Continuing the conversation
Murphy, Brian P.
ONLY IN AMERICA On September 21, world leaders gave President Bill Clinton a standing ovation at the United Nations. A few days earlier, Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, stood...
...It was also the same photo, when it was all over, that would appear in the newspaper and christen a new goldstar mother...
...Moments earlier, she had been sitting in her living room, cradling her newborn daughter--my mother...
...Or are they simply indifferent to our national obsession with Monica Lewinsky, Kenneth Starr, Henry Hyde, David Kendall, Newt Gingrich, Paula Jones, and, oh yes, Bill and Hillary Clinton...
...It was provided by the Army so mothers and fianc6es could have a photo hanging on the wall at home or hidden inside a treasured locket...
...For others, it is bitter partisanship magnified by congressional elections...
...Are these world leaders moral nihilists...
...Leo Surek of Beaver Brook, Pennsylvania...
...All were sacred...
...the political and economic shambles in Russia...
...In contrast, a word that befits their pompous gravitas (and that of their fellow anchors) might be "absurd," or even "silly...
...For some, it is the destruction of Bill Clinton, rogue, scoundrel, and apparent penitent...
...he was their son, their would-be husband, their hero, and he promised he'd be back home when it was all over...
...Surek, my grandfather, who was underground at the time in the anthracite caverns of Carbon County...
...the precarious state of a globalized economy...
...Time to turn our attention to those genuinely historic and momentous issues that beset those world leaders...
...Today, the telegrams are sheathed in plastic, a letter is pleated by its original creases, and the Purple Heart is encased in its presentation box...
...Or could there be something truly terrifying for the rest of the world in watching the one and only superpower preoccupied with salacious sex...
...It has never been easy for me to explain what it means to grow up in a family that lost two uncles in that second great war...
...The American political elite politicians, journalists, lawyers-seem driven by interests that have little to do with governance, the Constitution, or the state of the world...
...There are, after all, more important problems facing the world than either the sins or the fate of Bill Clinton: the economies of Japan, Brazil, and Southeast Asia...
...Havel reiterated his friendship for the besieged Clinton...
...the coming shift to a single currency in Europe, to name but a few...
...Both cried as the olive-clad soldier awkwardly tried to offer comfort...
...Christmas cards, the telegrams, the official letter from President Roosevelt, the Purple Heart, and the burial notice...
...In the minutes before the Clinton videotape was released and televised on September 21 (and shortly before the standing ovation at the UN), CNN anchors Bernard Shaw and Judy Woodruff intoned the holy words, "momentous" and "historic...
...family history became hagiography...
...My granduncles rest side-by-side an ocean away in an American military cemetery in St.-Laurent, France...
...the bloodletting in Kosovo...
...It is a tawdry soap opera...
...World leaders, and everyone else, are right to worry...
...9 THE SECRETARY OF WAR ASKS THAT I ASSURE YOU OF HIS DEEP SYMPATHY IN THE LOSS OF YOUR BROTHER PRIVATE FRANK J SUREK REPORT RECEIVED STATES HE DIED SEVENTEEN FEBRUARY IN ITALY AS RESULT OF WOUNDS RECEIVED LETTER FOLLOWS _9 THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR BROTHER PRIVATE FIRST CLASS JOSEPH D SUREK WAS KILLED IN ACTION THIRTEEN JULY IN FRANCE LETTER FOLLOWS On August 24, 1944, at 12:43 in the afternoon, a ticker in a Pennsylvania Western Union office hammered out a telegram addressed to Mr...
...Time to turn off the TV...
...For as long as I can remember, Frankie and Joey's pictures have hung in my grandparents' living room without fanfare or decoration--two simple black-and-whites of two proud soldiers...
...Instead, his wife Rose opened her door to the uniformed messenger, and knew instantly...
...the barely breathing peace talks in the Middle East...
...This is not a Greek tragedy...
...Now his brother Joseph was gone, too, lost somewhere in France...
...A United States Army officer was dispatched to deliver the missive to the clapboard home of Mr...
...And for still others, it seems simply to be the prurient pursuit of everything we already know...
...Just as my grandfather's mining tales reminded me that this family understood the meaning of labor, the tears Commonweal 6 October 9, 1998...
...I never met them, but I was never allowed to forget them...
...Ditto Nelson Mandela, South Africa's national hero and retiring president, as he received the Congressional Gold Medal from Clinton before a gathering of Congress...
...After the Surek brothers died, everything they touched became a relic: the letters home, the G.I...
...A few days earlier, Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, stood perplexed at the president's side as reporters questioned Clinton's moral authority to govern...
...Four months earlier, the scene had been rehearsed when Frank Surek was killed in Anzio, Italy...
Vol. 125 • October 1998 • No. 17
