Navy and 'Great Influenza' Changed the World

Review by Bill Doughty

One hundred years ago another wave of an influenza epidemic crashed on America's shores.

(Illustration from Penn Medicine News)

"By February 7, 1920, Influenza had returned with enough ferocity that the Red Cross declared, 'Owing to the rapid spread of influenza, the safety of the country demands, as a patriotic duty, that all available nurses or anyone with experience in nursing ... (offer) their services," according to John M. Barry, author of "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" (Viking/Penguin, 2014).

Courage in the Face of Fear

Fortunately, the epidemic did not hit with the same deadly force throughout 1920 that it had in the previous two years. 

The epidemic of 1918 erupted with such speed and scope that it created worldwide fear and terror. This influenza seemed to target young, otherwise healthy, adults as well as people with vulnerable immune systems.

"In 1918 fear moved ahead of the virus like the bow wave before a ship. Fear drove the people, and the government and the press could not control it. They could not control it because every true report had been diluted with lies. And the more the officials and newspapers reassured, the more they said, 'There is no cause for alarm if proper precautions are taken,' ... the more people believed themselves cast adrift, adrift with no one to trust, adrift on an ocean of death."

The misnamed "Spanish Flu" of 1918 (Barry makes a strong case that it originated in Kansas) took more American lives in the first year (675,000) than all the U.S. service members who died fighting in WWI, WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam War combined. In one week in October, 4,597 Philadelphians died of the disease.

Paul Lewis

On the front lines of the war against the killer influenza epidemic – in laboratories and medical facilities – U.S. Navy and other military and civilian researchers searched for the pathogen as well as a vaccine and a cure.

This book is dedicated, in part, to one of those Navy warriors, and opens with a scene about him: "The Great War had brought Paul Lewis into the navy in 1918 as a lieutenant commander ..." Lewis had previously helped prove that a virus caused polio, "a discovery still considered a landmark achievement in the history of virology."

Lewis saw the early signs of disease in sailors in Philadelphia, where the virus was killing five percent of Sailors who showed any symptoms of influenza. 

In Boston, another Navy medical warrior, Lieutenant Commander Milton Rosenau at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, mobilized to fight the epidemic.

(Photo from Bureau of Medicine and Surgery)

"Rosenau too was a scientist who had chosen to leave a Harvard professorship for the navy when the United States entered the war, and his textbook on public health was called 'The Bible' by both army and navy military doctors."

Other military doctors and researchers who raced against the disease included William Henry Welch, Simon Flexner, Victor Vaughn and William Gorgas. Oswald Avery went from Army private to captain; he would eventually make "the most profound discovery of all" in his search for the cause of the disease.

The enemy in 1918 was not only the epidemic of disease, but also a pandemic of fear. "Uncertainty follows distrust, fear follows uncertainty, and, under conditions such as these, terror follows fear." Truth matters.

Emergency hospital in Funston, Kansas.

A Maritime Component

Author-historian Barry profiles each of these courageous warriors as well as dozens of other people who faced the crisis. He reveals the strong maritime component to its global spread.

(Photo from Naval History and Heritage Command)

The pandemic of 1918-1920 was fueled by WWI fervor and war mobilization – in crowded barracks and aboard ships, including international steamers and U.S. Navy vessels. Dozens of shipyards were hit and had to close. Naval hospitals were overwhelmed. Navy brig prisoners volunteered as test subjects for Lt. Cmdr. Lewis and other scientists.

Sailors unintentionally brought deadly influenza to Great Lakes Naval Training Center and Newport Naval Base in Rhode Island; to New Orleans and Puget Sound; back-and-forth to Europe; as well as across the Pacific aboard USS Logan to Guam. Adm. Albert Gleaves and his captains dealt with effects of the pandemic, including aboard USS Leviathan.

Navy collier USS Brutus carried a relief expedition to Juneau, Alaska. "They found terrible things. Terrible things," Barry writes. "In Nome, 176 of 300 Eskimos had died. But it would get worse." Other Red Cross relief teams to the Aleutian Islands found devastation caused first by the disease, then by starvation and finally by starving dogs.

Nineteen U.S. Navy nurses died on active duty during the war, more than half from influenza. One of the survivors was the second superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps, Chief Nurse Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee, recipient of the Navy Cross and namesake of the first USS Higbee, commissioned in 1945. The keel was laid for the future USS Lenah H Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG 123) in November 2017.



Changing the World

The epidemic of 1918-1920 occurred at a time when women increased demands for the right to vote, a right won 100 years ago. Women had supported the war effort in Europe, and they served on the front lines in the fight against the epidemic.

The nation and world changed in other ways too in those first decades of the 20th century. 

President Woodrow Wilson's physician, Navy Rear Adm. Cary Grayson (who had served as presidential physician to Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft) accompanied Wilson to the peace conference in Paris in 1919. Both Wilson and Grayson, as well as Wilson's wife and others, contracted influenza while in Paris.

President Wilson and Rear Adm. Grayson

Barry contends that the disease caused physical weakness and some mental lapses in the commander-in-chief and may have led to his stroke four months later. But the devastating effects of Wilson's bout with influenza also may have led to his concessions to the allied enemies of Germany in order to save his League of Nations.

"Historians with virtual unanimity agree that the harshness toward Germany of the Paris peace treaty helped create the economic hardship, nationalistic reaction, and political chaos that fostered the rise of Adolf Hitler," Barry writes. Feelings of persecution and resentment in Nazi Germany led to another world war.

Other ways the epidemic changed the world but for the better: Science, as represented by medical centers and researchers, triumphed over superstition. Corrupt local authoritarian governments in Philadelphia (the Vare political machine) and New York (Tammany Hall) were exposed and impeached in the court of public opinion. Truth and ethics were shown to be supremely important in the face of fear and terror.

"The media and public officials helped create that terror – not by exaggerating the disease but by minimizing it, by trying to reassure.Terror rises in the dark of the mind, in the unknown beast tracking us in the jungle. The fear of the dark is an almost physical manifestation of that. Horror movies build upon the fear of the unknown, the uncertain threat that we cannot see and do not know and can find no safe haven from. But in every horror movie, once the monster appears, terror condenses into the concrete and diminishes. Fear remains. But the edge of panic created by the unknown dissipates. The power of the imagination dissipates."

Cmdr. Richard Shope

Meanwhile, researcher Paul Lewis had remained perpetually restless both during and after the epidemic. The microscope was his periscope searching for an enemy lurking in his laboratory – "the mysteries he embraced. He settled into them like a man casting off into an impenetrable ocean fog, a fog that made one feel both alone in and part of the world.

"Among the warriors against fear was Paul Lewis's protege and assistant, Richard Shope. 

Shope investigated swine flu in the 1920s and by 1931 published his papers showing his discoveries. He included Lewis's name as an author on one of his papers.

Shope's research was successful. "He had found the cause of influenza, at least in swine," Barry writes. "We now know that the virus he found in swine descended directly from the 1918 virus, the virus that made all the world a killing zone."

In 1928, in England, Alexander Fleming serendipitously discovered penicillin while researching influenza. Oswald Avery's work on influenza led directly to the discovery of DNA, further changing the world.

Applied Science: Coronaviruses

Barry provides more than a history of the epidemic. He also explains coronaviruses, Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, and the science of the influenza virus at the cellular level, including the difference between a slower mutating DNA virus and a faster mutating RNA virus.

"Influenza is an RNA virus. So is HIV and the coronavirus. And of all the RNA viruses, influenza and HIV are among those that mutate the fastest," Barry writes.

"[O]ne cannot leave this subject without speaking to other questions: the likelihood and potential danger of another influenza pandemic, what we can learn from the one of 1918-1919, and how we can apply those lessons to the emergence of a new pathogen, whether that pathogen is a weapon of terror or a new natural menace – such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS, the disease which spread from animals to man in the spring of 2003 and threatened to become a major pandemic.The answer to the first question – the likelihood and potential danger of another influenza pandemic – is not very reassuring. Every expert on influenza agrees that the ability of the influenza virus to reassort genes means that another pandemic not only can happen. It almost certainly will happen."

Barry offers a special discussion of the coronavirus SARS – Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome – that appeared in China in 2003 and spread quickly across borders bringing with it susceptibility to ARDS. The Navy forward deployed to the western Pacific was concerned about the possibility of SARS outbreaks in 2004. The Navy maintains a preventive medicine SARS webpage as part of Ready Navy. 

The Navy (Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center), DoD and Centers for Disease Control are leaning forward to provide information and prevention tips regarding the newly emerged novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) that reportedly originated in Wuhan, China.

Today, unlike 100-plus years ago, scientists throughout the world are able to communicate and collaborate within seconds. They can, if allowed, share information and assistance across borders. An informed public can make rational decisions and not succumb to fear. Medical scientists have more tools and information to fight against pandemics.

Read this book to see the fate of Paul Lewis after the war. 

Right up there with McCullough's sweeping history books, Barry's "The Great Influenza" is a masterpiece. This is a great Navy read.

Camp Lemonnier’s medical team gives influenza vaccinations to service members, Oct. 28-30, 2019. (U.S. Navy photo by MC2 Marquis Whitehead)

'Deadliest Plague in History'

Review by Bill Doughty

In the first week of February, we published a review of John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza." Barry shows how fear became terror, how healthcare workers were affected, and how the Navy was center-stage as the disease changed the course of the world 100 years ago. Today the Navy is once again facing and helping defend against a global pandemic.

HN K. Kavanagh sanitizes medical equipment aboard USNS Mercy March 24. (MC2 R.Breeden)

In this follow-up Great Influenza blogpost, we offer some more important points from Barry's now-classic report.

His book has special resonance today in the wake of the current COVID-19 pandemic, where New York is again an epicenter. 

One hundred years ago, "New York City was panicking, terrified," Barry writes, after a politically appointed health commissioner named Royal Copeland – "a man with no belief in modern scientific medicine and whose ambitions were not in public health" – failed to respond or take the initial outbreak seriously, calling for a quarantine only after it was too late.

"There were literally hundreds of thousands of people sick simultaneously, many of them desperately sick. The death toll ultimately reached thirty-three thousand for New York City alone, and that understated the number considerably since statisticians later arbitrarily stopped counting people as victims of the epidemic even though people were still dying of the disease at epidemic rates – still dying months later at rates higher than anywhere else in the country. It was impossible to get a doctor, and perhaps more impossible to get a nurse."

Barry relates how nationwide "physicians attempted everything – everything – to save lives." The desperate attempts to find a cure led them to try "atropine, digitalis, strychnine, and epinephrine as stimulants."

"Physicians injected people with typhoid vaccine, thinking – or simply hoping – it might somehow boost the immune system in general even though the specificity of the immune response was well understood... Quinine worked on one disease: malaria. Many physicians gave it for influenza with no better reasoning than desperation... One physician gave hydrogen peroxide intravenously to twenty-five patients in severe pulmonary distress, believing that it would get oxygen into the blood. Thirteen recovered; twelve died. This physician, too, claimed success."

Barry writes, "No medicine and none of the vaccines developed than could prevent influenza. The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could." Quarantine, isolation and what we now call social distancing was the only way to slow the scourge.

Those areas that acted swiftly had less of an adverse impact. Meanwhile, Navy scientists played a key role in searching for a pathogen, vaccine and cure.

As a result of the 1918 pandemic and other smaller outbreaks – including H7N7 and SARS – over the past 25 years, the World Health Organization advised all nations to be watchful, prepared, staged and ready to respond to another pandemic.

Barry says there are two main lessons to learn: "The first involves threat assessment, planning, and allocating resources." "A centralized system should exist to allocate all resources," he writes. 

"But there is another lesson from 1918 that is clear. It is also less tangible. It involves fear and the media and the way authorities deal with the public."

In other words, tell the truth. The media and public officials made the problem worse when they downplayed the realities of the epidemic. "In 1918, the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing."

"So the final lesson, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. By definition, civilization cannot survive that. Those in authority must retain the public's trust. They way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one."

Well-written and fast-paced, this is a must-read now for everyone. For a full review of "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History" – including the key role the Navy played during and after the pandemic – visit the Navy Reads review of February 6, 2020. The review was written before the current novel coronavirus strain, originating in Wuhan, China, was given a proper name: COVID-19.

In one of several appearances over the years on C-SPAN, Barry gave a keynote address to a Pandemic Preparedness and Response forum on November 13, 2017. The Johns Hopkins meeting was attended by leading epidemiologists, other scientists and health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Barry focused his remarks on the imperative for honesty and trust in a crisis, saying he despises the term "risk communication" because "it implies managing the truth, and I don't think you manage the truth; I think you tell the truth."

He concludes, "Planning does not equal preparation. I think maybe the biggest challenge to the public health community is to get political leaders to make rational decisions in crisis situations."

The Navy hospital ship USNS Mercy deployed to Los Angeles this week. USNS Comfort is scheduled to deploy to New York in the weeks ahead.

SAN DIEGO (March 23, 2020) -- Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) navigates the San Diego channel March 23. Mercy deployed in support of the nation’s COVID-19 response efforts, and will serve as a referral hospital for non-COVID-19 patients currently admitted to shore-based hospitals. This allows shore base hospitals to focus their efforts on COVID-19 cases. One of the Department of Defense’s missions is Defense Support of Civil Authorities. DOD is supporting the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the lead federal agency, as well as state, local and public health authorities in helping protect the health and safety of the American people. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Lasheba James/Released)

Navy Reads Interview: Author John M. Barry, 'The Great Influenza'

By Bill Doughty–

Historian John M. Barry

John M. Barry's "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History," about the 1918 pandemic, has surged to become #1 on the New York Times bestseller list this past week. After its publication in 2004, Barry dedicated more than fifteen years as a self-proclaimed activist –– educating, advising and planning for a pandemic that could impact the United States.

On Feb. 6, 2020 Navy Reads posted a review of "The Great Influenza." I'm following up that post with this email interview with the prescient, farsighted author. He offers his views about truth-telling during a national crisis, the CAPT Crozier controversy, Navy's role in 1918 and now, and of course what's on his reading list.

BD: Your dedication of "The Great Influenza" was "To my Darling Anne and to the spirit that was Paul Lewis." Would you please remind us, why Paul Lewis? How should we all remember him?

JB: Lewis was an outstanding leading civilian scientist who became a Navy officer when the war started. He was a tragic figure. A scientist, brilliant, with an incredibly promising early career, he judged himself a failure partly because he could not develop a vaccine for influenza. Later, while seeking a vaccine for yellow fever he ended up infecting himself in a laboratory accident and dying of the disease. In fact I think there is a good chance it was a suicide. I just found his story moving and I wanted to honor him in some way. The book opens and closes with him.

HM1 Matthew Oberg advises people to get their pneumococcal vaccine at NH Bremerton, June 2015

BD: In what ways was the military, especially military researchers, important to the story of the 1918-1920 pandemic?

JB: Virtually every top scientist in the country became a military officer. The deans of medical school became colonels. The entire Rockefeller University (then called the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research) was incorporated into the army. Most of the science done in the pandemic was done by these people while in the military. All of them were trying to find an answer to the disease. They tried things we are trying now, such as using convalescent serum, and they did develop vaccines against secondary bacterial pneumonias. If you get an anti-pneumococcus vaccine today, it's a descendant of what was developed back then.

BD: What is your take on the way commanding officer Navy Capt. Brett Crozier dealt with the COVID-19 outbreak aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt?

JB: He did what leaders are supposed to do. Take care of people they are responsible for, as opposed to those above them.

CAPT Crozier, CO, USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71). (Photo by Seaman Alexander Williams)

BD: You've said the most important lesson from 1918 is "tell the truth." Do you think Americans are getting the truth today?

JB: We are (getting the truth) from public health leaders and from many politicians, Republican and Democrat –– governors in Ohio, New York, Louisiana, off the top of my head. Unfortunately we are getting less than that from politicians in other places, including the White House.

United States Marine Corps COVID-19 poster. (LCPL Leslie Alcarez)

BD: Should there be more emphasis on various kinds of widespread testing in order to provide more data to epidemiologists, governors and others?

JB: Absolutely. Testing is everything. Think of a guerrilla war. You can't fight an enemy effectively unless you can identify that enemy. 

BD: (During the 1918 pandemic, once people confronted the truth and adapted to realities, some places like San Francisco came together as a community.) What are some good things that are coming out of the COVID-19 crisis?

JB: I think there has been a sense of community, that we are all in this together.  I think people are largely helping each other. I live in New Orleans and know some homeless people. A guy told me yesterday he almost cries because people have been so generous to him. My neighbor is a dentist and gave all his masks and gloves to a hospital, and he continues to treat emergency cases without an N95 mask. I'm over 70 and younger friends have volunteered to get groceries for me. A lot of little things like that add up.

BD: During this extended self-quarantine period of isolation, many people have more time to read. Who are some of your lifelong-favorite authors and books (of any genre)?

JB: Classic fiction mostly. Faulkner. Russian novels. I expected to do a lot of reading when I stopped going to my office, but right now I'm busier than any other time in my life. Communicating with scientists around the world, the media, trying to get people to comply with public health guidelines.

BD: What about books specifically for Navy readers; anything you'd recommend with a nautical, maritime or leadership theme?

JB: No nautical themes. Well, a river is in there. Always meant to read a Russian novel by a Nobel laureate, Mikhail Sholokhov, "And Quiet Flows the Don." That's the only book I've read lately and it's a great book. About Russia in World War I and the Russian Revolution. 

BD: Finally, are you considering a book perhaps on the COVID-19 pandemic? What are your book plans for the future?

JB: A week ago I'd have said no, but now I'm considering it.

###

Barry advised panels and groups under both the Bush and Obama administrations and helped develop stockpiles, plans and preparations for a pandemic. In every meeting he said he "pushed" the importance of starting out by telling the truth.

In addition to promoting truth-telling, Barry says that a federally guided and states-aligned response should prioritize providing protective equipment for frontline health care providers; testing, isolation and contact tracing; and sustained quarantine and stay-at-home measures while a vaccine is developed.

Barry is a Distinguished Scholar and adjunct faculty at Tulane University.

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

Throughout 2020, Navy Reads intends to post other author interviews. Recently Navy Reads featured an interview with Michael Junge, author of "Crimes of Command." A review of Junge's book included a report about the firing of CAPT Brett Crozier, CO of USS Theodore Roosevelt. Since then, Acting SECNAV Modly was asked to resign after remarks he made aboard T.R.

Lt.Gen. Honore directs paratroopers in September 2005 during relief efforts along the Gulf Coast.

As this is posted, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday and Acting Navy Secretary James McPherson recommended reinstatement of Crozier as commanding officer of T.R. However, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Army Gen. Mark Milley, asked for a "broader inquiry." A decision on Crozier's fate is expected this week, according to news reports.

In a televised interview yesterday, retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré said, "It should be a simple decision for the Secretary of Defense." Honore was commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, coordinating military relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina in 2005 across the Gulf Coast. Like John Barry, he calls Louisiana Home. Honoré suggested DOD listen to its admirals. "This is the legacy of our great Navy. It should be an easy decision for Secretary Esper."

A Curious Read on the Pandemic

Review by Bill Doughty––

As vaccines and drug treatments turn the tide against the pandemic, numerous books document the initial response by the United States to the novel coronavirus pandemic that began at the end of 2019. This one, by one of the nation’s great contemporary writers, tells the story of some of the key people who helped raise the alarm, write the plan, and show how COVID-19 should be confronted.

A team of talented military veterans were at the heart of the effort.

Michael Lewis is the author of “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story” (W.W. Norton, 2021) on the heels of  “The Fifth Risk.” He says, “…this particular story is about the curious talents of a society, and how those talents are wasted if not led.”

“Curious talents” perfectly describes some of the main characters in this book, especially Veterans Administration doctor Carter Mecher, epidemiologist Richard Hatchett, and California public health doctor Charity Dean. Mecher is described as an intellectual force of nature, who thinks outside the box and who draws other critical/innovative thinkers together through humility, creativity, and honesty. Lewis refers to all three by their first names throughout the book.

Carter and Richard worked as advisers in the Bush43 and Obama administrations and were involved in pandemic response planning under Tom Bossert, President Trump’s first homeland security advisor. Bossert had previously worked with the two public health experts in the George W. Bush administration. (President Bush directed development of a national pandemic response plan after reading John Barry’s “The Great Influenza.”)*

“But then, on April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser, and the next day, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team,” writes Lewis. Funding for pandemic planning was stripped, the team was disbanded, but fortunately Carter and Richard stayed in touch with each other.

Dr. Carter Mecher

Soon after the outbreak occurred in Wuhan, Carter predicted a pandemic and wrote in an email, with H&HS personnel on the string: “History will long remember what we do and what we don’t do at this critical moment. It is time to act and it is past the time to remain silent. This outbreak isn’t going to magically disappear on its own.”

Military readers will be interested to see a team, almost all veterans, who formed around Carter Mecher and Richard Hatchett.

“Seven men, all doctors. All were younger, some a generation younger, than Carter, who about to turn sixty-five. Most had seen combat in Iraq, and all, at one point or another, had worked with Carter in the White House. All except Rajeev Venkayya, who had brought Carter and Richard into the White House in the first place … had served in the military. Duane Caneva and James Lawler had come from the U.S. Navy, Matt Hepburn and Dave Marcozzi from the U.S. Army. And all had a role to play in the event of any pandemic. Lawler ran the Global Center for Health security at the University of Nebraska, for instance. That was a federally funded facility to which any American infected with some deadly new pathogen was likely to be sent to be studied and cared for. They’d treated some of the Ebola patients.”

The team had worked together, usually behind the scenes, for more than ten years combatting MERS, Ebola, and Zika –– and now COVID-19. They were affectionately known as the Wolverines after the 1980s cult film “Red Dawn” (remade in 2012).

The team welcomed their California “Wolverette,” Dr. Charity Dean, after she proved her mettle, demanding to act quickly. She pushed for social distancing, greater testing, and temporary school closures. The Wolverines reached out to her because, in the absence of a federal response to the pandemic, they needed a state to take the initiative. California was it.

“The goal was to find at least one state to take the lead and roll out an aggressive response to the virus, introduce the social interventions outlined in the pandemic plan, and create a domino effect. ‘We had to create an epidemic for an idea,’ said Carter. At some point Duane Caneva realized that he had something to add. He’d been in the shock trauma unit that deployed with marines in Falluja, and not much rattled him, but have also know what he didn’t know. He’d worked with Carter Mecher and James Lawler in the Obama White House, but he didn’t regard himself as really being in the same field … Duane had been invited to the White House for National Security Council meetings to discuss what, if anything, to do about this new outbreak in Wuhan. He was disturbed by the lack of understanding, or even information, those meetings. It was at once shocking and unsurprising to Duane that Carter Mecher, sitting at a desk in his bedroom in Atlanta, was creating a clearer view of a virus in China than anyone in the United States government.”

Duane Caneva put the Wolverines in touch with Charity Dean, the type of person who could “grab hold of an entire state and turn it into an example that might lead the nation.”

Dr. Dean’s story is one of courage, resilience, and commitment. She overcame personal and professional obstacles and developed what would become a California’s plan, taking the state from nearly last to roughly first in testing, for example. Under Gov. Gavin Newsom, California became the first state to implement a stay-at-home order. Charity Dean’s plan would indeed become the national plan, at least for a time.

She wrote, “This is a case for all Americans to rise collectively in the spirit of patriotism with the same vigor and stubborn resolve that our grandparents’ generation rose to meet the moment of WW2.”

Lessons to Learn

The Wolverine team, along with other “curiously talented” characters, including researcher Joe DeRisi, provide some lessons Lewis captures. These takeaways are worth highlighting:

• “For people to learn the needs to want to learn … People learn, but they might not be learning what you’re teaching them.”
• “… the way to change minds was by first changing hearts. Carter ceased his appeals to reason and began to appeal to emotion –– which is to say that he stopped making an argument and began to tell a story.”
• There was a need to develop a global early warning system to identify infectious diseases, but China is a “black hole” because they have “declined to participate.”
• “The U.S. medical-industrial complex … lurched between lethargy and avarice.”
• “Corporations were interested only in stuff that made money. Academics were interested in anything worthy of publication, but once they had their paper done, they tended to lose interest. The government was meant to fill in the blanks, but he U.S. government by now mystified Joe.”
• “The country badly needed a true network … a system.”
• “The absence of federal leadership had triggered a wild free-for-all in the market for pandemic supplies.”
• “Among other consequences of the White House’s strategy was that it gutted the credibility of the career federal officials.”
• “Leaders with the worse judgement smugly claim they have the best.”

Lewis fills “Premonition” with fascinating metaphors –– from firefighting to fake flowers. This is a book that asks to be read from beginning to end to understand the full force of its title and to see how much influence military veterans had in helping to battle the pandemic, especially with help from Charity Dean in California. Crises require leaders who are competent, decisive and truthful.

President Donald Trump watches USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) deploy from Norfolk, VA, to New York City, March 28, 2020. (MCC Mike DiMestico)

Power of Reading

This is also the story of the influence of a great book.* Several times in the narrative, Lewis  reveals the impact of “The Great Influenza” by John Barry, a book we reviewed in March 2020 and an author we then interviewed for Navy Reads in April. Barry’s book about the 1918 pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide was a clarion call, and an American president heard the alarm.

President George W. Bush at NIH.

President George W. Bush read Barry’s book in the aftermath of Katrina, and was moved to establish a “whole-of-society plan” to deal with a pandemic. Barry also informally advised President Obama and his administration.

Carter Mecher read "The Great Influenza" and was moved by the different ways two cities handled the crisis in 1918, Philadelphia and St. Louis. Through his remarkable book, Barry influenced the development of the nation’s pandemic response team and plan in place until 2018.

Lewis cites other books that helped the Wolverines. To provide critical thinking skills, the team read James Reason’s “‘Human Error,’ like an owner’s manual of the human mind,” that showed the “best way to guard against error is to design systems with layered and overlapping defenses” –– like slices of Swiss cheese put back together so there are no apparent holes. 

They were also influenced by “Young Men and Fire” by Norman MacLean, author of “A River Runs Through It.”

Charity Dean was moved by William Manchester’s second volume of his biography of Winston Churchill, “Alone,” especially Neville Chamberlain’s failed appeasement policy toward Adolf Hitler after the Nazis invaded Poland and threatened the rest of Europe.

Curiously talented Michael Lewis’s “Premonition” should be read and analyzed by future pandemic fighters for its cool and often mind-blowing insights.

I recommend reading it alongside “Nightmare Scenario” by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta. Theirs is a more detailed, bareknuckled account of the failures of leadership by the Trump administration in confronting the pandemic, especially in the early weeks and months. There is one reference to Carter Mecher and the Red Dawn Wolverines and their emails in “Nightmare” but no mention of James Lawler or Charity Dean. So the books are complementary, each filling in the other’s gaps. And, like John Barry's "The Great Influenza," "Nightmare" shows the biggest needs in a pandemic: a well-led sustained federal response and effective, honest communication to build trust, understanding, and teamwork.

Navy veteran Dr. James Lawler, executive director of international programs and innovation at the Global Center for Health Security at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, gives an overview of the Isolation System for Treatment and Agile Response for high-risk Infections, or ISTARI, to Lt. Gen. Robert L. Miller, U.S. Air Force Surgeon General, Aug. 18, 2021. The ISTARI is located in the Training, Simulation and Quarantine Center in the Davis Global Center at UNMC. (Kent Sievers)

Team Player?

Both books are refreshing to read in the wake of the recent bad news about Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers. Rodgers, who lost the endorsement this week by Prevea Health over Rodgers's anti-vaccination stance. Rodgers tested positive for COVID even though he said he was immune after reportedly taking various unapproved medications. He said he is taking ivermectin, a drug for treating parasitic worms, because he fears ill effects of the vaccine.

The Associated Press reports, “The COVID-19 vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. were tested in tens of thousands of people and proven to be both safe and effective at dramatically reducing the risk of serious disease and death. The vaccines now have been given to more than 200 million Americans and that real-world use plus extra government safety tracking have made clear that serious side effects are extremely rare — and that any risk is far lower than the risks posed by COVID-19.”

McCarthyism/Trumpism III: Endless ‘Anxiety’

Review by Bill Doughty

In this third book review (in a Navy Reads trilogy) about Senator Joe McCarthy and his legacy, author Haynes Johnson provides more unintended parallels and links to Trumpism in “The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism” (Harcourt, 2005).

Anxiety at the time this book was written came from the smoldering memories of 9/11 and fear of ongoing terrorism as the American military waged war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Haynes makes a connection from 9/11 to the anxiety of communism in the 50s –– which would lead to the Vietnam War debacle.

Today, there are still fears of socialism and communism, as well as anxiety about fascism in the aftermath of a failed insurrection Jan. 6 at the Capitol by Trump supporters.

Presciently, Haynes writes this more than fifteen years ago: “The age of anxiety has not ended, nor is it likely to end soon.”

Here are some more parallels and links, including page numbers in the first edition version of this insightful book:

Like Trump, McCarthy tried to paint his opponents, including democrats, as unpatriotic, irreligious and unAmerican. Both Trump and McCarthy warned of “godless communism” in their speeches calling for their version of patriotism. (p.314)

After an earlier hearing in the Senate in the wake of the Tydings report (somewhat comparable to Trump’s first impeachment hearing) “McCarthy was rebuked, but not rejected. From then until the November elections, he became the Republican Party’s most tireless, sought-after, and effective campaigner.” (p. 188)

“The Democrats remained clueless. They believed that McCarthy’s falsehoods were so transparent and outrageous that they would emerge victorious from any encounter with him.” “McCarthy had poked the tigers of the Senate and showed them to be toothless.” (p.159)

McCarthy sued opponents, including a $2M libel suit against Sen. William Benton, admittedly for intimidation purposes and to “force him to spend money to defend himself.” (p.221)

Eisenhower makes a point with McCarthy

President Eisenhower, who is considered a moderate –– or even liberal –– Republican, worked behind the scenes to fight McCarthy. He “was becoming so frustrated with the obstructionism of McCarthy and other ultraconservatives, [he] … was considering the formation of a new party bringing together all the sensible people in the great middle of American life.” (p.260)

Haynes writes, “Over the decades, a more rigidly ideological Republican Party has emerged, forged by many of the forces McCarthy unleashed or harnessed.” (p.461) 

Navy readers will find a fascinating parallel between the swift-boating of John Kerry  and the smear of another Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, both former Senators who had been awarded multiple Purple Heart medals. (p.498)

In Kerry’s case, in which wealthy Texas Republicans funded TV ads with false claims that Kerry falsely received his combat medals, including the Silver Star. “Constant repetition over cable outlets had an echo chamber effect the greatly magnified the ads’ false charges.” (p.499)

Here’s some irony: McCarthy lied about his service in the Marine Corps, and he falsified records after the war to get Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal commendations. “The deceit was breathtaking,” Haynes writes. A later investigation revealed McCarthy had apparently drafted his own letter praising his war record and forged the signature of his CO, Maj. Glenn A. Todd. McCarthy then forwarded the letter to be countersigned by Admiral Chester Nimitz, commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, as a matter of routine. (p. 53)

The McCarthy “hearings were a landmark in American History. They were consequential, and they stamped indelible images in the public mind.” (p.388) So was the second impeachment of Donald J. Trump, which included indelible images of bloodthirsty Trump supporters attempting to overturn an election and transfer of power. Rioters were summoned to D.C., incited to fight, directed toward the Capitol, and allowed to attack police and the Capitol itself for hours.

Are McCarthyism and Trumpism names for the same phenomenon, describing ultranationalism, patriarchy, racism, and misguided patriotism? Examples in American history abound: slavery, actual witch hunts, Alien and Sedition Acts, loyalty tests, disallowing women the right to vote, civil rights violations, and family child separations, and others.

Haynes reports about the first Great Red Scare just over 100 years ago as World War 1 was about to end and Lenin and Trotsky came to power in the Russian Revolution. Bombings and riots shook the United States. In 1919, in the middle of the Great Influenza Pandemic, soldiers and sailors stormed the office of a Cleveland socialist newspaper. In Chicago, a sailor shot a man for not standing and removing his hat for the Star Spangled Banner. (p.102)

SECDEF Lloyd J. Austin III

A century later: A remarkable number (reports say 12 percent or more) of insurrectionists and rioters who stormed the Capitol last month had served in the military. New Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III ordered a 60-day stand-down to confront extremism.

Endless vigilance against violence is required of those who take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. As Edward R. Murrow said, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

Haynes gives an excellent presentation of the Army hearings in which the Army's lead defense attorney Joseph Welch confronted and ended McCarthy’s reign of terror with the immortal rebuke: “… You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency at long last ? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Haynes concludes, “McCarthyism remains a story without an ending.” “Extremism –– and the suspicion and hatred it engenders –– may be Joe McCarthy’s most lasting legacy.”

A Presidents Day Postscript:

Haynes writes, “As a way of indicating his own model for statesmanship, McCarthy posted on the wall of his Senate office a copy of Lincoln’s famous remark: ‘If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.’” (p.79)

Conservative anti-communists prevented the performance of “Lincoln Portrait” at Eisenhower’s inauguration, because the composer, Aaron Copland, was loosely associated with “radical causes,” although he did not belong to the Communist Party. “Portrait” includes Lincoln’s memorable and still relevant words, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.” (p.300)

Democratic presidential candidate in 1952, Adlai Stevenson, echoed Lincoln in a speech about the Republican Party divide over McCarthyism: “A political party divided against itself, half McCarthy and half Eisenhower, cannot produce national unity.” (p.375)

Just a reminder: Navy Reads is an unofficial blog of book reviews and personal views on critical thinking, core values, Constitutional issues, and political-military-diplomatic philosophy.

WASHINGTON (April 15, 2015) -- Aviation Maintenance Administrationman Airman Apprentice Zaine Ahringhoff, assigned to the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), admires the Lincoln Monument during a trip to Washington, D.C. to commemorate the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination, April 15.  (MC3 Brenton Poyser)