Memory Loss

In 1986 the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored the first national assessment of what high school seniors knew about history and literature. Nearly 8,000 17-year-old students of different races, both sexes, and all regions of the US – from private and public schools – were tested and the results were published in a book authored by Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?

Well, apparently they didn’t know enough to earn a passing grade – they correctly answered 54% of the history questions and 52% of the literature questions.

Three-quarters of the students did not know when Lincoln was president; one-third did not know what the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision was about; 70% could not identify the Magna Carta. One-third did not know that the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” comes from the Declaration of Independence; some attributed it to the Gettysburg Address.

Only 20% could identify James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ralph Ellison, Joseph Conrad, or Henrik Ibsen, only one in three knew that Chaucer is the author of The Canterbury Tales; 65% did not know what 1984 or Lord of the Flies is about.

Almost 25 years later the Department of Education last week released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Of the seven subjects on the national test, students performed the worst in U.S. history; only 13% of the 12,000 high school seniors can be considered “proficient” according to the standards of the test administrators. The test was also given to 7,000 fourth graders and 11,000 eighth graders.

Fewer than a quarter of the 12th-graders, for example, knew that China was North Korea's ally during the Korean War. The percentage of seniors considered proficient in 2010 has not changed since the last time the test was given – 2006. More than half of all seniors posted scores at the lowest achievement level, "below basic."

There is much to criticize in the National Assessment test. While sponsored at the federal level, it is administered by the states with state-to-state differences on the standards. Some of the questions have multiple choice answers, but others ask the students for a short “constructed” (essay) response, for example, to interpret the meaning of a World War II poster or give two reasons why George Washington was an important leader. These subjective answers must be graded by administrators to determine if they represent an adequate or inadequate answer – also requiring a subjective determination which is likely to vary from state to state.

Uniformity of standards is needed but the last place it should come from is the federal government. The federal government should never have been involved in a state’s educational system in the first place. Where is that authorized in the Constitution?

A frequent criticism of public education today is its political correctness and that revisionist history is being taught. In fact a controversy raged in Texas last year over the content of textbooks and the history curriculum. The current curriculum plays down the role of Thomas Jefferson among the founding fathers, despite being the author of the Declaration of Independence, the third US President, and the President responsible for the Louisiana Purchase. Texas Board of Education discussions ranged from whether President Reagan should get more attention (yes), whether hip-hop should be included as part of lessons on American culture (no), and whether President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis's inaugural address should be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln's (yes).

A Board member who is a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students also study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He further made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported and many Democrats opposed.

Another Board member won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action, and Title IX legislation. He further won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the US during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

History revisionists around the country howled that the Texas Board members were unqualified to specify a history curriculum because they weren’t historians. Well, yes. However, I’m not trained in animal husbandry, but I can tell the difference between horse hockey and cow pies. I think the Texas Board is qualified to distinguish history from historical horse hockey.

Keep in mind that the revisionists wrote the textbooks and suggested what and how the curriculum would be taught. Texas is one of the two largest textbook buyers in the nation. Publishers will now have to comply with the Board’s requirements in order to sell in that state, which means the Texas decisions will influence how history will be taught in other states as well, because publishers can’t afford a Texas text and different texts for other states.

In his American Interest blog this week, Walter Russell Mead noted that when it comes to excellence in education, red states rule – at least according to a panel of experts assembled by Newsweek. Using a set of indicators ranging from graduation rates to college admissions and SAT scores, the panel reviewed data from high schools all over the country to find the best public schools in the country.

The results make depressing reading for teacher unions because the very best public high schools in the country are heavily concentrated in conservative red states.

Three of the nation’s ten best public high schools are in Texas – the no-income tax, right-to-work state that blue model defenders like to characterize as America at its worst. Florida, another no-income tax, right-to-work state long misgoverned by the evil and rapacious Bush dynasty, has two of the top ten schools, Mead notes.

Newsweek isn’t alone with these shocking results. Another top public school list, compiled by the Washington Post, no friend of conservative causes, was issued in May. Texas and Florida rank number one and number two on that list’s top ten as well.

Evidence of revisionism and political correctness comes through in the National Assessment – in the multiple choice and constructed response questions – samples of which are available online. One has to wonder why the NAEP won’t put the entire question set online.

A past assessment asked fourth-graders to identify the document “that contains the basic rules used to run the United States government.” The choices are the Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Constitution. The best answer is, of course, the Constitution, but the question is wrong. Characterizing the US Constitution as “rules to run the government,” even though asked of 10-year olds in the fourth grade, shows how clueless the test designer is. The Constitution is a document that states the limits on the powers of the federal government by explicating what it can’t do and enumerating the few things it can do. That hardly amounts to “rules to run the government.”

Other questions and answers characterize our form of governance as a democracy, which it isn’t; we have a constitutional republic. The two are about as similar as a cat and a dog. Both have four legs but that’s where their likeness ends.

Despite the failings of the NAEP, there can be little doubt that the average American either never received or has forgotten even the minimal level of education required to be a responsible citizen.

Another national survey, this one sponsored by the Bill of Rights Institute, was conducted by Harris Interactive between December 1 and 3, 2010. It revealed a level of ignorance that is lampooned by Jay Leno’s “Man on the Street” interviews. American adults selected the correct answer 32% of the time, on average, on questions about the Bill of Rights, the freedoms it protects, and American government. An embarrassing 42% of the adults surveyed incorrectly chose one of America’s founding documents as the source of the phrase, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," – which, of course, is the foundational statement of communism articulated by Karl Marx. Of all their incorrect choices, the most frequent incorrect choice was the Bill of Rights.

It’s important for every citizen to understand how America works. Our government derives its powers from the people, not the other way around. Yet, Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, once told a group of federal law enforcement officers “You are part of a government that has given its people more freedom … than any other government in the history of the world.” This Constitutional Neanderthal obviously didn’t understand the document she was sworn to defend! Within her second-rate mind there has always been a third-rate mind struggling to get out.

Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the Harris Interactive survey showed 60% of Americans failed to recognize that a government whose powers derive from the people is something that makes this country exceptional. Perhaps it also ought not surprise us that congressmen fail to understand this, and when grilled by their constituents at town hall meetings, become incensed that they aren’t treated with more deference, calling loud but otherwise peaceful demonstrators Nazis.

In addition to the findings of NAEP and Harris Interactive, we have yet another survey, this one sponsored by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), which commissioned the Roper Center in 2000 to survey seniors at the nation’s best colleges and universities as identified by the U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings. Remember, now, that these were college seniors enrolled in supposedly the best 55 schools in the country. They were asked questions from a basic high school history curriculum. Four out of five or 81% of seniors from the top colleges/universities received a grade of D or F based on their answers.

Slightly more than half possessed a passable knowledge of American democracy and the Constitution. Only 34% identified George Washington as the American Commanding General at the battle of Yorktown, the last battle of the American Revolution. More of them (37%) thought Ulysses S. Grant was in charge. He would command the Union Army in the Civil War 80 years later.

Only 42% were able to identify George Washington as “First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Only 23% correctly identified James Madison as the “father of the Constitution. Most thought it was Jefferson, who was in Paris when the Constitutional Convention was in process.

Only 22% were able to identify the phrase “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” as a line from the Gettysburg Address; 43% put it in the Declaration of Independence.

Over one-third were unable to identify the US Constitution as establishing the division of power in American government.

Yet 99% knew who Beavis and Butthead were, and 98% knew that Snoop Doggy Dogg was a rap singer. Is this what parents get for an annual tuition that costs up to $50,000?

The future and the defense of the American system are dependent on an educated citizenry. Yet the ACTA survey found that students can graduate from every one of the top 55 colleges and universities in the land without taking a single course in US history. If knowledge of history isn’t required to graduate from college, it will eventually no longer be a requirement for K-12. Then where will we be as a nation?

Thomas Jefferson said “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.” We are losing our collective memory by not knowing history and with it we lose all that history encompasses to explain what happened that got us where we are.

Why study history? What good is its knowledge? What value is there in knowing the cause and consequences of the Salem witch hunts? Why ask the reason that cities are located where they are – any city? Does it make any difference in our lives to know the causes of the American Civil War? How about the English Civil War? Can today’s conflict between Islam and the West be explained by anything that happened in the past?

Why indeed? Because history lovers are curious people. Voltaire's desire was "… to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization."

Will and Ariel Durant took 50 years – most of their 68 years as husband and wife – to write one history book: their magisterial oeuvre, The Story of Civilization, which was published in 11 volumes. Will Durant had initially planned to write a history of the 19th century. But as he started working on it he found that his subject couldn’t be understood without the knowledge of what had come before. His search for a starting point gradually led him to begin with the pre-Sumerians and to write a history of all civilization, ancient and modern, Occidental and Oriental. As he explained in the preface of a later volume, “The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for our understanding.”

Durant’s conclusion is a succinct rationale for studying and understanding history. If we see humankind as an evolving and connected society, we can’t understand who we are until we understand who we were. And if we have no interest in who we were, it’s hard to understand why it matters who we are. Why then should we be willing to spend blood and treasure to defend a way of life that is rootless – that has no legacy worth protecting? Why would future generations have any interest in our accomplishments?

One premise of our democratic society, which Jefferson recognized over two centuries ago, is that for it to succeed, all of its members must have a sufficient grasp of history and current affairs to "… enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom." I believe that premise has never been more true than it is today.

At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, a woman asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the Founders had given them. “A Republic, madam,” said Dr. Franklin, “if you can keep it.” We must understand our roots. Because, in my opinion, there has never been a time in the history of the Republic when the greatest threat to “keeping it” comes from its leaders in government – especially the man holding the office once held by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

Men Behaving Badly

“Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” so said former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

Perhaps that explains the bizarre behavior of some political notables such as South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, married 20 years and father of four sons, who shook his bodyguards and disappeared for a few days for a hike on the Appalachian Trail, which mysteriously turned south to Patagonia and a soirée to see his Argentinean mistress. The period during which he was AWOL included Father’s Day, 2009. He escaped impeachment but not divorce.

Shortly after his election as California’s Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, father of four, was accused of hitting on several women, one of whom produced a child who is close to the age of one of the Governator’s natural children. For those who live and vote in Palm Beach County, Florida, that means he was married at the time the out-of-wedlock son was conceived. Ah-nold’s wife of 25 years has separated and is filing for divorce after her detective finds out how many other little earthlings Mr. Universe produced during their marriage.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, formerly the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, was arrested in New York for sexually assaulting a maid – behavior the old lecher has been getting away with for years. He has four daughters and lives with a third wife, who dutifully sent him a million dollars for bail and an ankle bracelet. If convicted, Strauss-Kahn will find American prisons have gone Dante one better and added a tenth circle to the Inferno – wall to wall males.

Today’s news comes to us courtesy of Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY), whose name and misdeeds have provided a field day for double entendres. The eponymously-named lawmaker’s body part is now more familiar than a “See Rock City” sign, and his tweets in various stages of, as the French say, déshabillé' make us wonder if the guy’s wardrobe consists only of towels and jockey shorts.

Weiner becomes the latest casualty in a line of men who forget that when they step on to the public stage, their lives will be under constant scrutiny even after those lives end.

To wit:

Young George Washington seems to have fallen in love with Sally Fairfax, the wife of George William Fairfax, a member of a prominent Virginia family. George William’s sister, Anne, was the wife of George’s half brother Lawrence Washington. The Fairfax’s social status and education was well above that of the Washington family; they were landed gentry in late colonial Virginia and therefore quite influential. Nevertheless, the Fairfax family had befriended George since he was 15, and when Sally married into the family, she taught George to dance. Their relationship blossomed but no evident indiscretions occurred.

Martha Custis was 27 years old when she and George, not yet 27, were married. She was sophisticated and quite wealthy, and despite George’s love for Sally Fairfax, they made a good marriage. George William and Sally Fairfax were frequent visitors to Mount Vernon, so when they decided to return to England in 1773, her leaving upset George Washington. How long he carried romantic feelings is not known – the war came, the Fairfax fortune in America was lost, George William died in 1787, and Sally remained a widow until her death 24 years later. She seems to speak with some regret in a letter to her sister-in-law the year after George William died and about the time that Washington became president when she wrote, “I know now that the worthy man is to be preferred to the high-born who has not merit to recommend him…when we enquire into the family of these mighty men we find them the very lowest of people.”

The year before he died, George Washington wrote his last letter to Sally:

During this period, so many important events have occurred, and such changes in men and things have taken place, as the compass of a letter would give you but an inadequate idea of. None of which events, however, nor all of them together, have been able to eradicate from my mind, the recollection of those happy moments, the happiest in my life, which I have enjoyed in your company.

Sounds like love lingered long.

Alexander Hamilton was Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury when he became entangled in a sex con involving Maria Reynolds. She was 23 and he was 34, married, and father of two children at the time. Maria also was married and her husband was part of the scheme. Maria claimed that she and her daughter had been abandoned by her husband, James, and she needed money to return to New York City and her family. Hamilton accommodated, and when Maria said she had more than money on her mind, it began a three year affair that would cost Hamilton his career and reputation.

James Reynolds began defrauding Revolutionary War veterans in a scam that cheated the ex-soldiers out of unpaid back wages. At the same time, Reynolds blackmailed Hamilton, allowing him to continue his sexual romps with Maria. Essentially Maria had become Hamilton’s prostitute, pimped by her husband. When Reynolds veterans’ scam was uncovered, he implicated Hamilton’s involvement. A Congressional investigatory committee consisting of James Monroe and Frederick Muhlenberg was established to determine Hamilton’s culpability.

Hamilton claimed his innocence in the wages scam but revealed his affair with Maria Reynolds and the fact that James Reynolds had blackmailed him in the amount of $1,000. He even turned over love letters he had written to Maria to prove his innocence. Monroe and Muhlenberg had been given Hamilton’s confession of the illicit affair in confidence, and since it was unrelated to Hamilton’s official duties, the affair was revealed to no one – except Monroe told his friend Thomas Jefferson, who was a political enemy of Hamilton.

Jefferson used his knowledge of the affair to start rumors about Hamilton's private life employing an ethically-challenged pamphleteer, James Callender, to hide Jefferson’s involvement. His motive clearly was to destroy a rival’s political career. Callender was a known muckraker and managed to get Hamilton’s letters, which he published. Hamilton had no choice but to come clean and openly confess the truth of the Reynolds affair in order to save his public reputation against the charge of misusing his office and its funds. He retired as Secretary of the Treasury in 1795.

The humiliation must have been unbearable for Hamilton’s wife, who was in the final stage of pregnancy with their third child. But the true humiliation of the scandal is that no one believed Hamilton’s innocence in the wage fraud scheme, though he was, and no one believed Jefferson was not the source of the love letters given to Callender, though he was not. Enraged, Hamilton threatened to make public an old chestnut about an early indiscretion in Jefferson’s life with Betsy Walker, the wife of a friend, but he never made good on the threat because he had no proof to substantiate the rumor.

The Betsy Walker story was finally made public in 1805 by Jefferson’s enemies when Jefferson was president. Whatever happened, it occurred when John Walker, a neighbor and Jefferson’s childhood friend, had left home for four months in 1768 to conclude an Indian treaty. He asked Jefferson – then a single, young plantation owner, and his friend – to look after his wife Betsy and their infant daughter. Twenty years passed before Betsy Walker mentioned the incident to her husband, which she did at the time when Jefferson was in France as the American minister. Betsy claimed Jefferson made repeated sexual advances during her husband’s absence, which continued, she said, after Jefferson married the 23-year-old widow Martha Wayles Skelton.

Jefferson said nothing publicly to refute the rumored Walker scandal. The closest thing we have to an admission survives in a letter to Jefferson’s Secretary of the Navy to whom he wrote, “You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknowledge its incorrectness. It is the only one founded in truth among all of their allegations against me.”

One of the several “allegations against me” to which Jefferson refers was made by James Callender, who by then had turned against the President, revealing in an 1802 newspaper article the existence of “Dusky Sally” – a slave and alleged concubine of Jefferson named Sally Heming by whom Jefferson, then a widower, was accused of having sired several children. The news eclipsed the public’s interest in the Betsy Walker affair and haunted Jefferson all of his days.

Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died in 1782 shortly after delivering the sixth child in their 10-year marriage. Some have said that having so many children so closely spaced led to her death, although the absence of birth control and perinatal healthcare contributed to the high rate of maternal mortality in colonial times. Jefferson promised his wife on her death bed that he would not remarry – an odd commitment for a 40-year old with an apparently overactive libido to make.

Jefferson was sent to Paris as the US Minister to France by friends who feared that the death of Martha would destroy his health and career. His daughter Patsy accompanied him and soon after arriving, Jefferson called for 9-year old Polly, his other daughter, and the 14-year old slave girl, Sally Heming, to join him in Paris. Sally was 19 when the Jeffersons returned to America in late 1789. After being George Washington’s Secretary of State between 1790 and 1793, Jefferson resigned over his feuds with Hamilton and returned to his Virginia estate, Monticello. He would remain there until 1797 when he was elected Vice President in the election that made John Adams the Republic’s second president. It’s likely that during the four-year interregnum at Monticello, Jefferson’s affair with Sally Heming began. There was a 30 year difference in their ages.

Although Dumas Malone, the leading biographer of Jefferson, discounted the rumor of a Jefferson liaison with Sally Heming, a slave woman – which was not rare among slaveholders at the time – Malone’s biography was completed before the modern era of DNA testing. In 1998 DNA established evidence that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally’s six children although she was never married. Several bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson.

A dalliance not as well known as the Heming affair is one Jefferson had with Maria Cosway in Paris. She and her husband were introduced to Jefferson in 1786 when he was 43 and she was 27. Allegedly, Jefferson was immediately smitten with her, if not in love, and over the next six weeks they spent every day together, her husband having conveniently returned to their home in London. Cosway’s world-wise sophistication would certainly have attracted Jefferson into an intimate relationship, and Paris, after all, was the place in the late 18th century where morality among the aristocracy was lax and infidelity was a social sport.

When Cosway’s husband insisted later that year that she return to London, Jefferson penned his famous 4,000 word letter to her that has been called “The Dialogue of the Head vs. the Heart” which is classic Jeffersonian logic – the struggle of the romantic and the practical – concluding that a lasting relationship between the two of them was impossible. Yet when he departed Paris to return home even as she was preparing to live in Italy with her brother – apparently having separated from her husband – Jefferson wrote to her: "I am going to America and you are going to Italy. One of us is going the wrong way, for the way will ever be wrong that leads us further apart."

Their letters would continue for the rest of his life.

It’s generally known that President Grover Cleveland, a bachelor early in his term, fathered a child by Maria Halpin a decade before his election in the 1884 campaign. However details vary widely, ranging from his manly advice to his campaign staff to “Tell the truth” and his acceptance of paternity – the story in general circulation – to the sordid details in a yet-to-be-released book, A Secret Life, which reveal an uglier Grover Cleveland than the one constructed by history.

Author Charles Lachman tells a tale of date rape which resulted in Halpin’s pregnancy. After the birth of the child, a boy, in 1874 Cleveland acted with Dickensian cruelty to forcibly remove the child from his mother and have him placed in the Buffalo Orphan Asylum. Maria Halpin was incarcerated in the Providence Lunatic Asylum but was soon released when it became evident that she was the victim of high-placed political abuse.

When the media uncovered the illegitimate son during the 1884 presidential campaign, the Cleveland smear machine went to work, according to Lachman, and spun a tale of Halpin’s promiscuity and excessive drinking. She was allegedly intimate with three or four married men – all Cleveland cronies – and since Cleveland was the only bachelor, he took the fall as the father of Oscar Folsom Cleveland, the name Maria Halpin gave him.

And the beat goes on.

Warren Harding did not live long enough to complete the four years of his presidency. Perhaps it’s a good thing. He had already had extramarital affairs with four women, two of them personal friends of his wife when he died at age 57. One of those women, Carrie Phillips, was involved with Harding for 15 years beginning in 1905 – encompassing all but three of his remaining years.

Fearing revelations about his illicit affair with a young campaign volunteer – which included sex in an Oval Office hideaway while being guarded by Secret Service agents – Harding realized that lying was pointless. So in a Carteresque confession about his carnal desires, he stunned a group of reporters at the National Press Club, saying, "It's a good thing I am not a woman, I would always be pregnant. I can't say no."

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s philandering is well-known. His longstanding affair with Lucy Mercer began in 1918 and she, not Mrs. Roosevelt, was with him when he died of a stroke at Warm Springs, Georgia in 1945. The affair was an open secret that everyone, including the First Lady and the Secret Service, kept hushed up until long after Roosevelt’s death.

Then there’s the hero of D-Day and the invasion of Europe, General and later President, Dwight Eisenhower. While he was busily managing WW II as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces he apparently made time to carry on an affair with Kay Summersby, his Irish driver. In a post-war book, Harry Truman revealed that Ike had planned to divorce his wife Mamie and marry Summersby but his superior officer, General George Marshall, threatened to bust him out of the army if Ike persisted. Still, Mamie heard the rumors, and Ike knew she knew. The rumored affair stayed as quiet as it could among the bunch of lonely soldiers surrounding Ike until Summersby, dying of cancer in 1975, wrote a tell-all book entitled Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which she says they twice tried to consummate their relationship but Ike couldn’t do his part. War has that effect, I suppose.

John Kennedy and Bill Clinton. Need I say more?

Yet when I think of the utter idiocy of Anthony Weiner’s inability to keep his pants on, Gary Hart comes to mind. Hart was the frontrunner for the Democrat nomination in the 1988 presidential campaign and very likely would have won the presidency. After he announced his candidacy, however, rumors began to fly that he was having an extramarital affair. Power and testosterone turn some male brains into oatmeal. Hart dared the press corps: "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored." They did. And they weren’t bored.

Reporters staked out Hart’s Washington townhouse and observed Donna Rice, a very beautiful 29 year-old model, leaving in the evening. Later, a photograph of Hart with Rice on his lap was published by the Miami Herald. They had spent the night together in Bimini on a yacht appropriately called Monkey Business. The allure of Miss Rice was a Hart-stopper. Within a week his political career was toast.

So is Anthony Weiner’s. Since all of his income-earning years have been spent as a government parasite – he doesn’t even have a law degree – how is he going to earn a living? Maybe he could follow Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former governor of New York whose sexcapades with a prostitute ended his career. He is making a non-political comeback as a CNN talk show host. The two defrocked politicos could join forces on CNN and call their program WeinerSpitzer.

I know. It’s bad.

Fairies in the Garden

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the very logical and perceptive Sherlock Holmes, truly believed that garden fairies existed. Richard Dawkins, British author, atheist, and evolutionary biologist put the argument for fairies in a logical bind: “There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any …” And then over here in America, we have people who believe Medicare in its present conception can be saved. Ah! Fairy fantasy is everywhere!

Medicare is a socialistic product of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and exemplifies everything that is wrong with government-designed and government-managed programs. Politicians – mostly Democrats – had tried to get government into the healthcare business since the Roosevelt administration. Failing that, they changed their strategy in the late 1950s and decided to focus on a smaller goal, namely single-payer health insurance for over-65 seniors. Kennedy campaigned on the idea. With his death, Johnson hoped to convert the campaign pledge into law but was stalled by the Democrat House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Wilbur Mills.

Then Mills had a change of heart (perhaps influenced by his own presidential ambitions before being scandalized by an affair with a stripper) and championed not only the original idea of hospital insurance (Medicare Part A) but also insurance for doctor care (Medicare Part B). Mills alone was the architect of the form and structure for Medicare.

Medicare is a program designed for the circumstances of 1965 – not today. It was crafted at a time when the population was young, the number of elderly was relatively small, and the cost of medicine was minimal. Therefore a generous program that was free at the point of care was affordable and politically astute, given the reliable voting patterns of the elderly.

But today, the high-tech, high expense revolution in medical treatments has transformed both care and costs. When Medicare was created, officials projected that hospital insurance, Part A, would cost $9 billion in 1990. In fact, it cost seven times that amount in 1990. And in 2010 Medicare and Medicaid spending was $793 billion – 23% of federal spending – which exceeds defense spending (20%) and Social Security (20%).

Today’s Medicare program is dying under its own weight. After 46 years, with a tsunami of new beneficiaries about to enter the program, Medicare is entering its twilight years because its basic financial assumptions were fatally flawed. The program isn’t just financially flawed; it’s also structurally flawed because it divorces recipients from the financial consequences of their healthcare choices. It is a defined benefit, fee-for-service program with very ugly math.

Consider:

The 24 million Medicare enrollees in 1975 grew to 47 million in 2010 and will grow to 88 million in 2040. The $2,813 cost per enrollee in 1975 grew to $12,090 in 2010 and will grow to $44,416 in 2040. For all except those who believe in garden fairies, the word “unsustainable” has entered the lexicon of entitlement reform. Medicare will be broke in nine years, leaving an unfunded liability of $90 trillion. Such is the nature of government transfer payment schemes. As birth rates slow – which they will always do as a nation gets richer – the recipients of social programs must ultimately exceed contributors.

Medicare is financed through a combination of payroll taxes, premiums and general revenue. The problem is that spending has been growing faster than the economy and is projected to do so indefinitely. Not surprisingly, payroll tax revenue and premiums aren't keeping pace with the program's increasing costs. And that means the draw on federal coffers will grow larger barring any policy changes. In 1975, the program's income from revenue and premiums covered 69% of total Medicare disbursements. In 2010, they covered 40%. By 2040, they'll only cover 30%. Except that Medicare won’t be here in 2040.

Today, over 85% of our healthcare spending is paid for by third parties – either private health insurance or government programs. That is not insurance. Insurance is supposed to protect us against catastrophic, unexpected expense – not routine and elective expense. An annual physical is not a catastrophic, unexpected expense. It is routine and elective. It should be paid for out of pocket. Arguably a normal birth is routine and elective. It should be paid for out of pocket just as the routine and elective purchase of a car, a house, a vacation, a restaurant meal, and repairs of damage that may have been unexpected but certainly aren’t catastrophic. America has one of the world’s highest rates of insulating consumers from their healthcare costs because it abuses the concept of insurance. If people paid more of their non-catastrophic healthcare costs, costs would come down as do all costs paid out of pocket.

Not convinced? Consider Lasik surgery, a procedure that isn’t insured. The inflation-adjusted price of Lasik surgery has dropped by over 50% since its inception and continues to trend down. Providers compete through advertised prices using radio, television, and print media. Full body scans, also not paid by insurance, have fallen under the pressure of competition. The prices for cosmetic surgery have risen less than the general inflation rate because candidates shop, look at photographs, and ask for prices.

This is the way Medicare should have been designed. But it was always more of a political program than an insurance program. The objective from the outset was to increase voter dependency on government, as was the case with Social Security. (See Happy 75th Birthday, August 21, 2010 blog post.) Unless people pay more than a trivial co-pay for what their healthcare costs – saving and investing for their elderly expenses when they are young income earners – they have no interest when those costs get out of control and have to be paid by others. Likewise, when everyone – and I mean everyone – doesn’t pay enough income tax to keep them interested in reckless government spending, fobbing it off on the minority who pay the country’s bills, democracy is weakened by the decline of interest in the cost of democracy's functioning.

Medicare has now become America’s most popular social program. Its failures are of little concern to its recipients who don’t pay for it. Their only concern is that the benefits will keep coming regardless of cost or consequence. Politicians, whose main concern is reelection, are unwilling to commit suicide to reform the program’s failures, and some cynically hope they will be out of government when the inevitable collapse comes and the politicians of that time will face the wrath of the voters.

So what happens when someone like Paul Ryan has the courage to point out the elephant in the room and put forth a plan – imperfect though it may be – to help transition a failing program to a more substantial footing? Is he encouraged, helped, cheered on for taking leadership in a politically risky undertaking? No! He is castigated for “ending Medicare as we know it.” Advertisements lampoon him for pushing grandma over the cliff. Shamefully uninformed retirees are frightened into voting for candidates who lie to them as happened in the NY-26 special election upset victory of Democrat Kathy Hochul in a heavily Republican district – using tactics that give further credence to Mark Twain’s assertion that prostitution is a higher calling than politics.

Ryan saw that the Medicare problem was rooted in the fact that there is no competition in the Medicare marketplace. When there is no competition, we get crummy schools and crummy healthcare. Medicare providers are paid reimbursement rates that are established by the government and backed with about as much science and thought as throwing darts at a dart board. Medicare reimbursement gives providers an incentive to do more to the patient to compensate for being paid below market prices for their services, and providers have little incentive to be more efficient so they can do more for less and make a good living at it. At the same time, patients lack the incentive to police their bills and shop for healthcare services because they have very little monetary skin in the game. In time government reimbursement will be so far below the market that providers will refuse to accept Medicare patients, and meanwhile the system is running out of money due to patient indifference.

This is how government designs programs because its designers and managers have never held a real job in the private enterprise economy where the goal is to keep expenses below revenue and to C-O-M-P-E-T-E – that ever-absent word in government vernacular – because customers in the world sans fairies are usually limited and suppliers generally aren’t.

The Ryan plan will attempt (the operative word is “attempt”) to head off this impending train wreck with a reform that won’t take effect for ten years and impacts only those who are 55 and younger. It will mimic the design of health plan all Federal employees enjoy, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which makes criticism of the Ryan plan by the Left even more hypocritical. Grandma is pushed over the cliff by the Ryan plan, which offers grandma more or less the benefits of a government employee or retiree? Go figure.

Here are the Ryan plan highlights:

By 2011 private insurance companies that want to compete for Medicare “customers” would be required to offer plans with varying diversity which comply with Medicare specifications (that may be the killer but it’s worked for government employees)

Medicare will pay providers directly (ugh, back to single-payer) for services provided under the patient’s health plan using a premium subsidy (aka voucher.) Any portion of the voucher amount not used would be paid into the patient’s health savings account for future use. Any portion exceeding the voucher amount would be paid by the patient. (Now the patient has two incentives to be a good healthcare shopper – they keep the under-spend, and pay the over-spend.)

Additional subsidies will be made available to low income Medicare patients. High income earners would get less subsidy. (How about no subsidy?)

The voucher subsidy would begin at around $11,000 and be indexed to inflation. Patients could voluntarily receive a risk assessment of their health status, and if a patient is considered high risk for care, the voucher subsidy would be adjusted upward.

The Medicare-eligible age will increment up after 2011 from 65 to 69.5 years, reflecting the increasing longevity and years of good health of Americans since the 1965 law was passed.

That’s it. Pretty radical, huh? Makes you want to run out and push someone’s grandma off a cliff or start looking for fairies in the lawn.

The Lefties hate the Ryan plan because, they claim, it shifts more of the cost of healthcare onto the patient. Well sorta’. But not excessively. Grandma’s subsidy is risk-adjusted and low income beneficiaries get higher subsidies. But, hey, let’s stop the fairy fantasy and admit to the elephant in the room … until Medicare patients have an incentive to manage their healthcare cost, there is no plan that will save the Medicare program. So maybe what we ought to be saying is: Think No Medicare. Now, what’s everyone, including grandma, willing to do to prevent that outcome from happening?

What really chafes the Ryan critics is the suspicion that if a private sector defined contribution plan (versus the current defined benefit plan) really becomes popular with grandma, it will open the door to a privatized Medicare system, and Obamaphiles hate anything with the word “private” in it.

Ryan’s plan is a good start – not a great start. A great start would be a plan that gets the government out of the plan altogether. Giving the government my money to give back to me 45 to 50 years later is like giving myself a blood transfusion with a leaky tube in between arms. A better way is a verifiable mandate that I lay aside a certain amount for my future healthcare in an interest-bearing account during my income-earning years. When I reach 65 or 69.5 years old, I can begin to make withdrawals to buy my annual health insurance. Anything left over when I die goes to my estate.

Now that I think about it, that’s not a bad way to handle Social Security! The returns would be higher and another program would be released from the clutches of government.

The Lefties will of course fight proposals like these because it moves away from the socialism that Obama’s remaking of America envisions.

But in the recent Medicare Trustee’s Report, Richard S. Foster’s Statement of Actuarial Opinion gives this grim assessment:

Without major changes in healthcare delivery systems, the [reimbursement] paid by Medicare for health services are very likely to fall increasingly short of the costs of providing these services. By the end of the long-range projection period, Medicare prices for hospital, skilled nursing facility, home health, hospice, ambulatory surgical center, diagnostic laboratory, and many other services would be less than half of their level under the [pre-ObamaCare] law. Medicare prices would be considerably below the current relative level of Medicaid prices, which have already led to access problems for Medicaid enrollees, and far below the levels paid by private health insurance.

Well before that point, Congress would have to intervene to prevent the withdrawal of providers from the Medicare market and the severe problems with beneficiary access to care that would result. Overriding the productivity adjustments, as Congress has done repeatedly in the case of physician payment rates, would lead to far higher costs for Medicare in the long range than those projected under [pre-ObamaCare] law.

For these reasons, the financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range (as a result of the unsustainable reductions in physician payment rates) or the long range (because of the strong likelihood that the statutory reductions in [reimbursement] updates for most categories of Medicare provider services will not be viable).

Well golly gee, Margaret Thatcher was right after all: "The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money."

June 4, 1942: The Battle of Midway Begins

Following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US suffered one humiliating defeat after another at the hands of the Japanese. Wake Island and Guam were captured in December following Pearl Harbor. The defenders of the Bataan Peninsula surrendered in April 1942, followed by the Bataan Death March which forced the 76,000 prisoners to march 60 miles to a POW camp. Eleven thousand died or were murdered along the way. Corregidor was forced to surrender in May 1942.

The only positive turn in the months following Pearl Harbor was the success of the largely symbolic Doolittle bombing raid on Japan in April 1942, which did little damage but shook the belief that the Japanese homeland and the Emperor's palace were safe from attack. Doolittle’s raid stunned Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Japanese Fleet. These were two-engine B-25 medium bombers. Many on the Japanese Imperial Staff believed they had to have been based on Midway Island instead of launched as they were from the US carrier Hornet 650 nautical miles from Japan.

Admiral Yamamoto had studied at Harvard University, and as Captain Yamamoto, he was the Naval Attaché to the US between 1925 and 1928. He understood the American mind and knew that American industry and ingenuity would inevitably produce an insurmountable military machine as the war wore on. He had told the Japanese Prime Minister, “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.”

Therefore, Yamamoto began immediately to develop plans for a major naval battle that he thought would effectively destroy the American navy and set its war plans back at least a year – enough for Japan to secure a strong Pacific foothold that would be difficult and costly for the Americans to dislodge. He chose Midway Island, 1,000 miles from Honolulu, as the site of a decisive battle.

Complete surprise would be necessary for the attack on Midway as it had been in Yamamoto’s plan for the Pearl Harbor attack. He was unaware, however, that the Japanese naval cipher code named JN-25 had been broken before the war by Commander Joseph P. Rochefort and his team of trained mathematicians, communications experts, and cryptologists. They had been able read at least 10% of the Japanese Navy's radio transmissions, which doesn’t seem like much useful information, but Rochefort was a very talented intelligence expert when it came to examining the value of the intercepted information.

Rochefort's men had become aware of an increase in Japanese radio traffic and guessed that a new operation was being planned, which would combine all fleet units that the Japanese could muster. Initially, they didn’t know the target of the Japanese plan but noticed frequent references to a code name “AF” in the traffic. As a picture began to emerge, Rochefort and his team were convinced that “AF” was Midway. Unfortunately, no one else among their superiors at Navy Communications in Washington, D.C. agreed with them. Navy Communications thought the only target that justified the assembly of a Japanese fleet of this size would be Hawaii.

In the minds of the Navy brass, why would the Japanese make Midway the site for a major battle? After all, it is only an atoll consisting of two small sand spit islets surrounded by a coral reef. Eastern Island, the main and smallest of the two islands, had a landing field which took up most of its 334 acres. Sand Island, the other of the two, had a longer landing field on its 1300 acres.

Therefore, Rochefort decided to put his theory that “AF” was Midway to a test. He asked Midway to bury a mundane message in an uncoded routine communication saying that its desalinization plant was out of order. The Japanese picked it up and reported in a coded message that "AF has problems with its de-salting plant".

Yamamoto’s plan called for the entire force of the Combined Fleet to be sent across the Pacific to give battle to the US Pacific Fleet in the waters around Midway and to attack and take the island. Toward that goal, his order of battle included almost every Japanese fighting unit that was not needed in tasks around the Empire – over 100 warships including four carriers. Yamamoto was betting all his chips on this battle.

The battle plan included a diversionary attack on the Aleutian Islands, and in one of war’s ironies, one of the Zeros assigned to this diversion would be disabled by US anti-aircraft fire and would attempt an emergency landing on Akutan Island. The pilot was fooled by what he thought was a field of grass but was in fact a bog. He landed wheels down causing the plane to flip over, killing him on impact.

In those early days of the war, the Zero was one of Japan’s “secret weapons.” Therefore, the wingman circling above had orders to destroy the plane to prevent its capture. Fearing the pilot was alive and unconscious, he disobeyed and returned to his carrier. Later, intelligence analysts recovered and repaired the plane so it could be flown in simulated dog fights to learn its strengths and weaknesses. What was learned would save the lives of many American pilots who had to outmaneuver a Zero on their tail.

Yamamoto would personally lead the main body of the attack – the battleships Yamato, Nagato and Mutsu, the most powerful of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Support would come from the light carrier Hosho whose eight attack planes would be used for anti-submarine work. Destroyers would screen the force.

The First Air Fleet was under command of Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. His striking force was comprised of four fleet carriers – Akagi, Nagumo’s flag ship, Kaga, Hiryu, and Soryu – and supporting ships. Nagumo was assigned the dual mission of bombing the military facilities on Midway Island and destroying any US fleets that attempted to oppose an amphibious landing. The military objective was to put Japanese troops ashore by June 7.

Over on the American side, the senior commander was Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific. He assembled his fleet consisting of Task Force 16 with the carriers Enterprise and Hornet under the command of Rear Admiral Ray Spruance and Task Force 17 with the carrier Yorktown under the command of Rear Admiral Jack Fletcher. Unlike Yamamoto, Nimitz did not personally lead the fleet. Operational command of the battle fell to Fletcher.

At first light on the morning of June 4, Nagumo launched a bombing raid on Midway Island with fighter support. At the same time seaplanes from Midway were out looking for the Japanese fleet. One of the seaplanes spotted the Japanese carrier force at about 5:30 a.m. It also reported incoming Japanese aircraft headed for the atoll. Marine Corps planes from Midway scrambled to intercept the attack formation, but the Marines were hopelessly outnumbered and their planes were no match for the Japanese Zero fighters. Marine pilots shot down a few of the enemy bombers but suffered great losses themselves. PT torpedo boats and anti-aircraft fire from Midway's guns were more successful in disrupting the Japanese attack.

One hundred and eight Japanese planes hit Midway's two islands at 6:30 a.m. Twenty minutes of bombing and machine gun fire knocked out some of Eastern Island’s facilities, but the Japanese attack did not make the destruction of the airfield its principal objective. This would later prove to be a strategic error. Sand Island's oil tanks, seaplane hangar, and other buildings were set afire. The commander of the Japanese attack radioed that another air strike was required to soften up Midway's defenses against the landing.

Because the air fields remained intact, the Japanese carriers received several counterstrikes from Midway's torpedo planes and bombers, including B-17s. However, the American attacks were uncoordinated, and facing withering opposition from the Japanese fighters, the Americans suffered terrible losses without hitting anything but seawater around the maneuvering ships.

While these attacks were in progress, a Japanese scout plane reported that it had found the US fleet including a carrier. This put the Japanese commander Nagumo on the horns of a dilemma. Spotting his fighters – i.e. arming, fueling, running up propeller power, and staging the launch – had been underway for 30 to 45 minutes. However, the spotting was for the planes armed for a second strike land attack – not to fend off an American carrier air strike or to counterattack the carriers, which required torpedoes, not bombs. Nagumo decided to wait for his fighters to return from Midway when he would then rearm them for an attack against the US fleet. It was a fatal decision.

American carrier aircraft were launched from the Hornet, but once in the air, they began looking for the Japanese fleet along the wrong compass heading and missed the fleet. However, Torpedo Squadron 8 led by Lieutenant Commander John C. Waldron broke formation and followed what he believed to be the correct heading. Finding the fleet, he put it under attack. But without fighter escort, all fifteen of Waldron’s squadron were shot down without being able to inflict any damage. Only pilot Ensign George H. Gay, Jr. survived his plane’s crash, and he watched the entire battle in his life vest from the water.

Other torpedo and bomber squadrons fared similarly – failing to inflict damage but dropping enough bombs and torpedoes to force Japanese ship captains to make evasive maneuvers. This had the unplanned good fortune of keeping Nagumo from launching a counterstrike and it prevented Zeros, which were running out of fuel and ammunition from landing. The appearance of another American torpedo squadron drew off the overhead Japanese combat air patrol, leaving Nagumo’s fleet unprotected – a tactical error that would prove lethal.

At the same time the torpedo squadron was sighted, two squadrons of American dive bombers from the carriers Enterprise and Yorktown were searching for the Japanese fleet. The commander of one squadron was tailing the wake of the Japanese destroyer Arashi, which was steaming at full speed, obviously to rejoin Nagumo's carrier force.

Despite being low on fuel, the American planes stayed their course and arrived at the perfect time. Armed Japanese strike aircraft filled the hangar decks, fuel hoses snaked across the decks as refueling operations were being completed, and the change of ordnance meant bombs and torpedoes were stacked around the hangars, rather than stowed safely in the magazines, making the Japanese carriers even more vulnerable than they were absent overhead air cover.

An attack was launched by the Enterprise pilots in two waves, one scoring four or five hits on the carrier Kaga and the other hitting the carrier Akagi with but one bomb. But that bomb fell on the upper hangar deck and exploded among the armed and fueled aircraft there. Another bomb exploded underwater very close astern, causing a geyser that bent the Akagi flight deck upward and damaged the ship’s rudder, making steering virtually impossible. The Yorktown squadron scored three hits on the Soryu hanger deck. The fourth carrier in the fleet, Hiryu, was sandwiched between Soryu, Kaga, and Akagi, and received no hits, but three of the four Japanese carriers were now out of action and were eventually abandoned and scuttled.

Only Hiryu remained operational. Shortly before 11 a.m. she launched 18 dive bombers which found the Yorktown around noon. As the Japanese bombers approached Yorktown, they were intercepted and 11 were shot down. But the seven that got through hit Yorktown with three bombs and stopped her ability to maneuver.

The Yorktown crew repaired the damage and got the carrier underway, but two more groups launched by Hiryu managed to coordinate a torpedo attack that stopped Yorktown again. Dead in the water, the Yorktown began to list and the order to abandon ship was given. Planes from other American carriers found and bombed Hiryu, which sank the next day. But on June 6 a Japanese submarine located the crippled Yorktown and the destroyer which was helping her return to Pearl Harbor. The submarine torpedoed both vessels, sinking the destroyer immediately. Yorktown finally sank the next morning. These were the only two American ships lost in the battle.

The American losses in the Battle of Midway were 150 aircraft and 307 men. The Japanese lost four irreplaceable aircraft carriers and a cruiser, 248 aircraft, 3,057 men including 200 of their most experienced pilots. The losses shocked Yamamoto. Though the war with Japan would wear on for another three years, Midway was the high water mark of the Japanese Pacific offensive. True to Yamamoto’s prediction, Japan’s military might would wane and America’s would become superior.

If the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway, the Americans almost certainly would not have invaded Guadalcanal two months later, if ever. Guadalcanal would take the life of Admiral Yamamoto. The Japanese would most likely have renewed their effort to occupy Australia. That threat would have forced the recall of Aussie troops from North Africa where they were fighting Rommel’s attempt to capture the Suez Canal, the loss of which would have been incalculable. Any substantial occupation of Australia by the Japanese would have deprived McArthur of his staging base to retake the Philippines and cost US submarines the crucial bases that allowed them to harass Japanese war ships in the South Pacific. A Japanese armed force on Midway Island would have threatened the American west coast, weakened American ability, if not its resolve, to retake France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Absent an American presence in Western Europe after the defeat of Hitler, the Soviets would have overrun the continent and possibly the UK.

That’s how important the American victory at Midway would prove to be.

Ensign George H. Gay, Jr., the sole survivor of Waldron’s torpedo squadron, was picked up after the battle. He had spent 30 hours in the water literally watching the US Navy win World War II in the Pacific. He went on to fight in the Battle of Guadalcanal, and after the war, he was a pilot for TWA. Gay retired in Marietta, Georgia where he died of a heart attack in October 1994.

The US Navy honored his request to rejoin his squadron and scattered his ashes over the site where all of the pilots of the attack he survived lost their lives.