Courthouses of the West: In Memoriam: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

Courthouses of the West: In Memoriam: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor: 

In Memoriam: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor

I'm late in posting this and, frankly, so many things have been posted it would hardly be necessarily.

Justice O'Connor was the first woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Frankly, even though this came in relative terms, in 1981, fairly close to the pioneering appointment of an African American to the Supreme Court bench, it was later than it should have been. Having said that, like Nixon going to China, coming by way of a conservative, Ronald Reagan, perhaps it meant more in real terms than it would have had it come under an earlier President, such as Jimmy Carter.

O'Connor had been a member of the Arizona Court of Appeals at the time of her appointment. She was a Westerner by birth, having been raised on a 198,000 acre cattle ranch in that state.  She attended Stanford as an undergrad and as a law student, and oddly enough had received a proposal of marriage from William Rehnquist while still a student.

Her accomplishments cannot be denied, but frankly, like a lot that Reagan did, her appointment has a mixed record.  I frankly don't think she was as great of jurist as people now wish to recall, and like many of the "conservative" justice of her era, she was conservative only in a very reserved way.  True conservatives wouldn't really reappear on the Supreme Court for many years, none of which takes away from her personal accomplishments.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. Accidental Legal Muse.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. By Sử dụng hợp lí - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118355303

 

Nguyễn Chí Thanh is the man who caused me to go to law school.

Eh?

Now, Nguyễn Chí Thanh was a General in the North Vietnamese Vietnam People's Army and former North Vietnamese politician who died in 1967, when I was just four  years old.  How could this be?

Well, he was the figure who thought of what became the Tet Offensive of 1968.

From a Vietnamese middle class family, Thanh's father died when he was 14 which forced Thanh into farming, as his family entered poverty.  Perhaps it was this experience which lead him in 1937 to join the Vietnamese Communist Party, which in turn lead to being sentenced to French labor camps.  He was both a political and military figure, and following 1960, was principally a military one.  It was his idea to launch what became the Tet Offensive of 1968, a disastrous, in military terms, general uprising that cost the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese over 100,000 casualties, over twice as much as the Southern effort lost, and which ended so badly that Gen. Võ Nguyên, who accented to the plan and help prepare it, thought that he was going to be arrested and potentially suffer the fate of all who get blamed for stuff in Communist societies do.

Thanh didn't get the blame, for the military failure.  Nor did he get the credit for the massive political success, as the offensive shocked the American public and lead to the US abandoning South Vietnam to its fate.  He was killed from wounds sustained by a B-52 raid in 1967.

What's that have to do with law school?

Well, this.

In 1980, I had to write a paper in my community college freshman composition class.  I was still in high school, but I only went half days and took freshman comp at the college in the afternoon.  I wrote a detailed paper on the Tet Offensive of 1968, taking the position that the U.S. had won the battle militarily, but lost the war due to it due to the huge public reaction.

That thesis is widely held now, but at the time, not so much.

Sometime in the next couple of years, I had an American history class of some sort.  I can't recall, but I do recall it was well attended.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the professor was a lawyer, but one who had largely not practiced, if he ever had, after doing a stint in the U.S. Navy.  I had to write a paper, and what I did, which was legitimate, was to revise and dust off my preexisting one.

Keep in mind, this was in the typewriter days, so that was more difficult than it might sound.  Indeed, writing in general was more laborious in those days.

Anyhow, when it came back, I had received an A, and the professor had marked "You should consider an analytical career".

The part of the story I usually don't tell is that I asked my father, "what's an analytical career"?  That's probably as I don't want to have my father tagged with any other problematic career stories other than the one that's been mentioned before, which is unintentionally dissuading me from becoming a game warden. Anyhow, he mentioned lawyer.  I think that's the only analytical career he mentioned.  It's probably the only one that occurred to him, and frankly, it is hard to think of analytical careers.

And hence the seed was planted.

Saturday, September 16, 1972. Premier of the Bob Newhart Show.

Cast of The Bob Newhart Show.

The Bob Newhart Show premiered on CBS.  One of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, it would run only until 1978.

I'm actually fairly surprised, as I well recall the show and would have thought that it premiered a little later than 1972.  Having said that it has always, in my memory, seemed very early and mid 1970s, not late 1970s.  My family watched it regularly.

The show was set in Chicago at a time just after the television Rural Purge which would feature a lot of television comedies set in mid-sized Midwestern cities. WKRP In Cincinnati, for example, was set, obviously, in Cincinnati. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was set in Minneapolis.

Earlier that same week, on September 14, the nostalgic The Waltons commenced airing.  While fondly remembered, I never liked it.  I really dislike Spencer's Mountain, which is based on the same source material.

We didn't watch The Waltons, but even back then I had the feeling I ought to like it.  I never did and never have.  It always, even in the 1970s, had the feel of a show filmed in the 1970s, with the look of the 1970s, trying to be about the 1930s.  It ran until 1981.  Additionally, the set and the fact that it was tapped made it impossible to suspend awareness that you were, in fact, watching it in the 1970s.

The show was unusual in that it had a rural setting at a time in which most television shows did not.  It was also unusual in that it presented a very clean, romanticized, look at the Great Depression, something that was well within living memory of many of the viewers.  In this fashion, it contrasted with the earlier Spencer's Mountain, which was centered on desperation.   Both were based on the work of Earl Hamner Jr. who had grown up in Depression era Virginia.  Hamner died in 2016 at the age of 92.

FBI Associate Director W. Mark Felt reviewed a draft of Bob Woodward's news story on Watergate by telephone and confirmed an anonymous tip that money from Maurice Stans had been used to finance the break in of the Watergate Hotel.  Felt did so undercover, using the odd and somewhat perverted cover name Deep Throat.

Retroactive Counter Factual. Imagining yourself seventy-nine years ago.

It's always temping to look back at an historic event and imagine "where would I have been".  I have to admit, having an historical inclination and mindset, if you will, I do that often.

When I do, I usually imagine it with some calendar related restrains.  I'm not sure why, but to some degree I don't think you can accurately imagine where you would have been, and what you would have done, but for that.  The constraints of time, when you were born, and how that plays into where you are at anyone time, are an inescapable fact.  I know that I tend to do that pretty strongly, when inserting my hypothetical self into past events.

Having said that, for whatever reason, in seeing something on the upcoming 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, to some extent the real framework of "1941" struck me for the the first time, in a realistic sense just the other day.  It's weird, as I've looked back to World War Two quite a few times, as I imagine nearly everyone with a sense of history, and imagination, and wondered "where would I have been"?

I graduated from high school in 1981; forty hears after. . . well not actually forty years after, the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.*  In May 1981 when I graduated from high school I was 17 years old.  I joined the National Guard that following August, by which time I was 18, not even telling my parents that I had done it before I had.  That, in some odd way, tend to have formed my frame of reference looking back, as that puts my actual military experience in context.

But in looking at the calendar of the United States in World War Two, the National Guard was mobilized in August 1940.  So if I imagine myself 40 years prior, and apply a sort of calendrical lock to it so that I would have graduated from high school in 1941, instead of 1981, the National Guard would have been mobilized for a year.

Now, I also know that lots of high school men, and no matter how we might imagine it the story of service during World War Two includes women, but far more it includes men, had been in the local unit of the National Guard at that time. Indeed, the 115th Cavalry, Horse Mech, included not only a lot of high school students, a significant percentage in fact, but it included a lot of underaged ones.  Would I have been in that number?  Those too  young to serve in the Army were discharged, along with those too aged and infirm to serve.  Were the 17 year old sent?  I imagine some where, some were not, depending upon their wishes and those of their parents, maybe.

I wonder.  I like to think that I would have, and just knowing myself I probably would have joined the unit in high school, probably whenever I could have, but who knows.  Maybe not?

Well, in my own actual life in my junior high years I was in the Civil Air Patrol and I did in fact join the National Guard when still a teenager.  So my guess is that I probably would have.  Almost certainly.  I didn't, however, join high school JrROTC (which was mandatory for those in our local high school until some date in the 1970s), so maybe not.  Indeed, at that time I conceived of myself as busy, so I may not have.

In August 1940 I would have been 17. So would that have meant that I would have been mobilized with the 115th?

Maybe.  It's hard to know for sure.  I know that the 115th discharged a lot of underaged soldiers, as noted above, right at the start of their mobilization, and I know that the U.S. Army required parents consent to enlist until you were 18.  Contrary to what people typically think, the service itself wasn't too keen on teenage soldiers at the time.  

I know that my father wouldn't have been, but it would have been just my father's consideration at the time, assuming my life otherwise played out as it did, my mother being horribly ill when I was 17.  I'd have only been 17 for a few months at the time and also knowing myself I very well may have waited until fall to join, if I'd been planning to.  I only joined the National Guard in August 1981 as I'd planned on going to the University of Wyoming that fall and joining ROTC but changed my mind and didn't want to be hypocritical to my stated desires, so I joined the Guard.

Indeed, looking back, I'm stunned how earnest I was in my convictions.

That plays a role here too.

So, on December 7, 1941, I might have been an 18 year old cavalryman at Ft. Lewis Washington, surprised, and not surprised, that the nation was finally at war.

Or I might have been an 18 year old University of Wyoming student (the community colleges didn't yet exist here).

If that was the case, and for reasons I can't quite define I think it more likely, I would have joined the service after that semester.  And it would have been the Army.

If I'd gone to Ft. Lewis with the National Guard at some point I would have cadred out, almost certainly, and have been assigned to some other unit as an NCO.  Likely armor, and that would have likely meant Operation Torch and the ETO in that branch.  Most of the war. . . if a person survived it.

If it was UW and on to the Army, I wouldn't have opted for armor but rather for infantry, and maybe airborne, knowing myself.  Same theatre and the like, but probably less of it.  And again, assuming a person survived it.

All of which is interesting to imagine, and I'm surprised that I haven't really though of this retroactive counterfactual in this context before.

*This upcoming year, 2021, I will be as many years from my high school graduation as I was from World War Two at the time I graduated. A sobering thought.  This effectively means that, at that time, high school graduates from the class of 1941 were men my present age, something that's stunning to imagine.

The Aerodrome: The F15 is back in production and so is the Mig 31.

The Aerodrome: The F15 is back in production and so is the Mig 31.:

The F15 is back in production and so is the Mig 31.

The F15 is the F15EX variant, a brand new version of the old F15, which first went into production in 1976.  The planes history dates back to tests that go as far back as 1972.

The enormous Mig 31 first went into production in 1981 and has a history that goes back to 1975.

Why are they back?

Missiles.

The F15EX can carry a seven foot long missiles that can reach deep into China, should the need arise, and its external hard points can carry more missiles than the F35.

The Mig 31, which might simply be getting an overhaul rather than new editions, can carry missiles that can reach into low orbit and hit satellites.

And so the Cold War sort of returns, in a way.