Death in the Springtime:
A Meditation on Richard L. Armitage, with a Coda for Camile Luber Hemsley and William Frey Taylor
We naturally rue death when it comes to someone we know or esteem from afar. We cannot help but reflect on our own mortality when we think of another’s death, and for most that reflection stirs undercurrents of stress in the face of the unknown and, still more stingy, the unknowable. Somehow death in the springtime on the American East Coast, when the natural world blooms anew and is brash with birdsong, is particularly cruel. Just a few more weeks, please; when the dog days arrive I’ll agree to go. Doesn’t that sound reasonable? Death is not reasonable. It just is.
What happens to our consciousness (never mind our bodies) when we die? Does it merge into some stream of amorphous energy gathered back to our ultimate Creator, it being understood that, for all we know, there may be several layers of intermediate creators? Does it simply disappear forever, forever being a very long time if time isn’t somehow curved or tricky, like that next cosmic Cat’s Cradle move yet to be discovered. And does that mean that the entire universe disappears forever, too, since it obviously does from the personal perspective? This is why the Rabbis taught in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 37a) that he who destroys a human being, it is as if he has destroyed the whole world, and he who saves a person it is as if he has saved the whole world.
Ah, but of course the whole world doesn’t disappear: No individual’s death destroys the universe from an impersonal perspective. The universe, as it were, takes any particular person’s death without breaking stride. Where is the universe striding to? Maybe it’s just exercising on a stationary bike?
What does the eternally incommensurate I/not-I exposure to the consequence of death mean? Is great treasure to be gained by solving this mystery, or is trying just another pointless onion-peeling exercise for dolts? We don’t know. Maybe it’s just a head-scratcher designed to make us more humble whilst we live. Knowing that the universe will go on without us might also make us better parents and grandparents—burnish the quality of intergenerational responsibility, in other words—if we reflect on the DNA and chromosomal life-stuff we inherit and pass along. It is humbling, too, to imagine ourselves as part of multidimensional web of coral-like life through time, ineluctably connected to what came before and what comes after. Whenever I feel the quiet gales of mortality terror approaching I ponder this life-web, and sometimes it helps to still the winds.
Some pretend to have actual no-doubt answers to these kinds of questions. Some have even persuaded themselves that they are not pretending. Entire doctrines posit the physical resurrection of dead bodies, the recirculation of souls, and other “everything will be fine in the end” psychic palliatives. This is accomplished mainly in groups, for belief in the highly improbable works well as a social congealent, which boosts group morale and so has epigenetic survival value.
Then again, some have commodified impossible-to-know forms of trans-fleshy hope to make a lowly living. The medieval Church sold tickets to heaven for those who could afford them. Some still do roughly similar things—promise salvation of a sort for a price, that is—and the techniques are not unknown in political life in some ways. When death is cheapened by artificial palliation, acquiring evasions of it seems more easily within reach. But the conceit of evading death, Donne’s proclamation “death be not proud,” only cheapens the preciousness of life—a mug’s bargain for discount salvation if ever there was one. Whether this sort of thing has survival value for the group is questionable.
Of course not everyone takes lofty philosophical attitudes toward death. The prolific Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, a connoisseur of darkness, death, and troublemaking, summed it up for the modern many, for whom heaven is much too far away, when he wrote, “Everything is ridiculous when one thinks of death.” That qualifies as a higher-brow version of Woodie Allen’s refusal to do his homework as a child based on the certain scientific knowledge that one day our sun would implode and the earth would be no more.
For some, too, death is a release from acute chronic pain. Frida Kahlo’s last written words were, “Espero Alegre la Salida–y Espero no Volver jamás.”[1] For some unfortunate people, one life is already one too many.
But whatever attitude we take toward death, whether hopeful or defiant or simply one of stunned inarticulateness, no one really knows the answers to such questions. That is why we need—I need—a metaphor for and about death that is resolutely neutral toward pointless speculation in the midst of unavoidable ignorance. There is such a metaphor, one devised by Robert S. Vansittart that graces his posthumous memoir, The Mist Procession, published in 1958. Here is how Vansittart described it:
I was walking under a burden and rested by the road, which ran through a clearing in a forest. Dusk was falling, and on either side were drifts of mist; but into the open space a shaft of light had pierced. Along the road moved in an endless procession all sorts and conditions of men and women. Emerging from one obscurity they passed into the other. Mixed with the throng I saw mighty ones, whom I recognized from books and pictures, and others whom I had known in the flesh. I thought thereafter that if I ever write my memoirs, I would call them The Mist Procession. I would try to discover the point of this universal journey, the sum and substance of the events and shadows sharing and surrounding my own transit.
I’ve never written a memoir since nothing I’ve ever done justifies one. If I can just bring The Age of Spectacle project up to completion that will suffice, for there is personal substance in it as well as what ordinarily ought to be in a book of that kind. But this Raspberry Patch post is partly memoirish. It is not part of the “Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle” series and does not fulfill the promise of revealing the revised ending of the book, as mentioned last week. For that you must again wait. It is rather an interspersion of prose, punctuated with a closing spark of poetry, occasioned by death—not of one person but of three. Any grander structure it may evidence is entirely accidental.
The Man with No Neck
Richard L. Armitage passed away on April 13. He was Deputy Secretary of State in the first Bush 43 Administration, which is where I saw him most often in the 2003-05 period. I first met him in the summer of 1991. I last saw and spoke with him on Friday, November 5, 2021, after the funeral of Colin L. Powell at the Washington Cathedral. Three eulogies were delivered on that somber occasion, the first by Madeleine Albright, the second by Rich Armitage—Powell’s best friend for more than forty years, since they met in Vietnam—and the last one by Powell’s son Michael. Now Albright and most recently Armitage are gone off, along with Powell, into the mist procession. Powell’s wife Alma, in a wheelchair at the funeral, has since left us, as well, this past July 28.
I wonder what the notables in attendance that day, who included Joe Biden and Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, are thinking now with Rich’s passing. (Bill Clinton did not attend because he was recovering from an illness, and Donald Trump, who had publicly insulted Powell just after he died on October 18, was not invited.) I have been in small-room company with most of these notables, and others gone before in the most procession. Sometimes I feel like the Forrest Gump of U.S. foreign/national security policy. (I first met Joe Biden, for example, in 1979 when I worked briefly for Scoop Jackson.) I know I’m not alone in this feeling and I’m sure I’m not the first to say it: The typical American has little idea how many minor hearts and minds attend the doings of the mighty, as Vansittart called them. Each one of them, to paraphrase and mangle Walt Whitman, contains or once contained multitudes….the word understood generically as “staffers.”
I don’t know what they’re thinking in these starlight cooled spring evenings. I only hope that their common humanity and common fate as mortals either has or still can overcome the aging petty animosities that could be felt, but were never heard, at that November 5, 2021 funeral service.
At a time like this it is proper and right to do what Franz Kafka said we were created to do: tell stories. I did not know Rich Armitage like Colin Powell and so many others knew him. I have known these and other more or less household names as staffer, not peer—so always only in a backstage peripheral way. But stories can be told from many angles: facing, from the side, behind, below; and the stories I tell here are stories only I can tell for their being glancing, happenstantial one-offs. Maybe one day some enterprising writer will read and suppose they need them; who knows? If so, they need to be written down now, before I forget, get distracted, or myself join others’ mist processions.
The first time I met Rich Armitage in the summer of 1991 was at Main State, 22nd and C Streets, NW, my future place of employment—but at the time I of course did not know that. When you enter the main doors of the State Department building, just directly off to the left is a door leading to small suite of rooms used then, if not still, for diplomats on temporary assignment. Rich Armitage was then the designated U.S. negotiator dealing with the Philippines government concerning the U.S. leases on Subic Bay and Clark AFB. With him on this assignment were Fred Hof and Linc Bloomfield. But before dealing with the Philippine bases negotiation, the three of them had earlier been the envoy team during 1989-90 dealing with the Yarmouk Dam affair, and that is what I came to discuss with Armitage and friends. I had been referred to Armitage by Eliyahu Rosenthal, who was at the time the head of Mekorot, the Israeli government office dealing with water, its National Water Carrier, and various diplomatic/political matters pertaining thereto.
This is neither the time nor place to go into scintillating detail on the Yarmouk Dam business, but some background is necessary to understand what Armitage did, or tried to do, as a latter day successor to Eric Johnston, of Eisenhower Administration vintage. Suffice it to say that I was in mid-stages of writing a book, published in 1992, entitled Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War: Functional Ties and Futile Diplomacy in a Small Place (St. Martin’s Press), that analyzed the meaning of a range of quiet cooperative efforts between the Jordanian and Israeli governments. One of those efforts, very longstanding, concerned matters hydrological.
Now, in 1989-90 the Jordanians had an idea of damming the Yarmouk River, which flows south into the Jordan at Naharayim, and which in its earlier course forms the border between Jordan and Syria. This dam had been envisioned in smaller form in the 1953 Johnston Plan, along with a second small dam. The World Bank agreed to finance the construction of a larger single dam pending agreement on the part of all the legal riparians, which of course included Israel. The Israeli government of the day wanted some assurances concerning prior agreements between Israel and Jordan before signing off, and it did not trust the Syrians to do as promised in a September 1987 agreement between Jordan and Syria. So Israeli agreement to the project proved to be a problem, and King Hussein on one of his visits to Washington asked President George H.W. Bush to appoint an envoy to mediate the issue.
This was a complicated business. The Yarmouk Dam project—also known to the locals as the Wihda or Wahda (Unity) Dam project—that issued from the September 1987 agreement had been more or less forced on Jordan, since the Syrians were off-taking large quantities of water to irrigate a new agricultural region. The period from the mid-1980s through the end of the decade featured an acute drought cycle with poor winter rains, so the Syrian drawing of water threatened to reduce water levels for Jordan’s East Ghor Canal, a mainstay of Jordanian commercial agricultural production, below its in-take culverts. So rather than sit by and watch as the Syrians took the water, the Jordanians sought to stabilize arrangements to the extent possible. The Syrians, meanwhile, figured that a dam could be useful for generating electricity in a remote but developing area of the country, and they could still take water, even more easily from the reservoir behind a dam, and take as much as they liked and dare the Jordanians to do anything about it.
The Israelis worried that, among other things, the new dam would reduce the water volume flowing through the southern course of the Jordan into the Dead Sea, which was already shrinking from recent weather patterns. They were also mindful of the possibility that less water would strain established Israeli-Jordanian cooperation patterns.
If that were not enough, corruption in Jordan was uncharacteristically making news at the time, as wealthy politically connected families were accused of quietly buying up cheap land whose value would explode if a dam were actually built.
To get through the thicket of all these impinging factors, a U.S. mediator had to know the domestic and international politics of the three involved countries, the hydrological realities of the Jordan Valley, and the details of secret cooperative arrangements between Jordan and Israel concerning water and other matters (like off-taking potash in the Dead Sea). He had to be discreet, not leak; he had to be shrewd, not get played; and he had to inform and engage other offices in the State and Defense Departments, and the IC, with equities in these countries and issues so as to keep them happy—but not engage too much lest that invite unwanted busybodying and backfire on the need to be discreet. In short, this was a tough brief to master, and it took time and patience to do it. Armitage mastered it, which is one of the reasons he became one of the most trusted and effective diplomatic troubleshooting envoys of his generation.
In the course of two years of dam mediation Armitage, along with Hof (a Syria specialist) and Bloomfield, got to know the issues and the PLK (“plucky little king”) pretty well. As it happened, “the damned dam” never got built: The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and the Gulf War that started in January 1991, put paid to all of Armitage’s mediation efforts. The PLK leaned hard in favor of Saddam Hussein for fear of consequences—Jordan got cut-rate oil from Iraq, and the relationship usefully irritated the Syrians—if he didn’t. President Bush called off the Yarmouk Dam mediation as an expression of his disappointment, let’s call it, over the King’s behavior. The last time Armitage traveled to Nadwa Palace to talk to the King, just on the eve of the Gulf War, it was as a friend, but a friend with a message from the President, more or less to wit: Various projectiles are about to fly over Jordanian airspace from U.S. naval vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean headed for military targets in Iraq and occupied Kuwait, and you should please do nothing to impede their progress. Well, that was that, sayeth the history books.
So I asked Armitage about details of the Yarmouk Dam mediation, and he answered complete with tales about the key personalities on all sides. I got pretty much all I needed to finish my book, the Armitage-supplied material laid out near the end of Chapter 4. I also took the opportunity to ask about how Armitage assessed Jordan’s role in the Gulf War and the future of U.S-Jordanian relations, which had been at the core of my doctoral dissertation and which I expected to continue following and writing about.[2] I think I was there for about two hours or so; Fred and Linc were kibitzing the interview, which was like no interview I had ever conducted. Stories, anecdotes, and jokes were flying. The roar of laughter, I thought, had to be audible all the way over at the main desk, where perfectly normal, sober people were trying to pass muster to gain admittance. These guys really knew how to enjoy themselves. It gave me a new view of government work.
Now, as far as the negotiation with the Philippines was concerned, this effort too was drawing to a conclusion at the time and, alas, it fared no better than the Yarmouk Dam negotiations. Again not to agonize the details, but a new and more nationalist leadership in Manila under Corazon Aquino was trying to gouge the United States over the cost of re-leasing Subic Bay and Clark AFB. In the midst of protracted negotiations, Mt. Pinatubo erupted for the first time in more than five centuries. A very loud noise came from the volcano in early April, but then not much happened until June 12, when lava began to pour out of the cone and a thick coat of ash commenced to cover the land for miles and miles around. Clark AFB was damaged by the attendant earthquakes and Subic Bay naval station got smothered in 10-14 inches of ash. The Philippine negotiating team suddenly found the final U.S. “compensation” offer to be acceptable after months of contemptuous rejection. But President Bush had already been thoroughly alienated by Manila and had decided that the bases, regardless of condition, were not worth the lease price being demanded. So we re-ported our ships and took our aircraft elsewhere, leaving the Filipinos to clean up the messes their petulant volcano had caused.
So just before leaving Armitage, Hof, and Bloomfield in that office off to the left of the front doors, I said to Rich: “Sir, please, just one more question: How the hell did you manage to get Mt. Pinatubo to erupt, right on time like that?” Howls of laughter; sheer gales of it, ducks hoots, slapping knees, the whole deal. It’s amazing how much noise four men can make when they’ve got a mind to.
So about a dozen years latter I found myself in that same building, in Policy Planning, room 7311 to be precise, where about half the Policy Planning staff had desks, and Richard Armitage found himself in a much larger office on the same floor as Deputy Secretary of State. At either end of the Secretarial office as it was set up then—and probably still is—were “crash” doors. These were heavy doors with cipher locks. In the center of the Secretarial suite were the main doors just across from the Treaty Room. If you entered the Secretarial suite from the Treaty Room, and walked past the two conference rooms on either side, the Secretary’s area is off to the left, and the Deputy Secretary’s area is off to the right. Since I was working for the Secretary I had the code to the crash door nearest the Deputy Secretary’s area, so whenever Powell asked to see me for some reason, I walked though the Deputy Secretary’s area to get there.
At one point, Rich’s speechwriter had to take a maternity leave. The Secretary, at least at that time, had a complement of three speechwriters, the Deputy Secretary a billet for only one. Rich’s speechwriter, Sharon Burke, told me that at first Rich didn’t want a dedicated speechwriter. He’d never had one and didn’t think he needed one, since the Deputy Secretary, with his core organizational management and budgetary responsibilities, doesn’t do much public ceremonial tongue-wagging. Powell persuaded Armitage to take on board a speechwriter, thinking he would use him publicly more than was the norm for a Deputy.
At first, having a speechwriter made Armitage uncomfortable; whenever he saw Sharon he’d sort of cringe and mutter curses below the level of audible sound. But he got used to it, learned to use a speechwriter, set very high standards—as per a Naval Academy Graduate and a man with three-tours-of-duty Vietnam War experience—and expected others to raise their standards of excellence to meet his. Armitage was the kind of man who understood what a virtue spiral was. He knew that someone’s very best effort lived at a level still to be achieved, and he was going to help those who worked for him achieve that level.
Sharon had to take leave a little sooner than she thought she might, and before Armitage could get a replacement he found himself once in the lurch. He had a speech to give, he needed it polished and tuned up a bit, and he needed it printed out for the dais in a way that only he understood the reasons for: all small-cap letters, for example. So one day when I was walking over to talk to someone in the Secretary’s office—maybe Peggy Cifrino to discuss some speech scheduling issues—Rich took my arm and asked me to help him get this speech ready for him. He showed me a copy of a text formatted to his liking so I could apply the format correctly, smiled, and sent me on my way.
I was happy to do it, of course, but I figured I ought to mention the encounter to the senior speechwriter of the three of us, Lynne Davidson, just so she’d know how I was using my time in the moment. Her reaction was that sure, this was fine, but she thought Armitage should have come first to her—and I should mention this to him in case there might be a next time. She implied, basically, that he was poaching on her turf. Anyway, I worked an hour or two on the speech, printed it out as directed, brought it back and handed it over. As Rich was flipping through, looking it over, I carefully—oh so carefully—mentioned Lynne’s preference that were there to be a next time before Sharon’s replacement showed up he should let her know.
Well, there are volcanoes and then there are volcanoes. Rich was not happy to hear this pass-along remark. You have to know what this man looked like to appreciate what the phrase “not happy” actually meant. If you don’t know, try to picture a large bald-headed man with piercing eyes whose chest girth side to side covered, say, three medium-size Massachusetts counties. He had no neck, too. He looked at me the way a leopard looks at a prospective snack and growled, “Adam, when you punch a pail of water it doesn’t leave a hole.” And then he just looked at me, at my face, which I was meant to understand did not resemble a pail of water. I don’t remember what happened next. I maybe asked to be excused so I could use the toilet. I don’t recall exactly. As luck would have it, there was no next time. And they want to make you think that working in a government bureaucracy is boring.
And last for now, one day in September 2003 I was standing in Secretary Powell’s inner, smaller office where he preferred to hang out, getting marching orders concerning a eulogy speech he was planning to deliver in Stockholm for the recently murdered Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, when Rich Armitage showed up at the door. He wanted to discuss something very quickly with Powell about Pakistan, something he’d just learned that it was either doing that it should not have been doing or not doing something it should have been doing, or possibly some of each. This was part of an ongoing, segmented conversation between the two of them but for some reason this exchange involved five or six alternating sentences each between them. I looked at first one, then the other, like, you know, watching a friendly tennis match. I said nothing…..I was just a speechwriter. So then Rich looks at me and he says, “You have any idea what Musharraf is doing over there—isn’t this a part of the world you know something about?” I did know something about it, since back in my college days when I got hooked on reading British Great Game adventure travelogues and learned to admire Afghan King Amanullah.
Now, before I relate what happened next, let me remind or inform you—as the case may be—that soon after September 11, 2001 Armitage was the guy President Bush sent to Islamabad to read Pervez Musharraf the proverbial “riot act” viz the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. According to urban legend, Armitage threatened an ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) general, not Musharraf personally, to “bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age” if the Pakistanis equivocated. Armitage later denied using language quite as blunt as that, language which may have gotten exaggerated as it passed from the ISI general to Musharraf. Maybe instead Armitage told the senior ISI officer about punching pails of water not leaving a hole; I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Of course Armitage pulled the “we’re allies, after all” card, even though everyone knew the history here: If this is how allies act toward one another, better perhaps to be enemies? The two governments, as they oscillated in both capitals over the years—Republicans and Democrats here, civilian and military governments there—had taken turns frustrating and disappointing each other.
Anyway, I simply said, more or less, as follows:
Look, it’s a simple matter of ethno-linguistic geography. In Afghanistan Pashtuns are the politically dominant plurality, about 42%, but many more Pashtuns live on the Pakistani side of the border, though they are a small minority, only about 18%, of a much larger population consisting of Punjabis, Sindis, and others. The division of the Pashtun tribes between the two countries has been a problem since the British left the Subcontinent in 1947. The demarcation line between them, the Durand Line, is not a border either country recognizes. Pashtuns in Afghanistan have strong irredentist longings for their more numerous cousins—literally cousins—in Pakistan. Kabul’s support for a Greater Pashtunistan, which has its own flag and anthem, nearly caused a war in 1954-55.
The Pakistani Army, meanwhile, has a disproportionate number of Pashtun soldiers and officers, and military governments in Pakistan like Musharraf’s both need them and fear to alienate them. The army and ISI therefore apply a light hand in the Pashtun tribal region, and so they both cannot and dare not totally seal the Durand Line from two-way passage. So Musharraf won’t allow the Pakistani military to either crack down on Pashtun tribal leaders in Pakistan or ask it to attack Pashtuns in Afghanistan, or even too openly facilitate our doing so from Pakistani soil. That’ll threaten his leadership and, worse, if Islamabad looses control of the Northwest Frontier Province Pakistan’s avenue of influence into Kashmir would be forfeit, spelling existential threat at the hands of India.
So Musharraf has been tap dancing on the head of a diplomatic pin since 9/11. Up in those mountains he’s literally between a rock, us, and a hard place, aka local realities. In his head he’s not lying to us so much as just trying to survive. Under the circumstances Musharraf will promise us anything he thinks he must; he’d be a fool not to because he needs us; but we’d be foolish to believe him overly much. He probably thinks we understand this tacitly, since strategic ambiguity is what everyone aspires to and expects in this part of the world. So there’s only so far anyone can push him toward what he considers personal and perhaps national suicide, even you, sir.
Then silence. I took an opportunity to breathe. I then added, thinking to downplay the overstepping image of the three-minute cameo speech I had just made because I couldn’t help myself: “In INR we have people who know all this stuff and lots more than I do. But they need to be asked, right?”
Armitage just stood there quietly leaning against the door jamb for about thirty seconds—he never did come in and sit down…his whole visit took no more than six or seven minutes—then nodded his head curtly and left. As for that speech about Anna Lindh, Powell couldn’t get to Stockholm to deliver it thanks to a rogue hurricane—Hurricane Isabel—that grounded all the airplanes in the DC area. The U.S. Ambassador to Sweden read it instead. (Since Powell himself did not deliver the remarks they did not go into the official archival record. Too bad; one of my better efforts, I think.)
With a single other exception, that was the only time I ever got substantive in Powell’s presence. Our deal was, you ask, I’ll answer best I can; you don’t ask, I keep quiet. But Rich is the one who asked; what was I supposed to do? Beg off to use the toilet again?
In April 1975, as Saigon was falling, a nearly-30-year old Richard Armitage was ordered to prevent South Vietnamese naval assets from falling into the hands of North Vietnamese invaders, whether by moving them or, if necessary, destroying them. Once arrived at Con Son Island, Armitage was surprised to find thirty still-floating South Vietnamese ships crammed with about 30,000 refugees trying to get out of harm’s way. Speaking fluent Vietnamese, Armitage tried to calm the situation on board the ships. Then having gotten aboard the destroyer escort USS Kirk he decided on the spot to lead the motley flotilla slowly, very slowly, all the way—over a thousand miles—to Subic Bay, despite lacking permission from either the U.S. or Philippine government to do so. He arranged for DOD to supply food and water en route, and then negotiated an arrangement to allow the refugees to land temporarily in the Philippines. Armitage was the point of the compassion spear that arguably saved 30,000 innocent lives, thus demonstrating that when in your heart you know the right thing to do, it is always better to ask forgiveness than permission.
An unsuspecting reader would learn none of this from Trip Gabriel’s April 15 New York Times obituary.[3] You would see nothing about the Yarmouk Dam mediation mission, or the Philippines bases negotiation, or a half dozen other diplomatic troubleshooting missions, or Armitage’s special ties on behalf of the U.S. Government with Japan and Australia. You would not discover the fact that of the many foster children he and his wife Laura cared for over many years a good number were Vietnamese orphans. Just about all the room Mr. Gabriel had he used to re-litigate, urban-legend-like, the Iraq War and the Valerie Pflame episode, a kerfuffle in which Armitage played an accidental and on balance minor role.[4] Tom Stoppard once remarked that “the press is a stalking horse masquerading as a sacred cow.” Yes, and a horse with some dull, and poorly aimed, axes to grind.
Richard Armitage was a great American. He devoted his life to the service of his country. As a sailor he fought in wars he didn’t start, and as a diplomat he strove to prevent wars in which others might have to fight. And he never punched a pail of water that didn’t deserve it. Oh, do we so need men like him right now.
A Mostly Unknown Cousin
My mother’s eldest brother’s middle child, Camile Luber Hemsley, passed away in late March at the age of 82. The last time I communicated with her, by email, was about three years ago—the subject was the Luber family genealogical charts. The last time I actually saw Camile—nicknamed Camilla—in the flesh was probably in 1959 or early 1960, at her house on the DC side of Chevy Chase.
My parents used to take me with them to my Uncle Walter and Aunt Helen’s house fairly often. My mother adored her eldest brother despite his being the only one of seven siblings who abandoned Judaism and the Jewish people, marrying “outside” not just once, briefly to a woman named Alice Frazier, but twice, the second time to Helen DuShane. Their eldest child Mariana was born in 1937; Camilla arrived in 1943; and Edward in 1949. I remember Uncle Walter’s house well, but not the children. Mariana was away at college by the time I was five; as for Camilla and Eddie, I can’t summon a mind’s-eye picture of them then. My mother’s death in late October 1960, when I was 9, dramatically reduced my exposure to her side of the family. I did not think again about my Uncle Walter’s children, just three of fourteen first cousins on my mother’s side, for several consecutive decades. (I have/had seventeen first cousins on my father’s side, making 31 first cousins in total.)
Since Camilla passed away I’ve been in touch with her daughter, Susan Lori Ford, whom I’ve never met. I’ve also spoken by phone with Mariana for the first time since, I think, 1956, when I was five and she was 19—what could that conversation possibly have been about? Mariana and her family play bridge. At 87 she has some physical issues, but her speech, mind, and memory are tack-sharp, and she is perfectly capable, with the right partner, of skunking us at contract bridge. We intend soon to find out.
So, one first cousin lately lost, but others once misplaced again found. Death can be a unifier. It can summon the balm of family even in grief, showing again—as if there are those who still don’t know—that memorial services are not for the dead but for the living. Death cannot even register without memory, and memory is our reservoir of bone-truths, how our mind connects to what is most real in and to us. Without memory death makes no sense, but then neither does anything else. You see the dilemma.
Just Keep Moving
My wife’s uncle Bill—William Frey Taylor—passed away in his sleep on April 19, less than two months short of his 104th birthday. He had been in hospice care for several weeks. The Portland Press Herald carried an obituary on April 20, and if you want to know about the life of another great American, look it up.
That’s Bill there on the left, with his little brother Howie and his mother Helen, in the summer of 1924, near Waterboro, Maine. These are Yankees. These are Mayflower descendants. These are American originals.
Bill was a medical doctor, educated at Yale and Columbia Medical School, who at one point ministered as a young man to sorely underserved Native Americans. He served in the Navy, and after WWII witnessed a series of nuclear weapons tests near Enewetak Atoll. He once agreed to euthanize a woman in terrible pain that neither he nor any doctor he consulted for help could alleviate. At a time when no laws in Maine pertained to euthanasia Bill made sure that a clergyman and a judge were present to sign off on it. He followed his heart; he knew the right thing to do, and he did it. He showed us that real freedom, as a refined aspect of human agency, depends on knowledge of right and wrong. It is, as Lord Acton said, not the right to do what you want, but the right to do what you ought.
Uncle Bill preserved countless lives, healing when he could, comforting when he couldn’t. He endured severe personal hardship, including the suicide of his bipolar first wife at a time when the meds could not cope so well with severe cases. Withal, he never lost his boyish joy at life, never stopped believing in the better angels of human nature, never knowingly said a hurtful word to anyone, ever……and learned to wind surf in his early 80s. “Just keep movin’,” Bill would say to us. Medical advice? Not just, not hardly.
Bill’s smile could melt steel. He was a great American, and it has been an honor to know him.
Kentucky Moonshine
We are well advised not to speak ill of the dead. All the more reason, therefore, to do so when absolutely necessary while some people are still alive.
When President Trump recently fired General Timothy Haugh from his post as NSA/Cyber Command head at the behest of Laura Looneytoons channeling Torquemada, Senator Mitch McConnell (Invertebrate, KY) said: “If decades of experience in uniform isn’t enough to lead the N.S.A. but amateur isolationists can hold senior jobs at the Pentagon, then what exactly are the criteria for working on this administration’s national security staff?”
One answer to that question came from my old friend Trudy Rubin writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer of April 11: “But we know what ‘the criteria’ are, Sen. McConnell.” What Trudy did not add, though she might have, is that had McConnell, as Senate Majority Leader, been true to his oath rather than to his party at Trump’s second impeachment trial in February 2021, we would not now be suffering through the surrealist nightmare playing out before us since January 20. McConnell could have shifted that 57-43 vote to convict past the two-thirds mark. He knew that, he knew somewhere in his cobwebbed brain that it was the right thing to do—and yet he didn’t do it. So what are the criteria, Sen. McConnell, for being a decent, responsible, courageous, patriotic American in a position of very high Legislative Branch authority? Apparently unaware or dismissive of those criteria when time came to act, you are not a great American.
The Speed of Life
Bodies slow as time speeds up,
memory drops a stitch;
aches expand as rolling months shrink
into weeks, then mere days, so rich.
Is it more mercy than mystery
that we sprint our fastest,
just before we stop altogether?
—but do we?
We stop not for death but achieve the speed of life;
time bending into infinity,
as darkness blossoms into light,
mortality echoing eternally, just out of sight.
Neither here nor there but everywhere,
and nowhere, too—oddly true;
a strange affair, that we may care
in moments few, beneath a sky so cyan blue.
[1] Quoted in Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (Harper & Row, 2002), p. 425.
[2] I never published my dissertation but I did get a journal essay out of the essence: “U.S. Decision-Making in the Jordan Crisis of 1970: Correcting the Record,” Political Science Quarterly, Spring 1985. I did continue following and writing a book on water in the Jordan Valley, but, annoyingly moving target that it was at the time, never finished it—to my lasting regret.
[3] For another TRP obit critique, of Harrison Smith’s obit of Randy Kehler in the August 9, 2024 Washington Post, see my “How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down,” The Raspberry Patch, October 2, 2024.
[4] Search for other obits, by Dov Zakheim in The Hill and James Mann in the Washington Post, for far more balanced accounts of Armitage’s career.