There's a Hole in our Universe Today: Jack Kemp has Died

by Bill Seebeck

There is a hole in our universe today.  One of our nation's leaders, Jack Kemp, has died.

We used to call him "the Republican JFK".  He was youthful, handsome, athletic and a very inspiring speaker.  He was also different from his more conservative Republicans. I think it was because he worked on farms and drove trucks in his youth and played college and professional football becoming a championship quarterback despite his 5'11'' height.  He was the co-founder of the AFL Players Union and led it for a number of years. He was a working man, yet was probably its best dressed, always "well turned out".

He was also a decent man who cared about the people, not only in his district in Buffalo, but around the country.  He was an advocate for major reforms in housing and urban affairs working within a political party that didn't want to go in that direction until they had to and then he was there, as he had always been.

I first met him at a dinner in the mid-1970's, during which we talked about social issues, especially about the plight of the cities which were then in crisis.  He was a very good listener, patient and also engaging.  At the time, I was on the board of the National Urban Coalition.  In 1978, when serving as chairman of the Coalition's Corporate Urban Affairs Advisory Committee (CUAAC), I invited Congressman Kemp to speak at our annual meeting.  I remember the Coalition's president, Carl Holman, was skeptical, asking whether Kemp could be responsive to such pressing urban needs given his place in the political spectrum.  As a result of our earlier conversations, I felt Jack Kemp was a person that we should engage, that he had a different slant on things and shared my previous conversations with Carl. We met with Jack that spring.

(The first picture above shows Carl Holman describing some of the difficult social issues pressuring minorities and the deteriorating conditions of our cities. Kemp was always a patient listener. The second picture shows Jack Kemp, N. Carl Holman and the author.)

Carl called me the day after the meeting pictured here and said that he was surprised by how much common ground there was between the Congressman and the objectives of the Coalition.  He told me, Kemp said that his door was always open to Carl.  In fact, after that, they had regular meetings and members of the Coalition board testified on behalf of Kemp when he was nominated to be Secretary of Housing & Urban Development under President George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988. Although that Bush administration did not move on many of the projects Kemp sought as Secretary, the successor Clinton administration did.

Jack Kemp was a great leader. He was also a very nice man, who genuinely seemed to care about each person he met and about his fellow countrymen and women. Let's not forget the smile. It could break across his face and light him up and all of those around him. It was infectious. You were ready to follow him forward. If you ever wanted an example of a compassionate leader, he was it. That's why today, we have alot of work to do to stitch up that hole in our universe. May we begin by using his life as an example of the compassion we need to show one another. It will help fill the emptiness that we are experiencing today.

Chris Meagher - Artist, Poet, Footballer, Friend

We remember his birthday today -- May 1, 1947.

He would have been 62.

He died at age 21, in service to his country at Quang Ngai, Vietnam, protecting the lives of the other young men in his unit, D Company, 4th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade, U.S. Army.

Lest we forget.

The Nixon Factor: How War Can Impact a Nation

by Bill Seebeck

In February 1971, I met with then President Richard Nixon to discuss a report co-authored by me on the Progress of Vietnamization.

This was the name given to a program, begun by this President, that provided American styled basic military training to young Vietnamese men who became members of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Once trained, new ARVN units would replace American units that would then be brought home.  In a sense it is similar to the training provided by U.S. forces right now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yes, that is a picture of the author (above) with the President and then Assistant National Security Advisor, General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., in the Oval Office.  

During the meeting, the President addressed criticism he had received over prolonging the war. He said that he was trying to extract U.S. troops in a way that would give the South Vietnamese a better chance to defend themselves and made the point that he was not a warmonger. The President then turned and asked Press Secretary Ron Ziegler how many men were killed that week.  Ziegler said 32.  Mr. Nixon then said, "It's always a number.  When I came here the number was in the hundreds, always a number."  "Yet, I'm a politician," the President continued, "and if there is one thing I know is that they are not numbers, they are men."

The President went on to say that he had a theory that by the time a man is 18, 19, 20, he has touched the lives of at least 2,000 people --- his elementary and high school classmates, cub scouts, boy scouts, little league, family, friends, neighbors, church members, they all add up.  So while 32 men may have died in Vietnam that week, the President said, 64,000 Americans have been personally and painfully impacted by the war.

Ever since that meeting I have called this observation, the Nixon factor of how war can impact a nation.  When you apply it to the War in Vietnam with 211,501 casualties (58,198 dead and 153,303 wounded), the Nixon factor indicates that 423,002,000 Americans were personally impacted, some more than once.  Since that number exceeded the population at that time, it is fair to say that most every citizen was personally touched by the war.

When you apply the Nixon factor to the War in Iraq and Afghanistan with 38,960 casualties (4,953 dead and 34,007 wounded as of 4/24/2009), the results find that some 77,920,000 Americans have been personally impacted.

Something to ponder when those in power consider sending young American men and women in harms way.

The Stress of It All is Becoming Dangerous

by Bill Seebeck

It seems that not a day goes by during these most difficult financial times when we don't hear a story about people "losing it".  Just this week, a young man apparently took his life.  He was the acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac whose stated mission is to help stabilize residential mortgage markets in the United States.  The Treasury Department took over the company last September.  He was only 41.

That story was followed up by another in which it was reported that a lawyer mother ordered her two daughters out of the car because they were yelling too much and wouldn't quiet down. I checked up on the mother and found that she is a skilled senior attorney whose specialty is law that governs banking and other lending institutions with particular emphasis on the very issues being faced by, we the people, and our Treasury Department.

No matter what else was going on in the lives of these two individuals, I recognized in them, one of the real threats to the health and welfare of the American people.

STRESS.

Every day, in addition to whatever we've had to previously bear, we are now faced with losing our jobs, keeping our homes, feeding ourselves and our children not to mention the loss of dreams of retirement, college education and just a plain better life.  This folks results in stress and it has a profound impact on us.

According to a 1996 article in Psychology Today, "When stresses become routine, the constant biochemical pounding takes its toll on the body; the system starts to wear out at an accelerated rate. By responding to the stress of everyday life with the same surge of biochemicals released during major threats, the body is slowly killing itself. The biochemical onslaught chips away at the immune system, opening the way to cancer, infection, and disease. Hormones unleashed by stress eat at the digestive tract and lungs, promoting ulcers and asthma. Or they may weaken the heart, leading to strokes and heart disease." "Chronic stress is like slow poison," [Jean] King [Ph.D. of the University of Massachusetts Medical School] observes. "It is a fact of modern life that even people who are not sensitized to stress are adversely affected by everything that can go wrong in the day."

This is another reason why I have been so worried about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.   I am not concerned about the professionalism of our armed forces but I am concerned about the constant stress that four or five years of combat, four, five, six 12 and 15 month deployments have had on our service people and their families.  And don't think that bravado will overcome it, it will not.  Examine the increasing suicide rate among the military and you will find that we have a problem that can't be swept under a rug.

Watch the way people drive these days, listen to the concerns we share with one another, we as a nation are worried and stressed. Our institutions have failed us and our social contract has been broken.  Now we can fix it, but there must be more relief given directly to the people in order that the stress of it all doesn't endanger us in ways we have never yet experienced as a society.

What do you think?