Nuestro Pueblo: Hollywood

July 17, 1939: Nuestro Pueblo stops at the Lasky barn on the Paramount lot, where it's being used as a gymnasium.

Julius Shulman Q & A

Los Angeles Times Interview Julius Shulman Capturing the Essence of California Architecture October 9, 1994 By Steve Proffitt, Steve Proffitt is a producer for Fox News and a contributor to National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and "Morning Edition." He spoke with Julius Shulman at the photographer's home in the Hollywood Hills In 1960, Julius Shulman took a photograph that, perhaps more than any other single image, conveys the style, grace and allure of postwar Los Angeles. Inside a steel-topped glass box balanced lightly on a hilltop, two young women in white cotton chat, while the City of Angels sparkles below. It is a picture both nostalgic and modern, the work of a self-taught photographer who truly invented himself. In 1936, Shulman used a vest-pocket Kodak to snap a shot of a Hollywood home designed by architect Richard Neutra. A brash 26-year-old, he showed the picture to Neutra, and a career was born. Neutra hired him to photograph some of his other projects, and introduced the young photographer to such other leading West Coast architects as R.M. Schindler, Raphael Soriano and Gregory Ain. Shulman's dramatic prints played an important role in establishing an international reputation for these and other Southern California architects, especially during the '50s, a period many consider the golden age of Modernism. More than any architect of that era, he created a public image of the California style of design. Perhaps because he never had formal training, Shulman worked intuitively, eschewing light meters and fancy light-reflecting umbrellas, and relying on nature. Yet, he was a master manipulator, often working at twilight, creating long exposures, opening and closing the lens, while turning lights on and off, to create texture and contrast. His clients often expressed surprise when seeing his images, for Shulman created a vision even they, as the creating architects, had never seen. Shulman, who turns 84 tomorrow, lives with his wife, Olga, in a steel-frame house designed, in 1949, for them by Soriano. Long walls of glass contrast with corrugated sheet-steel siding. The house is hidden within two heavily wooded acres in the Hollywood Hills. In 1986, Shulman announced his retirement, in part as a way of expressing his distaste for post-modernist design. But the lure of the lens was too strong, and now, back at work, he's busier than ever. A retrospective of his early photographs is currently on view at the Craig Krull gallery in Santa Monica, and a biography, "A Constructed View: The Architectural Photographs of Julius Shulman," by Joseph Rosa, has been published by Rizzoli. Inside his studio-office, Shulman shows off prints and publications, bouncing around the room with the energy of a teen-ager, promising not to retire until he hits 120. * Question: What were the elements that came together to make the 1950s so robust in terms of architecture in the Los Angeles area? Answer: I'd say, first, the economy. The '50s were glorious years . . . . The population was booming--people were coming to Los Angeles from all over the world. And architects were given free rein. They were allowed to experiment, not in the way that is being done today--these horrible monstrosities being made in the name of post-modernism--but with integrity. The architects of this period, people like Richard Neutra, Pierre Koenig, Gregory Ain--they respected the client. Every line they drew was drawn with the client in mind. Those were the great years and the result was that, throughout the world, there was a recognition of these architects' work. I was lucky to be doing the right thing at the right place at the right time. So anytime, anybody wanted a photograph of a modern house, Uncle Julius provided the picture. Q: Can you describe the essence of the design philosophy of these '50s Californian architects? A: I have to backtrack a little to answer that. In the 1930s, it was the heyday of what we call the International style. Architects like Richard Neutra, Raphael Soriano--these men were following a very austere, Bauhaus kind of practice. The result was that many architects who followed people like Neutra began to edit that style of architecture, by doing things like literally raising the roof. They said, "We don't have to have just a box, let's add a little character to the design." And that was one of the things that happened during the '50s, and right up to the '60s. Soriano, for example, who did my house, used an all-steel framework. During the earthquake--it was a shattering, powerful quake--we had not a crack. I am indebted to Soriano for his discipline in using those steel frames. The earthquake has proven this type of architecture is completely successful. Yet, Soriano didn't have a client for 25 years. The public didn't recognize his work; they didn't buy it. But other architects modified the austerity, began to create more space with higher ceilings, sloping roof lines, and created some character. Q: So would you say that, in the 1950s, California architects held on to the framework of the Bauhaus, and humanized it? A: Yes. The dominant feature of contemporary architecture in the '50s was glass. My house has two window walls, which are 30 feet long. That's great for us, because we are on a large piece of property, surrounded by a jungle. But, as my wife has always said, put this house on a 50-foot lot on a city street, and it would be a disaster. Soriano once built a house in Long Beach on a normal, city-street lot. The bathroom faced the street, and he walled it with obscure glass--textured glass. He told the owner she didn't need draperies because of the obscure glass. She moved in, had a open house to meet her neighbors, and one of them said to her, "I hope we can be friendly and tell you this. We admire your figure when you take a shower." The obscure glass provided a perfect view of her silhouette. The next day she got draperies. So the architects who came down the line refined the architecture. They designed with less glass, more solid walls, more space. And the result was an architecture that became popular throughout the world. You could almost say it was an evolution in design, to fit the needs of more and more people. Q: What happened in the '60s and '70s? Why did modernism in architecture fall into disfavor and disuse? A: One of the reasons was that the public-at-large still didn't buy the work of contemporary architects. And by the '70s, a new breed of architect came on the scene--represented by men like Frank Gehry and Michael Graves and even Charles Moore--who introduced a sloping, high-cathedral-ceiling kind of design. People began to say, "Hey, this is good," because these designs didn't have the walls of glass like the '40s and '50s designs did. The result was that they began to accept what I call "weird architecture." And, right now, we are in still another transition. Even architects like Gehry are beginning to reform their designs. He admits that he is an experimenter, and his work is often not well-received by the public. Nowadays, the elite--the people who can afford it--they want something "different." They are getting it. And they are paying for it. Q: Let's turn back to your career, and the way you use the camera. You've said the camera is not important when it comes to taking a picture. What do you mean? A: The camera is the least important element in our work. Photography is dependent on the eye, the mind, the heart and the soul of the photographer. Many times, even architects aren't aware of the presence of their structures, and they will ask, "How did you get this picture?" In 1937, the architect Stile Clements, one of the old-timers, had done the Coulters Department Store on Wilshire (razed in 1980). The building faced north. He called me--it was late in June--and asked me to photograph it. But he said there was a problem: Because it faced north, he thought I wouldn't get any sunlight on the face of the building. I didn't say anything other than that I could photograph it. Well, being a good Boy Scout, I knew that the sun rises in the summertime in the northeast and sets in the northwest. Architects often don't know these things. And so I went down early one Sunday morning--I do most of my public buildings on Sunday when there is less traffic, especially in those days. I set up my camera across the street, the sun was beaming across the north face of the building, and I made an 8x10 photograph. I gave it to Clements the next week and he said, "How did you do this, I thought the sun didn't hit the north side of the building?" And I said, "Oh, it was easy Mr. Clements, I just turned the building to face the sun." The point is that I have always tried to be conscious of the site, the direction of the sun--by the minute. I learned to look at a building and know exactly what time of day to photograph, to best reflect and define the quality of the architecture. It has nothing to do with snapping a shutter. My photography is based on the quality of my vision, my feeling for nature, the site and location of a building and what was around the building. Q: You almost always include people in your photographs, something fairly unique to you in architectural photography. Why people in a picture of a building? A: For scale, and also to create a feeling of occupancy. When I photograph, for instance, a university building, I will round up some young people and put them in places where they fill in voids in the space. Without the people, you would get a flat, vacant, austere photograph. Sometimes, I will tell people, "OK, that's it, we're all through"--and just as they start to move and walk away, that's when I actually take the picture. Q: Your photograph of the Pierre Koenig house is, to me, an almost perfect expression of the optimism of the 1950s--the house cantilevered over the city below, and the two women so breezy and sleek and sophisticated. Did you know how dramatic this photograph would be when you took it then? A: Well, people just love to see that picture. It represents a quality of architecture and photography that is not very well-observed. But the ironic thing is that when I took the exposure in my 4x5 camera, I honestly didn't know what I had. I saw something--a mood and a scene. But I didn't realize I had made what would literally be one of my masterpieces. Q: It seems silly to ask, but who are those two women? A: Pierre Koenig, the architect, told me he wanted to bring some of his students when I photographed the house, and I told him to have them bring their girlfriends; I'll use them as models. I never imagined this picture, though--we were doing photographs of the interior of the house. Then I happened to step outside, and I saw the view, and the girls in the house, chatting. I thought, "Wow, this might make a fine picture!" So I set my camera up outside, turned the lights off in the house, and exposed the film for about seven minutes, to capture the lights of the city below. Then we set off a flash inside the house to get the girls on film, and that was it. Q: So it's a composite--an image the human eye itself could never experience in reality? A: Exactly. And can you believe that until I read the title of the new book about me by Joseph Rosa--"A Constructed View"--did I understand that is exactly what I was doing for these 59 years: I construct my view of a building. My wife has always said that I capture a moment which can never be reproduced. No photographer could go back to that Koenig house and reconstruct that photograph--no matter how hard he tried. It was a secret, wonderful moment in my life. It almost makes you feel religious--thank God, I'm an atheist! You know, I've never used an exposure meter. I often use natural, reflected light. I rely on nature, and the picture comes out because I know the value and quality of the film I'm using. I feel blessed that I've been ordained, if you will, to do this kind of photography and not only make a success out of it, but to create a success for the architects as well.*

Nuestro Pueblo

On July 15, 1939, Jane Seewerker, wife of Times writer Joe Seewrker, died in Long Beach. Joe Seewerker and Charles Owens had been producing three features a week, but after Jane Seewerker's death, their schedule went to once a week.

Found on EBay -- Charles Mulford Robinson

A plan for Honolulu, 1907

In the early 20th century, Charles Mulford Robinson wrote a series of books on beautifying cities and developed specific plans for such places as Detroit and Los Angeles. Robinson proposed that Los Angeles build a Union Station, straighten Spring Street and plant jacarandas. He also advocated a scenic drive from downtown to Pasadena and a large library on 5th Street. Sound familiar? A copy of his plan for Honolulu has been listed on EBay. It's priced at $85, a bit expensive for an ex-library book, but it's hard to find. Luckily, many of Robinson's books are available at archive.org. But not the plan for Los Angeles.

Nuestro Pueblo: Long Beach

July 10, 1939: Joe Seewerker and Charles Owens go down to Long Beach and visit Shorty Orr.

Holy Barbarians -- Continued

Reading "Holy Barbarians" has turned into a curious case of role reversal. I was a youngster when the book was published and the beats and squares who populate Lawrence Lipton's study of the Venice scene would have been my parents' contemporaries -- although my folks were a bit older. Today, however, although the Beats and squares have remained in their 20s and early 30s, I'm old enough to be one of their parents -- and this shift in ages provides an odd perspective. I'm apt to be a little tougher on them than if I'd read the book when I was younger, and I'm also a bit more charitable toward these earnest, naive angry young artists telling the truth. Even so, I bogged down in Lipton's lengthy defense of smoking marijuana, which may have been dangerously revolutionary in the 1950s but is trite and passe these days. For the record, Lipton didn't even smoke marijuana, which the Beats preferred to call "pod" rather than "pot." But he was "given a pass," which tells you something about the minimum requirements to be a beatnik. And I'll have more to say about that later. In fact, "Holy Barbarians" had just about gotten a one-way ticket to the discard pile when I came across an incident that's absolutely hilarious. I can't guess why Lipton buried it in the middle of the book, but he did. He's describing a reading in Los Angeles by Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso that's interrupted by a heckler. It's some square, of course, who wants to fight. Instead, Ginsberg starts undressing and dares the heckler to take off his clothes.  "Holy Barbarians," Pages 195-198 The reading was to be held in a big old-fashioned house that was occupied by two or three of the Coastline editors, living in a kind of Left Wing bohemian collective household, furnished what there was of furniture, which wasn't much in atrociously bad taste, nothing like the imaginative and original decor of the Beat Generation pad, even the most poverty-stricken. I consented at their request to conduct the reading, "chair the meeting," as these people are in the habit of saying. To them everything is a meeting. In this case they got more than they bargained for. Allen showed up high mostly on wine, to judge by the olfactory evidence and, after an introduction by me, in which I tried to spell out something of the background of this "renaissance," he launched into a vigorous rendition of "Howl." "Launched" is the word for it. It was stormy, wild and liquid. In his excitement he tipped over an open bottle of wine he had brought with him, spilling it over himself, over me and over his friend Gregory Corso who was with him and was also scheduled to read. Allen and Gregory had refused to start till Anais Nin arrived, and now that she was seated in the audience Allen addressed himself exclusively to her. He had never met Anais before and knew her only from Henry Miller's books. She had written the preface to Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" in the Paris edition of the book. He was sure that Anais was one person who would be able to dig what he was putting down. For him there was no one else in the audience but "beautiful Anais Nin ." That she had long ago come to the parting of the ways with Henry Miller and was making her own scene now, a very different scene from the one they had once made together on the Left Bank of Paris, made no difference to Allen. She was still, to him, the Anais Nin of the Henry Miller saga, a fabulous figure out of a still brightly shimmering past. Artistically, he felt, she was his nearest of kin, and Anais very graciously acted out the role he had cast her in that night. The audience, except for Anais and the people we had brought with us from Venice West, was a square audience, the sort of an audience you would find at any liberal or "progressive" how that word lingers on even though the song is over fund-raising affair of the faithful who are still waiting for the Second Coming. Few of them had come knowing what to expect. They never read anything but the party and cryptoparty press. The avant-garde quarterlies are so much Greek to them. Most of them don't even know such magazines exist any more. They associate that sort of thing with the little magazines of the twenties which were swallowed up with the advent of the Movement, the real Movement (capital M), in the thirties and transformed into weapons in the class struggle. The few who had heard rumors of what was going on in San Francisco and Venice West were there as slummers might go to a Negro whorehouse in New Orleans, to be with, briefly, but not of. But even they were not prepared for Howl, or for the drunken, ecstatic, tortured, enraptured reading Allen was giving it that night. A very moving performance, for all his tangle-tongue bobbles and rambling digressions. He was reading from the book, which had just came out, but he changed words, improvised freely, and supplied verbally the obscenities that the printer had in a few cases deleted. As it happened, Allen and Gregory were not the only ones in the place who had been drinking. There was one other in the audience. He was someone who had drifted in, having somewhere picked up one of the pluggers advertising the reading. At first he applauded Allen's reading at all the wrong places and too loudly. Then he took to cheering, the kind of cheers that are more like the jeers they are in tended to be. I watched him and it struck me that he looked and sounded like a brother Elk on the loose, or an American Legion patriot on a convention binge. When Allen got to the poem America, the drunken square was visibly aroused. He began to heckle. Allen ignored him and, at one point, interrupted the reading to ask the heckler, very gently, to hear him out and he would be glad to talk to him about it later and listen to any comments or criticism he cared to make. That, and disapproving scowls from some members of the audience who, being squares themselves and sober dislike anyone "making a scene," stopped him for a few minutes. Gregory Corso now got up to read or, rather, sat down to read Gregory, unlike Allen, is the gentle, relaxed persuader rather than the shouter. At least he was that night. When the drunk started heckling him, too, he turned the face of an injured angel to him. When that failed he reversed himself and tried shock therapy. "Listen, creep, I'm trying to get through to you with words, with magic, see? I'm trying to make you see, and understand " The square had an answer for that. "Then why don't you write so a person can understand you, instead of all that highfalutin crap?" "You will understand," Gregory replied patiently, "if you open your self up to the images. Try to get with it, man." You think you're smart, don't you?" Gregory ignored the remark and went on with his reading. Nothing could have angered the drunk more. It brought out the righteous citizen in him. "Think you know it all, don't you? I know your kind. It's punks like you that are to blame for all this -all this " he sputtered, unable to make up his mind which of the crimes punks like this were to blame for were equal to the enormity of the occasion. He tried again, gave up, turned a beet red and, to cover his chagrin, launched into a tirade of uninspired, stereotyped, barroom profanity, ending with, inevitably, an invitation to "step outside and settle this thing like a man!" Gregory grinned. "Yeh, I know, you want to fight. Okay, let's fight. Right here. Not with fists, you cornbalL That's baby stuff. Let's fight with a mans weapon with words. Images, metaphors, magic. Open your mouth, man, and spit out a locomotive, a red locomotive, belching obscene smoke and black magic. Then I'll say:Anafogasta. Rattle-boom. Gnu's milk. And you'll say: Fourth of July, Hydrogen bomb! Gasoline! See? Real obscenities. . . ." The drunk was indignant. He was outraged. When he heard snickering in the audience he started toward the front of the room, menacingly, repeating his challenge to step outside and settle this thing. "You're yella, that's what. Like all you wise guys. You're yella " Ginsberg got up and went forward to meet the drunk. "All right," he said, "all right. You want to do something big, don't you? Something brave. Well, go on, do something really brave. Take off your clothes!" That stopped the drunk dead in his tracks. Ginsberg moved a step toward him. "Go on, let everybody see how brave you are. Take your clothes off!" The drunk was stunned speechless. He fell back a step and Allen moved toward him, tearing off his own shirt and undershirt and flinging them at the heckler's feet. "You're scared, aren't you?" he taunted him. "You're afraid." He unbuckled his belt, unzipped his fly and started kicking off his trousers. "Look," he cried. "I'm not afraid. Go on, take your clothes off. Let's see how brave you are," he challenged him. He flung his pants down at the champ's feet and then his shorts, shoes and socks, with a curious little hopping dance as he did so. He was stark naked now. The drunk had retired to the back of the room. Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. The audience just sat mute, staring, fascinated, petrified, till Allen danced back to his seat, looking I couldn't help thinking at the moment with inward amusement like Marcel Marceau, the great French mime, doing his hopping little David and Goliath dance. Then the room was suddenly filled with an explosion of nervous applause, cheers, jeers, noisy argument. Our hosts, the editors of Coastlines, had been having a huddle on the sidelines. Now one of them, Mel Weisburd, dashed up front and stood over Allen menacingly. "All right," he shouted, "put your clothes on and get out! You're not up in San Francisco now. This is a private house . . . you're in someone else's living room. . . . You've violated our hospitality. . . . "If this is what you call . . ." He looked over at me as if to say, "You re chairman here, do some thing." I rapped for order like a proper chairman and announced the next order of business. Gregory Corso would read another group of poems and then we would hear from Allen Ginsberg once more with his poems Sunflower Sutra and A Supermarket in California. Corso was all for leaving at once. "We'll go somewhere where we can get good and drunk and take Anais Nin with us."  But Allen shook his head and quietly put his clothes on, one piece at a time, in slow motion, smiling to himself with half-closed eyes. A sly, mysterious, inner-directed Buddha smile. The reading went on amid general approval and with closer, more respectful attention than before. The incident had sobered up the drunk. When the reading was over he approached Allen and said, loud enough for everybody to hear, that he was sorry he had made such an ass of himself and where could he buy a copy of Howl? Through it all Anais Nin, faithful to the role in which the poets had cast her, sat imperiously still, only slightly disdainful of the hubbub, like a queen on a throne.

Nuestro Pueblo: West Pico

July 7, 1939: Nuestro Pueblo stops at 5000 W. Pico, site of a one-room schoolhouse. View Larger Map

Robert S. McNamara -- 1916 - 2009

Hoang Dinh Nam / AFP/Getty Images Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara meets with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the Vietnamese communist army commander during the war. Note: Former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara has died at the age of 93. The Daily Mirror presents David Halberstam's review of his 1995 book, "In Retrospect" and opinion pieces from 2001 and 2003. Dead Wrong Robert McNamara says he miscalculated our chances in Vietnam, but what's not in his book is as telling as what is. April 16, 1995 IN RETROSPECT: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, By Robert McNamara (Times Books/Random House: $25; 356 pp.) By David Halberstam David Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War for the New York Times. He is now at work on his 15th book, about what became of the young people he covered during the Civil Rights sit-ins in Nashville in 1960. About 25 years ago, when I was working on the book that became "The Best and the Brightest," I spent part of a surreal afternoon with Robert McNamara, then head of the World Bank. My book was designed to explain how and why we went to war in Vietnam, or more specifically how men who were once viewed (at the very least by themselves and their journalistic and academic acolytes) as the ablest men to serve in government in this century could be the architects of what was arguably the century's most tragic miscalculation. Suffice it to say that McNamara himself was not very much help in my quest. He said he would see me but would not talk about any of his experiences on Vietnam, "out of loyalty to Presidents Johnson and Kennedy." That day he absolutely stonewalled me on any questions on the origins of the Vietnam commitment. But to my surprise, he grew warmer and friendlier as he began to talk about his efforts to bring a halt to the bombing. Suddenly he became willing, almost eager to talk about Vietnam--indeed, he was voluble about the latter part of the war when he, aware that our military presence in Vietnam could not succeed, had initiated a doomed attempt to start fruitful negotiations with Hanoi. These would be preceded by a bombing halt, which he was working for. The bombing halt and the attempt to bring negotiations turned out, of course, to be futile; Hanoi knew very well, far better than he did, that it was dealing from a position of strength, that it had blunted our military commitment and that it need now only wait for our inevitable departure--albeit at very high cost to its own young men. Yet in my session with him McNamara was willing to talk about precisely that part of his service when in fact Lyndon Johnson did begin to think he was disloyal, but where history and historians might feel more generously inclined toward him than the earlier period of his service when he was one of the fiercest proponents of escalation. For that reason he had suddenly become cooperative. I tell this story at some length here because reading "In Retrospect" is very much like being with McNamara and watching his puzzling, contorted performance on that strange difficult afternoon 25 years ago. This is a shallow, mechanistic, immensely disappointing book. Had it been published 25 years ago while the battle itself and the debate over it was still raging--had McNamara come forth then and said, as he does here, that what had come to be known as "McNamara's War" was "wrong, terribly wrong," it would have been an extremely valuable part of the ongoing debate; indeed, it might have ended the debate then and there. A secretary of defense of his seeming certitude who came forward and said that he had been mistaken in his earlier estimates and that the war could not be won would have been the most powerful of witnesses and would be now a revered American instead of one of our most divided and haunted of men. Sadly, the inner strength to do that, to put loyalty to country and to a larger truth above a narrow bureaucratic loyalty to a President and failed policy, was not within his powers. In this book, much heralded by his publisher as a mea culpa, the agenda is McNamara's, not the reader's. That is not surprising: He has always been a control freak, and one of his singular skills, going back to his years at Ford, was his ability to take command of a given bureaucratic agenda and to set the terms in which an issue was debated according to his strengths rather than those of potential opponents. In this book he not only gets to give the answers he wants but he also gets to choose the questions he asks himself. As he did with me that day, he still controls the ground rules. In these surprisingly bloodless, carefully sanitized pages, McNamara is like a player at the poker table who, when the game is over still refuses to show his cards. The book is almost devoid of mood, insight and spiritual texture. He does not reveal his own feelings at that terrible moment in 1967 when he realized that his military calculations were wrong, that thousands and thousands of Americans and Vietnamese were dying each week and that, of all the things that he had done in a seemingly admirable career, he would be remembered more than anything else for Vietnam. This is not his way; there are no feelings here. We will never even know if he has ever visited the Vietnam Memorial. Nor is this an intellectual's book, for McNamara, despite the attempts of so many people in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to sell him as an intellectual, was never very much of an intellectual; his mind was at best technocratic. Nor is it a historian's book, lacking the richness of texture that Henry Kissinger at his best supplied to his own memoir, for Kissinger, with his immigrant vulnerability to other men of power, was fascinated by all those around him and sensed the nuance of every person he dealt with. By comparison, McNamara never seems to have had any interest in anyone else, save perhaps his immediate superiors. His insights into the other key players as they face the denouement of 20 years of deeply flawed policies are almost nonexistent, worthy of an eighth grader: Gen. Paul Harkins, the American general in Saigon in 1962 and 1963, a man best remembered for deceiving Washington on the war's progress (as Washington wanted to be deceived) appears as "tall, handsome and articulate; he looked and spoke exactly as a general should." (In fact on another occasion, McNamara said of Harkins, "He wasn't worth a damn, so we got rid of him.") Or of Lyndon Johnson, about the best we get is this: "one of the most complex, intelligent and hard working individuals I have ever known. He possessed a kaleidoscopic personality . . . a towering paradoxical figure." One can almost imagine the disappointment of his editors when the manuscript finally came in: Is this all we get? they must have asked. Can't we get him to tell more about how it felt in those meetings when they were deciding to cross the Rubicon? This most bureaucratic of histories nevertheless reveals a struggle between two McNamaras: the McNamara who was the fierce advocate of intervention, and the McNamara who came two years later to understand that the war was a tragic miscalculation, that neither side could win. The Bad McNamara worked the Pentagon and the Good McNamara worked Georgetown and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, where miraculously enough, for a time he was president. The Good McNamara tried to stop the bombing and whispered privately to his select journalistic friends that he was a dove while the Bad McNamara tried to signal to the military that he was still on board, that he still believed their estimates and thought the war winnable. The Bad McNamara was willing to go on network television endlessly in the war's early days to help project a sense of confidence about the progress of the war. The Good McNamara, as he is quick to tell us in these pages, went to the President in 1965 and asked for a tax increase to cover the otherwise inevitable budget deficit of the expanding war; when the President refused him and told him he was politically naive, the Bad McNamara thereupon loyally lied to the Council of Economic Advisers on the President's behalf, advising them to forecast a small war in a moment of dissembling he fails to mention in this book. For a long time the only thing the two McNamaras had in common was an agreement that they would not talk publicly about Vietnam. Then the Bad McNamara finally gave the Good McNamara permission to write the book, but the Good McNamara is still so locked up and emotionally blocked--so incapacitated by the deeds of the Bad McNamara--that he found no freedom when he set down to write. McNamara was always a superb bureaucrat, a fierce apparatchik, who sensing what his superiors wanted, took no prisoners in his struggle with peers and subordinates alike. His rise in the post-World War II years, first at Ford, and then at the Pentagon, symbolized the coming of the super-accountant as the driving force of the ever larger, virtually uncontrollable super-corporation, the man who in the computer-driven age could use numbers not merely as small bits of information to keep a company out of the red but, far more important, as a weapon of power, overwhelming opponents and critics with facts or pseudo-facts. To McNamara, numbers still have an almost poetic quality, and one of the few moments in this book when he comes alive and seems almost lyrical is when he talks about them: "My mathematics professors taught me to see math as a process of thought--a language in which to express much, but certainly not all, human activity. It was a revelation. To this day I see quantification as a language to add precision to reasoning about the world. Of course it cannot deal with issues of morality, beauty and love, but it is a powerful tool too often neglected when we seek to overcome poverty, fiscal deficits or the failure of our national health programs. . . ." Sadly for him, for the nation and for the Vietnamese, Vietnam of all wars most resolutely withstood quantitative analysis. The numbers never revealed the burden of the immediate past; they failed to show, for instance, that the other side's commanders were the architects of a great revolution that had already defeated first the French and then the Army of South Vietnam, aided and advised by Americans. The science of quantitative analysis, which McNamara had cherished because it seemed to have such purity, was like a god that failed him. Bring systems analysis to a badly aberrated policy and it is no help; humans will simply jiggle the numbers as necessary. The computer becomes useless. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. McNamara, nevertheless, was not merely a great square of the Midwest, an apolitical man with a taste for numbers. He was in fact a great political operator, a killer inside the bureaucracy with a superb sense of how to put opponents on the defensive and to exploit their weaknesses while concealing any of his own. He understood every nuance of power and how to hold it. While at Ford, he was so tense and driven that he ground his teeth at night. In time this caused serious dental problems. For treatment he selected a dentist in New York, lest news of his neurosis get out in the gossipy, incestuous world of Detroit; lest it subtract from the myth of his omniscience, from his image of a man completely in control, cool and calm. Grinding his teeth might have cost him more than dental pain; it might have cost him power. He and those in the financial cadre he helped create and who followed him at Ford knew little about cars and were often almost scornful of those who did, but they knew how to bring organization to a sprawling, poorly run company, and they learned how to destroy opponents who were skilled in engineering or manufacturing but innocent of politics. What worked for McNamara in Detroit worked for him even better in Washington for a time. He had more and better numbers than anyone else around the Pentagon, and given the growing complexity of weapons systems and their cost, he was a valuable ally for the Kennedys in the early going. One must sympathize with his early role as the Administration's point man for Vietnam. He moved quickly into a vacuum on a deeply flawed, essentially dishonest policy, though he did it with no small amount of hubris and arrogance. Dean Rusk was a weak secretary of state who accepted (all too readily) all the norms and givens of the era. As for our real Asia experts, the Asian equivalents of Kennan, Bohlen and Thompson, they had all been driven out of the Foreign Service by the McCarthy era, their sin being that they accurately predicted the collapse of China's nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. True McCarthyism, it should be pointed out, was not just the demented ravings and accusations of the alcoholic junior senator from Wisconsin against a few flawed political leftists; the truest manifestation and the lasting legacy of McCarthyism was the willingness of one political party to use the issue of subversion against the other party (even against an Administration as hard-line in stopping European communism as the Truman-Acheson one had been). What was worst about those accusations was how deeply they seeped into the political bloodstream. The Democrats were accused of losing China to the Communists (though of course there had been no Republican congressional voices in favor of sending American troops to fight for Chiang on mainland China). In time the Democrats were driven from office, but the McCarthy charge seemed to stick in their collective political psyche; in the future they did not dare lose a country to communism. Let us then set the Kennedy years in truer context: A team of brilliant rationalists had taken office but for political reasons they were dealing with irrational assumptions on American policy in Asia, which they were afraid of challenging because they did not want to take the political heat required to change the existing policies. Thus we were unable to see China for what it was: nationalist revolution rather than Soviet Communist expansionism. Nor were we able to recognize, more than a decade after Mao had come to power, that there were important new opportunities for American policy in the emerging, historic split between China and Russia, based again on nationalism. The reason the Kennedys did not see them was not lack of intelligence but an awareness of the political cost of even thinking about dealing with China. Even to discuss the possibility in the most private of meetings was to open the door to severe assault from the right. (Thus the opening to China would be left for Richard Nixon a decade later, secure in the knowledge that when he went to China to start diplomatic relations, he would not be red baited by Richard Nixon.) McNamara, nevertheless, wasn't merely the loyal domestic policy servant he portrays himself to be in these pages. Both publicly and privately, he was a fierce advocate of escalation, and for a time he became the driving force of the war, the man who loved the truth of numbers, but who would be remembered sadly, for one set of numbers above all others: the body count. McNamara also denies playing an active role in the rigging of the information that came out of Saigon. On Page 43, I encountered this truly remarkable sentence: "None of us--not me, not the President, not Mac (Bundy), nor Dean, nor Max--was ever satisfied with the information we received from Vietnam." For Robert S. McNamara to write so singularly dishonest a sentence 30 years after the escalation of the war, in a book heralded as a mea culpa is, it seems to me, perilously close to a felony, and a sign that he is a man so contorted and so deep in his own unique self-delusion and self-division, that he still doesn't know who he is and what he did at that time. (One of the ironies of this book is that there is a rare moment when McNamara's normally muted voice becomes both real and passionate and it is his attempt to settle an old score with Barry Goldwater. The Arizona senator had blamed McNamara for the Edsel, which was not a McNamara car, and the secretary of defense remains outraged by this and by Goldwater's subsequent refusal in 1964 to drop the charge, even after other Ford men wrote saying it was not a McNamara car. That McNamara, by rigging the information on Vietnam through 1963 and 1964 in order to serve a Democratic President in the most blatant political way imaginable, sinned more against Goldwater than Goldwater ever sinned against him does not seem to occur to him.) By 1967, McNamara knew that the American commitment was going to be blunted, that we had underestimated the resilience of the other side and its essential invulnerability to our technology. Privately anguished, he was desperate for some way out. He seized on all kinds of ideas--one was building an electronic fence around South Vietnam, an idea privately ridiculed by almost all uniformed officers, and another was some kind of bombing halt that might in time lead to negotiations. But any bombing halt was doomed, because he refused to go public and say what he knew: that the policy had essentially failed. Here we see McNamara for the first time as a completely divided man. The government position was that we were winning, the secretary of efense knew we were not, and his more hawkish colleagues had come to regard him as figure of ridicule. He was effectively paralyzed. The emotional erosion this division inflicted on McNamara was, his friends thought, considerable. He was the hawk who had been the principal architect of escalation and who now knew that it did not work, a man at war with himself. Finally, Lyndon Johnson, fearing both for McNamara's sanity and health, and loyalty (ever the political realist, Johnson feared that Bobby Kennedy would run against him in 1968, which he did, and that McNamara might leave the Administration and go with Bobby and go public with his doubts), dumped him and dispatched him to the World Bank. In the ensuing nearly 30 years he has remained silent as a public man: distant from the public debate, a not-so-innocent bystander, and yet still the gifted bureaucrat, a man still immensely skilled in his private politicking with select journalists (primarily liberal columnists and bureau chiefs) in the Washington area in order to protect his own personal reputation and to float his own doubts in proper, private genteel channels and keeping his reputation for being on the right side of issues intact. He is a man who seems to live in a time warp. Vietnam happened but it didn't happen. No rain has ever fallen and dampened those great reputations of 34 years ago. To him, the Kennedy team is still as dazzling as ever, its players are all still the best and the brightest. Mac Bundy, essentially silent all these years over the tragedy of Vietnam, is in his words "by far the ablest National Security adviser I've observed over the last 40 years." Max Taylor, a man whose uniformed subordinates thought that more than anything else he was committed to keeping American ground troops off the mainland of Asia, and whose fingerprints are all over the fateful decisions to intervene, and whose own memoir seems to blame the failure primarily on the press, remains "the wisest uniformed geopolitican and security adviser I ever met." But McNamara is not really talking about Mac Bundy and Max Taylor and his own hope that their reputations have remained untarnished by Vietnam; he is really talking about himself. By implication and extension, McNamara still thinks of himself as the ablest secretary of defense of modern times, the man who tamed the Pentagon. I do not believe in war crimes on Vietnam, for there was enough responsibility to go around for everyone involved. But McNamara, given his role in the early days and his belief so early on that the military involvement was a failure, is guilty of something else: the crime of silence. He tells us that while writing this book, he asked himself, Why speak now? Why break my silence? Though there are many reasons, he says, "the main one is that I have grown sick at heart witnessing the cynicism and even contempt with which so many people view our political institutions and leaders." Indeed? What a charlatan. Has there ever been a more insulting sentence written by a high public official? Does he know so little about why the mood of this country has shifted? This from the man who remained silent when a decision to tell the truth publicly might have not only diminished cynicism but strengthened the democratic fabric. This should have been an important book. But it is not. It permits us some insight into McNamara's inability to come to terms with his role and its consequences, and it involuntarily offers a rare insight into the difference between the mind of a truly public man and the mind of a bureaucrat. But that is little recompense. McNamara comes to us now as a sad and greatly diminished figure from a tainted past. The debate has long since passed him by. When we last saw him some 28 years ago, ever so confidently lecturing to us about Vietnam, he was deceiving millions and millions of his fellow Americans. Now with this book, he is merely deceiving himself. :: FANATICISM The Nature of the Danger We Face Sunday October 28, 2001 By ROBERT S. McNAMARA and JAMES G. BLIGHT Robert S. McNamara, former Secretary of Defense, and James G. Blight are co-authors of "Wilson's Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing and Catastrophe in the 21st Century." NEW YORK -- For the first time in a long time, Americans are fearful of attacks on the U.S. itself, a fact dramatized by President Bush's decision to establish a new Cabinet-level secretary for homeland defense. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the emerging threat of bioterrorism and the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan, with its risk of provoking new terrorist strikes against America, have produced in a new generation of Americans an overwhelming feeling that the U.S. is vulnerable in much the same way that the rest of the world is. The events of Sept. 11 have been likened to the British burning of Washington in 1814, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea in the Civil War and Pearl Harbor. But there is a more recent event during which Americans felt supremely vulnerable, completely surprised and shocked, and fearful about where the escalation would end: the 13 days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Not only is there a psychological similarity between October 1962 and September 2001. There is also an unsettling likeness in the extremely dangerous situations posed by Fidel Castro and the Cuban people in 1962 and Osama bin Laden and the Taliban now. Grasping their correlation may enable us to better respond to the terrorist threat with less risk of catastrophic escalation. Just how close we came to nuclear war on the climatic weekend of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Oct. 26-28, was not generally known until years later. A remarkable series of meetings, beginning in March 1987 and ending in January 1992, involving the former chief adversaries--Americans, Russians and Cubans--of the crisis produced these principal revelations: First, any U.S. attack on Cuba would have also been an attack on more than 40,000 Soviet citizens--not the 10,000 the CIA had estimated--who were deployed chiefly around the missile sites, which would have been primary targets. A devastating Soviet response was thus likely, perhaps a nuclear one. Second, by that weekend, Castro had concluded that an American air strike and invasion of his island was virtually inevitable. In a cable to Nikita S. Khrushchev, the Cuban leader urged the Soviet premier to launch an all-out nuclear strike against the U.S. if the invasion occurred. "That would be the moment," Castro wrote, "to eliminate such danger forever through an act of clear, legitimate self-defense, however harsh and terrible the solution would be, for there would be no other." Or as the translator of the cable, Soviet Ambassador Aleksander Alekseev, put it in his own cable to Khrushchev, Castro said: "If they attack Cuba, we should wipe them off the face of the earth." Separately, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Castro's colleague, declared his willingness "to walk by the path of liberation even when it may cost millions of atomic victims." Third, by Oct. 27, when the majority of President John F. Kennedy's military and civilian advisors favored an attack on Cuba, the Soviets had already delivered 162 nuclear warheads to the island and had stored them at a depot at Bejucal, southwest of Havana. The CIA had believed that there were zero warheads on Cuba. Since the U.S. invasion seemed imminent that weekend, the Soviet field commander in Cuba, Gen. Issa Pliyev, ordered the warheads for tactical weapons out of storage and moved closer to their launchers. All the pieces were thus in place for Armageddon. A quarter of a million Cuban troops and more than 40,000 Soviet troops, armed with dozens of tactical nuclear weapons, would have met a U.S. invasion force, initiating nuclear war, in the (mistaken) assumption that the U.S. forces would have attacked with nuclear weapons. The Soviet troops, the Cuban leaders and the Cuban people would have paid the ultimate price for this misperception. Yet, so would the Soviet people, the American people--indeed, the entire world. For the initiation of nuclear war would certainly have provoked a U.S. nuclear response. Fortunately, Khrushchev ordered the missile-carrying Soviet ships bound for Cuba to alter course, thus signaling the end of the crisis. Are there insights to be applied to our current crisis? Rather than being 13 days of gamesmanship followed by an American victory, as is popularly imagined, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the culmination of a long history of bitter enmity between the U.S. and Cuba. In Cuba, the crisis stirred notions of sacred mission, manhood, duty to a higher cause and other cultural characteristics poorly understood in North American (and Northern European) cultures. It aroused intense feelings of both desperation and resignation. When viewed in this light, the willingness of Cuban leaders to take measures that entailed huge risks appear quite predictable. Are Cubans the only people of limited means who feel a need to confront the U.S. directly, "inviting" a U.S. attack? Is Castro's communism the only belief system capable of driving people to contemplate suicide, even national suicide, in the service of their cause? Do we now understand non-Northern European systems of ideas any better than we understood the potent blend of nationalism and communism that moved Cubans to take on the most powerful and influential nation on Earth? Are there currently charismatic leaders like Castro capable of motivating their followers to carry out what may seem to Americans to be unbelievable acts of violence against the U.S.? If there are, can we depend on military means alone to change their fanaticism? At what point, and after how much escalation, will it all end? :: We Need Rules for War  History shows why U.S. should back the international court August 03, 2003 By Robert S. McNamara, On the night of March 9, 1945, when the lead crews of the 21st Bomber Command returned from the first firebombing mission over Tokyo, Gen. Curtis LeMay was waiting for them in his headquarters on Guam. I was in Guam on temporary duty from Air Force headquarters in Washington, and LeMay had asked me to join him for the after-mission reports that evening. LeMay was just as tough as his reputation. In many ways, he appeared to be brutal, but he was also the ablest commander of any I met during my three years of service with the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. That night, he'd sent out 334 B-29 bombers, seeking to inflict, as he put it, the maximum target destruction for the minimum loss of American lives. World War II was entering its final months, and the United States was beginning the last, devastating push for an unconditional Japanese surrender. On that one night alone, LeMay's bombers burned to death 83,793 Japanese civilians and injured 40,918 more. The planes dropped firebombs and flew lower than they had in the past and therefore were both more accurate and more destructive. They leveled a large part of Tokyo, which I had seen during a visit in 1937. It was a wooden city and burned like a match when it was firebombed. That night's raid was only the first of 67. Night after night -- 66 more times -- crews were sent out over the skies of Japan. Of course we didn't burn to death 83,000 people every night, but over a period of months American bombs inflicted extraordinary damage on a host of Japanese cities -- 900,000 killed, 1.3 million injured, more than half the population displaced. The country was devastated. The degree of killing was extraordinary. Radio Tokyo compared the raids to the burning of Rome in the year 64. LeMay was convinced that it was the right thing to do, and he told his superiors (from whom he had not asked for authority to conduct the March 9 raid), "If you want me to burn the rest of Japan, I can do that." LeMay's position on war was clear: If you're going to fight, you should fight to win. In the years afterward, he was quoted as saying, "If you're going to use military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force." He also said: "All war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier." Today, looking back almost 60 years later -- and after serving as secretary of Defense for seven years during one of the hottest periods of the Cold War, including the Cuban missile crisis -- I have to say that I disagree. War may or may not be immoral, but it should be fought within a clearly defined set of rules. One other thing LeMay said, and I heard him say it myself: "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals." On that last point, I think he was right. We would have been. But what makes one's conduct immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win? The "just war" theory, first expounded by the great Catholic thinkers (I am a Protestant), argues that the application of military power should be proportional to the cause to which you're applying it. A prosecutor would have argued that burning to death 83,000 civilians in a single night and following up with 66 additional raids was not proportional to our war aims. War will not be eliminated in the foreseeable future, if ever. But we can -- and we must -- eliminate some of the violence and cruelty and excess that go along with it. That's why the U.S. so badly needs to participate in the International Court for Crimes Against Humanity, which was recently established in The Hague. President Clinton signed that treaty on New Year's Eve 2000, just before leaving office, but in May 2002 President Bush announced that the U.S. did not intend to become a party to the treaty. The Bush administration believes, and many agree with it, that the court could become a vehicle for frivolous or unfair prosecutions of American military personnel. Although that is a cause for concern, I believe we should join the court immediately while we continue to negotiate further protection against such cases. If LeMay were alive, he would tell me I was out of my mind. He'd say the proportionality rule is ridiculous. He'd say that if you don't kill enough of the enemy, it just means more of your own troops will die. But I believe that the human race desperately needs an agreed-upon system of jurisprudence that tells us what conduct by political and military leaders is right and what is wrong, both in conflict within nations and in conflict across national borders. We need a clear code, internationally accepted, so that not only our Congress and president know, but so that all our military and civilian personnel know as well what is legal in conflict and what is illegal. And we need a court that can bring wrongdoers to trial for their crimes. Is it legal to incinerate 83,000 people in a single night to achieve your war aims? Was Hiroshima legal? Was the use of Agent Orange -- which occurred while I was secretary of Defense -- a violation of international law? These questions are critical. Our country needs to be involved, along with the International Court for Crimes Against Humanity, in the search for answers. Robert S. McNamara was secretary of Defense under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Holy Barbarians -- Police Beat Man in Raid on Gay Club

There's a lot of rambling, self-important navel-gazing in "Holy Barbarians" and although these meandering insights are vital to the people in the book, they can be fairly tedious reading. But there are also rewards. Here's an account of a group of people tending to a gay man who was evidently beaten by the police after a raid on a gay club called the Casbah. In this instance, author Lawrence Lipton's "I Am a Tape Recorder" approach brings us into this tiny converted garage in Venice where several people are nursing Ron Daley.  Page 120-123, "Holy Barbarians" (Scene: Ron Daley's pad. A made-over garage. Ronny has fitted it out with redwood panel walls and laid straw mats over the cement floor wall to wall. Two mattresses on the floor are covered with Japanese fabrics and strewn with cylindrical and three-cornered cushions of pastel colors. The bookcases are boards and glass bricks. Two lamps hang from the ceiling, parchment lantern shades of modern design derived from the Japanese. The components of the hi-fi are unenclosed. In one corner, a triangular private shrine holding a single rosebud in an Oriental vase, over it a rice paper print of the Buddha in contemplation, a Buddha of Zen simplicity. Partitioned off with bamboo and rice paper screens is a tiny kitchenette, all the utensils neatly hung on the wall, copperware, shiny bright, and the dishes set up on the shelves, a spartan kitchen, clean, monastically clean). Ronny is lying on the bed, swathed in bandages. He was brutally beaten up by vice squad officers during questioning at the police station after a raid on the Casbah, a gathering place for homosexuals, and is out on bail. Gilda Lewis has moved in to do nursing duty. She is busy in the kitchen making some broth for Ronny. He is telling me about the incident. His voice, always low and modulated, is almost a whisper.) RON: It wasn't like anything I had ever experienced before, Larry. His eyes were hazel, with little golden flecks in them. I must have been pretty high at the time and I guess he was, too. But it wasn't the pot altogether, I'm sure of that. It wasn't physical so much as it was spiritual, something inside us or outside, out there, who knows what it is, really? drawing us together. And he was talking. Art. Music. Philosophy. Poetry. I can't recall what he said, exactly. It wasn't what he was saying. It was a kind of spiritual presence. I felt as if I had finally found someone who was like that other dark side of me, myself, and I was looking at myself as in a mirror. And discovering myself in ways I had never known before. I'm sure it isn't a unique experience. Others must have known it -- I remember vaguely having read about such a meeting once in was it Shelley? Or something in Gide? (Gilda comes in with a cup of broth. I help to prop him while she spoon-feeds him, slowly and very gently. His face is badly cut up under the bandages. The doctor told me as he was leaving that he might be badly disfigured for life. After the broth he continues with his story. So far he has said nothing about the police beating, only about the young man he met at the Casbah that night and what happened before the raid.) RON: There was something in his voice that I remember. It seemed to be coming from somewhere far out. And I was enveloped in it, like a palpable thing. Like he was an extension of myself ...  the mystical being ... the Other ... Narcissus' reflection in the pool come to life and assuming an existence of its own. And yet separate and different in some wonderful, mystical way ...  Something I had always dreamed might happen to me.... (He goes on like this for some time, his voice trails off into silence. He may be asleep. About the police beating nothing now or at any time since then, to me or anyone that I know of. Angel Dan Davies is at the door with Dave Gelden and Rhonda Tower, the chick Angel has been making it with lately. They take off their sandals and leave them at the door before entering, as Ron always does. Rhonda has bad news. The prominent lawyer she knows has refused to take Ron's case.) RHONDA: You could have knocked me over with a feather. Like I was sure he'd take the case. He's taken other cases where there wasn't any money. Liquor cases and labor cases, things like that. But when I told him how the vice squad goons beat up Ronny and the homosexual thing man, he just flipped. What kind of a friend was I, trying to drag him into a scene like this! DAVE: Like I told you, you were wasting your time going to a cat like that. He's a square, man, and you don't catch a square sticking his neck out. RHONDA (to me): Do you know any hip lawyers? (I shake my head and smile) See, you've got to go to a square in a case like this, whether you like it or not. They've got you over a barrel. GILDA: Even the doctor was afraid to come when I told him what it was, and where it was. ANGEL: It's like money. Did you ever try sounding a square for money? He'll take you to a fancy restaurant and spend ten bucks but you can't sound him for money to buy food for your wife and kids. They'll buy you drinks in a bar but sound them for a buck to buy groceries and they'll act like they're embarrassed they'll hem and haw and Christ! -- You'd think you'd asked them to take their pants off in public or something. DAVE: That's what it is, man. Like they can't admit it, even to themselves, that there's such a thing as real starvation in the world. Or like this lawyer the cat can't face it, that a couple of cops will beat up on a cat just because he's a homosexual. They've got to prove it to themselves and to each other that they're real he-men. RHONDA: Do you suppose the Civil Liberties Union lawyers might do something? ANGEL: The Liberals? The political cats? They're the biggest squares of all when it comes to sex. Homosexuals yet -- wow! We got to find a lawyer who isn't prominent, or political or social. Some shyster who's mixed up in the rackets, maybe. He's the only kind that'll have the guts to mix it up with the cops in a police-beating case. He's beat, in a way, so he doesn't have to worry what the country club boys or the PTA is going to say about him. He doesn't have any illusions about justice or civil rights or the Constitution. RHONDA: I know a prostitute that works up on the Strip --   DAVE: Now you're talkin, Get ahold of this chick and she'll know what to do, who to go to. ANGEL: Like when I was on the road and I landed in a town broke, I learned one thing: never go to the local minister or the rabbi or the social agencies. All they'll want to know is who you've got back home that they can ship you back to if somebody back home is willing to wire them the money. Go to the first whorehouse you can find and talk to the madam, or to some saloonkeeper in the slum part of town, I remember a whore in Terre Haute once-- DAVE: They're the original hipsters the outlaws, the outcasts. The square, like he's got all these official lies he's got to believe, the schoolbook story and the church story and all that shit --  (Ronny stirs a little. Angel lights a stick of tea and holds it to Ronny's lips to take a drag on. Ronny smiles and tries to nod his thanks. It hurts.) DAVE: (looks over at me and shakes his head): Like I told you, Larry. The squares talk about their religion, their laws, their justice, their charity, but sooner or later it always turns out to be the man with a gun on his hip. The text of the entire book is here in plain text and in pdf format.

Nuestro Pueblo: The Pico Adobe

June 30, 1939: Nuestro Pueblo visits the Pico Adobe.

May 9, 1889: Pio Pico is back in court. Feb. 12, 1891: A Times editorial soliciting aid for Pico after his courtroom defeat. Today's Nuestro Pueblo sent me in search of the story of Pio Pico. One of best things about ProQuest is that I don't need to turn to a  book in which the facts have been diluted, filtered through an author's viewpoint or mangled through shoddy research.  I can go back to the first draft of history. To be sure, the newspapers have flaws and one must always be alert for them. But even so, the newspaper accounts have an immediacy, authenticity and comprehensiveness that books rarely match. For that matter, the biases of the original reports constitute their own type of history. Coverage of Pico is rather typical in the attitude that the Spanish of early California were idlers who threw away their fortunes on grand fiestas and that the region would have been nothing but raw land had it not been for the influx of shrewd white businessmen.   Sept. 12, 1894: The Times' obituary of Pio Pico, the last Spanish governor of California.