Salon.com > Myra MacPherson

The private war of Chuck and Tom Hagel

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:35:00 +0000

In 1968, through a fluke that remains a mystery, Chuck Hagel and his younger brother Tom became the only known American siblings to serve in the same infantry squad in the Vietnam War. The future Republican senator from Nebraska and anti-Iraq war maverick, then 21, fought side by side with his little brother in the steaming jungles of the Mekong Delta. They walked point together, they watched comrades get ripped in half by land mines, and they sent five Purple Hearts home to their mother. They also saved each other's lives.

Tom, two years younger than Chuck, saved his older brother first. Normally the Hagel brothers walked point, but one morning in 1968 they had rotated to the rear as their column of soldiers crept through the jungle. The soldier who took their place that day met instant death as he stepped on a huge land mine. Flying shrapnel ripped through the squad. It hit Tom's arm, but a bigger chunk lodged in Chuck's chest. Ignoring his own wound, Tom frantically wrapped compression bandages around Chuck's chest to stop the fountain of blood, praying his older brother would live long enough to make it out of the jungle.

“We cannot stay as an occupying force in the Middle East”

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:30:00 +0000

Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel, who is otherwise a rock-ribbed red state conservative, has been called a "defector" and "defeatist" for clashing with President Bush on the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and the war in Iraq. Most recently, he has inspired GOP ire by siding with Senate Democrats who want to set a timetable for redeploying troops from Iraq. On Thursday, Hagel again voted with Senate Democrats when they passed the final version of a bill that tied funding for the war with bringing soldiers home. Nebraska's Republican attorney general has said he is seriously considering challenging Hagel in the 2008 Senate primary because many Nebraskans were unhappy with the senator's criticism of the president.

McNamara’s “Moron Corps”

Thu, 30 May 2002 01:07:00 +0000

The highly acclaimed HBO movie "Path to War" powerfully details President Lyndon Johnson's descent into the disastrous quagmire of Vietnam. LBJ is depicted, in part, as a victim of his defense secretary, Robert McNamara's, intellectual arrogance and duplicity. But the film spares McNamara from the deeper moral condemnation he deserves, entirely overlooking, for instance, one of his most heinous acts as the chief architect of the war -- a cynical recruitment gambit aimed at the underclass known as "Project 100,000."

The HBO film premiered on May 18, but it continues to play in heavy rotation -- in fact, it can be seen twice on Thursday, at 4 p.m. and midnight EST -- which is why the untold story of McNamara's Vietnam years bears closer review. In the film, Alec Baldwin admirably depicts McNamara's buttoned-up style and automaton-like self-assurance. The bespectacled "Whiz Kid" was an engineer of death, known for his dispassionate litanies of bomb tonnage and civilian and troop casualties. In one scene, McNamara is shown "grading" various aspects of a planned bombing operation aimed at North Vietnam. When he is told that the number of civilians killed might be high, he says, "Give it a D."

Gored in Miami

Sat, 25 Nov 2000 02:32:00 +0000

Unfolding like a Greek tragedy, Al Gore's 11th-hour -- or rather, 13th-hour -- bid for the White House is not without a horrible irony for the vice president.

The Gore team this week deplored the Miami mob that shouted, screamed and nearly shoved through the door of a government building -- thus succeeding by intimidation in halting the Miami-Dade County canvassing board's recount of crucial votes. Losing that recount in a county where a majority of the votes were expected to be favorable to Gore may well cost him the presidency.

But guess who was among that crowd drummed up by the Republicans? The same Cuban-Americans whom Gore had tried so hard to woo by pandering to them over the fate of a little Cuban boy who washed up on Florida shores a year ago this week.

Remember back that far? Rather than risk Cuban-American animus or votes -- a largely Republican vote to begin with -- Gore refused to support his own administration's position on the case. He would not say that the United States had the legal and moral authority to return Elián González to his father and, thus, Cuba, arguing instead that a state family court should make the decision.

Adiss, Elian

Thu, 29 Jun 2000 10:06:00 +0000

So it's farewell, Elian, we hardly knew ye. One of the weirdest sagas in recent history comes to an end as you fly off to Cuba with your father. In an era when "news" has the shelf life of fresh shrimp, you had an amazingly long ride in the media. You were paraded like a cute and playful panda in a cage for the TV cameras in Miami's Little Havana by your temporary "family" in your temporary home of five months. You were known all over the world by your first name. You stopped a lot of things -- traffic, as rallies ensued; the flow of important international and national news as the media went into full Elian alert, day and night.

You were also instrumental in stopping something major -- the benighted thinking that has kept the embargo against Cuba alive in Congress. The antics of the most rabid of Cuban-Americans in Miami, who screamed and sobbed and marched and picketed and vowed to the death to keep you from going back to Cuba, finally shined the spotlight on our political relationship with Cuba and the kind of people who defended it. And our policy was found wanting. Just as the polls overwhelmingly said you should be able to return to Cuba with your father, so did they show a growing majority of people who felt that an arcane Cold War economic policy was wrong. Now conservative Midwestern farmers and congressmen are adding their voices to the push for an end to the embargo. Now there is a beginning -- the lifting of the 38-year-long ban on food and medicine to Cuba will come to pass.

The last supper

Thu, 04 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

To hear the huffers and puffers on
Capitol Hill and TV news, you would
think that Janet Reno's raid on the
Gonzalez home to reunite Elian with his
father was the biggest betrayal since
Benedict Arnold. And all those agitated
Miami negotiators, piling up outrage
upon outrage, made it seem as if Reno had
left them in the dark while they were
just minutes away from brokering a rosy
diplomatic ending.

The congressional Republicans bellowed
their rage and cited the shabbily
treated negotiators as one of the reasons
for calling hearings about the raid. Not since Pearl
Harbor had such an attack been
perpetrated, they assured the world.
The hearings were aborted when it
finally dawned on them that they had
learned nothing from the impeachment
fiasco.

And now, as the true story of the
so-called negotiations that took place
in the final hours leading up to the
raid emerges, it's time to take a closer
look and ask the important question:
Which was the gang that couldn't shoot
straight?

Why they can't all just get along

Thu, 13 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Poor Juan Miguel Gonzalez must feel like Charlie Brown. Every time he thinks he will get to see and hold his son Elian (no last name necessary), the entire brood of Lucys -- great-uncles Lazaro and Delfin, Marisleysis and the Cuban American National Foundation's (CANF) lawyers -- yank the football away. The extended Gonzalez family saga has come to seem like the world's longest telenovella, except a soap opera writer would probably reject the family as too implausible.

First there is cousin Marisleysis, the so-called surrogate mother, who has said on TV that she thinks Elian would be tortured if he returned to Cuba. Does anyone have a moment's doubt as to what she is telling this 6-year-old? And why he is saying he doesn't want to go to Cuba? Or even to Washington? (Although we only have his great-uncle's word for this.) And should we be surprised that a boy whose only traveling experience ended with his mother's death and his near-drowning doesn't want to travel?

All in Elian's family

Sat, 08 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

As Elian's odyssey is spun from one insane moment to another by the national media, a majority of angered Miamians, including moderate Cuban-Americans, wonder why pandering national politicians and the media duck the unsavory side of this saga.

Instead, they report reverentially the words of extremist self-appointed Cuban-American exile leaders, no matter how inflammatory and distorted. In the meantime, Elian's Cuban-American relatives are depicted as loving caretakers for stridently disobeying American law and, in effect, kidnapping the child.

When a family lawyer, for example, vowed that Elian's father and the United States government would "rip Elian from the loving arms of his cousin" most of the press did not question anything about the 22-year-old Marisleysis Gonzalez, nicknamed his "surrogate mother." The vision of Gonzalez being taken out on a stretcher, oxygen mask to her face, has become a staple of TV news. Six times since Elian's arrival four months ago, she has been hospitalized for a "nervous stomach" or "emotional anxiety," and just as quickly released. Even last summer, when Elian was an unknown child in Cuba, she collapsed and was admitted to a hospital -- which does not square with the reason her family has given for the episodes, her fear that Elian will be returned to Cuba.