The Jewish People’s struggle toward independence

Harry Zubkoff, eternally photogenic

One year ago, I began this blog to honor my father’s memory and stay connected with his family and friends, far and wide. Because Israel was near and dear to his heart, today, on Israel’s Independence Day (Yom Ha’atzmaut), I’m sharing two articles Harry wrote for his synagogue newsletter. He was 88 when he filed the original computer documents, dated January and March 2010. Most of us have never seen these articles, and some of us are learning lessons in Jewish history.

The relationships between the Jews and the Arabs in the Middle East did not start with the establishment of the State of Israel. Long before Israel came into existence in 1948, the Arabs were opposed to the growing presence of Jews in the area, known as Palestine. While Jews had been coming to Palestine in small numbers for the past 2,000 years, the numbers started increasing in the late 1800s, when oppression of Jews in Eastern Europe stimulated emigration to Palestine as one of the few places open to them.

When Theodore Herzl organized the Zionist movement into a formal, recognized group and convened the first Zionist Congress in 1897, emigration of Jews from Europe to Palestine picked up speed. Those Jews returning to Palestine were already talking about establishing a Jewish homeland there either under Turkish or German rule. Early in the 20th century, the Jews established a number of farming communities, most notably at Petach Tikvah, Rishon Letzion and other locations. They also started building a new city, Tel Aviv, just north of Jaffa. As the Jews built new facilities in Palestine, increasing numbers of Arabs came into the area, seeking to share in the new prosperity and opportunity provided by Jewish enterprise. By the time WWI started in 1914, there were about 600,000 Arabs and 100,000 Jews in Palestine.

The First World War put a stop to everything. It was hard on both the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine with outbreaks of disease, both cholera and typhus, affecting both populations. An Ottoman military government ruled the area and was detested by Jews and Arabs alike. The Ottoman Empire joined with Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Allies during the war, and many Jews fled the area to avoid being drafted into the Turkish army. A small group of Jews, however, organized an underground unit that provided critical intelligence information to the British which helped their invasion effort. Their help was but one of many reasons why Britain endorsed the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. At the same time Britain also promised the Arabs a state in the area in return for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans led by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia). 

In the spring of 1920, and again a year later in 1921, and eight years later in the summer of 1929, Arabs, who opposed the idea of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, organized simultaneous violent riots and pogroms against the Jews in a number of locations – Jaffa, Haifa, Hebron and Jerusalem. Throughout the decade of the 1920s, other sporadic acts of violence by Arabs against the Jews took place, but never rising to the level of riots or pogroms. As a result, the Jews organized a self-defense force, the Haganah, since the British did nothing to protect them. A major instigator of violence against the Jews was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the foremost Arab religious leader, who later in the 1930s became a Nazi collaborator.  

In the late 1920s and through the 1930s, Arab antagonism to the Jews increased dramatically. They claimed that Jewish immigration and their land purchases, though legitimate, were displacing and dispossessing Arabs, even though all the economic indicators showed that the Arabs were benefiting from Jewish investment in the area. In fact, the Arab standard of living in Palestine was higher than in any other area of the Middle East, and Arabs were flocking there in record numbers to share in the prosperity engendered by the Jews.

Anti-Jewish violence was fueled by lies which the Arabs trot out periodically, even to this day, that the Jews were planning to build a Synagogue at the Wailing Wall, and thereby encroach upon the Temple Mount compound and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The technique of telling lies about the Jews in order to incite violence against them was perfected and expanded by Joseph Goebbels. As Minster of “Propaganda and Enlightenment” for the German Third Reich, Goebbels made lying about the Jews into an art form. “If you tell a lie big enough,” he said, “and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Thus, the Germans came to believe that the Jews were sub-human and perpetrated the greatest atrocity in human history, and the best documented mass-murder rampage. The Third Reich was obliterated in World War II, but the technique of lying about Jews to incite violence against them lives on in the Arab world and in some European states, as well. 

A public opinion survey taken in Europe just a few years ago disclosed that Europeans view Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. This kind of public attitude is a direct result of lies repeated relentlessly about Israel’s attempts to defend itself against incessant attacks by Palestinians and other Arabs. The most outrageous lies are told about the Jews: for example, a British report stated that Jews were killing Palestinians in order to harvest their vital organs; a Norwegian report stated that Jews were killing Christian children in order to use their blood to bake matzah, etc. The reporters involved disregard the tenets of their own profession – a search for truth and verification. Indeed, when confronted with questions, they declare that they do not know what is true, only what they are told. In Arab schools today, children are taught from earliest childhood to hate Jews and that their highest goal is to kill Jews and become martyrs. In Arab newspapers Jews are insulted and derided every day so that the Arab “man in the street” is conditioned to hate all Jews everywhere.   

Despite Arab objections and British obstacles, Jewish immigration increased substantially in the 1930s as the Germans tightened the persecution screws and Eastern European countries did the same. The pivotal point came in 1936 when widespread riots took place, which were dubbed the Arab Revolt or, in some media reports, the Great Uprising. Fully half of the 5,000 residents of the Jewish quarter in Old Jerusalem were forced to flee and the few Jews remaining in Hebron after the killings of 1929 were also evacuated. The Arabs were not only warring against the Jews, but against the British, as well, and as many as a thousand or more Arabs were killed in the fighting. 

In the aftermath, the Peel Commission of 1937 came up with a plan to partition the remaining Mandate area into a small Jewish state and a much larger Arab state. (Remember, more than three quarters of the original Palestine Mandate had already been given to the Arabs for their state, now called Jordan.) Meanwhile, in a further response to the riots, the British began restricting immigration of Jews, despite the growing evidence that Germany had embarked on a program of killing all the Jews of Europe. These restrictions culminated in the British White Paper, issued in 1939, which limited the number of Jewish immigrants into Palestine to 15,000 a year for five years, after which any additional immigration would be subject to Arab approval. In effect, this meant no more would be allowed, a situation which was intolerable to the Jewish people, especially in view of Germany’s inexorable move toward a policy of genocide against them.

*****

Beginning in the mid-1930s and throughout the World War II period from 1939 to 1945, the Arab leadership in Palestine maintained ever stronger ties with the Nazi government in Germany. The wartime cooperation was exemplified by a “fatwa” (religious edict) issued by the Arab religious authority in Palestine for a holy war against England in May 1941. In a meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1941, Amin al-Husayni, leader of the Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine, discussed Britain’s endorsement of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine. Hitler promised him that he would eliminate the Jews from Palestine after Germany won the war in Europe. During the war, Amin al-Husayni served with the Nazis in the Waffen SS in Bosnia. 

Meanwhile, the Jews of Palestine organized a 5,000-man Brigade, which served with the British Army during the war in Europe. After the war, the Brigade succeeded in spiriting thousands of survivors of the Holocaust, the remnants of Europe’s Jewish population, out of that forsaken continent and smuggling them into Palestine, under the noses of the British, who had steadfastly refused to allow Jewish immigration. At the same time, the Jewish leaders in Palestine, the Yishuv, as it was known, decided to make a major effort to bring the Jewish refugees into Palestine. They organized a huge illegal immigration enterprise using small boats and operating in total secrecy. Many were intercepted by the British and detained in makeshift prison camps on the island of Cyprus, but even so, during 1946 and 1947, some 70,000 European Jewish refugees were smuggled into Palestine. 

As details of the full dimensions of the tragic slaughter of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis in pursuit of a “final solution” emerged, it had a major impact on public opinion around the world and inspired additional support for the Zionist cause. And Britain, which had restricted every attempt to bring Jewish refugees to the area, finally decided to return its Palestine Mandate to the newly organized United Nations. 

The UN recommended that the Palestine Mandate be split into three parts – a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a separate area to include Jerusalem and Bethlehem under UN control. Neither side liked this partition plan, but the Jewish Agency, the de-facto government of the Jews, accepted it and campaigned for it. The Arabs rejected it.

All the Arab leaders in the Arab League objected in principle to the right of the Jews to an independent state in Palestine. But the UN General Assembly voted for the Partition on Nov. 9, 1947, with 33 countries in favor, 13 opposed, and 10 abstaining. The official partition was scheduled to take effect as soon as the British withdrew from the area, on May 15, 1948.
   
Almost as soon as the UN Partition vote was announced, the Arabs started carrying out attacks against the Jewish population. The consulates of countries that had voted in favor of the Plan were attacked, bombs and Molotov cocktails were thrown at shops and cafes, synagogues were set afire and many businesses looted.

With the British withdrawing, there was no force responsible for maintaining law and order. In December 1947 and January 1948, more than 1,000 people had been killed and 2,000 wounded. By the end of March 1948, more than 2,000 dead and 4,000 wounded. 

On May 14, the day before the British Mandate expired, David Ben-Gurion announced to the world that the State of Israel had been established in accordance with the UN Partition Plan. As required by the UN’s resolution, Israel agreed to ensure that all its inhabitants would enjoy equal social and political rights, regardless of race, religion or gender.

You can find several other articles about Israel in previous posts on this blog.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman

Is the United States the world's policeman?

Author Harry M. Zubkoff

In May 1993, Harry wrote the following article and filed it on his computer with the title “DMR”, likely for Defense Media Review. That’s the name of the private newsletter he started after he retired from government in 1986. Harry’s professional bio called the newsletter “a summary analysis of media coverage of defense related news and commentaries.” The New York City Tribune printed a story about it, shown at bottom of this page. In 1989, Harry sold the newsletter to Boston University, but evidently still submitted articles. 

The most popular and widely repeated cliche of the past half century is that the United States cannot be the policeman. Now that the Cold War has ended, that cliche has become even more entrenched in the public consciousness. Every media pundit who comments on foreign policy and international security affairs has embraced it, as has almost every politician and every military spokesman. Indeed, it has been repeated so often that it has assumed the status of a mantra. Repeat after me – “the U.S. is not the world’s policeman, the U.S. is not ...” – etc., etc.    

But is this really a true expression of our national will, or of our national character? Are we really unable or unwilling to help right the world’s wrongs, or are we inhibited from expressing strong views on international conflicts by this omnipresent cliche? Maybe it’s time to review the phrase, and to reevaluate our policy, as well.    

The United States never really sought or wanted a position of world leadership. It was, so to speak, thrust upon us when we emerged from World War II as the one true superpower. Throughout the period of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was a superpower only militarily; in all other respects it was basically a third world country. With the end of the Cold War, the United States remains the only world superpower and Russia is still a third world country, as are all the states that once comprised the Soviet Union. But the end of the Cold War brought new credence to another aspect of international relations, the United Nations.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, the United Nations has become more like the effective international force for harmony that it was meant to be. At the same time, the need for an effective international agency has multiplied as the long repressed nationalistic fervor and ethnic hatreds of Eastern Europe have been revived. Throughout the Cold War period, the Soviets blocked the UN from playing any really meaningful role in world affairs. What’s more, the Soviets never helped the UN in those situations where the UN was allowed to play an active role. In every case in which the UN played its proper role, it was because the United States was a strong participant. There is no question that without the Soviet Union, the United Nations is a stronger force for good in the world community.

It is also true, unfortunately, that the UN cannot act at all without strong backing by the U.S. Like it or not, the U.S. is the leading power in the world, which brings with it the responsibility to use its power as a force for international stability. The question is, can we make such a contribution by using our power or by withholding it? And if we decide to use it, can we do so unilaterally, or must it be done in concert with others? These questions emerge as the most relevant with respect to the current situation in the former Yugoslavia. If ever there was a conflict anywhere that cried out for intercession, this is it. The outrageous acts by the participants, the entire concept of “ethnic cleansing”, the crimes against humanity, demand intercession.

The European nations, in whose immediate neighborhood these things are happening, profess to condemn the mass rapes, the mass deportations, the concentration camps, the tortures and the murders – all the horrors perpetrated in the name of ethnic cleansing. The best they are willing to do, however, at least until now, is to provide some humanitarian relief – food and medical supplies. They are unable to organize an effective military intervention, which would require the deployment of a substantial ground force. They are unwilling to make any substantial commitment of military force, even if the United States provides the lion’s share of such forces, including the essential element of air power. They would prefer to wait and see if a solution can be found through diplomacy, though all diplomatic efforts to date have failed.

The point is, all the European countries together have not thus far been able to stop the horror, either diplomatically or militarily. Can the U.S. do it alone? Of course not. If a military intervention is ever to be decided upon, and if it is ever to be successful, it must be an international effort under the auspices of the United Nations, and with the United States, as the most powerful nation, bearing the brunt of the burden. It seems as though the U.S. has become the epitome of the “Have gun, will travel” syndrome. Our leaders may be willing to participate in an international effort. The question is, are we the people willing to do so? Are we willing to act as the world’s policeman, even in concert with other nations? Or, to put it more bluntly, are we willing to become the world’s mercenaries?

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman 

I believe Harry continued to submit articles to Defense Media Review after he sold it in 1989.

Memories from the War, the Eisenhower years

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day (or Yom Hashoah) on May 5, I’m posting a note Harry wrote to an individual 50 years after his Army service ended. I found the note, plus another one on the Eisenhower years, in Harry’s computer files. I believe both are worth sharing for history’s sake. Harry’s loved ones will enjoy these photos from his time in Germany. (I will not post the gruesome Holocaust photos also in his collection.)






In every photo, Harry is on the left.

Holocaust reflections

In November 1996, Harry wrote to someone (unknown) with a few details on World War II and concentration camps. He had served with an Army mission to hunt down Nazi war criminals and gather evidence for the Nuremberg Trials. (You can read about his experience in an earlier post on this blog.)

When the Allies invaded the continent of Europe in June 1944, the Russians were already moving west toward Europe’s heartland. A great many Germans could see the handwriting on the wall and started making preparations for their inevitable defeat. The Russians were the first to come across the concentration camps, most of them in eastern Poland, and the word started to spread about the horrors they were finding. By the way, most people only hear about the major camps and believe there were only about a dozen or so. The truth is, there were several hundred camps, all of them competing to see who could kill the most people in the shortest period of time. Anyway, those Germans who could see ahead, wanted to avoid the Russians, realizing that the atrocities the German armies had inflicted on the Russians the previous year were about to be returned by a vengeful Russian army. Hundreds of thousands of them fled westward, hoping to be captured by the Americans.    

Starting in October/November 1944, about six months before the war ended, some Germans decided to hedge their bets, so to speak. They would pick the strongest or healthiest young Jews, mostly young women but some men, too, who could be expected to survive under the harsh conditions they would face until the war was over, and help them to “escape”. They would also provide shelter, such as it was, and some food – enough to keep them alive. The survivors could then testify, if need be, to the fact that their benefactors had saved their lives. True, it was a risk for them – they could perhaps be sent to the camps themselves if caught. But it was a calculated risk, and for most of them it paid off. It’s also true that there were some righteous people among them who acted for humane reasons, but not very many.    

When the invading armies got close, the Germans who were stationed at the camps almost all fled, tearing off their uniforms and joining the thousands of refugees streaming along the roads. Your grandmother was one of hundreds of similar survivors we found at that time, all with similar stories to tell. What had happened to them was terrible, worse than anyone in your generation can ever imagine. But what happened to them in the immediate aftermath of the war, at the hands of us Americans, was enough to break your heart. I don’t think that part of the story has ever been adequately told. You should ask your grandmother what happened after she was freed, and how she found her way to America.


The Eisenhower years
In March 2010, Harry jotted these thoughts to someone (again, unknown). He refers to Presidents Eisenhower and Truman, Secretary of Defense George Marshall, and Senator McCarthy. History buffs may especially appreciate this. (You can read about his experience during the McCarthy era in an earlier post on this blog.)

This is my understanding of Eisenhower’s treatment of Marshall. Senator McCarthy, whose claim to fame rested solely on his fiery anti-communism and his accusations that there were communists in the State Dept. and the Defense Dept. (though he never, never once, named one), attacked George Marshall. He called him a man “steeped in falsehoods” and accused him of harboring communists in the State and Defense Depts. and of catering to Russian requests, etc. etc.  Eisenhower, who owed his career to Marshall, and was now the Republican candidate for President, had ignored McCarthy while he was an Army officer, but as a political candidate he had to take a position. I got this from the speech-writing fraternity (a small world in the government, especially at State, Defense and White House).

While campaigning in Wisconsin, McCarthy’s home state, Ike had a prepared speech defending Marshall in strong terms against McCarthy’s charges. But, when it came time to use it, he gave the speech but left out all references to Marshall. He did what all politicians do, he backed away from a fight he thought he couldn’t win – and to hell with principle. The newspapers all commented on it, and I remember that TIME magazine especially gave him a hard time about it. But, what the hell, he won the election and became President – twice, two terms. But he could have stopped McCarthy a lot earlier. As it was, McCarthy figured he had nothing to fear from Eisenhower, so he went ahead to accuse the Army of harboring communists and started holding hearings. That’s when Eisenhower finally decided to stand up and fight – now he was President. Those famous hearings were televised and drew the biggest TV audience ever – up to that time – 1953, I think. McCarthy was finally discredited, later reprimanded by the Senate, and died in disgrace.

But Ike never defended Marshall. He resigned as Sec/Def in 1951, while Ike was campaigning for Pres. The scuttlebutt was that Truman wanted him to stay on with the expectation that Ike would also ask him to stay on if he were elected, but Marshall declined and – get this – because he did not want to put Eisenhower in the embarrassing position of deciding whether to keep him on or not.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman

Are the media doing their job?

Author Harry M. Zubkoff

As readers of this blog know by now, writing was a huge part of Harry’s life, and he saved a lot – letters, emails, articles, poems, stories, novels and more. Much of what I’ve posted in the past year, I found in his paper files, organized neatly in about a dozen boxes and in folders on his shelves. Starting in the 1990s, he also saved writings in computer files. Those documents, too, wow me with more about my dad – his interests, knowledge, experiences, and feelings from both professional and personal aspects of his life. I hope you continue to enjoy these discoveries, too.

Harry wrote this piece on Dec. 6, 1996, likely for a publication. I was especially struck with his comments on our environment, Vietnam, and gun control. See what you think.

The American Constitution begins with this statement: We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.    

These purposes are listed not in descending order of importance, but rather as matters of equal importance. This paper will concentrate on the fourth listed goal – to provide for the common defense. (The American spelling of “defense” has superseded the British spelling.) Surely this is among the most important purposes of the Union, and the “common defense” in modern parlance has come to be known as the national security.

Most Americans have only a vague idea of what is meant by “national security”. They know that we have an Army, a Navy, an Air Force, and a Marine Corps, but informal surveys disclose that fewer than one in a million knows what the roles and missions of these armed forces are. Which of them, for example, is responsible for defending the nation against a surprise attack by submarine launched ballistic missiles? Or by land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles? Or which of them, if any, is responsible for the research and development of nuclear weapons, or of laser weapons?

And how many would recognize the different uniforms the military services wear or the various insignia they display? According to random questions asked on college campuses just after the Gulf War, I would guess that fewer than one in ten million Americans – that’s one in ten million – would know the difference between an Army officer and a Marine Corps officer, or between an Air Force officer and a Naval officer, if he saw them all walking down the street in their respective uniforms. And that, I submit, is a sad state of affairs.    

This level of ignorance extends to some of the most important public policy questions confronting our nation today. What size military forces should we build and what should the proper numbers of men and women allocated to each of the services be? What kinds of weapons systems should we develop and procure? What is the nature of the threat confronting us over the next ten years, and how should we prepare to meet it? How much of our national budget should we spend on military preparedness? Of course, these are complicated questions, and even the experts can disagree on the answers, but if there is one thing we all agree about in this country, it is that the people must be participants in the policy-making process. The problem is that they cannot participate if they have no foundation of knowledge on which to base their decisions.    

And there’s the rub. Who’s at fault here? Is it the government for failing to disseminate the necessary information on which informed decisions can be taken? Partly, although the government is constrained in many ways from providing more than the most basic information to the people. The main source of information for the public at large is the giant industry collectively known as the media. And the media, or the one small piece of the media that any individual looks to for information about public policies, is inadequate for the task.   

I don’t know how to solve this problem, though I have some suggestions. To begin with, the public policy quandaries and dilemmas confronting the country are extremely complex, and no single element of the media has the resources to cover them all and to explain them all to the public – not the wealthiest of the newspaper conglomerates, not the weekly news magazines, or even the broadcast networks with all the facilities at their disposal. I have stated many times and still believe that the major responsibility for keeping informed about public affairs lies with each individual; that only by reading widely in the various elements of the media – newspapers, magazines and broadcasts – could you be well enough informed to make decisions on public policies. But study after study has shown that the great majority of individuals in this huge, diverse society of ours spends less than 30 minutes a day on the news, and most of that time is spent on television news, which may be entertaining but is only marginally informative.   

What to do about it? I believe public policy studies should be incorporated in the teaching curricula of all public schools, elementary through secondary through college levels, so that all Americans will have a solid grounding in the public policy questions that the various levels of our government must deal with. And foremost among those questions is the provision of national security.    

So, what is national security? 
In my view, the national security embraces three major aspects of national activity: first, the nation’s military and defense policies; second, the nation’s foreign policies; and third, the nation’s economic policies. These three components are inextricably intertwined; you can’t have one without the other.                

The military and defense policy component of national security is covered only superficially by the media. The recruiting of men and women for military service, for example, once a subject of national concern and debate because of the draft, has subsided in the national consciousness since the draft ended in the mid-1970s. To this day, however, the implications of the all-volunteer service are not well understood in all their ramifications, and their devastating effect in terms of isolating our “mercenary” forces from the mainstream of our society is never discussed in the media. If the public truly understood what is happening, how a wholly new and culturally different element of our society is taking root in our midst, I suspect there might be a renewed effort to reinstitute conscription in order to maintain a genuine citizen’s army that would more nearly reflect our societal values.

Yet, the only media discussions about manpower and personnel problems take place when a cheating scandal emerges at a military school or a sex scandal at a military base, which places a skewed picture of military life before the public and further distances the military from the general public. News coverage of foreign policy matters is scanty, at best, unless an international crisis occurs. Unfortunately, international crises emerge quite often, but for a citizenry that needs to stay informed, the only time international affairs receive intense coverage is when a crisis develops and surprises the public. But crises do not develop and explode overnight. Every international event that assumed the proportions of a crisis since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War was foreseeable.

What’s worse, not only were they foreseeable, they were actually foreseen and predicted. And, more to the point, they could very possibly have been averted or blunted had the media been more aggressive in informing the public, and had the government been more willing to act before public opinion could be mobilized instead of waiting for the full-fledged crisis to emerge.

The economic component of national security is even less well-covered than is defense or foreign policy. It is generally recognized that international trade agreements are important elements of our economy, but how many are aware of the impact of such agreements on the security of our country? For example, for decades the Defense Department tried to control the export of sensitive technologies, but only after Iraq invaded Kuwait did the public suddenly become aware of the need to prevent some countries from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Even today, with the world’s expanded awareness of the danger involved in allowing Saddam Hussein, or any of the other rogue states such as Libya and Iran, to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, there seems little doubt that he and they continue to pursue them clandestinely. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait exposed still another aspect of our economic national security – our increasing dependence on the Middle East sources of energy. In fact, a great many other countries around the world are even more dependent on Middle East oil supplies, which make the integrity of the entire region a matter of international security. 

A huge and complex problem
There are other elements of national security seldom mentioned in the media, but which will surely affect us all in the coming years. There is a problem confronting us so huge and so complex that its dimensions are almost impossible to describe – the management of our planetary environment.  We are, without a doubt, poisoning the planet, and the consequences will ultimately be disastrous, but the media are doing very little to keep the public apprised of the steady erosion of the environment. The destruction of our tropical rain forests is taking place at an ever increasing pace with a foreseeable impact on the ozone layer. The explosion of the world population is a phenomenon to which no attention is paid. 

From the beginning of history to 1830, we reached the one-billion mark. The second billion took 100 years, from 1830 to 1930. We added 3 billion more in the next 60 years, from 1930 to 1990.  The next billion will be complete only 11 years after that, in 2001. The pressures generated by an expanding world population can be predicted, with the developing countries competing with the developed countries for a larger share of the increasingly scarce natural resources. And, not the least of the international environmental problems facing humanity, the widespread distribution of toxic and nuclear waste materials is slowly rendering substantial areas of the planet uninhabitable.
 
If you don’t think that’s a national security problem, you’re living in another world with the media, which seem completely oblivious to this growing catastrophe.

More media failures
Let’s just mention a few other areas of enormous importance in which the media are failing to keep the public informed. Take the question of arms control and disarmament; the public generally believes that, since the Cold War has ended, arms control is no longer a priority consideration and may even be a moot question. The fact is, however, that missiles with nuclear warheads are still aimed at targets in the United States and the process of dismantling them is on hold. Moreover, the nuclear materials and other essential components of warheads are disappearing from Russian storage, with their ultimate destinations the subject of considerable speculation. Surely there is a threat to our national security involved.    

Take the question of our national defense industries: With the end of the Cold War, the need for new weapons systems has understandably declined, and as procurement contracts shrink, the industrial arsenal of democracy also shrinks. In order to stay afloat, defense industries are realigning themselves, and mergers are the order of the day. Where once we had dozens of large corporations and hundreds of smaller concerns in the defense business, today there are only a half dozen major corporations and a few dozen smaller ones left.

Hundreds of thousands of skilled workers have lost their jobs in this industry in the last five years. That’s the bad news. The good news is that many of these industries and skills are becoming engaged in other enterprises that are changing America’s lifestyles even as we speak. But how much of the media and of the public are truly aware of the tremendous technological revolution taking place right now? And how many are aware that the explosion of electronic wizardry, from computers to the Internet, is the direct result of the military research and development process?     

Look at just one weapon – the B-2 Bomber: Study after study has confirmed the fact that the public derives most of its news from television, so how have the networks covered the B-2 Stealth bomber? This case provides an illustration of how the networks distort the news and paint a curious picture of events. The public roll-out took place in November 1988, on the 25th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. All three major networks focused on the cost of this airplane, varyingly described as ranging from 250 million dollars to 500 million dollars. Not a word was mentioned about the capabilities of the plane or the purpose it was meant to serve. When the plane carried out its initial taxiing tests in July 1989, the networks again fixated on the cost and spoke derisively about its ability to travel six miles on the ground at a cost of a half billion dollars. They were all uninterested in discussing any substantive issues involving the advanced technology represented. 

Indeed, television will not or cannot talk about complicated events or problems unless it can present pictures to accompany the discussion. This means that no intelligent discussion reaches the great mass of the public on one of the most potent weapons systems ever developed. The fact is, this bomber, and the F-117 Stealth fighter, are together rewriting the rules of air warfare with technological advances that are fully as impressive in the field of aeronautics as the nuclear warhead is in the field of physics. But the media, and consequently the public, are completely unaware of the developmental marvels involved.                 

Do the media influence public policy?
There is more than one answer to that question. The first answer is one that the media do not like but that I believe to be mostly true. I believe the media has little or no impact on the formulation of public policies. Let’s look at a little history to document my view. The military and a substantial segment of the public believe that the media was responsible for losing the Vietnam War. They look at the news reports and they truly believe that the media was against the war from the start and in the end persuaded the public to turn against the war which, in turn, forced the government to settle for a phony peace and get out.    

Every objective study of the media’s performance during those years, however, proves differently. Actually, the media supported the war, from the time President Eisenhower first sent Americans to Vietnam in the mid-1950s, after the French were defeated and left. It was not until the American public turned against the war and began mass demonstrations on campuses all over the country and in Washington in the late 1960s that the media began opposing the continuing war effort. Helping to turn the public and the media against the war was the opposition of a number of congressmen and other prominent public figures. And while it is true that the government bowed to the pressure of public opinion in getting out of the war, it is not true that the media played a significant role in shaping that public opinion. Indeed, it was public opinion that shaped the media’s performance. 

Of course, other factors were at play, as well. One was the fact that President Johnson’s role in escalating the war was based on a lie – the incident in the Tonkin Gulf never happened and the lie was subsequently exposed. Another was the increasing number of casualties we were suffering. Still another was the failure to enunciate a clear declaration of policy by the President, and the seemingly incomprehensible conduct of the war itself under the leadership of Secretary McNamara.

Only in the last two or three years, two decades after the war ended, has McNamara finally confessed to the fact that the war was unwinnable under the rules he himself laid down. But it was widely known from the early days of the war that it could not be won under the conditions imposed by him and the President. The lessons drawn from that sad experience were directly reflected in the successful conduct of the Persian Gulf War five years ago, when victory was the goal, clearly stated, and the forces assigned to the task were adequate to carry out the strategic and tactical actions involved.    

There is plenty of other evidence to support my contention that the media has little effect on the formulation of public policies. To put it another way, the policy makers at the top levels of our government make their decisions based on other considerations, not on media support or opposition. The media, for example, was generally opposed to sending ground troops into Bosnia. The President did it, anyway. The media, too, was generally opposed to the NAFTA agreement; the government entered into that agreement, anyway. The Democratic President acted despite strong opposition from his own party and succeeded only with the support of the Republicans in the Congress. And take the elections of 1992 and 1996; despite a drumbeat of media comment about the President’s character, and poll after poll showing that the public did not fully trust him, he was still elected. I can only conclude that the media has little effect on the public itself, as well as on the policies that the government adopts.   

Measuring media performance
But let’s go on to another way of looking at the media’s impact. This involves looking at how the government’s policy makers view the media and measure the media’s performance. While it is true, as I noted earlier, that the public gets most of its news and opinions from television, this is not true for the decision makers. Most high-level officials cite CNN reports, which has emerged since the Persian Gulf War as a major source of news on breaking stories, but they rely on the print media for in-depth coverage. Now this is an interesting twist on the impact of the media on public policies. The CNN and television news reports often break a story, which is to say that they report on a news event with whatever pictures are available, thus providing a sort of headline service. Then the print media go after the story in a sort of feeding frenzy to obtain every possible scrap of information and conjecture they can get. Thus, TV has a multiplier effect by provoking the print media to pursue stories in ways that TV cannot. And it is the print media that the decision makers read and reread as they examine all the ramifications of the policy options open to them before they come to a final decision.

To be sure, they take public opinion into account in the decision-making process, and it is true that they would like to have public support for their decisions, but it is not the major consideration in the momentous decisions of our times. Sometimes, Presidents or Administrations or even the Congress will do what they think is “right” for the country, despite contrary public opinion.

Gun control is a case in point. Both the electronic and the print media have strongly supported gun control for the last 30 years, ever since President Kennedy’s assassination. What’s more, every poll taken since 1968, when both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed, has indicated that as much as 70 percent of the public favored gun control. Yet, every Administration and every Congress voted against gun control, despite public opinion and media pressure, until President Clinton and the 1992 Congress enacted the crime bill and the Brady bill. In fact, the 1994 Congress started agitating against gun control and wanted to repeal the Brady bill and the part of the crime bill prohibiting the sale of certain weapons, despite growing public and media support for those measures. And the 1996 Congress is again threatening to take these actions, despite public opinion and the certainty of a Presidential veto. So, I repeat, where’s the impact?                            

Power of the media
The real impact, I submit, lies in the power of the media to spark a national debate and to stimulate a national discussion about the problems confronting our country and our policy makers. This, actually, is what the media is supposed to do – to report on governmental activities and other current events and thus to keep the people informed. The real debate and discussion takes place in the Congress, which, through its system of conducting hearings in order to obtain information leading to legislation, keeps the media occupied in conveying that information to the public.

So, information takes a circular path; the media breaks a story usually with a minimum of information to start, followed by other media pursuing the story and obtaining additional information, followed by governmental pursuit of the story in its deliberations, followed by media elaboration of the story based on information disclosed by the government, and so forth and so on ad infinitum – or until the media in its wisdom decides that the story has been milked dry and goes on to repeat the cycle with another story. The life-cycle of a “big front page story” varies from a few days to a few weeks at most for 99 percent of them; only once in a great while will a story last longer.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman

'The Jerusalem Affair' still applies today

Author Harry Zubkoff

When it came to Israel, Harry used to mention that certain news media got their stories all wrong. He had a chance to make stories right in articles he wrote for his synagogue newsletter. He also enjoyed sending articles from his trusted news sources via emails to family and friends. In a way, he was our trusted news source.

Harry wrote the following article in April 2010. It makes sense to share it now because the circumstances when he wrote it six years ago are amazingly similar to those today. His comments still apply, too, except Secretary Kerry is in the place of Secretary Clinton. 

I took the photo in the graphic below when I visited Israel, coincidentally in April 2010.

A funny thing happened on the way to the peace process. Well, funny may not be the right adjective. Looking back (it was just a month ago, in March) it seems surreal. It started with VP Joe Biden scheduling a trip to Israel advertised as an effort to reassure the Israelis of America’s continuing support and friendship for the Jewish state. Such an effort was deemed advisable because the warm relationship between the two countries that had existed during the Bush administration was obviously deteriorating. Mr. Biden’s good-will trip, however, ended with the most serious crisis in American-Israeli relations in several decades. It was triggered by an announcement of Israeli government approval of a 1,600-unit apartment project in East Jerusalem’s Ramat Shlomo neighborhood. 
   
There are other Israeli housing units in this part of East Jerusalem, as well as Arab housing units, although the Arabs regard this area as “disputed territory”, which means its status has yet to be negotiated. Of course, the Arabs regard all of Israel as disputed territory and have thus far even refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself. As for this area of Jerusalem, populated largely by a community of Orthodox Jews, it complies fully within Israeli policy guidelines, and both the U.S. and the Arabs were aware of it. In fact, PM Netanyahu, who back in October had announced a 10-month freeze on settlement building in order to bring Palestinians back to negotiating, had specifically excluded Jerusalem from the freeze. Jerusalem, he had declared, is not a settlement. Secretary Hillary Clinton had understood and accepted his declaration and even praised his “unprecedented concessions” in imposing a temporary construction freeze on settlements. 
   
There is no doubt that the announcement of this building project while VP Biden was visiting was incredibly stupid, and PM Netanyahu delivered an abject apology, both privately and publicly. But was it a gaffe or an insult to America, so grave as to precipitate a genuine crisis and a permanent rift in American-Israeli relations? The unusually harsh language that Ms. Clinton and the State Dept. used would seem to indicate so. State Dept. spokesman Philip Crowley made it clear that Israel’s actions “undermined American interests”, and he reported that Secretary Clinton now felt that it was up to Israel to show that it was committed to our bilateral relationship not through words but through specific actions. America’s angry reaction to this incident has also emboldened the Palestinians to back away from the peace talks once again – the indirect peace talks, since they simply refuse to negotiate directly with Israelis.

Interestingly, American spokesmen have never spoken so harshly to the Arabs or the Palestinians as they have to their “friends and allies”. Some of the most knowledgeable observers of American political and diplomatic behavior have noted that the escalation of tensions with Israel is not simply the result of a misunderstanding or of events spinning out of control, as sometimes happens unexpectedly. On the contrary, it seems to be premeditated and calculated, and if it had not been this housing project announcement, another excuse would have been found. It seems obvious to them that the current American policymakers look upon the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as undermining American interests in the Middle East and that Israeli housing projects are impeding the peace process.
   
So it all comes back to the so-called peace process. America sees it as in its best interests for the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs to agree on a peaceful solution to their conflict by establishing a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli state. Forgotten is the fact that more than three-quarters of the Mandate land that the League of Nations had designated for a Jewish state had already been given to the Arabs for their own state. That state is now called Jordan. Overlooked, also, is the fact that the Arabs have consistently refused to establish another state alongside Israel, a fact that American policymakers seemingly cannot grasp. What the Arabs of Palestine want is the elimination of the state of Israel, another fact that American policymakers seemingly cannot grasp. To look upon a housing project in Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel, as an obstacle to peace seems very strange when dozens of rockets launched by the Arabs of Gaza against Israeli civilian targets do not raise similar concerns.      
   
The American policy rests on a faulty assumption. It is not settlements, construction, or housing projects that are obstacles to peace. It is the Arab refusal to negotiate directly with Israel over the terms of any agreement; it is their resolute refusal to accept the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state in the region; it is their unwillingness to accept the idea of any Jews residing in any area that might someday be a part of their state; and it is their unwillingness to establish a state alongside the Jewish state. Over the years they’ve had many opportunities to do so and always refused. Three times they have gone to full-scale war to eradicate the Jewish state instead. Each time they lost. They have persisted in dozens of smaller-scale hostilities and lost those, too. And still, there are those among us who continue in the mistaken assumption that Israel is sabotaging the peace process, and that if Israel will only stop building new apartments or expanding settlements, peace will ensue. 
   
Over the years America and Israel have devoted time and effort into building a strong and mutually beneficial relationship. The freedom that the peoples of these two countries enjoy has provoked those who cannot abide the notion of liberty to perpetrate acts of terrorism against them both. Israel and America are opposed by the same enemies. In the face of a common enemy, the two countries have formed a union of joint effort in military training and intelligence gathering and sharing, and close cooperation in many areas of research and weapons development that have strengthened both. This is what makes the U.S. attitude toward Israel so puzzling to Middle East analysts. It is sad but true that Israel has only one friend in the world today – the United States. Without this powerful friend, Israel cannot long survive in an unfriendly world. And this friendship rests on a foundation that is no longer firm and solid, as it has for the past half century. To preserve and strengthen this friendship for the next half century and beyond is our first priority now.

Copyright 2016
Elaine Blackman
   

‘Invasion’ – a '60s newsroom story

Author Harry M. Zubkoff

Immigration is a hot topic today, as always, and the theme of Harry’s fiction below. If it looks familiar, you may remember his brief “opinion” piece on this blog last November. The version below, I later discovered, tells the full story. 

Harry’s setting is one he found familiar – the newsroom. He wrote the story, like many of his others, when he lived in Greenbelt, MD (1949 to 1963), where he spent a lot of time volunteering at the city newspaper office. His involvement there and in other Greenbelt activities probably gave him excellent fodder for his imagination. (See one example in the news clipping at the bottom of this page.)   

This is the last of Harry’s fictional stories I’ll post for now because others are too long for a blog; some run 50 pages or so. He also left behind several unpublished novels.  




The Managing Editor was still reasonably young, although his sandy hair was balding on top and he could no longer read copy without his black-rimmed glasses. But he didn’t need his glasses to note with appreciation every movement of his secretary’s ripe figure as she approached his desk.

“Here it is, Chief,” she announced triumphantly as she slapped an envelope down on his desk. “It’s marked Personal for you,” she added, “and there’s no return address, but there’s no doubt who it’s from.”

His heart beat a little faster as he fingered the envelope, absently watching her hips as she walked away. Then he swiveled his chair to face the window, carefully adjusted his glasses, and opened the envelope.

The letter was handwritten, unusual for a reporter like Larry. He must be hiding somewhere without his typewriter, the thought flashed through his mind as he started reading.

* * * * *

Chief,

When you first assigned me to do a story on the boom in apartment buildings, I was uncertain how to tackle it. We’ve had dozens of stories in the Real Estate Sections during the past year, so there seemed to be little I could add in terms of construction starts or building plans.

Every major city in the country is going through the same experience, with modern high-rise monstrosities coming to dominate the skyline from coast to coast. These apartments aren’t inexpensive, either, with rentals ranging from over $100 a month for efficiencies to several hundred a month for multiple bedroom units.

Frankly, I found it hard to believe that there were enough people around to fill these buildings. And I found it doubly hard to believe that there were enough people around who could afford these prices. The more I thought about it, the more it struck me that no one had ever written a story about the people who live in all those new apartments. Oh, sure, there have been planning studies, in statistical terms, of the impact of apartment dwellers in a given area – on the road facilities and traffic patterns, the shopping facilities, the employment markets, etc. But how many human interest stories have you seen? How many stories about people – who they are, where they come from, what they do?

Well, that was my gimmick. I decided to peg the story on the “population explosion”; but first I had to do a little research to find out just how fast the population is growing in order to tie it in with the number of apartments being built. That’s when I started running into trouble. I kept checking and rechecking my figures, but somehow they didn’t make sense to me.

Consider, for example, these statistics. China, which is and always has been the fastest growing nation in the world, had about 70 million people at the time of Christ. If the population had been increasing at the rate of only 1% per year since then, it would amount to something like 21 million billion today (which would come to 13 Chinese per square foot of the Earth). Obviously, this is not the case. The most reliable estimates put the Chinese population at about 700 million today, which means that their rate of growth has been a very small fraction of 1%.

Let’s bring this a little closer to home. Europe, throughout the period of its greatest growth in the 19th century, never exceeded a growth rate of 1%. In fact, between 1800 and 1950, the population of Western Europe went from 125 million to 310 million, an average increase of 0.6% annually. These figures represent the norm, against which all other statistics must be measured. With that in mind, does it make any sense at all to believe the United States Census figures? Look at these incredible statistics for some of our states. Between 1900 and 1960 the population of Arizona increased by 958.5%; California by 958.1%; Florida by 836.1%; Nevada by 578.6%; and so forth and so on for a total United States increase of 135.5%. Not only are those figures incredible, they are absolutely unbelievable.

I know I’m taking the long way around, Chief, but just bear with me a few more minutes. You must realize the state I was in when these figures finally registered with me. The statistics are based on a head count by official census takers, so they must be right. And obviously, the people are here. So the question I was stuck with was – where are all those people coming from?

Now seriously, have you ever stopped to consider that question? Has anyone? Well, I have – and what’s more, after racking my brains over it for a long time, I think I’ve come up with the answer. The fact is, I don’t think they’re people at all. Have you been reading all the reports about flying saucers lately? Well, judging by the frequency of these reports, it seems to me that somebody “up there” is running a shuttle service to Earth – that there’s a mass immigration taking place right under our noses.

Now wait a minute, Chief, don’t flip your lid just yet. I know it sounds wild, but I ask you again, stop and consider. Even a hard-nose editor like you can’t help but be impressed by these statistics.

The astronomers estimate that there are about 6,000 million galaxies, like our own Milky Way, within range of our 200-inch telescopes. (There are probably millions more that we haven’t seen yet.) They also estimate that our galaxy contains about 30,000 million stars, most of them bigger than our Sun and each of them with its own family of planets. If each of the galaxies contains approximately the same number of stars, and the truth is, most of the galaxies are considerably bigger than our own, then we can conservatively guess that there are something like 180 million million stars out there. Multiply that figure by ten and you get a rough idea of how many planets there are. Now with all those trillions and trillions of planets, literally more numerous than the grains of sand on all the beaches of all our oceans, there must be at least a few on which life similar to ours has evolved. A few – well, let’s put it this way … If only one planet in a million had life like ours, there would be billions; if only one in a billion had life like ours, there would still be millions. With odds like that, it seems quite reasonable to assume that life like ours has evolved elsewhere and that they have discovered our existence.

And if they’re anything at all like us, they must think the grass is greener here, and maybe it is, at that. Anyway, I think they’re coming here, probably from many different places, landing secretly on dark nights, printing their own money (which accounts for inflation that’s taking place) and setting themselves up in residence. Maybe they look upon the Earth as a vacation capital of the universe. After all, viewed through their eyes, we’re probably good for a lot of laughs the way we behave towards each other. Or maybe they look upon us as a horrible example and are trying to figure out how to avoid making the same mistakes themselves.

By now you probably think I’ve gone off the deep end, and in a way I don’t blame you. But you’ve come this far with me so you might as well hear me out. Like any reporter, as soon as I’d make the assumption, I started to check it out. First, I spent some time just observing the people (creatures?) living in one recently completed luxury apartment house. The pattern of their lives struck me immediately. To begin with, they all seem to be fairly young people. The men are all handsome; the women all beautiful; everyone well-dressed at all times. The men play a lot of golf; the women a lot of bridge; and none of them seem to have to work for a living. Now I ask you, Chief, is that the way normal human beings live? Of course not.

I noticed, too, that there were a lot of single young men and women living there, with no visible means of support. How can young people afford to live like that? If they’re human, they can’t. There was also a complete absence of children. A lot of pets, but no children! How do you account for that? It’s just not human, that’s all.

In probing deeper, I learned that almost all of them were college graduates, so I decided to visit a few campuses to see what I could learn. Well, Chief, that’s where I struck pay dirt. Without exception, all the campuses (including some of our most famous universities) have been literally transformed into an alien environment. I could see at once that in their younger years these aliens bear only a superficial resemblance to human beings. Oh, now and then you see a human being, but for the most part, the students are obviously aliens. They go to school, apparently, to learn something of our language and our culture, but among themselves they speak incomprehensible jargon and have a culture which is decidedly un-human. Everything about them is different – their dress, their speech, the way they walk or their “gait,” if you will, the way they sit or slouch – everything which goes to make up our “human qualities” is missing. And get this, Chief, they’re also either sexless, or their sex is interchangeable – at least, in most cases, it’s impossible to distinguish between the sexes. I think what happens is that about the time they graduate, give or take a year or two, they undergo a metamorphosis and emerge into something which bears a much closer resemblance to human beings, even to the extent of assuming a gender, although exactly how the change takes place is still obscure.

In any event, Chief, I think I have established a prime facie case for my thesis, but I can understand that you may feel that I still need more concrete evidence. The trouble is, something’s wrong. There’s an old jungle that keeps running through my mind. It describes my situation, in a way, and it goes like this:

I took her to the movies,
I took her to a show,
I took her almost every place
A boy and girl could go.
I took her out to dinner,
I took her out to tea,
When suddenly I realized
That she’d been taking me!

You see, Chief, during the last couple of weeks I’ve had the most uncanny sensation that I was being watched. Just this morning I found out for sure. I spotted them, two of them, everywhere I went, and I suddenly realized that all this time, while I’ve been observing them, they’ve had me under observation, too. And suddenly I’m scared. That’s why I’m writing this letter, to bring you up to date on my findings, just in case. As soon as I mail it, I’m going to drop out of sight. I’ll be holed up in a friend’s place (she’s a very good friend) at 1121 Park Road. The phone number is 221-4573, if you want to reach me for anything. But please, Chief, you’re the only one I’ve told and I ask you to keep it strictly between us until the heat’s off.

As ever,
Larry

* * * * *

When he had finished reading he sighed and swiveled back to his desk. Almost reluctantly his finger reached out to punch the intercom button.

“Call the Security Squad,” he told his secretary. “He’s at 1121 Park Road.”

The fourth one this month, he thought sadly, and more of them learning about us all the time. And yet, he consoled himself, it’s still the easiest way to settle a new planet with the fewest possible casualties to the poor natives.

THE END

Copyright 2016

Elaine Blackman

According to this 1962 article, Harry was chairman of Greenbelt, MD’s, 25th Anniversary events. I was 10, but don’t remember. I do vaguely remember the NASA tour mentioned in the article; Greenbelt residents are NASA’s fortunate neighbors. (Special thanks to Paul Kasko, the photographer’s son, for sharing this and other clippings surprisingly absent from Harry’s files.)

'A Big Idea' -- a short story

Author Harry M. Zubkoff

When I first discovered Harry’s fictional stories, I told you there were dozens. Since then, here’s what kept happening: I’d pick up a story, begin to read it, and realize I’d read it before – but with a different title. It turns out he wrote two or three versions of most of his stories. In the case of the story below, he had begun a fourth version – dated Feb. 2, 1997 – and filed it on his computer. For this blog, I chose his third version, apparently from the early ’90s, when he lived in Silver Spring, MD. The first, by the way, looks quite old, likely from the 1940s. With each version, Harry changed details and scenarios.

Times were tough. I’d been looking for a full-time job ever since I left the Army six months ago. I’d had my fill of flying helicopters in the Gulf War and did not want to do that anymore. It’s not that I didn’t like flying; it’s just that military life requires the kind of total commitment that I was not prepared to make. Something like getting married, I suspect, another commitment I was not prepared to make. Maybe someday, but not yet.

Anyway, evenings and weekends I’d been waiting on tables at Louie’s Place, while waiting for some responses to resumes I’d sent out. Waiting tables paid the rent and kept food on the table, but it was not exactly the lifetime career I wanted, either. So I was getting kind of desperate when I saw this ad in the Sunday paper; it looked like the perfect job for me.

Universal Advertising Agency, Inc. wants someone with the four “I’s” – INITIATIVE, IMAGINATION, INGENUITY AND IDEAS. Apply in person at the U.A.A. Bldg., Monday morning at 8:00 A.M.

So the following morning I took more care than usual in fixing my hair, which I’d allowed to grow almost shoulder length since I’d put away my uniform. I wore my navy blue blazer, with matching gray skirt and white silk blouse, put on the quietly colorful silk scarf, and hurried on over to the U.A.A. Building downtown to report for work. Well, about a hundred other people also showed up, and it struck me that quite a few of them were my age, in their mid-to-late twenties. Some of them looked to me like they had served at least one hitch in the Army, too, and maybe had also seen some action in Desert Storm.

One man, in particular, caught my eye. He had dark brown hair and grey-green eyes, the kind of eyes I wish I had, the kind of “how deep is the ocean” eyes that Irving Berlin must have had in mind when he wrote that marvelous love song. This man had an air of cool competence about him that set him apart, or maybe it was just his eyes that excited me. I was wondering if he, too, had fought in the Persian Gulf War, when a guy who looked like a retired Colonel, or maybe a drill sergeant, rounded us all up and put us in a little conference room about the size of the grand ballroom at the Hilton. B.B. (read Big Boss) Peckham himself addressed us. His picture had been in the papers often enough, a handsome former professional football player who had not yet gone to fat like some of them do after they stop playing. He had invested a big part of his multi-million dollar salary in U.A.A. and had made it into one of the most prestigious public relations firms in the country. Which goes to show that football players can be as brilliant in business as they are on the playing field. Some of them, anyway.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he spoke in a mellow baritone voice, “I won’t waste words. What we do here is produce and sell IDEAS. IDEAS, ladies and gentlemen, which provide the advertising lubricant that turns the wheels of progress.” He stopped to let the idea of IDEAS sink in a while before he continued. “I am prepared,” he went on, “to pay fifty thousand dollars a year as starting salary, with generous bonuses from time to time depending on performance, to the person or persons who qualify. In order to qualify, you must earn a thousand dollars as quickly as you can, hopefully in one week, certainly not more than two. Now wait,” he raised his hand to quiet a rising murmur, “hear me out. These are my rules. You start with nothing. No drawing money out of your savings; no gambling, no begging, borrowing, stealing, or accepting gifts. No investments in stocks and making a killing. Nothing illegal. No dangerous experiments. No pawning, mortgaging or selling personal possessions. You must prove that you earned the money, every dime of it, legitimately.

Now then, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you to display initiative, ingenuity and imagination. These are the attributes I stress to start with, though there are others, equally important, on which you will be judged, as well.” He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “The IDEAS are in here, ladies and gentlemen,” he continued, “all you have to do is bring them out. Those of you who wish to participate should fill out an employment application and leave it with my secretary before you go. Then, if you make any progress toward our goal, report to me personally a week from today. At that time I will evaluate your progress and decide how or whether to proceed. That is all, ladies and gentlemen. Good day and good luck.”

Well, most of the people were groaning or swearing as they left the room, but at least a dozen or more of us, including the guy with the g-g eyes, just stood there looking at each other and thinking. The way I figured, what did I have to lose by trying? And anyway, maybe I could make a thousand bucks and get the job, too.

By the time I got home, I had a dozen ways figured out, but, just to be on the safe side, I bought a morning newspaper to look at the want ads and send out some more resumes. When you stop to think of it there are probably dozens of ways to make a thousand bucks and still stay within B.B. Peckham’s rules. For example, you could make some lucrative real estate deals that could net you more than a thousand in commissions, but it usually takes a long time to set them up, and besides, you need a real estate license to do it. Or you could be a bounty hunter and catch a criminal with a big reward on his head. You may not need a license to do that, but chances are good that you could get hurt. Or you could recover stolen jewelry or other merchandise for an insurance company and get a substantial fee as a reward. Or write a book like “Primary Colors” and make a million or more in royalties; or write a story, or a poem, or a screenplay, or a song or something and sell your creation to a publisher who could market it. Or act in a movie or on television if you were a famous personality.

Then there are dozens of promotion schemes. Bring a dance band to town and hire a hall and sell tickets. Or promote a play, or a bridge tournament, or a tennis match, or anything you could charge admission for; but you need to know the right people to do those things. Or you could sell lottery tickets or raffle tickets for a new car or something. Or you could go into the multi-level mail-order business; I’ve heard you could make $50,000 to $100,000 doing that over a two- or three-month period, though I’ve also heard that it may not be legal. The trouble is, all those things require an investment and all of them take time, and I did not have a lot of time or enough capital to invest, and besides, investments were against the rules. Sure, I could always find an oil well in my back yard, but I live in an apartment and don’t have a back yard. Or I could sell my eye to a rich blind man, or my kidney to a rich diabetic, or my whole body to an institution or my soul to the devil, for that matter, but all those things were against the rules, too.

In short, I just couldn’t think of a get-rich-quick scheme that would net me a thousand bucks in just one or two weeks. I didn’t sleep for two days thinking about it; I couldn’t think of anything else. I walked around in a kind of a daze, trying to dream up an IDEA. My friends all thought I was in love. Maybe I was, subconsciously, because I kept seeing a vision of that fellow with the g-g eyes in my mind, though I hadn’t spoken a word to him and didn’t even know his name.

On the third day, a small idea that had been growing in the back of my mind suddenly blossomed out and energized me. I had a car that was worth maybe six or seven thousand dollars. If I could sell it for ten thousand, which was obviously far more than I could reasonably expect to get for it, that would represent a legitimate profit. Of course, the only way to get that much for it would be to raffle it off; get a thousand people to buy raffle tickets at ten dollars each and you’ve got ten thousand dollars. I knew it was against the rules to sell my car, but what about a friend’s car? Or anyone else’s car? Or, to stretch my small idea even further, suppose I got one of the automobile dealers in the area to donate a car for a charitable purpose, say the proceeds to go to the neighborhood Senior Citizen Center that was desperately short of funds? And then, to carry the idea even further, suppose I got my boss, Louie, to agree to sell chances on the car to all the customers who came in for drinks and dinner every night, say for an additional five bucks a chance or three for ten bucks added on to their bills?

Well, actually, Louie liked the idea. With me working there, he said, he was rapidly becoming a senior citizen himself. Anyway, with his input, and his influence on the car dealer, we put the whole thing into effect with an insert in the dinner menu in time for the weekend crowd. Sunday night, when we counted the total take for the weekend, we had almost $2,000, which was still a far cry from our goal. We needed $8,000 for the dealer, $1,000 below his cost, he swore, which represented his contribution to the cause. Anything over that would go to the Senior Citizen Center. I was supposed to get ten percent of the total take, which represented the administrative expenses involved in setting up the raffle, printing the tickets, publicizing it, setting up a bank account, getting the charity tax-exempt number, keeping track of all transactions, setting up the books and the accounting system, and, in short, taking care of the myriad details involved in running the whole enterprise, including paying myself.

Theoretically, therefore, if we really raised ten thousand dollars, I would get one thousand and the S.C.C. would get one thousand. My actual expenses, however, would run about two hundred or so, not counting the time I would spend on it, so my net would be somewhat less than the thousand I needed. But the gross was what counted toward my qualifying for the job, not the net.

Monday morning I reported to the U.A.A. Building, hoping I’d be the only one to show up. I was wrong. There were ten others, out of the original hundred or more who had shown up the week before. An older fellow whom I hadn’t noticed the week before seemed to be smiling a lot, as though he already had the job. Grey-green eyes was there, too, and on closer inspection his hair had a sort of reddish sheen to it. He was not exactly handsome; his nose looked like it had been broken once, though not badly, but he had a strong chin and lines of character around his eyes and his mouth that marked him as someone special. It seemed to me that he was looking me over, too, but what he saw was not nearly so special – just an average girl, dark brown hair, light brown eyes, five foot six without shoes, maybe a head shorter than he, 120 pounds reasonably well distributed in all the right places, maybe fifty-some pounds lighter than he, with the kind of face that is adequate enough for me but does not cause men to turn and whistle when I pass by. My father thinks I’m beautiful, but I suspect that he’s not entirely objective. Each of us, eleven by my count, four men and seven women, was ushered into B.B.’s private office one at a time. We all took between two and three minutes to brief him on our progress. Then we were all called in together.

“I congratulate all of you,” he said, steepling his fingers and looking at the ceiling. “The fact that you are here means that you have developed some IDEAS and are on the way to meeting my initial requirements.” He aimed his eyes at each of us. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “none of you has yet earned a thousand dollars. On the other hand, a few of you seem to have some very promising IDEAS, so I am inclined to give you one more week. Six of you are still in the running; I will read their names. Those whom I do not name have been eliminated. Mind you,” he added, “you should not be discouraged just because I have not endorsed your IDEAS. It’s simply that I do not believe they are viable for this Agency, but I wish you luck as you seek employment elsewhere. Now then,” he glanced at the sheet of paper in his hand, “the following people should report to me a week from today if …” he hesitated, cleared his throat, then went on, “if, that is, you mean to pursue this opportunity and if, that is, you continue to meet my requirements. They are Miss Daniels, Miss Konagher, Miss Santiago, Miss Walker, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Marker. You six,” he spread his hands, “please remain here a moment. The rest of you, those whose names I have not called, may go.”

The five who had not been named seemed more relieved than disappointed as they left. I was absurdly happy to see g-g eyes among those of us who stayed. B.B. waved a hand at us, taking us all in with his eyes. “Each of you seems to have a promising IDEA,” he said, “but it remains to be seen if you can bring it to fruition. If you can, I will expect you here next Monday morning. Until then, I wish you luck.”

Well, it was a discouraging week for me. From Monday night through Sunday night we collected only two thousand dollars more, giving us four thousand in all. While it seemed pretty certain that we would reach our goal in the next few weeks, since more and more of our patrons liked the idea and many of them bought three chances for ten bucks added to their bills, it was a case of too little too late. The only bright note was that word about our raffle was getting around on the restaurant circuit and a couple of Louie’s friendly competitors came in to talk to him about setting up similar arrangements. He referred them to me, which caused another small IDEA to start germinating in my mind. On the strength of it, I reported to U.A.A. Monday morning, even though I had not fully met B.B.’s requirements and expected to be rejected.

Only three of us showed up this time; g-g eyes, the older man and myself. We were escorted in to B.B.’s office together and seated in comfortable chairs in front of his billiard-table size desk.

“Since you are here,” B.B. said, eyeing each of us in turn, “I assume that you have met our requirements. So, why don’t each of you tell the rest of us exactly how you did it, beginning with you, Mr. Edwards?” That was the older guy, and I was beginning to feel as if I shouldn’t have come after all. I looked around to make sure where the exit was.

Edwards stood up, a small smile on his face. “Mr. Peckham,” he said, “the problem was elementary.” I could have socked him. “There are so many television shows that give away money and prizes that really, it was quite simple. I obtained passes for several such shows and made myself conspicuous enough to be selected as a participant. The rest was easy. I merely answered some childish questions or behaved foolishly, depending upon the program, and succeeded quite well. In fact, so far I have won twelve hundred dollars in cash and some nine hundred dollars’ worth of merchandise.” He looked at us, his smile broadening into a full-fledged smirk. “You know,” he added, “I never realized it before, but you could probably make a comfortable living just by taking advantage of all the offers available on television. In fact,” he went on with a quick glance at g-g eyes and me, “I mean to try doing just that. I’ve had an offer to appear on two shows and I plan to pursue a few others where the prospects of winning big money seem very promising. And,” he hesitated, his smile appearing a bit strained, “since I will be doing some traveling in preparing for these shows, I regret that I will be unable to accept a job here at this time.”

By the time he’d finished talking I was ready to duck out without being seen. B.B. was clearing his throat.

“Ahem,” he said. “Most ingenious. It takes a lively wit and a healthy imagination, Mr. Edwards, to do as well as you have done. But, since you are no longer interested in my offer, you may leave now with my congratulations and my thanks. And now,” his eyes shifting to the other man after Mr. Edwards left, “shall we hear from you, Mr. Marker?”

So that was his name, I thought, Mr. Marker. “My approach to the problem was somewhat different,” Marker remained seated, speaking in a low, husky voice. Good speaker, I thought, poised and self-confident. “I believe your desire was to have us earn a thousand dollars by selling an idea or a service of some kind,” he went on. “There are probably a great many good IDEAS floating around out there with no one interested in implementing them. And there are probably many more that are only being partially implemented, with an unlimited potential for further development. For example, no matter how many photographers there are in town, you have to book one six or eight months in advance to cover a wedding or an anniversary party or whatever. If you put an ad in the paper, you’d get a dozen calls a day to take pictures at special celebrations. I know because I put a note up on my supermarket bulletin board and got a dozen calls in just two days. Anyway, with today’s cameras and current photographic technology, you don’t have to be an expert to take good pictures. Anyone can do it. There are other things, such as party planning, which has become a profitable business for lots of people, or transferring old home movies to video tape. Anyone can do it with the kind of equipment that’s available today and the demand is so great that anyone can quickly get more orders than he could process in a year.”

I noticed, as he spoke, that B.B. was as captivated as I, not only by what he was saying, but by the way he said it, by his voice and his manner of speaking. A remarkable man, I thought, and if I were B.B. I’d hire him in a flash. “Anyway,” he went on looking directly at B.B., “the problem for me was to take an old but good IDEA and develop it to the point where it could be profitable for me – or at least profitable enough to meet your requirements. As it happens, a couple who lives in the same apartment building as I had a problem with planning a 50th anniversary party for her parents. They, both of them, were simply too busy, with their jobs and three small children, and could not make all the necessary calls in time to hire a photographer. Well, I have a good camera and a good camcorder and, as I said, with today’s technology you don’t have to be a true professional photographer. So I agreed to photograph the affair for them. Without going into all the details, I wound up with a profit of almost $300. In addition, I have signed contracts for two weddings and another 50th anniversary party, which will keep me busy for three of the next six weekends, with advance down-payments amounting to $750.” He paused for a moment, glancing quickly at me sitting next to him before turning his eyes back to B.B., as though to assess the impact of his words on us and awaiting some reaction before proceeding.

“Very commendable, yes, indeed, very commendable,” B.B. murmured. “And now,” he turned to me, “it’s your turn, Miss Daniels.”

I was stuck. “I really don’t belong here,” I said. “I didn’t earn a thousand dollars, not even a nickel, and …” I got up to go, “… I have to leave now to go look for a job.”

“Why, then, did you come at all?” he asked.

“Well, sir,” I responded, “I had an IDEA, just a little IDEA. My IDEA was that no one else would earn a thousand bucks, either, and that I’d be the only one to show up, so naturally, you’d hire me. After all, you need someone and while I didn’t meet your requirements, not exactly, anyway, wellll … I need a job and I’m willing to work.” He didn’t say anything, just looked at me for a long moment. So did Mr. Marker, and it seemed to me that those grey-green eyes were glowing with – what? Sympathy? Pity? Scorn?

“I see,” he said, finally. “But what do you mean exactly when you say ‘not exactly’?”

“What I meant,” I said, “was that I have not yet earned a thousand dollars, although I’m on the way. It may take another few weeks, but it will happen.”

“Why don’t you tell us about it?” he said.

So I did, and while I was talking, explaining about the raffle, another IDEA occurred to me. It just lit up like a light bulb in my mind full blown, so to speak, and I presented it off the top of my head as though it had been carefully prepared in advance. “If I were representing U.A.A.,” I said, “I could go out and organize a few dozen restaurants, who knows, maybe half the restaurants in town, to participate in a joint raffle for all kinds of charitable purposes. And, with this Agency as a sponsor, so to speak, we could put out the kind of appropriate advertising and publicity that would generate a great deal of public interest and guarantee a lot of ticket sales. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised, with the kind of volume we could generate, that we’d be able to raffle off a car a week, maybe even two a week. And I’ll bet every automobile dealer in town would be knocking on our door, anxious to contribute cars to the charitable cause of the week. We wouldn’t have to go looking for them. They’d come to us. And the restaurants, too, would come knocking at our door, to say nothing of all the bars and night clubs. Even the charities would come to us with proposals for fund-raising projects.” I paused to take a deep breath. B.B. was looking at me, a broad smile on his face, and when I looked at Marker, sitting next to me, those grey-green eyes were positively glowing again. With what? Admiration? Astonishment? Approval?

“Miss Daniel,” I was so engrossed in those deep-ocean-grey-green eyes that it took a few seconds before it registered on me that B.B. was speaking. “As I mentioned when I spoke to you last week,” he said, “there are other important qualities that I look for in my employees. One of them is what I like to think of as perseverance – the strength of will to keep on trying, not to give up, even when the odds seems to be against you. You must be familiar with the old adage that genius is one tenth inspiration and nine tenths perspiration? That’s what I mean by perseverance, and that, Miss Daniel, is what I like about you. You did not give up simply because you did not fully meet my requirements. You kept trying. I like that and I want you to come and work for me. Your first assignment will be to follow up on the proposal you just made, and you will have all the resources of this Agency at your disposal.”

He shifted his gaze to look directly at Marker. “Mr. Marker,” he said, “you obviously fulfilled my requirement to earn a thousand dollars. The question is, can you relate your efforts to this Agency? Can you see a role for this Agency in the business you have entered upon, in the same way that Miss Daniels outlined with respect to her efforts?”

“To be honest,” Marker responded, “I hadn’t really thought about it until Miss Daniels started talking about her ‘small’ IDEA.” His grey-green eyes flickered toward me and back to B.B. again. “It sounded like a big IDEA to me,” he said, “and she started me thinking,” he added, “and yes, I can see this Agency setting up a separate unit to photograph special events, such as anniversary celebrations, birthday parties, and so forth.”

That started me thinking. “Yes, indeed,” I chimed in. “I can see this Agency setting up a whole separate division, an organization to plan and make all the arrangements such as catering, photographing, videotaping, etcetera, etcetera; in short, to do everything necessary for a celebration of almost any occasion. Take all the work out of party planning for the sponsor, so to speak. Enjoy yourself, folks, and leave the party to us.”

“Another attribute I insist upon,” said B.B., “is enthusiasm, and you, Miss Daniels have an abundance of that. Perhaps some of it will rub off on Mr. Marker as you work together on these projects. I would like you both to report for work in my Creative Department, shall we say next Monday morning?”

I don’t know how his secretary knew we were finished, but at that moment she came in and escorted us to the outer office. We stood there looking at each other for a moment.

“I’m Roger,” he said simply.

“I’m Rita,” I replied.

“R and R,” he mused. “Goes well together, don’t you think?” Those grey-green eyes were glowing again, but I couldn’t read anything into them at all – not yet, anyway.

THE END 

Copyright 2016

Elaine Blackman