... and I recall my days in Cleveland, where Charlie Gulf sent me following OCS:
Jim Castagnera: Recollecting the Cleveland of Mayor Dennis Kucinich
SOURCE: News of Delaware County (1-4-06)
With winter well underway, the rain and snow have helped keep Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the Democrat representing Ohio’s 10th Congressional District, on my mind. This baby-faced fifty-nine-year-old tossed his hat into the ring during the presidential primaries of 2004. He has kept himself in the news by continuing to push his campaign proposal for a cabinet-level Department of Peace. Bills to establish the new federal department, pending since September in both houses, thus far have garnered 62 Congressional endorsements. That’s a long way off enactment, but still much more than a flash in the pan. This tells me that Kucinich is somebody to watch.
So what sort of a fellow is he?
If you believe the old saw that the child is the father of the man, perhaps we should wonder, “What sort of fellow was he?”
That question takes me back 30 years. My wife and I, both native Pennsylvanians, found ourselves in Cleveland, compliments of the U.S. Coast Guard, in 1970. By 1976, after half a dozen years of apartment dwelling, we’d bought our first house… in Cleveland’s blue-collar West Park neighborhood. Proud homeowners, we enjoyed our rose bushes and backyard barbeques.
Then, along came Dennis.
He was still some months shy of his 32nd birthday when inaugurated the 53rd mayor of the “Mistake on the Lake” in 1978. The municipality he inherited was by then a national joke. Its Cuyahoga River was famously so polluted that it once burst into flames. Ironically, the steel mills lining its shores, which provided much of the volatile pollution, were in sharp decline; some plants were already closed.
Cleveland’s weather also was a national howl. Only Buffalo’s winters garnered worse press. Kucinich’s first month in office witnessed the worst winter in recent memory. Unrelenting snowfalls climaxed with a blizzard on January 26th which roared through town on the back of a 100-mile-per-hour wind. When friends and neighbors here in Delaware County complain about our winters, I think back to Cleveland in ’78 and… like an old combat veteran… mutter under my breath, “Think about shoveling out your driveway for 14 mornings in a row and then tell me how bad you have it here.”
In short, we hapless Clevelanders required a real leader. Instead we got the mayor whom the media were soon calling “Dennis the Menace,” partly because of his uncanny resemblance to the comic strip character… but mostly because his was a destructive administration from the get-go.
Among his appointees was a 24-year-old finance director with little or no financial experience. The beleaguered Cleveland business community’s discomfort over this appointment seemed justified when the mayor rejected a prestigious $41 million Urban Mass Transportation grant for one of only four downtown “people movers” to be built in selected cities. Take it “back to Disneyland where it belongs,” was his oft-quoted kiss-off of the federal bucks.
When Kucinich appointed Sheriff Richard Hongisto of San Francisco to be chief of police, he hailed him as “the best law enforcement officer” to come to Cleveland “since Elliot Ness.” Not three months later Kucinich fired Hongisto in front of live TV cameras during a Good Friday press conference.
The police chief was merely canned. The mayor was very nearly crucified. When on April 10th the City Council voted to investigate other City Hall shenanigans, the mayor called the council members “a group of lunatics.” With that, the movement to recall Kucinich, only a fourth of the way through his two-year term, was underway. By June 1st the necessary 37,500 petition signatures had been gathered. When the ballots were counted on August 13th, Dennis held on to his post by a mere 236 votes.
The following year, Cleveland became the first U.S. city of its size to default on its municipal bonds. We hapless homeowners voted ourselves a 50% income tax increase to insure that the city could continue to collect our garbage, police our streets --- at one point during the fiscal crisis Kucinich threatened to lay off 600 city workers, including 400 cops and firefighters --- and, heaven help us, plow our snow.
That autumn Dennis the Menace was ousted by George Voinovich, who went on to become governor of Ohio and a U.S. Senator. Kucinich went into exile in New Mexico for almost 20 years, before returning to politics, eventually winning his current Congressional seat in 1997. By then Joanne and I had long since returned to the relative warmth and sanity of suburban Philly.
Even from three decades’ distance, I still feel a chill. Hey, maybe it’s only my recollection of record winters that makes me shiver. On the other hand, commendable as a Peace Department might be, I’d hate to see it catapult Dennis the Menace to national power.
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James Castagnera: Tuning in to Terrorism
SOURCE: News of Delaware County PA (5-2-07)
[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, and the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University, Lawrenceville/Princeton, NJ.]
I’m a coward. And I’m not afraid to admit it. In Catholic grade school I was one of the weenies the class bully picked on. My high school letter is in “newspaper.” You jocks out there didn’t know a guy could letter in something as wimpy as that, did you? When my 2-S (college-student) deferment ran out, I enlisted in the Coast Guard, correctly concluding I’d never come closer to Southeast Asia than Hawaii. In the event, I never got any farther west than Duluth, Minnesota, while some classmates sweated out their tours as grunts in Vietnam.
All of the above is in the interest of full disclosure. So when I tell you that later this month I’m off to Israel on an Academic Fellowship on Terrorism, you’ll know that I’ll be looking over my shoulder the whole time. Some 45 faculty from universities across the country were picked for this fifth-annual fellowship by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies [www.defenddemocracy.com]. FDD was founded by Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, Jeane Kirkpatrick and other, mostly conservative, philanthropists and politicians, shortly after Nine/Eleven to help support democracies and confront terrorists around the world.
My own interest in terrorism predates September 11, 2001, by a couple of decades. In 1968, when my 2-S deferment was still solid, Paramount Pictures came to my hometown of Jim Thorpe to film “The Molly Maguires,” starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris. With many other locals, I briefly worked on the film’s set. Ten years later, I devoted the central chapter of my doctoral dissertation to a discussion of whether the Mollies really were a 19th century Irish terrorist organization in the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. Or were they neophyte labor organizers, branded “terrorists” in order to hang them and ‘bust’ their union?
Whatever the answer to that question (still controversial), the U.S. is no stranger to terrorism. An anarchist killed President McKinley shortly after he was elected at the turn of the last century, ironically enabling his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, to become one of our great national chief executives. During the Roaring Twenties, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed as much because they were Italian immigrant-anarchists as because they may have committed an armed robbery and murder. A bomb set off on Wall Street by a fellow anarchist sealed their fate, even though the evidence of their involvement in a payroll heist left lots of reasonable doubts.
The Sixties were a decade of domestic terror, carried out in the context of the unpopular war I joined the Coast Guard to avoid. The assassinations of John, Bobby and Martin; the bombings, arsons, and violent marches orchestrated by the Yippies, Weathermen, and Students for a Democratic Society; and the war between the Black Panthers and the nation’s police all contributed to the atmosphere of terror. Why some Baby Boomers of my generation now romanticize and even glorify the Sixties is a mystery to me. To quote from novelist-newspaperman Philip Caputo’s recent reminiscence on the 1970 Kent State shootings, which were precipitated in part by the fire bombing the KSU’s ROTC barracks, “It was a dreadful time.”
The Nineties were no pastoral period in the U.S. either. The first Islamic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center early in the decade prefigured the horror in store for us in the first year of the new millennium. So did the Oklahoma City bombing at mid-decade.
Like most Americans, I’ve tried to keep my head down and myself out of trouble across the six decades of Cold War, hot war, civil unrest, and terrorism that have disturbed the peace during my life. Consequently, friends and colleagues have wondered why apply for a fellowship on terrorism that will take me to the roiling Middle East to study the topic on its home turf.
Maybe it’s because Nine/Eleven seems somehow different from all the other acts of terror I’ve recounted in this column. From the Mollies to Sacco and Vanzetti, down to Lee Oswald and Tim McVeigh, my studies of terrorism in America never led me to conclude that the Republic was in mortal danger from these wild-eyed radicals.
In 2007, when radical Islam is locked in mortal combat with Western democracy, and the potential weapons could include biological plagues and dirty nukes, this old coward isn’t so sanguine about our prospects. So, head down and eyes over my shoulder, I’m off to get better informed about what a “War on Terror” really means.
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