Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (14 page)

After dinner Sun was introduced as a guest speaker. Sun, who had been educated at the '
Iolani
school in Honolulu, Hawaii, spoke a half dozen languages, and delivered his speech in impeccable English, much to the young journalist's embarrassed consternation. But when Sun resumed his seat, he preempted the coming apology by smiling and asking, "
Likee
speechee
?"

 

Sun
Yat-sen's
Nationalist
(
Guomindang
)
Party came under the leadership of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek after Sun's death, and Chiang was, regardless of his positive vision of
China
's future, someone who abused power shamelessly. When he was staying overnight in a village, for example, he would have all the dogs in the village killed so their
barking would not disturb him. More disastrously for a rural agrarian area he would also have all the roosters killed so their dawn crowing would not wake him up. His wife, taking her cue from
his behavior, wore all articles of clothing only once and then had them destroyed, and also ordered her sheets to be changed (and the old sheets destroyed) each morning and also after
every nap.

Of greater concern were the hundreds of millions upon hundreds of millions of dollars in
aid Chiang received from the U.S. and other countries, money which seemingly disappeared down a bottom pit of venality and embezzlement. It was for this reason that in U.S. State
Department circles Chiang Kai-shek was referred to as Generalissimo Cash My Check.

 

Manuel Quezon, Philippine revolutionary and later
US
ally and eventually the first
president of an independent
Philippines
, was born and raised in a small provincial town in which the local priest was treated almost as a potentate. Once when as a teenager he needed to speak to the
priest, the clergyman arrogantly offered Quezon his hand to kiss. Quezon, annoyed at the presumption, grabbed the priest's hand and shook it instead. The priest responded by throwing
the young man out of the church.

Publically humiliated, Quezon swore revenge. But then he learned that the supposedly celibate priest was having an affair with a girl in the poorer side of town. Quezon introduced himself to her, seduced her; and left her room with a souvenir. He was thereafter seen walking about the town with the priest's clerical collar hanging loosely around his neck.

 

Quezon's
tendency to oppose authority had a significant historical consequence. He was
not at all involved in radical politics in the late 19
^th
century Philippines, not involved in politics
at all, actually. But he was a man of amorous passions, and when a young lady of his acquaintance was the object of uninvited attentions by a Spanish officer (the Philippines, be it remembered, being a colony of Spain until 1898, at which time the US acquired the country in
the Spanish-American War), Quezon confronted the Spaniard and struck him in the face. He was
of course arrested and sent to jail; but the authorities, not wishing to expose the tawdry situation
attendant upon the assault, instead accused Quezon of being an anti-Spanish rebel, a supporter of
Emilio Aguinaldo, the great Filipino guerilla leader.

Quezon had barely heard of Aguinaldo and had nothing to do with the independence movement, but his conviction as a rebel aroused his interest. He thus
became
a supporter of
Aguinaldo and a
member
of the independence movement. It was this that resulted eventually in
Quezon becoming the first president of the Philippines.

 

(Warning! Vulgar language alert!)
Diplomacy has been defined as the art of bringing
home the bacon without spilling the beans. This involves, of course, being able to speak at length
without actually saying anything.
Dimitrio
Lakas
, figure-head President of Panama during the
Torrijos
dictatorship, was a master of this, as American journalist William F. Buckley learned, to his chagrin.

In 1976, as debate over the proposed Panama Canal Treaty was raging in the U.S.,
Buckley went to Panama City to tape an episode of his weekly talk show,
Firing Line,
with
Lakas
as his sole guest. The topics ranged from the Canal, the treaty, the drug problem, the U.N.,
and at last, Panama's warming relations with Castro's Cuba. But try as he might, and using every
single interrogative technique at his disposal, Buckley could not get
Lakas
to say anything that could be even vaguely described as a comprehendible declaratory sentence. Convoluted, vapid, vacuous, evasive, meaningless statements were all that Buckley could elicit from the person he later described as "the impossible guest."

As the interview ended with
Lakas
continuing to emit empty blather about Panamanian-
Cuban relations, Buckley had long since despaired of taping anything at all of substance.

And then, immediately after the cameras stopped rolling and the microphones stopped recording,
Lakas
leaned forward to Buckley and said, "And as far as I'm concerned, Mr.
Buckley, I'd just as soon fuck Castro as sign a treaty with him." For what was probably the first
and last time in his long, loquacious life, Buckley was speechless.

 

President Charles De Gaulle of
France
was undoubtedly the greatest Frenchman of the
20
^th
century. He led the Free French forces while the country was under German occupation, and then after liberation helped establish the 4
^th
Republic. When that regime began to collapse under the strain of the Algerian War, he came out of retirement and created the 5
^th
Republic, becoming
its first president.

He resigned in 1969 over a political issue. This decision upset his supporters and political
allies, one of whom said to him, "You must not resign! You are indispensible! You are
irreplaceable!"

De Gaulle dismissed this with a wave of his hand and said, "The graveyards of France are filled with indispensible, irreplaceable men."

 

One of the most common clichés in prison comedies is the file baked in a cake. It actually
happened.

Eamon
De Valera, first president of an independent Ireland, was sentenced to prison
instead of execution after the Easter Rebellion of 1916 because of his citizenship. His mother had emigrated from Ireland to the United States late in the 19
^th
century, where she met and married
an Argentine immigrant, and a year later gave birth to a baby boy whom she named
Eamon
. After her husband's death, she sent her two-year-old son to live with
relatives in Ireland. Thus De Valera was by birth an American citizen; and in 1916, with the U.S. still neutral in World War One and the British eager for us to enter the war against Germany, executing an American would have been contrary to Britain's interests.

So De Valera—or "Dev," as his admirers called him—went to prison, instead of being hanged as were so many of the other leaders of the Easter Rebellion. While incarcerated he was allowed
to send and receive mail, subject of course to censorship. One of his friends received a postcard
from him with a drawing in
Dev's
hand showing a drunken man fitting an enormous key into a lock. The drawing passed through censorship with no difficulty, because the censor did not realize that Dev had drawn a picture of the shape and size of the key to his jail cell. His friends managed to send him, without inspection, a cake in which was baked a file and a metal key
blank. Dev meticulously and patiently filed the blank down to the shape of the key; and one fine evening,
Eamon
De Valera unlocked his cell and walked out of jail. A massive manhunt ensued,
but he was never captured. Fourteen years later he was President of Ireland.

 

The last president of
Germany
before the establishment of the Third Reich was a hero of
the First World War, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, who was born in 1837 and died in 1934. Elected president in 1925, he wished to retire at the end of his term of office in 1932, but
he was talked into running for re-election by politicians who feared (correctly) that otherwise Hitler would be elected president.

Hindenburg was re-elected, but he was not a functioning executive. In fact, his senility contributed to the establishment of Hitler's dictatorship. The problem was that he seemed lucid enough in the morning, but by the afternoon he was clearly in a different world. On one occasion, he was speaking to the finance minister and began and ended the conversation by
screaming, "General, I was not at all satisfied with the spring maneuvers!" On another occasion
he was watching an armed forces parade when he turned to his aide and commented, "I did not know we had taken so many Russian prisoners."

Thus it was that when Hermann Goring arranged the burning of the Reichstag (Germany's parliament building) and Chancellor Hitler came to President von Hindenburg with the alarming news that the Communists were trying to start a revolution, and that to prevent this
Chancellor Hitler needed presidential authority to exercise emergency powers, the old man,
barely understanding what has happening, signed the order with his aged, shaky hand. And thus
was the Nazi dictatorship precipitated. Hindenburg died the next year, never realizing or
understanding what he had done.

 

John D. Rockefeller, who had cornered the market on oil refining, was at the time of his
death the wealthiest men in the world, with a personal fortune in excess of one billion 1937
dollars. His success was a result of foresight and luck, of course; but it was also a result of
attention to detail and an awareness of the importance of every single dollar and cent. For
example, refined oil was shipped from refineries to markets in wooden barrels whose staves were
held together by copper bands fastened by solder. Rockefeller asked how many drops of solder
were needed to fasten the bands. When he was told it required fifty drops, he ordered a test barrel constructed using forty drops. The barrel held. Rockefeller then ordered that all barrels thereafter
be fastened with forty drops of solder. "I saved a fortune by making that change," he later commented.

Though he officially retired in 1897 (and died at age 98 in 1937), Rockefeller always kept
his eye on the businesses being run by his son. He could often be found in the corporate offices early in the morning examining the books and going over dispatches. One morning an office
worker arrived to find the old man on the floor on his hands and knees. Fearing that he had fallen
or had a seizure, the employee ran over to him crying, "Mr. Rockefeller! Are you all right? Are you hurt?"

"No, no, I'm fine," the old man said. "I dropped a quarter."

 

One of John D's grandchildren was Nelson Rockefeller, who served as governor of
New York
and vice-president of the
United States
. As one of the Rockefellers he was, of course, quite
wealthy. (His estate at the time of his death was estimated at $632 million.)

Once when engaging in a question and answer session with some students he was asked,
"They say that money isn't everything. Do you think that's true?"

"It is absolutely true," Nelson Rockefeller replied. "And believe me, because I should
know. I have money, and I also have everything."

 

Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK's father, was not a very nice fellow. A serial adulterer who made
a fortune during prohibition in various nefarious ways, his attitude toward morality and ethics
can be surmised from one of his favorite sayings. The original proverb was, "Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes."
In Joe Kennedy's version, the saying was, "Always walk a mile in the other man's shoes.
Because then he's a mile away, and you have his shoes."

When in 1960 the Catholic John F. Kennedy was fighting for the Democratic nomination,
ex-president Harry Truman, who opposed JFK, was asked if he was concerned about Kennedy's
religion and the possible influence Pope John XXIII might have on him. "I'm not worried about
the Pope," Truman replied. "I'm worried about the Pop."

 

Kennedy himself had a sense of humor about his father's incessant political
machinations. At one point in the 1960 primary campaign, just after JFK won the
West Virginia
primary, he told an audience of his supporters, "I just received a telegram from my father. He
told me, 'Don't buy a single vote more than is necessary. I'm not going to pay for a landslide.'" On another occasion JFK said, “Last week I made statement to the effect that contributing financially to my campaign will not guarantee access to the White House once we are elected. Ever since I said that, I haven't received a dime from my father.”

 

Sam Rayburn was a Congressman from
Texas
who served for forty-eight years, including
a cumulative total of seventeen years as Speaker of the House, but in his early life at the
beginning of the 20
^th
century life he was a teacher in rural
Texas
. In those days teachers were
regarded as the moral guardians of the community, and were sometimes obligated to engage in
what might be called active moral oversight.