Ben Nighthorse Campbell
Viola, Herman J.
whistlestop contains millions of yards of microfilm, enough to circle the globe at the equator as Earhart planned to do on her last flight. No one can see it, however, because it won't be ready...
...Just why Campbell found this respectful depiction of Indian culture "grotesque" is unclear...
...I hope I've just got to never make it public...
...I discovered over the years that the only one who will listen to your stories is another Marine...
...Whichever it is, and despite the byzantine FOIA, Brink achieves some extremely effective moments in this book...
...On page 102 he writes: Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Howland Island was the second U.S...
...Describing how Campbell's fanatical competitiveness wrecked his first marriage, Viola carefully explains: "Losing his wife seemed a small price to pay for improving his judo skills, because Ben Campbell had a long way to go if he hoped to compete effectively on an international level...
...It is obvious that, if only to prevent future waves of Greek hoplites, Vikings, and Roman legionaries, politicians should be prohibited from appearing in paradeswhile in ethnic warrior costume...
...But in writing that the tragedy removed an "obstacle" to the name-stripping, Viola inadvertently suggests what we already knew: the only way his jumped-up "warrior" can get the better of a Custer is if the Custer is already dead...
...Then I noticed their eyes glazed over," he writes...
...Booher has since been replaced by—surprise!another Indian, the Park Service having adopted a Jim Crow rule excluding whites, blacks, etc...
...He recalls that he often entertained his children and dinner-party guests with stories of his days as a Marine in World War II...
...the congressman did have an answer...
...171 along the way...
...In 1876, when soldiers attacked chief Dull Knife's Cheyenne village, they found among its trophies scalp-trimmed shirts, two human-finger necklaces, a woman's arm, and a bag containing the right hands of twelve Shoshone Indian babies...
...The book's most disgusting revelation is its claim that then-Congressman Ben Campbell helped the homicidal psychopath Russell Means plan the 1988 defilement of the mass grave on Custer Hill...
...to think that they had Amelia so they could use her for a bargaining chip in peace negotiations...
...limo...
...Launching a second career as an acclaimed and highly innovative Indian jewelry-maker, Campbell began his mutation into Professional Indian...
...I'll stake my life that is not Amelia's voice," said G.P...
...In his history of the Comanches, T.R...
...About three-quarters of the way through the book, Buchwald gives a hint of his motivation...
...the noble red man wittily replied...
...Yet they did not, presumably, waste their time stripping scarves off Caesar's images...
...According to Susan •are's book, Putnam married twice more before his death in 1950...
...Yet Campbell is not even that, and has been cited elsewhere as describing himself, perhaps too generously, as three-eighths Indian...
...Even more chilling is what Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau told Eleanor Roosevelt: If we're going to release this, it's just going to smear the whole reputation of Amelia Earhart...
...On the day of his death he had helped dedicate a Michigan monument to his fellow Vietnam veterans—"losers" all, given Campbell's criteria...
...Brink believes that Japan wanted the U.S...
...The last wireless message was not a navigation report, as was long thought, says Brink, but a reference to seeing someone who "looks like an admiral," indicating capture by Japanese naval forces in the area...
...Growing his hair long and mysteriously becoming "Ben Nighthorse," he would do very well at being an Indian—or "half-breed Indian," as he describes himself...
...Nor need we dwell on Campbell's career as an Olympic judo competitor and successful instructor, save to note the strong vein of moral idiocy running through his biographer's work...
...Unfortunately, that introductory premise Wayne Michael Sad' is the author of The Little Bighorn Campaign, March-September 1876, and co-editor of The Custer/Little Bighorn Battlefield Advocate...
...And if so, would he have wanted Amelia found...
...Still, when a bystander, obviously thinking of the horse's introduction to the New World, raised the reasonable question, "Why aren't you walking like your ancestors did...
...We have the wireless messages...
...The real story would stagger the imagination," said Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz in retirement...
...The most dramatic concern the drinking problem of Jim Noonan, Earhart's navigator on the last flight...
...Viola, needless to say, does not mention the episode...
...As though forgetting what he has just written, Viola stupidly claims that Campbell could "sympathize" with the Custer family—just one line after quoting him to the effect that the fatal heart attack of the general's great-grandnephew, Colonel George A. Custer III, was a good omen...
...He could have written a novel instead...
...Viola does not address the question, but does his (confusing) best to trace Campbell's Cheyenne roots back to Reuben Black Horse, a veteran of the Custer fight...
...The Japanese carrier-based planes blasted 1 n 1905, fabled Indian warriors, includ- ing the Comanche chief Quanah Parker and the Apache die-hard Geronimo, rode in Theodore Roosevelt's Inaugural Parade...
...congressman who secretly conspires to desecrate the grave of almost two hundred U.S...
...It seems to have been offered not for illumination but as punishment...
...So what if it had hung there for over a century...
...His view of Campbell's success as a massive Indian "victory" is pathetically absurd, for in agreeing to dishonor the Custer name, congressmen desperate to be loved, or in mortal fear of being called "racists," abandoned something they had ceased to value...
...built for Amelia on tiny Howland Island...
...Donald McIntosh, with more Indian blood than Campbell, died commanding a troop in Custer's 7th Cavalry...
...He fails to realize that neither fact is of any particular interest...
...Fiendishly well-coached for what purpose...
...Yet Campbell was raised in a "mainstream" environment, and not even enrolled in the Northern Cheyenne tribe until 1980...
...But for the Professional Ethnic, extremism in the pursuit of trivia is no vice...
...Perhaps Campbell really is the sort of fool who considers the death of a 67-year-old man with a bad heart an "omen...
...See my "Russell Means on Custer Hill," TAS, December 1988...
...This is a curious admission for a memoirist to make, especially after hp has just uncorked more than seventy-five pages of the very same Marine stories that stupefy his dinner companions...
...The thing to remember in dealing with the FOIA, says Brink, is that in order to request a secret document, you must know what's in it...
...One gets the impression that Campbell's reputation as a "moderate" Democratic Colorado legislator and congressman was due to never having had an ideological thought in his head before vaunting ambition inspired his first campaign...
...F ortunately Campbell is not always ghoulish...
...CI is not justified by the 313 pages of Dull Earnest prose that follow—dull earnest, that is, when the voice is not one of openly confessed, goop-eyed admiration for an admittedly talented and determined man whose "remarkable" feats may not be immediately apparent to the reader...
...Another problem with Brink's account is his conflicting descriptions ofthe landing field the U.S...
...Entering a committee room, Campbell viewed Seth Eastman's painting Death Whoop (not War Whoop, as Viola has it), depicting an Indian brandishing a fresh scalp...
...senator of Portuguese descent...
...dreams who stole the spotlight from the contingent of Navajo code-talkers and other legitimate warriors...
...W hen does the quest for one's non-Portuguese roots become an annoying affectation...
...Perhaps this shouldn't matter: After all, was not the gray-eyed Quanah himself half-white...
...Brink's account of the bender Noonan probably went on the night before their final takeoff and his imaginative reconstruction of Noonan flying with a massive hangover are truly harrowing...
...What happened to her the last few minutes...
...Instead of putting the freshman in his place, committee chairman Morris Udall instantly had the painting removed...
...usually he is merely a boorish publicity hound...
...Campbell's lack of any genuine interest in the battle site accounts for his current acquiescence in Park Service plans to destroy it by defacing The American Spectator April/May 1994 75 old entrenchments with concrete, actively discouraging land preservation, and "privatizing" the area into a theme park...
...The humorist has written a memoir, currently a best-seller, that is much longer than its 250 pages would suggest...
...Quoting Campbell's scornful rejection of Montanans who feared that removing Custer's name would hurt the local tourist economy (odd talk from a man who dropped his own surname simply to sell jewelry), Viola endorses his hero's characterization of opponents as racists and "rednecks...
...On page 75 he writes: To this day, although three impacted coral runways remain as firm and perfectly smooth as asphalt (the longest a mile long), no airplane has ever touched down on the airfield at Howland...
...No one can see it, however, because it won't be ready until 2021, when the machines to run it on will no longer be available...
...If Viola's findings are still somewhat vague, for Campbell "establishing a technically pristine paper trail was never a high priority...
...But in 1993 it was the Indian of Bill Clinton's P.C...
...In tones both indulgent and patronizing, Viola records the rise of an All-American boy and his descent into the role of Professional Ethnic...
...Viola attempts to portray Campbell's jihad as a Homeric struggle against Custer's heroic image—as though that image had not already been smashed by almost sixty years of hysterical debunking...
...Fehrenbach reminds us that "grandsons of Gauls crucified by Caesar could and did become Roman senators...
...Was he married to another woman when he went to China to listen to the tapes...
...On LEAVING HOME: A MEMOIR Art Buchwald G.P...
...Putnam's Sons /253 pages / $22.95 reviewed by ANDREW FERGUSON 76 The American Spectator April/May 1994...
...territory to be attacked...
...A s one of the aforementioned "rednecks," I can authoritatively state that Viola's lengthy account of the controversy is sheer nonsense, faithfully regurgitating the propaganda generated by the National Park Service...
...they did their duty manfully (to use an unOprah word) and found virtue in reticence, self-restraint, discipline, and hard work, having as much fun as they could Andrew Ferguson is a senior writer for the Washingtonian...
...After Earhart disappeared in July 1937, the U.S...
...Nor was precision in matters Indian: having declined to help Nicaragua's Miskito Indians fight their Sandinista oppressors, Campbell recalls them as "the Mesquite Indians of South America...
...They were not given to complaint...
...By any standard of measurement," gushes Herman J. Viola in his preface to this new biography, "Ben Nighthorse Campbell is a remarkable individual...
...I knew the late Colonel Custer...
...Indifferent to history, but obsessed with "symbolism" as only a Professional Ethnic can be, Campbell led the Orwellian crusade to strip General George A. Custer's name from Montana's Custer Battlefield and replace it with "Little Bighorn"—on the nonsensical grounds that the field's real name, in common use years before the government adopted it, slighted Indian participants and broke a nonexistent rule that battlefields must not be named after "losers...
...F--- you...
...The bomb damage has never been repaired...
...government quickly acknowledged her death as fact, yet in 1944 it made her husband a major in Army intelligence and sent him to China to listen to Tokyo Rose tapes to see if he could identify her voice...
...A more telling consideration, which he does not address, is Putnam's marital status in 1944...
...Putnam...
...Our fearless leader delivered a weird clenched-fist salute as the horseman rode past, face painted, lance in handnew-minted Colorado senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, his warbonnet's feathers symbolizing not authentic war deeds but the somewhat less hazardous victories of competitive judo...
...Our hero's sometimes harsh, sometimes Tom Sawyerish youth need not concern us, save to note that a teacher found the 14-year-old Campbell "resentful and hypersensitive"—good traits for a future Professional Ethnic, though his father (apparently "part Apache and part Pueblo Indian and, most likely, part BEN NIGHTHORSE CAMPBELL: AN AMERICAN WARRIOR Herman J. Viola Orion Books/ 313 pages /$24 reviewed by WAYNE MICHAEL SARF 74 The American Spectator April/May 1994 Cheyenne") had insisted upon concealing his own Indian background...
...Unlike the loutish Campbell, he was no sham warrior, but the real article, who had served in three wars and bore his decorations for valor proudly...
...Now, for the Buchwald generation, it's pay-back time...
...the Howland airfield into cratered uselessness...
...heat off Cristobal Colon, a descendent of the archfiend Columbus, Campbell appeared on horseback as a nineteenth-century Cheyenne war-chief, insisting on riding ahead of Colon's A rt Buchwald, the famous humorist, is an exemplar of the pre-Oprah generation, the cohort of men who came of age in the late 1930s, saved the world during the 1940s, and thereafter set about creating the most prosperous and pleasant country in history...
...His worshipful vision of battlefield superintendent Barbara Booher, a BIA veteran with no previous Park Service experience, bears no relation to the obtusely incompetent token appointed in 1989 solely because she was a woman and an Indian...
...Reminded that Wyoming's Dull Knife battlefield was named for its loser, Campbell claimed ignorance of this major Cheyenne disaster...
...Yet would it really be amiss to suggest that a U.S...
...Their children and grandchildren, in turn, repay their steadfastness by queuing up for Phil and Sally Jessy and Oprah herself, where with tears and bitterness they complain about how thankless it has been to inherit the most prosperous and pleasant country in history...
...In opposing the name-stripping, he sought not to glorify the three slain Custer brothers at the expense of Indian combatants, but to defend his family's name and honor—a concept apparently too esoteric for either the ghoul Campbell or his Boswell...
...soldiers in an American military cemetery—solely to gratify his sick Ethnic lust for revenge on a century-dead foe—deserves to rot in jail...
...It isn't a very nice story...
...Rumination piled upon anecdote piled upon reminiscence piled upon more rumination, it has a strangely unvarying tone, a long low rumble that never intensifies, never slackens...
...Yet when chosen co-marshal of the 1992 Tournament of Roses Parade to take the P.C...
...B rink makes it clear that Earhart was up to something...
...This is Affirmative Action history with a vengeance, and Viola cannot resist reminding us that Campbell, born to a Portuguese immigrant mother, is not only one of the few Indians ever elected to the Senate, but also "the first U.S...
...On the other hand, half-Iroquois Lt...
...certainly by his ancestors's standards it was mild stuff...
...He also found that Campbell's paternal grandmother was a prostitute—a peril of genealogy, I reckon...
...It sounds to me as if the woman might have lived in New York, and of course she had been fiendishly well-coached, but Amelia—never...
...Leaving Home probably takes longer to read than it took its author to write...
...he declared it "grotesque" and "out of sync with modern-day sensitivities...
...Drawing again on his Moral Idiocy vein, Viola terms this atrocity "long overdue," mocking its opponents...
...Campbell has since encountered more serious opposition when attempting to force the dropping of the Washington Redskins' name, which he imagines originated with the skinning of Indians...
Vol. 27 • April 1994 • No. 45
