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.

A Kinder, Simpler Time Dept.: Your Movies

July 11, 1934:Confirmation that celebrities' deaths always come in threes.

Found on EBay -- Marilyn Monroe Pictures

If you have $10,000* that isn't doing anything, you might want to pick up some Marilyn Monroe photos by Joe Jasgur that have been listed on EBay. And yes, you may recall him as the guy who said Monroe had six toes. He also made some claims about the Black Dahlia case, but given his nonsense about Monroe's six toes I wouldn't believe anything he said about anything.  The listing is here. *Update: The price has been cut to $2,500.

Services for Theater Organist Bob Mitchell

 

Daily Mirror fan Karie Bible of Film Radar reports the death of theater organist Bob Mitchell. Mitchell was a regular feature of the Los Angeles Conservancy's Last Remaining Seats series. He was quite frail at this year's event but it was good to see him. Mitchell's services are scheduled on Friday at 9:30 a.m. at  Christ the King Catholic Church, 624 N. Rossmore Ave. He will be buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd. Memorial donations may be made to the American Heart Assn. or Boys Town. Here's a field recording I made at Last Remaining Seats a few years ago of Mitchell playing "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." Thanks to our friend Jon Weisman of the fabulous Dodger Thoughts blog for reminding us that Mitchell was the first organist at Dodger Stadium. At right, an article from April 10, 1962.

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.

Voices -- Karl Malden, 1912 - 2009

Expressly, Karl Malden His pet project, the film academy's Center for Motion Picture Study in Beverly Hills, opens Wednesday January 20, 1991 By JUDITH MICHAELSON, Judith Michaelson is a Times staff writer. At 76, his face is unlined, his cheeks are rosy and the familiar "don't leave home without it" voice booms off the walls of a conference room. He still lifts weights, though they're not nearly as heavy as in the years when he was in high school in Gary, Ind., or working--and playing basketball for the tournament team--at the local steel mill. Now Karl Malden is into a second term as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences--a year that promises to be the busiest (and most expensive) in the Academy's 63-year history. It's just another notch on a career that counts more than 50 feature films, a dozen TV movies, a five-year series playing Lt. Mike Stone on "The Streets of San Francisco"--and all those TV commercials. On Wednesday, the academy's Center for Motion Picture Study opens at its new home, the historic Waterworks Building in Beverly Hills. The nearly $6-million center will include the Margaret Herrick Library and Academy Film Archive and will be, according to the academy, the world's premier film research center. Its statistics are staggering: 5 million still photographs; clipping files on 60,000 films and 50,000 people; 18,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals; 5,000 scripts and over 12,000 films. Meanwhile, Malden is helping to raise a $15-million endowment fund for the center over three years. With the first year completed, $6.8 million has been raised. Last month the academy also reopened its refurbished movie theaters, and Malden jokes: "Isn't that the way to go down in the history of the academy? Karl Malden spent all the academy's money? I've been saying that since I took the presidency." Also last month, Malden went into production on "Absolute Strangers," which will air on CBS this spring. Malden plays the father of Nancy Klein, the Long Island woman who underwent an abortion in February, 1989, to help her chances of recovery from a coma after an automobile accident. Klein's husband Martin, an accountant, fought abortion opponents all the way to the Supreme Court in order to have the operation performed. Malden, who broke into acting as a student at the Goodman Theater drama school in Chicago, won a best-supporting actor Oscar as Mitch, the aging bachelor, in "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) and an Emmy as Freddy Kassab, the father on NBC's "Fatal Vision" (1984). Question: You're an actor's actor. . . . Answer: That's the kiss of death, an actor's actor. . . . (It) means the public doesn't know him or doesn't care about him. You're (supposed to play) for an audience and not for the other actors and yet I cherish and like it when the industry thinks I'm an actor's actor. But when you're going out looking for work, it's a little tough. Q: With an Oscar, an Emmy and that reputation, why did you want to be academy president? A: I never in my life dreamed that I would be president of anything, and finally when a group got ahold of me and said "We're going to make you president," I said "You're crazy. I don't know how to run a meeting or anything." (They) said that doesn't matter. And to be frank there were two of us nominated. I voted for the other person. Q: You said in a recent newsletter you "wouldn't mind if the pace slowed down just a bit this year." A: It's true; I've never made so many speeches in my life. I've never gone out and raised money for anything in my life. And now that I'm president I feel it's my duty. Q: I take it you see your role as an activist president? A: I'm afraid I'm an activist. I'll tell you why: When you commit yourself to something, you want to see something done, you want to leave something behind. . . . I didn't start all this. Another president, Bob Wise, really started it, and Richard Kahn picked it up and yet I saw that there was an endowment fund committee which had never done anything for three years. I said, "Let's activate it and get it started." Bob Rehme took it over, and we're quite proud of the fact that we've raised quite a bit of money. . . . Q: Why was a new center needed? A: Have you been down on the floor where the library was originally? We outgrew it. We have two warehouses filled with material we sometimes can't get to. Now with it all being under one roof, it's going to be much simpler, much easier to handle, and also we have enough room to go on for another 20, 25 years. Q: The Beverly Hills Waterworks Building opened in 1927--the same year the academy was born. Does that have special meaning for you? A: It certainly does. A member of the Beverly Hills board was Douglas Fairbanks, and he also started the academy. And if what we hear historically is true, it was he who said we have to build a plant to purify the water . . . and at the same time he was president of our board. So that's the connection. An actor did it all. Q: How is the endowment campaign going? A: (Smiling) Have you gotten a letter from us yet to give us a little money? . . . We need the endowment to keep that library going for the rest of its life. If we invest it properly the interest off of that money will keep that library open so that no one else will have to worry, and we'll never raise money again. This is a one-time deal. Q: Who have been the major contributors so far? A: Bob Hope--we're naming the lobby of the library after him. He gave us a million dollars. Bob Wise asked him when he first started and he got it. And (the) DeMille (Trust) the Reading Room is going to be named after (Cecil B.) DeMille . . . same amount. We started the whole thing wanting to get the industry behind it. The industry is the studios. We went to the studios and without any hesitation they all gave the same amount, so they're all behind us. . . . I would rather not say (how much). Warners, 20th Century Fox, Columbia, Disney--help me name 'em--Paramount, (MCA) Universal, (MGM-Pathe Communications) all the studios were right behind us. And then we went to the smaller, what we call the second-(level) producers and they all contributed. Not as much. . . And if I may say so with pride, a company that I love very much, American Express, gave us a good amount. . . . And then the next step, we had three wonderful people who under their stationery--Michael Douglas, (Steven) Spielberg and Meryl Streep--sent letters out to people we felt were making a good amount of money in what they're doing, and asking for $50,000. And you'd be surprised how many have come through. We felt (Douglas and Spielberg) represented producers and directors. And Michael is an actor, and Meryl an actress. Q: What's your pitch? What do you say? A: "Hello, how are you? What are you doing, where are you going, you got any money, we need it." No, I'm kidding . . . Being an actor, I deal in specifics. (Bob) Daly is now head of Warner Bros. and I walked into Daly's office with Bob Rehme, and Daly's office happens to be Jack Warner's old office and I was under contract with Warners for nine years. I was in that office many times, discussing things that I didn't want to do and that I wanted to do. . . . I started telling (Daly) things about Warner Bros. he never knew, and I can do that in every studio . . . it warms 'em up. I was here when Louis B. Mayer was head. I was here when Zanuck hired me for films on 20th Century Fox when I used to see Betty Grable walk up and down the lot or John Hodiak or Tyrone Power, all these people and I was nobody but I saw them. Q: You had a Broadway career; you weren't nobody. A: That's why they hired me. I had a Broadway career for 20 years. I started making pictures in '48, living in New York and coming out here for (a few) weeks and then go back. I was star-struck. Q: Do acting offers keep coming, or are you turning things down or putting them on hold? A: I've turned a lot of things down but I think I would have turned them down even if I hadn't been here. There are some things that I just don't fit into . . . I'm a square as you probably know; I am . Q: You've been married for 52 years to the same woman, some people would say. . . A: Yes (smiling) that's a square. Especially in this town. And I just find some things objectionable in films today. . . . Let's take nudity. Nudity has been in films since the time films began, except it wasn't as specific and so blatant as it is today. They made you feel if two people went into a room and closed the door a certain way that something was going to happen. And when that door opened the next morning, you knew something happened; that's what I call art. But to see two people in bed, supposedly, is that art? Q: Last year we had the summer of blood and guns and guts; what do you think of that movie crop? A: Well you said it, and the way you said it, that's the way I feel. Summer of blood and guts and stuff. Q: You're president of the academy, do you ever discuss this with studio heads? A: No, that's not my job, and even if I weren't president, I wouldn't do it. It's people's tastes. You like that color, I like this color. The only thing is, I just wish there were an equal balance--between what we're talking about, and what I call art and art form. See I feel the good writers, Maxwell Anderson, Clifford Odets, Elmer Rice, Robert Sherwood, Tennessee Williams, these people found a way to say what they wanted to say . . . in a very beautiful way. There were some terrible movies at that time too. I just feel that there were more of the kind of movies that I'm talking about than there are today. Let's take the late '40s and the '50s. Listen, I was in a couple of (the best). I think they were beautiful movies. "Streetcar Named Desire," "On the Waterfront." There's a picture that deals with a sexy theme, Tennessee Williams' "Baby Doll." Remember "Baby Doll"? Today it would be nothing but then it was banned. We said a lot . . . but never once was it shown, never once, but you knew what they were talking about. That's art. Q: Of all the movies you have done, what role was the closest to you? A: I enjoy them all--the next one I'm going to do. . . . The ones I enjoyed are the ones that I got to meet, when I played a living person like Father John (Corridan; he struggles with the name) who I stayed with for 11 days, the priest in "On the Waterfront." Father John (Father Barry in the movie), who just died about three years ago, was born and raised in that (Brooklyn) area, a Jesuit priest. Q: What was he like, this priest? A: I'll give you an anecdote. The picture had started and three days later I was to start work, Father John was there, and I said, "Well tomorrow, Father John, I'm going to be you. " And he said, "I'm not worried." I said, "Got any advice?" He said, "Yes. Just don't make me holier than thou; make me a human being . . . I've seen some of those priest movies; don't make me that way." He was a Jesuit priest who taught law to the longshoremen. And if you remember the picture, the scene in the hold of the ship, he wrote at least 80% of that speech. A man came to him and said, "Father John, I can't get a chit to go to work. Now I haven't gotten a chit in two months." He says, "You go in there and demand a chit even if you take it out of his hands. Legally you have that right, you do it." And the man did it, and two days later (he) was found (dead) in the East River. Q: And that speech? A: " 'God is with you no matter where you are.' " That's the essence of it. Q: Are you concerned at all about Japanese corporations buying up some of the major studios-- Matsushita buying MCA, Sony and Columbia, JVC and Largo Entertainment? A: The only way I can answer that is to say that I was here when Jack Warner was head of a studio, Louis B. Mayer, Zanuck, Cohn . . . and I never felt I'd see the day when I say I wished they were back. The studios today are even different than they were then. And if the Japanese buy what they're buying, so it'll change (some more). How they'll change, who knows? Another 10 years somebody will buy from Sony. It's just changing, and I don't worry about those things. And I honestly don't think the academy should worry about those things. (Film) is an art form. We just hope, I just hope that they hold on to a kind of integrity about filmmaking--keep it at a level where people will be proud to be a part of this industry. Q: So who owns doesn't bother you; it's the kind of movies that are being made? A: That's right. All over the world they're making films. Some foreign films are terrific films. It's the kind of films--not who owns the company. . . . Q: In 1990, the announcement of "Driving Miss Daisy" as best picture was not made until 12:30 EST, which missed about 61% of the East Coast audience. . . . A: Would you put (best film) at the beginning of the show . . . or where would you put it? Q: At the end, but I'd tighten the show. A: Well, now we're going to discuss tightening. Now I've got you (smiles). You know I always thought until I became president that the show was supposed to last two hours. No. ABC wants between three hours and 3 hours and 20 minutes. That's what they want. We're putting on that show for them . . . . Everybody thinks that it's a two-hour show that runs over an hour--it's a three-hour show. Q: So why not start the show an hour earlier--at 5 p.m.? A: What about the people here? The first hour we give out best supporting actor and the best supporting actress. Figure it out for me; help me. . . . Save what for the second hour? . . . Then everything before it they'll say is junk , we don't have to look at it (raising voice). It's a problem, a big problem. . . . Q: Last year the Oscars had the smallest audience in three years--25.7 million homes, 48% of the audience. Why do you think that happened? A: This is my personal opinion: The show (the year) before didn't help us much (and) I think this coming year will have a terrific audience because the show last year was terrific. We had a theme--films are worldwide. And we went worldwide for the first time. Q: What was your own Oscar night like? Did you go in a big limo like they do now? A: I was here making a film at Warner Bros, one of the contract films. It was with Cornel Wilde, a French underground picture, I don't know what it was. The Oscar night was going to be held at the Pantages Theatre and I wasn't going to go (but) someone from the office came down and says, 'You're going to the Oscar show . . . you go to the wardrobe and get yourself a tuxedo. You're going .' I drove in a rented Chevy, and when I got (there) I saw those limousines piling up in front. . . . So I went about a block away and parked the car, and I walked. I had a coat because in New York you had a coat, a topcoat and I walked in, nobody knew me and I went down, sat in my seat. I put the coat down in (the adjacent) seat and the next two people who came in were Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. So I was in good company. I knew Bogart slightly because he was on the Warner lot also. . . I thought I'll sit here and enjoy the show, never dreaming they'd call my name. When they (did), like everybody else for a moment you don't know what to do, and I got up, walked to the aisle and the only thing I could think of is my coat. What the hell am I going to do with my coat? Because I knew they took you backstage. So I leaned over to Bogart, I says, "Will you look after my coat, please?" He said, "Get up there, kid, take your Oscar." So I got up. About a half-hour later, I see Bogart holding an Oscar, and the first thing I said to him is "What did you do with my coat?" He said in nice words, "Forget your coat, hold on to the goddamn Oscar ." :: King Karl How Malden conquered the worlds of stage and screen. April 26, 1998 By Charles Champlin, Charles Champlin is the retired arts editor of The Times Even now, when the commercials no longer run, strangers who run into Karl Malden invariably say, "I hope you didn't leave home without it" or some variation thereon. And a few years ago, going to lunch in Studio City, Malden found a parking space across Ventura Boulevard from the restaurant and, seeing no cars in either direction, crossed the street. A police car sped into view and ticketed him for jaywalking. Curiously the officer did not ask his name and when Malden examined the ticket, he discovered it was issued to Mike Stone--the detective he was then playing on the '70s ABC series "Streets of San Francisco." Malden cheerfully tore up the ticket. It is an irony, pleasing but still ironic, that 21 years of an American Express commercial and five seasons of the series made Malden more recognizable to more people than 60 years of superior acting in theater and film, with an Academy Award for "A Streetcar Named Desire" among many other honors, and a reputation as one of the strongest and most versatile supporting actors in Hollywood. His performance as Marlon Brando's beer-drinking, poker-playing crony in the original stage company of "Streetcar" and then in the film; his sympathetic priest, again with Brando, in "On the Waterfront"; his cuckolded husband of Carroll Baker in "Baby Doll"; the warden in "Birdman of Alcatraz"; Gen. Omar Bradley in "Patton"; and his work in dozens of other films established him as an Everyman, but one whose range moved easily up and down the levels of society and the IQ scale, from heroes to heavies and ordinary, decent guys just trying to get along. "I figured I was never going to be a leading man," Malden says, "and it's probably spared me a lot of heartbreak." With all the honors he has earned and the treasury of fine work he has put on film, Malden feels that his monument will be the superb library of the motion picture academy on La Cienega Boulevard in Beverly Hills. During his two terms as president of the academy, Malden and Bob Rehme, head of the Academy Foundation, raised a $12-million endowment to complete and sustain the library, which was originally built in the '20s, in the style of an Italian church, bell tower and all, to disguise the city's water works. The refurbishing was completed in January 1991. The largest single gift from outside the industry was from American Express, and the top-floor conference room at the library is named for Malden. No two Hollywood success stories are alike, and Malden's seems as improbable as any. The Serbs have a word for it--sudbina, or fate--Malden says in his highly readable new autobiography, "When Do I Start?" (Simon and Schuster), which he wrote with his screenwriter daughter, Carla. Malden's father, Petar Sekulovich, a Serbian immigrant, arrived at Ellis Island on April 18, 1906, bound for San Francisco. But it was the day of the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, and his father landed in the Serbian community in Chicago instead. Malden was born there in 1913 and named Mladen Sekulovich. He spoke almost no English until the family moved to Gary, Ind., when he was 5. Starting school was hard, Malden says, because he not only couldn't spell many of the words, he didn't know what they meant. His father drove a milk wagon for 38 years. When he graduated from horse-drawn wagon to a truck, Sekulovich was asked which he preferred. "Horse knows route. Truck don't," he said. But his father was also a lover of theater and knowledgeable about it. He staged productions at Serbian patriotic organizations in Gary. Karl and other teenage boys were usually cast as Turkish brigands with false mustaches and beards. The elders would play the pashas. It was Malden's earliest taste of performance. In high school, Malden began to be noticed as both an actor and an athlete, and was once briefly bounced from the basketball team for refusing to miss a performance. He was let back on the team in time to help win a championship game. He also played the lead in the high school's senior play, Shaw's "Arms and the Man." He was promised an athletic scholarship at Arkansas College in Batesville, Ark., After hitchhiking to the campus, he lost the scholarship because he wouldn't play football as well as basketball and the school couldn't afford one-sport scholarships. (He had broken his nose twice in sports, and as he says, it was heroic to begin with.) So he hitchhiked back to Gary and went to work in a steel mill, where he spent three years, finally at the open hearth furnaces, which paid $5 a day, the top pay. "The furnaces are as near to hell as you can get," Malden said at lunch recently. "The doors open up and the flames shoot out. And it looks so glamorous in the movies, with the molten metal pouring into the molds. Forget it," he said, laughing scornfully, "it's hell." He realized at last that acting was his only possible hope of escaping from hell. He'd saved a little more than $300 in his three years, and, with no introductions or references, went to the Goodman Theater in Chicago and he said he wanted to be there and to act. Doctor Gnesin, a Russian emigre who then ran the school, evidently knew madness or true grit when he saw it. He told Malden that if he was willing to gamble on himself and spend his $300 on the first-term tuition--and if he did well--Gnesin would put him on a full scholarship for the rest of the two-year program. Malden, remembering the furnaces, swallowed hard but took the gamble. He had enough left to commute to Gary for a while (60 cents each way). When he missed the last train he slept in the station, then, broke in the school's basement. Then he was able to share cost-free a hotel room with a better-heeled fellow actor, Jimmy Russo. At one point, to keep eating, he stole sandwiches from lunch bags, favoring the excellent fare carried by Ralph Alswang, later a highly regarded Broadway designer. When Alswang's mother found out what Malden had been forced to do, she said, "If I'd known, I'd have packed an extra sandwich." At the Goodman, he still had traces of a Slavic accent and underwent strenuous training to get rid of it. "After a while," he has said, "there were these clipped British tones coming out of an open hearth face." When he finished at the Goodman in 1936, the commercial theater did not open its arms to welcome him. He was so broke he couldn't afford $5 for his diploma--and never got it. He went back to Gary and drove a milk wagon, as his father had. Then an acquaintance from the Goodman, Robert Ardrey, author of "The Territorial Imperative," called him to New York where a play of his, "Casey Jones," was going to be produced. (Ardrey's sister had studied at the Goodman and he had seen Malden act.) In New York Malden bunked in with Jimmy Russo again, who was seeking his own fortune and making endless rounds of casting offices. From his milk delivery wages, Malden had a stash this time of $175, but even at 1936 prices, that would not fund a long stay in Manhattan. The plans to produce Ardrey's play fell through; Malden's first call at a casting office produced a "Nothing for you" in tones of smug indifference. But Ardrey introduced Malden to Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan at the then and later famous Group Theater. There Malden was taken on at a small stipend, studied with Clurman and was cast in "Golden Boy," which became his Broadway debut in 1937. It was Kazan who urged him to change his name. "It sounds Jewish," Kazan said, "and some of us are Jews, but the Group isn't a Jewish theater." So Karl rearranged Mladen into Malden and took his mother's father's first name. Malden was well reviewed in his small part in "Golden Boy," but found himself having to head back to Gary to earn some money that summer. He was back in New York in the fall. But, as he says in the autobiography, the next years "were a mess . . . a period of chaos and confusion." He was cast in eight plays, none of which lasted a month. He married Mona Graham, an actress he met at the Goodman and they moved so often he has trouble remembering when they lived where. (They celebrated their 59th anniversary in December.) For their wedding dinner they found they had 80 cents between them and went to a Chock Full O' Nuts coffee shop. His life, he says, was an endless round of fruitless calls at casting offices. It seemed possible that he and Mona could go back to the Goodman and teach, and the idea of a 9-to-5 job, any 9-to-5 job, began to feel seductively attractive. But in the end the dry period at its most dispiriting simply confirmed how soul-deep his commitment to acting is. He knew he couldn't be happy doing anything else. "Just like the writer facing the blank page," Malden says, "the actor starts fresh every single time. It is an arduous, painful and often demoralizing process. We suffer through those feelings to get to the moment where it all clicks. But in the meantime we feed on the hope that that moment exists out there, somewhere." The early years gave him his enduring philosophy as an actor: that it was never the money that mattered, it was the part. "I've always believed there isn't a part I couldn't learn something from." Malden never played coy or hard to hire. His customary response is "When do I start?," which, the more Malden and Carla thought about it, seemed the perfect, apt title. Three years after the Broadway debut, he went to Hollywood to make his film debut in "They Knew What They Wanted." Following his Air Force service (he appeared in "Winged Victory"), Kazan in 1947 cast Malden in "Streetcar," which gave his stage and screen career a momentum it has never lost, although the arc of any actor's career has its share of blips. After years of commuting to Hollywood, the Maldens finally moved west to stay in 1960, and he began the string of performances that secured his reputation in a range of films as different as "Gypsy" and John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn." Daughter Carla says: "As I learned more about my father's struggles, I began to realize that his is an American dream story." And even as Hollywood success stories go, it does seem a long, unlikely road from an ethnic enclave on the Chicago West Side, where English was rarely heard, to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, facing the cameras and introducing the Oscar show to a billion watchers, as Malden did in 1990 as president of the motion picture academy. That night, waiting in the wings, Malden said he felt as nervous as he had before his debut in "Golden Boy." He still worried about flubbing a line in a speech he'd rehearsed a thousand times. But this time, he said, "I was no longer afraid I didn't belong there."

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.

Michael Jackson: End of the Jacksons?

Sept. 13, 1981: Michael Jackson tells Robert Hilburn that he's done touring with the Jacksons. "I sometimes feel like I should be 70 by now," Michael Jackson says.

"Our parents did push us, but it wasn't against our will," Tito Jackson says. "I think I'd die on my own. I'd be so lonely. Even at home, I'm lonely. I sit in my room sometimes and cry. It's so hard to make friends and there are some things you can't talk to your parents or family about. I sometimes walk around the neighborhood at night, just hoping to find someone to talk to. But I just end up coming home," Michael Jackson says.

Michael Jackson -- Master of Marketing

Jan. 15, 1984: Michael Jackson as a master of marketing. "Jackson is assuredly not the innocent he's usually presumed to be."

Michael Jackson in Victory Tour

July 9, 1984: Michael Jackson's Victory Tour: "Michael Jackson is passively aggressive, childishly macho, asexually passionate, dreamily realistic ... The 25-year-old pop sensation is the living, dancing embodiment of an oxymoron ... a figure of speech in which opposite or contradictory ideas are combined."