Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Rethinking Ike... and maybe Bush?
I watched a great Nova program on PBS last night about, of all things, the launching of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957 and why then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly didn't seem fazed by it.Fifty years later, we now know Ike was actually happy because the beeping Soviet spacecraft gave him the international legal justification to launch spy satellites with which he could keep a constant eye on the then-U.S.S.R.
The media and the citizenry went even more batty from the Russian-made metal ball in their skies than they did in 1938, when Orson Welles started reading a science fiction story over the radio. But Ike kept the secret and took it to his grave in 1961.
In most of my history classes I was taught that Ike was a military genius as the Allies supreme commander during World War II, but a befuddled grandfather by the time he was voted into the White House.
How wrong those historians were, which got me thinking about an online exchange I had recently with Bucks County Courier Times columnist J.D. Mullane.
I've known Mullane for nearly 20 years, back when we both had long hair, worked at The Temple News and learned in journalism classes that we would be writing the first draft of history. We were both liberals then, but he was always a rod ass.
Today, he's a father, a homeowner and a conservative columnist/blogger in (big) Bucks County as well as a big believer in George Bush.
And I'm still a fiscally conservative social liberal.
On Sept. 19, Mullane wrote a blog post entitled "History will vindicate Bush" to which I replied, "History may prove the rest of us wrong, but I doubt it."
Now I'm thinking what if I and much of the rest of the media - save the Fox news channel and a handful of true believers like Mullane - has W. all wrong?
What if Bush knows something we don't?
What if terrorists are really a hair's breath away from obtaining nuclear weapons?
Oh, who am I kidding? Bush sat in a classroom for seven minutes after being told his nation was under attack. He's no secret military genius.
This is one time where the public perception is probably spot on.
Labels: Bush, Eisenhower, Ike, Mullane
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
