April memories
And resulting monumental shifts
Somewhere along the way, I saw the saying that humans think big events—weddings, birth of children, divorces, taking on a new home or job, and death—are the essence of life while instead life is the every day events we experience regularly where it’s getting a cup of tea in the morning or walking the dog. I don’t know which is more accurately the essence of life but it’s there somewhere.
I want to focus on a number of milestones which created tremendous consequences for this nation. Actions create consequences. Please feel free to disagree on my assessments.
Similarly, I am sure that each month and probably each day of the 365 (bonus this year!) we experience at a nation is important for its own reasons. I am, however, struck how many pivotal events occurred in our history during the month of April. Actually, I would hone it further to the second week in the month.
Earlier this week—the 9th, actually— marked the 159th anniversary of General Robert E. Lee surrendering his Confederate forces to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. Actually, what those who attended recorded as a relatively civil and respectful, although somber event transpired at Wilmer MacLean’s home. In a twist of fate, MacLean relocated his family to Appomattox after his property was the site of the First Battle of Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia in the summer of 1861. Bull Run marked a substantial expansion beyond the skirmishes between Union and Confederate troops which happened sporadically following Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard’s attack on Union forces at Fort Sumter one hundred sixty-three years ago today.
A mere five days after Lee surrendered, angry and despondent southern actor John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, merely six weeks into his second term. He lingered painfully through the next morning. Mourning replaced celebrations in the north as Lincoln’s body took a circuitous route home to Springfield, Illinois for burial. Southerners were still coming to grips with Lee’s surrender, many still vowing to fight on so the nation remained bifurcated with multiple tragedies as the war began closing and a new era of mending began in April 1865. In retrospect, we have yet to close that chapter in many ways but the violence so pervasive between 12 April 1861 and 14 April 1865 continuing in other forms.
Similarly, a monumental war in Europe and Japan was nearing its termination when Franklin Delano Roosevelt felt a pain in the back of his neck, then collapsed from a massive stroke on 12 April 1945. Roosevelt was visibly quite ill when reelected to his fourth term the prior November but sought to finish the incredible task of defeating the Axis powers. Perhaps other presidents could have done as well but Roosevelt’s transformation of a relatively weak American military into the most feared war machine working simultaneously on two distant fronts was unknown in U.S. history. That effort followed his similarly distinct accomplishments—failures in the eyes of some—to create the social safety net needed until we exited the Great Depression which he inherited when he reached the White House in March 1933.
A dear friend, born in 1930, commented to me more than once in discussions how hard she found coming to grips with the radio broadcasts of Roosevelt’s passing seventy-nine years ago today because she said ‘We in my generation had never known another president. None. Most of us wondered how we could go forward without him in that office’. Roosevelt’s vice president, Harry Truman, knew virtually nothing of the true depth of our military prowess under development when he took the Oath but a mere three and a half months later he used the previously secret atomic bomb twice to defeat Japan to end this global conflict; he had already seen a victory over Germany just over three weeks into his tenure.
Not all foreign policy events have been successful ones as the disastrous attempt to rescue U.S. hostages held by Iranian religious nationalists, known as Desert One, occurred on 24 April 1980. This occurred almost five years to the day after the scenes of panicky evacuations off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as the North Vietnamese defeated remnants of the South Vietnamese military on 30 April 1975. President Jimmy Carter’s desperation to liberate the hostages ended in flames as helicopters collided, needed secrecy was blown, and the competence of an American military underwent even further criticism. Carter never recovered as president, though his reputation as a humanitarian later rose. Desert One was a contributing factor to the 1986 Military Reform Act known as Goldwater-Nichols but the entire Iranian experience so near to Vietnam left us dubious of ourselves and our future.
April 1961 left an indelible mark on Cuban-American relations when John Kennedy continued the efforts developed by the Eisenhower administration to overthrow Fidel Castro through an invasion by CIA-trained cubano exiles. The effort failed immediately when Castro’s forces, obviously aware of the landing, responded on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. The exiles blamed Kennedy who blamed the CIA but ties between Havana and Washington are still pretty poor more than sixty years later.
On 10 April 2003, U.S. forces victoriously claimed a new era for Iraq following an invasion three weeks earlier. Indeed, I stood in front of my television with tears running down my face on 9 April as I watched U.S. personnel helping to topple one of the many Saddam Hussein statues around the Iraqi capital. I cried not because I was sorry to see the heinous Saddam out but because I feared we did not understand what we were getting into. Sadly, this came to pass as our objectives morphed into remaking a society, an incredibly dangerous and futile goal that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars in treasure.
Even Sino-U.S. relations had a notable date when a Chinese fighter jock clipped an American EP-3 surveillance plane over the South China Sea on 1 April 2001. It was not an April Fool’s joke as the Chinese aviator died. His U.S. counterpart somehow landed his badly mangled plane on Hainan Island, setting off a multi-week standoff to get both U.S. personnel and the plane itself back. The diplomatic tension occurred as the new George W. Bush administration was setting course to discourage PRC’s growing confidence. The EP-3 incident was not the sole source of bilateral tension, however, as President Bush offered to support Taiwan with ‘whatever it takes’, occurring twenty-two days after the EP-3 incident. This reinforced China’s fears regarding our intentions in the region. These were building block tensions in competition between Beijing and Washington in the new millennium.
April has provided Americans with domestic consequences as well. James Earl Ray, a Caucasian, killed Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis on 4 April 1968, not only extinguishing the civil rights leader’s voice and activism on behalf of African Americans and peace efforts around the globe. The resulting fury over a white man murdering the black man set off vicious violence in several parts of the nation, perhaps most noteworthy in the nation’s capital. The section of town that burned for days as arsonists torched whole streets in retribution remained empty, a tribute to division and hopelessness, for the following quarter century. Washington rebuilt eventually but the painful scars within a mile of the Capitol and the White House were a tribute to division, discrimination, and futility for generations.
There are many other April commemorations and consequences I could cite. Again, perhaps I am merely captured in the history because it is mid-April right now but so many crucial events which have transformed our nation occurred during this month. We are hearing rumours about an anticipated Iranian retaliatory attack on Israel following the assassination of several military commanders in the on-going anti-Hamas war; President Biden’s support for Israel is already a complication for the United States yet I cannot believe he would ignore such an act should it occur. Perhaps it won’t but I am not sanguine about that. Assumed nuclear weapons in Israel and feared ones in Iran don’t make this any prettier a picture.
Additionally, the Arizona Supreme Court decision earlier this week re-ignited the abortion issue as a draconian law aimed at curtailing abortion prevents women from receiving the full range of heath care needed or desired. That decision burst forth only days before a first in U.S. history when a former president goes on trial for falsifying business records to hide alleged payment to silence a porn star from discussing a purported liaison weeks before the 2016 election. Hollywood could not make this up any more than it could make up the drama of the 1996 O.J. Simpson murder trial, an event resurrected only yesterday with the acquitted Simpson’s death. During the past eight years, blockbuster news erupts every single day but so many of the dates we commemorate—happily or sadly—in April had truly crucial results down the line.
Yet for many Americans, today and this weekend will be tax events as they struggle to complete the bewildering process of paying taxes. 15 April is no one’s favourite day except accountants who rake in so much of their salaries working through the thousands of pages of tax code to figure out returns. Too bad for most of us as the skies are actually bringing us some warmer weather and hope of spring, if not summer soon.
I welcome your thoughts on the major April milestones for Americans and the world. Perhaps you would add others or explain why you think I have overstated some. I welcome, truly love hearing from you. My goal remains expanding civil, measured conversation on the big issues of our world. I appreciate each of you taking time to read this and any other column; please feel free to circulate them. I especially thank those who support ACC with financial subscriptions as you help more than you know.
It was quite a wet night here, I understand, though I blissfully slept through the deluge. This afternoon the winds are driving puffy clouds across the Creek in preparation for a good weekend. I hope yours is as well. Get outside if you can: it always makes life better.
Be well and be safe. FIN
Mark Bowden, ‘The Desert One Debacle’, The Atlantic, May 2006, retrieved at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/05/the-desert-one-debacle/304803/
David Sanger, ‘U.S. Would Defend Taiwan, Bush Says’, NewYorkTimes.com, 26 April 2001, retrieved at https://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/26/world/us-would-defend-taiwan-bush-says.html