Cakes and Ale

Millions have their memories.

As President Obama escalates the newest war in the Persian Gulf, the question is whether remembering September 11, 2001 eases the pain and makes sense out of all that has happened since.

Martha and I had just settled into our offices in The Interchurch Center that day, more than 100 blocks north of the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, Martha directed public relations and communication for the United Church of Christ Pension Boards on the 10th floor (as she still does), and I was communications officer of the U.S. conference for the World Council of Churches on the 9th floor.

I was probably sipping the last dregs of my morning coffee in the 9th floor office of the U.S. Conference for the World Council of Churches when Martha called. “Did you hear a plane has flown into the World Trade Center?”

Instinctively, I turned to my keyboard and typed http://www.ap.org. The Associated Press had moved a tentative story with a file picture of the twin towers.

“What a mess,” I thought. I could imagine a small plane veering off course from Teeterboro and straying into one of the 1,340 foot-high towers. No doubt some office workers in the tower had been injured.

Martha called back. “We have an office on the 19th floor,” she said. “We can see the towers from there.” I met her at the elevator and we went up. Tom, the office IT director, shook his head as we walked in and nodded toward a southerly window.

The towers were nearly seven miles south of us, but in my memory they seemed just a few blocks away. Black smoke billowed from the northern façade of the North Tower, and I still assumed an errant small plane had done the damage. Most of the people in the office had stopped looking out the window and had returned to their tasks.

We watched the smoke streaming eastward for several minutes.

“I have a service downstairs in the chapel,” Martha said.

One of her coworkers had died over the weekend, and Martha, an ordained Baptist minister, was in charge of the memorial. We thanked Tom for allowing us to satisfy our curiosity and walked out. Seconds after we closed the door behind us, the second plane hit the South Tower.

An hour later, when Martha and her colleagues emerged from the memorial service, both towers were fully involved in flames and on the verge of collapse.

Across the river in Hoboken, Martha’s cousin Tony watched in horror as people leaped from the towers to escape the flames and fell to their deaths on the plaza below.

Martha’s cousin Alina was stranded with her colleagues at Brown Brothers Harriman on nearby Wall Street. In the Empire State Building on 34th street, Alina’s husband, Steve, was making urgent calls to her office to see if she was all right.

Back at the Interchurch Center on 120th Street, my colleagues Jean and Sonia were literally holding each other up as news came of the collapse of the North Tower. Jean’s niece, who had been staying with her that summer, worked at one of the buildings adjacent to the towers and Jean had been unable to reach her.

As I sat in my office overlooking the Hudson River, I spun my radio dial, seeking additional updates. I listened briefly to an FM deejay who said he was broadcasting from one of the towers. “They’re telling us to evacuate,” he said excitedly, “But I’m staying at my post as a public service, ‘cause folks need to know what’s goin’ on …” I spun past him looking for 1010 WINS or another all news station and didn’t give the deejay a second thought. But 13 years later, I wonder: did the guy wise up and get the hell out of the tower? Or did I accidentally tune in to his last words on earth?

It wasn’t easy getting news about what was happening outside. I began receiving emails from a World Council of Churches colleague in Geneva, Switzwerland. Martin Robra, a German Lutheran peace activist, was monitoring the news in Europe and it was in one of his emails that I learned a plane had also struck the Pentagon in Washington. “You are at war,” Martin wrote ominously.

Our offices in The Interchurch Center at 120th Street and Riverside were far from Ground Zero and still unaffected by the calamity that was unfolding downtown. Two days later, a foul yellow haze that stung the eyes and burned the throat would spread throughout all of Manhattan. But in the midday hours of September 11, the air was still clear uptown. If you turned northward toward the George Washington Bridge, it was a beautifully pristine late summer day.

Outside the city, persons following the events on television wondered if all New York was in flames. Our son, Will, then a junior at Port Chester High School, left an urgent message on Martha’s cell phone. He had heard the city was under attack by military jets flying out of the White Plains airport and he pleaded with his mother to get in touch with him. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the message until hours later, when we were all safely home.

Daughter Victoria was in sixth grade in Port Chester on September 11 and we felt sure she would be safe with her teachers until the end of the day. However, daughter Katie was in a special education program in an outside school district and needed to take a school bus home. What the traffic situation would be like in Westchester County was anyone’s guess.

“Let’s go pick up Katie,” Martha said. I told Jean and Sonia that we were heading home, and they waved their hands as if to shoo us out. “Be careful,” Jean said. She had just heard that all bridges and access routes to Manhattan has been closed.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s see how far we can get.”

As it turned out, Riverside Drive was virtually empty. When we got to the Bronx-bound Henry Hudson Bridge, I looked for signs it had been closed. Instead, an MTA officer waved us through the tolls. We made it to Katie’s school in Ardsley in half the usual time.

But there were scores of cars jamming the high school parking lot. Parents from all over the district had come to take their children home. We parked at the far end of the lot and headed for the nurse’s office to sign Katie out. We found ourselves waiting in a line of anxious parents as a stressed-out gray-haired nurse scolded us.

“This is crazy,” she hissed, “You people are over-reacting,” as she impatiently scribbled her signature on dismissal slips.

After several minutes, Katie was escorted to the office by her teacher, Erin. Erin smiled at us but she must have had other things on her mind. She knew her brother, an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald, could have been one of nearly 3,000 people killed at the World Trade Center. It would be weeks before his remains were identified, but hours after the attack his fate was still unknown.

That night, as the sun began to set on September 11, the Port Chester members of the family were safely home on Wesley Avenue. Throughout the tri-state area that night, thousands of shaken people who made it home kept an eye on their neighbors’ homes to see if they returned safely. But many never did.

As supper was being prepared, I stepped outside briefly, probably to retrieve something from the car. A military fighter jet roared overhead at a low altitude; if the jet had been slower, I could have read the words on the fuselage, but it thundered angrily and disappeared. My knees buckled as I ducked instinctively, but in an instant the air was silent again. I thought to myself, “We really are at war.”

It’s difficult to exaggerate the worldwide effects of September 11. The attacks – and our reaction to the attacks – had an indelible impact on billions of people. On September 12 we learned that our British friends John and Bridget had been traveling from London to New York on September 11. When U.S. airports closed, their flight was diverted to Nova Scotia. They and other passengers were taken in by friendly Canadian farmers until the planes started flying again, on September 14.

Our daughter Lauren had planned to fly from Washington State to Philadelphia on September 11.

“I was going to a wedding in Philadelphia on the 15th,” Lauren recalls. “My flight was supposed to be a red eye leaving on the night of the 11th, but it didn’t get out until the 14th. I waited on line at (the Seattle-Tacoma airport) so long that I got free water and snacks from the Red Cross.”

Lauren was in a tiny minority of Americans who still wanted to fly that week. As it turned out, she made it to the wedding on time. “The minister pointed out that weddings are always audacious acts of hope in a world full of tragedy,” she recalls. “It’s hopeful, loving, life affirming acts like marriage that get us through everything else.”

It was not easy to find loving, life affirming acts in the aftermath of September 11. It’s not any easier today as the war in Afghanistan, launched as a direct reaction to the terror attacks, goes on and on. For many of us, the murder of Osama Bin Laden a decade after the attacks did little to ease the anger and salve the grief.

Perhaps one of the most prophetic statements that came out of September 11 appeared within days after the attacks. It was called, “Deny them their victory,” and it was written by four interfaith leaders* and signed by 4,000 people, including Martha and me and perhaps including you.

“We, American religious leaders, share the broken hearts of our fellow citizens,” the statement said. “The worst terrorist attack in history that assaulted New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, has been felt in every American community. Each life lost was of unique and sacred value in the eyes of God, and the connections Americans feel to those lives run very deep. In the face of such a cruel catastrophe, it is a time to look to God and to each other for the strength we need and the response we will make. We must dig deep to the roots of our faith for sustenance, solace, and wisdom.”

The statement continued: “The terrorists have offered us a stark view of the world they would create, where the remedy to every human grievance and injustice is a resort to the random and cowardly violence of revenge – even against the most innocent . . . The terrorists must feel victorious.

“But we can deny them their victory by refusing to submit to a world created in their image. Terrorism inflicts not only death and destruction but also emotional oppression to further its aims. We must not allow this terror to drive us away from being the people God has called us to be. We assert the vision of community, tolerance, compassion, justice, and the sacredness of human life, which lies at the heart of all our religious traditions. America must be a safe place for all our citizens in all their diversity. It is especially important that our citizens who share national origins, ethnicity, or religion with whoever attacked us are, themselves, protected among us.”

Ten years after the attacks, I still can’t bring myself to watch the television images of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. They are simply too painful.

But there was another historic event that occurred less than a week after September 11, 2001, and many religious leaders have called upon people of faith to recognize it whenever they pray about September 11.

On September 17, President George W. Bush, in an extraordinary act of statesmanship, began his day with a visit to a mosque in Washington.

He bought coffee for a cafeteria full of people as he appealed to Americans to get back to everyday business and not turn against their Muslim neighbors.

The Associated Press reported that Bush removed his shoes in Muslim fashion and “padded through the ornate mosque on Washington’s Embassy Row and heard stories from his hosts about Muslim-American women afraid to leave their homes for fear of prejudiced backlash after last week’s terrorist strikes.”

“Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don’t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior,” Bush said.

He quoted from the Quran and fervently defended the Islam faith: “Islam is peace,” he said. “These terrorists don’t represent peace, they represent evil and war.”

The judgment of history is still pending on George W. Bush, and millions of his admirers and critics engage in spirited debate about his preparedness for a terrorist attack, or his decisions to go to war in Afghanistan – a war that continues to this day.

But on September 17, 2001, he demonstrated the kind of leadership the nation needed most. He made it clear that the terror attacks were the acts of mad and evil men who had no connection to millions of peace loving Muslims around the world. And he said people who felt otherwise “should be ashamed.”

It was a reminder that should engage us all as we look back on those terrible days.

And looking back, we will always wonder if the U.S. response of war and mass destruction was the correct one.

Or would the world be different today if we have responded with a courageous “vision of community, tolerance, compassion, justice, and the sacredness of human life”?
___
* The writers of “Deny Them Their Victory” were Jim Wallis, Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, David Saperstein, and Bob Edgar.

August 9, 2014 – I remember exactly what I was doing and where I was forty years ago today when President Nixon resigned.

I was vacationing at my parents’ home on Route 20 West in Morrisville, N.Y., watching his speech the night before on my parent’s large-screen color television set.

By this time in history, my parents’ support for Nixon had dissipated and we watched the speech with some relief. He was not the first president to secretly record conversations in his office, or lie to the American people, or undertake illegal acts in the dubious cause of national interest. He did arrogate to himself the power to secretly bomb Cambodia, which I thought was a war crime – and which then Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D-Brooklyn, N.Y.) of the House Judiciary Committee added to the articles of impeachment.

By August 9, 1974, there was not a lot of goodwill for RN around my parents’ neighborhood. He was never entirely likable but a lot of people ignored his tricky deviousness because he was Ike’s vice president. When I was in elementary school, My Weekly Reader wrote nice articles about him. And in 1962, he seemed benign enough that I included him in my target list of politicians whose autographed pictures I wanted. I told that story here.

Later, when I tried to make an appointment to interview Lawyer Nixon for Smoke Signals, the Morrisville-Eaton Central School student newspaper, I received a polite demurer from Rose Mary Woods, another future Watergate figure.

In later years, I had another Watergate-related encounter with Chuck Colson, the Nixon aide who never lived down his oft-misquoted claim that he would run over his grandmother to assure Richard Nixon’s re-election. Then again, Colson’s is heard on the famous Oval Office tapes boasting to the president, “Woodward and Bernstein [Washington Post investigative reporters] only report the little stuff I’ve done. They have no idea about the really bad stuff.” Nixon passes over the opportunity to ask, “Like what?”

I interviewed Colson for The American Baptist magazine and found him rather likable, although his newly acquired devotion to Jesus seemed as uncompromisingly relentless as his Nixon devotion, and not in a good way. At one point Colson asked if I’d like to do write under his byline for his Prison Fellowship organization. I was never sure if the offer was sincere or gratuitous, but I let it pass. One of my wiser career choices.

Forty years on, there’s little question that Watergate, Nixon’s surreptitious and illicit management style continues to have a complicated impact on presidential leadership. Today overreaching Republicans are hinting about impeaching President Obama for exceeding his authority, and the President sends U.S. bombers to attack militants in Iraq without Congressional approval.

None of this, of course, is Nixonian in its reach.

But all the same, it’s beginning to seem like a never-ending story.

[Adapted from an article I wrote a few years ago for the National Council of Churches.]

The way Harry Truman saw it in August 1945, there was a sickening possibility that the Second World War would end in a historic bloodbath. The only alternative to a mutual massacre of American and Japanese troops, he believed, was the atomic bomb that his scientists told him was ready to use.

Months earlier, in the battle of Buna-Gona, New Guinea (my Dad was there and wrote about it in his diary, www.bunadiary.com), 2,300 Americans were killed and 12,000 were wounded. In land battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, U.S. forces suffered 75,000 casualties. On Iwo Jima, the president was informed, 21,000 Japanese troops fought fanatically to hold the island and 20,000 were killed.

In July, as secret plans were underway for a U.S. invasion of Kyushu, the interception of Japanese messages indicated their military build-up on Kyushu was four times larger than earlier estimates. In Truman’s estimation, the Japanese military government was prepared to fight on until every soldier was dead or wounded.

The atomic bomb, Harry Truman said, was the only way to “end the agony of war.” On Truman’s orders on August 6, an American B-29 dropped a bomb on Hiroshima killing 80,000 people.

The total swelled to 140,000 as people injured and suffering from radiation poisoning succumbed. An additional 80,000 died August 9 when a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Whether the numbers fell short of projected deaths in an invasion of Japan has been the subject of debate for 69 years.

When Truman went on the radio to announce the use of the bomb, many Americans regarded it as a hopeful sign the war was about to end. But even hopeful Americans were sobered by the number of human beings – including civilians, women and children – who were blown away in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was immediately clear that the world had entered a dark and uncertain age.

Member churches of the Federal Council of Churches were appalled by the evils the new age had unleashed. Church spokespersons such as Presbyterian John Foster Dulles – known later for his policy of nuclear “brinksmanship” as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State – urged a moratorium in further use of the bomb.

The Rev. Samuel McCrea Cavert, general secretary of the Federal Council, sent a telegram to the president on August 9, the day Nagasaki was bombed:

Honorable Harry S Truman

President of the United States,  the White House

Many Christians deeply disturbed over use of atomic bombs against Japanese cities because of their necessarily indiscriminate destructive efforts and because their use sets extremely dangerous precedent for future of mankind. bishop Oxnam president of the council and John Foster Dulles chairman of its commission on a just and durable peace are preparing statement for probable release tomorrow urging that atomic bombs be regarded as trust for humanity and that Japanese nation be given genuine opportunity and time to verify facts about new bomb and to accept surrender terms. respectfully urge that ample opportunity be given Japan to reconsider ultimatum before any further devastation by atomic bomb is visited upon her people.

Federal Council of churches of Christ in America

Samuel McCrea Cavert general secretary

Harry Truman, in office only five months, struggled with diplomatic language in his terse response. In a letter dated August 11, he wrote:

My dear Mr. Cavert:

I appreciated very much your telegram of August ninth.

Nobody is more disturbed over the use of Atomic bombs than I am but I was greatly disturbed over the unwarranted attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and their murder of our prisoners of war. The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.

When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.

Sincerely yours,

Harry S. Truman

The nuclear age had begun virtually over night, and Truman’s 11 successors made decisions that built, expanded or maintained the American nuclear arsenal. The political rationale from the very beginning was that the bomb was needed to end conflict or as a deterrent to conflict.

But to millions of church people, the potential for “indiscriminate destruction” of God’s creation became a daily nightmare and the focus of millions of sermons, statements and theological debates.

The churches began preaching that sermon of peace in August 1945, and seven decades later it continues unabated.

If you remember moderate Republicans, you also remember green stamps and dial telephones.

In the sixties, some Republicans even leaned into the liberal column. They included Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Jacob Javits of New York, and – for a period – Mayor John Lindsay of New York. Lindsay, eyeing a future presidential nomination, abruptly switched to the Democratic Party in 1971, announcing he had singlehandedly rescued the city from Republican misrule.

What all these moderate liberals had in common is that they were called Rockefeller Republicans after Nelson Rockefeller, the four-term governor of New York and U.S. vice president. Rocky was a civil rights activist, an educator who dramatically expanded the State University of New York, a developer of low-income housing, a proponent of Medicaid and welfare, and an expander of state roadways, tunnels, and bridges.

He was so liberal, in fact, that many people wondered why he wasn’t a Democrat. Eager to learn the answer, I pretended to be undecided about which party to embrace and wrote to the governor to ask him why he embraced the GOP.

He replied (perhaps disingenuously considering his reputation as a tax and spend governor) that the Republican Party was fiscally responsible and a “dynamic force” for keeping the economy strong. But he didn’t dismiss the Democrats, either, pointing out “there is plenty of work for young and old in (both) our parties.”

Rocky’s words may not have originated with him, and over the years I’ve noticed that his signature on the letter is precisely identical to the signature on the picture. It is likely the product of a sig-mac machine, not the governor’s hand, and governor may not have seen either document.

After another decade had passed, the harsh Rockefeller Drug Laws and Rocky’s brutal assault on the Attica prison riot raised doubt if he was still a Rockefeller Republican.

But in 1962 he was both popular and charismatic in New York State.

That summer, my Dad was a counselor at New York’s Boys State held at Colgate University and he invited me to tag along and sit in the chapel balcony as Rocky addressed the boys.

The boys stood and cheered lustily as the governor walked on the platform, and Rocky smiled broadly and waved both arms in response to the accolades. He made a brief speech about the importance of youth in government, and I was impressed.

In many ways, I suspect Rocky was more liberal than my idol JFK, but like JFK he had a knack for saying what crowds wanted him to hear. One of the boys asked him what he thought about the Supreme Court’s recent decision to remove prayer from public schools, and he said, “I feel just as badly about it as you do.” But he added that the court’s decision was the law of the land.

Nelson Rockefeller was on Richard Nixon’s short list to be named vice president when Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace in 1973. If that had happened, Rocky would have become president when Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974.

Of course the nomination went to Jerry Ford, who did ask Rockefeller to become vice president in 1974. But Rocky did not appear happy in the powerless office and he declined re-nomination to the position when Ford ran for election in 1976.

Rockefeller died January 26, 1979 at the age of 70. Today, there are probably more people who remember the circumstances of his passing than the accomplishments of his long career.

Initial reports of his death said he had been in his office in Rockefeller Center working on a book about his art collection. It was quickly revealed that he had actually been in his 54^th Street townhouse when he died, pursuing more strenuous activities with his 25-year-old aide Megan Marshack.

The Rockefeller family did its best to obscure the actual circumstances of Rocky’s last hurrah. They refused to authorize an autopsy and issued statements absolving Marshack and others from accusations they delayed calling medics to revive him.

The family also declined comment on New York Magazine’s suggestion for an epitaph: He thought he was coming, but he was going.

He only gave us 48 years (1924-1973), and his musical compositions peaked and all but disappeared after 1963. But as I was preparing supper tonight, I found myself humming again one of Allan Sherman’s memorable parodies:

O, the moon is bright upon the carwash
And I’m having my Volkswagen washed again
But the way it is with me, the way my luck runs,
Just as soon as they’re finished it will rain.

The song segues illogically into

On top of Old Smokey,
All covered with hair.
Of course I’m referring
To Smokey the Bear.

Allan Sherman was a television comedy writer and producer who made it big in 1962 with his long playing album My Son the Folksinger, which sold a million copies. Most people remember him for his parody of Dance of the Hours by Ponchielli: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Here I am at Camp Granada …”

But for those of us with a high tolerance for lyrical puns and simple satire, Allan Sherman’s songs remained stuck in our heads for the rest of our lives. My all-time favorite was his send-up of the French Revolution mimicking the rhythms of You Came a Long Way from Saint Louis” (“You Went the Wrong Way Old King Louie”).

But who, having heard them once, could forget Sherman classics such as:

When you go to the delicatessen store,

Don’t buy the liverwurst.

Don’t buy the liverwurst.
Don’t buy the liverwurst …

Oh buy the corned beef if you must,

The pickled herring you can trust,

And the lox puts you in orbit AOK.

But that big hunk of liverwurst

Has been there since October First,

And today is the Twenty-Third of May.

Or his homage to Gilbert and Sullivan: “I’m called little butterball.”

When I put on my earphones for my morning walks, my iPhone is usually tuned to the Grateful Dead or Norah Jones.

But I’m convinced that as I grow older, the last tunes to rattle in my head will be Allan Sherman tunes: deep, soothing, irrepressibly funny, and impossible to forget.

They say Allan Sherman’s fame declined when the nation’s sense of humor changed following the death of President Kennedy in 1963

That could be true, because the short, pudgy songster and tall, slender president had something in common. If Wikipedia can be believed, Sherman’s send up of Frère Jacques soared to the stratosphere when JFK was overheard singing it in a hotel lobby.

See http://bit.ly/ChAssts

April 4, 2014 — Remembering the dreamer and his Daddy. From my January sermon celebrating MLK’s birthday.

Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes,

To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. 1 Corinthians 1:1-9


… For in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you…


Paul seems to be indulging in a bit of public relations hyperbole with the church in Corinth. 


The church members may have been enriched in every way, but they’re not as perfect as Paul makes them seem in the opening paragraph. 


Later he reminds them of their spiritual immaturity and complains about their divisions and arguments. But certainly they are better people than they would have been without Jesus. Each of them – like Paul – can recite the oft-quoted prayer: “I’m not where I need to be, but thank God I’m not where I was.”


This weekend, as we commemorate the 85th birthday of our fellow American Baptist, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., these thoughts are worth pondering.


Looking back on his ministry, we thank God for Martin’s moral and rhetorical genius. In every way, he was clearly enriched by Christ, in speech and knowledge of every kind, and used his testimony of Christ to give divine authority to the Civil Rights movement. He gave direction and cohesiveness to the campaign to remove legal impediments to justice and to diminish the racism that demeaned the American dream. His intellect, his courage, his eloquence, and his grit combined to make him one of the great figures of the 20th century.


It is entirely appropriate that we have engraved his image on postage stamps and carved larger-than-life stone monuments to his memory.


But as we celebrate his 85th birthday, let’s also allow ourselves a moment to regret that in making him a cold granite figure, we have lost contact with the warm, passionate, and often imperfect humanity of the man. 


When I started work at the American Baptist Churches offices in Valley Forge, Pa., in 1971, I worked with many people who had known Martin, marched with him, strategized with him, sat on platforms with him, and befriended him. 


As I listened to stories of Martin, I quickly noticed everyone had a different view of him. Even today, if you talk to some of the old ladies at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, they will happily regale you with unique stories no one else knows. “Let me tell you,” they will say, leaning close to your ear, “Martin’s favorite hymn was, ‘Amazing Grace.’” But don’t write that down. The next old lady will get a far away look in her eye and say, “I remember Martin telling me how much he loved, ‘Be Not Dismayed whate’er Betide, God Will Take Care of You.’” And later, as, you sit down in the old fellowship hall for dinner and ask your hostess if she knew Martin, she’ll reply, “Oh, my yes, and he once confided to me that his favorite hymn was, ‘It is well, It is Well, With My Soul.’”


It makes one wonder how many people historians have interviewed when they write their books. The one fact about Martin than I’m sure of, because empty bottles of it are prominently displayed among his personal effects in the MLK museum, is that he liked Aramis cologne. 


Baptists who knew him well remember he also liked to play pool and, when he was with Baptists willing to conspire with him, he sipped Dewars whiskey on the rocks. He smoked True cigarettes. He had stepped out on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel to have a smoke when he was shot in April 1968. 


Reminiscences among my American Baptist colleagues are varied. My first boss, Dr. Frank Sharp, who was head of American Baptist News Service in the seventies, regarded M.L. as “a difficult celebrity,” in part because it was Frank who negotiated with Martin’s staff to get him to last-minute meetings and hastily scheduled press conferences on time, an almost impossible task. Dr. William Scott, ABC executive minister in Buffalo, met Martin shortly after the successful resolution of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and wrote in his diary, “He is young and inexperienced and in no way prepared for the leadership that is about to be thrust upon him.”


Dr. William T. McKee, the first African American to head a national American Baptist program board, was responsible for supervising me as director of communications for the ABC, and I would spend hours in Bill’s office as he tried to keep me out of political trouble. 


Bill, who grew up in Berean Baptist Church in Brooklyn, knew Martin well and often got tears in his eyes when he talked about him. When Bill served on the national staff of the ABC Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board (MMBB) in New York, he was often in contact with Martin England, a white MMBB staff member in the ABC of the South. 


Both Bill and England were concerned that Martin Luther King had no life or health insurance, and they both pressed him to sign up for MMBB benefits. According to Bill, Martin kept putting it off but finally agreed to sign the application form in 1963, five years before his death. Bill’s eyes would overflow when he talked about that. “If he hadn’t, his wife and children would have had nothing,” he’d say. I heard the story often.


“I called him Mike,” Bill would say quietly, almost as if no one else was in the room. It was from Bill that I learned that Martin and his father had been named Michael King when they were born, and the elder King changed it to Martin Luther King, in part to satisfy the last request of a dying grandfather. But close friends continued to address the two by their original names. Insiders knew them as Big Mike and Little Mike. This is not a secret, of course, but neither is it widely known.


Martin was assassinated in 1968. My kids, all of whom were born after 1976, tended to think of him as a distant historical figure, lost in the archival dust along with Frederick Douglass and Thomas Jefferson. Even before my hair began to thin out and fade to gray, though, the kids suspected I was old enough to have encountered some of these old-time figures. But they figured they had really underestimated my age when they asked if I had known Martin Luther King, Jr.


“No,” I replied. “But I knew his father.”


“His father?” None of the kids ever challenged that. They always had trouble figuring out when I was making things up. They still do.


But I did know Daddy King. He remained a loyal American Baptist all his life and attended many ABC biennial meetings when I was on the staff. One time I stood behind him in the J-K line at the registration tables and listened to a young African American woman on the other side of the table ask his name.


“Martin Luther King Senior,” he said, carefully accentuating each syllable.


The young woman giggled.


“No,” she said nervously. “I really need to know your name.”


I was standing behind him, looking at the back of his large gray head, so I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not. But he did make it clear he was not teasing.


“Young lady, I am Martin – Luther – King – Senior. And I am quite sure of it.”


The chastened young woman handed him a registration card, and the great man wandered away.


I was invited by an ABC colleague to have coffee with Daddy King during that meeting, and not long afterwards The American Baptist magazine interviewed him for an anniversary story honoring his son. He sat serenely at his desk and opened letters with a silver knife as he answered questions. His voice was so deep and cavernous that a staff writer and I argued whether to compare it to “pebbles falling on a tin roof,” but we decided that would be disrespectful. We reported that his voice was “deep.”


We probably asked him questions he had heard before. We asked if he was bitter following the murder of his son and the loss of other family members, and he quoted the King James Bible: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” 


I don’t recall the exact year of the interview, but it was after Daddy King had lost a second son, A.D. King, who died in a swimming pool accident in 1969; and after and his beloved wife, Alberta, playing the organ in Ebenezer in 1974, was shot by a deranged man who had planned to shoot her husband. 


The elder King’s quiet grace and determined forgiveness were almost super human and a marvel to those who witnessed it.


If you talk with aging members of Ebenezer Baptist Church today, there is one thing on which they all agree: Martin Luther King, Sr., was the model of love and the harbinger of justice that molded his oldest son into the singular civil rights leader he became.


Baptists who attended the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Ebenezer Church in April 1968 have many stories to tell: how President Lyndon Johnson sat frowning and drenched in sweat in the middle of the congregation, or how Ralph Abernathy saw Bobby Kennedy in the rear of the church and went to the microphone to invite him to the front. 


But many remember a more private moment, when Daddy King saw his son lying in the coffin for the first time. Daddy King began to weep and reached out to his son – some say it was if he was trying to wake him up – and whispered, “He never hated anybody. He never hated anybody.”


Daddy King worshipped at Salem Baptist Church in Atlanta on November 11, 1984. Later that same afternoon he suffered a heart attack and died at 5:41 p.m.


I don’t know what his last words were, but when I heard he died I thought of his four word eulogy for his eldest son: “He never hated anybody.”


What better way to sum up a life? Probably none of us would be comfortable with the opposite assertion, “He loved everybody.” Who among us is capable of that? Even if we have been spared the violent deaths of loved ones, who among us have not experienced insult, bigotry, unfairness, intolerance, xenophobia, sexism, ageism, or discrimination? There are simply persons who cross our paths who are unlovable. And perhaps the hardest commandment of Jesus is to love our enemies. Chances are we cannot, if we are honest, claim that we love everybody.


But with God’s help, it may be possible to get through the snares and thorns of life without hating anybody. That would be grace indeed.


Martin Luther King – Junior and Senior – never hated anyone. But more than that: each had cultivated the divine spark which is planted in all of us but nurtured by few of us. 


Daddy and Martin King had what Jesus bestows: the power to live lives of purpose, a power so vivid that it inspires directionless persons to breathe life into their own divine spark, setting them on the path to faith and endowing that faith with an unwavering moral purpose.


Millions were inspired to a higher moral purpose by the example of Martin Luther King – Junior and Senior, Big Mike and Little Mike – and because they lived, the world is very different than the world into which they were born.


But today’s world is still imperfect, and God is still calling each of us to continue the march that was enhanced so powerfully by Big Mike and Little Mike, and not so long ago.

Like them, we seek to be enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind, praying Christ will strengthen us so that we are not lacking in any spiritual gift: especially the gift of humanity, and the grace to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

April 1, 2014. This previously undisclosed letter from President Lyndon B. Johnson requires some explication.

To make a long story short, I was the best Latrine Queen in the Air Force.

Anyway, that’s what Curt LeMay said. Just ask him.

Oh, right. He’s dead.

But you can believe me.

It all began in October 1964. I was in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, struggling to find my niche in the military hegemony.

I got a nearly perfect score in the Air Force aptitude test in mechanics, achieved by guessing my way through several pages of multiple choice questions, and I tested high in typing. Early on, it looked like I’d be spending four years repairing jets or typing supply requisitions. Neither possibility seemed heroic (although as I think about, it’s improbable that jets maintained by me would stay in the air long enough to liberate the Mekong Delta). I began to question whether volunteering for military service had been such a good idea.

Then one morning Sergeant Ellefson, our barracks chief, said he detected stubble on my face. This was likely a ruse because, at 18, I had never shaved a day in my life, but sergeants had a highly personalized view of reality and it was rarely a good idea to challenge it. So I checked an impulse to stroke my fuzz-free cheeks and said, “Yes, Sergeant.”

“And this is what I’m gonna do about it,” Ellefson said. He led me into the barracks latrine – a room equipped with an open-bay shower, 12 sinks and two rows of redolent commodes facing each other – and said the words that would change my life.

“You’re gonna be my Latrine Queen,” Ellefson said. “And every morning I wanna see these commodes so clean General LeMay can eat breakfast out of ’em.”

Ellefson didn’t seem like the kind of guy who used hyperbole, so I said, “How does he like his eggs?”

“You’ll find out,” he said, and left me alone in the Latrine.

It is now almost forgotten that Curtis E. LeMay was the Air Force chief of staff. He was a hard-nosed S.O.B., the father of the Strategic Air Command, and the World War II commander who oversaw the destruction of Japan from the air. Later, he applied the same strategy to North Vietnam.

I was stunned when Sgt. Ellefson strode out of the latrine, leaving me alone with so much stained porcelain.

But I had grown up in a household where clean toilets and godliness were theologically fused and I knew exactly what to do. I armed myself with sponges, scowering powder and cans of pungent disinfectant and set to work. By the end of the day, my nose smarted with lingering fumes of ammonia. More to the point, the harsh glare of white porcelain that glowed like our transfigured Lord, brought tears to my eyes.

The next morning, Sgt. Ellefson’s mouth dropped open when he came into the latrine.

“God DAMN,” he said. “God DAMN.”

He stroked the silvery faucet of one of the sinks, and admired his unblemished reflection in one of the mirrors. He stepped back to view the full pristine panorama and he began to smile. “God DAMN.”

Sergeant Ellefson placed me on full-time latrine duty. That was fine with me because it replaced the more onerous trials of boot camp, like precision drilling and olfactory comparison drills to prove you could tell the difference between tear gas and human pheromones.

And politically, Latrine Queen proved to be an extremely powerful position. It gave me the authority to impose such time-saving measures as requiring my barracks mates to use the latrines in the mess hall and shower in the rain.

But as the eleven weeks of basic training neared at end, I began to worry what the next four years might hold. There were no medals for exceptional commode cleansing, nor did a four year career of urinal polishing seem likely to generate diverting tales to spin in American Legion bars.

Then one day as I was using a cotton swab to clear calcium deposits from the shower heads, I heard a commotion in the barracks. A high-pitched voice yelled, “Ten HUT,” followed by a thunderous rumble as fifty guys leaped off their bunks and slammed their brogues on the linoleum floor.

“Where’s the latrine?” a gravely voice shouted with urgency. “Gotta crap.” This was not an unusual occurrence in San Antonio where northeastern stomachs were introduced to green sausa and burritos. After lunch, stricken officers often found it necessary to pop into the first barracks they passed.

“This way, Sir.” Ellefson’s muffled voice sounded uncharacteristically polite.

“Outa my way, goddam it.”

The latrine door sprung open and in marched a scowling officer clenching a huge Cuban Cohiba in his teeth – unusual even in the earliest days of the Cuban economic boycott. The officer was barrel-chested with thick steel-gray hair. There were four twinkling silver stars on each of his shoulders.

Before I could stammer, “General LeMay, Sir,” he pushed me out of his way and moved earnestly toward the bank of sparkling commodes. But the unblemished souls of his spit-shined low-quarter shoes were too new to resist the polished tiles of the cleanest latrine in the Air Force.

Down went the general.

I watched transfixed as the general’s feet rose and his posterior descended in a fluidly graceful motion, while his arms shot out like a uniformed cruciform.

Abruptly, he was on his back with his limbs fully extended like DaVinci’s Vitruvian man. His wide body spun in a clockwise motion on the shiny floor.

The general’s gabardine uniform offered little resistance to the polished tiles, but when he stopped revolving he surrendered the back of his head to the hard floor. He appeared to be carefully assessing his situation, like the great tactician he was.

I could think of no chapter in the USAF Customs and Courtesies manual that addressed this particular situation. I stood cautiously over the general and leaned forward to make eye contact with him. He scowled upwards at me, furiously chewing the Cohiba.

“General LeMay,” I ventured.

The general narrowed his eyes menacingly. I think he said, “Grempf,” but he might have been swallowing a piece of tobacco.

“How do you like your eggs?”

He appeared to think about it briefly, but then he spat the wetly chewed cigar out of his mouth so forcefully that it smacked against a urinal on the far side of the room.

“Help me up, goddam it. Gotta crap.”

I placed my hands under his arms and pulled him to his feet. As soon as he was erect, he shoved me aside and skidded toward the commodes. He dropped his gabardine drawers and plopped down on the seat. I had gotten used to seeing young basic-trainees seated in the humiliating ritual of collective crapping, but the Air Force chief of staff seemed out of place.

The general carried it off with dignity but never stopped scowling at me. I wasn’t sure what the rules called for, but I assumed they had something to do with standing at strict attention. I refrained from saluting.

Soon (and I spare the reader the auditory and olfactory details of the scene) the general was finished. He stood and tightened his belt.

General LeMay walked to one of the sinks. As he washed his hands he looked around the cleanest latrine in the Air Force.

“Goddam,” he said. “This must be the cleanest latrine in the Air Force.”

Now seemed like an appropriate time to salute. I snapped my right hand rigidly to my forehead, and he responded with a more casual gesture that looked as if he were shooing a fly from his face.

Silently, the general pulled a neatly folded towel from the shelf and dried his hands. When he walked out, I picked up the reeking cigar butt and threw it away.

General LeMay retired from active duty early in my Air Force career, and I saw him rarely after that first latrine rendezvous. When I did see him, it was usually when the chief of staff was called to accompany President Lyndon B. Johnson on his visits to military installations. For the remainder of the general’s career, whenever word came down that LBJ was planning to visit a base, I got a call from a chief master sergeant in the chief’s Pentagon office.

“The old man wants the President to have access to the cleanest latrine in the Air Force,” the sergeant would say. “Get to work.”

On such occasions I would spend a week getting the presidential latrine in shape for presidential elimination, whichever form it might take. On occasion, General LeMay would invite me outside to shake hands with the president.

“Goddam,” LBJ would say. “That must be the cleanest latrine in the Air Force,” and General LeMay would nod happily. I would stand modestly between the two men, trying not to expose the pride that was swelling in my chest.

But pride was warranted. I was the best Latrine Queen in the Air Force.

Anyway, that’s what Curt LeMay said. Just ask him.

Oh, right. He’s dead.

But you can believe me.