’s beliefs), but it’s the Constitution that matters.

The pinnacle of misplaced faith and beliefs came when Trump supporters, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists marched through the halls of the Capitol last year shouting “Hang Mike Pence,” “Nancy, where are you Nancy?” and, ironically, “Treason, treason, treason.” The insurrectionists defiled the People’s House and Pelosi’s office. They gathered for prayer in the U.S. Senate Chamber, captured on video by New Yorker reporter Luke Mogelson: “Jesus Christ, we invoke your name, amen … Thank you heavenly father for gracing us with this opportunity … Thank you divine, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent creator God for filling this chamber with your white light and love, with your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots … We love you and we thank you, in Christ's holy name we pray.”

(Mogelson, New Yorker)

It’s been said that not every Republican or so-called ultra-MAGA Trumpist is a white supremacist or Christian nationalist, but every such extremist tends to be a Trump supporter.

Even Luntz says many conservatives are turning away from Trump and his martyrdom ideology.

Despite Luntz’s attempts at sincerity and concern for others, looking back, I wonder how much of a role Luntz played in fertilizing extremism, exploiting division, and empowering the insurrection he seems to earnestly condemn. The day after January 6, Luntz on CNBC called the attack on the Capitol “horrible,” but he did not distance himself from the Big Lie that the election was stolen. Instead, he said we need to understand the anger and pain of of the Trump supporters: “They do believe that there’s voter fraud,” he said. “I think the business community is expecting Washington to get its act together. It’s expecting Republicans and Democrats to figure out what went wrong in their various states and address it so we never have an election process like we had.”

Dr. Frank Luntz is a complicated individual. His books, including “Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear” (Hyperion Books, 2007), are filled with truly good advice on how to communicate. Which must be why he was invited to speak the PAO symposium in Baltimore in 2010 (unexpectedly dropping a figurative dog turd in the punch bowl). Questions remain about Luntz and his self-described “wisdom” as a pollster and strategist. Does he really believe he is an impartial broker of opinions when Republican backers fund his focus groups? Does he really want to bring both sides together? Does he think ends justify the means if wrongdoing is done in service to a higher power?

Luntz had the right to say what he wanted about Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi back then in Baltimore, but we have the right to turn away from his veiled hate, fears, and contempt.

A POW Forgives But Does Not Forget

Review by Bill Doughty––

Christmas time in a Hanoi POW camp could be an especially desolate time, but American prisoners had innovative ways to cope. POWs secretly shared memories, stories, “imaginary gifts,” and even Christmas carols secretly through their tap code or other innovative ways to communicate. A pair of bright red socks became a treasured gift. Chewing gum –– among the rare items not confiscated by the guards –– was like a gift from Santa.

Porter Halyburton recounts, “I shared the gum with others, but I managed to keep my piece of gum going for nearly a month until it disintegrated.”

Two years into his imprisonment at Hoa Lo Prison and the “Hanoi Hilton,” Halyburton received his first care package from home. His devoted wife Marty, who at first had no idea he was alive, sent a hand-knitted green sweater. It was Christmas 1969.

“I also got a new ‘towel’ –– actually a large washcloth –– from the Vietnamese, since mine had become threadbare over the years. It was dark green and perfect for a Christmas tree when it was draped into a cone shape and supported by a stick. Silver gum wrappers were used to make tiny balls for the tree as well as a star on the top, and the red socks became Christmas stockings hanging below the tree, which was placed on a platform below the window in the back of the cell. The window could be opened from the outside by the roving guards but, because the walls were double with an airspace between and quite thick, the guards could not see the tree and decorations below the window. We took it down during the day, but it was a magical sight during the night.”

Lt. Cmdr. Porter Alexander Halyburton was captured in 1967 after his F-4B fighter-bomber went down in North Vietnam. He was released, along with other POWs, in February, 1973, shortly after the United States and North Vietnam signed a Peace Agreement on January 27. (The war wouldn’t end for another two years until the fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975).

His “Reflections on Captivity: A Tapestry of stories by a Vietnam War POW” (Naval Institute Press, 2022), is a gift of memories, reflections, and insights. It evokes both tears of sadness and of joy. Readers will cringe at the torture, depravity, and pain endured by prisoners. But there are also stories of pure genius in the ways the POWs overcame cruelty through resilience, innovation, and sheer grit.

Examples of their innovative inventions include making playing cards, dice, and even a slide rule from bread dough and “ink” from cigarette ashes and pig fat. The men memorized names and details of their fellow POWs for future accountability. They developed amazing ways to communicate through their tap code –– sometimes done through coughing, sweeping, or other ways of making sound. And, when vision wasn’t blocked, they communicated through a “deaf-mute” hand signal code. In “Reflections,” Halyburton shows how in descriptive passages and diagrams.

His most precious gift from home was a photo sent to him in 1969 of Marty and their daughter, Dabney.

He describes living in the past and future to avoid the present, yet ironically the prisoners who survived captivity did so by facing and overcoming their present circumstances with communication, creativity, mutual support, subtle subversion, and a sense of humor.

I laughed out loud at some of the antics Halyburton describes: tricking the guards with American slang, sing-songing and dancing their roll call. But the most shockingly funny story in the book involves a perverted guard and a duck. Guaranteed to crack you up. “Quack, Quack!”

With a generous sharing of his poetry, private thoughts, and journal entries, Halyburton achieves a deep introspection and personal history that helps us understand the experience of prisoners of war in Vietnam. Readers and lovers of books will be pleased to see his references to authors John M. McGrath, Edgar Allan Poe, Jim and Sybil Stockdale, George Hayward, and Viktor Frankl.

Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” helped Halyburton put his POW experience and survival into context in its examination of human suffering at the hands of others and what it reveals about ourselves, how we react, and whether we have free will and the freedom to choose. “I realized that our lives were determined more by the choices that we made rather than the circumstances of our captivity."

That, he says, was “the first great lesson” he learned from his captivity.

“I learned a second great lesson from my experience, but it did not come until the very end. As I wrote in my journal, when I walked through the gates of the Hanoi Hilton on February 12, 1973, as we were leaving the prison the had symbolized all the misery and hatred that we had endured over those many years, I turned to face the compound and said, ‘I forgive you.’ I did that because I knew I could not and should not carry that hatred back home with me, back to my family and my life of freedom. I realized during the last few hours of my captivity that although hatred had been useful as part of the armor that had protected me from the influence of my captors, it was no longer needed. Hatred is a poison to the soul, mind, and body, and it has been the source of many of the ills in the world throughout most of our history … One must choose to forgive.” 

Reuniting with family, hugging Dabney, in 1973.

The concept of “freedom” is so cherished, we are willing to fight to defend it. Freedom demands responsibility, accountability, and ultimately a reckoning with the truth. In Halyburton’s case, the truth involved forgiveness and letting go of hate.

Speaking of which…

In 2022, we’ve seen a thriving democracy –– Ukraine –– under attack by Putin’s Russia, and we wonder if the world can forgive the unforgettable murder, terrorism, and destruction Putin continues to unleash out of pure hate.

Today, Ukraine’s President Zelensky visits the United States to express his thanks to Americans for our defensive military support, in the name of freedom.

Top photo: U.S. Naval War College Professor Emeritus Porter Halyburton shows a photo of his wife and daughter during a lecture at the Naval War College about his time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Halyburton was held captive for seven years in a number of prisons, including the infamous “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hanoi Hilton.” (MC2 Eric Dietrich)

1943 Onward: US Naval Power

Review by Bill Doughty––

When a veteran British historian and a gifted artist team up for a big book, the result is a work of art and a great early holiday gift for Navy readers: “Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II” (Yale University Press, 2022) by Paul Kennedy with paintings by Ian Marshall.

Paul Kennedy

Kennedy’s theses: (1) 1943 was the pivotal year for victory for the Allies, and (2) World War II accounts for America’s rise as a consummate and exceptional world power, “an extraordinary shift in Great Power history.” Kennedy makes the point in three data-driven appendices, a ream of research notes, a preface overview, and more than a dozen charts, maps, and tables.

If that sounds boring, just turn to the book’s compelling narrative and gorgeous art.

You’ll find a rich sweep of naval history leading up to and during the Second World War –– in both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean areas of operation and in the Mediterranean Sea. Ian Marshall’s sketchy watercolors in soft pastels convey human commitment and achievement even in the fog and gloom of war.

Regarding Kennedy’s thesis about 1943:

“At the onset of 1943 the US Navy was down to a single carrier fleet in the Pacific War, and German U-boats were poised to launch their largest-ever offensive against the critical Atlantic convoy trade. Changes had to come if the Allies were to prevail.

“The changes came in 1943. World War II defies easy summary, but the key to an eventual Allied victory, essentially, was to get the increasingly vast numbers of American and British Empire fighting men and munitions across two oceans so that the combined armies (along with the Russians) could crush Italy, Germany, and Japan. This involved two elements, sea power and a productivity revolution. In the sea-power story, the struggle for control of the North Atlantic was won by the defending forces, quite dramatically, in May and June of that year, with severe U-boat losses. North Africa was consolidated, Malta relieved, and Italy defeated. Things moved more slowly in the Pacific fighting, but victories in the Gilbert, the Solomons, and northern New Guinea confirmed an American advance that would not be thrown back. Yet the year 1943 meant more than just another saga of hard-fought convoy battles, amphibious landings in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and the sinking of a German battle cruiser off Norway. It was the year in which the sheer productive muscle of the United States, which had existed in latent form in so many measures before that time, at last realized itself in all of the arenas of the world war … In place of the dearth of fleet carriers, new powerful ones began to stream across the Pacific from June onward. Over the Atlantic, high above the now-secured convoys of supply ships and troopships, flew thousands of US aircraft on their way to their new bomber and fighter bases in southern England. Landing craft and Liberty ships poured out of American shipyards. Even the Royal Navy’s hard-fought defeat of the U-boats in 1943 could not have been imagined without the productive American force behind the ultra-long-range B-24 patrol planes, the escort carriers, the mass-produced radar sets, the homing torpedoes, and Lend-Lease stock for Canada’s and Britain’s production of escort vessels. By the year following, this flow of munitions to the fronts had become a flood, producing in turn the victories of Leyte Gulf and Normandy. And behind all this military hardware and productivity was a financial, tax-raising strength bigger than anything known to history. Allied naval predominance was assured because of a surge in the American economy that dwarfed that of all its rivals. It was not just a story of more and more warships; it was also a tale of a new international order emerging. Victory at Sea was affirmed, with the clear winner of the war being the United States of America.”

Henry Kaiser's Star of Oregon was the first of many Liberty ships built in U.S. shipyards.

America’s massive production output came about through progressive New Deal initiatives under President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a country of immigrants, largely from Europe, hungry to work. Women and African Americans, previously disenfranchised, came into the workforce.

An industrialist who harnessed the moment and accelerated production in the United States was Henry Kaiser, a friend of FDR, who built shipyards and who embraced innovation and technology. [See our post last year about the amazing HJK, whose company helped build the Bay Bridge, Hoover Dam, Western highways, and 1,552 Liberty ships.]

Kaiser’s innovations dovetailed nicely with what Kennedy calls, “the New American Navy,” one that could put multiple fast-carrier task forces to sea. The Navy invested in more than two dozen light fleet carriers (CVLs) and built or converted 122 escort carriers (CVEs).

“Already the creative genius of Henry Kaiser, soon to become famous chiefly for his Liberty ships, had obtained from his friend Roosevelt permission to build an entirely new class, the Casablanca-class, from the bottom up. They would draw 11,000 tons, steam at 20 knots, and carry 28 planes, a 5-inch gun, and smaller armaments, and they would operate as a jack-of-all-trades covering every new amphibious operations s well as the escort duties mentioned above. Kaiser’s scheme was symptomatic of the entire story of American wartime expansion.”

While American exceptionalism is heralded in the realm of production, it is the human dimension that deserves special mention. (“Men,” cited below, while accurate in WWII, is now “men and women” in today’s Navy. And women played a pivotal role in the Homefront war effort.)

“The victor’s ships, planes, and guns need courageous men to steer them, insightful men to organize them, and clever men to give them superior battlefield performance. When the tides of war in the great Atlantic fight turned against the U-boats, it was because hundreds and hundreds of little ships, sloops, frigates, ore carriers, tankers, and cargo vessels, manned by tens of thousands of very brave crewmen (Americans, Britons, Norwegians, and Greeks), steamed back and forth from New York to Liverpool. If the vital strategic position of Malta held out, it was because the eventual winners, the Allies, were willing to take repeated heavy losses to both convoys and escorts and the home garrison. If victory in the great four-part Battle of Leyte Gulf went to the side with the most battalions (to employ Stalin’s phrase), it was because American submarine commanders were extraordinarily skillful, American carrier air forces extremely professional and American gunners remarkably well-trained…”

In fact, Kennedy credits two fellow historians for highlighting the human factor in their watershed works. “It is not surprising that when those two mature official historians of the American and British naval effort, Samuel Morison and Stephen Roskill, came to write the final pages of their respective multivolume works, they preferred to focus on human agents rather than on broad underlying forces.”

Kennedy does the same in the penultimate paragraph of this gorgeous book, aesthetically designed and printed on high quality glossy paper.

This is actually two books in one.

Kennedy had told his friend Ian Marshall he would write a foreword and some text for Marshall’s planned book of original paintings, Fighting Warships of the Second World War. But in the wake of Marshall's death, the book project expanded.

Kennedy reflects on his late friend: “I miss his gentle manners, his great professionalism, and his remarkable erudition in the realms of maritime history and warship design. Each painting is not only a fine work of art but also an understated display of Ian’s impressive topographical and historical knowledge.”

Marshall was a fellow and past president of the American Society of Marine Artists. Kennedy is the New York Times best-selling author of “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.”

This book is recommended by Admiral James Stavridis (U.S. Navy, ret.), who blurbed, “This extraordinary work of both global history and nautical art brings two brilliant minds together in Paul Kennedy’s luminous prose and Ian Marshall’s lovely paintings.”

(Top photo: Battleships USS Oklahoma and USS Nevada at Charlestown Navy Yard, Boston, 1935. Detail from a painting by Ian Marshall. Oklahoma was damaged beyond repair at Pearl Harbor; Nevada survived and served throughout the war (including D-Day and Okinawa operations). Ian Marshall via Yale University Press.)

‘Dawn Light’ on Water

Review by Bill Doughty––

Diane Ackerman shares this with us:

In Ireland there are many names for rain depending on the temperature, duration, or season.  Germans use words “designed to capture the sound of rain: pladdern (heavy rain with big drops), prasseln (heavy rain but smaller drops), giessen (pouring rain), sprühen (spray-like rain), trop fern (dripping).” “Hawaiians require over a hundred names for rain, including kolele ua, a light moving rain; ‘olulo, a storm beginning out at sea; and Kahio o ke aka, rain that’s so beautiful it must be the adornment of the gods.”

Word artist Diane Ackerman writes about rain, clouds, seas, skies, and seasons –– and "the experience of being alive –– in her radiant “Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day” (W. W. Norton, 2009). Among other topics and musings, she interprets Claude Monet and impressionism, focusing on Monet’s Impression, Sunrise.

“Surely Monet has been up for hours painting this watercolor sky in full cloud regatta. He limned many weatherscapes, but like the other Impressionists, preferred the sparkling blue skies of early morning when the air is tranquil. One can tell the time of day by the small puffy clouds that stalk their paintings, sometimes with wispy clouds higher above. Even in Paris, where pollution chalked the view, they tended to paint nearly empty skies with small well-behaved cumuli that haven’t had time yet to swell in the hot humid afternoon haze.”

Impressionism was Monet’s, Renoir’s, and Pissarro’s ways of expressing life as they perceived it in the moment.

“The experience of being alive is only one impression after another, a feast for the senses in ever-changing light, one now seamlessly flowing into the next moment of being. How do you explore the texture of being alive? In Impression, Sunrise, Monet paints the lavish spell of the senses detained by a pink and blue sunrise, colors that create purple where they meet, in a softly puzzling war of blue and red that’s not so much hue as emotion, as the eye struggles to make sense of it but pleasures in the ambiguity, and where a slightly out-of-focus fisherman floats in his own reality (no doubt occasionally eyeing the painter on the dock), and the rising sun is a watery fireball at the end of a long path of copper cobblestones.”

The harbor, Ackerman notes, was painted “at dawn, on a misty morning, when sun and sky shone equally luminous and a simple squiggle of black was enough to create a fisherman in the foreground.”

One of Monet’s influences was the eccentric nature-centric Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Monet supposedly happened to see Hokusai’s work in a food shop in Amsterdam, “where cheap paper decorated with Japanese prints was being used to wrap purchases.”

Hokusai was born in then closed-to-the-world Japan in 1760 and produced his most iconic works late in life as Japan was about to be opened to the world.

“It was in his seventies that he began the stunning series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which also included The Great Wave off Kanagawa, probably the most reproduced print on earth, a scene of turbulent foam-tipped waves of cyan and pale blue clawing at three small fishing boats in which frightened men frantically bend to their oars. In the flat golden sky, billowy clouds promise a placid morning, and a tiny Mount Fuji sits calmly in the background. It’s the foreground that holds all the drama, though I think most people miss the nearly capsized swift boats that carry fresh foodstuffs at dawn to the Tokyo markets from nearby villages. That the mood of the ocean and the sky don’t match –– galloping chariots of carnal blue under a fair-weather sky –– creates a sinister beauty that alarms the senses at the same time that it reassures the psyche. To the men, the wave is much taller than the volcanic mountain, a perspective that fits. With a faint echo of the fishermen, we’re swept up onto the waves, knowing that at any moment the waves are going to crash.”

USNWC Color Guard at M.C. Perry statue, Newport, RI. (Haley M Nace)

Note: Hokusai was a teenager living in feudal Japan when America’s founders declared independence from Imperial England. He died in 1849, three years before President Millard Fillmore assigned U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry the mission of sailing to Japan to open the country to trade with the West. The Convention of Kanagawa (the same Kanagawa in Hokusai’s iconic work) was signed in 1854. Monet was a teenager in 1854; he painted Impression, Sunrise in 1872.

Commodore M.C. Perry (namesake of the high school at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, my alma mater, by the way), is honored by Japanese and American friendship groups each year both in the United States, particularly in Newport, Rhode Island, Perry’s hometown, and in Shimoda, Japan, at the Black Ship (Kurofune) Festival. Marines and Sailors often participate in the annual festival with parades, concerts, school visits, and other community outreach events.

U.S. Marines from Camp Fuji and Sailors from USS Stethem (DDG-63) march in a parade at the Black Ship Festival in Shimoda, May 18, 2019 (MC2 T. Fraser)

In “Dawn Light” Diane Ackerman connects seasons and cultures, people and animals, prose and poetry, sound and silence, nature and nurture, and cold perception with warm imagination.

Ultimately this is a book about literal and figurative enlightenment in Ackerman’s world, hoping for a better appreciation and respect for life, nature, and our precious time alive in the cosmos. A time for Love.

Ackerman shares her views as well as those of poets who appear throughout the book. She also includes more than a dozen beautiful full-color photos and prints.

Returning to the recurring images of water and the sea, as well as West (Monet) meets East (Hokusai), here are Ackerman’s choices for epigraphs to this book:

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise

somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once;

a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.

Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and

gloaming, on sea and continents and islands,

each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

–– JOHN MUIR

This world of ours ––

To what shall I compare it?

To the white waves of a boat

That disappear without a trace

As it rows away at dawn.

–– SHAMI MANSEI, EIGHTH CENTURY

This is a book for anyone who'd care to wake up to the experience of being alive.

Spectators observe Shimoda City's firework show during the 83rd annual Shimoda Black Ship festival, May 21, 2022. The Shimoda Black Ship Festival celebrates Commodore Matthew C. Perry's arrival to Japan, Japan's subsequent opening to international trade, and the U.S.-Japan alliance. (MC1 Kaleb J. Sarten)

(A nice accompaniment to this post: Neil Young & Crazy Horse's new album, "World Record.")

‘Zookeeper’s Wife’ and Shipwrecked Souls

Review by Bill Doughty––

In a village a circus lion suddenly died…

“The circus director asked a poor old Jewish man if he would pretend to be the lion, and the man agreed since he needed the money. The director said: ‘All you have to do is wear the lion’s fur and sit in the cage, and people will believe you’re a lion.’ And so the man did, muttering to himself, ‘What strange jobs I’ve had in my life,’ when his thoughts were interrupted by a noise. He turned just in time to see another lion creeping into his cage and fixing him with a hungry stare. Trembling, cowering, not knowing how to behave himself, the man did the only thing he could think of –– vociferously chant a Hebrew prayer. No sooner had he uttered the first desperate words, Shema Yisroel (Hear O Israel) … than the other lion lined in with adonai elohenu (The Lord our God), and the two would-be lions finished the prayer together.”

Zookeeper Jan Żabiński and real lion.

It’s an old folk story that Diane Ackerman heard as a young girl and shares in an introductory Author’s Note. And it’s a tale that became “oddly relevant” to the true story she tells in her amazing book, where art and storytelling come alive to become history.

“The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story” (W. W. Norton,  2007) is based on a true story in which brave people in Poland risked everything to help protect Polish Jews in World War II from the Nazis and the Holocaust. Like the lion-man in the folk story, “shipwrecked souls” eventually make their way to a zoo outside Warsaw for sanctuary.

And regarding relevance: Though the book was written in 2007 –– one year before Russia's Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, seven years before he invaded Crimea, and 15 years before he began waging war in Ukraine –– readers in 2022 will likely think of Poland's role in Putin's current war in Ukraine as they read about what happened in Warsaw eight decades ago.

At first Ackerman lulls readers with her depiction of an idyllic human-animal bond, one of understanding, love, and respect for life. Innocence. Nature. Nurture. Peace. The pursuit of happiness in pre-war Warsaw. Ackerman beautifully depicts that world before the storm clouds of war start to destroy the way of life of the Żabiński family.

Antonina and family pet badger

Antonina Żabiński is the Zookeeper’s wife and a hero of this tale along with her husband, Jan, who served secretly with the Polish Underground to fight the Nazis. Ackerman dedicated the book “For Antonina and her family, human and animal.” The Żabiński matriarch helps manage the improbable zoo as well as schemes to hide and feed Jews they call “Guests.”

With the arrival of the Nazis, the sometimes-normal-occasional-calm of the zoo is shattered. Fascism brings iron-fisted and racist “law and order.” The Nazis build walls and deny freedom based on differences of religion and ethnicity. Casual cruelty leads inexorably to calculated genocide.

Ackerman depicts the banal evil of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, Eugene Fischer, and others who valued the lives of other animals over the humans they condemned to camps, ovens, and mass graves.

Ackerman writes in a “narrative history” style. Her embellishments are sometimes well beyond David McCullough’s interpretive style. Yet, like McCullough, she imparts cold hard history. In "The Zookeeper's Wife" she builds her storytelling around actual facts published or contained in interviews, news stories, and diaries, including the diary of Antonina.

“‘How can this barbarity be happening in the twentieth century?!!!!!!’ Antonina asked herself, an outcry of disbelief with no fewer than six exclamation points.” Antonina saw the war as a return to the Dark Ages. She and her family counter their horrors with efforts to help those who were targeted by the Nazis for destruction. Along with housing and feeding castaways, the Żabińskis participated in a plot to feed Jewish residents in the Ghetto.

The Warsaw zoo helped make animal-human connections in 1938, before the arrival of the Nazis.

After most of the animals in their zoo were removed, released, or killed by the Nazis, the Żabińskis turned their enterprise into a pig farm. They secretly transported meat into the Ghetto. “If it felt a little off-color giving Jews pork, a taboo food, dietary laws had long since been waived, and everyone was grateful for protein, a scarce gift on either side of the wall,” Ackerman observes.

Such humanism and such audacity –– helping targeted victims of the Nazis –– was extremely risky.

“Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer’s family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed ‘collective responsibility.’ Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city’s underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist’s dummies.”

Diane Ackerman

Ackerman, author of “The Whale by Moonlight,” “Natural History of the Senses,” and “Dawn Light,” writes with heartbreaking brilliance of “The unbearable weight of Ghetto life.” Not surprisingly, her words include these metaphors of nature and the sea.

“During this time of seismic upheaval, more and more Ghetto dwellers washed up on the deck of the villa, arriving weatherbeaten, ‘like shipwrecked souls,’ Antonina wrote in her diary. ‘We felt that our house wasn’t a light, flimsy boat dancing on high waves, but a Captain Nemo’s submarine gliding through deep ocean on its journey to a safe port.’ Meanwhile, the war storm blew violently, scaring all, and ‘casting a shadow on the lives of our Guests, who fled from the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of gas chambers,’ needing more than refuge. ‘They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war’s horrors would one day end,’ while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.”

Navy readers and their families who choose to read this book will identify with the core values of the Żabiński family: honor, courage, and commitment.

There is a familiar ethos in the character of the men, women, and children who participated in rescuing victims of the Nazis. Ackerman writes:

“Rescuers tended to be decisive, fast-thinking, risk-taking, independent, adventurous, openhearted, rebellious, and usually flexible –– able to switch plans, abandon habits, or change ingrained routines at a moment’s notice. They tended to be nonconformists, and though many rescuers held solemn principles worth dying for, they didn’t regard themselves as heroic. Typically, one would say, as Jan did: ‘I only did my duty –– if you can save somebody’s life, it’s your duty to try.’ Or: ‘We did it because it was the right thing to do.'"

Antonina had to deal with Nazis who invaded her home and threatened her; then she had to confront Russians who came to liberate Poland but tried to take what wasn’t theirs. Her inner strength, voice, and instincts proved to be all too powerful.

This is another treasured find I discovered in a used book store. It is also a book that gives a hopeful view of the human spirit, strength in resilience, and the power of righteousness in time of war.

Ackerman and W. W. Norton include comprehensive “details,” a bibliography, and index. The paperback version I scored comes with a “reading group guide” and list of other books with similar group guides. Blurbs are from an impressive list of reviewers, with standouts for me by Dava Sobel (“Longitude”), Jared Diamond (“Guns, Germs, and Steel”), and Donna Seaman of Los Angeles Times.

The Żabińskis in Warsaw, Poland, saved 300 Jews.

As of the autumn of 2022, Poland has accepted at least 1.4 million refugees who fled Ukraine due to Putin’s war and campaign of terrorism against civilians. This week, during a Russian missile onslaught against Ukraine, a Ukrainian defensive missile exploded on a grain farm in the rural village of Przewodow, five miles within Poland's border, killing two people. NATO nations, including the United States, met to consider additional options to deal with Russia’s continued aggression.

USS Chincoteague, ‘Sailing Home’

Review by Bill Doughty––

They were dead in the water. Their seaplane-tender ship suffered major damage after a bomb with a delayed action fuse penetrated the super structure and deck. The bomb had detonated in the after engine room, killing Sailors there. Imperial Japanese bombers came back time after time. But “whistling death” Marine Corsairs came to the rescue, chasing the enemy away from the crippled AVP-24, saving the sailors and their ship. (Happy Birthday, United States Marine Corps!)

The harrowing tale is told in “USS Chincoteague: The Ship that Wouldn’t Sink” by Frank D. Murphy (Murphy Books, 1995).

Murphy wrote the short autobiography for his grandchildren, but it’s clear he also wrote it for his former shipmates and for his beloved ship.

Murphy in Boot Camp, 1942

Murphy grew up, one of eleven children –– in Sarles, North Dakota –– in another era: no indoor plumbing, shoeshines, fifty-cent haircuts, and hitchhiking. He traveled and worked as a teenager between North Dakota, Montana, and Washington State, wanting to escape an abusive father.

After attempting to enlist in the Marine Corps but being rejected due to a heart murmur, or “mummer” as he calls it, he joined the Navy and went to boot camp in 1942.

Murphy describes visiting Pearl Harbor aboard Chincoteague (AVP-24), crossing the Equator, and dropping Marines off at Espiritu before heading to the Santa Cruz Islands and Saboe Bay, Vanikoro Island. He and his shipmates arrived there the day before his 19th birthday.

For the young men who fought in the Pacific, like generations everywhere who go to war, the experience is tattooed on their souls.

Such was certainly the case for Frank Murphy.

“I can still remember those bombs coming out of these bomb bays. They looked like capsules when they first started out at about 30,000 feet. They got bigger and bigger as they got closer and closer. The screaming of those bombs scared me so bad that to this day I hate the sound of sirens and screaming fireworks.”

A squadron of PBYs prepare to take off from an island in the Pacific to attack Imperial Japan.

Murphy explains the important mission of a seaplane tender, to support PBY patrol bombers. The book opens with a moving description of how the “Chinc” rescued an airman from a Peleliu-based B-29 that had gone down in choppy shark-infested waters. A boatswain’s mate from Chincoteague dove into the sea and swam “with the speed of an Olympic swimmer” to rescue the exhausted airman.

The book, which I was lucky enough to find in a Salvation Army store, is signed by the author. Murphy dedicates his tribute to USS Chincoteague “to the 250 crewmen and officers of the USS Chincoteague and especially to those who lost their lives.” 

What Murphy’s thin book lacks in polish, it makes up with its first-person, eyewitness account and love for his shipmates and ship.

Chincoteague serves with USCG in 1964

Murphy includes a brief description of what happened to the Barnegat-class AVP-25 after the war, including stints in the U.S. Coast Guard, Vietnam (as RVNS Ly Thuong Kiet), and Philippines (where it was named BRP Andres Bonifacio). The ship was finally sold for scrap in 2003. Murphy died ten years later in early 2013, nearly ten years ago. His obituary reads, in part, “After six years in the Navy, Frank returned to North Dakota and worked for the Great Northern Railroad, later as a conductor for SP&S in Wishram, WA and the Burlington Northern Railroad in Vancouver, WA. He retired after 36 years. On Jan. 1, 1951, Frank met Carol Mortinson and they were happily married, for 61 years. They enjoyed traveling, especially to Hawaii.”

In “USS Chincoteague: The Ship that Wouldn’t Sink,” Murphy includes this poem written in 1942 by another Sailor who served in the war, Sherman Walgren, aboard USS Northhampton. Walgren’s verses must have made their rounds to other ships and WWII veterans, and Murphy undoubtedly identified with the sentiments in the poem.

'Sailing Home'

What is it the billowing waves impart,

and repeat and repeat with each dash

What is the pounding in my heart?

I'm sailing home, at last.

The salt spray stings on the naked cheek,

and the wind sings in the mast,

but it only sings because it knows,

I'm sailing home, at last.

Was it centuries since we sailed away

Out of the harbor there,

or was it only yesterday

I don't know, nor care.

For gone are the lonely nights and the days

mid tropical isles alone

and gone is the hunger countenanced there,

At last I'm sailing home.

And tho the sailor sails the seas

and in distant places roam

There is no "call" that's quite so sweet

as the call "I'm Sailing Home”

–– Sherman Walgren, May 1942, aboard USS Northampton

For a fuller description of the Chinc and its fate, I recommend the Last Stand Zombie Island website. Navy History and Heritage Command has great information, including a damage report of USS Chincoteague. And, of course, Wikipedia has a robust account of the ship’s history.