(Source: nightmarry-you)
IN OMNIBUS CURIOSUS SEMPER
Paul Douglas: Economist, Politician, 50 year old Marine Private
“Shortly after losing the primary [for Senate], Douglas resigned from the Chicago City Council and, with the aid of Knox enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a private at the age of 50.
Promoted to corporal, then to sergeant, Douglas was kept stateside, writing training manuals, and giving inspirational speeches to troops. He was told he was “too old to go overseas ‘as an enlisted man’”. With the aid of Knox, and of Knox assistant Adlai Stevenson, Douglas was commissioned as an officer, and was subsequently sent to the Pacific theater of operations with the 1st Marine Division.
On the second day of the Battle of Peleliu, Captain Douglas finally saw action when his unit waded into the fray. He earned a Bronze Star for carrying ammunition to the front lines under enemy fire and earned his first Purple Heart when he was grazed by shrapnel while carrying flamethrower ammunition to the front lines. In that six week battle, while investigating some random fire shootings, Douglas was shot at as he uncovered a two-foot-wide cave. He then killed the Japanese soldier inside at which point he wondered whether his enemy might be an economics professor from the University of Tokyo.
A few months later, during the Battle of Okinawa, Douglas earned his second Purple Heart. A volunteer rifleman in an infantry platoon, he was helping to carry wounded from 3rd Battalion 5th Marines along the Naha-Shuri line when a burst of machine gun fire tore through his left arm, severing the main nerve and leaving it permanently disabled.”
Also, he was a Quaker.
For at last this leader of men would be leading, fighting, not only for himself but for a great cause. This man who in the pursuit of his aims could be so utterly ruthless—who would let nothing stand in his way; who, in the pursuit, deceived, and betrayed and cheated—would be deceiving and betraying and cheating on behalf of something other than himself: specifically, on behalf of the sixteen million Americans whose skins were dark.
Eisenhower said that the satellite [Sputnik] “does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota”; he would “rather have one good Redstone nuclear-armed missile than a rocket that could hit the moon,” he said. “We have no enemies on the moon.
[…]leadership was needed—effective leadership: leadership that not only enunciated ideals but that made progress, limited though it might be, toward achieving them. It was needed particularly in the halls of government, because it could only be from those halls that laws, the only permanent remedy for injustice, could issue.
The Councils’ vigilance extended into areas previously not thought of: incensed that some of Southern Bell’s party lines were used by both black and white subscribers, Mississippi’s Monroe County Council demanded that the company segregate its telephones.
So caught up was Johnson in the race he was running now that, once again, as for most of his life, dates meant nothing to him; trying to set up a conference with Adlai Stevenson or his campaign manager, Tom Finnegan, he scribbled a note to Stevenson: “I’d like to see you or Finnegan [on] Dec. 25th.” If there was a reason that the December 25 page in his appointment book had been blank, the reason didn’t seem to cross Lyndon Johnson’s mind.
Phenomenal.
(via staticeverywhere)
(Source: alxicon)
(Source: alxicon)
