Dave Does History

For the anniversary of the Peal Harbor attack, Dave made an appearance on the Florida Round Table show with Bill Mick to talk about the USS Utah, a Florida Class Battleship, lost in the attack…

On the morning of December 7, 1941, lying at berth F-11 on the west side of Ford Island, the USS Utah BB-31, a Florida Class battleship that had been disarmed and was now used as a training ship, awoke to the sound of the attack. In the first moments of the attack, she was somehow mistaken for either an Aircraft Carrier or a fully operational Battleship. In the opening moments of the attack, six torpedoes were fired at her, with two striking the ship.

At the end of the day, sixty-four officers and men were entombed on the wreck.

Unlike her other sisters in the harbor, Utah was all but forgotten. Her location on the far side of a very secure Naval Base, without access to a memorial built over her relegated her to an afterthought of the attack.

Today, her wreck rests quietly on the shore of Ford Island, with a small a memorial to the six officers and fifty-eight men who were lost with the ship in the first moments of the Pacific War, and who remain, eternally on duty…

Born on December 5, 1782, Martin Van Buren was the first American President who had been born a citizen of the United States. That said, his first language was NOT English! He would go on to start a major political party and was long noted for his spectacular ability to conduct politics, leading to one of his nicknames, “The Little Magician.”

Long distrustful of the banks, he found a home in the Jackson Administration and was nominated as Vice President for Jackson’s second term. He would then be handpicked by Jackson to be his replacement. The problem is that much of being President depends on… well… luck and timing. And the one thing that Van Buren did not have was timing. easily elected to succeed Jackson, he was hit with the brunt of the fallout from the Jacksonian policies and his own Administrations issues.

In the only occurrence in US History, Van Buren was re-nominated by his party, but without a pick for Vice President. He would not be re-elected, As the national debates unfolded, he waited quietly and hoped for a draft movement to return him to the White House. On the major issues of the day, he stayed mostly silent, except on the single issue of the annexation of Texas. Like many democrat politicians, it was his position on the extension of slavery (via Texas) that would ultimately end his political career.

The lesson is that doing the right thing is always the right thing, even when it costs a man his dream of the Presidency…

Sixty years ago this week, President Lyndon Johnson announced the formation of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of John Kennedy. The Nation was deep in shock and needed some reassurance.

One year and eight hundred and eighty-eight pages later, the commission announced its findings. Those can be boiled down to this: Lee Harvey Oswald fired the Magic Bullet that killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connelly.

Sure, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff, including some commonsense recommendations about Presidential security going forward. But for the past sixty years, there has been almost no single page of the report that hasn’t found its detractors somewhere.

And it all seemingly comes back to that single, magical bullet that somehow defied logic and physics and did it all…. or… did it?
Cue the Black helicopter…

Over the course of eight days, beginning on the 25th of Kislev (this year, the evening of December 7th), Jews around the world will light the Hanukkiah, or Hanukkah Menorah. Each night, a new candle is added, until the light from the Menorah is brilliant and fills the home with its life and luster.

Almost twenty-two hundred years ago, the Jews sought to rededicate the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple had been intentionally desecrated by Antiochus IV when he ordered a pig to be sacrificed on the altar and a statue of Zeus to be set up in the Holy of Holies. His was only the latest attempt to eradicate the Jews from the face of the Earth. It would not be the last.

Nor would it be the last night that Jews around the world gathered around the menorah to remember the reasons that we light those lights…

In the annals of American history, few figures have stirred as much controversy and debate as Senator Joseph McCarthy. Known for his relentless pursuit of alleged communists within the United States government during the early 1950s, McCarthy’s actions and the era named after him, “McCarthyism,” have become synonymous with witch hunts and unfounded accusations. But who was Joseph McCarthy beyond the headlines and history books?

And was his crusade really as it is portrayed? Or was it just a whole lot of hot air? Or… was it… something else entirely?

On November 7, 1916, the nation did something it had not done since 1832: it reelected an incumbent Democrat Party President to a second term. Woodrow Wilson, who ran his campaign on the slogan, “He kept us out of the war,” pulled out one of the closest elections in US history, albeit without the controversy and rancor of other close races.

The biggest issue of the campaign had been the US position on the war in Europe. Charles Hughes, the GOP nominee, called for greater mobilization and preparedness, while Wilson’s campaign claimed that a Hughes win would automatically mean war with both Germany AND Mexico. By the by, Wilson had already sent US troops to intervene in the Mexican Revolution.

Hughes had gone to bed the night of the election convinced that he had won. In fact, even the Kingdom of Serbia’s official newspaper had announced that Wilson had lost. But it wasn’t to be, as the later voting states rolled into the Wilson column. For Hughes, it wasn’t clear that he had lost, so he decided to sleep in the following morning.

The confusion would lead to one of the most famous political zingers in the history of the country.

A few short months after the election, after strongly carrying the heavily German Midwest, Wilson called for the US to declare war on Germany.

Narrator: Wilson did not, in fact, keep the US out of the Great War…

On October 31, 1864, Nevada became the 36th State to join the Union (I just got that BB-36 was USS Nevada!). While most States that joined the Union did so with certain conditions that varied with the era in which they were admitted, most of them had similar conditions, vis-à-vis republican governments and the banning of slavery and so forth.

Nevada on the other hand, was unusual in that its first attempt at a Constitution had been rejected by Congress. It was over a taxation issue, and given the circumstance in the Territory, Congress wasn’t about to allow any hanky-panky with tax revenues. But it was another condition that cause the biggest conundrum, even today. As we have seen in the last decade, many conservatives, who in 1864 pushed for the condition, now find themselves with almost no understanding of why – by law – 85% of Nevada is and will always be owned by the Federal government.

On the surface, the answer makes sense. When you dig deeper, it’s more than common sense, it’s downright… wise…

On December 7, 1941, the bombs rained down on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Of the eight Battleships present that day, seven were put out of action. Two of those, Oklahoma, and Arizona, permanently.

The other six Battleships were essentially obsolete. In fact, the very reason that the Battleships were in Pearl Harbor that day was because they were useless to accomplish the task the Navy needed done that week. But they were still fully manned and fully operational when Japan attacked. That said… the Navy saw value in the old ships, and decided to raise, repair and refit them to the standards of modern Battleships.

In those roles, these six ships would serve through the rest of the Pacific War. One of them, the USS Nevada, found herself pounding the German defenses on D-Day and throughout the Normandy campaign.

When General MacArthur landed with his troops in the Philippine Islands on October 20, 1944, the Imperial Japanese Navy had no choice but to respond. Virtually the entire fleet sailed to the Philippines to face off with the US Navy in a do or die struggle. Over the course of the next five days, four major naval engagements would take place.

While the most famous of these battles involved the US Navy’s TAFFY 3 and its incredible stand, it was to the south that the Japanese were attempting to make that fight even more lopsided. But the Southern Force of the Japanese Fleet was headed straight into the teeth of Read Admiral Jesse Oldendorf’s battle line of six US battleships.

Five of those battleships were raised from the mud and muck of Pearl Harbor. And on this night, led by USS West Virginia, … they would have their revenge…

On the night of October 14/15, 1781, a combined force of American and French forces stormed two British forts, known as redoubts, that held the right side of the British lines at Yorktown. Behind those forts waited seven thousand or so British troops and their German mercenaries.

Leading the assault on Redoubt 10 was Colonel Alexander Hamilton. He had been personally selected by George Washington to lead what he hoped would be the final attack of the battle. He had also selected crack Rhode Island troops to carry the assault. They had been chosen for a specific reason and they were more than ready to inflict defeat on the hated British.

When the attack was over, Washington knew, as did General Cornwallis, that the Yorktown campaign was over. The were only two questions now. First, would this end British war on America?

The second question was much more telling. The answer would haunt America for the next four score years and four years…

“What is the vice presidency? The Constitution dictates only two duties: casting the deciding vote if the Senate is deadlocked and replacing the president if he dies or is impeached. Apart from waiting for those two things to happen, you made the rest up and were duly forgotten by history. The exception being Aaron Burr, who shot someone, decisively lowering the bar for the rest of us.” ― Austin Grossman

“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” – Dan Quayle

“Freedom of speech is useless without freedom of thought.” – Spiro Agnew

“One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice-president, and that one word is ‘to be prepared’.” ― Dan Quayle

“Remember, no one decides who they’re going to vote for based on the vice president. I mean that literally.” ― Joe Biden

In 1968, Richard Nixon selected as his running mate the Governor of Maryland, Spiro T. Agnew. He was known for being a very tough “Law & order” Governor, who had little love for the civil rights chaos sweeping the nation. He fully expected – because Nixon had said so – to be the most active and involved Vice President in the history of the United States.

In some ways, he was. But for the most part, he did what most Vice Presidents do, got up every morning and asked how was the President? Day, after day.

As the President’s relationship with the press deteriorated, he was sent out as the attack dog for the Administration. In speeches and in press conferences, he became the face of the Nixon Administration’s adversarial relationship with the media, the public and anybody who didn’t think that the President was doing a good job at literally anything.

And then came the day when he was accused of corruption and of accepting a bribe. All his expectations and hopes for continued service to the nation evaporated into mist. President Nixon, already deeply embroiled in his own accusations, sent his representatives to tell Agnew to “go quietly.” On October 10, 1973, he resigned as Vice President. But he would never forgive those who he believed had ruined his career.

In the aftermath the nation got reminder of why a Vice President is a dual sided coin. It is both completely unnecessary and yet, at the same time, a critical piece of the political infrastructure.