James Webb Versus Skull and Bones
From Born Fighting: How the Scotts-Irish Did stuff and did some Other Stuff
As my grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt told it, my grandfather’s sin was to explain to the black folk of Kensett that they were being charged higher interest rates than whites at AP Mills’s store, thus keeping them in an even worse spiral of debt — and also to suggest to AP Mills that this was not a particularly Christian thing to do. By all accounts, my grandfather than told AP Mills to go to hell. And AP Mills, along with others who controlled the admittedly sparse purse strings of White County, showed my grandfather that there could be such a thing as hell on Earth.
The hard-luck story goes on. Unable to get any other job, he does some Hard Labor, wherein his bones give way, and he dies a horrible death.
When I became assistant secretary of defense in 1984, the deputy secretary of defense was a protege of Weinberger’s named William Howard Taft IV. Taft , who had graduated from Yale in 1966 and Harvard Law School in 1969, is the great-grandson of former President and Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft, also of Yale, and the great-great-grandson of one of the founding members of Yale’s famous Secret Society, Skull and Bones. Will Taft and I may as well have grown up on different planets. He had gone to Andover, Yale, Harvard Law, heading to Nader’s Raiders after law school. I had attended seven different public schools in four different states between the sixth and twelfth grades alone as my father moved from one military base to another, then headed off to the Marine Corps and Vietnam after the Naval Academy. But I found Taft likable and proficient despite a certain patrican aloofness. And he did not know it, but he also inspired me.
During my initial “courtesy call” in Will Taft’s office, I noticed that he kept a huge painting of President Taft just behind his desk. And so when I returned to my own office, I called my aunt in Arkansas and asked her to send me the old snapshot of BH Hodges standing in his boots and overalls, staring hard back at the world that had tried to stomp him. I had the small photo enlarged as far as technology would allow, which resulted in a four by seven inch black and white copy. Then I framed the picture with barn wood. And from that time forward, Old BH has looked down on whatever desk I happen to be occupying, urging me on but also standing watch over my humility.
Some people have their Skull and Bones. And some people keep their pride, then die of untreated broken bones.
Rip it; throw it on a brochure’ stamp a “Vote for James Webb — US Senate”; mail it to every Registered Voter in Virginia. There’s your campaign literature.
May 9th, 2006 at 7:18 am
It’s a tricky matter, and looking at the purpose of “leftyblogs.com”, I didn’t see that I quite fit. I don’t terribly focus on local issues and politics… which is to say, based on Portland, Oregon, so I let it pass.