A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (28 page)

By the end of July, Wills had 50 steals, equaling his
personal best. Talk of breaking Ty Cobb's all-time record of 96
began. It was not an empty record by any means. Aside from the fact
Cobb was a Hall of Famer, the record was symbolic; a black man
breaking the record of the Georgia Peach was significant. The
stolen base can be used to win games or just to steal bases. In
this case, Maury's steals propelled his team to great heights. Just
as importantly, he generated huge excitement that manifested itself
in record-breaking crowds in Los Angeles as well as on the
road.

"The guy that got under our skin the most was Maury
Wills," admitted Giants catcher Tom Haller. "He was so competitive
and did so many little things that hurt you. Our perception was
that it seemed like everything he was doing was trying to rub it
in. Of course, he was just playing hard, but we still didn't like
him. We always wanted to beat him - get him, knock him out on the
double-play, whatever you could do."

Wills more than anybody else represented the
intensity of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry. It had been super intense
in New York, especially in the 1950s. Some had speculated that it
would lose its edge in California. The "new breed" of modern
ballplayer was not as likely to get caught up in the rivalry, it
was speculated, but in Wills it was every bit as heated as Jackie
Robinson vs. Sal Maglie.

Some teams took to cheating, not unknown in the
sports rivalries between the north and the south. When Cal's
All-American running back tandem of Vic Bottari and Sam Chapman
came to Los Angeles to play USC on a hot, dry September day in the
1930s, they found the grass was soggy. A Trojan groundskeeper had
"forgotten" to turn off the sprinklers in an effort to slow down
the speedy Golden Bears runners.

National League teams tried a similar tactic with
Wills, watering down infields or letting grass grow to slow his
high choppers. Candlestick Park's groundscrew was the most blatant
about it, which heated the rivalry up even more. Desperation crept
into the opposition's efforts, with pitchers throwing at his legs
and catchers risking errors by trying to hit him on picks to third
base.

But it was the constant sliding that took the
biggest toll on Wills. He endured a bruised right hand, black and
blue hips, hamstring spasms, and brutal "strawberries." Wills was a
constant in the trainer's room, where Bill Buhler and Wayne
Anderson offered vitamins, diathermy, whirlpools and foot massages.
Will wore inch-thick pads on his knees, and even consulted a
psychiatrist to held him overcome the pain.

The New Rome

"Carthage must be destroyed."

- Roman statesman Cato's last line in every
speech

The Roman political figure Cato uttered these
words at the conclusion of all his public addresses. It referred to
the looming danger of the Carthaginian General Hannibal, the
greatest threat to their empire until the Romans - finally - did
destroy Carthage.

The threat to Rome resembled the threats that
long faced America. One by one, colonialism, slavery, Nationalism,
Nazism, Communism (and soon terrorism?) have been, as President
Ronald Reagan famously said, deposited into the "dustbin of
history."

In 1945, the United States found itself at
the top of the heap, but threats still remained. The main threat
was Communism, and this was the dominant concern of the body
politic that concerned us for 17 years and was very much priority
number one in 1962.

An observation of American history leaves one
astonished. Americans have been inculcated with the notion that God
graces this nation. We sing songs like "God Bless America." Our
money says, "In God we trust." Our founding documents are filled
with references to God's grace. Many of our cities and towns have
Biblical names and references:
Bethel
, Pennsylvania; New
Canaan
, Connecticut;
Saint Peter
sburg, Florida; Los
Angeles
. When the U.S. decided to expand Westward, we called
it Manifest Destiny.

There is little in the American experience
between our Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the year 1962
to dissuade most from the idea that we are a new Promised Land. The
Bible and world history books tell the story of nations, empires
and armies that ascended to great heights. In most cases, they were
ancient countries that took 1,000 years to reach power, often to
fall precipitously. Great powers have included the Persians, the
Greeks, the Roman, British and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The
French, the Germans and the Soviets all had grandiose visions of
such glory, but fell short.

Then there is America. A small group of
agrarian colonies, completely separated from the salons of
influence, politics and religious or military power. A tiny
population, naturally pre-disposed to avoid "big government" and
its trappings: armies, navies, groupthink over self-reliance. A
bunch of individuals who wanted to be left alone, much less invade
other countries.

Yet this little, disparate group of loosely
confederated states grew in less than 200 years to become the
single biggest, most powerful, influential, and richest empire . .
. power . . . military . . .
idea
. . . ever conceived by
Mankind. This was the state of America in 1962.

In 1939, we were happily ensconced in
isolationism; a Pacifist, anti-military country, weakened by a
Great Depression that left us questioning our very
modus
operandi
. The idea that we had what it took to "rule" the world
was laughable. John F. Kennedy's father, Ambassador to the Court of
St. James Joseph P. Kennedy, advocated that "we join with Adolf
Hitler and do business with him, since we obviously can't beat
him."

Our future looked to be the landscape Ayn
Rand described in
Atlas Shrugged
, which seemed to be an
America that never recovered from the Great Depression, and
certainly never entered or won World War II.

But we did enter World War II, from the
weakest possible position. Our Army was a shell of its victorious
World War I self, and after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor our
Navy was barely afloat. In our first battles with the Nazis in
North Africa and the Japanese in the Pacific, we were soundly
beaten.

Four years later, we were the greatest
military juggernaut ever conceived, an all-conquering,
indestructible force that ruled by complete fiat over all she
surveyed. More important, we were a
reluctant
empire,
dragged kicking and screaming into a new role as the world's
policeman, arbiter, shaper and decider. People were not ruled by
us, but rather
looked
to us. They
wanted
us to be in
their countries. They begged for our industries, our American
know-how, our can-do spirit to help their war-ravaged countries
rise from the rubble. We were benevolent kings, masters happy to
free those who served us. Our international policy was a microcosm
of Christian freedom.

We had "the bomb" when nobody else did. We
had the capacity to use it, and therefore to eliminate any future
threat, to establish total dominance over and above all previous
conceptions. Had the Romans, Napoleon, the Nazis, the Soviets, or
most any other great power with the exception of the British,
possessed a weapon with such unilateral ability to use it without
response, they all surely would have. We decided not to conquer
every inch of the world for one reason: the decision not to do it.
Why? Because our leaders knew that a just God would not approve of
it. Therefore we did not do it.

Spared annihilation by our kind charity, the
Soviet Union set out to defeat the U.S. Their policy was the
baseball version of Leo Durocher's phrase, "Nice guys finish last."
If we were too soft to murder them, then they would murder us. They
would take advantage of our gullibility to destroy us. If we were
ahead 7-0 in the eighth inning but refused to steal an open base in
order to keep the score down; well, the Soviets figured if we did
not have the will to win 20-0 then we did not deserve to win,
period!

Again, the concept of God's relationship with
Mankind, and most notably with America, comes into play. The
Soviets had peace and could have existed in comfortable partnership
with America. They chose to oppose America. America was a free
country filled with grateful, religious people. Communism was an
atheistic, evil concept. Therefore, it was simply
natural
,
pre-ordained really, that they would try to beat us. It was good
vs. evil. It could only be this way.

So, over the next 17 years, this was the
dynamic that played itself out. They called it the Cold War, but
there was plenty of "hot" war, too, and in America, the "land that
I love," treachery was afoot. Righteousness was opposed. Evil
reared its ugly head.

The Nazis were easy to hate. They were
up-front about what they intended to do and then set out to do it.
Their crimes were obvious and out in the open. They dared us to
stop it, and somehow we did. But Communism slithered around under
the guise of "equality" and "fairness," amorphous terms that the
world has desperately tried to live up to, always to be slapped
down by the reality that life is not "outcome based" or fair.

The Soviets engaged in an espionage program,
mostly based on the East Coast, beginning in the 1920s. Dictator
Joseph Stalin also understood that the new medium of film was the
most powerful tool of propaganda yet devised. Adolf Hitler had
built his Nazi empire using the documentary talents of Leni
Riefenstahl. Stalin wanted to take a step further; plant his own
moles in the American film industry, therefore destroying the enemy
via a cancer from within.

The U.S. was mostly oblivious to this until
1947, when Soviet espionage became the dominant news item of the
post-war era. At the heart of this dynamic was the wrinkled little
man, Whittaker Chambers. Out of his revelations to California's
freshman Republican Congressman, Richard M. Nixon, did the House
Un-American Activities Committee come to dominate political
dynamics. After Alger Hiss's conviction, the country focused on
Communist treachery and treason. Left wing Berkeley professor
Robert Oppenheimer leaked atomic secrets to the Soviets. Ethel and
Julius Rosenberg furthered that effort, and in 1949 the U.S.S.R.
exploded their first atomic bomb. Harry Truman's failure to support
Nationalist forces in China was credited by the Right with "losing"
Red China to Mao Tse-Tung. A confrontation in Korea led to
accusations that the Democrats had failed to let General Douglas
MacArthur defeat the "Red menace" once and for all. Out of this
rose a Republican Senator from Wisconsin named Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy had exaggerated his World War II exploits, all-but giving
himself the sobriquet "Tailgunner Joe" in reference to his
experience in a Marine fighter plane.

McCarthy saw the issue of Communism and
seized on it. In fact, he was right in that the Communists had
infiltrated government, but he was a demagogue who went too far;
namely accusing such stalwarts as President Dwight Eisenhower and
former Joint Chiefs chairman George C. Marshall of treachery. He
was discredited and run out of the Senate. However, McCarthyism
became the symbol that the Left used to discredit Republicans, even
saying that despite the evidence and the guilty conviction, Hiss
and many others were innocent.

It was not until after the Cold War had been
won and the Soviets opened their KGB archives that the Venona
Project was revealed, de-classified, demonstrated beyond doubt that
Hiss had been a paid agent, and that McCarthy - misguided as he was
in many cases - was essentially right.

But in the 1950s, the Cold War had
not
yet been won. In 1950, Communist North Korea invaded South Korea.
President Harry Truman ordered the U.S. to defend the south. Led by
MacArthur, the Americans stemmed the tide. MacArthur orchestrated
an amphibious invasion at Inchon, one of the most daring and
brilliant strategies in war annals. The harbor was a muddy flat,
not navigable by heavy boats, but for about five hours every three
or four months, the tides were high enough to allow ships to pass.
MacArthur staged the attack at the precise moment of tidal heights.
It was successful and the Americans captured the Communist capital
of Pyongyang. At that moment, it appeared, symbolically at least
the United States had literally triumphed over Communism.

Then, 1 million Red Chinese crossed the Yalu
River and came to the aid of North Korea. MacArthur urged an
advance into China, literally conquering the Chinese menace in
their homeland, replacing symbolic victory with actual victory.
Fearing a nuclear World War III, Truman refused to allow MacArthur
to proceed. When MacArthur bucked Truman's orders, he was relieved
of duty.

The war ended in a stalemate in 1953, under
the auspices of new President Eisenhower. Between 1954 and 1961,
the battle for world supremacy between the Communist East and the
free West was fought in a series of covert actions and proxy wars.
This policy worked hand-in-hand with a long-held concept called
"containment," originally conceived by George Kennan. The Kennan
plan was not to "win" the world struggle against Communism, but
rather to contain it; to disrupt its efforts at expansion. Major
military action was not called for under the containment
method.

When the Communists tried to starve Berlin,
Germany into submission, the Americans airlifted food and supplies
to the free west, thus preventing the entire city from falling to
the Soviets. The CIA engaged in a series of actions in a long
"game" with their Soviet counter-parts. The Shah of Iran was
propped up by American interests. A friendly government was
installed in Guatemala. American organized crime families took over
in Cuba with the tacit approval of the CIA.