Chelsea Manning Welcome Home Fund, and Final Reflections
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This will likely be the final email from the former Chelsea Manning Support Network. We hope that you'll help Chelsea restart her life by contributing to the Welcome Home Fund, and helping exceed the $100,000 goal. It’s still hard to believe that we won Chelsea’s freedom (only 80 days to go!).
We are extremely proud to have served as fiscal manager for the Chelsea Manning Defense Fund for nearly seven years. Those funds provided Chelsea a legal defense team at trial, funded most of her appeals, supported hundreds of events worldwide, and in the end, was immensely important to winning Chelsea’s freedom.
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Chelsea Manning Welcome Home Fund, and Final Reflections
The Harp Beneath The Crown- With The Chieftains In Mind
The Harp Beneath The Crown- With The Chieftains In Mind
By Sam Eaton
“I’m as Irish as the next goddam bogger,” shouted Jack Callahan, “I just don’t like to wear it on my sleeve. I don’t have to break out in song every time I think about what my maternal grandfather, Daniel Patrick Riley and that should be Irish enough for you, called the “old sod.” For him it was the old sod since his own grandparents had come over on the “famine” ships in the 1840s after the bloody Brits had starved them out of County Kerry with their wicked enclosure policies so they could have grazing land for their sheep or something and they, the Brits hoarding enough food for a full larder for everyone and the starved broken bodied piling up on the roads after eating tree bark or something you wouldn’t feed a pig. At least that was the way my grandfather told me his grandfather told him.”
Jack’s whole uproar over his heritage, over his bloody green flag, harp beneath the crown heritage had been brought about innocently enough as he and Bradley Fox, a friend whom he had known since his school days at Riverdale High, sat in The Plough and Stars bar on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge when Bradley had mentioned that the Chieftains would again be doing their yearly series of shows around Saint Patrick’s at the Wang Center in downtown Boston and had assumed that Jack would once again jump at the chance to show his green side.
And that outburst was the way that Jack had answered him with some put-upon air of righteous indignation that he had to prove himself and his Irish-ness. Prove it he added to a half-breed like Bradley whose own father was descended from the bloody Brits, had only with fire and determination on his mother’s part had he been brought up in the true church rather than some heathen Protestant chapel with those god-awful hail high Jehovah psalms beseeching an unjust god to forgive them their bloody heathen sins, and who had only been saved by his mother’s full-blooded Irish lineage (his mother’s great-great grandfather having come over on the famine ships with Jack’s maternal great-great-great grandfather if that was the right number of “greats”)from being totally ostracized in the whole neighborhood by the old “shawlies” who commented on every little deviation. So no this year he would not be going to the annual concert, maybe would not even go to the Saint Patrick’s Parade over in South Boston which he had been going to since he was a kid although less frequently over the previous few years as he had lost patience with the drunks, the rowdies and the one-day-a-year Irish. The Polish Irish they would call them when they were kids, the Poles being the other big ethnic group in the town, the ones who worked on the watch factories that had dotted the river in those days. They would come into school on Saint Pat’s Day all in green calling themselves MacWalecki or something. That was the way the two old friends left it that night, left like they did many a blow-up argument with a semi-smile since half the time after a certain hour or a certain number of whiskeys they would collapse in on their arguments. This one had that same fate.
[What Bradley did not know that night, did not know for several more weeks, was that Chrissie (nee McNamara) Callahan, Jack’s wife of many more years than any of them wanted to count and who had been the classic high school sweethearts was giving signals that she wanted to leave Jack now that the kids were grown and they were “empty-nesters.” Wanted to in her words “find herself” before it was too late and that she had felt like a stranger in Jack’s presence. That fate weighted heavily on Jack since Chrissie had been his rock through those many years and he was not sure what he would do if she left him high and dry like that. Tried to argue her out of her thoughts always going back to the usually tried and true argument about how they had first gotten together and that night had pledged their eternal love. Bradley had known that story since he had been at Molly’s Diner the night it happened. Jack had had a crush on Chrissie since sixth grade when she had invited him to her twelfth birthday party and as such things went at “petting parties” she had given him a big kiss that he never really forgot about. But being shy and self-conscious he never pursued the matter. Time passed and as they entered high school it turned out that Jack was a hell of a football player who led his team to the state division championship senior year.
So Jack could have had any girl he wanted from sophomore year on. But he still retained his Chrissie thing and his shyness. Chrissie had been harboring some such feelings as well although as more outgoing and a beautiful girl she did not lack for dates and the evil intentions of guys. One Friday night in the later fall of sophomore year though she had had enough and knowing that Jack and the boys would be at Molly’s playing the latest rock hits on Molly’s jukebox while having their burgers and fries she went into Molly’s front door, drew a bee-line to Jack, and to Jack’s lap. The way Bradley always described it later was that Chrissie had had such a look of determination on her face that it would have taken the whole football team to get her off that lap. A look a Jack said that it would take the whole football team and the junior varsity too to get her off his lap. So that night their eternal love thing started. Jack had told Bradley in confidence that he could have had anything Chrissie had to offer that night when they left Molly’s for Jack to take her home. That would come later, the next spring when on Saint Patrick’s’ Day night after the parade was over and after they had both consumed too many illegal beers they went over to nearby Carson Beach and Chrissie had given Jack all she had to offer. So those mist of memories had been were driving Jack dyspeptic response to Bradley’s question.]
Later that night after Jack got back to Hingham where he had his business, his Toyota car dealership (he was perennially Mr. Toyota in Eastern Massachusetts), and his too big house, Chrissie asleep upstairs (in one of the kids’ bedrooms, so that was the way things were just then) turned the light on and went into his den. Sat down on his easy chair and turned the light off. He had just wanted to think in the gentle dark about how he was going keep Chrissie with him but he found that he started to drift back to the days in Riverdale when he was a kid and being Irish meant a lot to him, felt he had to uphold the Easter, 1916 brotherhood, had to buck the trend that his parents and their generation had bought into-becoming vanilla Americans. Losing the old country identities that men like his grandfather held too with granite determination in the flow of too many other trends driving them away from what they had been, where they had come from in this great big immigrant-driven country.
All the funny little rites of passage. First of all listening to his grandfather’s stories about the heroic men of 1916 (women too but they slipped through cracks in his telling the womenfolk being held in the background in that generation), above all James Connelly who had place of pride on his grandfather’s piazza wall. Then the times once his grandfather was in his cups a bit the singing of all the old songs, some he had never heard of then but which later he would find were ancient songs going back to Cromwell’s bloody hellish times. Later when he and his friends, usually not Bradley since his father was adamant that he not attend some frivolous doings, would sneak out of school, walk to the bus which would take them to the Redline subway station and over to South Boston and the Saint Pat’s Parade. See that day, March 17th was a holiday in Boston and Suffolk County, not Saint Pat’s Day but Evacuation Day, the day the colonial patriots drove the bloody Brits out of Boston during the American Revolution. But Riverdale in Middlesex County did not get a holiday hence the sneaking out of school.
Of course of all the Saint Pat’s Days the night he took all Chrissie had to offer stood well above all others. He thought about how Chrissie, all prim and proper on the outside, at first refused to skip school until he made a fuse over it that he wouldn’t have any fun without her. That got to her, and so they went with Jimmy Jenkins, Frankie Riley and a couple of other girls whose names he could not remember over to South Boston. They ran into one of Jack’s older cousins who gave them some beers. At first Chrissie balked at drinking the stuff but Jack said just take a sip and if she didn’t like it that was that. Well she liked it well enough that day (which was probably the last time she had beer since thereafter it was respectfully Southern Comfort, mixed gin drinks, and later various types of wine). They drank most of the afternoon, had somehow lost the rest of the crowd from Riverdale and Jack saw his big play. He asked Chrissie if she wanted to go to the beach to sit on the seawall and watch the ocean before going home. She didn’t resist that idea. So they went to Carson Beach as it was starting to get dark, went to a secluded area near the L Street Bathhouse, and started to “make out.” Jack began to fondle her breasts and she didn’t push him away, didn’t push him away as he put his hand between her thighs either, actually held his hands there. And so they as they saying went after a Howlin’ Wolf song they had heard on Molly’s jukebox did the “do the do” for first time. He blushed as he thought about that first time and how they, foolish high school kids, didn’t have any “protection,” didn’t even think about such an idea. Later they got wise but then they were as naïve about sex and what to do, or not do, about it as any two Irish kids could be.
Jack as he sat there in dark then thought enough of this or he might head up those stairs, kids’ room or not. But above all that night he thought about his sainted grandmother, Anna, by his account, by all accounts, a saint if for no other reason than she had put up with his grandfather and his awful habits but also because she was the sweetest woman in the whole neighborhood and was not, it bears repeating, not afraid of the “shawlies” and their vicious grapevine (which had even caught wind of his and Chrissie’s trysts although they denied the whole thing every time somebody mentioned it-they were after all as good virginal Catholics as anybody else in the neighborhood so there). He then remembered how when he was young she would sing the songs from the old country while she was doing the washing (the old-fashioned way with scrub board and wringer, clothesline-dried), Brendan on the Moor, Kevin Barry, The Rising of the Moon, and many others. He would always request The Coast of Malabar, ask her to sing it twice when she was in the mood. Such a song of being away from home. He always loved it when the Chieftains played the song as a part of their show.
Jack had that song on his mind the next morning when after Chrissie had come down for her morning coffee he asked her, half expecting to be turned down, if she wanted to go to the Chieftains concert in March. She brightened and said “yes, yes of course.” Later that day he sheepishly called Bradley and told him to order three tickets for the Chieftains concert. Bradley chuckled. Enough said.
In Boston- Join the Mass Protest Against Trump this May 1st!-Join The Resistance
In Boston- Join the Mass Protest Against Trump this May 1st!-Join The Resistance
- Q
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Saturday, April 22, 2017
From Socialist Alternative- Have you heard the news?-Vote Ginger
Have you heard the news?
To
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A View From The Left- U.S. Slaughter in Near East
Workers Vanguard No. 1109
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7 April 2017
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Raqqa, Mosul
U.S. Slaughter in Near East
The long list of U.S. imperialist war crimes in Iraq and Syria is growing by the day. On March 17, a U.S. airstrike in the Iraqi city of Mosul killed over 100 men, women and children taking shelter in the basement of a house. That week, some 240 civilians were killed by the U.S. in that neighborhood as part of the battle by the imperialists and Iraqi government forces to drive out the Islamic State (ISIS) from the city. An estimated 400,000 civilians are trapped in the war zone in the densely populated areas of western Mosul, having been set up for wanton slaughter after the Iraqi government directed them not to flee.
In Syria, a U.S. drone fired missiles and dropped a 500-pound bomb on a religious gathering at a mosque in a town near Aleppo on March 16, massacring more than 45 people. Less than a week later, a U.S. airstrike killed at least 33 people who had taken shelter in a school near the Syrian city of Raqqa. In March alone, the coalition of U.S. and other imperialist forces together with local proxies butchered over 1,400 civilians in Syria and Iraq. At the same time, in Yemen the U.S. stepped up its military strikes against alleged al Qaeda targets and increased military aid to the Sunni theocratic monarchy of Saudi Arabia, which is waging a reactionary war against Houthi-led forces. Last month, the U.S. launched more airstrikes in Yemen than in all of last year. Down with U.S. imperialism! All U.S. troops out of the Near East now!
Apologists for the capitalist Democratic Party claim that the Trump administration has lifted Obama-era restrictions supposedly aimed at minimizing civilian casualties. In fact, the recent carnage is a direct continuation of Obama’s murderous wars, and the rules of engagement had already been loosened on his watch. Since August 2014, the U.S. coalition has carried out over 19,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria with more than 72,000 bombs and missiles. Working people should have no illusions that the Democrats are any less a party of racist U.S. imperialism than the Republicans. The only way out of the perpetual cycle of imperialist wars, occupations and bloodletting is the fight to end the capitalist system through workers revolution.
In its campaign against ISIS in Iraq, the U.S. has enlisted the forces of the Shia-dominated Iraqi government together with Shia militias and Kurdish pesh merga fighters. Imperialist machinations have sharply intensified the conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims. The war against the Sunni-based ISIS has served as a pretext for Shia forces to ethnically cleanse majority Sunni cities in Iraq, with Kirkuk province alone receiving some 500,000 displaced Sunni Arabs. The heavily Sunni Arab population of Mosul faces a similar fate. In Syria, Kurdish forces that took over ISIS-controlled villages carried out a campaign of collective punishment and communalist expulsions of Arabs and Turkmen. ISIS, of course, is infamous for its own communalist slaughter and expulsion of Shias, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians and others.
As Marxists, we have no side in the intercommunal conflict in Iraq nor in Syria’s squalid civil war between the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad and various Islamist-dominated rebels. But we do have a side against the U.S. imperialists—the main enemy not only of the Syrian and Iraqi peoples but of working and oppressed masses around the world.
The gruesome crimes of ISIS pale in comparison to those of the world’s biggest terrorists—the U.S. imperialists, who are responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions. We are implacable opponents of everything the ISIS cutthroats stand for. But we recognize that when they inflict blows against the U.S. occupiers and their proxies—the Iraqi army, Shia militias and Kurdish armed forces in Iraq and Syria—such acts coincide with the interests of the international working class, including in the U.S. At the same time, we do not imbue these repugnant forces with “anti-imperialist” credentials. While our main opposition is to the U.S. and other imperialists, we also oppose the capitalist regional powers (Russia, Iran, Turkey) that have become involved in the conflict and demand that they, too, get out.
The Assault on Raqqa
As in Mosul, in Raqqa some 300,000 people are trapped; U.S. coalition forces have dropped leaflets threatening residents with airstrikes if they flee the city by crossing the Euphrates River. Coalition airstrikes hit the northern neighborhoods of Raqqa almost daily. In early March, the U.S. deployed hundreds of troops to Syria, joining the several hundred Special Operations forces who have been there for months. The U.S. also recently deployed a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System trained on Raqqa. In addition to the 6,000 troops currently stationed in Iraq and Syria, backed by thousands of private military contractors (i.e., mercenaries), the U.S. is sending 2,500 troops to a staging base in Kuwait from which they can join the assaults on the ISIS strongholds of Mosul and Raqqa.
Raqqa is a historic city. It served as the capital of the Abbasid dynasty during the reign of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809 A.D.), who ruled over an empire that stretched from northwest Africa to Persia. He was best known for establishing the legendary Baghdad library Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom). Under al-Rashid’s rule the city enjoyed a high degree of urban development, where palaces, mosques and a water management system were constructed. His time was marked by the flourishing of Islamic arts, culture, science and music. Harun al-Rashid is also remembered for his love of wine and his lavish lifestyle, which inspired many of the salacious tales in The Arabian Nights. Today Raqqa is the self-proclaimed capital of the abhorrent ISIS and faces massive destruction in the multisided conflict in Syria, with every major power involved in the war competing for its capture.
Assad’s forces, supported by Russia, are positioned on the outskirts of Raqqa. Turkey is backing the Syrian Islamist opponents of Assad, the Free Syrian Army, to take the city. To Turkey’s chagrin, the U.S. is relying on the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in its assault on ISIS positions near Raqqa. The SDF is dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Committees (YPG) and includes smaller non-Kurdish forces. The YPG is the military wing of the Syrian-based Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which is allied to the petty-bourgeois nationalist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey.
The Turkish government, along with the U.S., considers the PKK a “terrorist” organization and escalated its campaign to crush the organization in 2015, when Turkish forces launched a furious assault on Kurdish cities in southeastern Turkey. In August 2016, the Turkish military moved into Syria—ostensibly to fight ISIS—in order to prevent PYD/YPG fighters from linking the two semiautonomous Kurdish regions in northeast and northwest Syria, which border the Kurdish regions of Turkey. The U.S. imperialists, committed enemies of Kurdish independence, agree with Turkey that Kurdish-held regions should remain noncontiguous, even as they continue to use the PYD/YPG as their ground troops in Syria.
The Fight for Kurdish Self-Determination
The Kurdish people, whose homeland is the mountainous area straddling the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, have long suffered murderous national oppression at the hands of the capitalist regimes in these countries as well as the imperialist rulers. Through years of struggle, the Kurds have clearly demonstrated their desire for independence. We of the International Communist League call for a united, independent Kurdistan. We also support Kurdish independence from individual capitalist states—e.g., the right of Kurds in Turkey to secede. However, in Iraq and Syria, the Kurdish nationalist leaders have subordinated the just fight for self-determination to their alliance with U.S. imperialism. In so doing, they help perpetuate the divide-and-rule stratagems that inevitably inflame communal, national and religious tensions and serve to reinforce the oppression of the Kurdish masses.
In Turkey, where Kurds form a sizable component of the proletariat, it is vital for the working class to fight against Kurdish oppression, which is a key prop of Turkish nationalism and capitalist rule. If the proletariat of Turkey is ever to liberate itself from capitalist exploitation, it must take up the struggle for Kurdish self-determination. Essential to this perspective is the forging of a binational Turkish-Kurdish revolutionary workers party committed to the struggle for working-class rule.
Indeed, it is in the interest of the working classes of the Near East to champion the fight for Kurdish self-determination. In taking up this struggle, the proletariat of the region would strike a blow for its own emancipation from its capitalist exploiters and would undercut U.S. imperialism’s capacity to manipulate the Kurds’ grievances in order to further dominate the Near East. It would also go a long way toward breaking Kurdish militants from the nationalist politics of reliance on imperialist and regional bourgeois patrons, which invariably lead to disaster for the Kurdish people, and winning them to a revolutionary proletarian internationalist program. We seek to build Marxist workers parties throughout the region that fight for the establishment of a socialist federation of the Near East that would include a socialist republic of united Kurdistan.
Defeat U.S. Imperialism Through Workers Revolution!
The U.S. working class must be won to the understanding that its enemy is its “own” ruling class and that it needs to oppose imperialist aggression abroad. The same ruling class that is raining death and destruction on the neocolonial masses is also waging war on the livelihoods of working people and the oppressed at home. What is desperately needed is class struggle against the capitalist rulers, both to defend the interests of workers at home and to hinder the ambitions of U.S. imperialism abroad. The Spartacist League aims to win the most conscious layers of the working class to the understanding that what is necessary to put an end to exploitation, racial oppression and endless imperialist slaughter is the overturn of the U.S. capitalist order through socialist revolution.
That means tapping into the fundamental discontent and conflicts in American capitalist society: the anger of the oppressed black and minority populations who face mass incarceration and are gunned down by the police on America’s streets; the glaring disparity in wealth between the many at the bottom and the few at the top; the fear of joblessness, homelessness, loss of health insurance and pensions that plagues tens of millions of American workers. To harness this anger into a struggle against the capitalist system, it is necessary to forge a revolutionary multiracial workers party—section of a reforged Trotskyist Fourth International. Built in opposition to all capitalist parties, such a party would lead the struggle for working-class rule in the belly of the imperialist beast. Only victorious workers revolutions on an international scale can end imperialist slaughter and ethnic bloodletting and open the road to eliminating material scarcity and building an egalitarian socialist society.
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Mumia to Start Hep C Treatment, Finally
Workers Vanguard No. 1109
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7 April 2017
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Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
Mumia to Start Hep C Treatment, Finally
After a two-year battle, class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is scheduled to begin lifesaving treatment for hepatitis C. On March 27, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied a motion by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) to block a January 3 order that the DOC begin administering antiviral drugs to Mumia. That order had declared that the prison authorities’ “protocol” of withholding treatment from all but those with advanced cases of liver damage was unconstitutional. On March 31, the DOC announced that Mumia would begin treatment the following week.
Mumia is an innocent man who is the victim of a decades-long vendetta by the capitalist state that began in the 1960s when he was a teenage spokesman for the Black Panther Party in Philadelphia. Mumia went on to become an award-winning journalist, known as “the voice of the voiceless” for his searing commentaries on the crimes of the racist American ruling class. He was also a prominent supporter of the largely black, back-to-nature MOVE organization, which was also on the receiving end of a murderous, racist campaign by the capitalist state. Framed up for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia policeman, Mumia was sentenced to death explicitly for his political views. In 2011, the state abandoned its efforts to legally lynch him, but Mumia remains locked up on the “slow death row” of life without parole.
Prison officials have made clear that providing the medication does not mean they accept the appeals court decision. Rather, due to their denial of treatment, Mumia’s liver damage is now so severe that he qualifies under the DOC’s own protocol. Recent medical tests revealed that Mumia has clear signs of cirrhosis of the liver caused by hepatitis. As Mumia bitterly noted: “My first reaction was really shock, anger, disbelief. If I had been treated in 2015, if I had been treated in 2012 when they say they first diagnosed it, I wouldn’t be this far advanced.” There is good reason to believe that the antiviral treatment will reverse the cirrhosis and return Mumia to health, although he will be more susceptible to liver cancer. However, the DOC may use the slightest improvement in his condition to declare that he no longer qualifies under their inhumane criteria and pull the plug on his treatment.
The DOC has also filed a motion to dismiss Mumia’s lawsuit demanding antiviral drugs, claiming that, since he will now be receiving treatment, his case is moot. Prison authorities fear that Mumia’s case could set a precedent and that they will have to provide the medications to all those afflicted with hepatitis C behind bars—where the disease is endemic.
In a March 31 commentary on prisonradio.org (“The Illusion of Correctional Medicine”), Mumia pointed to his racist jailers’ harsh economic calculus: “The DOC said it will cost them $600 million. It may only cost me my life.” The ghouls who lord it over the largely black and Latino prison population prefer that their victims just rot and die, with a bit of torture thrown in for good measure. The prisons are a central component of the capitalist state, which exists to protect the rule and interests of the bourgeoisie against the working class and the oppressed. Only a proletarian socialist revolution that sweeps away the capitalist order can get rid of the bourgeois rulers’ barbaric institutions and torture chambers.
Unlike the anonymous millions suffering in America’s dungeons, Mumia is relatively well known. After he nearly fell into a diabetic coma two years ago, which could have led to his death, thousands signed petitions demanding he receive treatment from the doctors of his choice. Protests outside Philadelphia City Hall helped to throw a spotlight on the nightmare of “medical care” in prison. While advocating the pursuit of all possible legal avenues in Mumia’s case, we place no faith in the capitalist courts and the bourgeoisie’s injustice system. Rather, we look to the power of the multiracial workers movement, which has every interest in fighting for Mumia’s freedom and must be mobilized independently of the forces of the capitalist state and its political representatives.
In response to Mumia’s medical crisis and the life-and-death struggle for curative treatment, the Committee to Save Mumia Abu-Jamal has issued an urgent fundraising appeal to cover legal expenses. The Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle legal and social defense organization whose purpose is in accordance with the political views of the Spartacist League, has made a donation to this fund and encourages others to do likewise. Checks should be made payable to National Lawyers Guild with “For Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Defense” on the memo line. Mail your check to Johanna Fernandez, 158-18 Riverside Drive W., Apt. 6C-50, New York, NY 10032.
Suddenly Is Right-Frank Sinatra’s “Suddenly” (1954)-A Film Review
Suddenly Is Right-Frank
Sinatra’s “Suddenly” (1954)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Film Critic Sandy
Salmon
Suddenly, starring Frank
Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, 1954, based on a 1943 story Active Duty by Richard Sales who wrote the screenplay, 1954
For my generation, the
generation of ‘68 as one political pundit who I read occasionally called those
of us who were involved in the great counter-cultural wave of the mid to late
1960s, November 22, 1963 the day President Kennedy was assassinated by an
ex-military man, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a touchstone in our lives, as December
7, 1941 was for an earlier generation and 9/11 for a later one. Thus the
subject matter of the 1954 film under review, Suddenly, an assassination attempt on the President of the United
States as he passed through by train the Podunk fictional town of Suddenly out
in California was a little shocking. If I had seen the film in 1954 at a time
when I knee-deep, as were many of my fellow film critics, in attending Saturday
afternoon matinee double features I probably would have passed it off as
another great B-film noir effort. And at some level that was my reaction
recently as well but the film brought to the surface more questions than I
would have expected for such an old time film.
The plot-line was like
this if it helps the reader understand my perplexity. In advance of the unnamed
President (although if you go by the original 1943 story the film is based on Active Duty by the screenwriter here Richard
Sales hard it would have been Franklin Delano Roosevelt but by the film’s release
Dwight Eisenhower) heading to some Western mountain retreat the town of
Suddenly was suddenly (I couldn’t resist that, sorry) infested with all kinds
of cops, feds, Secret Service, naturally, state and local cops. The important
one of the latter here is Sherriff Shaw played by gruff he-man type Sterling
Hayden. With all this police action it was fairly easy for a bunch of guys led
by John Baron, played by Frank Sinatra, to pose as FBI agents and gain access
to a primo location at a house across from the railroad station where the
President was expected to stop. That house also just happened to be the home of
Sherriff Shaw’s hoped for paramour, a war widow, her son, and her ex-Secret Service
father.
After a series of ruses
Baron and his boys set up for the ambush in a position in the house and with a
rifle that reminded me of what the situation was like at that 1963 Texas School
Depository. But remember this is 1954 and fiction so that you know that this
plot like many others before and since would be foiled before the dastardly
deed was consummated. Foiled one way or another although not before a senior
Secret Service agent was killed and Sherriff Shaw was wounded and taken hostage
along with his sweetie and her family. The long and short of it was that the
plot was foiled by the heroic action of that son, that paramour, her father and
even the Sheriff. So you can see the film to get the skinny on the how of that.
What is of interest,
beyond the excellent job that Frank Sinatra did of playing an ex-soldier who
learned to love to kill, who gained self-respect and dignity during World War
II when he could freely shoot on sight anything that moved and nobody thought
anything of it and the good job Sterling Hayden did as the Sheriff also an
ex-soldier trying to figure out Baron’s motivation for shooting the President.
Baron was nothing but a flat-out psychopath who had no more feeling about what
he doing and who he was doing it to than the Germans he wasted in the war. I
have seen guys like that, saw them during my own military service, saw them at
the VA hospitals too when they completely broke down. With this caveat in
Baron’s case he was a hired killer, was being paid big money, half a million,
no mean sum back then, by unnamed sources to perform his task and blow the
country. Who was behind it and their motivation didn’t interest him.
In light of all the
controversy surrounding the Kennedy murder by an ex-Marine of unknown psychological
stability and a million theories about whether he acted alone or as part of
greater conspiracy that got me thinking about who might have hired Baron to do
the dastardly deed. That was a matter of some speculation among the hostages in
that ambush house and since it was the post-World War II 1950s and the heart of
the red scare Cold War night the obvious
possibility was the “commies” (although not the Cuban variety since their
revolution was several years away). But that did not end the possibilities. It
could have been some nefarious criminals, the mob, unhappy about their exposure
to public scrutiny. It might have been the military-industrial complex unhappy
about their contracts, or lack of them. It could not have been Lyndon Johnson
since he was not Vice President then but it could have been the sitting Vice
President. You know who I mean in 1954 if you are old enough. Yeah, Richard
Milhous Nixon, later to be a President and a known felon. Don’t tell me he wasn’t
mean and craven enough to order that hit. Don’t be naïve. Watch this film and
develop your own conspiracy theory.
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