THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (82 page)

After Watergate, Nixon retired to San
Clemente, California to lick his wounds. He began his rebound by
writing an important book,
RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon
,
but perhaps his real comeback started when he attended numerous
California Angels games as a guest of owner Gene Autry during their
1979 divisional championship year. Nixon later moved back to the
“fast track” of New York. Even though a native Southern California,
he always yearned for this stage and felt oddly out of step in the
surf culture. Always a sports buff, he became a regular at Giants
Stadium, where he rooted for Bill Parcell’s greatest teams during
their 1986 and 1990 Super Bowl title years.

Living in a fashionable New Jersey enclave
and operating out of a Manhattan Federal office, Nixon achieved
what
Newsweek
called “elder statesmen” status by 1986.
Separated from the politics, hatred and anti-Communist vitriol of
his Alger Hiss and White House years, he wrote books and advised
Presidents. When he died in 1994, Bill Clinton called his the “age
of Nixon.”

Experts see that indeed Clinton was right;
the world was and continues to be shaped by Nixon and, to a lesser
extent, Henry Kissinger. Israel, the fall of Communism, the
post-Soviet Eastern Europe, and quasi-capitalist China are their
“inventions.” They were modern Platos, their America the New
Athens. They were the men who, along with Reagan and others, used
World War II and the Cold War to make the United States an empire
dwarfing the influence of the Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine,
French or British ones.

Americans resist empire, so celebration of
this is not seen as an accomplishment in all quarters. Nixon and
Kissinger knew this, but like that man who people “want on that
wall . . . need on that wall” as Jack Nicholson’s Nathan Jessup
called it, they knew that whether we want it or not, our empire
protects us – and freedom loving people everywhere - in a dangerous
world.

While Jihadists hate us because of our
sizable power, among other reasons, it is that sizable power that
makes them marginal enemies at best. This is a calculation that
goes back to Lawrence of Arabia. Great Britain and the United
States had devised it since World War I. Winston Churchill
literally told Franklin Roosevelt that America was taking over the
reigns of the British Empire. FDR’s first move was to consolidate a
deal with Saudi Arabia when then they saw that we had prevented the
Nazis from doing their “work” for them, which was to wipe out
Jewry. We were the only game in town. We needed their oil and they
needed to survive. We allowed them to thrive.

In winning the Cold War and becoming an
impregnable force of military, cultural, political, financial and
religious power unlike any ever conceived by man, we have
effectively rendered the Muslim threat a small one. A threat, but
manageable; a blip on our historical radar screen.

If, for instance, terrorists were to nuke
Los Angeles, while it would be a brutal tragedy, it would not
destroy or come close to destroying the U.S. It could be withstood.
We are that strong. Our reaction, and they know it, would probably
be to wipe out Mecca and Medina. We have the ability to turn all
potential enemies into fire within days. They know that only one
thing has kept us from doing it up to know: the pure benevolent
decision not to, motivated at its core by the belief that a just
God would not favor us in the after-life if we did. At some point,
only the most apocalyptic anarchists on both sides would want such
a thing.

Just as LBJ wanted a parade, Nixon would
have preferred a parade, and in 2003 George Bush expected a parade,
we did not get that kind of perfect scenario in Iraq. Political
know-nothings therefore conclude that because this number one
selection among 10 reasonable alternatives did not materialize, all
is a shambles. It is the nature of those who cannot see the forest
through the trees to make such hay.

Nixon/Kissinger took the tragedy of Vietnam
and made it work for us. We have done the same in the Middle East.
The War on Terror was over a period of 30-35 years a strange,
twi-light struggle fought on planes, trains, boats, and buildings;
in Israel, Beirut, West Berlin, Scotland, England, Spain, New York,
Los Angeles and a myriad other places. What the U.S. finally did
was decide to end that, to change the location from those mostly
Western countries to the Middle East. Nobody ever wants to be the
“home team” in war. Ask the Civil War denizens of Atlanta, or the
Berliners of World War II. We took the war to their turf and made
them pay with their blood, their treasure; to defend themselves,
their computers, their weapons caches, their leadership, and to use
their
manpower.

Two places that were already pits of the
world, Afghanistan and Iraq – countries that were so bad it could
not get worse, and if it did it would not really matter – were
selected. The struggle was transferred from those Western train
stations and buildings to the Pakistani border, to Sadr City, and
other disposable locales. The Bush strategy was to identify these
places that were already bad, draw terrorists away from Western
civilian targets, put them in a small place of America’s “time and
choosing,” thus encircled by U.S. forces in such manner that they
could effectively be killed by the forces of righteousness. It was
naked self-interest on the part of America, which did not stop it
from being brilliant. The people who live there are pissed.
Americans do not live there. Critics state that we have “created a
breed grounds for terror.” There may be some truth to this, but it
is a marginal breeding grounds, surrounded by and waiting to be
crushed by U.S. power.

Since 2001, the messy struggle has been the
perfect training ground for our military as they prepare for the
new age of warfare. It is a treasure trove of intelligence. All the
things we suspected about terror for decades we now discover and
learn about up close, in minute detail. We have lost in six years
the number of men we used to lose in a single day’s battle during
the desperate years when we were securing freedom and building our
empire. Other countries do not love us as they once did. Nobody
loves the New York Yankees except true Yankees fans, either. We are
the biggest, the most successful. The world is not a popularity
contest. Everybody wants to be loved. It would be nice to be loved
and admired as we were for more than two decades after World War
II; or as we were for a century when we were an idealized,
isolationist bastion of the human spirit. However, this is not our
highest priority. Sometimes a parent must exert discipline and stop
trying to make friends with his children. The parent-child analogy
might not be entirely accurate; rather, we are a nation that has a
responsibility to protect the world, like it or not.

Are those whose glaring deficiencies are
exposed by us going to like us for exposing them? Maybe we had some
sympathy after the World Trade Center. Was that really worth it,
just to have a French newspaper write, “We’re all Americans now”?
The answer is not necessary. It is a self-evident truth.

This is a war that will be won, over time,
partly through attrition but by varying methods, by America; just
as Nixon and Kissinger knew the Cold War would be. Time and
pressure, just like geology. Any “victory” by the Jihadists,
whether that be blowing up a market or something, is
Pyrrhic
in nature, just as Viet Cong hit ‘n’ runs may have resulted in a
little short-lived jubilation but is now viewed by history as a
wasted effort. The terrorists are not winning hearts and minds.
They kill fellow Muslims. George Patton said, “No bastard ever won
a war by dying for his country, he won it by making the other poor,
dumb bastard die for his country.” The terrorists are no more
effective than Japanese kamikazes in the losing days of World War
II.

By forcing the terrorists to fight America
in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have effectively forced them to spend
their money, treasure, manpower, intellectuality, planning and
future there, instead of in scattered fashion throughout the
world.

Every one of them who kills himself is one
less we have to kill. We have effectively placed them in two small
places where we can kill them efficiently, and they kill themselves
in good order, too. Each civilian they kill is another family that
hates them. Some hate America. It makes little difference in the
scheme of things, which is that we win.

That is the cold, hard truth of it. I’m
rootin’ for America! The Democrats, however, have failed to
understand their own lessons. Whether “the Surge” results in a
clear-cut American victory, complete with enemy capitulation,
parades and hero status for General Petraeus, or whether it is a
murkier form of victory, they are in deep, deep trouble.

During and after the Vietnam War, the Left
called soldiers “baby killers,” abandoning the South Vietnamese and
Cambodians to the tender mercies of Communist evil to the tune of
1.5 million murders. Eventually, this fact became common knowledge.
The result was the Reagan Revolution.

In the 2000s, the Left is somehow seen as
being more concerned with the rights of terrorists who, left to
their own devices, would cut their throats. They describe legal
interrogation techniques designed to save innocent lives as
“torture.” This is an identified lie. In 2006-07, they had a great
chance to jump on board and share in American victory in Iraq, just
as Harry Truman and John Kennedy are seen as partners with the
Right in eventual Cold War victory.

Instead, they failed to learn the lessons of
1973-80 and opposed America’s best interests in the world. By so
doing, they painted themselves, to coin a pun, between “Iraq and a
hard place.” That is, if America indeed does achieve a traditional
win in Iraq, the Democrats will not benefit in any way. If this
occurs, Karl Rove’s plan to effectively dismantle the Democrats as
an effective national party by 2012 may come to fruition, more by
their own actions than by any winning strategies employed by Rove
or the Republicans.

While unlikely because the GOP will resist
it, if on the other hand they force a complete U.S. withdrawal, in
the manner of the 1975 retreat - replete with abandoned helicopters
- and a subsequent Pol Pot-style slaughter ensues, then at some
point (with talk radio sooner rather than later), the American
public will again identify them as the culprits. At that point, the
GOP will go on another winning streak.

Only when a nation reaches such power as the
United States now has, can a disaster as terrible as Vietnam be
absorbed by the tides of history into eventual victory, but that is
precisely that with which has happened! The United States has
reached a point where she is so strong that Jihadism, for lack of a
better word – an ideology left to it its own devices that would
gladly re-create the Holocaust, which they consider to be have been
“God’s work” – has been rendered, in comparison, relatively
impotent by America. What some people with a keen sense of history
realize is that the terrorists would kill and kill and kill; 100
million, 200 million . . .

They are part of the same maniacal mindset
as V.I. Lenin, who once said, “It does not matter if three-fifths
of the world dies, so long as the remaining two-thirds are
Communist.” Or Joseph Stalin, who said of the genocide he presided
over, killing millions:
“You can't make an omelet
without breaking a few eggs.”
Substitute
“Islamo-Fascist” for “Communist” and you
simply have a repeat of history. Santayana famously said so those
who do not remember the past are condemned to re-live it.
Unfortunately - fortunately for the GOP from a strictly selfish
political point of view – the only ones who apparently have learned
these lessons appear to be the conservatives. The single entity,
the “thin red line” that has made it impossible for Jihadism to
carry out this “second Holocaust” – to their utter humiliation, by
the way – is America.

What the Left has consistently failed to
understand and embrace is that the United States is the most
powerful empire in the history of Mankind. It is a tiger’s tail
that once grabbed is not easy to hold on to, but the Right has a
much better hold on it in the 21
^st
Century.

“The Yankees are the best team money can
buy.”

- Common refrain of the George Steinbrenner
era

In 1995, David Halberstam wrote
October
1964
. In that retrospective of the World Series between the St.
Louis Cardinals and New York Yankees, Halberstam used each team as
a metaphor for a changing America. Placed against the backdrop of
Vietnam’s nascent beginnings, Lyndon Johnson’s sweeping
Presidential victory, and the Great Society – the Civil Rights Act,
the Voting Rights Act, and other legislation – Halberstam painted
the Cardinals as that year’s winning Democrats. The Yankees were
the losing Republicans.

St. Louis, like the Democrats, was an
aggressive group of blacks, whites, Latinos, even Southerners (Tim
McCarver). The Yankees were old school country club pinstripers
waiting for the long ball in an age of “National League baseball.”
The Cardinals won.

The Yankees went into a slump that,
depending on one’s standards, lasted from 1965 to 1975, but they
rebounded to win the American League pennant in 1976, followed by
consecutive World Series in 1977-78. The Republicans did not
exactly mirror the Yankees but there are similarities. Their
“slump” lasted from 1960 to 1966; was broken up by a period of
brilliant success – big midterm wins in 1966, Nixon’s 1968 victory
followed by his 1972 landslide - but Watergate ushered in the worst
downturn in GOP history (1974-79).