Cakes and Ale

Friday marks the 75^th anniversary of VE Day on May 8, 1945.

The Second World War was not over then, and thousands of young people on both sides continued to die in vicious battles on the Pacific Rim. It would be three more months before the nuclear bombing of Japan would bring the slaughter to an end.

But Winston Churchill assured his people that they could pause for a few moments of celebration. And in May 2020, it is a good time to pause and think of the millions on both sides who fought and waited and died in this war. Most of them are gone now.

I was born a year after the war ended, a droplet in the tsunami of baby boom births that followed. There will never come a time, in my life, when I will not think of my father, uncles, pastors, teachers, and mentors in the Greatest Generation that endured the Great Depression and the greatest war.

This year also marks the 130^th birthday of Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the iconic figures of my youth.

General Ike was the primary architect of the victory over Nazi Germany that will be celebrated Friday. He was a war hero whose gravitas raised him to political power and he was president of the United States during eight years of my childhood. I have vague memories of his predecessor, Harry Truman (and the affected way television reporter John Cameron Swayze said “PREZ-i-dent TROO-man”) but it’s Ike I most clearly remember.

In November 1952 my family owned a 12-inch Admiral television and my father’s parents  were invited to make the 60-mile drive from Oneonta to Morrisville to watch the election returns. Ike was running against the hapless Adlai Stevenson of Illinois and, at 6, I was aware that my parents held Stevenson in quiet contempt. Grandma and Grandpa voted in Oneonta and drove to Morrisville – the last time I remember Grandpa leaving his house – and I remember the excitement of their arrival. I asked whom they had voted for, and I can still hear Grandma’s happy voice: “Eisenhower!”

For the next several years I managed to catch several highlights of Ike’s presidency: his measured comment on the death of Stalin, his refusal to intervene when Britain and Israel attempted unsuccessfully to prevent Egypt from seizing the Suez Canal, his muted comment when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth, his dramatic decision to sent federal troops to enforce the integration of Little Rock, Ark., public schools. And, of course, his heart attack and stroke, from which he had recovered slowly while the nation held its collective breath.

Everyone liked Ike, at least so far as I knew. I remember being shocked in the sixth grade when one of my classmates raised his hand to complain to the teacher as we read the latest edition of My Weekly Reader, “Gary has drawn a mustache and beard on President Eisenhower.”  Miss Johnson gasped and sent Gary to the principal’s office, which I thought was a just punishment.

Gary, as it turned out, was the scion of one of the few Democrat families in Morrisville. His father, a prosperous farmer, later became postmaster in the village when the Democrats returned to office.

I remember December 1960 when Ike pushed the button to light the national Christmas Tree in Washington. That wasn’t particularly impressive on our black and white Admiral (which survived all eight years of Ike’s two terms) but by then I was imagining how great it would be next year when President-elect John F. Kennedy lit the lights.

I was not the only Boomer to succumb to the charisma of JFK and by 1960 I was a confirmed Democrat, albeit too young to register to vote. I believed the rhetoric of the Kennedy campaign that the United States was moribund under Eisenhower, that the country needed to get moving again, that it was time for vigorous, youthful leadership.

But that didn’t stop me from sitting in front of the old Admiral to watch Ike’s farewell address, the one in which he warned against the growing influence of the military industrial complex. I may not have realized, at 16, how discerning he had been.

My man crush on JFK did not dim while he was alive, but now a comparison of the two presidents – the oldest and youngest presidents ever elected at the time – has caused me to change my mind about Ike’s place in the political firmament.

One of the many biographies of Eisenhower, Ike’s Bluff, President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World, (Little Brown and Company, 2012) makes a concise case for a reevaluation of Ike.

According to a Good Reads review:

While Eisenhower was quickly viewed by many as a doddering lightweight, behind the bland smile and simple speech was a master tactician. To end the hostilities, Eisenhower would take a colossal risk by bluffing that he might use nuclear weapons against the Communist Chinese, while at the same time restraining his generals and advisors who favored the strikes. Ike’s gamble was of such magnitude that there could be but two outcomes: thousands of lives saved, or millions of lives lost.

As the 75th anniversary of VE Day approaches, it’s appropriate to remember that General Ike was not only the tactician who helped win the war in Europe, he was also the political virtuoso who kept Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Montgomery, and Patton working together to make it happen. Ike’s ability to herd these political cats may be the most remarkable achievement of the war.

Ike’s true stature as a strategist was obvious within weeks after he left office. Looking back on the turbulence of the early 1960s, it seems unlikely he would have approved a CIA scheme to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs because his experience would have led him to see it was politically unfeasible and militarily unachievable. Too, although he approved initial U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the erstwhile supreme allied commander was always convinced that a land war in Asia would be a disaster. He wouldn’t have hesitated to pull the plug on sending more troops to Vietnam. Had he been in office from 1961-1965, history would have been radically different. And the military industrial complex wouldn’t have won.

Ike died in Walter Reed Hospital on March 28, 1969, after suffering a series of heart attacks. Despite chronic pain he was kept alive for weeks by medical machinery that was state of the art in 1969. Finally, he begged his doctors to let him go.

Eisenhower was buried in his army uniform bearing the five stars of a general of the army. Toward the end he had lost so much weight that the uniform seemed immense on him.

I think he never doubted that his place in history was secure.

And I came to realize decades ago that his greatness as a president far surpassed the callow judgments of many of his contemporaries, including mine.

A tall, slightly stooped figure dressed from head to toe in shiny black leather shuffled into the kitchen of the RAF Woodbridge chapel.

This was 1965, a quarter century before the Borg appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation. But it was a Borg-like figure that startled me as I prepared coffee for chapel activities that night. I stared at the creature.

“Good evening,” he said, removing a black plastic helmet from his head. He was a middle-aged man who quickly ran his fingers through his graying tousled hair.

“I’m Teather,” he said. “The Catholic Children’s Choir director. Are you the new lad?”

I nodded, still silent.

Mr. Teather placed the helmet on the kitchen table and slowly unzipped his leather jacket. Underneath the black leather he was wearing an old gray tweed suit with a vest, an off-white shirt with a slightly frayed collar, and gray tie. Over the years I knew him I never saw Mr. Teather wearing anything different.

He carefully folded the black leather jacket and leggings under his arm.

“I must mind my minions,” he said pleasantly, referring to the children’s choir. “If you’re still hear when we’re done, I shall stop by for a chat.” I nodded.

Robert Teather was a history professor at the University of Suffolk in Ipswich, England. He was one of several British civilians contracted by the U.S. Air Force to lead choirs and provide musical support for the chapel. Every Wednesday night he would hop onto his petrol-powered scooter in Ipswich and make his way up the A-12 to Woodbridge base. On most Wednesdays, his leather outfit was barely adequate to protect him from the chill wind.

As an Air Force chaplain’s assistant, my job was to be present at evening chapel activities to keep an eye on the facilities and make sure everyone had tea or coffee – or Hawaiian Punch, which was a special favorite of the children of Air Force personnel. There were several activities including adult and children’s choir rehearsals throughout the week, most taking place after normal working hours. I would make myself scarce during the rehearsals, sitting in my office, smoking Pall-Mall cigarettes, and typing letters home. When everyone had left, I cleaned up the kitchen and retired to my Quonset hut across the street from the chapel.

I quickly learned that Mr. Teather liked to have a cup of coffee before slipping into his black leather and beginning the ordeal of his 15-mile scooter trip back to Ipswich. That made him and me the last persons to leave the chapel. At first I sat at the kitchen table with him and tried to conceal my impatience.

“One cannot get coffee as good as this at home,” he would say. “You Americans have a special talent for brewing coffee.” The “special way” involved guessing the quantity of grounds to load into a 30-cup GI coffee pot, but I had a knack for guessing right.

Both Mr. Teather and I smoked unfiltered cigarettes (he rolled his own) as we sat sipping heavily creamed and sugared coffee at the kitchen table. He quickly noticed I was interested in history.

“I’m sure you know Cardinal Wolsey was born in Ipswich,” he said.

I didn’t.

“He was Henry VIII’s closest advisor until he fell from grace over the issue of the King’s marriage,” Mr. Teather explained. He added some details and it was the first time I heard the school child’s rhyme for keeping the six queens straight: “Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived.”

“You are just a few miles from Framlingham Castle,” Mr. Teather said. “Queen Mary hid there during a rebellion against her.”

“Bloody Mary?”

Mr. Teather, a good Catholic, scoffed good-naturedly. “They were all bloody back then.”

In June I traveled to London to watch the Queen preside over the Trooping of the Colour. Elizabeth II was 40 then, smiling and rosy cheeked, and I thought she was beautiful. I told Mr. Teather about it and he decided to tell me about the royal family.

“There are two types of Windsors,” he said. “One, typified by Her Majesty, is serious and dutiful. The other type is reckless and often irresponsible. In my lifetime, there has been King Edward VIII who fell in love with an American and abdicated the throne.”

I knew that story. My mother had listened to Edward’s abdication speech on the wireless in 1936 and found it so romantic.

“He was highly immature and foolish,” Mr. Teather said. “It was a national crisis.” He smiled, took a drag on his cigarette, and sang, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Missus Simpson’s pinched our king.”

George VI, who succeeded Edward, was an example of a serious and dutiful Windsor. “Princess Margaret is more the irresponsible type,” said Mr. Teather. “With Prince Charles, he’s too young to be sure which way he’ll go.”

I often thought of that conversation as the royals evolved over the next half century.

Mr. Teather had a sprightly sense of humor. As we poured our coffee one Wednesday evening he was laughing about something he had read about a movie that took place in Scotland.

“But it was not filmed in Scotland,” he said. “The director said they looked and looked and that if there is any place that does not look like Scotland it’s Scotland.” He found that hugely amusing.

On one occasion, he shared a profoundly sad experience with me.

“This would have been my son’s 20^th birthday today,” he said. “We lost him at three. You know it is very difficult to lose a child at that age because they have developed a vivid personality and you are connecting with them emotionally and intellectually and there is so much promise.”

He said that matter-of-factly, as if he thought that was a life lesson I might be interested in keeping in mind.

One weekend I traveled to London to see a musical, The Barretts of Wimpole Street with Donald Wolfit, June Bronhill and Keith Michell,* and to sit in the visitor’s gallery of the House of Commons to watch a debate on Britain’s support of the Vietnam War. Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Tory leader Edward Heath sparred with each other, and I was exhilarated. Mr. Teather wanted to hear all about it.

“The war has become a serious issue,” I said.

“Oh,” Mr. Teather raised his hand as if I had said something significant. “Is that what Americans call it now? Just – the war?”

I hadn’t thought about it but it was true. The War in Vietnam had totally occupied American attention, at least on military installations. Mr. Teather the historian made a mental note.

The last time I saw Mr. Teather was in late 1967 when I was preparing to be reassigned to McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas. Two young Catholic seminarians had been ordained that day and were visiting the Catholic chaplain, Father McCausland, in his office. The chaplain invited Mr. Teather in to say hello.

My mouth dropped open when the distinguished Mr. Teather knelt humbly before these very callow youths. But the new priests were not surprised and they made gestures of blessing over his graying head.

Mr. Teather chatted with the young men for a while, and then we retired to the chapel kitchen.

“It is a very special blessing to be blessed by a priest who has just been ordained,” he explained to me as he lit a cigarette.

“Great,” I said.

I lost touch with Mr. Teather after I left England and became distracted by college and youthful pursuits. This week I tried to find him on the Internet – a dubious task because there are many Robert Teathers on social media and this one would be approaching his centennial now. I could find no mention of him on the Suffolk University webpage or Ipswich obituaries. He is one of scores of people I knew in the Air Force – Brit civilians and fellow airmen – who were important to me for a brief period in my life but have now disappeared.

But every now and then I find it amusing to read an article about the discovery of Richard III’s body beneath a parking lot in Leicester, or Harry and Meghan’s escape to Canada, or BREXIT, or Boris Johnson’s pregnant fiancee, and imagine what Mr. Teather would have to say.

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* In the seventies, Keith Michell had the title role in the television mini-series The Six Wives of Henry VIII, but I had no recollection of seeing him on stage.